I hereby announce the creation of a new conglomeration of schrodingerian believers, skeptics, anarchists and anyone with any set of views.
The Church of Metaepistomology, aka the church of think for your F---ing self.
The thing is, everyone is already thinking for themselves, they just might be dong a shit job at it.
In many churches the forbidden word TRUTH is shouted, strewn about, forced into the ear canals of those poor sods chained to their seats by the expectations of communities seeking to bolster their own positions through indoctrination. So often are those words and messages swallowed whole, to lodge themselves in the frontal lobes of the supplicants, diverting the flow of their lives from the diverting wholeness of a well incorporated worldview. Please chew your beliefs thoroughly and divest yourself of the undigestable.
The church of metaepistomology has no ministrations of what you believe, but how you believe. There is no Truth here, all revolves around the subjective, personal, perspective. We are each our own puzzle, though we may get hints from the lives and stories of others, anything taken in faith from on high will serve only as sand in your gears, slowing your unique and fulfilling epistemological developments, perhaps permanently hindering them.
If you are yet unaware, epistemology is the study of the dreaded “truth”, which only strikes me a useless squabbling over meaningless incommunicable perspectives in the greater reality that IS the ultimate truth, the indivisible wholesness of the universe, of which a piece that is divided or abstracted away from will certainly lose some of its jooj.
So metaepistomology diverts around this issue focusing instead on the why and how of belief. But how can one have a church of skeptics? Does that not belie the very purpose of community? To join together with likeminded compatriots in order to build together your very own tower of babble, that your words and shared faith might together have the strength to bridge the gap to the divine?
Communion with others rests on two simple and oft overlooked principles: What do we agree on? and How can we come together to live a better life than we might apart? These two ideals form the foundations of all civilizations, or, if unanswered, the spears on which they fall.
And what of the beyond of which many claims are made? I say that the only path to the divine is the internal one, and if you try to eff the ineffable, you are going to F it up. Not to say there is nothing to be said, just the opposite. There is a sweet melody that comes from sharing of experiences or perspectives, from an inquisitive conversation with others, and from the creation of the art.
We are each an eye unto the divine, and by taking in what we can from eachother, our sight can be expanded. However many seek to blind those whose visions of the world do not align, sacrifices to the cyclops king whose world is simple and flat, and whose dreams are of pure bliss.
Putting aside dreams and instead looking out onto this world that is our divine realm, it seems to be a bit of a nightmare. I can see why people don’t want to look too closely, however turning away does not make it go away. I’d say we are doing an awful job of working together, not that it’s an easy problem. Stuck in bureaucracies and systems of value that do not serve anything but the fruitless chase for infinite profit growth has lead us to a new age of extinction that humanity might not be safe from. Do we really want more needless suffering? Is that not our shared foe?
I see through the haze a vision of what might be if we can align on our values and treat the Earth as the whole indivisible organism that it is. I must believe that the spark of a new form of cooperation is at hand, where we can escape the zero sum game and instead work together for our shared joy.
This shift will come about as a moment of zeitgeist when the increasingly large portion of the downtrodden and those in the know find that we can, indeed, do it better ourselves, and shed the old systems as a a cicacada sheds their shell. Or perhaps, if just one of the worlds multibillionaires could see the path of suffering our structures have hurdled us down and realizes that releasing dogma and working for the good of all could push beyond the space where there is any distinction of selflessness and selfishness.
Due to this I announce the rebranding of the Church of Metaepistemology to The Church of Meta, with a prayer to our corporate overlord:
Dear Lord Zuckerberg, please expand your sight to take in all of the Earth, use your almighty wealth to ensure the health and wellness of your beloved home the Earth and it’s inhabitants, and turn your algorithms away from evil and toward good, that we may escape the path of dystopia and destruction. We’re all in the same boat. Amen.