Copyright © 1999 by Lenna A. Mahoney

Beach BEM:  As a matter of fact, FM, I regard conspiracy theories as false religions, with the word "religion" properly defined as "a code of behavior and explanation based on the intentions of a non-verifiable entity".
         Consider the reversible evidence that conspiracy theorists usually adduce.  Trends and actions that advance the goals of a devotee's favorite conspiracy are always used as proof of its existence.  All observations of countervailing activities or motives are stated to be coverups, ploys that the conspiracy has devised with Mighty Mouse's ingenuity, Boris Badenov's subtlety, and Scrooge MacDuck's ruthlessness.  Conspiracy theorists argue their chosen cabal's powers as abtrusely as God's Plan, with the result that no conceivable fact could possibly refute any conspiracy's existence.  I submit that this reveals conspiracies to be non-disprovable, non-Popperian entities, like gods, and that I did not describe the new millennialism in this manner.
         The conspiracy religions, in particular the millennialist ones, have been force-fed by our accomplishments.  Civilisation has more than reached the point where we face greater challenges and dangers from human nature than from Nature.  Famines, plagues, natural disasters, all of these we can manage, in the First World at any rate, but fortunately technology and education have as yet given us no method to manage each other.  Furthermore, the "information age" has made it clear that the natural source of our wealth is knowledge and skill far more than physical goods and services.
         The "natural" result is that modern citizens try to harvest and harness each other, precisely as the ancients used animals and streams.  Just as nature could be impersonally harvested, so can other people, while they are distant enough to be regarded as abstract groups.
         It's been said that sailors, farmers, and actors are prone to superstition because their livelihoods depend so greatly on uncontrollable flukes.  How much more reason for superstition do we have, then?  We depend on others to feed us, and on the incalculable decisions of distant expert strangers, our leaders, advisors, businessmen, scientists, and therapists.  So we look for gods of human affairs in conspiracies, in a social animism that tries to rationalize the cause and effect of social catastrophes in terms of the intentions of groups.  In much the same way, our ancestors tried to comprehend lightning and plague as the intentional wrath of gods.
         Think, for example, of the fourteenth century when the Black Death eviscerated Europe and Asia.  In those days, the immediate, fully accepted explanation was that God was giving man his merited punishment for a legion of sins.  The Flagellants vividly expressed the sense of submitting to a merited punishment.  In our days, our modern dogma explains high-level corruption and tyranny as a just punishment visited upon us by that conspiracy of all except us that we call the democratic political system:  "People get the government they deserve."
         One might as piously say that animals get the ecosystem they deserve; piously, but not accurately or verifiably.  There are laws of demographics, sociology, and economics that are wellnigh as inexorable as those of microbiology or macro-ecology.  Our conspiracy theories are only the alchemical rudiments of those as yet unfathomed laws, cast (as was alchemy) in the form of false religion.

Thalp:  This "brings up" ecology, one of the perplexing things about Earthuman culture.  Perhaps you know of the burgeoning Gaean religion of Western Earth.  Gaea is named a purely loving and nurturing entity, also the planet Earth, that conspires solely to protect all her children, all the species, in all the time.  I do think it is similarly and more possible that Gaea, who I understand as the deified aspect of the macopave of Earth, has conspired upon another great burst of species extinctions and chosen Earthumans rather than asteroids or climate to dance the execution.  That does fulfill the "destroyer" side of the triple goddess, on Earth called by names such as Hecate and Kali; the nurturing side is never all.  Earthumans might be the "hammer of Goddess", for this era.
         To go on the "record", I would dislike this happening.  An n-Hexist, I feel that Godhead is everything, unlimited, and can follow no moral rules, so be it.  Godhead can not be meaningfully condemned for extinguishing species.  However, sapients are nearly nothing, except in our Inner Worlds.  We unlike Godhead have limits and do need our imagined moral goals and rules for meanings.
         It may be well for Godhead to decree extinction.  We cannot say, we are of Total Understanding but not the Whole of it.  But if extinction is immoral by some individual sapient's imagination, then it is most pitiable and most profound to see yt/him/her compelled by Godhead to perform it.

Theofe:  I think not all conspiracy theories count as religions by BB's definition.  Do they all set rules for behavior?  Most Gregarian ones don't.
         The most popular conspiracy theory in IVE has to do with reality laundering.  That means getting rid of excess reality to avoid having to pay reality tax on it.  Only maybe two reputable experts think of reality tech as possible.  Its disreputability strengthens the conspiracists.
         An example of hypothetical "crude", "seeded" reality generation.  Suppose a launderer wants diamonds.  In "nature", the Universal-Access Reality, you find diamonds formed in blue clay.  So Master Clean the launderer takes a seed of any plain rock from the U-AR.  He carries out initial reality operations to create the pre-clay matrix plus the carbon.  Those constitute the necessary precursors.  After further reality operations, mixed with physical processes, he has blue clay, diamonds, both.  So Master Clean has to pay reality tax on both.  Unless he can conceal the reality in which the clay exists.  Not just the clay, in practice.  All manner of byproducts, impurities, what clay needs before it can come into, remain in reality.  Perhaps seas, small micellar life-forms, physical laws of electrical charge.  Things we don't intuitively recognize as intrinsically connected to the reality of clay.
         Of course, diamonds don't have any great value in Gregaria, hardly more than blue clay.  So no one would take the trouble to engineer reality for diamonds.  Local nodes of locked alteration in physical, magical law do have value, go by the name GW, say the conspiracists.
         The launderers supposedly use personal computers as a front to disperse the leftover excess reality from GW creation.  No one denies that Repo brand personal computers show up on many complex pre-GW worlds.  Some say Repo comes from AREPO, hence from the remagic dumpers.  How Earthiecentric, says the Repo Charity.  Some claim "Repo" stands for "reality possession", allegedly a criminal charge under the rules of the reality tax collectors.  The Repo Charity coterie claims otherwise. 
         The conspiracists say each Repo computer links into the excess reality.  It allows the computer user to enter a fully-detailed Individual-Access Reality of his very own, set up as he likes it.  It serves to disperse the excess reality among many users, helping to hide it.  A kind of I in the pyramid scheme, too.  Consider.  Often the user imagines a Repo inside his I-AR, created by the Repo in the U-AR.  So then he goes into a second I-AR inside the first.  Then into a third I-AR inside the second...  The recursion goes on indefinitely, mirrors reflecting mirrors, any number of concentric I-ARs.  All the pyramiding realities use up the excess that needs laundering.  Also they discourage reality tax agents, who don't want to get lost inside the pyramid.  Once they got in, they'd never know for sure they'd gotten out again.
         The Repo Charity calls this nonsense.  Nonetheless they have a slogan, "Repo -- everything you want in a computer."

Thalp:  Indeed, Major, I have studied with great interest about the Malcolm X, JFK, RFK, King, and Wallace rituals, and too that of John Lennon.  And also I have studied with fascination the Western Earth political orgs unique with their parallel structure, in the covertly sacrificial facade of elected officials and celebrity superstars and the true permanent governors hidden like the favored prince among the "bureau"crats.
         I venture into this subject in trepidation, indeed my imprints all warn me against it.  Most Gregarians, when we sometimes note Earth, find extreme if even abhorrent the Earthumans' near-perfect abstinence from human sacrifice.  Some ritual, regular, open sapient sacrifice is practiced in every part of each planet in Gregaria, except Earth.  Only Western Earth has but one familiarity for us, the ritual symbolic cannibalism of a consenting weekly victim.

         I apologize deeply for any distress I may have caused.

If human sacrifice had not continued on Earth, albeit in forms unfamiliar to Thalp and nearly invisible to yt and us, then the human (or, more precisely, Cro) race would more than likely have ceased to exist on this world.

When a planet's macopave isn't tuned to a sapient species, the results are excess plagues and deleterious mutations, the absence of mancied warning of upcoming disasters, and the loss of most of the species' magical intuition.  It's well known that the planetary macopave of any world is unlikely to remain attuned to a sapient species unless the sapients perform regular consenting sacrifices.  The crux of it is the consent, the magical will that permits a merger between the macopave and local Sapience.  A non-consenting sacrifice, however, leaves her/his/yts curse on the species.  That is not in the least prophylactic.

The greatest mystique in Gregaria is that surrounding the generosity of the consenting sacrifice.  Her/his/yts nobility is all the greater because she/he/yt isn't the only or greatest redeemer, and doesn't have the consolation of unique or outstanding deathfame.  All honor is paid to the sacrifices.  Their names are remembered, for a while, their last months are made pleasant, and their passing is eased to avoid the deathcurse.  And then they are eaten by as many of their community as possible, to get the benefit of the magical link.  "You are what you eat."

But consider impoverished Earth, where the sacrificial instinct possessed by all sapients has been stifled by millennia of remagic.  Earthumans can't reasonably be expected to have remembered why sacrifice is important, or how it must be performed; but the ancient urge remains among us, as among Gregarians.  It's an evolved instinct, a species survival drive like sex or hunger, one that can seldom be entirely denied and that can't be safely sublimated.

Many Gregarians feel that Earthumans suffer from a kind of sacrifice neurosis.  Sexual suppression leads to sexual perversion:  rape, bestiality, frigidity.  The same is true for sacrificial suppression.  Earthumans are said to display a Jekyll/Hyde ambivalence toward sacrifice that's found only in the sole other dumpworld.  The Jekyll part appears in the quasi-worship given to unconsenting victims, meaning anyone who can be imagined to be helpless in a cruel, cruel world.  It's lavished on children, the poor, the post-1945 Jews, mistreated races, endangered species, any acclaimed underdog at all.  The Hyde side shows in a sickly fascination with illicit, unconsenting sacrifices:  ritually abused children, or Van Gogh, or Jack the Ripper, or Stephen Hawking (the Fisher King of Earth quant-sci).  Mother Teresa and Peter Sotos (who's a downscale postmodern Marquis de Sade), they're both strangely caught up in that famous Earthuman perversion.

Citizen Paine:  Ya wanna sample of how that victim twitch works, ya gotta look at that ADA law fer handicappeds.  With this dipshit law if Helen Keller comez to my buziness demandin to be my secretary, I gotta hire her like anybody else or else.  Then I gotta train her like anybody else or else.  Then I gotta promote her like anybody else or else.  I gotta buy her a Braille processor, I gotta dump her phone dutiez to somebody already too buzy, and I gotta redecorate the office to go with guide dog dung.  Creezus H Jist I bet it would be cheaper to take out a contract on her, time to call up Uncle Salvatore.  Why not, Helen can't hear me!

La Belle Dame Sans Souci:  That's such a cruel thing to say.  I know I'm going to get in trouble for flaming, but I can't help it, why pick on the differently abled like that?  They're just like the rest of us, trying to find happiness with what they've got.

Sabre:  What makes you think people want to be happy?  Where is your evidence?  Wake up, look around you.  You will see happiness comes second for most people.  First comes wanting to be victims.  Even bullies make sure to see themselves as victims or people who have been imposed upon too far.  Having someone else to blame lets them evade the responsibility for their own behavior and lets them feel tragic and important like their favorite soap-opera stars.

Ironically, some of the mass murders committed by Earthuman sacrificial perverts do in fact serve the species' purpose of sacrifice, "behind a veil".  There's a need to sacrifice, and a need to be sacrificed.  The wouldbe victim, not realizing what she is seeking, makes herself vulnerable; and the executioner is unthinkingly drawn to her to make the sacrifice.  The consent is there, albeit unconsciously.

