XI - RELIGION

Religion is worldwide. Most cultures have it and most people adhere to it, some more than others. People like religion; they find it comforting, inspiring, and sustaining. What is it doing in people’s lives? What is its function?

Religion offers answers to mythically significant questions that are not easily answered otherwise. How did life begin? What happens after death? Why do bad things happen to good people? (Why does life hand out moral demonstrations counter to the ideals of our group myth?) Without answers from religion, we would be driven to deal with these questions on our own. Our answers would be speculative since we would have no clear moral demonstrations to show us the way. People would come up with all sorts of answers depending on the needs of their individual myths. The importance of the questions would make us want confirmation and support of our answers from others, who with their own opinions would not be inclined to validate ours. The uncertainty would make people anxious.

Religion cuts through this problem by having enough alpha in the group myth to be a source of answers that we can accept at face value due to the alpha of the source. Also, if everyone you know believes the same answers to be true, you tend to accept them as such and can put the questions to rest and get on with your life.

In addition to answering difficult questions, religion tells us what to do. It offers a wealth of mythic material and guidance on which morals to demonstrate and how. It functions as an alpha source both for individuals and groups, forming the basis of most myths. Its adherents let it be the authority over much myth, which can reduce squabbling and alpha competition, benefiting group stability.

Religion also stabilizes the group by giving standards for status determination. Religion gives us a set of ideals by which to judge where we stand. Religion also indicates what the relationships should be between people of various roles.

Groups like religion. Using religion as a basis for group myth increases the apparent infallibility and authority of the myth. Members are more reluctant to challenge a group myth backed by religion.

If all members of the group share the same religion, there is more common mythic ground among the members and the group myth has less work to do to hold the members together. Groups tend to sort for members of the same religion.

Religion also offers a moral framework for information that is mythically significant but of uncertain moral import. It tells you what things mean and posits moral causality when others might see none. If an event is truly random, then it does not yield or confirm any moral demonstration (except that “things just happen”), and that can undermine much of a myth’s careful moral effort.

Religions usually introduce new characters into myths—gods, devils, spirits, angels, and other nonphysical reality types. They make possible ascribing moral motives to what are otherwise seemingly random events—weather, inexplicable death and disease, coincidence, the many events that we associate with luck, good or bad. We understand the spiritual beings to operate within myths and moral frameworks with parallels to our own. The interaction of our moral demonstrations with theirs allows us to affect their actions, thus giving us some feeling of control over that which we might otherwise seem powerless. An example would be praying for the sick to recover or carrying a rabbit foot for good luck. Luck is not usually thought of as a spiritual human allegory, references to “Lady Luck” notwithstanding, but nevertheless is seen as being morally connected (“He doesn’t deserve such luck”) and capable of coming and going on its own, so it has some aspects of a dramatic character.

Changing randomness to moral demonstration also makes the myth a better story. Stories are about moral packages creating wants which inspire actions which have consequences which reflect back into the validity and priority of various morals, statements about the nature of reality. A story is a feedback loop of experience.

Randomness breaks up this dramatic process. If some uncontrollable event outweighs all our actions, then we see that whatever we do is useless and we might as well do nothing at all. Doing nothing makes for a bad story and thus dissatisfaction. One way out is to take action to influence a spiritual being who can affect what we cannot. The belief in an omnipotent god we can pray to increases our own apparent power.

Powerful gods do more than that. Since we interact with them and our morals overlap, we share myth with them and we are tribally related. They are alpha sources. If they are seen as standing for morals we admire and also as supremely powerful and members of our tribe, we see them as supremely right; “might makes right.” Most people find the idea of an alliance with a supremely powerful alpha source to be very comforting and satisfying, for by following the god’s teachings, we can be confident our myth cannot fail us.

Religion also gives comfort and satisfaction in the relief it gives from feelings of abandonment. You get a lot of new characters for your myth who will always pay attention to you. “God answers my prayers. Jesus is always with me.”

In addition, most religions are social. A common pattern is for a group of like believers to assemble weekly for a ritual of reconfirmation of their group myth. They can see that they are not alone—not alone physically, not alone in their faith, therefore not alone in their myths.

The whole idea of faith is based on the concept of drawing mythic material from a source so much more alpha than oneself that it is beyond one’s own understanding, that the right thing to do is believe what is categorically beyond one’s own experience because of the alpha of the source.

The act of faith allows an answer to the otherwise indeterminate question of who is the ultimate alpha, thus reducing anxiety. Faith in a supreme alpha decreases one’s personal need to be alpha, further lowering stress. Giving top alpha duties to a spiritual being eliminates some alpha jockeying and helps stabilize the group myth. But not all. People still fight endlessly over who speaks for God.

Faith has other attractions. No myth can ever cover all of reality just through action and moral demonstration. Faith allows us to fill the gaps and see our myths as complete. Being sure about morals that we are powerless to demonstrate connects us to characters with power greater than our own and we feel enhanced.

Group myths all demand that their members accept some body of knowledge and morals on faith. This mythic material fills the gaps in the group myth and makes it coherent and able to unify the group. Since everyone’s experiences and personal myths are different, the group faces the problem of establishing common mythic ground between the members. Having them all accept the same body of knowledge on faith quickly forms mythic overlap between the members.

Membership in the group, a legitimate place at the table, is made conditional on accepting the group’s articles of faith. What the would-be member is asked to believe will be more than just religious beliefs, but some degree of religious conformity is expected. Integration of young children into the family tribe nearly always involves religious indoctrination.

Most people who believe in a divine being did not come to that belief on their own. Instead, at an early age, their parents or other alphas instructed them in religious beliefs they were expected to accept. Why was this done? Not why in the sense of the answers the people involved would have given, answers that come out of the beliefs themselves, such as “So you will know the love of God”, ”So if you die your soul will go to Heaven and not to Hell”, “So Jesus will forgive your sins”. Answers like these are circular reasoning. They are understood to be true because they are believed to be true. For centuries people have been trying to prove the existence, outside of constructs of the human mind, of God, souls, Heaven, Hell, and a Jesus that can forgive your sins today. No one has ever been able to do it. Yet millions of people are undeterred in their certainty by this consistent lack of proof. Such is their need to believe in something that lets them live in a myth shared by other people and makes their own myth more dramatically satisfying.

Our need for both tribal connection and enhancement of personal myth is so great that we seek out and believe whatever we find necessary to satisfy those needs. Thus parents indoctrinate their children with religious ideas to be taken on faith to maintain the unity of the tribe, to confirm the truth of their own faith through its acceptance by others, and to set the children up in a system that has helped the parents cope.

A religion offers a universal myth as a context for the myth of the group and the individual, so that no one life need stand alone, no one group feel lost in the world or in the expanse of time. It gives answers to the dilemma of “If our myth is so great, why are we defeated in the end by death?”. Death, another spiritual mythic character, challenges all our myths. We meet that challenge in a variety of ways, so that our myths may remain meaningful and sustaining.