SOEMT The Sovereign Order of Enlightenment, Mercy, and Truth

A Church

The Sovereign Order of Enlightenment, Mercy, and Truth

SOEMT is a church: a religion dedicated to the advancement of human beings through 3 pillars, Enlightenment, Mercy, and Truth. It is measured by what its members become and expressed in what they do.

How shall we make the world a better place through Enlightenment, Mercy, and Truth?

That is the Order's ultimate question. Every practice, honor, and rite of SOEMT is an answer to it.

The 3 Pillars

Enlightenment
The lifelong pursuit of knowledge, understanding, self awareness, and command of one's own mind and actions. Learning and teaching are both obligations. Volunteering as a participant in university research counts as teaching, because it adds to what humanity knows.
Mercy
The obligation to recognize the humanity of others and act on it: empathy, compassion, cultural understanding, forgiveness where it is earned, service, and the improvement of the conditions in which other people live. Its ordinary form is volunteering.
Truth
Respect for reality even when it is inconvenient: science, evidence, measurement, reproducibility, intellectual honesty, and the willingness to abandon a belief when better evidence appears. Truth work means putting work into the world by publishing, replicating, correcting, and creating, including art.

Each pillar has a named opposite, an act rather than a people: enforced Ignorance, Cruelty, and Deceit. The Code calls them the Three Shadows, and they bind the Order first.

On the Divine

SOEMT does not require belief in a deity and does not prohibit it. It does not require the worship of a deity and does not prohibit it. A person may believe in 1 god, many gods, no gods, or remain uncertain, and stand as a full member. Members may keep any other faith so long as it does not war with the 3 pillars. On the divine, SOEMT is agnostic. On the pillars, it is absolute.

What Members Do

Members give 1 hour in 10 of their waking time to study, teaching, service, truth work, or care, and log it in the Ledger of Work. They gather on Thursday Night in the Library of Enlightenment to learn, work a problem, teach it back, and eat together. They mark 3 passages: a first teaching, a first costly act of mercy, and a first belief abandoned in public. They keep a jar of their errors all year and, on the last night of the year, read 1 aloud and burn the rest. Everything taught and every record is kept in the Archive. The practices, and what is operating today.

The Scale of the Work

The Code puts the question in numbers. In the United States adults spend roughly 6 billion hours a year inside religious services. The entire Apollo program, which employed 400,000 people at its peak and put 12 human beings on the Moon, consumed roughly 6 billion hours of labor across 11 years. Americans give that many hours to worship every 12 months.

SOEMT makes no claim about the worth of those hours. It asks 1 question: what could humanity reach if 1 hour in 10 were also pointed at a destination? That would be 600 million hours a year in the United States, an Apollo program every decade. The figures and their assumptions are stated in the Eighth Book of the Code.

Research

A church whose pillars are Enlightenment and Truth has to do its own research and publish it. SOEMT's first project is the Human Voluntary Control Atlas, a study of which physiological processes a person can bring under voluntary control and how far that control can be trained. About research at SOEMT.

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