Anonymous asked:
The backstory is that when I was a kid I was pretty Catholic. I liked going to Mass and everything, but I could never really wrap my head around the God thing. I knew about science, I knew that magic wasn’t real, and I knew not to believe everything you hear, that unbelievable stories people passed around often turned out to be just urban legends. But I still tried to be a good Catholic, and pray and fast and do all the things you were supposed to do.
At some point, I heard the story of the Incredulity of Thomas. It made me feel terrible–if Thomas was a bad person because he didn’t believe that Jesus rose from the dead without evidence, then I was a bad person too. I tried to believe, but I didn’t know how you were supposed to make yourself believe something that didn’t make any sense. I started praying every night before I went to sleep, asking God if He existed to please help me believe in him, to give me a sign, or maybe just come in the night and fix my brain because it was clearly missing the faith module.
Then one day when I was 16, something clicked. I realized God didn’t exist, and that was okay. I wasn’t a bad person for thinking He didn’t exist because, you know, the belief system that told me I was a bad person wasn’t true because he didn’t exist. I felt tremendously relieved and happy. I stopped praying. I still went to Mass, but it went from something I looked forward to to something I dreaded. All the priests saying these wonderful things about Jesus, all the people following along in the prayers and saying the Nicene Creed, did they really believe God existed, or were they just going along and pretending? Were they just silly and deluded, or evil men perpetuating this structure of lies that hurt people?
That phase lasted a couple of years. After I had time to get over all the negative feelings I had about Catholicism, I started to miss it more and more. The music, the weekly ritual of Mass, the fasting and giving things up for Lent, the comfort of praying every night before I went to sleep. I started getting into my hypercontrarian Social Conservative for the Signaling phase and thinking a lot about the value of ritual and community and tradition and hiding in a corner of the campus bookstore to read First Things when it came out every month and thinking people who get it. (Yeah yeah I know, thou shalt not steal.)
This thread is actually a fairly good summary of the argument in my head going on about religion these days? I was really excited when I came across the argument that the focus on belief and brain-states in religion is actually sort of modern and degenerate and Protestant-centric, and religion at its heart is about participation in rites and tradition. But on the other hand, I’m still unsure about the value of rites and tradition that are grounded in a belief system that ultimately I can’t get behind. I mean, a lot of Catholicism really is founded on the whole Jesus thing and on the concomitant system of moral beliefs that, well, I don’t agree with. A lot of Mass still feels hollow to me, knowing that it’s not true. The most meaningful ritual I’ve ever participated in was an effective altruist ritual, because I really believed in the value and truth of everything we were saying and doing. But, well, if EA is a religion it’s a religion that was founded in 2011 by some nerds who spent a lot of time arguing about utilitarianism on the internet. It’s not exactly a two-thousand-year-old tradition passed down by your ancestors for almost that long that you can baptize your children into.
This is silly, but this issue is actually the biggest thing one of my friends and I fight over. Whenever I say that I want to go to Mass or refer to Catholics as “we” or express an opinion on the direction the Church should take, she accuses me of appropriating religion. She thinks that participating in religion without believing in God is wrong, that if I don’t believe then I’m only being Catholic ironically, and that’s disrespectful of people who are actually religious. And maybe she’s right? I don’t know, I do a lot of things ironically I guess, not that I’m trying to it just happens, and even from the inside it’s hard to tell the difference between doing something ironically and just doing it. How do you do something really, truly sincerely?
And I just don’t get her attitude toward religion. She’s one of the people I mention in this post: she believes in God (or uh, believes that she believes in God), but this belief doesn’t really lead her to do anything except go to church twice a year or so to hear the pretty music. I mean, if the Christian god is real, doesn’t that change everything? Doesn’t that affect every thought you have, every action you take? Isn’t it better to try to do something, even if the faith module in your brain is broken and maybe you’re just doing it for the signaling or maybe you’re doing it because you want to but you’re telling yourself you’re doing it for the signaling so you can maintain some level of ironic detachment, than not to try at all?
So yeah idk if any of that was helpful anon. I don’t really have any settled thoughts, just a lot of feelings and questions.
I feel like I should respond to this, because it’s relevant to my interests, and you linked a thread that I was part of. So!
As far as I can tell, religion is, indeed, not about beliefs. Or at least, beliefs aren’t the point of the religion. The point has more to do with values, shared cultural traditions, and rituals that create a sense of group belongingness. (And if you’re a mystic like me, then religion is also about the experience of the divine, but I won’t get into that here.)
But that doesn’t mean beliefs are irrelevant to religion. If I remember correctly, Kevin Simler says that beliefs are basically just an ingroup shibboleth. You believe some crazy ideas for which there’s no evidence, and these beliefs imply you should practice laborious rituals and follow restrictive taboos, which provides a costly signal that you are, in fact, a member of the group. (I haven’t read the essay in a long time, so I hope this is actually what Kevin was saying.)
