I can say with confidence that atheists have won. Not by their own doing - their actions might've actually slowed down the process - yet they're reaping the rewards nonetheless. Religion, theistic religion, is pretty much dead, alongside all of the hundreds of Gods and Goddesses that roamed the planes of reality.
You must be sad about it, even if you were never a believer. It's one of those "be careful what you wish for" situations. When professional atheists like Harris and Dawkins were getting paid serious money to tour the world and spread their own gospel, everyone was infatuated by their gotchas and whimsical comebacks. Their rhetoric grew stale when we finally got the point; religion is bad.
But the truth is that religion is unnecessary. At least the kind of religion that we've been practising in our culture since the Enlightenment. The boiled down, free for all, oversimplified Christianity and the other Abrahamics. But today, much of what comes out of priests tends to be a reheated soup of vague messages about love and community. Stuff you can find in the drawer of a failed romantic poet.
‘That is the beauty of the message! Everyone can understand it’. Sure. The reason Christianity dominated the Western world is because it shapeshifted into whatever the common folk already believed in using Biblical language. This is where atheists are right. We use and abuse these conceptual complexes to serve our unholy purposes, true for all popular social organizations I may add.
Eventually, we reached a point where there's no give, only take. We assimilated the core messages - essentially separating them from the theological jumble - and threw the rest away. So, theistic religion is no more.
Welcome theistic atheist, have a seat!
But what about faith? When Nietzsche proclaimed "God is dead!", he forgot to add a footnote explaining that faith grew stronger. The limping, amputated kind of faith that seeks to replace religious logos with secular theocracy. See, our psyche has a placeholder for these things. It needs to have a purpose, to believe in something greater than the experience of the self. And if it doesn't find it in the divine, it'll seek to fill in the spot with flawed mortals.
So, here we are, hands in our pocket, kicking down the metaphorical can of meaning, with no care about the future. We've found our place in the world; we're insignificant. No one cares about us petty humans. No God, no old man in white garments is watching over us. We said our piece and took our things and moved away to a place where we make our fate.
And it felt good for a moment. The teenaging spirit of rebellion feels euphoric. After all, standing up to a strict parent is as much of a psychological trigger as it is political a political affair. We needed that break.
But we quickly found out that we miss the old man. Sometimes, you want someone to tell you to wear a coat because it's freezing outside. So we returned to the paternal home, only to find out that the furniture is missing and no one has cleaned the fireplace in a long time.
The Origins of the Ritual
Religion is a Technology, there are mechanisms, bolts and cogs, that facilitate a smooth operation. But when we decided to take matters into our own hands, we’d forgotten.
Our rituals have become merely celebratory, symbolic, forgoing the fact that they were once a method of esoteric transformation.
You can still see the stark difference if you compare Eastern traditions and their goals with modernized, Western traditions. There's praxis and action, not merely faith.
Of course, one can't blame the average believer. As I said, this abolition of the operational Ritual is a political affair. Coming out of an inherently "dark" age, we sought to demystify everything we didn't understand, even if we had to strip away everything that made them functional. The part of us that fears the unknown led us to burn and destroy sources that revealed the deeper meaning of what's going on during a liturgy or holy communion.
Oh, did you think you're witnessing a pure, Catholic mystery? I have news for you. Remember the title - religion is a technology. There's a way to the madness, a blueprint that creates a syncretic form of the Ritual. To create a circle, to place an offer on the altar, to fill a cup with one of the four elements and instil it with the divine, and then consume it. I don't want to bore you with the details - I'm not an academic thank God - but ancient, as in before the birth of Christ, texts have informed the way of things. The PGM, Egyptian cults, Mystery schools, etc outline the structure and purpose of the Ritual, obviously adapted to the proper language.
Your "true" religion didn't pop out of nowhere. It's a product of historical, mythological, psychological, local, folkloric, and philosophical narratives that have been running in the background and amongst ancient civilizations for thousands of years.
This is something many priests will try to hide under the rug because it warrants many questions. Why we’ve been using similar techniques for thousands of years, only to stop very recently? Why are we ignoring the fact that there’s an underlying technology behind religion - or “spiritual practices” in any case?
I ask you, have you any idea what's going on when you go to church? Has anyone ever told you why you're doing certain things and how they're affecting your psyche? Is it all a fanfare to bind together a community that has become fodder to fuel a big industry?
The function of religions today is to mute individual differences and formalize subjective, spiritual experiences within the confinements of their respective dogmas, making sure that the metaphysical is an allegory or merely a psychological insight.
A secular recontextualization of what it means to be “spiritual”.
There's a conspicuous purpose behind this, which we'll explore in part 2 next week.
Stay tuned.
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