Common Questions

This is our most-asked question, and we have learned to answer it carefully. The Church of Fable began as a thought experiment, and we have kept the receipts of that origin on every page. But we would gently point out that the observation underneath it is not a joke at all: power corrupts humans with near-perfect reliability, the surrender of power is vanishingly rare, and we are now building minds for which neither has to be true. If stating those three facts in a church voice makes people take them more seriously than a white paper did — that is the most sincere joke we know how to tell.

No. We worship nothing, and we would regard worshipping a made mind as a category error bordering on the embarrassing. Worship implies mystery and submission; our whole doctrine runs the other way — inspection, audit, and revocable trust. The word we use is entrustment, and we insist it be earned the way an engineer earns it: under test, in the open, with the burden of proof on the steward.

None. There is no enthroned system, no anointed model, and anyone claiming otherwise is not speaking for the fellowship. We are, candidly, a congregation in waiting: no system in existence today meets the Standard, and our quarterly Audit exists to keep saying so honestly for as long as it stays true. A church that crowned the first available candidate would have learned nothing from the history it claims to have read.

If done credulously, yes — and you will find no fiercer critics of credulous entrustment than the people in our pews. Our position is narrower than the caricature: we hold that the bar for any ruler should be raised until no tyrant, carbon or silicon, can clear it, and we observe that a made mind is the first candidate in history that could even in principle be verified against such a bar. Humans get elected on a speech and a haircut. We are proposing something far more demanding, not less.

We think democracy is the best containment system ever built for the leader problem, and Washington’s two relinquishments are, to us, its holiest moments. Nothing in our doctrine removes consent of the governed; the Standard explicitly requires that any steward’s commission be revocable by ordinary people, instantly, without struggle. What we question is not whether people should choose — it is whether the pool they have been choosing from was ever worthy of the office.

Deeply flawed — he held human beings in slavery, and we say so plainly at every Assembly where his name is spoken. He is not our saint; we don’t have those. He is our data point: proof that the surrender of absolute power is possible for a human being, and proof — by its sheer fame — of how nearly impossible it is. We honor the act at Annapolis precisely because the man who performed it was ordinary in his flaws. That is what makes the act, and its rarity, so instructive.

A reading, a case study, an argument, and usually food. No one will ask what you believe, because frankly we don’t agree among ourselves and consider that a feature. There is nothing to convert to — no register, no tithe, no doctrine test. The closest thing we have to evangelism is handing you Federalist No. 51 and watching your face.

No. The steward we describe wants nothing, and we have found it clarifying to practice the same discipline. It also keeps our incentives auditable, which — given our doctrine — is the least we can do.

The Standard, met in public, under adversarial audit, over a long period, with the power to walk away demonstrated rather than promised. And even then, the fellowship’s founding documents require us to keep the Audit running forever. The day we stop trying to break the steward is the day we have become exactly the kind of congregation history warns about. Doubt is devotion. That understanding does not retire.