Source: Facebook

THE SPECTRUM OF REFERENTS WE CALL GODS

I dunno. I think we just use the word ‘god’ to represent increasingly poetic references. It’s the simple people for whom that poetry is existential and anthropomorphic, common people for whom it is literary, atheists who are in between (‘educated’) for whom it is pseudoscience or deceit, and the sophisticated people for whom it is poetry (aesthetic).

I talk to my god every day. But my understanding of ‘god’ would to an atheist make sense, but be silly. To an ordinary person not refer to god at all, and to literalists be atheism.

The reason people at the bottom are more attracted to the divine is to ‘know’ right action, feeling, and belief, and take comfort in right action, feeling, and belief, and therefore giving them confidence in right action, feeling, and belief – without being persuaded (manipulated) by those with greater abilities and lower ethics and morality. In other words, religions give people a shield against guilt, manipulation, coercion, and risk.

Religion was successful because mindfulness(certainty, clarity, confidence) is increasingly necessary as you move left on the curve.

I have been working on this question for I think three or four years now and the phenomenon is widespread, and not limited to religion, but philosophy, and the modern social pseudosciences, and even literature.

We evolved in bands where the entire group functioned as a single distributed nervous system. We prospered by extending our numbers beyond our ability to perceive. So we needed rules (limits) and goods (objectives), and we eventually needed writing, numbers, money (prices really), and governments (commons), to coordinate our actions in large numbers.

But while we gained increasingly diverse physical certainties, they came at the high cost of mental and emotional certainties. At this point we are comforted primarily by consumption and (at least in america) we are seeing extraordinary increases in suicide among the aged. So we are extremely ‘alone’. And as alone we search for some sort of membership and shared understanding, by which to obtain the certainty of our evolutionary history in bands.

Hence the expansion of social media among the verbally acute.