“Markets decide what is valuable…I don’t want a central planning committee to say what is and isn’t valuable…what bothers me is the presumption behind the question that someone is in a position to make that judgment other than us collectively…” - @thetrocro

This is a fantastic point, and it applies to religions as much as it does to energy (the context in which Troy spoke it yesterday at the @btcpolicyorg Summit.)

The overwhelming majority of people who have ever lived have believed (and still today continue to believe) in divine entities and have found religions vitally important tools in understanding and navigating the world. Those religions that are the largest ought to provoke curiosity, especially on the part of those who don’t subscribe to them, on the grounds that they are market bound phenomena. This especially applies to those religions that have most grown as a result of and that most prioritize socially constructive free market virtues such as:

- passionate and rational debate over ideas in a search for truth

- high prioritization of personal integrity/piety

- self-sacrificial love of one’s neighbors, including the weak and those who cannot defend themselves

- high emphasis on and pursuit of impartial justice

- low time-preference action

- peaceful non-coercive proselytization

With all of those factors in view, the results over the past two thousand years are pretty definitive.