Theme: Cooperation

THE TECHNICAL PROPERTIES OF RELIGIONS

The technical properties of a religion are rules or norms, and a set of (costly) rituals, and a mythology, that together provide a means of people to collect in numbers safely, and feel the safety in numbers.

There are really three properties of religions, and all religions use these properties differently. I tend to represent them as a triangle, saying that different approaches emphasize one or more of the properties.

1) Legal Religions – which to some degree the west practices – they contain no mysticism. American judges are fairly close to priests in their devotion to the ‘sacredness’ of the law. (future-looking)

2) Behavioral Religions contain spirituality – the pack response. Emphasis is on ritual for generating the pack response. Stoicism, Shintoism, and to some degree early buddhism. (past-looking)

3) Supernatural Religion. The pack response is obtained through the telling of narrative, and the promise of some mystical reward. (escapism).

In practice most cultures use multiple ‘religions’ for the purpose of creating shared experience, ethos, behavior and trust. We tend to focus on monotheism because the church FORCED us to, because jews force themselves to, and because islam forces its adherents to.

The function as a hierarchy of intelligence dependent upon the abilities of the population.

Mythos at the bottom, for Virtue Ethics.

Rituals in the middle for Deontological Ethics

Procedures at the top for Teleological Ethics.

Hence we do see that as IQ increases the religious emphasis increases from the virtue ethic of the young and ignorant, to the ritual ethic of the young adult, to the technical ethic of the mature.

If one is raised in a religion, It is hard to view religion as a purely ritualistic purely programatic form of education and training. But for all intents and purposes, the function of religious myth is to get you to imagine a ‘model’ by which to made decisions; to practice costly rituals with others in order to invoke the submission of the pack response; and to teach you traditional rules of the social order as if they are physical properties of objective reality (metaphysical) rather than merely a group evolutionary strategy that has been demonstrated to work at perpetuating the population.

If you told a mathematician he had to forget math he would say “well I don’t know how to do that – or think otherwise”, and the religious person says the same.

That is why these things work.

Curt Doolittle

The Philosophy of Aristocracy

The Propertarian Institute, Kiev Ukraine.