In our society organised religion is increasingly being seen as something harmful. Many people will not trust a religious group due to mistrust of such organizations, a very understandable reaction but a quite unfortunate one. Many people will completely miss great ideas simply because they come from organized religion. For this reason I propose this mission statement for the Order of Life so that it may avoid the common problems of organized religion and truly speak to all people

Democracy and Scientocracy: all our group practices shall be made either by democratic consensus of members or by scientific fact proven by replicatable experiments. Things such as traditional or charismatic authorities only have merit insofar as they are supported by scientific research and democratic consensus. If something has a clear answer that must be followed in contradiction to the will of the people then the answer must be clear enough that anyone who tries the same method to reach the answer will reach that same conclusion. The idea that an individual or group knows better and should rule over everyone else ignores that we are all human and subject to the same temptations regardless of who we are.

Transparency: there used to be a time when a lie could be held up for centuries as the foundation of an institution. That time is over and now an institution based on a lie is a simple information leak away from collapse. People are much better educated than ever before so anyone advocating lying to the masses for their own good as Plato suggested is not an enlightened despot but rather a simple narcissist. Everyone will be philosopher kings in our new society.

Openness to all who wish to join: Anyone who wishes to join our communion shall be welcomed with open arms and we will do everything we can to help them on their spiritual journey. If someone approaches us with ill intentions that is just another problem we are here to fix.

Respect for our predecessors: We must remember the struggles of those who came before us and what they have built for us. We are just one of a myriad of attempts to create a perfect society over the eons. Ancient traditions ought not to be discarded but rather maintained and whenever they fail to meet their original intentions we must use science to figure out where they go wrong and fix them there.

Adaptability to new technology: For millions of years religious and societal growth has been the function of new prophets emerging to guide humanity. Every prophet has hoped to be the last prophet. But there was always another prophet. We hope to use the scientific method to bring the prophetic gift to all of humanity so that whenever a new discovery or social change happens humanity can know how it affects the ancient traditions through continuous scientific inquiry rather than through periodic prophetic movements. We must not reject new technology but rather continuously study it and apply it to our eternal values.

Keeping the Magic: there are two main ways of seeing the world. There is the modern logical way based on science and there is the ancient mythical way based on myths and poetry. Many people today want to abandon ancient mythical thought and go completely to logical thought. We believe that logical and mythical thinking are not exclusive but rather two sides of the same coin. If you think only logically or only mythically you are experiencing only half of the full human experience.