You always have a state religion. If your state religion is easily falsified by the empirical facts of this world, then your state religion is going to be inherently hostile to science, technology, and industry.
So, if your state religion proclaims
“all men are created equal”,
you have a problem.
And not long after that, your state religion is proclaiming all sorts of remarkable things, most recently Global Anthropogenic Catastrophic Warming. Regardless of whether this doctrine is true or false it is not a scientific doctrine for to doubt is sin, to be in favor of higher CO2 or warmer temperatures, even if you live in Alaska, is sin.
You should not confuse real science, the science of the Royal society from 1660 to 1945, with the post 1945 peer review “science” of Harvard, which has murdered science, gutted its corpse, and wears its gutted corpse as a skin suit.
The key lights of the early Royal Society were deeply Christian and opposed to the enlightenment. Science rested on a commitment to truth that was rooted in aristocratic and elitist Christianity, a value system whose elitism and aristocracy ran fundamentally contrary to the enlightenment, and whose Christianity ran fundamentally contrary to the enlightenment.
Science was possible because a gentleman and a nobleman should speak the truth, and because truth speaking was a sign of being a gentleman or a noble.
Compare and contrast with the Harvard self esteem culture, where speaking the truth shows you are a deplorable and an oppresser of the holy masses.
Judaism is inimical to science. Orthodox Jews don’t do science or technology. Judeo Christianity did not do science and technology. Christianity did science and technology. Not the enlightenment, and not Jews.
Progressivism and progressive Judaism is not inimical to science on an individual level. Individual progressives and individual progressive Jews individually do lots of good science, but their collective behavior is inimical and hostile to science and the scientific method, rewarding unscientific and antiscientific behavior, because progressivism rejects truth speaking. Atheist Jews do lots of good science, a quite disproportionate amount, and usually support the scientific method (not counting progressives as atheists, because they believe in “the arc of history), but the trouble with their atheism is that they don’t have a moral basis to defend the behavior on which the scientific method depends, and so their defenses of the scientific method address the individual, rather than the scientific community. They are disarmed before progressives, who do have a moral basis for attacking science and the scientific method, who attack it as hurtful to oppressed holy victim groups and damaging to the earth.
The proposition that our society is not religious is obviously false. The solution is to replace a state religion which has equality as its key belief, with a state religion whose key beliefs are less easily falsified by empirical data about the world.
Take Christianity, reinterpret away young earth creationism as a parable about early humans getting black pilled, and we have a religion far more resistant to empirical falsification by the facts of this world than progressivism, a state religion far more compatible with reason, science, technology, and industrialization than our current state religion.
Fortunately the Church fathers were already onto the job, sixteen hundred years ago.
Origen, writing about two hundred years after the crucifixion, tells us in no uncertain terms in Book Four of “The Principiis” that the young earth account of creation is to be understood spiritually, not literally:
let us examine the passages of Scripture. Now who is there, pray, possessed of understanding, that will regard the statement as appropriate, that the first day, and the second, and the third, in which also both evening and morning are mentioned, existed without sun, and moon, and stars — the first day even without a sky? And who is found so ignorant as to suppose that God, as if He had been a husbandman, planted trees in paradise, in Eden towards the east, and a tree of life in it, i.e., a visible and palpable tree of wood, so that anyone eating of it with bodily teeth should obtain life, and, eating again of another tree, should come to the knowledge of good and evil? No one, I think, can doubt that the statement that God walked in the afternoon in paradise, and that Adam lay hid under a tree, is related figuratively in Scripture, that some mystical meaning may be indicated by it. The departure of Cain from the presence of the Lord will manifestly cause a careful reader to inquire what is the presence of God, and how anyone can go out from it. But not to extend the task which we have before us beyond its due limits, it is very easy for anyone who pleases to gather out of holy Scripture what is recorded indeed as having been done, but what nevertheless cannot be believed as having reasonably and appropriately occurred according to the historical account. The same style of Scriptural narrative occurs abundantly in the Gospels, as when the devil is said to have placed Jesus on a lofty mountain, that he might show Him from thence all the kingdoms of the world, and the glory of them. How could it literally come to pass, either that Jesus should be led up by the devil into a high mountain, or that the latter should show him all the kingdoms of the world (as if they were lying beneath his bodily eyes, and adjacent to one mountain), i.e., the kingdoms of the Persians, and Scythians, and Indians? Or how could he show in what manner the kings of these kingdoms are glorified by men? And many other instances similar to this will be found in the Gospels by anyone who will read them with attention, and will observe that in those narratives which appear to be literally recorded, there are inserted and interwoven things which cannot be admitted historically, but which may be accepted in a spiritual signification.
And Augustine similarly tells us that the Bible is not a science textbook, and if you argue scientific facts on the basis of biblical authority, you are an idiot. Three hundred and seventy years after the crucifixion, and twelve hundred and sixty years before science and the scientific method was granted the prestige and authority it came to possess and had the success it came to have, he tells us that religion needs to stay out of matters in which science has its proper magistry – something that the enlightenment is in its arrogance and violence conspicuously and spectacularly fails to do.
Compare and contrast with the enlightenment. Irrespective of whether the left position on Catastrophic Anthropogenic Global Warming is true or false, it crushes science and replaces it with holy rolling and the persecution of dissent. Global Warming is sin. Being in favor of Global Warming is like being in favor of adultery.
Saint Augustine took various self contradictory positions on the book of Genesis, but in his final work on the topic, “the confessions” holds it to be allegorical and to contain a multitude of spiritual meanings. Fourteen hundred years before Darwin, Saint Augustine points towards Darwin’s program:
In the beginning were created only the germs or causes of the forms of life, which were afterwards to be developed in gradual course.’
This account (which is to say Darwin’s account) is, according to Saint Augustine, the “literal” meaning of Genesis, which is not very literal at all.
The proper magistry of science in religion is, for example, to confirm the doctrine of the fall with evolutionary psychology, that risen killer apes will have the human nature described in the book of Genesis. The proper magistry of religion in science is, for example, the moral character of the scientific method – that scientists are obligated to speak the truth, and use methods of evidence and argument likely to lead to the truth. And if they fail to do so (as for example in global warming science, vegetable oils, and so forth) then those scientists are sinful. Sin is within the proper magistry of the state religion.
In the argument on animal fats, and the argument on Global Warming, scientists, instead of employing the scientific method, politiced to add their doctrines to the official state religion. This should be heresy, and heretics should be denied state and quasi state employment – not heresy in claiming Catastrophic Anthropogenic Global Warming is true, nor heresy in denying that it is true, but heresy in adding either doctrine to the state religion.
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