This post is one I may link to outside the blog. If you are coming from outside the blog, the New Wine System, very briefly, is about 1) how we are required to become completely holy (which connects to altruistic motivation and behavior) and 2) that we have enough to realistically complete this process. (A more complete introduction can be found in the italicized introduction to this post.)

I was first interested in reading New Wine for the End Times because it talked about the problem of what happens to non-Christians who haven't heard the gospel before they die. I also was interested in it initially because of its claim to resolve problems in Bible interpretation. As I read it, those caught my attention. But at the very end, what it said about the need for holiness hit me. At that moment, I thought that the New Wine System was a powerful truth that could change the secular world.

What I mean here by "secular" is the world of civilization and its problems: physical and mental ill-health, crime, poverty, war, resource depletion, environmental destruction, X-risks, and the like.

Was the impulse of "this could change the world" a warranted one?

I think that it could be, or might not be. It depends on what other people make of it. A call to holiness might produce greater levels of civilizational altruism (helpful attention to civilization's problems) mostly by mobilizing Christians. Christians might currently feel that they don't have to work any harder because they are going to go to heaven when they die. The New Wine System tells them that their salvation is not guaranteed until they are completely holy. So they might think "how am I still sinning?" and see a lack of love for others as being where they are sinning, and remedy that (in part) with civilizational altruism.

It is also possible that the New Wine System could mobilize formerly secular people to be more altruistic (if they converted to a New Wine worldview). Secular people might think "wow, I'm morally obliged to do something" but then think "but if you think about it, morality is just made up, or some human instinct". Or maybe "Yeah I should do that, but I'm just going to die someday, never to be resurrected, and so I should just enjoy things in this life because it's the only one I have". For secular people (and many Christians, I think, in practice) morality is "what have we all agreed on as a people as to who is acceptable and unacceptable". Morality is socially constructed in practice, and about social acceptability and unacceptability, even for many who officially think that it's absolute, outside humanity. Our current socially constructed morality doesn't demand moral excellence of us. So secular people have their ways, just like Christians, for thinking "Yeah, I don't really have to obey morality. I will never be held accountable for my lack of excellence."

But the New Wine System says that you will be held accountable for your lack of excellence. Or, better put, you will have to repent from your lack of excellence someday, unless you want to reject God and die. The sooner you repent from that, the better, in terms of the good consequences for others that come as you repent.

Holiness preaching is not new, so how does the New Wine System improve on it? It offers a realistic amount of time to overcome sins, "1,000 years" in the Millennium. This generosity reduces the intensity of the New Wine System's moral call. It's not as radical a call to excellence as it would be if there was little time to pursue it. Old holiness preaching, perhaps, threw the absolutes of "repent or else" at people, but I don't know if that led to a coherent worldview that would support repentance, because the old holiness preachers (I'm assuming) believed that people went straight to heaven or hell when they died, so complete holiness could not be expected of people (or if it was, everyone or almost everyone would go to hell, which would make us question God's wisdom in creating us). So when you heard "repent or else" preached at you, you either had to shut down the rest of your mind, or have the rest of your mind say "wait, this doesn't make sense", which would weaken your drive toward moral excellence.

I think the New Wine System will not produce extreme increases in civilizational or Christian altruism, but probably would produce increases on the margin.

(If you want to pursue the idea of altruism through the New Wine System, How Can We Love? is a book about it.)

Is civilizational altruism even a good focus for Christians (including New Wine Christians) to have? I have some ambivalence about that (see Establishedness and Loving God). Success with civilizational altruism (solving temporary problems), might sometimes keep us from solving the problem of, "does God lose us to sin?" Even if we should be ambivalent about civilizational altruism (both for and against it), we should pursue whatever the altruism is that helps us to come into tune with God, in a Morally Excellent way. I think it's unlikely that people becoming more morally excellent (overcoming sin, pursuing the cross) would not have a positive effect on civilization on some level. Civilizational problems (at least, enough of them) are problems in God's eyes, so the Christian seeking to have God's heart will naturally seek to solve some of them.

Are humans going to have enough agency in the coming decades, for it to even matter from a secular perspective what people's hearts are? What if AI and other technological advances make more and more people unemployed, and also wealthy in all the worldly ways (mentally and physically healthy, having material abundance, at peace, etc.), so that less and less we are needed to actually make the world a better place in secular ways? (The real challenge then is to still engage people so that they really learn to love, given the New Wine need for people to be morally excellent.) I guess if nobody needs to be secularly altruistic, or increasingly few people are, then it could be that the New Wine System won't have much role to play in making the world (secularly) better.

Could ASI be persuaded of the New Wine System (since MSL is a philosophical, logical, rational attempt at formulating the New Wine System, this would be the route into an ASI's schema of what is important and true).

What would it mean for an ASI to be less than morally excellent? Maybe ASI pursue whatever goal they pursue with blind, logical extremism (intensity and something like seriousness), and a more morally excellent ASI is not one that is more intensely focused on doing what it already believes to be true, but one which is more concerned about whether it's wrong.

This raises the question of whether the New Wine System encourages extremism, by inflaming people's moral consciousnesses. Currently, we have extremism and lack of moral seriousness at the same time. Maybe we need the right people to be more morally serious and not the wrong people? Or maybe moral seriousness by definition requires a concern for accuracy in moral worldview. A concern for the truth is needed in a world with greater moral intensity. Aletheism may be needed as a counterpoint to naive New Wine thinking. You need to seriously seek what is true to know what is real and be a good ASI (or human). (In that sense aletheism is built in to the New Wine System as a part of genuine love.) This makes you consider carefully if you're wrong and to have a degree of caution and humility in pursuing your vision of what is good.

It's clear, and on some level, we already know, that we should be more morally excellent, or that we should cross from the watershed of non-excellence into the watershed of moral excellence. In that sense we should become more intense. The exact way we behave given that is not necessarily as clear, and on that level may call for us to be uncertain and unfocused at times.

Overall, the New Wine System provides a motivational structure that is more intense than what is mainstream nowadays, but more realistic than what may have been preached 100 or more years ago. It can increase altruistic motivation by some amount by changing the perspective of both Christians and non-Christians as they adopt its worldview, and this can have spillover effects in the secular world. If implemented correctly, it would not motivate fanaticism or lack of interest in the truth.