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Reclaiming religious social technology by rejecting literalism
We have had discussions on secular culture and the consequences of the old “religious impulse”. But usually there’s a focus on the worst examples and experiences of religion. I want to bring up a different angle: what is the best that religion has to offer? What does religion accomplish best, beyond what we all know (fostering a community with moral rules)? And how can we reclaim and reorganize only the good and useful aspects of religious social technology?
The worship of God as therapeutic mental and emotional practice
Let us assume that there is no God. With this assumption, God is still the greatest possible Being that can be conceived in our mind. This is one of the more popular definitions of God. (Theologians have entertained many ways of construing God, including that He is “being itself”, the ultimate Good, or the ultimate Reality, yet what unites all of these is a desire to imagine the greatest possible thing in a given framework). If a person is using his mind to imagine the greatest Being, he is engaging in an activity that brings psychological and emotional benefits. When we dwell on an aspect of God, we dwell on a greater experience, straining our mind to understand something that brings awe and reverence. If the aspect we focus on is God’s eternal nature, we are attempting to know and feel the fact that something can be eternally existent throughout all of time, reminding us of the grandeur of existence and the insignificance of passing vanity. If it’s God’s truthfulness, we call to mind the idea of perfect certainty and logic, while praising truth itself. If it’s God’s power, we imagine the greatest experiences of power, and applying these experiences to one Thing (one Being, Idea, Cue, or Point in the mind: God). Thunder, waves, the magnitude of the sun, various imagined metaphors (“the earth in his hand”) or personal experiences may apply. If it’s God’s peace and love, we reach into our memory to pull out the greatest experiences of peace and love we know, and then associate God with the underlying experience of love. When someone is worshipping God as “King of Kings”, they imagine a perfect ruler over their life. The perfect goodness and purity of God is a way for us to strain our mind to imagine and feel perfect goodness and purity. The act of worship is a mental reorganization around greater experience, growing in our mind the experience that we attend to.
The triumph of monotheism is that all of these are associated with one “thing”. We might call it one god, one experience, one Word, one “inner gaze”, or one ineffability. Since a person can only focus on one thing at a time, the monotheistic God is just the greatest possible single thing to focus on — not as a consequence of his being real or his being God (we are assuming He is not), but purely on definitional grounds as a phenomenological activity. It’s a mental and emotional activity, a meditation or exercise, which results in benefits even for a 100% atheistic person.
Experiences of greatness, awe, reverence, and the “sublime” are associated with life satisfaction in numerous studies [1]. It is not surprising then that “awe directed at God” collects all of these benefits and more [2]. What I would assert is that God, understood in the way above, is the greatest mental practice of ordering these feelings or states of being. If there is any great thing you have in your mind, then unless it is perfectly great, there is going to be something greater to conceive. That “something greater” is nothing other than the ancient practice of worshipping God, minus the insistence on His existence and providential qualities.
God as Optimal Social Relationship
Leaping from this ground of defining the divine, we can consider what’s going on with a personal Christianized God. Can’t all this be done without “believing in a personal God”, let alone a Christian God, let alone a god? I will supply two answers. (1) Yes, but it never is. In fact, it is not often done by nominally religious people despite thousands of years of poetic tradition. It’s the realm of ancient philosophers, mystics, and the obscurely devout. So while it is not necessarily religious, it is still distinctly religious, and nevertheless a great part of religion that should be recreated. But to be double-minded: (2) no, because there is an essential variable left out of the equation: the primacy of social relationships.
We are not rational creatures first, we are social creatures first. From the standpoint of evolution, social cooperation comes before rationality. Our motivations are traced to social acculturation and values and not pure rationality. Actually, there is no rationality without social cooperation and values. Social life is the father of rational thought and has dominion over it. This is evident when looking at scientific cheating scandals, marketing, and in-group biases. I’d say you can also find this when looking at rationalist communities: it requires a community to draw people toward rationalism and to have them think and consider within the rationalist framework.
Due to evolution, our animal mind comes with large disk space exclusively dedicated to social life. This means that, if we want the greatest thing in our mind, it must be understood socially. We do not love and serve an idea in the way we do a Being, simply because we are not designed to do that. Evolution has deigned to make us social animals with deity-forming instincts when left unattended.
If we cannot grasp in our mind the fullness of an idea as we can the fullness of a Being, and our desire is to grasp the greatest thing in our mind, then it must be conceived of as a being. While we might stand in awe at a mountain, the sea, and the celestial heavens (hence why these are used abundantly in religious poetry), we have more reverence for an individual than a theory. This is the purpose of a personal God and the purpose of prayer. To maximize the use of our mind toward the greatest single object of attention, we must see God as person-like, or in other words, a Being.