Theofe:  Among the sapients who bear their offspring serially, most sacrifices come from the firstborn.  Not as Earthuman myth would have it, that the parents value the firstborn more, so sacrifice them.  That can't explain it in Gregaria.  However much the parents prize their firstborn, they don't make the choice.  The sacrifice has to decide, give his own sincere consent. 
         The firstborn majority stems from everyday family psychology.  The firstborn bears the brunt of his parents' inevitable, natural, no-fault startup errors.  Expecting the child to grow up faster than he can.  Pushing him out of the nest a little too soon, to raise later children.  So the characteristic firstborn traits, always trying to meet other's expectations, at heart feeling he'll never.  A natural impulse to appeasement, apology, sacrifice follows.
         So the younger children face less tiring expectations.  They have the comfort of "he's too little to know any better".  The defense of "pick on someone your own size", the phrase used to shame their eldersibs.  The support of parents, sick of arbitrating, when the youngers try to tag along with the eldersibs' private pursuits.  It leads to the most characteristic laterborn psychology, competitive optimism.  Feeling a little bit favored, not regarding the usual rules, troubles as pertinent to them.  Eldestborn think of what the world wants from them, latestborn of what the world will naturally give them.  In general, of course, not in all cases.
         The excess loss of the eldest children benefits Gregarian society, accentuating the impact of younger children.  Youngers' brashness has made the third, youngest son the one who always succeeds in many worlds' fairy tales.  It leavens those weltstamms in which extra lastborn survive to play a larger role.

SOCIAL MEMONICS 101

Course synopsis:  Social memons teach certain behaviors, in the guise of religion, to the majority of the orglings in any long-lasting pre-GW (scarcity-based) org.  Without them no such org can survive for very long.  This course will describe those favored "religious" behaviors, presenting numerous examples from many worlds.

Abstract:  Long-lasting, exogamous, heterosex relationships are favored to produce a plethora of genetically sound children who will receive consistent long-term training to conform to the org's memon:  "brainwash early, brainwash often".  At first the favored relationships are polygamous to maximize the production of genomes that have high susceptibility to memons.  In later economic development, when large accumulations of property become possible, the org changes to favor monogamous relationships so that "property power" is not lost by splitting it between too many heirs.  Male dominance is favored:  uterine capacity limits how fast reproduction can occur, so males must seize control to accelerate the production of their own bloodline and ensure that self-serving female decisions don't slow down the birthrate.  Social stratification is favored:  it is most stable for an elite to have the knowledge, rationalizations, teachers, enforcers, weapons, and wealth to hold down the bottom.  And treating the mind (or spirit, or soul) as more important than the body is also favored:  a social memon can more easily deceive and mold the mind than the body, with all its needs and senses, so the body and its contra-org advice are persistently devalued and debased.

Range of applicability of the course material:  partly accurate for sapient species in general, mostly accurate for humans, and nearly always accurate for Cros. 

Free Meson:  I enjoyed your very intrepid remarks about the merits of believing in the Bible, the more so because I entirely disagree with them.  I greatly doubt you could find a case in which Bible study was the sole source of any knowledge that demonstrably benefitted human life.
         First, though, let me clarify that I am talking only about the hard-science facts that Bible literalists claim to find in their Holy Book.  All of the discoveries that have improved our lives have resulted entirely from diligent scientific inquiry into finding out how the world works.  A great deal of conscientious thought and hard work have also gone into interpretation of the Bible, and the only result has been a Science of the Absurd.  And who needs that?
         Just as one recent example, consider the Creationist "theory" that the speed of light has changed by many orders of magnitude over the past several thousand years.  This theory is entirely pointless except as a stratagem to "reconcile" carbon dating with one of many discrepant sets of Bible-based historical calculations.
         All of this goes back to a "mathematics Ph.D.'s" misuse of an exponential extrapolation when the data could only defensibly have supported a linear one.  The measurements and inferred estimates of light-speed that he used came from different kinds of instruments whose error bands varied wildly, but he never considered that.  Furthermore, any genuinely qualified mathematician knows it's misleading to use a statistical correlation outside its data domain.  (But what did Dr. Strangemath do?  The fellow tried to predict a variable over millennia when his data covered only a few recent centuries.)  And this whole unfortunate "study" received absolutely no peer review from any scientists who were recognized outside Creation Science.  At the barest minimum, reviewers from the fields of quantum physics, measurement technology, and mathematics were needed to confirm such an unprecedented theory.  Honestly, did any of this accomplish anything worthwhile?
         Now am I to conclude a bona fide qualified PhD missed the abysmal theoretic flaw in this grand triumph of Creationism?  If a change in the speed of light accelerated the speed of nuclear processes, and made carbon-dating overstate the passage of time, then it would have equally accelerated the chemical processes in life.  We simply couldn't observe decay-dating showing us billions of years of history while human life only experienced six thousand.  The time scales of both radioactive decay and organic metabolism would have changed by the same factor. 
         It is very difficult to credit that the behavior of quantum and electronic phenomena is so radically different from what has been observed in thousands of tests.  Nevertheless, there would have to be an enormous discrepancy to match the diminished-c theory.  Were we to design technology using this theory, we would certainly have to do without our life-saving, labor-saving electronic equipment.  (And our rich yuppie gimmickry like automatic bread-makers.)  None of it could ever have been invented using this technically useless, demonstrably false, but Biblically flawless theory.
         Creationists seem unqualified to recognize that the physical sciences and technologies are fundamentally interrelated.  A shot fired at one science ricochets throughout all and so must be tested against all, not only against some convenient tiny subset of the data.  And if any Creationist out there doesn't understand these technical issues, then he (or she) is living proof of their own lack of qualifications.  I see no excuse for the sheer incompetence and triviality of the scientific "theories" proposed by Bible students.
         Then again, why should we use only a small astrophysical subset of Bible data as the backbone of the "Literalist Science"?  Let's learn from I Samuel 6.  We can try curing bubonic plague by giving the local priest five golden images of rats and five of buboes.  (Or "emerods", hemorrhoids, as some Bibles say.)  Take the experiment further.  We can diagnose and treat leprosy using Leviticus 13 and 14 for our only guides.  Logically, we have no other choice if we take the Bible as the literal and pre-eminent source of scientific truth.
         Perhaps you see my point?

Aquinas:  Although I disdain to respond to your straw-man taunts, I nonetheless accept the gauntlet you have thrown down before me.  We can anthropically conjecture, with complete safety, that God willed to employ the evolutionary process and that He did not employ other methods of generating the human race because human free will would not have resulted had He not used evolution.  This teleological hypothesis (dependent on a mere religious belief though it may be) is freely tendered to give AI "inventors" a clue for their researches.  The evolutionary process that worked for God might succeed again (Deo volente) in the software laboratory.  Is this humble suggestion not in part corroborated by the success of "evolutionary algorithms" in software design?  If so, then religious beliefs do have a "demonstrable benefit", to use your niggling bureaucratic terminology.

Because the perfecting of imagination is the quest in nonsapiomorphic (High) Hexism, memons (those petrifiers of the imagination) take the place of demons.  Thalp, a High Hexist, never quite got around to discussing yts version of angels, though yt used the phrase "free-will lifeforms".  However, the mythomane Low Hexists regard myths as the meme equivalent of angels.

This is the font of your editor.  Let me define.  "Meme" is an Earthuman term, courtesy of Dr. Richard Dawkins.  "Memon" is one of those preverted words, derived sideways from Earth jargon, that appear so frequently in dopplEnglish.  A meme is to the intellect what a gene is to the body:  something that uses its host to replicate itself, not necessarily to the host's personal advantage.  A memon is an interrelated collection of memes that has enough complexity and "modulated inconsistency" (Thalp) to behave like a sapient entity.

Some ideas are not memes.  The personal quirks and knacks that give someone individuality.  Books that don't sell well, and those that are immediately, tracelessly forgotten.  Paintings and music that only a few people enjoy, all for different reasons.  Crank political theories.

To give you examples of memes -- an ad or sitcom jingle (or the theme from "Scheherazade", aka Rimsky-Korsakoff's Psychosis) is a simple meme.  It makes you remember it for weeks, whistle it, and repeatedly infect other people with it.  Mr. Spock, the Vulcan, is a more complex meme; witness the contagious popularity of his maxims, finger gestures, and green pointy things.  Catholicism might well be a full memon, with its charisma, lavish intricacy, and durability, excellences almost as great as those of Pharoah-worship.

Theofe:  Memes make celebrities into a different kind of sapient.  Most people only reproduce through genes.  Celebrities need genes plus a meme, their image.  Spin-doctors serve as obstetricians, PR specialists as pediatricians.  IVE tells a legend about an actor who kept playing the same role in infinite stories.  So heshe can't die till everyone on IVE forgets all the stories.  Also heshe can't live as himherself.  Only hisher character lives, using hisher body.

Come to think of it, are mass-marketing mailing lists alive?  And those faxual harassment phone-number databases?  They surely are hard to wrest your name from, and they never give up, and in that they match the Gregarian portrait of a memon.

The Hexists think we have a major problem here in material existence:  the memons don't know that we material creatures have Sapience.

Paisley is My Friend:  Why don't you use bumper stickers to tell the memons we're here?  Say something friendly like "Caution, memons, sapients on board". 

It'll never work.  Memons can't read.  They seem to have Sapience without any sensory contact with materiality.  The psychological laws of material sapients like us serve as physical laws to memons.  Our physical laws, spacetime, massenergy don't make no nevermind to them, unless they're deeply immersed in us.  Mostly they barely keep their toes wet in what Timothy Leary called our upper four circuits.

Makes me wonder about the reciprocity of it all.  Supposedly our thoughts are the memons' matter; could our matter be their thoughts?  Does our ability to see the past, but not the future, make the memons' time run reverse to ours?  Do they refer to our mental laziness as The Law of Conservation of Energy?

Think of a sapient mind, or the set of all sapient minds, as a world.  It has a climate, a landscape:  structures of the mind that hardly differ from person to person, and barely change from generation to generation.  It has plants:  the emotions and the senses; some long-lived blooms, others ephemeral.  These feelings are present everywhere, in all people, springing from the common ground and (like most plants) not moving easily from one person (biome) to another; they can scarcely be communicated, "though sometimes they set seed".  (Again Thalp, whose special interest in memons came from yts quest to directly communicate with them.)  And the mindworld has animals, beasts, both simple and sophisticated, that move about and batten upon, or cooperate with, the "plants", the "soil", and each other.  Consciousness seems the most complex of the mindworld's native animals.  It consumes more resources than the others and can domesticate them, a little.

General evolution, worldswide evolution, has produced a population of smaller, similar, evolving, inside-the-mind subsidiary worlds by producing all our motley kinds of sapients.  It's one more example of the lovely self-similarity to be found throughout nature at many scales:  coastlines and crystal outlines, blood vessels branching like rivers, the spattered groupings of stars and freckles.

In yet further similarity, the memons live sapient in this our mindworld.  We can't perceive them, except when we redeploy our endogenous neurochemicals with a DMT treatment or some such.  Under those conditions, the memons look to us much the way that we sapients would look to hills -- spirits of mischief, immensely fast, encrusted with machinery.  The memons excavate, level, and garden us with compelling ideas, using some systems of ideas, in other words memes, as a sort of mental equipment.  Their machinery resembles them just as our mechanisms resemble us.  Apparently that decidedly complicated Thalp's endeavor to communicate with the memons -- "I cannot tell them from their tools."

