How Techno-Puritanism Started
Simone and Malcolm Collins were raised atheists. When they started having kids of their own, they began to consider the traditions and beliefs with which they they would be raised. Because humanity has co-evolved with religion for hundreds of thousands of years, it was clear to them that humans are unable to develop mentally healthily without one. To that end, Simone and Malcolm began to piece together the theological structure they thought would have the most positive intergenerational effects for their family.
Having done this, they began to re-read the books of the Judeo-Christian tree of religions only to find many of the stories and claims they had thought to find in these sacred texts—premises pervasive in modern Judeo-Christian religions—missing. Instead, they found stories that backed the theological structure they thought they had made up. They next found these same ideas eloquently laid out in a book from the mid-1800s, William Winwood Reade’s Martyrdom of Man, that also makes explicit chronological predictions about future events which had all taken place in the order the book predicted.
When they brought this up on their podcast, they found hundreds of other people had a similar experience and formed similar ideas. If so many people have come to such similar conclusions, why had they not gone mainstream? Because having conversations about a living, constantly-evolving religion has been forbidden—if not outright banned—in the ossified Christian mainstream. As a result, the Christian faith has lost its allure for many. The active conversations allowed seem to center around how much the church should cave to progressive values or mysticism rather than advancement or evolution of the strict, disciplined, austere, logical, monotheism that made these traditions great.
For this reason, we do not say that “Malcolm and Simone,” founded Techno-Puritanism in the same way Martin Luthor did not “found” Protestantism; they where just central figures in the cultural conversation within which it emerged. As such, they decided to put together this website to record some of the ideas that are being discussed in the Tract series that can be found below.