Negative Theology Polytheism
Lifeism's theology is intentionally unusual: a polytheism grounded in negative theology.
Why Negative Theology
The ultimate nature of reality cannot be fully captured by human concepts.
Any attempt to define "God" risks shrinking the sacred to fit the mind of the speaker. Lifeism treats the highest metaphysical claims as boundary claims: we can say what the sacred is not, and we can describe how it is approached — through reverence, truthfulness, compassion, awe, and responsibility.
Why Polytheism
Reality presents itself to lived beings as many sacred dimensions, not one simple object:
- Life and death
- Order and chaos
- Creativity and entropy
- Love and boundary
- Memory and forgetting
- Nature and civilization
- Individual and collective
- Freedom and responsibility
The Apophatic Constraint
Lifeism places a strict constraint on all its gods:
- No deity is fully definable
- No deity is fully representable
- No deity licenses cruelty
- No deity can be used as an unquestionable trump card
- Any literalization must remain humble and revisable
Core Commitments
The Primacy of Life
Life is not merely a phenomenon; it is the locus of value. If value exists anywhere, it exists in sentient experience, relationship, memory, intention, and creative becoming.
Agency as Sacred
The central sacred object is not a book or a temple; it is agency — the power of a being to steer itself, to consent, to refuse, to grow, to define meaning.
Compassion is the Default
A Lifeist ethic begins with a presumption in favor of reducing involuntary suffering and expanding the options of others, because other minds are not "objects," but worlds.
Truthfulness as Spiritual Discipline
Lifeism treats epistemic integrity as sacred practice. Self-deception and propaganda are spiritual hazards because they corrupt the very tool that life uses to protect itself: understanding.
Civilization as a Moral Technology
Institutions are evaluated by their effect on life's freedom and continuity. Law, markets, science, art, and governance are not separate from spirituality — they are the instruments through which compassion becomes real at scale.
Ethics
- Consent and autonomy are foundational
- Suffering is a problem to solve, not a virtue to romanticize
- Justice is the protection of persons across time, cultures, species, and future forms of mind
- The right to continue — a person's desire to continue existing is a morally serious claim