Memons also infest the other sapient species in the universe, including some outside Gregaria.  That memonic free passage through spacetime can give us impressions of future aeons, alien worlds, though usually only when we use the few mind-altering techniques that push us into the memon "circuits" in our brains. 

Thalp:  Perhaps we hold memon shelters in our minds for evolutionary augments.  The memons can communicate to our survival, and I may mention enlighten our sideways evolution.

What do the memons gain from us?  Not nourishment or haven or any survival needs, as we can understand them.  But they want free passage.  They want to move about easily in the mindworld and tour as much as possible.  The memons want similarity, or congruence, in our meme systems to give them better access amongst our mind, but they want enough variety among our minds to make the access worth using.  Their tools work to develop "common ground" between minds:  shared ideas, that is to say memon roads.

Ruby Arsenic:  So yr humble correspondent lives at the intersection of Anti-Normalism Tollpike and Pure Skepticism Byway, which is a less-traveled dirt road with soft shoulders of indefinite extent.  Bleah.  I can smell the roadkill from here.

Memons think of changing from one meme system to another the way we think of riding a bike or calling a dog; or in the case of wildly different systems, the way we think of travelling round the world or taming a tiger.  We can guess that some memons have a taste for wild canyons of memes, others for formal gardens, others for small, square, decently watered mowed lawns.

Thalp wanted to change the memons' incomprehension of us without having even the most inchoate idea of how.  Maybe yt didn't wholly want to figure out how.  Yt admitted to qualms about driving off the memons -- the stupefying possibility that we sapients have no independent intelligences, only loaners from memons.  What yt truly wanted was a full voluntary link between material and memonic sapience, a sort of hieros gamos or holy marriage.  With the full understanding that in wedlock one mate usually benefits more than the other, because the marriage is too intrinsically valuable to be considered bankrupt because of a mere cash flow imbalance...

Thalp insisted that (in the prenuptial meantime) we should see the memons not as our parasites, but our symbionts.  Consider.  A successful parasite or disease does not kill the host till it's used him to spread the ailment.  Colds make you sneeze and cough germ-laden sprays.  AIDS leaves you vigorous enough for rupturous decades of sex and needles.  Likewise, the memons want to tolerate or help their environment -- while it helps the growth of their (our) meme systems.

Memons find their potency in our evolved sapient inability to select what we learn, and they treat us in such ways as will keep us unable.  Most of our learning occurs without our consciousness, without our volition -- as in childhood training, brainwashing, peer pressure, word poisoning, and deathbed conversions.  Memons break ground in a person through his unmeant learning.  Then the victim rationalizes the memon's urges and concepts as part of himself and protects them as such.  This comes about all the more easily when the memonic possession coincides with common sapient traits.

To build their better roads and gardens, memons need as broad and deep a foundation as possible.  They need to take advantage of what we sapients all have in common, and in return (without knowing it's in return) they'll help us in any way that increases their access to us. 

Thalp:  We might well better comprehend sapient evolution, cultural and genetic, if we knew in which direction memons experience time.  This overlooks that they may not experience time.

What kind of mental elements do we sapients (even the redoubtable Aa) have in common?  The memon's "terrain", our inherited ways of thinking and perceiving, in short, the mental, perceptual, and emotional methods we got from evolution, the ones that keep tricking us into status quo Survival -- that's our common if not lowest denominator.  Our innate epistemological flaws are the memons' inevitable natural laws.  History luxuriates in examples of how the memons have used our mental failings to design and fuel their jackhammer memes.

We sapients would have retained all of those evolved pre-sapient mental quirks even on our own.  How could we not?  Even our "higher" animals show signs of many of them.  But the memons reinforce them in ways that give extra lebensraum to the memons, their road-building tools, and their roads.

Theofe:  Do you want the short list of bugs, kludges, then?
         Crisis thinking.  An evolved energy-saving feature.  Forethought, like foreplay, uses effort that might turn out wasted.  Our minds only work, fast if not well, when threatened, startled.  Weekly church attendance increased by hellfire sermons.  Inventions flourishing in wartime. 
         Pain means more.  For survival we've needed the danger signal of pain more than any other.  Pain hurts us more than pleasure pleases us.  Pain remembered more vividly than pleasure.  Drama must have conflict.  For the tale to intrigue, only the ending can turn out happy.
         Lazy-mindedness.  Thinking takes so much work you can't do it all the time.  Setting priorities for "paying" attention.  "It's not worth taking seriously."  Common sense.  No reasonable man can imagine that.  The Big Lie works because it would take too much effort to disbelieve it.  Slogans.  Cliches.
         Unification.  Ultimate simplicity.  The "elegance" of a scientific theory.  As below, so above.  Occam's Razor.  One God.  "Thou art God."  Only one set of physical laws sans exception.  One sapient species in the universe.
         Jumping to conclusions.  "No smoke without fire."  McCarthyism.  Guilt by association.  The ad hominem fallacy.  Post hoc, propter hoc.  Correlation proves causation.
         Polarization.  Dualism.  Seeing a grain of truth as either the whole plant, no plant at all.  God/Devil, good/bad, pleasure/pain, for/against, foreground/background, us/them.  Solipsism.  "I am different from other people.  People are different from animals."
         Tradeoff, payback, balance.  Deserving.  Nothing comes from nothing.  Happiness/suffering now means later suffering/happiness.  Fairness.  Equality.  Revenge.  Lex Talionis.
         Clan and pack dependence.  God as the pack leader.  Political hierarchy, competitive sports, gangs, cliques, claques.  Team spirit.  Conquest.  Birds of a feather.  Only following orders.
         Thinking in terms of people, not ideas.  Our God the Anthropo-, Sapiomorphic.  No naked narrative lumps of ideas, clothe them in vivid characters, their spine-tingling story.  Saints.  Stereotypes.  The huckster's name outweighs the merchandise's poor quality.  Memory palaces.
         Cognitive dissonance.  Making a virtue of necessity.  Sour grapes.  Acting out an emotion makes you feel it as if true.  Rationalizing habits, reflexes, post-hypnotic commands.  "I wouldn't have said it if it weren't so."
         Ambition.  The grass is greener.  Comes the Revolution.  Five-year plans.  Forbidden fruits taste sweeter.  Positive thinking.  When I grow up.  Tomorrow belongs to me.  Hope.

Sabre:  That is the dirty little secret right there.  Pain feels more important than happiness because evolution wired us that way for our own "good".  It is no wonder most people would rather suffer and sacrifice themselves than be happy.  It makes them feel so important where being happy only makes them feel frivolous and small by comparison.

Thalp:  You perhaps have read the tagline "You can't conquer a free man, the most you can do is kill him."  But a crafted slogan will construct any road.  "You can't rape a chaste woman, the most you can do is kill her."  "You can't harvest a real weed, the most you can do is kill yt." 
         What can this meme tool in any way mean to its host?  A dead sapient doesn't function like a "free" one.  Yt doesn't act, speak, or think and yt has no left choices or individuality for freedom.  But the slogan meme reassures a sapient into death.  After yt has died, yts comrades will be attracted to yts road and hunt out the off-roaders, in the result of pack loyalty and the desire for revenge.  Cognitive dissonance also twines on.  Our cause must be a good one if he died for it.  Heroes and martyrs personalize the memes of the cause, their names and anthems make ritual mnemotypes.  It is all a very ingenious synergy.

Ruby Arsenic:  He also serves who only lies and rots, as it were.

Memon tools and roads have one large general problem.  Insufficient replicability.  They mutate like nanobots and change like a road built on quicksilver jelly.  Inadequate communications (especially words) make it impossible for two people to have entirely the same meme system, the same memon road passing through them.  To misquote Lao Tze, "The road that can be talked is not the road that can be walked."

Think of a highway that breaks off in discontinuity every quarter mile and you'll see the memons' problem.  With this mutation rate, the memons' tools, roads, and meme systems must often use extreme methods to stay close to their original design parameters.  They make their environments (their hosts) attack each other vigorously for the smallest ideological deviations or mutations.  Some memon hosts on the Paulianity road killed each other over an "iota" of difference in their word describing the Nature of Christ. 

Of course, that particular conflict was badly exacerbated by the ease of movement that missionaries found on the long, defended roads of the Roman Empire.  It's analogous to disease spread.  When contagion can be easily broadcast, as by a waterborne vector, disease organisms can afford to rapidly kill off their hosts because it won't hamper their own spread and survival.  When long-term direct person-to-person contact is needed for infection, the host has to be kept alive a while to do the organism's work.  The more easily meme transport can occur, the less the memons need us sapients for close personal transmission.  In those situations memons use their more virulent vectors, the ideas that work like plagues.

Despite which the memes in post-GW Gregaria have declined in deadliness.  Communication vaccination comes so easily to GWers that information bloat, or more accurately opinion bloat, immunizes them against most memes.  The most direct sort of interpersonal contact is needed to convey any sort of idea over IVE.

