The First Sermon

 

We are humanity. The light of reason is our birthright. The way of training is our legacy. We have survived millions of years on this deadly world, and we will survive billions of years to come in the perilous void of space. We are titanic, and we shall overcome.

Our greatest enemy is ourselves, our own violent and prideful natures. We are truly powerful and great, so great in fact that we threaten the very future of our own imaginings.

A humanity disunited will fall upon itself in a moment of temporary hardship, and so truly, whatever the symptom, we could only be the annihilators of our own destiny.

Thus, the way forward is in unifying all people in collective purpose and vision, not as the act of one vision overcoming all others, but in a synthesis of vision that encompasses and validates all human ways which uphold our spirits.

We will find knowledge and safety through the practice of science, purpose and unity in the learning of religion and mythology, and fulfillment and meaning through the practice of magic and ritual. Disunited from the others, each loses its true purpose and becomes corrupted, but in harmony together they bring an individual to a higher level of understanding and purpose.

To uphold the individual while working to strengthen society and achieve justice. This is the ultimate purpose of the practice. Ultimately society is nothing more than the cumulative effect of individuals acting upon their wants and needs. If people want harmony, prosperity and peace, they will achieve it. If they want conflict and terror, they can achieve that too.

New Renaissance is an idea bigger than any person, but it finds its true purpose and meaning at the individual level. It acts on the level of the individual, and thereby shapes society as a whole.

It is the unleashing of each person’s full and true potential, bringing them to a natural state of fulfillment. This is achieved through training, which is the main ritual practice of New Renaissance.

Two aspects define the religion of New Renaissance; The aspect of learning, represented by the sacred book, and the aspect of action represented by the sacred knife. These two objects are the key ritual items of New Renaissance and each practitioner should keep and maintain both.

The book is keeper of intended knowledge, each persons book is unique, beyond outlining the basic principals. You collect whatever knowledge or art that you want to preserve and learn; This then becomes a tool to focus your study, to refine and compile all your desired learning into a single tome which acts as a sacred text, and ultimately to learn that text until it is fully memorized and becomes knowledge transmuted into an active principal.

The knife is both your protector and a guide for your training. Its physical properties dictate the nature of your actions, whether in craft or combat. The subtlty of the knife must be understood and ones actions must be made in line with its form and function. This is a metaphor for how we interact with any tool or weapon and should be applied universally throughout life. This is what the knife symbolizes. As with the book, ultimately one seeks the way of training until the knife itself becomes redundant, the body and mind are all that is required. This reflects ultimate goal of New Renaissance; Refinement of the self into the highest possible form. This is practiced physically with the knife and mentally with the book.

Thus each person seeking to individually uplift themselves while all people seek collective upliftment leads to a society where all people are respected, provided for and there is peace.

This society is embodied in the FIVE PRINCIPLES of New Renaissance.

PRINCIPLE 1: Society shall be organized for the benefit of all people.

Together, we must usher humanity out of the long dark aeon and into the light of reason and wisdom. Into a new golden age where we stand shoulder to shoulder instead of upon one another. Were we hold fast to our values and band together to create a society that embodies them, instead of giving in to personal weakness in the face of a decadent and ruined order we all know betrayed the social contract long ago.

To each person will be granted all the things which have been denied. For each person in society there is little choice but to exist within the confines of the economic condition, and so to free humanity we must end this economy of exploitation.

PRINCIPLE 2: No human shall exploit another human, the system of exploitative labor shall be abolished.

Society shall be organized to provide a basis of living for all people, food, clean water, clothing, shelter, heat and electricity medical care. These are the staples of a free and open society. And so their free provision is the mark of a truly free society.

We have allowed the system to artificially inflate some individuals over others, these are the beneficiaries of stolen wealth over all of human history, there can exist no meritocracy when there is such an immense chasm between those who have, and those who have not.

We must liberate the wealth of humanity so that we can unleash humanities true potential, instead of stifling it, indulging in personal luxury and wealth, creating a system that prioritized the comfort and wealth of those at the top over the needs and lives of those below, and even threaten the very earth itself.

For too long has industrial society stripped the earth of its resources without concern for the consequences of its actions, and so we have reached a point where the fate of the planet hangs in the balance. Even with our best efforts, the actions of our leaders are woefully inadequate to handle the coming crisis. We must be the ones to make the changes, we must make changes to our economic and social relationships to each other and to society at large.

PRINCIPLE 3: The environment shall be retained and protected, technology should be limited to allow for the recovery of the environment to a sustainable level.

This change in the nature of society must also be reflected by a sense of personal discipline and restraint. We must restrain our more destructive tendencies so that we can fully utilize our powerful technology without succumbing to the temptation to unleash its darker potentials.

Indeed the essence of technology has been perverted to sustain and guarantee the comfort of a few individuals while sacrificing the well being of human society as a whole and indeed the future of humanity as an intellectual and technological species.

Personal discipline is required to limit ones contribution to the destruction and to help build consensus around the alternative. We must all live within limited means so that everyone on earth can have a sustainable life. That is not to say we must live in poverty, indeed the opposite, we simply must redefine what it means to be wealthy. One need not have a car if there is free public transport, buses,trains, and cheaply available electric bikes or other alternatives. Even so we need not stop using cars entirely, only limit their use to a sustainable and safe level. Cars are a useful and powerful technology but used on a mass scale as we have for recreation and comfort, they are a hazard and an extinction level threat.

PRINCIPLE 4: We should not use machines unless absolutely necessary or safe. We should not become dependent upon machines.

We should remain masters of ourselves, and should not let one who controls technology control us. This is the essence of New Renaissance. Freedom for humanity. Freedom to pursue our own destiny and for each person to realize that destiny and potential within themselves. Technology is good as long as it uplifts us and helps us realize our greater potential.

While being disciplined and mindful of our personal use of technology, we must also work to build humanities technological capability to confront new and novel threats we may encounter in the future. Despite the danger inherent in their use, technology like AI and nanomachines will be necessary to ensure our survival in the long term as we inevitably move to living and working in space.

Space represents the ultimate frontier upon the shores of which humanity stands, preparing to voyage into the unknown, full of treasure, opportunity and danger. Preparing ourselves for this and what we might find is the ultimate higher mission of humanity going into the future.

Science is our ultimate tool to determine how we should prepare, and what threats we should prepare for. Greatest of these threats is arguably the likely reality of intelligent civilizations living on other planets.

Without a united human civilization capable of space travel we will be surely destroyed by the first technological species who detects us, even though this is probably still hundreds of millions of years out, if humanity continues as we are, we will set ourselves inevitably on the path to defeat, only by uniting in common purpose and uplifting all people can we hope to be ready for what the future holds.

PRINCIPLE 5: We must build our planetary technology to prepare for the dangers of the future, on earth and in space.

New Renaissance is a path of learning for all people, not just the elite, the rich, the academics, the scientists, but all people. None will be left behind as we move toward our collective future, a future our ancestors worked and fought for so that we could live a rich material and spiritual existence, so that we could unite, and be at last the realization of our potential fulfilled! Only together can we achieve this, and only by setting aside our selfish needs for the needs of the many, for the needs of the environment and the earth, for the needs of future generations, instead of the wealthy.

Humanity should unite in spirit and in purpose, to build a better wold for ourselves and for our children!

The Way is in training, the Way is in bringing the self to the highest potential.

The Way is in uplifting humanity.