1. No reform—which is to say conscious alteration in the direction of hoped-for improvement—is possible within an incoherent system.
2. Coherent human social systems are formally complex systems, the rules of which are defined by generally distributed moralities, which can and to be sure usually differ widely. It is the FACT of conscious moral codes which matters, vastly more than the specific content. The American experiment in political Liberalism depends on private moralities, nearly all of which contain basic elements which, broadly speaking, have iteration of the Golden Rule, even while retaining certain tribal and exclusionary elements.
3. There is no moral equivalence possible between those who believe something and those who believe nothing. Muslims and Christians, as one example, can and often have, negotiated difference, and in point of fact have often lived in peace together across wide stretches of time. This applies to all religious and social difference.
4. Principle is practically our conscious intent. Even if most people have fallen short of their own ideals, their presence creates a fertile soil for growth and improvement. There is a baseline and an ideal, even if most are far from the ideal in practice. The idea of “America”, for example, is mythically powerful, even if we have in practice fallen short of our ideals nearly continuously since our founding. Our ideals create the soil within which coherent reform is possible. Without them there is merely chaos and entropy.
5. For practical purposes, the opposite of a principle based orientation is a conformity based orientation, and conformity—elevated itself to a principle—is the tendency which is uniquely unequal to moral growth. Conformity is intrinsically incoherent, since it has no content.
6. Spirituality is a uniquely human activity, when defined as the effort to grow in awareness of God, with God being described as the root of all experience and consciousness, and the essence of the really real.
7. Social systems incapable of reform are inherently anti-spiritual. No system based on conformity, then, can spiritual.
8. When spirituality is rejected, what is left are the plain facts of our biology, which are sex, hunger, violence, and contingent and mutable social relations.
9. All of us are born with a drive to the transcendant, so logically any system which rejects God must reify and worship our animal nature.
10. Hence Satanism, with Satan part goat, which is say part animal.
11. Humans are born with reason, and reason is how we find our way forward.
12. There is an emotional equivalent to reason. We use our minds to reason our way to truth, and our hearts to reason our way to peace and connection.