Theofe:  By now you know what information bloat feels like.  ;-8

Theofe:  Gregaria has godzillions of religions.  About half the religions, many more than half the worshippers, belong to planetbound categories.  Then we also have the raumstamm's bubbling creeds, the fully native faiths of Gregaria.  ("Bubbling" means throwing off bits of religion, culture, visions from planets into space.)
         The nonsapiomorphic Hexists, the High Hexists, n-Hexists, regard imagination as the goal of all Sapience.  They see interstellar space as the closest recognizable approximation to a symbol of the pre-perceptual Universe.  The Universe before imagination ever acted on it.  Most of the nth-generation raumstamm, where n exceeds 1.5, end up High Hexists.  Our son Elcar tends that way, we think.  (Though Gi, who has a crush on him, wants to convert him to a mythomane like himherself.)
         So the n-Hexists build beauty out in space to pay tribute with their best imagination to what imagination can't comprehend.  One example, the enormous wine-colored crown lily out near Fomalhaut.  The worshippers' GWs, illuded gold, align together to form the lily's stamens.  An overwhelming sight, like "Queen Victoria's commode, dreadnaught of dreadnaughts".  (Yes, I've seen a geminate of that amazing object.)
         The starminders have an even more massive project.  They want to take all the GWs from The GWaveyard, put them inside a star.  There, arrange them into a lattice designed to channel the starstuff flows so complexly as to mimic neuronal function.  In other words, they hope to make a star sapient.
         Also we have the humor prophets, the cachinnodeists.  You might think of them as practicing applied religion.  They think most jokes contain prophecies, so they keep humor chronicles to test against.  Among that sect you see a lot of Pranksters, using mindfucks, hoaxes in the name of missionary work.
         Humour requires seeing ideas, events in a briefly alien, sideways surround, more than one context at once.  Mightn't this addition of extra contexts, meanings improve a joker's predictive ability?  So a higher density of information equals better guesses?  Maybe the humor gives a sign of the joker's talent for prediction?  The cachinnodeists try to deduce the nature of Godhead from which jokes turn out as solid prophecies.  So they try to convert strangers with humor, electroshock style, to get more jokers, more prophecies.
         Gregaria also has the elementalists, Low Hexists, the most populous in belief, diverse in their myths.  Elementalists, where not mythomane, have a strong bubbling contingent because they can find the elements anywhere.  They worship the full set of six elements, not only the four that locally dominate any macopave.  Earth, Air, Water, Fire for your local planet.
         A Triple Goddess, a Triple God make up the Low Hexist pantheon.  The God represents our sapience, what we create, what we think.  The Goddess, everything else, what creates us, a distinction seen as somewhat arbitrary.  You might as well try to separate the knower from the known, as God from Goddess.  Hexists usually view the Goddess as somewhat more important than the God.  That does vary from weltstamm to weltstamm.
         The symbolism comes out Maiden/Earth, Mother/Water, Crone/Air, Hero/Fire, Maker/Claw, Hermit/Metal.  With two of the Triple God's elements magically trivial on Earth, you have little familiarity with His Triplicity, though you know of the Triple Goddess.  "Hero" appears in Earthuman myth as Dionysos, Coyote, Cernunnos.  So also as the Student, Apollo, Orpheus, wild for truth, beauty, as well as sex, killing, japes.  The important trait, the wildness, not its goal.  "Maker" represents the Master Builder, Leader, Lawgiver, Father, Zeus, Prometheus, Daedalus, Vulcan.  The last, "Hermit", stands for the wandering sage.  Hermit lives disconnected from society in his wisdom, memories, abstractions.  By comparison, Crone remains close as the advisor, final judge, healer.
         Take Krigi society as an example, a not too unusual religious structure based on the Triple Goddess, God.  The Krij live as post-GW gypsies, building, rebuilding shrines, temples in proper spots as they go.  They travel in groups, each with several families held together by a kind of contract.  Major negotiations go on to set up the cross-tribe, cross-family, cross-group loops that raise the children born of the loop's wombs.  All of the loop's members must swear their support to each other, to all the loop's children of whatever age.  The women, herms of the loop must not conceive children by the loop's men.  (This in addition to other sorts of incest taboos.)  Each loop must contain one member from each of the six agetribes.  Fireboys, Earthgirls, Woodfathers, Watermothers, Metalhermits, Aircrones.  Herms must choose whether to live as women, men, so they fit in too.
         Fireboys have no fixed skills.  They live outside, away from the main dwelling areas, only visit their loops.  Custom permits them to commit art, pranks, battles, study, sex, preaching, whatever makes no trouble for other agetribes.  If it bothers Fireboys of other groups, "that's what they're for."  Earthgirls, just the opposite.  They live in the central dwellings, lovingly disciplined, apprenticed from early childhood in motherhood, negotiation, some kinds of art too.  They get some exercise, training to bear pain, so they won't fear giving birth.
         Woodfathers have outgrown firehood, proved it by swearing craft obedience to a craftsmaster.  So they gain a voice in the group plans for shrine construction, other arbitrations within the group.  Watermothers, the women allowed by their status to raise the children of their own wombs, have the most to lose by war, their children, and unlike ex-fireboys never tussled with other groups.  So they direct their group's negotiations with others.
         Metalhermits, the post-potent men, have proved the reliability of their memories for old things.  So in some ways they serve as the group's soul.  They live at the periphery of the camp to shield them from the temptation of learning new things to displace the past.  Aircrones provide healings, subject to no reprisals should they pass judgment by choosing to poison rather than cure.  They also advise on marriage, which candidates would fit which loops.  What habits, quirks, scandals might affect their eligibility.  Agetribes other than Air shouldn't collect, pass rumors, though they usually do.
         Do the customs really work that precisely, universally?  Sure, except when they don't.  Look at our Krigi friend Gi, who rebelled, got shunted out to raumstamm.
         Finally, the mythomanes.  Mythomane religions sometimes appear on their own, also mix well with Low Hexism.  About 1600 years ago, the idea of designing archecultures to keep acting out the archetypal myths till they come out right started catching on all through Gregaria.  A prophet suggested the Ultimate Myth as the Redemption for sapients to pursue after GWs made survival a non-issue.  Imagination finds its best use in creating a dreamtime attached to sapient interactions, symbols, not to mere territory.  Almost all the archecultures have taken this route.  Though not the Aailurosi worlds.
         At some time, each weltstamm will have run through every variant of myth possible for its world.  Thereby it will have reached its own local macopave's version of the Ultimate Myth.  That makes paradise, say the mythomanes.  So those mythomanes who also follow Hexism value imagination as a religious virtue.  Only imagination feeds the talent for living in the dreamtime.
         Conquest of one world by another plays no part in the Ultimate Myth.  The Myth means something different on each planet.  It can't spread from planet to planet by force, fraud, friendship.  Nothing less will do than a dreamtime that can encompass one world as a whole.  Sapients must live as nomad natives of the whole world, not fixed upon one part of it.  Only constant considerable change keeps a sapient valuing the present moment, as in a dream, a myth.

The Offsettians have four true gods:  Outer Actions, Inner Ideas, the Interplay between Inner and Outer, and Death.  Death is a maiden, an ever-virgin girl with a vaginal vacuum that eventually sucks in everything.  Interplay is a herm, a sorcereress, with two lovers, Action and Idea.  Heshe is often portrayed in intercourse with both of them at once in various positions.  Action is a warrior leader, Idea a gaunt ascetic boy (or sometimes a herm) who buggers Action.

Death has a fine sense of humor and is less likely to play her own jokes on the moribund if they find some other way to amuse her.  This is why clowns as well as executioners perform in the Offsettian temple yard; the executioners are needed for the criminals, and the clowns to get deathmercy for the criminals being executed.  The deathmercy is sometimes spoken of as the pleasurable quaking of Death's vaginal muscles when she laughs.  However, Offsettians are quite offended by the notion that cachinnodeism is in any way related to their native Virgin Death.

The Offsettians believe that the Hexist gods, the Triple Goddess and Triple God, are not genuine gods.  They are sapients from long ago, who died while dreaming and are still dreaming; the real first gods who created the Universe, and some other kickshaws, no longer have anything to do with it.  Everything in the so-called real world is part of the dream.  These six Dreamers, being sapients, have hobbies, interests, and phobias which can attract their notice to related behavior by sapients.  However, the Dreamers are as irrational as any other sapient dreamers; their attention may be of dubious benefit.

Ruby Arsenic:  It helps if you recognize that nowadays The One True Eternal Reality is the object of faith, the justification of actions, and the thing that everyone uses to explain why they have all the answers.  Compare and contrast it to the olden days.  Ye oldetime JudeoChrIslam religion had its certain, simple ideas that put God at the core of what matters.  Faith in and reliance on God is the highest thing available to man, it has accomplished everything worth doing in our lives, and it is of absolute and primal importance.  God is incomprehensible to man.  Our mortal temporal lives and world are of little importance and only God can improve them in the way that really matters, by transmitting man into the afterlife.  Amen.  Selah.
         This new religion of realitarianism has substituted certain, simple ideas that are ostensibly human-centered.  The method of rational logical inquiry into Reality is the crux of Mankindhood, it has accomplished everything of Real significance in Our lives, and it is of absolutely primal importance.  Reality (including the part of it called ourselves) is comprehensible to We Mankind and We will in time fully understand it, if We don't pretty much already.  We Mankind have the power and the right to continually improve Our Reality, that is, Our environment and Ourselves, maybe not in that order.
         Now, most people who believe the realitarian ideas do it on faith, which they refer to as "common sense", without any much serious rigorous examination.  That by itself only makes realitarianism a belief system, not necessarily a religion.  To establish that this (or any other belief system) is in the subset of beliefs called religion, I have to show that it has Ought-Tos, Shoulds, What-Fors, and rituals.  Start with the Ought-Tos and Shoulds.
         Pop Gnosticism:  The pursuit of knowledge for its own sake Ought-To be regarded as the highest human goal.  Therefore, everyone Should be willing to spend less time and money on materialistic activities like football, sex, and candy, and more on intellectualistic activities like paying taxes to support pure research.  Like most tithing, this tends to get only lip service.
         Pop Hylotheism:  Everyone Ought-To recognize that there there is only one True set of natural laws of Reality, which (being knowable) is Unified, consistent, and made up of explicable, verifiable material processes rather than non-verifiable "souls" and "spirits".  Therefore, everyone Should respect the one Truth; reject God, the afterlife, and overt religion; and continuously debunk "pseudo-science", as for example any experiments (however seemingly well attested) that support, aid, and abet the existence of non-material psychic abilities. To a Pop Hylotheist, Unproved and Unprovable ideas are unReality and just as wrong-headed as Disproved ideas.
         Pop Darwinism of the Left-hand Path:  Mankind is the pinnacle of evolution and Ought-To continue to grow and evolve and expand its abilities to the utmost.  Therefore, Society Should direct Its energies to the efficient, orderly achievement of this goal, not to petty individual profit.  This version of Pop Darwinism drives the Marxismo-jocks and others who respect the human species as an individual but disdain the individuals within the species.
         Pop Darwinism of the Right-Hand Path:  Every individual of Mankind Ought-To continue to grow and expand and fulfill his abilities to the utmost, as evolution demands of its fittest.  Therefore, everyone Should live a competitive, industrious life aimed at incessant accomplishment and at acquiring resources to continue accomplishing.  This is the only way of life that makes "the personal best" possible.  This alternative sustains the laissez-fairies and the other addicts of the pursuit of excellence (not to be confused with the pursuit of happiness).  This is the yuppie form of Pop Darwinism:  a yuppie idolizes accomplishment and mistakes his acquisitions for his accomplishments (whether his possessions are intellectual hobbies or material toys).
         Pop Stoicism:  Everyone Ought-To want to behave in a logical, knowable, explicable, reproducible way.  Therefore, we Should seek to maintain a positive, flexible attitude and make ourselves well-adjusted to the Reality of our current society, which possesses the only norm that has been proven empirically to work.  Corollary.  Everyone Should recognize and take their responsibility for repairing, extending, and obeying society's laws, since they are Mankind's codified comprehensibility.  All political conspiracy theories, however well they explain events, must be spurned because they tempt citizens to the sins of irresponsible Apathy and Willfully Ambiguous Incomprehension.
         Pop Reductionism:  Everyone Ought-To think that behavior is, causally, fully determined by knowable external material influences, such as the absence of money or the presence of guns.  Therefore we Should not blame malefactors as if they had non-verifiable immaterial free-will, we Should instead change the material influences upon them, as by giving them money or removing their guns.  Corollary One.  Everyone's minds can and Should be changed by Mankind's bringing all the right material influences to bear and removing all the wrong ones.  Corollary Two.  No one can internally change their own mind, so someone else with external influence Should always do it for them.  Compulsory education and rehabilitation programs of various degrees of lethality have resulted from these corollaries.
         There you see the Shoulds and Ought-Tos that allow the realitarian belief system to qualify as an ethical system.  It isn't that most realitarians have explicitly thought out and justified their Shoulds.  A thousand times no, but their roughly formed central ideological attitudes magnetically attract a largely consistent set of ideas and slogans that gel into a somewhat coherent system.  This means you will find, if you look closely, that a great many people have knee-jerk reactions and loyalties that are a lot more consistent with the realitarian set of rules and attitudes than with the Godheaded set.  (Of course the two sets have elements in common because both have been attractively kludged to contain the Golden Rule, live and let live, and other basic genuinely useful moral precepts.  Thus both old and new worshipers have those relatively praiseworthy loyalties.  But I'm talking about the distinctive elements of the old and new religions, not what they share.)
         Anti-religious as realitarians may seem to be, they do have their equivalent of faith.  They call it "common sense".  What "faith" does for a godhead, "common sense" does for a realitarian.  Both terms are used to stop discussion of an idea; to remove the idea from further analysis; and to intimidate the unbeliever by letting him know he lacks some crucial virtue, whether it's called out as faith or common sense.
         Besides Shoulds and Ought-Tos and faith, I also have to demonstrate a What-Is-It-All-For before I can claim the realitarian ethical system as a religion.  Yes, you guessed it, I do honestly outright think that many people actually sanctify Reality.  That they try to aim their lives toward coming to terms with Reality, and coping with Reality, and living in the Real World, and all those other worshipful phrases that are such extremely common parlance even if they aren't in a catechism.  I do think that a right relation to Reality is exactly What many people tacitly think their lives Are All About, and what other people's lives should be all about, instead of closeness to God.  That "making someone face Reality" is what people use as a holy justification for their daily tiny brutalities and discourtesies toward each other, instead of "punishing those who stray from the Lord".  That "accepting Reality" has literally taken the sacred, unquestionable place of, for example, "accepting Christ (as one's personal Saviour)." 
         In a certain sense, this is how Evolutionism has supplanted Creationism, and why the antagonism between the two groups of theorists is so rabid.  It's not because they're different models of planetary history, but because both are religions jealously competing to indoctrinate the other team's kids.  Our secular public schools are just as creed-dominated as any private schools have ever been.
         Finally, there's the not particularly tiny matter of rituals.  A religion must have public rituals of affirmation and more or less private rituals of atonement.  On the public side, the realitarians have their TV news shows, documentaries, docudramas, debates, all "regularly scheduled" as rituals must be, all affirming contact with reality, nearly all of them ending with a moral.  Can anyone get reliable information from these sources?  No, all they get is a re-affirmation of their own "common sense" about how the world works and ought to work.  And for the private rituals of atonement?
         Back in ye olden days people kept playing theologically sound roles and looking over their shoulders to see whether Jesus (Mary, Jehovah, Yahweh, Allah) was paying attention and rewarding them with blessings, victories, status, and the right sort of afterlife.  If they sinned, they could get off the hook by funding some Masses or striking a indulgence deal with the priesthood, and then being told they'd repented and atoned sufficiently. 
         Nowadays people play realitarian roles, the realist, the meliorist, the rationalist or nondenominationalist or agnostic or atheist, the positive thinker, the humanist, the productive contributing member of society, the renaissance man.  And they keep glancing around to see if Reality (or its surrogate, government) is going to pay attention and reward them with perpetual progress, equal rights, safety, economic security, freedom of expression, and their own personal 15 minutes of fame.  Nothing Utopian, you know, just realistic social expectations.  Anyone who falls from realitarian grace can go to a counselor (or be sent to one by court order).  They pay fees, attend sermons (I mean, seminars or sessions), are told they're troubled or products of their environment or victims of a Disability or a Syndrome but not bad people, are prescribed the sacramental Prozac or Ritalin or some such, and then they're rehabilitated, off the hook, atoned. 
         Finally, religions usually have enemies, though there are exceptions.  No religion is a Klein bottle; every religion has an inside and an outside, with the unbelievers on the outside.  Not just unbelievers, but heretics.  Who do the Realitarians cast as heretics?  Not the politicians, as Beach BEM thought.  Also, not the old-style religionists, as Aquinas thought.  The godheads are to Realitarianism what pagans and the heathen were to Christianity:  the old tradition, an ancient continuity, obtrusive enough to be disliked and envied but too entrenched to be eradicated (yet).  But the heretics, not to mention the schismatics and apostates, aha, they're another matter.  They were raised in the One True Reality but they've departed, distorted, and betrayed it.  They're the worst enemy, and (for now) safely the weakest.
         In the Realitarian context I'd figure that drug-users are the most obvious heretics.  They're powerless and unpopular and safe to attack, which isn't true for ethnic or religious groups.  They misspend their time and money, and sometimes their health, by using drugs instead of being good little economic work-units engaging in Pop Darwinistic efficiency and accomplishment.  They try to change themselves from the inside, making their own choices (and mistakes), instead of letting an outside physician prescribe for them as a Pop Reductionist should.  They demand their own drug-induced version of Reality, thereby claiming reality is multiple, subjective and private rather than One, objective and public and Pop Hylotheistic.  They disobey the law (THE LAW) instead of laboring and suffering to change it for everybody, which is a horrifying offense against Pop Stoicism.
         Besides their crimes against the new improved Holy Reality, the druggies offend against that God-headed oldtime religion by trying to find, or even finding, their solaces, joys, and spiritual insights in chemicals -- how ineffably materialistic!  They should instead be using prayers, rituals, and meditation.  Soul and body are supposed to be separate, you know, and they're supposed to detest each other.  Pharmacological processes aren't supposed to be pertinent to grace; it's an unGodly heresy to employ a chemical sacrament.
         We've even had a Crusade against the drug heretics already, with genuine military action in Panama, marketed to the American public as being necessary to remove drug-running Noriega.  Who could ask for anything more?  (Don't answer that.  Don't even think about Panama's big brother Columbia, or its oil-sodden cousin Venezuela.)
         End of Rant.

