Moving Forward

In trying to think about my writing, I wrote a page called Categories of my Writing. I noticed different trends in my writing: "how can we love?", the "exilic/familial", "radically theistic / New Wine" (or, I should say now, "radically theistic / millennial holiness"), "aletheism". How would I now say all these things relate? And how do they relate to outside views?

Overall, I want to move forward. "Moving forward" characterizes "advancing kingdoms" -- the kingdom of God, or civilization, or justice, or something like that. One thing I have had to do is move beyond being more into advancing secular things (civilization, justice, etc.) and into doing good in a really theistic way (advance the kingdom of God, the God who really exists).

Is the project (or projects) of "moving forward" a good thing? I can think of some "dissents": postmodernism (in my mind "there are a diversity of viewpoints none of which can be said are invalid"), and elements of the "exilic/familial" (the sense that nobody wins, and we mourn the death of our enemies). If we mourn our enemies too much, then we risk being on their side, or sinking into inactivity. Being on their side might sound like a good thing if we think that we are on the side of them as persons. But we should not necessarily adopt everyone else's point of view. The truth is what it is -- that our enemies are wrong necessarily connects to the fact that there is something we need to do in the world.

Another dissent is the apocalyptic view (in the sense of, there is only a little bit of time left). I feel that this is working deep, under the surface of our culture, in a way we don't always explicitly state. But it can be an explicit view (climate, AI, the perennial religious end-times thinking). If there is no more time left, then we lost motivation to move forward.

Another dissent is the appeal to human nature, or other kinds of nature, or the body, or health. Human nature certainly isn't the best thing we can conceive of, but it's also not the worst. Health calls for moderation (for not moving forward too much, or not at all in a sense, since we already have the body and its desires).

Those engaged in the project of moving forward might become disillusioned with its failures (they might be on the side of moving forward still, in principle, but might have lost some faith in it because they see the damage it causes, or its inability to bring about what we think it promises). Prophets speak the unvarnished truth which "nobody" wants to hear, for the sake of the truth, even if it seems unhelpful for them to do so.

Part of moving forward involves the truth. How do we know the truth? Can we know the truth? For the postmodernist, the claim is that there is no one truth. For the Reformed (Calvinist) thinker, the claim is that humans can't naturally come to know the truth, and God has to give us that truth (this undermining natural reason). Buddhism and modern science also cast doubt on natural reason.

The Bible itself (I think, this is my reading) contains both moving forward and critique of moving forward. Abraham is called by God to found a new nation to bless the whole world ("moving forward") (Genesis 12:1-3). But he is also commanded by God to sacrifice his son, who is the child through whom that nation is supposed to descend (Genesis 22). David weeps for his son Absalom (who had been killed after trying to take the throne from David), but then David realizes (is told) that he has to live for the ongoing process, for the people who were on his (rightful) side (2 Samuel 19:1-7). Should you trust the voice of God? Overall you should. Should you fight for God's project (as I think the Bible would say David was doing more so than Absalom was)? Yes, but you have to acknowledge the danger in what you're doing and listen to the critique.

I use the term "moving forward" rather than "progress" because while progress is a form of moving forward, there is also the moving forward needed to preserve the things that already exist. Neither the church, civilization, nor justice will maintain their current sizes/fullness (in general) unless individual people move forward. The dissents to moving forward take away energy that can help people move forward -- whether to maintain what is good or to make things better.

"How can we love?" is about "moving forward". "Radical theism" contains both "moving forward" and concern for every person (because every person came from God -- every person has a history of being a child descended from God, even if they choose to reject God permanently) -- thus, mourning and losing (like in the "exilic/familial"). God loses in the end -- but he doesn't have to lose as much. Love mourns what is lost, but has to apply effort to prevent further loss.

I think that evangelicals (at least, the best of them) balance this forward-moving with a concern for every person, a concern which does not demoralize them but causes them to move forward (in a way that does not "outpace" the people they try to help), and I would consider my writing project overall to be evangelical in a certain basic sense.

I think it is wise to consider the dissents to moving forward, as each contain some element of wisdom and can be a check on moving forward in a misguided way.

