In the first civilizational game, cooperation creates a dynamic religion that motivates energy, work, shared prosperity, and gives poets and priests elite status.
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Priests
In the first civilizational game, cooperation creates a dynamic religion that motivates energy, work, shared prosperity, and gives poets and priests elite status.
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Key Notes
Organized religion creates artificial differences among faiths so religious authorities can exploit people and justify their own role.
Universities are diagnosed as temples for comfortable priests; true knowledge is found in the ordinary, mundane world with suffering people.
Jiang says the priests are analogous to what is now called the deep state: the class that must remain uncontrolled because it controls the ruler.
A religion based on reason bypasses priests because humans can use reason to access God and deduce basic civil dogmas from first principles.
Local priests give the church bureaucratic reach by interacting with people directly, gathering information useful for taxation, and shaping thought.
The priests' purity project is motivated by the belief that only keeping the religion alive can keep Yahweh and Israel alive.
Timestamped Evidence
"...this religion become the elite okay and this includes poets and priests all right poets and priests and at this point in history it's..."
"...religion is problematic. Because organized religion serves the interests of the priests who control the religion. Okay? And that's why there are differences in..."
"...to fall into ignorance okay why because the professors there the priests there they have departed from reality and they've chosen to live a..."
"...be away from God they are temples for the comfort of priests so if you want true knowledge go out into the world and..."
"...is everyone right because the people we didn't control are the priests they're what we today call the deep state and it's possible the..."
"...in it. Okay? So the way you do that is through priests who then tell you what to believe. Okay? So this is the..."
"...have the capacity to access God. So you don't really need priests. Right? So we can just think reasonably what religion should be like...."
"Well, that doesn't contradict what we already believe. Therefore, you can believe that animals can go to heaven as well. Okay? Do you understand?..."
"Okay. And it does that through its local churches. Right? The priests. Because if you think about it um the people are interacting with..."
"But there's a fanatical minority, mainly priests, who were determined to keep alive their religion. Because, only by keeping alive their religion could they..."
"a law. We want to maintain the purity of our religion because that's the only way to save our people. Okay? And that's why..."
Relevant Lectures And Readings
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