Source: Facebook

(diary entry) (gods, religion, prayer) (the technology of religion)

I find it much easier to ask myself the question ‘What does god want me to do to fulfill my mission?’ than it is to ask myself what I wish to do. I know that this is but one method of developing mental discipline. I know that there are other methods of developing mental discipline. It is the one that I was trained in (raised under) and is therefore the one I know how to use. I make lots of plans. I think through lots of options. We all have many fantasies and impulses. But the moment you add a third party to the internal dialog it is much harder to fool yourself with nonsense. We learn quickly to regulate our internal voice lest we be rejected by the people around us. We learn quickly to regulate our external actions lest we be punished by the physical world around us. But we have had to develop many technologies to assist us in the process of reasoning. One of those technologies is to make use of the interpersonal and physical regulations that we developed for speaking and acting and speaking with our internal voice. Our brains consist of dozens of agents each of which is greedy for our time and attention. They each want exercise and fulfillment. Unfortunately cannot introspectively criticize them. They are obscured from our consciousness by the intermediary we call intuition, but which functions as a search engine that examines the contents of memory and stimulus in every moment. But through training against the existential world, those parts of us that ‘dream’ can be silenced or at least disciplined, by the use of a third party. And what is most important, is that the third party, like a parent to a very young child,knows our mind, and cannot be lied to. It is this combination of submission to truthfulness, and suppression of dreaming – wishful thinking – that talking to a close friend or family member, engaging in prayer, practicing meditation, or practicing stoic disciplines, or scientific disciplines, provides for us. And this is inescapably valuable. We should not trivialize this ‘technology’. It is just as important as the discovery of writing for memory, mathematics for the extension of perception, and the religious era consisted of the first social science, and the first form of ‘reasoning’ by using combining an all knowing diety (parent), and interlocution with a third party as a means of suppressing the mind. The better are our third parties at disciplining our thoughts, the better trained we become at the use of reasoning truthfully. Conversely, the less training and discipline we have, and the less discipline and training our friends and associates possess, the less effective is our learn-regulatory voice. So this is another reason why it is so important to cut out the bottom layer of the gene pool. They both depend upon one another for information, but provide the worst regulation of the internal impulses and voices.