The Properly Guided Evolution of the Religious Impulse

[Dimmesdale]

1. Fetishism: Animals are innocent in their instincts. This inculcates a healthy love of oneself in terms of creatures. To model yourself after an animal is, in one sense, to remove yourself from fallen humanity. It is to embrace the honest.

2. Elementalism: When one is empowered from the foregoing, one experiences Life itself as it manifests through clean elements like heat and water. One tries for a more refined form of purity, isolating what is essential and discarding what is superfluous. Only the topmost survives the threshing.

3. Materialism: The world is systematized and classified into natural categories. Things are brought into a whole perspective, not just vis-a-vis separated elements. Things are seen in Nature's light, or law. Things are revealed in their vulnerable essences and thus protected.

4. Man-Worship: With the increase of the analytical mode of sorting Nature, the same tool is turned towards pure reason itself. Reason naturally points to the bearer of reason. One's own mind becomes the center of focus.

5. God Worship 1: A Revolution; the moving away from self to God. The radical preferring of the other (difference) rather than the ego (sameness). However, with the use of transcendent categories, purified intellection, not merely going by mysterian symbology.

6. God Worship 2: The Guru's Harvest Moon of Industry. The challenge of Life, requiring the Figurehead to direct one's energies. Life is given it's raison d'etre.

7. God Worship 3: The final taste of Paradise. True freedom's culmination. The place one finally resorts to rest, but without idleness or apathy.