Posted by fschmidt on
URL: https://mikraite.arkian.net/Mikraite-2-tp1381.html

The Old Testament promises victories for those who follow it.  Yet in our main business battle, we lost.  Why?

Did Moses choose the few best people based on some strict criteria for his group to leave Egypt?  No, he left with a million mediocre people.  One needs numbers to make a group work.  And from a large group, one can usually find one person to fill any given role that is needed.  Moses picked Aaron, a spineless narcissist, as chief priest.  And Moses picked Joshua, a homicidal maniac, as head of the army.  But whatever their faults, these 2 people were able to do their job.

Moses won battles with a large number of slightly above average people.  All Moses needed from his religion was to elevate his group slightly above the enemy.  That is enough for victory when you aren't lacking numbers.

So the Mikraite way was not the Old Testament way, and that is why we lost.  What now?  We can't exactly copy Moses and find some group of slaves to follow us.

If we can't lead a large group, at least we can identify a large group who is better than average using come criteria.  Modern religions have easy criteria for joining, but require members to actually choose to join.  We don't have this option since no one has any reason to join us.  A better model is ethno-nationalism.  These groups identify their people by race, so there is no need to join, one just belongs by default based on race.  But I don't think race is the ideal criteria.  The ideal is some better criteria for selecting better than average people.

Before discussing the criteria, let's look at the purpose of religion.  Religion provides morality.  But one has to decide who morality should be applied to.  And this is one reason to have some criteria for identifying who belongs to your group.  And one also hopes that this is reciprocated, that members of this group are more likely to be moral with you than average people are.

So based on this, I suggest this criteria:

1.  Attends sex-segregated religious service.
2.  Accepts the Old Testament as scripture and as morally binding.
3.  Applies morality to those who meet these 3 criteria.

Who meets this?  Rule #1 removes members of modern culture, who are the scum of the earth.  What is left after rule #1 are already morally superior.  Rule #2 is designed to make sure that we share core moral principles.  This eliminates Islam, which has its own rules based on the Quran, but is too different.  Rule #3 eliminates Judaism.  We want the criteria to select for people who will be moral with us.  What does that leave?  It leaves traditional Anabaptists and sex-segregated Orthodox Christian groups.  There may be others who meet the criteria who I don't know about.

Again, what is the point of all this?  Is this just role playing where we invent a meaningless group to belong to?  At the least, anyone can use these simple rules as a way of identifying who is more likely to be moral.  But I think one can take this further using the example of racist groups.  My experience with this is with Chabad Judaism.  They embrace anyone who is jewish and basically say "welcome to our club".  It is a nice feeling to just be accepted by a group, and this makes one more willing to listen to what they have to say.  Now imagine that I define a Mikraite as one who meets the above 3 criteria.  Then I attend a sex-segregated Orthodox church service.  When I talk to the people there, I will have a solid reason for attending, even without being Christian.  I can tell them that I am Mikraite and that they are Mikraite, that we belong to the same group.  And I can explain the reasoning behind it.  This is different from just being a regular guest.  This is an explanation of why we really do belong to the same group.  And I think this is important for being accepted as a member of the community of the church.