Postmodernism in a strong-enough form is a way to close the mind against the possibility of there being answers, and this I find hard to like. But in a sufficiently weak form, it says "you have to listen to everyone's point of view in seeking the truth, and when you start the discussion, everyone's view is equally valid". Or it could say as well "You feel like X is true from your own experience and reason, but other people believe not-X. Why do you think you're right and they're wrong?"

Apocalypticism biases us to do good in the short term. Perhaps we have too many incentives to do good in the short term already. But maybe apocalypticism biases us to act intensely in the short term. I don't know if that always is a good thing, but it's worth considering. Apocalypticism may also bias us to rest, a similarly mixed thing to pursue.

Concern for health, the body, human nature, etc. is necessary to keep us from burning out and to do good in an unhealthy way tends to be doing something that has evil mixed in it somewhere. Health-pursuing, like postmodernism, can close the mind, but if it does not make itself a god, it is something worth listening to. Respect for human nature (in the sense of seeing it there, like you see a rattlesnake in your path) and typical human fallibility is wise.

Those who move forward but in the process of moving forward critique specific ways of moving forward, are doing something good to make sure that their efforts are really good instead of bad, as long as they avoid demoralizing themselves (or other people) about the overall process of moving forward.

Reformed, Buddhist, and scientific questioning of human's natural ability to reason each have their uses.

The Reformed perspective says "you are not God". I think people should move forward, try to have the values of God and then do the things that God wants, which are in line with those people's values now that they have adopted God's values. So you should see what you see and do what you want. You want to do what is good, so your appetite is trustworthy when you want that. When you do what you and God want, you are an agent of God. You are becoming like God, on the small scale that you can act in. Everyone who acts out God's will is in a sense God himself, his body. When you behave completely legitimately, you are part of Legitimacy.

However, there is a sense in which you are not God and never will be. God's work is much greater than yours. Your work has a boundary to it and many things happen outside your work. Your work is affected by things you don't understand, but which God does understand.

If you are trustworthy, people will trust you, and some will think you are most-trustworthy on a deeper level -- they will give you the glory and not God, and this is a dangerous mistake. If they make you an idol, you (with all of your trustworthiness) could keep them from loving God.

So it is good to consider the Reformed perspective (in which it can sometimes seem like God does everything). I don't think it's literally true that God does everything and we do nothing, but it's a good perspective.

The Buddhist perspective can be taken as a means to achieve mental health (see above). The scientific perspective can elucidate human nature (see above). Also it teaches us to think carefully and biases us to not trust our intuitions, which is a good thing up to a point.

All of these things are dangerous when they close the mind to the good that we really should be doing, the forward moving that we should really take seriously. Buddhist and Reformed critiques of reason need to see the danger that they are wrong and that reason is saying something valuable (as much as it is important for rationalists to consider that their reasoning is dangerous, as Buddhist or Reformed thinkers allege). I would propose that everyone move forward with their worldview (postmodern, Reformed, Buddhist, evangelical, etc.), but periodically consider that which questions their worldview, take it as a live possibility.

This would be an "aletheistic" thing to do.

So, perhaps I could integrate all of the above into a kind of formula:

Movement: Motivate yourself strongly ("how can we love?") to go into the secular world to some extent ("how can we love?"), but primarily to reach people to prevent them from hardening and dying the second death ("radically theistic / millennial holiness"), seeing them as kin, children of a God who risks losing them if they reject him ("exilic/familial"), not as people to defeat but rather people to mourn ("exilic/familial") but overall still moving forward with the work to make the world more the way God wants it to be ("how can we love?"), anti-tempting ourselves and those around us ("radical theism / millennial holiness").

Dissents: We need to question the movement from time to time ("aletheism"). We can consider "dissents", like Reformed, Buddhist, health-oriented, human nature-oriented, postmodern, and apocalyptic thinking (mentioned above). Or perhaps even the Bible could be considered as a dissent, or both a dissent and a support (call of Abraham and binding of Isaac / David mourning Absalom and moving on). Or there could be other dissents not mentioned. The movement is improved by the dissents, but overall the movement is where you are headed.

Semi-dissents: We need to improve the movement. We might accept it as it is on a "coarse-grained" level, but on a "fine-grained" level still want to improve it. This requires self-criticism. Perhaps this self-criticism can morph into full-on dissent.

