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The fool says in his mind, “There is no God.”
They are corrupt; they do vile deeds.
There is no one who does good.
Yehovah looked down from heaven on the human race
to see if there is any that did understand,
one who seeks God.
All have turned away;
all alike have become corrupt.
There is no one who does good,
not even one.
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Psalm 14:1-3
I realized a few things this shabbat. First I realized that the value proposition "moral alternative to modern culture" is meaningless to basically everyone. People do not care about morality or quality in general. Religion should be like fishing for souls (as Jesus said). One needs some bait, and then when someone swallows the bait, you can try to use this to push morality on them. This is what traditional Christianity did, and the Mennonites still do. The bait is going to heaven and all that is asked is faith in Christ. This is then leveraged to try to push morality. Islam uses the same bait. Judaism uses racism as its bait. In our case, I think our bait should just be a better life. This is expressed in Psalm 1. To promote this, I think we should emphasize our own personal testimony which is a common sales technique for religion and is more effective than any kind of rational argument.
I also realized that the idea of a physical community isn't going to work anytime soon. So we should focus on making Mikraite work as a virtual community. This should include developing Mikraite online businesses and developing religious practices that can work for a virtual religion. This also means that I am in less of a rush to move, which means I will travel less often, which means we should move our skype readings to Saturday afternoon.
I would like to discuss these things at our next meeting.
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