Pragmatists Guide to Crafting Religion Review - Preamble
[audio available here, courtesy of AskWho]
I’m increasingly convinced of several things:
Humans need deep community.
You may think this is common sense, but it’s not a thing I knew. This was always implicit knowledge, embedded in the experience of life itself. When community disappeared, so did the knowledge that it was necessary for those who’d never experienced it. And everyone who had experienced community already had this implicit knowledge without ever having been taught it explicitly, so they assumed it was just the natural state to know this thing. It is not1.Most humans need a religion.
This was a huge Typical Mind Fallacy face-smash for me. Living as an atheist takes a defiant personality type, combined with a neurotic demand for consistency, a large bit of risk-tolerance, and a lot of spare mental capacity for all sorts of extra mental labor. I was taught Everyone Is The Same and I believed it for decades. Learning that people are radically different shattered everything, and was what allowed me to see that of the thousands of types of people out there, the majority cannot live happy & productive lives outside of a religion.
People that need a religion and are deprived of one will latch onto the closest substitute they can find. This is how wokeism became the fastest growing and possibly most powerful religion in the US. When the old religions were too obviously false to too many people, this was what took its place.Rationalism serves some of these needs, kinda. Rationalism has an ethos, it provides inspiration and meaning, it has an internal culture. It has a proto-community in some places, and a small actual physical community in 3(+?) cities, most notably San Francisco. It is beginning to build annual community rituals.
But a collection of beliefs and inspirations is a start-up religion at best (sometimes disparagingly termed a “cult”). A religion has a structural framework it rests on, which allows it to interface with the surrounding culture.
I’ve come to strongly suspect that many of us would benefit from having a legit, registered, Church of Rationalism thing. A secular “religion” without belief in a god or magic, but one that engages with the psychological binding-sites that evolution put into us. Things like spirituality and tribal affinity.
I have no idea how to even get started on such a project. It seems staggeringly difficult. Along with my various travels and exploration of gathering and ritual, I’ve also turned to (gasp!) books. The first book I picked up with The Pragmatist’s Guide To Crafting Religion, by Simone and Malcom Collins. It had a very promising title, and authors that are known for being agenty as heck.
I didn’t get what I wanted out of the book. But while it does not serve as a guide to crafting religion, it is still very interesting in its own right, introducing a lot of striking ideas and concepts. And I did take copious notes. Therefore I’ll be blogging through the chapters of this book in the coming weeks, in an long extended review. If nothing else, it brings up a number of things we should keep in mind.
Be careful when you kill self-perpetuating cultural memeplexes, I guess. You’ll need to cross a bridge of explicitly training all the things that were implicitly taught via culture previously.
Re. "Most humans need a religion": I'll say again, most people who have lived on Earth didn't have anything like a Western religion. They had beliefs about gods and spirits, but they didn't get their morals or their purpose for living from them. This 20th-century Western malaise and nihilism is the result of the collapse of a totalitarian religion, Christianity, which everyone in the West, whether Christian or not, was indoctrinated with from birth. Christianity forbids any purpose in life but that of serving God, and any moral reasoning other than blind obedience. So Christians, and people embedded in a Christian culture, never develop a purpose of their own or the capacity for moral reasoning. People suddenly deprived of the cultural swaddling of Christianity can't stand on their own because they never learned to walk, never developed the muscles.
I also want to teach a new religion. I would call it Infinitism, since the Infinite is the thing that is present in every spiritual tradition, including atheistic Buddhism, and it would claim that it is not new: every world religion is a different school of Infinitism. I would also fold science into it, since science is an infinite endeavor: every scientific truth is always open to falsification, and I once read a scientist say that the proper scientific posture is to always be open to whatever experience can dish out, instead of trying to impose limitations on it, and the Infinite is that which admits no limitation.