A person could try to live this out (or an improved version of it) both somehow integrating all of the above into everything they do in each moment (or getting closer to doing that), or by going through phases.

Book Review: In the Shadow of the Banyan by Vaddey Ratner

I didn't plan on writing a review of In the Shadow of the Banyan (by Vaddey Ratner). I read it to pass the time, rather than as part of some kind of study or writing program. But now that I've read it, I have some thoughts about it.

The book is a novel, based on the author's actual experiences as a young girl, member of the Cambodian royal family during the time of the Khmer Rouge, an anti-royal, anti-Western Communist revolutionary group that killed millions of Cambodians through purges, overwork, and underfeeding. She journeys from a relatively sheltered situation at the beginning of the book (a child who lives in the imaginal and familiar world of family, stories, Asian Buddhism, Hindu myths), through a series of progressively darker dislocations and losses, until she is struck dumb. She manages to survive (mirroring the author's survival) and make it out of Cambodia with her mother.

I thought of not writing this review, because the thoughts that I had feel like ones that are underdeveloped at this point, or that might not fit what I want to write about in this chapter of the blog, but something insists in me that I do write, and maybe I'm writing notes for later writing that explores the following subjects in more detail.

I identified with three themes that I saw in the book: The imaginal world, the Revolution, and the cross.

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The spiritual/imaginal world was something that the narrator's grandmother, and the narrator, both spent a fair amount of time in, as though when we are new to the world, or not long left in it, we are better able to see things like tevodas (angel-like beings), ghosts, or connect with the story of Indra, with mythical explanations for things. I don't remember there being any moments where the imaginal world appeared in the sensory world (the "real" world), but the grandmother and narrator were able to see it. I think that there is a part of me that lives in that world -- in fact, that's the world of philosophy, though it often presents itself prosaically and mechanistically. And, I sometimes feel (sometimes too much) that I belong there more than I do in the sensory world. I'm not sure I have much of a point to make in bringing this up, but that was my reaction.

--

The Revolution spoke to me, because of how much the revolutionaries were into willing and working. The book shows how some of them were heartless, psychopathic, and corrupt, and this makes me think that the revolutionary spirit is dangerous.

I know that some of my past writing (notably How Can We Love?) could, perhaps in its emphasis, if not its text read carefully, be considered a broadly left- (or "revolutionary humanist"-) leaning thing. It has some of the spirit of Revolution, even though it says on the surface of it things that go against Revolution. I think I would say now that the book is flawed, to the extent that it lends itself to a revolutionary humanist reading, because that was not my intention. But it is a somewhat revolutionary thing and that gives me one reason to want to think about the dangers of the revolutionary spirit.

In the Shadow of the Banyan mentions that there was a split within the Khmer Rouge between the Cause and the Party. The Cause was idealistic, but the Party took over. Causes tend to draw on one kind of energy, that of ordinary people, non-psychopathic human desires. But parties can focus on their own well-being, rather than devoting themselves fully to a cause, and outcompete groups still into causes. This is a pessimistic thought, and it's worth noting that there are a lot of places where parties exist but do not wipe out idealism. (Moloch seems like an undefeatable dynamic, but for some reason it doesn't always rule.) There is a tension between Party and Cause tendencies in a society, and it's wise to be concerned about how any cause could turn into a purely partisan thing.

I know that the revolutionary spirit is dangerous, but, as long as the status quo needs to be changed in some way, it is necessary, and perhaps revolutions, or the spirit of revolutions, is needed to maintain the status quo (if you don't fix things, you decay, and some fixing is "microrevolutionary"). A Communist rejoinder to a book speaking of the horrors of the Khmer Rouge might be "fair enough, they were corrupt and captured by psychopathy, and the empowerment of the corruption and psychopathy was enabled by the revolutionary spirit, but you should also do a calculation, alongside that of the death toll from the Khmer Rouge, of the lives lost due to the corruption and psychopathy that prevents capitalist society from doing the most it's really capable of doing to help the poor". (This sounds like something an effective altruist or EA-type person might try to calculate, or already has.) It may turn out to be the case that revolutionary Communism always turns out to be worse for people, but capitalism (or "capitalism+" (plus civil society? the state?)) that isn't doing its best also (less visibly) has blood on its hands.