Creating a community around the greatest conceived Being is creating the optimal conditions for community
Here’s where the idea of secular culture reclaiming religious practice gets interesting. If a group of people attend the same place to focus on and grow the experience of “perfect love”, then that is the best community for cultivating love. If they do the same thing for “perfect virtue”, then that is the best community for perfect virtue. Organizing people around each person’s conception of the Greatest Being is the best way to organize people together. It is the best way to share positive emotions, because despite each person having a slightly different understanding of perfect love, they are all feeling and sharing the emotion together.
Imagine for a moment that you have wrapped all of Life’s great and optimal experiences together in your mind under the dominion of one Being. You, and your neighbors, go to a dedicated place to worship that Thing, using all the same cues. (By worship, we mean simply increasing our love and interest in the Thing.) This is an extraordinary way to come together as a community. I would argue it’s considerably better than how most people form communities today, structuring them around hobbies, drugs, or suboptimal political aspirations.
The psychological magic of the Christian celebration as optimal religious experience: can an atheist culture recreate something Christian?
Christians come together to celebrate the story of how they (personally) escaped certain death due to the goodness and virtue of a Perfect Man. They celebrate also the wisdom that the Perfect Man bestowed humanity, which they leads to perfect felicity. They consider this Perfect Man to be their teacher who hears them when they speak and who provides support and favor. The Perfect Man is Perfect Teacher, Perfect Friend, and will one day be Perfect Judge. As icing on the cake, the book that unites Christians together (the Gospel) is about mankind’s evil inclinations causing this Perfect Guy’s torture and death!
The benefits of this celebration are remarkable as something felt and experienced (phenomenological) rather than analyzed or asserted. How would you feel if an amazing person saved you and your friends from death? What if your evil inclinations led to his death, but he forgave you? What if he came with good news about living life well and serving wisdom, and you just imitate him? What if he is your perfect friend? The point of focus here is imagining these experiences as if they unfold in your own reality, almost like a great movie that you’re watching rapt with attention. Just like a person can be changed from a movie or a song, while knowing the events are not physically real, a person can be changed from a dramatic religious experience. And this experience is accessible to anyone who simply forgets the question of reality or unreality and attempts in context to imagine this as having happened. It can literally just be appreciated as non-literal, poetry and “living drama” rather than limited-in-scope factual assertions about biographical detail or the archaeological record.
The underlying social technology of uniting a community around an imagined ideal human and an ideal relationship with him is simply profound. It’s so compelling that the element is recreated across all religions, with Buddhists imagining the Buddha, Muslims imagining Muhammad, and even Ultra-Orthodox Jews spontaneously seeing their Rabbi as the Messiah. The utility is that, as a social species, we can’t actually approach Greatness outside of our social understanding — there’s a chronic need for an intermediary between Man and the Divine. I think Christianity does this particularly well because Jesus can be related to through all the powerful emotional dimensions.
Why?
Why should we take a step back to religious social technology? Well, I think we’re in a social dark ages. Our attention is consistently brought down to matters of consumerism and social strife. The idea of genuinely talking about and encouraging virtue among peers is Don Quixote levels of comical. We have lost the religious language that allows us to succinctly reference optimal experience. Our youth are worshipping pop singers, rappers, dim-witted athletes, and absurd political Utopianism. Meanwhile, adults are training their mind for outrage and doom through scrolling and news. Negative emotional states and corrupt social infrastructure have far-ranging consequences on health and civic engagement, and religious social technology offers an improvement.
I'm an atheist who grew up Christian. I do still sometimes feel a sense of nostalgia for that "church feeling," and I've tried the UUs and humanist societies. They're lame. They don't really believe anything besides "we should all be nice to each other." I can (and do) get as much community and fellowship from the local boardgame meetup.
I've heard proposals like yours before, that you can "go through the motions" of being religious because it's good for you. I've even seen Christians argue that you should go to church and do that, even if you don't really believe, because it will lead you to belief. I don't see it. I can't make myself believe something I don't, and LARPing as a religious believer just seems like a waste of time to me.
I don't deny there is something to religion that fills a need for people, and some part of me would be sad to see religion disappear entirely. But, ya know, I don't believe in God or angels or faeries or psychics or ghosts and I think it's very unlikely anything will make me believe in those things. So we're going to need some better "social technology."
