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Introduction

We learn in order to act more effectively.

Here we wish to apply the ideas developed in volumes 1 to 10 of this site. The result will be a set of guidelines for human action.

When we are working (as opposed to playing) we generally act with some purpose in mind. Now after nearly 64 years of life, I have the settled ambition of developing and propagating a religious outlook which, given time and development (perhaps centuries) will underwrite peace on earth and the conditions for human survival at least till the sun dies.

An extreme ambition this may be, but one that must be embraced if the planet is to become aesthetically pleasing to me, without all the horrendous evils that we are currently heir to.

My starting point is the religion of my birth, Roman Catholicism. Catholicism promises an eternity of bliss in Heaven to all those who obey its commands. Quite early in life, I saw that this promise is fraudulent. Now I see it as a ploy to capitalize on our natural fear of death to gain political control over us.

I nearly fell for it during the Vietnam war. I had been indoctrinated to believe that if I lost my life in the 'war against the enemies of my religion' I would be rewarded with eternal bliss. Many similarly indoctrinated young men and women are still offering themselves as martyrs today.

Since I feared death despite the promise of heaven, I avoided military conscription by entering a monastery. Here I laid the intellectual foundations for this site. By the time I was rejected as an unbeliever, the era of conscription was over and I was well started on my lifetime mission to develop an alternative to Catholicism.

Without doubt, the Catholic story is a delusion, a castle in the air. The most obviously spurious claim is that death itself is a delusion.

If we are to survive and be happy in the world, we must first learn how it really works and how we fit in. Birth, death and change are real, and occur at all scales. We must embrace science. In particular, from a religious point of view, we must embrace scientific theology.

Using such a theology, we can derive the conditions for peaceful human survival. In general, this means designing the human layer of the cosmic network to achieve two ends: first that everybody has access to the resources for life without having to fight for them; second that in obtaining the resources for our lives we do not damage the planetary ecosystem that supports us and our fellow creatures.

Here we use these ends to derive general guidelines for human life. In general, we need to guide our population, our consumption and our production into ways that are consistent with the life of the Earth. This means getting our energy from the sun, recycling our materials, and maximizing the spiritual value of our activity.

(revised 23 November 2008)

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