Why Mikraism?

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Why Mikraism?

fschmidt
Administrator
This post was updated on .
The benefit of being a Mikraite is trust.  Mikraites should provide you with a community of people that you can trust and count on.  This is impossible to find in modern culture.

Trust depends on morality and morality depends on religion.  I think it is obvious enough that one can only trust a moral person.  That morality depends on religion is less obvious.  There are moral people who aren't religious.  But these people had recent ancestors who were religious and passed that morality down.  Morality can survive a few generations without religion but then it is lost.  All countries that have morality today had a strong religion a few generations ago.  But all countries without religion have declining morality.

There are two key ways that religion causes morality.  One is the idea of humbling oneself before an abstraction that is associated with a clear morality.  This abstraction may be a god or a set of gods or an ideal "Way" or karma.  Without such a concept, people put themselves first, above all other things, and this clearly results in immorality.

The other way that religion causes morality is to provide an analog of the tribe.  This analog is the church or synagogue or whatever other form the local religious community takes.  This community is small enough that everyone can know each other.  Any community that is too large for this cannot take the place of a tribe.  The tribe is the natural grouping of people, and a tribe enforces morality by condemning those who violate its rules.

Consider the alternative to the tribe.  This is the network model where trust is established between pairs of people.  This model is most developed in the Chinese concept of "guanxi".  But this model is much less effective than the tribal model in enforcing morality to produce trust.  The problem with the network model is that the cost of violating trust isn't high enough.  If you break the trust of one friendship for personal gain in the network model, the only cost is the loss of that one friendship and possibly a few other closely related connections.  But with the tribal model, all of your connections are to members of your tribe.  If you violate one connection in an immoral way that violates the rules of the tribe, you lose all of your connections because the tribe will throw you out.  So because of this higher cost for violating trust, the tribal model is the only one that can enforce morality.

This isn't to say that all religions are moral.  Religion is a necessary condition, but not a sufficient condition, for morality.  Modern Christianity is a prime example of an immoral religion.  Modern Christianity has churches that serve as tribes, but their god is no longer strongly associated with morality, so modern Christians have no morality.  For a religion to be moral, it must both be tribal and must worship something that is associated with morality.

There were many moral religions in history, but there are very few today.  I can only think of three today; serious Judaism, serious Anabaptists, and serious Shinto.  By "serious", I mean religions that put their own traditional values above modern trends.  Unless you live in Japan, serious Shinto is not an option.  Serious Anabaptism requires Christian beliefs.  If you don't have those beliefs, this option won't work.  The serious forms of Judaism are Orthodox and Karaite.  Conversion to Orthodox Judaism isn't easy and you will have to give up many foods.  Karaite conversion currently isn't even available.  So Mikraism was started to fill the void and to provide a moral religion for those who want it.