"They’re ersatz tribes." I have a couple of commentaries on the Gospels by various Context Group scholars, and the term they use for such things is "fictive kinship groups". The Way of Jesus being the foremost during the period studied, of course.

Exactly what question are you asking here?

> For instance I think the fact that Mormons were a bunch of pioneer white people isolated in the rockies was probably more important then any of the cult stuff Joseph Smith came up with in shaping Mormon behavior today. I think what's more important is differential migration/transition/selection into mormonism by personality. The theological nature of the cult mattered early on in determining who entered it, and the nature of its charismatic personalities probably mattered even more. I seem to recall that it grew largely by natural increase ; surely some people did transit into it later but they probably had substantial affinities of personality type with the relatively early members. Why are mormons marked by extreme 'niceness' and politeness today, which would verge on being pathetic if they did not also have a certain winningness of persona, and why might they have been like that from the first? -- I don't know, but I do think it a good guess they were probably like that, biologically, from the first. One might guess that they were relatively little self-assertive, hence below average in status, and this helped determine their will to transit into a new society. But I'm also gonna guess that Smith had a prominent easygoing niceness and a hearty, winning vibe. Whereas Jesus, although highly focused on niceness, mildness, and love, demonstrated a more passionate and suffering/desperate and craving nature, and as Nietzsche notes, seemed to sort of flip out when any person didn't love him pretty wildly. He is far weirder and uncannier than mormons I have encountered, less healthy, shamanically 'intense', considerably saturnine.

> once the internal logic of Islam was fully worked out, it resulted in a worldview (occasionalism) that was not fertile ground for science Sure, I'm in considerable sympathy with what you're saying (and with the view that ancient Europe was half-ruined by Christianity). Only you go a little far in referring to fertile ground for science, since pretty much there have been a million awesome civilizations, Hellas, India, China, but none of them except modern Europe were really fertile ground for science. Also it seems like you can say at least say that high IQ is stable at high latitude in the civilized state. This makes it seem likely that Northern Europe would probably have become a great civilization over 700-1000 as in fact occurred. The barbaric usages of the Voelkerwanderung were probably likely to be transitory. Hellas had a dark age featuring such total illiteracy that it returned with a completely new script. This dark passed. Also the migration of military-civilizational leadership ever toward the NW is rather striking in West Eurasia. It all started in Iraq, then Egypt, then for a while Israel was the most interesting place, not militarily but culturally, then Greece, then Rome, then Northern Italy, then France, then England. Not to slight Persia (Hafiz is magnificent in the McCarthy translation, so's Persepolis) or my personal cultural home which is Germany. Or mighty Slavland. But sure, Cathar land would have been a different world.

Best Answer - Chosen by Voters The biggest difference is to be found in the morals they convey. The heroes' ethics in Homer's works is summed up in the advice given to Achilles by his father "Always be first and best and superior to the others". In Hesiod's "Works and Days" we meet a different view. Hesiod puts the trust in the Justice of Zeus which guantees disaster for the man who commits crime but promises blessings for the man who lives with justice. So, in Homer we have the fierce heroic aspiration to excell, while Hesiod provides the counterpart warning against arrogance and excess.

> The second you start making the state of the world more important then your relationship with God your basically asking for trouble. Live well, let God sort out what may come. This is unwise IMO, and doesn't even reflect your own nature and practices, which don't sound very quietest. I realize your words are only committing a semi-quietism, but I still think you are going too far. This is our world, dedicated by god or by we know not (how to understand) what. As Meisters Spinoza, Stirner, and Nietzsche advise, the impulse to devalue it (and separate it from god), even relatively, even relative to god, is nothing holy, but is instead most wisely viewed primarily with a phronetic eye: as just an expression of frustration, which obviously we all have. Leave the world to god? What I would rather abandon to him is the great questions about himself ; most of all, let him figure out whether he is immanent, transcendent, immanotranscendent or transcendoimmanent (or something 500 times less expressible yet) -- if he even can. /I'll/ simply take him /almost/ purely as (at least under present conditions) immanent, spinozan, pending further clarification, because it's my wisdom to do so. I have a feeling the true, complete answer might be just a little over my head, but I am wise enough to hold to whatever fragmentary wisdom I can arrest, as I have the good taste to follow the law of gravity anytime I find myself in a powerful gravitational field. And god's own situation, though possibly billions of times more profound, may not be /entirely/ different from that, for all I know. I am certainly not identical with god, that much is manifestly clear, so accordingly I need a little wisdom of my own, to contain as my private property. Consider Job on this, or, certain of the riddles of Eckhart. Therefore I leave little, very little to some transcendent divine aspect. I leave the transcendent to god, let it go forth and transcend things. ("I ask god to rid me of god" -- though I don't think that was /all/ that Eckhart asked.) I don't do that so much, transcend stuff. Not much. When I do, it's an amateurism, a side experiment, it's not my responsibility or my property. I consider that god may conversely wish to leave something to me and other humans. Not his entire immanence in kosmos, but maybe the lion's share of property in this earth. The world swerves away from becoming hell, or just dead, when responsible men sack up big, train their spirit hard, and take responsibility for it. Experiences like wu-wei or god or the possibility of god are extremely important, but when we look at some of the finest men under Zen discipline, they reached the conclusion that supreme effortlessness and supreme effortfulness were needed at once. Of course, too many of our wise-asses and wiseacres, from Job to Heraclitus and onward and backward, have answered too many of the great questions with such dualities and paradoxes, for instance The wise is one alone, willing and unwilling to be known by the name of Zeus. Then there's Heidegger with his use of strikethru words, which is comparable. It gets a little stale, but in their defense, not one of these boys ever claimed that words alone, even at their very best, are anywhere near perfectly availing. Perhaps I, perhaps Spinoza, is just making a lot of ultra-sophisticated agnosto-atheist noise. And maybe I don't even care that much whether I am or not, maybe that's precisely where I personally like to stash my wu-wei or even faith. You can decide for yourself and I guess you probably will. Anyway I haven't actually read any of Spinoza's own text yet so I guess I will go give that a shot since here I am prating and gossiping about his mind.

