Naptastic

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=====Introduction=====

> "Religion: It's given people hope in a world torn apart by religion." Jon Stewart

=====Deconstructing Church=====

What is inauthentic about church?

  * Asceticism
  * Kingdom-building: The pretense of building "God's" kingdom, where the reality is what is being built is many little kingdoms of man.
  * Authority: Pretending that the authority of a church is divine; it actually comes from the consent of its membership, just like all other organizations.

But mostly, it's judgment.

====Judgment====

A persistent complaint that something should not be the way it is. The structure of Judgment is thus: {to do}

Judgments frequently rest on faulty assumptions; a view of the world that is inaccurate.

Anything having to do with the idea of "sin" is almost certainly a judgment. (Grandpa Sterling told me there's no sin except for judgment. Chew on that for a while, lemme know what you come up with.)

==Guilt==

Churches will evolve towards stronger anti-sex messaging because that's where the selective pressure puts them. As long as the goal is "asses in chairs" or "dollars into the collection plate" church leaders will be more "successful" if their members feel guilty. Guilt is a powerful motivator, and shame is a powerful tool for manipulating people.

Almost everyone has sexual desires, and //if you get to them early enough//, you can make sure they feel guilty for masturbating for //decades//.

==Sanctity==

The early-warning sign of judgment is losing your sense of humor. Most churches have a set of things you're not allowed to laugh about. They call them "sacred," and they become slaves of the sacred.

Personally, I hold that nothing is more sacred than anything else; everything is sacred, and everything is profane. Every part of human experience is sacred, the pleasurable, the miserable, the mediocre. And every part of human experience is profane, ridiculous, silly and worth being laughed at. Everything is sacred, and nothing is sacred.

:?: I wrote this and now I'm questioning it. Is genocide sacred? Is it not sacred? Is it worth being serious about? Is it worth joking about? We **are** slaves to that about which we can't laugh... but I've gotta think about this some more.

===Worthiness===

The concept of worthiness has been made one-way, and that's not how it should be. Institutions need to be worthy of their members. Churches have failed to stay worthy of their membership, and look how damned they are.

===Society Is Falling Apart===

There has never been a time that religious authorities didn't decry the current condition of society and assert that things are getting worse, not better. It's a dishonest and manipulative way of getting people to repent and join the flock; once they've joined, they can share in the judgment of people outside and society at large, which helps keep them from wandering away.

With people who are intellectually honest and/or progressive in their thinking, this tactic doesn't work because they look around and see how much better things are now than in the past, and that the main reasons things seem worse are:
  * things are different, and the pious will always be judgmental of change;
  * the truly unfair judgments, like racism, sexism, homophobia, antisemitism, etc., are being dismantled, and those who believe those attitudes to be correct are threatened, and think the world is therefore deteriorating;
  * our measurements of the conditions of the world have improved.

As the world progresses, and people have their needs met, societies turn away from religion, church, and belief in general, in part because this attitude doesn't ring true to them at all anymore. (If society collapses, will people turn back to religion?)

===Anti-intellectualism===

Opposition to the teaching of evolution was only superficially about "this goes against the Bible." Biblical literalism is a modern failing. Why did it come into existence?

Churches, as an emergent being, recognized the potential threat from humans learning what evolution does. Right now, evolution selects for profitable churches, at the expense of other concerns, like behaving ethically. The Emergent Church decided it would do everything in its power to stop the teaching of evolution so it could continue doing the harmful things it does while still making more money.

====Structural Dishonesty: What Church Is Made Of====

A church exists in two parts: Judgment, and Justification for Judgment.

===Judgment / Justification Within Yourself===
==Guilt==
If your faith tradition believes in salvation by works, you probably live in a balance between things you do wrong or fail to do right, and what you do right or at least keep yourself from doing wrong. You hope that, when you stand before God, you will come out justified.

If your faith tradition believes in salvation by grace, you probably live in a balance between the fact that we're all born sinners, and accepting Jesus as your personal savior and being saved.

==Absolution==
So, on the one hand, you judge yourself a sinner, and if that bothers you at all, you justify it with either the possibility of good works saving you, or the possibility of Jesus saving you because you accepted him into your heart.

Consider a church that didn't offer the possibility of salvation. How long would that church last? On the other hand, consider one that only offered the possibility of being automatically saved. Can you even think of any? I can! :-) (I refer, of course, to **C Street**.)

//A church will cease to exist if it doesn't offer people a potential escape from judgment, while at the same time keeping people from escaping.//

==Justification for inflicting that on people==
At the same time all this is going on, there are those rare people in churches who believe the basic tenets of their faith and somehow manage to not live in judgment of themselves. (Expand.)

===Judgment of Others / Justification===
==Something's Wrong With You==
==You're Doing It Wrong==
==Priority Inversions==
Of course, for a church to be a church it has to have some rules, guidelines, cultural expectations and taboos, and if you violate any of these, you're sure to be judged by at least some of the members of the church. If I had a dollar for every time someone's told me it's the people, not the church, or it's the culture, not the beliefs, I'd be a rich man. Well I've got news for you: it IS the church. It is the nature of a church to cause that kind of judgment among its adherents.

The justification, of course, is that it's not "supposed" to be that way, and hey look, there are people here in this church who aren't judgmental. Go make friends with //them//. Or, come sit with us. We'll be friends with you even if other people are judgmental.
==But Some People Don't Judge!==
Yes, and you keep them around to justify the presence of those who do. These are held up as "proof" of "it's the people, not the church, who are the problem."
===Abuse by Authorities / Justification===
Churches with rigid hierarchies sometimes abuse their parishioners. The abuse arises from the judgment we already mentioned, that you shouldn't be the way you are, or do the things you do...