As is often the case, formulas are dangerous. If you're into Communism or capitalism, you need to be into the good version of that, because the bad version is as bad as the ideology you reject, or perhaps worse.

Should we think in terms of "blood on people's hands"? I think there is an awful truth to it. The moral truth is something that, when comprehended, causes people to do the moral thing. Is it perhaps misleading to talk about "blood on people's hands", is that a deceptive truth? Perhaps for some people, it is deceptive, and for others, it is basically non-misleading. I think that we gaze at the harshest moral truths and then walk away from them to do our relaxed versions of good. (I think that the Drowning Child Illustration is one of the harshest moral truths and generally EAs walk away from it to do their relaxed version of good, as much as that relaxed version of good might burn them out.) If we never gazed, we might never change into the much more mundane, if still countercultural, versions of ourselves that live in the shadow of the gaze.

I try to focus on saying what's true (because I'm a writer, and I feel like that's my "professional" responsibility). I don't think that the Khmer Rouge's worldview is correct, as much as they might be on to something when they see the moral truth of people held down by the ruling classes, or suffering or dying prematurely. For instance, this life is not the limit of our existence, as they thought, and so purity is something that is not desperately urgent. Purity is something that is necessary, and will come in its time -- the sooner the better, but not desperately soon. I think that MSLN / New Wine System-descended thinking is good for addressing both revolutionary humanism and traditional evangelical religion in their crazily desperate (and on their view, completely necessary) sense that they have to do radical good (on a societal and personal level) NOW, that time is running out for people who must get the essential good (a nice life, or conversion to Christianity) in this life, with death coming all-too-soon.

I understand that the Khmer Rouge, as Communists, were atheists. I believe that God exists, and if I'm correct in that belief, then the emphasis on human well-being found in Communism (as well as in other forms of humanism) could easily be misguided if it ignores God, how our relationships to God are the most fundamental field of altruism. Much of what revolutionary (or microrevolutionary) humanists want to achieve is somewhat orthogonal to people's relationships to God and may not be as valuable, necessary, or urgent as it seems. Making things better from an atheistic standpoint could, in some cases, be dangerous or harmful from a theistic standpoint.

I feel a strong momentum in the direction of secular humanist altruism. For instance, it's relatively easy for me to feel a sense of outrage, or something like that, at things like physical poverty. I think I am somewhat wired to responding to the vivid, loud, and obvious, as I suppose most of us are. The habit of wanting to remove suffering or prolong life, in this life, is not the worst habit. But I have to remember that there's more to the truth than this life.

--

Finally, I saw the cross in Ratner's/the narrator's experience. Not that she pursued the cross, although her father did in a fairly obvious way, but in that she underwent the cross. There was a moment toward the end where, to me, it seemed like the narrator died inside in a somewhat good way, and thenceforth had nothing to lose, and little (or less) to fear. (See chapter 29, pp. 295 - 296 in first hardcover edition.) That is one dimension of undergoing the cross, that it pushes us to the point that in some sense we are okay with dying or our death (maybe this is something I can validly connect to the moment in the novel). We are made to be willing to die by being forced close to death, and having "died", we are free. Maybe we have some free will in the matter? I'm not sure, but the narrator was given a gift at that moment of "survivable death" (again, if I'm reading this right). I may want to look at In the Shadow of the Banyan when I someday write a proper book on the cross.

Re: Against responsibility, by Ben Hoffman

This is another in my series of posts where I respond to blog posts on here instead of by leaving comments. (See also Hero's Journey vs. Absurdism vs. Ancient Judaism and Re: Empiricism is Silly as an Epistemic Basis, by APXHARD.)

The post this time is Against responsibility (archived here), by Ben Hoffman.

You should probably read it before reading this, if you want to fully understand my response.

My response to "Against responsibility"

I like utilitarianism, but see how it could go wrong. One way to help might be to "price in" values that are threatened by utilitarianism into the values being maximized. (Like adding honesty or not controlling people to our list of values being maximized.) This could make for an awkward, hard to fully grasp, and therefore less useful "moral software", if enough values are added to that. But maybe that's okay. If there's a really high-stakes problem, which we have enough time to work on, our analysis of what to do should be complicated, cautious, and nuanced. Maybe we should use simplifications of moral software when we don't have the time or computational resources to do an indepth analysis. If you need a quick answer to a moral question, maybe use an established deontological principle. (This suggests a role for intentionally improving the supply of deontological principles, and for looking ahead to do moral analysis ahead of time of high stakes things that, once they come up, may not afford a lot of time for that analysis.)