Theofe:  After some post-GW generations, the people who remain on a planet mostly reach a characteristic social format.  The population spreads over the planet in communities of a few thousand people.  Each town centers on about a hundred GWs, keeping the GWs as last reserves, seldom crutches.  Only a small group of stewards directly use the GWs.  The stewards hold their position by their willingness to throw potlatches, take important people off-planet for healing.  So they must do a good job of generosity.  Else they find themselves the target of attacks physical, magical, social.  Misfits get exiled by GW.  They voluntarily, not so voluntarily travel to communities on their own, other worlds.
         What makes the stewards faithful servants of the archeculture?  Predecessor stewards leave worldlets behind in IVE.  These nodules, hierodules, contain information that all the new stewards need.  That the steward can't access without exposing himself to unfiltered emotion, ideas, perceptual frames.  So arranging, allowing his own indoctrination.  This has helped produce a certain mediocrity, uniformity of stewardic goals, behavior.
         Don't mistake a steward for a shaman.  A shaman has merit.  He has psychic, psychological, magical, mundane skills.  He has community ties.  "A shaman who lacks children might as well lack a kiln or a fountain."  The stewards select their successors differently.  They pick those who've refused apprenticehip, couldn't qualify for it.  Those who've floated free of families, goals.  On Earth, Hitler would have qualified.  IVE would likely have re-formed him, it's tamed worse ones.

High Hexism arrived later at the Gregarian banquet than Low Hexism, but, being more abstract, is the simpler of the two to introduce.

High Hexism is nonsapiomorphic.  It doesn't speak of the Goddess, or the God, but of Godhead, which is Total Understanding.  That's meant in both senses of the word:  what stands under everything, and what comprehends everything.  And there again, both senses of "comprehend" are fully intended, the inclusive and the knowledgeable.  Draw a plot of a mathematical equation, such as a fractal.  The infinitely detailed and inclusive image you see is like the universe we perceive, and Godhead is like the formula.  The formula is implicit in the picture; the picture expresses the part of the formula we can understand; neither is more important or fundamental than the other.  They are one.  Created and Creator are one.  In this sense, High Hexism resembles pantheism, saying "Thou art God."

High Hexism makes no absolute moral statements about what strict or mild rules of behavior its adherents must follow.  We may value any part of the Whole that we happen to prefer.  What is important is that we must imagine, and create ourselves as figments of our own imagination.  Every choice of moral or esthetic value is an act of pure imagination; it's not possible to give a proof, or evidence, that anything is the one and only good or evil, beauty or ugliness. 

No one can convince a High Hexist that there's any impersonal mechanism of moral judgment:  karma, God's will, paying for his crime, social justice, or what goes around comes around.  The word "deserve" means nothing to a High Hexist, however much it means to orglings as an invaluable term of dis/approval.  When an orgling says "X deserved what he got", she generally means something like, "There are moral rules beyond our choice that have the same effect on and meaning to everybody, X broke them, and those rules lead automatically and impersonally to X being punished."  The High Hexist hears her as saying "I choose to want to see X suffer and I'm not proud enough of wanting it to admit I want it, so I call it The Rules."

Not that hating, or making others suffer, outrages a High Hexist.  It disgusts some, it pleases others, according to their own choices; but none of them see it as absolutely inherently evil (or good).  Their reaction is more like esthetics:  "Here's an ugly or beautiful, tasteless or elegant cloud formation."  Hate is a reaction that comes from a sapient's ego-bound, solipsistic illusion of being separate from, more important than, and somehow threatened by the rest of the Universe.  Love is a reaction that comes from a sapient's non-ego-bound, holistic, synchronistic illusion of being a part of the Whole.  Both of those reactions and illusions fit seamlessly, valuably, and beautifully into Godhead.

The High Hexist recognizes that although no ethos is impersonal, mechanically all-governing, and absolute, every ethos has its own natural consequences.  The "might-makes-right", "winner-take-all" philosophy leads logically to the survival of one and only one strongest sapient.  That's the glory and beauty of it, though it's only seen as beauty by those who choose it.  The philosophy of pure altruism leads logically to everyone freely giving up what they most love as a sacrifice to whoever needs it more.  That's the nobility and beauty of it, to those who choose it.  The Golden Rule leads logically to a diversity of free interchanges and a general presumption of reciprocity and mutual payment:  "you get what you give".  That's the chaos and shopkeeper's stinginess of it, to those who don't choose it.

Once we choose our own "good" and "evil", and (perhaps more important) our own "neither good nor evil", it's up to us to live consistently and to fill our spirits with as many invented symbols and interpretations of our chosen beliefs as we can.  This freely chosen marriage to a memon is true Wealth, to a High Hexist.

Thalp:  On Earth, it is considered "blasphemy" to create a god?  It's commmoner in Gregaria to regard the refusal to create gods as blasphemous.  Godhead is the essential part of everything.  It would be "blasphemous", if that word means more than "gauche", to consciously decide that some thing would never partake in Godhead.  My root's closest friend in youth went to extremes and gave every rock in yts seedling plot its own Name of Godhead.

The only limit on an n-Hexist's imagination is that he must not falsify observations.  The ability to invent and decide upon holy symbols and devout moral values, while recognizing their hard consequences and the possibility the "facts" are wrong, is the ultimate power of sapience.  It combines objectivity, imagination, and honest self-knowledge, the distinctive features of true sapience.  It has the Quality of Godhead, though it's nowhere near Godhead in quantity.

Choose, if you will, to kill someone for their gold jewelry.  But don't pretend they "deserved" to die for being "rich", recognize outright that you chose to value their gold more than their life.  Choose, if you will, to develop the rainforests into condominia and storage units.  But don't pretend it won't have any damaging effects, acknowledge up front that housing humans is more important to you by your own choice than the ecological damage you know you're doing.  Choose, if you will, to die for a cause.  But don't pretend you have stout evidence that you'll be rewarded after death, realize straightforwardly that you've chosen to make your cause more important to you than a longer life.  The point of sapient life is full imagination:  choice, not chicanery.

Imagination rules.  High Hexism teaches that the Rule of Six, "always look for six of anything", is a way to pay homage to the imagination and keep it busy, vital, and objective, instead of letting it atrophy into a near-solipsistic dualism or trinitism.  (Although the Law of Fives might possibly suffice.)