What you write is quite obviously true, and therefore it cannot be new. It is the way the Magian civilisation of Spengler works - in other words, the Judea-Arabian civilisation of the Middle East. In fact, Mormons are in many aspects very similar to the nation-churches of the Middle East. Even their "temple garment" resembles the holy shirt and cord of Parsis. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Temple\_garmenthttp://www.the-south-asian.com/april2001/Parsis-Ritual,Customs & Manners.htm A good explanation of the Middle-Eastern nation-church phenomenon can be found in Catholic Encyclopedia in the article on Eastern Churches: http://home.newadvent.org/cathen/05230a.htm "Characteristics of the Schismatical Eastern Churches Although these Churches have no communion among themselves, and although many of them are bitterly opposed to the others, there are certain broad lines in which they may be classed together and contrasted with the West. National feeling The first of these is their national feeling. In all these groups the Church is the nation; the vehement and often intolerant ardour of what seems to be their religious conviction is always really national pride and national loyalty under the guise of theology. This strong national feeling is the natural result of their political circumstances. For centuries, since the first ages, various nations have lived side by side and have carried on bitter opposition against each other in the Levant. Syria, Egypt, Mesopotamia, and the Balkans have never had one homogeneous population speaking one language. From the beginning, nationality in these parts has been a question not of the soil, but of a community held together by its language, striving for supremacy with other communities. The Roman contest accentuated this. Rome and then Constantinople was always a foreign tyranny to Syrians and Egyptians. And already in the fourth century of the Christian Era they began to accentuate their own nationalism, crushed in politics, by taking up an anti-imperial form of religion, by which they could express their hatred for the Government. Such an attitude has characterized these nations ever since. Under the Turk, too, the only possible separate organization was and is an ecclesiastical one. The Turk even increased the confusion. He found a simple and convenient way of organizing the subject Christians by taking their religion as a basis. So the Porte recognizes each sect as an artificial nation (millet). The Orthodox Church became the "Roman nation" (Rum millet), inheriting the name of the old Empire. Then there were the "Armenian nation" (Ermeni millet), the "Coptic nation", and so on. Blood has nothing to do with it. Any subject of the Porte who joins the Orthodox Church becomes a Roman and is submitted politically to the ecumenical patriarch; a Jew who is converted by Armenians becomes an Armenian. True, the latest development of Turkish politics has modified this artificial system, and there have been during the nineteenthcentury repeated attempts to set up one great Ottoman nation. But the effect of centuries is too deeply rooted, and the opposition between Islam and Christianity too great, to make this possible. A Moslem in Turkey -- whether Turk, Arab, or negro -- is simply a Moslem, and a Christian is a Roman, or Armenian, or Maronite, etc. Our Western idea of separating politics from religion, of being on the one hand loyal citizens of our country and on the other, as a quite distinct thing, members of some Church, is unknown in the East. The millet is what matters; and the millet is a religious body. So obvious does this identification seem to them that till quite lately they applied it to us. A Catholic was (and still is to the more remote and ignorant people) a "French Christian", a Protestant an "English Christian"; in speaking French or Italian, Levantines constantly use the word nation for religion. Hence it is, also, that there are practically no conversions from one religion to another. Theology, dogma, or any kind of religious conviction counts for little or nothing. A man keeps to his millet and hotly defends it, as we do to our fatherlands; for a Jacobite to turn Orthodox would be like a Frenchman turning German. We have noted that religious conviction counts for little. It is hard to say how much say of these bodies (Nestorian or Monophysite) are now even conscious of what was once the cardinal issue of their schism. The bishops and more educated clergy have no doubt a general and hazy idea of the question -- Nestorians think that everyone else denies Christ's real manhood, Monophysites that all their opponents "divide Christ". But what stirs their enthusiasm is not the metaphysical problem; it is the conviction that what they believe is the faith of their fathers, the heroes of their "nation" who were persecuted by the other millets, as they are day-to-day (for there everyone thinks that everyone else persecutes his religion). Opposed to all these little milal (plural of millet) there looms, each decade mightier and more dangerous, the West, Europe Frengistan (of which the United States, of course, forms part to them). Their lands are overrun with Frengis; Frengi schools tempt their young men, and Frengi churches, with eloquent sermons and attractive services, their women. They frequent the schools assiduously; for the Levantine has discovered that arithmetic, French, and physical science are useful helps to earning a good living. But to accept the Frengi religion means treason to their nation. It is a matter of course to them that we are Catholics or Protestants, those are our milal; but an Armenian, a Copt, a Nestorian does not become a Frengi. Against this barrier argument, quotation of Scripture, texts of Fathers, accounts of Church history, break in vain. Your opponent listens, is perhaps even mildly interested, and then goes about his business as before. Frengis are very clever and learned; but of course he is an Armenia, or whatever it may be. Sometimes whole bodies move (as Nestorian dioceses have lately begun to coquet with Russian Orthodoxy), and then every member moves too. One cleaves to one's millet whatever it does. Certainly, if the heads of any body can be persuaded to accept reunion with Rome, the rank and file will make no difficulty, unless there be another party strong enough to proclaim that those heads have deserted the nation. "

[…] If we can’t have tribes, the only solution is having the second best thing, i.e. synthetic tribes. Now, where I have heard about this before… […]

[…] If we can’t have tribes, the only solution is having the second best thing, i.e. synthetic tribes. Now, where I have heard about this before… […]