If I had to specify a reward function that's worth pursuing maximally, it would be: "love God". But part of that is being aligned with God's interests, which are very diverse (and include not wanting people to be dishonest or to control other people). You might think that the answer is "maximize salvation of personal beings", and that that is all that God cares about. It is, but (the MSLN approach is), you have to watch out for your own salvation when you go to do altruistic things, because you are a moral patient, part of the world you are trying to help save. Your own salvation depends on you fully coming into tune with God, and your dishonesty or controlling tendencies are an obstacle to that. Also, Satan has a way of using the sinfulness of prominent theistic altruists to make a horror of them and drive people away from God. (Similarly with prominent secular altruists, who are not as closely associated with God, but are associated with other good things.)

I think that practically(/ethically) speaking, we are in a position where virtue ethics, consequentialism, and deontology are all valid and there are ways all of them call on us. There are times the most ethical way to proceed is to think like a virtue ethicist, other times like a deontologist, other times like a consequentialist.

I think that epistemically speaking, though, reality is finite, countable, aggregable, including what is good, and the good is to be maximized.

Maybe it isn't too hard to count the good. It's just the number of personal beings who can live in heaven, and the thing that makes them fit for heaven is their holiness (how in tune with God they are).

This sounds kind of like evangelical (consequentialist?) metaethics merged with holiness (deontological/virtue ethical?) metaethics. Perhaps that is the characteristically New Wine way of doing things.

--

"Against responsibility" makes me think about my own personality and how it interfaces with effective altruist ideology. I found Singer's Drowning Child Illustration to be awful, true, and powerful. But I don't think I'm really an effective altruist as a result.

I've had that Illustration somewhere in my mind for about 9 years now. At first I was struck by the horror it implied about human beings, as well as by a call for mourning over that, and a drive to move myself. I think these three initial results are spiritually trustworthy and valuable. I was not driven to an exceeding sense of responsibility over the state of the world. I was driven to a sense that my time is not my own, and also that my money is an instrument to be used for good. I think it helped me to develop the sense that I am morally required to do my work.

But, my work is limited, and is not something that I consciously choose. I don't want to claim that I am especially guided by God in what I write (although if I write true things, then I am doing his will), but I do have the sense that I am given most of the materials and motivation for my writing from something/someone outside myself.

I'm not really capable of bending my work according to some kind of ethical formula. That includes expanding it. So, although my work has brought me into stressful situations that were in themselves unsustainable due to the people around me, I don't think I've ever been a true "workaholic". I don't think that my work rules over me or controls me. Instead, it feeds me.

I don't really like competing or controlling, or in general staking my inner life on making the world around me be a certain way. Also, I have a somewhat quiet and weak personality, but also a persistent personality, and on top of that seemingly many constraints on what I am from outside myself, that aren't always socially legible. So in many ways I am who and what I am in a strong way. I think the tendencies and values just mentioned in this paragraph help to blunt or even weaken the force of the EA ideology that is in me both to do good or ill, and (speaking off-the-cuff in this "blog comment") I would say that I don't find myself troubled by the problems discussed in "Against responsibility". But, I have been shaped by EA ideology, and it has helped me to do more good.

I think there is something kind of Buddhist or Taoist in my difficulty in orienting myself to make the world be a certain way, and also somewhat like in the Bhagavad-Gita (detach yourself from the fruits of your action). Maybe I would say in "what I am", I lean Eastern, but in "who I am" or "what I value" or "where I want to go", I lean Jewish or Jewish-descended. And that might describe Jesus. So maybe that mixture of "who" and "what" is a good goal for those who want to follow Jesus.

Tranquility Seems to Autovalidate; Hedonism and Buddhism

Wireheading (my rough definition for this post:) is when we make ourselves feel rewarded, apart from some kind of reality. The default means is through some kind of pleasure or sense of well-being.