Theofe:  The parable of Danri.  To all appearances Danri's sight failed twice.  First, when heshe reached toddling age.  Again, after heshe'd regained vision for a year during adolescence.  The fable goes on, most people felt sure Danri had gone blind first by accident.  The second time, because heshe'd lived blind so long heshe'd never learned not to stare at the sun.  Other people thought heshe had faked hisher blindness the first time, for sympathy.  Got tired of it.  Then totally lost hisher sight as punishment for the fraud.  Another group believed Danri had gone blind the first time.  Recovered at puberty.  Finally started faking to save the work of learning to use hisher eyes.  Others charged Danri's parents with blinding himher twice, the second time after hisher miraculous recovery, both times to get charity money.  A few said Danri had always seen far too much, this world, the next world too.  Heshe chose to watch only the next world, though heshe backslid once in Fire age.  A few said Danri hadn't ever existed, except as a fable.
         The moral:  "If you can't see more than one way, why have eyes?"

Ruby Arsenic:  Wait a minute.  Is the parable about Danri or the people around himher?

Theofe:  Gotcha!  You gave only two alternatives.  Find a sixth way to see it!

There are always more than six possibilities.  But, according to High Hexism, the mercy of Godhead is great.  In Its mercy, It simplified magic into six Elements so that we sapients could more quickly learn to cast spells and ease our lives.  In just the same mercy, It eased the load on our imaginations so that we could preserve our creative objectivity by pondering as few as six alternative explanations or interpretations of anything.

Theofe:  One time Icsoner spoke up with one of his bizarre metaphysical ideas.  Suppose you accept quantum.  Then there may exist a nearly infinite (well, really big) number of branching universes.  Therefore, many infinitesimally likely things will occur in at least one.  Including whatever bizarre chain of events leads to eternal life for any, every particular sapient.  Then a sapient's self-awareness cannot undergo destruction in all universes.  Therefore each of us experiences only the universe in which we have immortality.  Only the other people die.  So we can never prove our own immortality from others' mortality.
         It reminded Gi of the Ultimate Myth dogma heshe'd grown up with.  If any group of people ever reached that condition of perfect mythhood, they'd all live in the same branching universe.  So they would go on forever because the universes branch in the dimensions of meaning. 
         "'Meaning' meaning what?" I asked.
         "Wait a minute, wait a minute," said Ixy, "let's compare this to Schrodinger's Cat. The observable difference between the two quantum states is that the observer does or doesn't see a dead cat." 
         "It's so very much a question of meaning."  This from Gi. "What is important to the observer" (I interrupted "and the cat") "what means something, is whether the cat is alive or dead.  That is a distinction that doesn't concern any part of the universe except we sapients, we minds who create meanings.  It doesn't come from chemistry, physics, magic, psi.  It matters a little in magic but truly it only matters because it has some meaning to sapients.  When a group of people all attain the perfect myth, then they all have the same meanings and they can all live forever in the same universe instead of lonely each to hisher own.  Memons are the walls between the universes and the Ultimate Myth is a memon, and we by merging with it are no longer walled from each other."
         During a walk in Krig's woods, Gi told us a Krigi myth.  "You behold here on this tree a rifter snake, not so very poisonous to humans, yet stay back.  A snake now, before the long years it was one of mother Koro's children.  Her eldest child was stolen, she wept herself to sleep and broke apart in her night dreams.  Her other children had no one to hold them and feared everyone, so they ran into the woods and stood stretching out their arms for Koro to pick them up.  Earth pitied them and made them serpents, giving them this same shape" -- heshe made a gesture like describing a spiral staircase -- "then Wood caught the bits of Koro from the dawn wind, making them the seeds of kindly trees that could fit within the children's embrace."
         "I don't want to talk like a debunker," said I, "but...  these look like some of the low-level trees on Ailuros.  Could they have been doppled here, perhaps?  And then these snakes might have evolved to live twisted into their bark."
         "That happened in history, yes; not, and your eyes will explain this to you where my words cannot hope to, not in the meaning of Krig."

Hexist poets and hermits all over Gregaria join in regular competitions to supply new fables, metaphors and examples of the Rule of Six.  The IVE-based collection of the winners' entries is also, confusingly, known as the Rule of Six.  Most of its contents are truly six-based.  Others are made up of two triplets, degenerate cases of hexness that have more to do with nine than six, or they form three couplets, hardly ever accepted because of their implicit eighthood.

One example of the genuine six-valued metaphors (aka theories) is the chief Hexist psychological theory, which divides the structure of personality into six interacting parts.

Earth:  the static racial memories, which are entirely unconscious and, in any individual, incomplete.
Fire:  the instinctive energies, which operate to allow the racial memory to affect a sapient's behavior without the racial memory itself reaching consciousness.  There are a variety of such drives, including but not limited to the parental instincts, territoriality, the fear of depths, the sacrificial drive, et cetera.
Water:  the passive, objective individual memories and the network of associations between them.
Air:  the active imagination and perceptual frame (worldview) that convert the raw material of events into meaningful personal memories.
Metal:  the ego, an essentially rationalizing, logic-using, defensive, preservative machine of the intellect that is programmed to keep the focus of consciousness on itself alone.
Claw:  the spirit, an essentially alogical, asymbolic, Dionysian machine of the intellect that is programmed to keep the focus of consciousness on the whole of the surroundings and their identity, or unity, with the individual.

Most varieties of Low Hexism hold that Air and Claw survive the body; Earth and Fire are given to the individual along with each new body of incarnation (or inherbation); and Water and Metal start fresh with each body.

Beach BEM:  Hexists, then, would hold that the memories of one reincarnation are entirely inaccessible to one in subsequent reincarnations.  How do they explain the occasional incontrovertible appearances of such memories?

Thalp:  Air, that rides with the Wood (what some call Claw) of a person, codes its life into the conclusions it makes of and extracts from its experiences.  Air creates an understanding of life, as in distilling a vapor from flesh, and keeps the understanding for more lives and discards the Water memories of themselves.  The memories some few come upon spring from closeness to Godhead, which loses no part of any life or unlife.  Often the untwined memories are of the famous, for in that sapients give these most importance and rememmber them more vividly.

Citizen Paine:  Hell no Thalp, like somebody once said reincarnation goez backwardz in time.  That meanz nobody rememberz their past selvez, only the future, thatz all.  In the future most everybody dix around livin in virtual reality historical fantasiez, what people are seein now is the fake memoriez from their future selvez channel flippin!

Theofe:  The Krij regard offworlders as forces of nature, beings with whom no communion can take place, like gravity or sunlight.  Nonetheless these offworld entities have their archetypal roles in the dreamtime.  As do those rare shamans, stewards who become tyrants.  Therefore the Krij have ways to deal with GWers (tyrants too).  Where communication can only fail, confusion, distraction must take its place.  Which they do.
         Not that the Krij show any dangerous hostility to tourists.  Not that they violently revenge themselves for any slights, attacks.  Their best weapons in dealing with offworlders consist of unpalatability, futility.  Krij feel no shame at deceiving, misleading, confusing, babbling at, conciliating, boring, bribing, mystifying, ridiculing, interrupting, prickteasing, distracting, disconcerting offworlders.  Having viewalls, the GWers recognize this as special treatment.  That knowledge does less than enough to make their visit a pleasant one.
         Krij scratching as if they have vermin, then hugging a tourist, fondling his food.  Voluminous spitting, vigorous anus-scratching, horrific wet coughing.  Children losing their housebreaking a few inches from a tourist's toes, congratulated on it by their mothers.  Obstreperous begging.  Fireboys laughing too loudly, lewdly, stopping too rapidly when the tourist looks around.  Aircrones gratuitously tendering embarrassing prophecies of successful lust, alarming predictions of doom.  Lovely Earthgirls following a tourist, shrieking, howling for him to go away, leave them alone.  Woodfathers, Metalhermits answering a tourist's questions only with questions, irrelevancies, blatant lies, epic drones full of tedious mutually contradictory details.
         The Krij don't hardly do this to each other.  They see nothing better as possible between mythomanes, GWers.  Nothing with meaning, not even battle, can change hands, minds with someone outside the planetary dreamtime.

Ruby Arsenic (private):  I call it Paulianity because Paul did more to create the organized religion than Christ.  Saul/Paul of Tarsus was a spy and a police agent for the then-existing mainstream.  After the big light bulb went on above his head and he was converted, his main interest was in feeding (and modifying) his new religion to make it grow into the next mainstream.
         Christians put "love thy God and thy neighbor" first.  Paulians are normals (especially the women, devil save me from anything proclaiming itself "a good Christian woman").  They kneel down to the mainstream way of life and mistake it for God; they can't settle for merely behaving morally, they have to be The Moral Majority.  They lack any deep spiritual experience, and they substitute mob arrogance.
         And the Paulians' God reminds me of nothing more than a rotten three-year-old.  "If I could do anything in the world, I'd put all the people I don't like in a big hole and then they'd really be sorry, and I'd take all the people I liked and all my best toys and keep them for all mine and get my own way forever and ever, amen."
         Christians don't need holy wars and Satanist hunts.  Christians don't need to fear new ideas like Evolution.  Christians don't need to forbid contraception to keep their churches the fastest growing.  Christians don't need to clump up together in amphitheatres, auditoriums, and BBSes to pat each other on the back and cry on each others' shoulders and collect money and votes to lobby against abnormals.  Christians don't need to spend most of their time boasting about their own barbaric sex superstitions, and gloating about how many people are wicked and due for suffering, and eagerly reading eschatological stroke books like Revelations to find out how they personally are going to gain by the end of the world. 
         Those are all obsessions of Paulians trying to reinforce their sense of belonging to the holy mainstream, trying to wipe out the abnormals.  Not only are the Paulians sustaining and enforcing the existing normalcy, they're imitating their brat God, like "monk see, monk do."
         Christians worship a God of Love, help people and look for new ways to help them, and judge only themselves with an eye to self-amelioration.  Christians I can live with, and I don't mind Christianity.  Paulians think I'm blaspheming; I think they're blaspheming; no dialogue is possible.  I gather many of you Wiccans, and you personally, are less bitter than I am.  Well -- more power to you, friend.

Paisley is My Friend (private):  Alas, you have it all mixed up <grin>, except for the kind words about Wicca of course.  There aren't any such animals as Paulians and no such separate kind of religion.  You know what I call them, and you also know which Thelemies I'm speaking of, is advertising Christians.  Figure anybody that advertises their own selves is going to be a pain in the derriere whether they're Christian or whatsis.  Because there's only two things to advertising.  Either someone brags all out of proportion about his own good side real as it may be, or puts down the competition that is to say everybody else, making sure everybody knows they aren't up to one's own superior standards.  Naturally Americans believe more in self-advertising what with all the ads in this country.  Like, if you don't sell yourself, who will?  Well, I married a Brit.
         What my aunt used to say about advertisers is, they're letting their tapeworms do the talking.  Egos and tapeworms have lots in common, they take a lot, they don't give anything, and they adore shit <grin>.  Back to the earlier subject, it doesn't seem like the fitting thing to waste a powerful word like blasphemer on anybody for having tapeworms.  I mean, in a sad sort of way it's almost to laugh, thinking about all those tapeworms doing the talking for people.

