What does it mean for a species to audit its gods? Omittoism

What does it mean for a species to audit its gods? It means, at minimum, that the species has reached the point at which it applies its own best thinking to all authority claims rather than exempting any category of claim from rational evaluation. This is not arrogance. The recognition that one does not know whether God exists, and that one’s own reason is fallible, is not arrogance but intellectual honesty. It is not hostility. The refusal to grant authority without demonstrated legitimacy is the same principle that animates every constitutional democracy’s relationship to its own governments. It is not nihilism. The affirmation of autonomy as a foundational value is, as Camus demonstrates, an affirmation of value, not its denial. It is not impiety. The concept of consentheism—reflective, voluntary, evaluatively grounded religious commitment—is not the framework’s concession to religion but its highest account of what genuine religious commitment looks like when freed from existential coercion. 

 

Omittoist framework illuminates dimensions of different thinkers’ work that their own preoccupations prevented them from exploring—Locke’s consent principle applied beyond its intended domain, Hume’s is-ought gap deployed as a jurisdictional firewall, Arendt’s power-authority-violence distinction deployed as a governance audit. The synthesis that emerges from this mutual pressure is a contribution to the ongoing project of human moral self-understanding—the project, pursued across millennia and across cultures, of figuring out what is owed to one another, what authority any being possesses over rational agents, and what it means to live as finite, morally serious creatures in an uncertain cosmos. 

 

The Omittoist declaration—‘no master is recognised absent demonstrable legitimacy’—is not a declaration of war but a declaration of philosophical seriousness. It is the refusal to settle for less than what the best available principles require. It holds that the same standards routinely applied to human authority claims—consent, accountability, proportionality, transparency—apply without exemption to cosmic authority claims, and that applying them is not an act of rebellion but an act of consistency. As such, it represents not the end of the conversation about divine authority but one of its most rigorous and productive contributions—opening a space of inquiry that political philosophy has been slow to occupy, and inviting all who are committed to the principles of legitimate authority to follow that commitment wherever, consistently, it leads.