In Wirehead Gods On Lotus Thrones, Scott Alexander points out that wireheading sounds repugnant:

Wireheading is commonly considered an ignoble end for the human race -- our posthuman descendants reduced to sitting in dingy rooms, taking never-ending hits of some ultra-super-drug, all their knowledge and power lying fallow except the tiny fraction necessary to retain delivery of the ultra-drug and pump nutrients into their veins.

but that something similar does not for him:

Imagine instead our posthuman descendants taking the form of Buddhas sitting on vast lotus thrones in a state of blissful tranquility. Their minds contain perfect awareness of everything that goes on in the Universe and the reasons why it happens, yet to each happening, from the fall of a sparrow to the self-immolation of a galaxy, they react only with acceptance and equanimity. Suffering and death long since having been optimized away, they have no moral obligation beyond sitting and reflecting on their own perfection, omnipotence, and omniscience -- at which they feel boundless joy.

I am pretty okay with this future. This okayness surprises me, because the lotus-god future seems a lot like the wirehead future. All you do is replace the dingy room with a lotus throne, and change your metaphor for their no-doubt indescribably intense feelings from "drug-addled pleasure" to "cosmic bliss". It seems more like a change in decoration than a change in substance. Should I worry that the valence of a future shifts from "heavily dystopian" to "heavily utopian" with a simple change in decoration?

I generally consider wireheading to be undesirable, but also I found a similar thing happening as Alexander did, when considering the two images of it. I found the lotus-god scenario basically acceptable, despite finding the dingy room scenario basically unacceptable. So I want to try to understand what is going on.

Maybe it's the imagery of the setting?

The future wireheading I imagine is clinical and efficient, each human (or post-human) slimmed down to the minimal size and complexity needed to experience maximal bliss, all lined up in a quiet hospital/factory/clean room, with robots maintaining them as necessary. Each (post-)human might be identical (because it turns out there's only one optimal way to solve for maximum bliss per resource expended). (In this scenario, we have no rational concept of what value ought to be anchoring us to a given axiology. So the concept drifts down economic gradients toward something that enables value to be mass-produced for as cheaply as possible. [Actually, maybe the cheapest value function to maximize is to say all matter/energy is of inestimable value and that nothing is needed to be done -- it's all conserved. Then, whatever was driven by value functions would cease. But maybe that idea should go in a different post.])

I think this (mass-production mini-hedonist factory) is more realistic than the dingy room idea. Aesthetically, I find this (the kind of hospital/factory/clean room setting) neutral compared to a dingy room (negative) or the more spiritual framing of Alexander's Buddhas (positive).

Having (from my perspective) neutralized the effect of the negative physical setting, do I still feel wireheading is repugnant?

Not as much. To be true to my thought as to what may actually happen in the future, I had to add the part about people being simplified and maybe made identical. That erases human individuality, and it may be the case that this turns full-fledged personal beings into mere blobs of conscious experience. That sounds objectionable. But what if I adjust for that as well? If I imagine that somehow they are persons, who have histories and whose proper names each have a unique denotation and set of connotations? (I'm not sure how they would acquire histories in the perfected future, but I can set that aside for the sake of a thought experiment.)

I still find wireheading to be undesirable in this version of the thought experiment, but I find that when I imagine wireheading to be just "real personal beings being in a state of blissful tranquility", as opposed to simply "bliss", it seems fine to me in the moment. I think the thing that makes a difference is that normally I think of pleasure in terms of "euphoria" or "being high". But "tranquility" gives it a different spin. I've experienced both intense euphoria and tranquility, and it's the tranquility that I find more trustworthy. As one might expect, the Buddha situation also seems fine when I imagine it.

I even feel like my MSLN-related arguments against things like wireheading and hedonism can't be worth worrying about. I intuitively know that they aren't true, just by imagining being in a state of blissful tranquility.

I am (like plenty of people, I guess) susceptible to imagining things. When I imagine blissful tranquility, I enter into that psychological state (enough to have an effect, although not fully) and find myself accepting things in general, including tranquility itself. This hedonic state is a feeling of ought-to-be-ness, and it persuasively validates itself -- or, has the psychological effect of validating itself in my experience -- exactly what you would expect from the feeling of ought-to-be-ness.