The justification is that there are, in fact, church leaders in every long-lasting church. These leaders are held up as examples of why the church is really a good thing; it's not all bad; and you shouldn't "throw the baby out with the bathwater." 

It's all bathwater. (Expand.)

===Abusive and Judgmental Churches / Loving and Accepting Churches===
Justification: For the church in question, X. Within other churches, justification is Y.

===Abusive and Judgmental Ideologies / Loving and Accepting Ideologies===
In different parts of the Bible, God says both "thou shalt not kill," and "thou shalt utterly destroy." These cater to different ideologies people have; different ways of viewing holy writ, so as to fit their own personalities.

On the one hand, damnation, and on the other, mercy. The only reason that mercy exists is to justify the existence of damnation.

At this point in the inquiry I realized that this is not a linear thing I've just gone through; it's an infinite cycle. For those two forces, damnation and mercy, are the same two forces working within yourself. And they're not even real!

If you've made it this far and are not convinced that churches are just made of judgment and its justification, consider this: what if all religion in the world preached nothing but damnation, that we're all doomed, and there's no mercy? Would you approve of such a church? Would anyone want to be part of such a church? Of course not! You have to add mercy to the equation to justify the damnation. And then something crazy happens: you get a group of people whose behavior is justified: **they** have somehow obtained God's mercy, and **you** haven't, and now there's a new kind of judgment, and it's automatically justified by their belief.

OK, you ask, what if we have a church with *just* mercy? Well, that's fine, but what would be the point? Why go to church--why even have a church--if there isn't something to save you from? To make you a better person? Except church doesn't make you a better person:
  * The only tool church has for "improving" you is guilt, which is, of course, just you passing judgment on yourself.
  * The people who discover life without guilt don't discover it from church: they discover it outside of church, and usually have to get a lot of distance from church before living without guilt.
  * Atheists, agnostics and unaffiliated are "better people" in every measurable way than their religious counterparts.

The only reason churches do good things is to justify the terrible things they do, and always have done, and always will do. They exist to enable very bad people to continue If the churches stopped doing good, we wouldn't allow them to exist, and if they stopped doing bad, they would cease to exist.

====The Ultimate Inauthenticity of Churches====

Judgments frequently rest on faulty underlying assumptions. Each of these judgments rests on something that isn't so. FIXME Elaborate.

That you can KNOW things that you can not know. (Testing reality via emotions, rather than by evidence; misplaced [[:trust]]; mind-viruses; keep expanding.)

===The belief set of highest integrity===

I don't believe in "God". I don't believe in "Not God". I don't believe in "It can be known". I don't believe in "it can't be known". With the question, "God", I simply don't engage. Why? Because for the building of a World That Works For Everyone, all possible answers, responses, or questions inside that conversation are at best useless; usually counterproductive; sometimes deadly.

=====A New Church=====
====Structure====
The new church has a top and a bottom, a front and a back, a beginning and an end, and many, many sides. The church

====Worship====
Since I'm not leaning on anything we know can't be known, I don't assert that you have a spirit. I use the word "spiritual" to refer to the //experience// of feeling connected to something larger than yourself, //even if that connection is an illusion//. It's a unique, powerful, and positive experience. Church activities, when they're done right, produce this experience //reliably enough// that people will keep coming back for the spiritual experience. Not because they feel guilty, not to be judgmental of others, but to feel that connection. We call this "worship".

What triggers a spiritual experience in someone varies. A well-designed church service will push every button it can to try to elicit a spiritual response. Most important is that these experiences are had together. That thing we're not actually connected to, but are trying to feel like we are, is partly each other.

It requires investment, and a commitment to excellence. Production values matter. Secular people just do not have the same drive for it as believers, so if the worship team ends up being all atheists, you're in trouble.

====Personal Work====
Repentance / transformation / recovery / self-improvement / whatever you want to call it.

Much work has been done over the last few thousand years to improve the process by which people are brought to repentance. {Historical innovation}

The normal, every-day methods of repentance focus on changing behavior, which is as effective as it is. Transformation, rather than dealing with what you do, and the science of doing, deals with who you are, and the science of being. What it means for a human being to be a human being has been inquired into, figured out, solved. That game is over and humans won. You now have an opportunity to transform yourself within that context, as much or as little as you like. Rather than focusing on making different choices, you focus on being someone who makes the choice you wish you would make.

Given the rapid pace of human development, the levels of literacy around us, the massive amounts of information surrounding us, and the new technologies that are enhancing how we communicate, I think it would be a worthwhile endeavor to examine all of these traditions and design one to be maximally effective and completely value-driven. We don't need to guilt people into repentance anymore, in fact, I request of people that they repent of their guilt itself. (Guilt is, really, just passing judgment on yourself – it's being right about being wrong.)

(Aside: the Simple Church formula is Values, Activities and Outcomes. Values are defined as those thing the church community agree to hold; I'm thinking that some clever and meta definition of service should be at the center of this. Activities include what I've already speculated about: singing together, telling stories, and the process of transformation. Outcomes: the world starts to work for everyone.)

====Service====

An authentic church will not object to this mission. It won't have any 'if's or 'but's. An authentic church will look at that phrase and say "yeah, that's basically what we're trying to do."