Fake Charity Nerd Girl

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.

Who said anything about shams?

The insistence on the primacy of belief over action isn’t necessary. Look at the Jews. How much does it matter whether a Jew is religious? A Jew who doesn’t believe in God can still go through the motions of Judaism. A Protestant who doesn’t believe in God, on the other hand… what motions are there to go through? Maybe he takes his children to church, but that’s about all there is, and that’s understandably rare. Who wants to sit in a hard bench for a few hours on Sunday morning and listen to some boring rand talk about God? 

The big issue for Protestants is that people lose faith. They’ve been looking for solutions to that. Books don’t seem to work. Personal charisma… well, look at the Pentecostals. That didn’t turn out so well. And there’s plenty of room for scam artists, which you don’t want either. 

Now, let’s say you have someone who was raised atheist, but whose absence of faith starts to crack. How do you get him? You don’t want there to be too high an inferential distance. Maybe he decides that God exists, or that there’s historical evidence for the Resurrection, it doesn’t really matter what it is, but if Christianity is alien to him, he’s going to be confused. Maybe he’d feel too awkward to go to church, maybe he’d worry about social pressure, whatever. You’re likely to lose him. But if he’s already going through the motions, it’s just a change in brain states.

And let’s say you have someone who was raised Christian, but ended up losing faith. What do you think happened there? There were some articles about this a while back, I think one was in the Atlantic, I’ve never been able to find it, but the point was: you might think people become atheists because of intellectual arguments and so on (if you haven’t accepted that intellectual arguments don’t mean all that much to most people), but what it usually comes down to is that they lose respect for their church. They think the people at the top of it don’t take it seriously or don’t care, they don’t get anything out of it, that sort of thing.

I’ve seen it happen. When I was about eleven, my mother got it into her head to start going to church – an awful ultra-liberal church for aging hippies, of course, because she’s an aging hippie. Used to be a commie, still basically is, went to the USSR even, darkly hints about having had friends who got up to some real darkside shit in the ‘70s, all that. Anyway. I was the only person in that building under 50. I slept through everything. I didn’t give a damn, and they weren’t trying to get me to. Then one day they brought in an old hunchbacked black woman with a lisp to lead everyone in a round of Kumbaya. Really. They lost half their people that day, including us. We didn’t switch churches. We stopped going entirely. I doubt we were the only ones. Now she gives me nü-atheist tracts every Christmas. 

But what happened to get a commie to go to church? She decided I ought to be familiar with the music. In other words, she went to church – and made me go to church – because there was a secular component that she, even as an atheist, could respect. And then there wasn’t.

(But she’d been apologizing for the low quality of the music there for a while before the Kumbaya incident. Straw, camel.)

In the ideal Calvinist theocracy, your brain states are between you and God. What’s between you and society is your participation in the rites. The Jews seem to get this right. So does the American civil religion. You celebrate Independence Day and Thanksgiving and so on even if you don’t care about the government, and you familiarize yourself with the Constitution even if you’re a monarchist. You go through the motions regardless of your brain states, and you know what the motions are about. Thanksgiving is an annual celebration of a good harvest in Plymouth after Squanto taught the Pilgrims how to grow corn. Independence Day is about the signing of the Declaration of Independence. Everyone knows that. It’s taught in schools, it’s on TV, all that. So do the Japanese. Does religion even exist in Japan? 

So you have general participation in the rites, and you make sure everyone knows what the rites are about – and the evangelicals get that part. They’ve been saying ever since the decisions came down that it’s a big fucking deal that the Court doesn’t want the public schools touching anything that smells like Christianity and doesn’t want the government putting up statues of the Ten Commandments, that Christmas and Easter are getting secularized, and so on – and they’re right. If the mechanisms by which the meaning behind the rites is explained to the general population are lost, the inferential distance is increased. But on the other hand, if you make it look like you want to affect people’s brain states, you run into problems. And if the thing can’t command respect – if the churches are ugly, if the music is shit, if the rites are tedious, if the general level of civilization is low, that sort of thing – you lose completely.

To answer your question in a sentence: in the ideal Calvinist theocracy, the concept of ‘sham’ doesn’t even apply.

(this sparked a lot of good discussion but it got really long so I’m just reblogging the original)

This was really interesting because the role of belief in religion is something I’ve thought about a lot. I was pretty Catholic until age 16. I really liked Catholicism but I couldn’t deal with the belief part–I remember hearing a reading in Mass about Thomas doubting that Jesus had risen from the dead, and feeling terrible because I found the whole resurrection thing a bit implausible and obviously that was Wrong.

When I told my mom that I didn’t want to go to Mass anymore because I was an atheist, she responded, “What you believe is your own business! That doesn’t mean it’s okay to stop going to Mass.” I found this very confusing at the time.

I had a mild nü-atheist phase that I got over by 19 or so, and now I daydream about getting married in a church and having my kids baptized and being a ~religious but not spiritual~ Catholic. But like … atheism is still a sin, at Mass you’re still supposed to stand up and profess publicly that you believe Jesus rose from the dead on the third day which feels pretty weird to me. I’m not sure how to be Catholic in an authentic way without believing.

(I’m jealous of people who were raised Jewish–it seems easier for them.)