How this has typically worked throughout history is that the lay people do believe unironically, and a more intellectually refined elite theologize quite a bit amongst themselves, come up with rationalizations, and basically act out a Noble Lie.
I'm not sure if we can move towards a better system, but I do know there is a bridge where you can rationalize yourself into believing in God in a strong and useful way while understanding that it's a social and mimetic construction, not a real agent flying in the sky. I'm living proof! There are dozens of us!
It is sign that Great Atheist War of the noughties is over, sign of complete intellectual defeat of Christianity.
If you remember, you would remember that Christians emboldened by Bush victory went to evangelical offensive, with lots of arguments about first cause, fine tuning of the universe, intelligent design, irreducible complexity, literal truth of the Bible, literal resurrection of Jesus etc...
Since all these arguments were demolished by reason and logic, no one talks about these things any more. This greatest internet flame war in history is over.
Now it is "Just believe, bro. Just go to church."
Online Christian triumphalist message is not anymore "We will convert you" but "We will outbreed you", admitting that Christian arguments will fail to persuade any grown up person and work only on captive audience of their children.
Throughout history, religion worked that lay people followed the rituals of their village, knew nothing about high theological claims of their religion and cared even less. The tiny intellectually refined elite was actually reading their holy books and trying to make sense of them.
Would you prefer that those of us who disagree argue to the contrary?
If you have valid arguments, sure. This is the same answer I'd give you if you want to argue homeopathy--find valid arguments and you're fine. If you can't, that's your fault for picking a subject that doesn't have them.
Pinging @Eetan, might as well.
The question was prompted by this thread, and particularly this reply. If we argue the point, we're preaching. If we don't argue the point, there's no valid arguments.
Briefly, then:
*Rationalist Materialism made a great many significant promises. Among them, that it could bridge the is-ought problem, that it could build stable, functional societies, and that it could secure objective truth better than its predecessors. It has failed at these three promises, and at many besides. Societies founded from the ground up on Rationalist Materialism have not been stable or functional, and often have not been survivable for significant portions of their population. Societies founded on Christianity did much better, and as those societies have drifted toward Rational Materialism, they've done considerably worse in terms of stability and functionality.
*Rationalist Materialism's current dominance has come largely from social factors, not objective results. Those social factors largely boil down to the promises it made and has failed to deliver on, and a variety of lies it has coordinated to conceal the failure of those promises. Rationalist Materialism continues to dominate for precisely the same reasons that Psychology continues to be regarded as a valid and reliable scientific discipline.
*Contrary to the dogma of Rationalist Materialism, abstract beliefs are not forced by evidence, but are chosen through exercise of one's will. Another way to say it is that we draw conclusions for reasons. This process can be directly observed and verified by each individual, should they choose to do so. Rationalist Materialism itself plays arbitrage by ignoring this fact, pretending that it will admit only that which can be verified on Rational Materialist grounds, and then simply ignoring those standards for claims that seem consonant with its general vibe. The entire history of modernism is replete with examples, with the history of Psychology as a science again being one of the most glaring.
*Due to the above, Epistemology is not a solved problem, and while Rationalism and Materialism are quite useful within relatively narrow fields, they fail utterly as soon as one exits those fields into the world as a whole. The basic problem is that they need specific constraints to operate, and the complexity of the wider world denies those constraints. You cannot, in fact, "trust the science" for actual questions of science, let alone questions of metaphysics.
*Christianity endures. Even by Materialist standards, it delivers significant results, such that Materialists keep trying to figure out how to get the juice without the squeeze. It has not died off, and does not seem likely to any time soon. The conditions that have pushed it from its dominant social position are now a memory, and do not seem likely to return even by the expectations of many Rationalist Materialists. One could argue that it is superstitious, but I defy you to claim that it is more superstitious than "structural racism" and "trans women are women" or "wreckers and kulaks are sabotaging our production quotas" or "dialectical Marxism is the inevitable outcome of the laws of history" or "free will does not exist" or any of the other dominant shibboleths that inevitably emerge from Rationalist Materialism. You can hate us all you like, but what you see around you is the alternative, and the fact that these outcomes are not what your ideology predicted for the policies it advocated and secured should give you pause.
...That would be a start, anyhow.
I don't call it preaching to say that non-Christians go to Hell when you're making points about Christianity, in a context where argument is welcome.
I do call it preaching, or worse, if you do it in front of non-Christians outside such a context. And I think that's what Amadan is saying too.
Threatening someone with hell would be seen by most people as hostile act, but the original Xeet that started it all was not agressive fire and brimstone sermon, it was talking about hope, not about eternal fire.
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