I am a problem solver. People like me are generally ignored. That’s OK. We do not expect immediate gratification. We have often been there and done that. The problem I set myself to solve was that of dying Christianity. Not to mention dying philosophy and dying politics. The whole world is not dead everywhere but it is definitely terminal in what we used to call the West.
That would be Europe and the Americas. But I would not eliminate most of the rest of the world also. Anywhere where the force of secularity and the whiff of Triadic thinking penetrates is a good candidate for the atrophy of religion.
What are the signs?
Signs that religion is dying are two-fold. There are death throes. Fundamentalisms of all sorts are desperate efforts to hang on and they will fail as new generations rebel against the small-minded cruelties that result from this mentality.
Then there is simple atrophy. Emptying pews. Seminaries on the ropes. The tendency to look to movements outside the church to buttress morale and provide a sort of objective correlative to validate their existence.
Validation
But it is precisely validation that is Christianity’s problem. As sage observers long ago concluded, the compromise that resulted in the union of church and empire meant that Christianity, reformed or not, swallowed the official creedal package, triumphalism and all.
In the last century, a small movement developed to argue that Jesus had little to do with the institution that we inherited. But they were mostly in the institution and dependent on it for support. It took being outside to realize the world of Christianity – the organized church – is exactly that, a world. When you are outside it does not exist.
Recovery
Nonetheless, values, philosophically, are real, which means they are universal. That means that what Jesus actually accomplished, despite the sins of Christianity, survives. But it only survives when the organized religion of all stripes is delegated to the ash heap of history. The values of Jesus can be inferred to be tolerance, helpfulness, and democracy.
These are the engines of progress.
I solve the problem of the death of religion by championing what I call Abba’s Way. Others do the same. The world is filled with folks who understand completely when we say the way is both easy and hard. We know that Abba exists as the one Jesus prayed to and that he is no respecter of persons. We know that in addition to the values I have named, the most important value of al is non-idolatry. Having no earthly gods. Most people worship earthly gods of some sort.
Abba’s Way embraces pragmaticism and is itself the basis for triadic philosophy. The ethics which lies at the center of the daily discipline of triadic thinking are the values I have named. Cybercommunities are a way of thinking about a world that could work for all people. I spend the remaining years I may have to try to put this all together until someone says, “Aha.”