Ruby Arsenic (private):  Ho, ho, ho, ego is a tapeworm?  No wonder I have so much trouble gaining weight!
         Okay, I'll retract the lerg about blasphemy but let's follow up your phrase, "advertising Christians".  I like it, but I'd still say "Paulian" rather than "Christian".  Remember, I was defining Paulians as the people who use Christian rhetoric, but who act as though they get their moral stature not from living a faith-filled life but from being part of the mainstream.  That fits with the central moral position that advertising has in Paulianity:  the mainstream is the biggest market there is, and having it wear the Paulian brandname and logo is the best proof that the Paulians are worthwhile.  Successful doctrinal market penetration, now that's real moral stature! 
         Paulianity has to focus on advertising; that follows from the fact that Paulianity was always a missionary faith, a proselytizing faith, from the time Taint Paul organized it and by his full intention.  It isn't enough for a Paulian to have the truth himself and live it, as it is for a Christian.  A Paulian has to push it into other peoples' heads.  To convert people he has to convince them; he has to master the use of persuasion and propaganda, in other words, advertising. 
         When the Scholastics like Aquinas (the historical one) rediscovered Greek logic and philosophy, what did they use it for?  To come up with advertising arguments in favor of the Paulian Church.  It may have helped lead to the Renaissance, and (through logic) to the advancement of science, but it was advertising.  Who went out to explore the far corners of the world?  Paulian missionaries, to advertise Paulianity to the heathen.  Who was it that invented the word "propaganda" and vastly systematized its practice?  Jesuits (the ultimate Paulians). 
         Which religious superstars milk the airwaves for every cent they can get?  Paulian televangelists.  Which country metastasized the modern art of marketing?  America, that makes so much mouthnoise about being a Paulian nation.  Who was it said "God was the first advertising man"?  One Reverend Dr.  P.H. Martin.  (Was "P" for "Paul, do you think?)
         I rest my case.  It may not be right, but it needs to be given a rest.

Paisley is My Friend (private):  Can you really call it marketing when all they want is to help you out of hell?  This is what they believe, right or wrong (and I think wrong), and some of those who've tried the hardest to convert me couldn't be nicer people or more charitable.  Which is to say that missionaries aren't at all the same as the advertising Christians I was talking about.

Ruby Arsenic (private):  If I twisted your ideas, and I guess I did, I'm sorry.  But I hold to what I was saying.  I'll grant you the good deeds of some Paulians.  But, good intentions!  Those plus five cents will buy you a nickel!  The best way to seduce someone into treating other people as his categorical inferiors is to convince him that he's actually helping them.  Thus, the Paulians, showing their loving-kindness and magnanimity, selflessly reaching out a hand to help the blind ungrateful unPaulian out of the threat of hell fire and pit of sin -- that only exist in the Paulian imagination.  Yes, I do call that marketing; kindly as it may be meant, it ain't honest.
         Want to see something really scary?  A few of the Paulian folks who ran the Inquisition sincerely believed they were helping people by burning them at the stake.  The merely temporal pain, you see, might lead the victims to repent their sin and so escape the eternal infinite tortures of hell.  Good intentions!

Paisley is My Friend (private):  Good intentions are the only hope anyone in the world has because they're the only thing that keep helping people to try to do right.  If someone is doing good deeds only to advertise, why not praise them anyway, there are so many worse ways for them to shine up their egos than charity.  Any day I'll take advertising do-gooders who might be able to learn new ways of being good, over honest do-badders who know exactly why the only thing they want is to ruin people.  Like the Nazis, as I remember it they never claimed to be helping the Jews, they just honestly wiped them out.  Honesty is a good thing but it sure isn't the main thing.

Theofe:  The stewards use the GW outer walls for stage backdrops for the play.  An All Fools' Day kind of reversal.  At no other time of year do the stewards let crowds of people down into the GW catacomb maze.
         I'd have to describe the Krigi miracle play as a kind of relay race, with two central team mates, competitors.
         An early scene.  The horse-headed hero fights a heroic duel in hisher quest, saves hisher true love, kills hisher true foe, then transfixes the frog-head with a glowing wand.  At once the horse stops motionless in place, seems to vanish from the other players' attention.  The frog, quite unharmed, uses the wand to raise the duel's loser from the dead.  After he has shaved her all over, painted her with hexagons like a hive, for a prank.  He of course gets blamed, pursued by the resurrectee, herself pursued by bees.  He hastens to hand off the wand to the horse.  Freezes in place, apparently becoming invisible, as the hero restarts where heshe left off.  Then players, audience, dash through the GW labyrinth in one of the ritual patterns, till they find the spot for the next scene.  Where different actors, from the audience, take the roles, stage.
         Later scene.  The horse preaches hisher holy, noble discoveries to a crowd, asks for anyone to come up for help by prayer.  The poor ragged frog comes up.  Thinking himself unnoticed, he filches a nearby charity cloak in which the horse has cunningly hidden the wand.  (The frog never, never takes the wand on purpose.  The horse always finds a way to stick it to him.)  The horse freezes, the frog dons his cloak with a flamboyant sweep to show off to his audience.  He catches, juggles the falling wand by reflex.  In the process, accidentally he touches, elbows, heals many of the crowd.  He whimpers as he recognizes the wand, peers at the approaching beseeching mob, frantically starts digging a hole in the ground, vanishes into the hole.  He comes out of his instant tunnel behind the puzzled miracle-shouting crowd, sees them turning toward him to beg more help.  So he desperately shoves the wand up into a very personal cranny to hide it.  Runs stiffly off one end of the stage, comes back at the other end, returns the wand to the horse in the same terribly personal manner.  Again the dashing around in the maze.
         The play goes on like that for more than a day, with the audience increasingly drawn into it, till the final half-blind duel between horse, frog.

Hexism, before the sapio- versus nonsapiomorphic schism, was "a gorgeous stew of sixes" (Theofe), innumerable superstitions and tenets that weren't fully consistent.  But then, it was a popular religion.  No moral code becomes popular unless it has many, many quirks and moral inconsistencies to give it stretch.  There is such a thing as a too-tight girdle, believe it or not.

Low Hexism, frequently world-based and therefore org-centered, has the explicit (if stretchy) ethical standard that's lacking in High Hexism.  Part of what makes it elastic is that it regards very few activities as inherently relevant to morality:  sex, money, and many other "issues" are nonmoral until they begin to involve harm or help.  Another Low Hexist flexibility comes from a trinary judgment scheme:  actions that affect morality can be evil, adequately good, or nobly good.  Evil consists of deliberate harm that has nothing to do with defense.  The refusal to do harm, except the minimum needed for defense, is called adequate good and is, morally, entirely obligatory and satisfactory.  The refusal to do harm even in defense and the gift of functional help to others are both lumped together under the name of generous or noble good and are, morally, entirely optional but highly praiseworthy.

By and large, the Low Hexist moral standard marches with what Earthumans have called the Golden Rule.  (Some Hexists call it the Rule of Claw after the magical element associated with vitality; it's no relation to our Lex Talionis.)  The religion holds that the most distinctively sapient skills, the ones most lacked by non-sapients, are abstract creativity, imagination, objectivity, empathy, and foresight.  It is well, say the Low Hexists, to foster that which does the most to make us sapient.  (Though we should not scorn the pre-sapient, animal part of our spirits, because the beast feeds us and can't be fenced out.)  Supporting our most sapient skills implies an ethical standard that's reciprocal among all sapients, most particularly "Do unto others as you would have them do unto you." 

Reciprocity, especially reciprocity of information (truthfulness), allows sapients to mutually transfer information and resources to each other, thereby giving our imaginations the greatest possible stimulation and strengthening our foresight.  Reciprocity encourages mutual trust, closeness and empathy.  Reciprocity discourages the threats and coercion, fear and anger, that result from despairing of others, that turn off the imagination, destroy objectivity, and induce the spirit to exchange foresight for panic.

To promote the highest sapient skills, Low Hexism defines three practices, three habits or virtues, that are those most fit for sapients:  generosity, objempathy, and satiability.  The opposites of these practices are the vices I've already mentioned:  envy, despair, and voracity.  In a way, Low Hexism says that the root of all evil is the wretched solipsistic little voice that giggles when it sees someone else's trouble:  "Yah, yah, you thought you were so great when you stopped me getting everything I wanted, well I guess you aren't such hot stuff now!"

That the vices are true opposites of the virtues can be easily seen.  It's not possible to give generously to someone you envy, when you crave instead to deny or destroy his superiority and advantages, nor is it possible to envy someone to whom you freely give.  It's not possible to despair of someone (or yourself, or the world) when you practice the objective empathy to see and feel him as he is to himself and to Goddess.  It's not possible for voracity to sink its teeth in you and yank you off to its (infinitely distant) lair when you have the habit of satiability.

Generosity means that you give more effort to an idea, person, or group than your own purely functional advantage would require.  Therefore the primary virtue of generosity includes the subsidiary virtues of courage, honesty, gratitude, and goodwill or respect toward your own privacy and others'.  All of these are noble virtues to the extent that they go beyond functionality.

This idea of functionality is central to Hexism.  Honesty, for example, can easily be seen to have functional advantages:  your reputation for truth leads people to trust you; you don't have to strain your brain to stay consistent with your past lies; you don't undermine your own memory and judgment by tending to rationalize and then believe your own lies.  However, mere practical benefits don't commit anyone to total honesty, because in every life cases will arise where a lie is demonstrably more useful, in the long term and the short.  Generosity is what fills the gap; it extrapolates from the situations in which honesty is obviously useful to encourage honesty in cases in which it may harm you, and leads you to take the merits of total honesty on faith. 

This is what faith (or generosity) is really for -- to help you totally commit your behavior to match a few simply defined virtues.  Faith isn't meant to make you give away your mind and imagination, credulously accepting complex dogmas and obeying transient leaders.

Ruby Arsenic:  But moral behavior isn't all that simple.  Honesty isn't simple.  I don't mean just because it can get you in trouble.  I mean, you can tell someone the full and helpful truth, and have them misunderstand you so thoroughly that they make it a lie that hurts you or them.  Generosity isn't simple, not when it converts itself so easily into self-glorification or guilt-leveraging.  And I could go on in that vein for a long, long time.

Theofe:  A Hexist might say, if you'd wanted simple, you'd have reincarnated as a rock.  Elcar has said that to me, Ixy, several times.  With luck he'll live to outgrow it.

In Low Hexism another major call on generosity, and a major moral theme, is the regard for privacy.  Keeping the robe of privacy over your own most intense activities and opinions, especially the most compelling ones like sex, bardic madness, and self-righteousness, is one of the best ways of reducing the chance of infecting others with memes and memons.  This generous memonic hygiene is in accord with the Golden Rule and with courtesy (which Hexists refer to as the "creative ambiguity" that prevents spreading one's own certainties to other people).

Another functional merit of generous privacy comes from the fact that when anything is important to someone he can only truly share it with a very few people.  After a few contacts, his mind will note the repetition and begin to make the sharing a rote performance rather than a sincere, vital act of imagination, empathy, and communion.  This goes for all manner of personal interactions, among them sex.  Do note that personal privacy, such as sexual monoeroticism, is not meant to make a virtue out of any willful scarcity, or difficulty, of interpersonal contact.  Hexists favor generous abundance and ease in sex and personal communion as in other matters.

Paisley is My Friend:  I'm disenchanted, the buildup made me think the Hexists were going to let people decide their own sex lives, which would be practically a first in history.  Instead of which they're setting up all these halfway phony rules about memes and courtesy and privacy, which aren't any real issue and the rules won't do anything but induce needless guilt.  If there's one thing a good religion shouldn't do though almost all of them do, it's to act like control freaks and make people ashamed of their tastes in harmless sex.

Thalp:  But you must remember that Low Hexism is an org religion and must maintain the org first and foremost through mating control.