Anyway, I disagree with this! Or, at least, I don’t think it’s the complete story. If beliefs only existed to create an ingroup shibboleth, then it wouldn’t matter what a group believed, as long as it provided a costly enough signal. But in fact, you see different kinds of societies holding different religious beliefs, suggesting that the specifics of the beliefs are important. You have the different kinds of mythology that Joseph Campbell described, one for hunting cultures and another for planting cultures. You have the fact that monotheism tends to arise in conjunction with empires. All of this suggests that beliefs are doing something. Whether they actually drive the social technologies, or whether they merely reflect the underlying worldview of the people, it seems that a synergy is necessary between the society and its beliefs. (I should probably give an example. By “beliefs actually driving the social technology”, I mean, say, that people are more inspired to follow the emperor when they’re also worshiping a single, all-powerful god. By “beliefs may reflect the underlying worldview”, I mean that in an empire, people might say “hey, we have a bunch of separate city-states ruled over by a single empire; I wonder if all our separate gods are ruled over by a single emperor-god, too”.)
So anyway, I think that beliefs are important. And you actually have to believe them in order for them to work. (I’m using “belief” pretty broadly here – to include the doctrines of the Judeo-Christian religion, which are interpreted as historical fact, as well as myths that aren’t historically “true”, but which exist in a separate dreamtime as archetypes of the collective unconscious. I’m also including traditions. The point is, I mean “believe” in an emotional sense, not a factual one. Like, I, personally, believe in the myth of the dying-and-rising god. Let’s take a concrete example, like the song “Finnegan’s Wake”. I believe in Finnegan’s Wake. What does that even mean? I don’t believe it actually happened. But I believe that the story condenses and encapsulates some fundamental aspect of human experience. I believe that it relates to things that happen in my own life. I believe it emotionally, where I listen to the song, and in my heart I say “yes, this is true”. But it’s not a factual truth. It’s an emotional truth. (If someone pokes me hard enough, I’ll try to explain this in cogsci terms.) Anyway, I think maybe this is what your Christian friend means when she says she believes in God. Maybe she feels, in her heart, that he is real and the stories are “true” in this emotional sense.)
So anyway, I think beliefs are important, but they don’t have to be factual beliefs; they can be emotional beliefs. But in any case, these beliefs drive people’s actions and values. The beliefs inspire people to perform specific rituals. And if the beliefs were just ingroup shibboleths, and the rituals were just mechanisms for promoting group cohesion, then it wouldn’t matter which beliefs and rituals a culture chose. But no, the beliefs drive people’s values and influence people’s fundamental ways of life. Christianity comes with certain values (chastity, etc.), and people are inspired to follow those values because they believe in the stories (of the Virgin Mary, etc.). So if you don’t hold the beliefs, what’s to inspire you to keep holding the values? And indeed, a lot of ex-Christians have ceased to care about chastity.
Here’s the thing – it’s nice to participate in age-old traditions, and we shouldn’t just tear down social technologies willy-nilly (Chesterton’s fence and all). But times do change, and the social technologies will need to adapt. Scientific discoveries weaken Judeo-Christian religious beliefs, which weakens religious values and traditions, and the whole thing starts to collapse. Similarly, the circumstances of the culture change, and the values that used to be necessary cease to be important, and people start to think that the religion is pointless. (I’m sure there is still virtue in chastity, but not nearly as much as there used to be, back before birth control!)
I think it’s pretty much inevitable that over time, religions will weaken; their beliefs, values, and traditions will become outmoded. People’s experience of the religion will start to grow hollow, as yours did. And when the religion collapses (just like when an empire collapses), it will leave this void of chaos, where new conflicting belief systems can compete for power. I think this is maybe what happened during the Protestant Reformation, and it definitely seems to be happening now.
So anyway, I wouldn’t feel bad about abandoning an old tradition, if it’s no longer meaningful to you. I wouldn’t follow a religion just because “religion is a social technology, and social technologies are important”. You have to find something that resonates with you. If Catholicism is important enough to you that you want to keep attending, regardless of your lack of belief, then by all means, continue. If you think Catholicism has something new-fangled belief systems can’t provide you with, then that seems like enough reason to keep practicing Catholicism. But if you think you can take what you like about Catholicism, and use it to create a new EA-inspired “religion”, then… I don’t see any reason why not to. I don’t think you should resist that course of action just because it’s new. (I mean, creating a new religion / social technology is always a matter of trial and error, and it will likely take a while before it’s as effective as Catholicism is to its true believers. But new social technologies need to be created at some point. Participating in a venerable institution can be powerful, but creating a new institution is also a method of participating in the continuity.)
This was a really interesting response, thanks!
I really like the idea of beliefs being emotional as well as factual, of feeling “yes this is true” being a way to believe things. And I really like the idea that traditions need to change over time, and creating new social technologies is a way to participate in the continuity. That’s actually quite comforting to me–that yes, tradition is important, but the ending of old traditions and the starting of new ones as society changes is a constant, and it’s traditional in a way too.