But rationally, should I ignore the possibility that when I'm blissed out, I may be preparing to harden myself against feeling real love, and against truly becoming kin to God? This would break God's heart -- can I comprehend his valuing of me and the pain I cause him when I'm on the drugs of imagining blissful tranquility? (And it threatens my destruction.)

When we perceive something that should be, it makes sense to feel the feeling of ought-to-be-ness. This is the natural function of the feeling. But if we are feeling the feeling all the time, it washes out our normative perception, our ability to sense what is acceptable through our direct perceptions of acceptability.

So perhaps the right way to think about the Buddha future is not to really understand what it would be like to experience, what the experience would be in itself. Or at least, not to let that be the definitive truth of it. There is reality outside the experience itself, and I want to know something about it, so I have to look at the Buddha future two ways: in itself (which says that on the hedonic levels of the hierarchy of betrayal it's 100% valid by definition), and abstractly, in its relationship with other truths (which says that it crowds out love / real valuing, a relationship with God and the truth, a kinship with the God who loved the world through its whole history, and a chance to live with God and the truth forever).

Beauty works very much the same way as tranquility. (Maybe beauty always brings tranquility, or they both always bring feelings of ought-to-be-ness.) The psychological state is nice, but can be a way we sell ourselves evil.

From an outsider's perspective, the overall appeal of Buddhism could often seem to be "feel tranquility no matter what reality is". But, to be accurate, I should note that the emphasis on psychological peace and beauty can be found in the Christian scriptures as well. Jesus is a beautiful person who says "My peace I give to you." But he also warns of hell and denounces evil. (Speaking from memory and not from having studied to address this topic,) Jesus is balanced somewhere between Buddhism (or hedonism) on one hand and something like perhaps the worst of anxious Christianity or materialism on the other. There is both "spirit" (experiential/hedonic ought-to-be-ness?) and "truth" (rational relations; matters of fact?) in God.

Believing Culturally

31 May 2021: minor edit.

The Christianity of MSLN includes in it a recognition of the value of non-Christian religions, as well as other doctrinal cultures of Christianity. A religion, in all its complexity and extensiveness, is all one simantic word, and is spoken by God. To the extent that it does not conflict with a person's relationship with God (which it might do, for instance, by turning people away from believing in a God who could be a human and die, or by turning people away from obeying the true commands of God, whatever they may be), it is part of God's creation and is trustworthy to those who trust it. So it is possible to practice a non-Christian religion and still be Christian, as long as your primary allegiance is to Jesus as the son of God, and thus ultimately to the Father. It can be practiced and believed in culturally, rather than literally, literal devotion being reserved for the Christian God.

For an example, consider within Christianity. Let us suppose MSLN is correct. It conflicts with all of the already-existing doctrinal cultures on some point or other, just as all of them do with each other. If a Calvinist, seeking the supremacy of Jesus Christ, came to believe that MSLN was really the truth from Jesus, they would have to convert to MSLN (New Wine) Christianity. But they would have their whole lifetime as a Calvinist as part of their spiritual heritage. There's a whole culture shaped by belief in the unshakable and absolute sovereignty of God -- the one so sovereign that he alone decides who is saved and who is damned. They could keep that culture, and could even look on that unshakable and absolutely sovereign God as a poem, an artistic image of God -- not literally correct but beautiful in a way, and something which can teach valuable lessons, as a literary example might. Perhaps they would entertain non-literal belief in such a God, perhaps through a ritual of remembering their heritage.

It could work similarly with converts to MSLN from outside Christianity. They could still read their non-Christian scriptures, and practice the old rituals and even observe the old laws (as long as none of this conflicted with the truth), but as poetry, not as literal.

A child could be raised in any one of different "nations" or people groups. There is a people group for Islam (actually a number of them), ones for Hinduism, Buddhism, Judaism, and so on. There are also many non-religious people groups (atheists, Americans, or even subcultures based around people's interests, like music fans or users of technologies), etc.). Children can be raised in many different people groups, whatever is part of their parents' heritage, as poetry, but there is only one literal truth, that of legitimacy itself.

I have used MSLN Christianity as an example of what people would convert to, because I'm writing from my perspective, with my hopes, but supposing there was something better, whatever aspires to being the actual truth probably will want to approach converts the same way I do here, or similarly.