Thoughts on religion? (Happy Easter!)
The term religion gets applied pretty loosely in the wider cultural dialect but a good working definition would be something along the lines of structured belief systems with a mystical component. This isolates generalized, unstructured mysticism from religion (in the vein of “spiritual but not religious”) without making religion a synonym for ethics and morality. Of course, for a lot of people it is a synonym, to the extent that Rand ran into issues with a line in Roark’s courtroom speech because of it.
Religion isn’t a synonym for ethics, to be clear. I think this confusion arises because most people are raised to accept altruism as the bedrock of morality, which fails even observation of human thought processes (cf. Haidt’s moral foundations theory). This is why we get usually-conservative theists arguing that without a belief in God, we’ll end up all raping and killing one another, and usually-liberal atheists failing miserably to explain why that isn’t true. You and I both understand that other moral systems are possible—one day I’ll get around to explaining how egoism follows naturally from reductionism, contra Yudkowsky. But that isn’t the question you asked.
What do I think of religion qua religion? Well, it’s complicated. I was raised in the last stop of Protestantism on the way to Unitarian Universalism, and in a go-to-church-maybe-five-times-a-year kind of way. It was really weird for my parents to become regular churchgoers after I turned twenty. This leads to a certain sort of conflict; I have generally-positive feelings about that particular brand of bland Christianity, but that’s hardly representative of the whole of world religion. (I can’t say I was a fan of what I heard their Zoom Easter Service, however.) Actually reading the Bible, both the Old and New Testament, I’m not remotely convinced. I don’t anticipate any other religious texts convincing me, either. The moral arguments are predicated on the existence of very particular Gods, and as implied above, I’m a reductionist. “Sire, I have no need of the hypothesis.”
How about the historical role of religion? Well, here things get messy. Again, I’m most versed in the Greco-Roman and Abrahamic belief systems. It seems clear to me that these played a huge role, in a very crude and approximate way, in providing a structure for everyday morality among the commoners and elites alike. The Commandments which don’t involve how to worship are pretty good guidelines, though I have to wonder if the fourth wasn’t written by someone with teenagers living under the same roof. Then again, for most of human history, everyone had teenagers living under the same roof as them, even though said teenagers were usually considered adults or near-enough in pre-modern times.
In other words, I think religion was a natural development for early humans; it’s mysticism that I take issue with. Unfortunately, man’s curiosity far outstripped his ability to explain before the triumph of the scientific method (and even then...) so naturally people turned to whatever explanations though could conjure up. Hundreds of generations is plenty time enough for mystic hypothesis to become accepted as self-evident fact. I’m hardly the first to toy with the idea of a non-mystic religion, but I can’t honestly see those catching on. Who needs it?
Conversely, I think modern religious practices could actually get some value out of looking to the past. Going to church of Sunday is hardly the same thing that our savanna ancestors were doing when they conjured up spirits and deities to explain natural phenomena. I suppose the New Testament was supposed to make God gentle and accessible, but perhaps we’ve lost something when we took genuine awe out of the worship process. Churches try to intimidate with their spires, but it’s nothing compared to comprehending the immensity of all creation under the prairie stars. Your average chapel isn’t the Hopton Stoddard Temple of the Human Spirit, but it’s not really that far by comparison.