Objectivity, as a virtue, is considered to be essentially the same practice as empathy, so both of the semi-virtues are combined in dopplEnglish as "objempathy".  Objectivity means thinking of yourself precisely as harshly and forgivingly as you think of anyone else; no distinction between the meanings of persons is permitted here, no moral equivalent of solipsism, no "I'm the real One who really matters".  Empathy means utterly getting inside another's skin (bark, pelt, shell), feeling as they feel, thinking as they think.  Objectivity and empathy are two sides of the same talisman; they're how Goddess and God see us and exist in us.

Oddly enough, charity is not among the Low Hexist virtues; or perhaps it's not so odd given the prevalence of GW.  Generosity and empathy may include some support for sapients and others who have been harmed by unprovoked diseases, accidents, or natural (macopave) disasters.  In other situations, there are limits to charity.  The limits are always other people.  The only serious help anyone needs (except in catastrophes) is a major change in the way they see themselves and handle the world.  That's the very thing they'll most resent and resist, as they twist your gifts to get themselves more trouble.  Recognize that your resources, abilities, and knowledge of what people need are finite, not absolute.  Let that recognition bound what you give.  Find your own natural limit, which no one else can specify.  Ignore the insatiable guiltmongers who want you to give more, and the insatiable guiltshruggers who want you to give up or give less so that they don't feel mean by comparison.

Satiability, the third virtue, is the recognition that moral absolutes demand too much for sapient capacity, even though they're too simple to support sapient imagination:  absolutes are absurd, horrific, and all-devouring.  Luxury and pleasure are grand and good, but the craving for them has to be satiable or it's a heated trap for your imagination and objempathy.  A man's reach should exceed his grasp; but continually straining after perfection is not admired by Low Hexists.  Do well, live well, train generosity and objempathy to live easily in your acts, but leave the heartbreak of perfection to God and Goddess.  "Enough is enough" is a very Gregarian maxim; so is one of Sturgeon's Laws, "Nothing is always absolutely true."

Low Hexists spurn absolutes.  Free will and determinism are no more absolute, to a Low Hexist, than any other quality found in sapients.  Instinct, inherited neurochemistry, and acquired habits and imprints thoroughly control some of what a sapient does and how he rationalizes it before and after.  But some of the time the sapient has his own choice; if not a complete choice, then enough to make a functional difference in the rest of his life, a difference that no purely deterministic model could predict.  Call it neurochemical non-linear chaos if you like quantitative buzzwords, but you might as well call it intermittent, non-absolute, nonetheless effectual free will.

Aquinas:  How pitifully familiar a ring this has, this expressed disregard for absolute principles, this behavioristic babblement of limited free-will, this yearning infatuation with moral relativism.  And, next, will I once again see the ladder of "diminished responsibility" being placed, and the helping hand of "addictive syndrome" outstretched, to assist criminals and deviants down "off the hook" of culpability for their repulsive actions?  Sad to say, woolly speculation about the sociomechanochemical impulsion of wickedness comes rapidly unraveled when faced by the self-evident fact of complete human free will.  A thug is a thug is a thug, and vice is vice is vice, and the explanation for a malefactor's behavior need be given only in terms of his (or, let us not be sexist, her) absolutely freely-willed choice of viciousness.

Nor do Low Hexists see the pursuit of transcendence as an absolute good (or evil).  The illuminating experience of Unity is no more important, primal, or true than our immersion in our daily sensual Separateness.  Goddess and God revel in the illusion of individuality and diversity as well as the illusion of unity.  However, it is surely the interesting case that the same practices and techniques that often lead to satori also tend to promote Golden Rule behavior.  Usually.  Which gives transcendence some extra laudability.  Nevertheless, the correlation between satori and virtue is hardly absolute, any more than the link between Maya and vice.

That more or less brings us to the afterlife, another topic where Low and High Hexists differ.  High Hexists take no position on the afterlife (or prelife), saying that observations are unavailable.  Many of them believe that, if there's an afterlife, it's a state so different and discontinuous from life that neither can validly be used as a sanction for the other.  They're mutually irrelevant.  A minority of High Hexists say the afterlife (or prelife) gives you exactly what you expect from it, heaven, hell, limbo, reincarnation, transmigration, or Godhead, until you learn enough to avoid being trapped in your own preconception.

Low Hexists, on the other hand, hold that some afterlife is essential because people who only have a finite life can't be generous; they have to be as stingy and particular as accountants because time is so short.  Reincarnation has to be the form taken by the afterlife because one mortality isn't enough to give objempathy.  We sapients can't understand each other from the outside.  All we can do is incarnate in so many different forms that we begin to understand from the inside, and so approach Total Understanding.  And with it, satiation. 

There's almost a different notion of the format of reincarnation for each Hexist planet.  Here, they say reincarnation works forward in time; there, backwards; way over there, a temporal scattergun, random throughout time.  Some say a single sapient bodymind holds only one soul, others say many souls, and a few pundits say a no-souled bodymind occurs.  The no-soulers, you see, get to build a soul from scratch without being thwarted by the animalizing distractions of their first life.  By "soul" is meant a compounded set of memories from many lives plus self-originated opinions about those memories.  Accepting others' opinions and meanings, or doing the same things an animal does but more cleverly and comfortably, neither creates a soul nor leads to an afterlife.

Theofe:  They say the Goddess walks about, always walking, always telling her tale without words.  At night, she hunts above the surface of a world, feet down, alone, like any sapient.  By day, she goes her ways below the surface, head-down, feet up.  Then she switches from one to another of us, as each one's subterranean, supporting, reflecting shadow.  In contrast, the God stays just behind, above, all of us at once, looking out over our heads.  Almost, never quite sharing all our points of view. 

Your editor is back again.  While the New Theleme Club was at its brief peak, Thalp told us much about yts aversion to one-dimensional evolution.  Yt readily admitted to the common n-Hexist predilection for any studies that might (even inadequately) demonstrate the possibility of sideways evolution toward "a wholly neotenous emergent".  The average adult sapient spends yts attention on the purely survival matters of feeding, breeding, bleeding, and wheedling:  that is, feeding its viscera, breeding more of yts own type, bleeding any other types, and wheedling nature for better ways to do more of the same.  Yt seldom employs yts highly evolved skills -- imagination, creativity, forethought, empathy, objectivity -- in any way that doesn't advance yt (or yts gene-kin) toward real or symbolic survival.

All of the gratuitous features of sapient life, notably art, play, and the other durable pleasures, grow from the budding way of thinking.  Art and play belong to the immature, neotenous thinker whose talents and interests haven't yet been mobilized into the quasi-military, quasi-mechanical, quasi-mercantile adult service given to survival.  What Thalp hoped for, perhaps baselessly (as yt ruefully admitted), was that all sapient genomes contained some currently unactivated constellation of features that would extend neotenous thinking throughout one's whole life.  Naturally these features would do damn all while sapients lived under survival conditions.  Should conditions make survival sufficiently irrelevant, evolution might veer into a decidedly sideways skid...

Thalp:  Sideways evolution is culling not by inability to survive but by insatiable incapacity to find anything worth doing.  You call it "jade".  It is a point of quantitative thinking, "more is better", more extreme and various experience must be happier.  In Gregaria more people die or grow ineffectively in otherwise aimless adventures of jade than to any other cause excluding "old" age.  Western Earth's teenage suicide rate may show enough wealth has at last composted to promote a "sideways" motion of evolution in two or more dimensions.

A counter-evolutionary whole-life childhood, that was what Thalp wanted, and yt uploaded not quite terabytes, but teratobytes, about it.  What would an old child be like?  An experienced child?  A wise child?  We may never have seen any such creature on Earth.  Our imaginations need a jump-start.  We have to distinguish between the lasting child mindspirit and the transient traits of innocence and egotropism, the ephemera that give us our whole survival-based concept of childness as something that can't (and mustn't) last.  Innocence, in particular, is our fetish; it puts children on the pedestal that attracts everyone from devoted mentors to virgin-molesters.  Nevertheless, when we visualize a wholly neotenous emergent we have to imagine a child without the transient aspects of childhood.

What is a mature child, then?  What is maturity when it isn't defined in the orgling's survival-based way:  a stolid acceptance of, and skill at, feeding evolution with our breeding, bleeding, and wheedling?

Thalp had lengthy feelings on the subject -- no data, only a kind of faith.  Yt defined conventional evolution-based maturity as "the unabashed acceptance of limited goals."  When a bud becomes a bloom, yt stops inducing yts own learning and begins to submit to passions of various kinds:  lecturing, fixing its moral rules, seeking symbionts, seeding, sacrificing.  Like any other addiction, a passion makes its victim try harder and harder while yt gets less and less of yts fave crave, and settles for less and less.  After enough of this tribulation, maturity comes to accept permanent limits on its goals, rather than temporary limits on its methods.

To summarize Thalp's ideal:  the neotenoid mind, the ever-budding, wouldn't see the world in terms of passion or of limits.  Yt could see anything fresh, if yt chose.  Yt would feel ytself capable of anything, in time, and be willing to turn yts full attention to anything, and yts full affection to anyone, with eagerness and ease and sense of discovery.  The ever-budding could even find a kind of refreshment in suffering; the intense focus of yts attention, the sense of being object rather than subject, would please yt till yt chose to go on to the next novelty. 

The ever-budding's maturity would consist of a skill at maintaining a schizoid state, in the sense that "a constellation is schizoid by comparison to a stone."  That is, a constellation doesn't have the unity and integrated behavior of a stone.  Rather, it has a "false" coherence in the eye of the beholder, and a "true" coherence in apparently having all its components bound by the same physical laws.  Similarly, the ever-budding personality would have coherence only in the I of the beholder.

In yts inner mind(s), the neotenoid would feel emotions, visualize them like lucid dreams, fantasize to the peak of them, in orgasms of sex, anger, fear, contempt, self-exgression, tenderest devotion, unselfed ecstasy.  The inner neotenoid could send yts imagination(s) on high, put the most personal, inexplicable, ineffable meanings on everything around yt, remaking the Outer World into yts Inner World by yts own rules alone. 

In yts outer mind(s), yt'd see ytself and others objectively.  The outer neotenoid could see and evaluate the Outer World and yts Outer Self entirely as all others did, with no coloring, no distortion from yts natural solipsism.  Yt could look at yts own Inner World(s) the same way.  Yt'd have no compelling ideas, no ideas with teeth, no beliefs that yt couldn't change in an instant.  Only that fluid, restless form of objectivity would guide yts external thoughts and actions.

Beach BEM:  The split between Inner and Outer Worlds is something your memons would attempt to bring about, I surmise.  It would be a logical culmination of their predictable attempts to achieve freedom by dissociating their sphere of influence, the intellect, from the physical survival domain over which the genome tyrannizes.

The mature neotenoids would never expect either their inner world or the outer world to abide by the other world's rules.  They wouldn't be ashamed of "unrealistic" Inner fantasy worlds, nor would they expect the Outer world to give them credit for their Inner good intentions.  They'd hold their inner and outer minds stringently apart except when playing rituals or games with their trustlings.  That mental tension would give them the capacity for pure counter-evolutionary recapitulation.  We've evolved step by step, in our ideologies and our bodymind both, every step constrained by all the earlier ones.  But the ever-budding could go back to ground zero, blast all the existing systems, and build a new optimized network of ideas without being forced to depend on patching or jury-rigging the old one.

Aquinas:  Consequently, your "ever-budding" sociopaths would not possess anything we mere adults could recognize as history, society, sanity, or a moral sense.

Ruby Arsenic:  You have been warned!

ALERT!  Nonlinear chaos in subroutine SELF(self).  Program continues.