Religion

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Revision as of 10:35, 21 April 2024 by Fractalguy (talk | contribs)
Can't we all just get along?

Religion is belief in god in practice. Those that share a common belief system will express those beliefs in their traditions, rituals and worship practices.

Unfortunately no such traditions exist for those with secular orientation. But since tradition and ritual are integral to culture, it is necessary for metaculture to develop traditions and rituals that can reinforce modern values like freedom, reason, science, equality, etc.

In order to remedy this situation, the first step is to enumerate all of the functions that religion serves in our society and personal psychology, in order that we can find secular analogs for each that can perform the same function, or improve upon them.

Essential Components of Religion

A fully fledged religion needs to have:

metaculture should provide all of these things in order to fully serve the social and psychological functions of religion without contradicting the rational, materialistic view of the universe.

The goal is not to establish any kind of organization around this practice, but to demonstrate what a fully secular analog to religion would need to encompass. Individuals are free to adopt it, or use it to help interpret their own cultural traditions in the light of science, or create their own New Religious Movement that borrows from it and other traditions they identify with. The wiki is here to help organize and share ideas, and demonstrate the universalist compatibility of all religions with each other and with science as a principle that we all need to share, or else.

Religion as the Human Operating System

While comparisons between the workings of the brain to those of a computer have often led to bad psychology, the metaphor is still quite useful for understanding the relationship between our brains and our conscious experience. Just don't take it literally.

If you think of the brain as the hardware in the human computer, and our learned skills and habits as the software, our belief systems are the operating system.

Let's Stretch This Metaphor

In computers, the operating system is how software interfaces with hardware. It provides an easy, common interface for all software developers to access inputs from scanners, microphones, keyboard, mouse, etc., and outputs like the screen, printer, and network. As software grows more complex, the operating system needs to be upgraded to handle it--from 16-bit, to 32 and 64-bit. Of course, the human CPU can't be upgraded, but for the purposes of this metaphor we can assume that the brain has always been 64-bit with terabytes of RAM, and we just need to install the OS upgrades that allow us to take full advantage of this.

Technically the OS is also performing the duties of the compiler in this metaphor as well if you're going to be a stickler about accuracy in allegory.

In culture, a shared religion provides the common interface that authors, poets, teachers, and leaders can use to create the ideas that lead us to action. It allows them to easily tap into our deep, primal emotions by using well-known concepts that are tied to ritualized reinforcement. This has both advantages and disadvantages, as history has shown.

Fractured Culture Means No Shared OS

Modern times have proven that not having a shared operating system has a very negative effect on human happiness. This is understandable from the programmer's point of view. Imagine if every program you wrote had to include its own custom hardware drivers! Or, you are forced to use the drivers that come bundled with Christianity, Islam, secular humanism, etc., and if the end user isn't running that OS it's up to them to write their own port regardless of their coding prowess.

The Cultural Cross-Compiler

Programmers solved this problem by creating the cross-compiler, allowing software developers to write code that can be run on multiple operating systems without having to make extensive changes for each one. Java is an example of this. Java code can run on Windows, Mac, Unix, Linux, Android, iOS, and everything else out there. Without Java it would be impossible to write any useful software for the Internet, since there are hundreds of different operating systems that need to run it and no single tech giant, let alone programmer, could ever port their code to all of them. If your project requires you to create a new operating system, one of the first things you do is create a Java compiler so you can run everything that already exists on the Internet.

The proliferation of New Religious Movements globally is similar to the proliferation of new devices and operating systems in the technology sphere. Developers of human software used to be able to target a single OS like Christianity and know that it would run on the vast majority of devices, at least the ones they knew about. Until recently, it was fairly easy to get global market share by writing a couple of quick ports to Judaism and Islam, since they have a similar architecture to Christianity. But with people abandoning monotheistic traditions in droves, and no shared canon of scientific knowledge and perspectives to draw from, humanity is in desperate need of mental Java.

Java for the Mind

metaculture is Java for the mind. Open source, compatible with all platforms. You run whatever OS you like, code in whatever IDE you are comfortable with, metaculture will make sure it runs on every device.

Version 4.0 Release Notes

Each major upgrade to religion throughout human history has been a response to advances in technology that profoundly changed the structure of our society.

  • Version 1.0 - tribal hunter gather societies developed animism.
  • Version 2.0 - the development of agriculture and permanent cities led to polytheism.
  • Version 3.0 - the growth of ancient empires led to monotheism.
  • Version 4.0 - the connected global society that science and technology has created requires a shared language for cross-cultural understanding--metatheism.

Evolution of Religion

Throughout history, the traditions of one culture have been coopted and repurposed by the next. Saturnalia becomes Christmas once the Roman Empire becomes a Christian state. This makes sense from a psychological perspective since it is much easier to redirect an existing habit than to form a new one from nothing.

Christmas has already been coopted again by the god of capitalism, and as such it should be embraced. Rather than being a selfish perversion of the teachings of Jesus, it can be a joyous celebration of all the wonderful stuff that capitalism is so good at producing. This is simply acknowledging the evolution in meaning that the Christmas holiday has already undergone.

And this is the nature of rituals. They evolve and change their meaning with the tide of history. Old traditions become new by taking on new meaning imbued by future generations. Rarely are they simply made up out of whole cloth, and when they are it's more likely to become a cult than a religion.

As old religions evolve and New Religious Movements continue to proliferate, we need to ensure that this process does not fracture and divide humanity. It can be a way that each of us can express our individual identity, culture, connection to history, and love of our fellow humans, or it can be a way to divide us into smaller and smaller in-groups until it becomes our small circle of true believers versus the world. A metatheology is necessary to make it easy for people to identify those movements that will lead to positivity and growth and avoid high-control groups regardless of their ideology.

metaculture's metatheology

The following beliefs have been lovingly hand-crafted to provide the greatest compatibility with both science and an allegorical reading of any scripture, while inspiring wonder and awe in the universe and the oneness of humankind.

Religion Videos

There are a lot of videos on religion that could be chosen. Here are some of them.

The Origins of Religion


The History of Religion


The Neuroscience of Spiritual Experiences - Patrick McNamara


The Neuroscience of Spiritual Experiences - Andrew Newberg


Mahavishnu Orchestra - Visions of the Emerald Beyond
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