Reverse-Engineering Religion

Speaker 1

Jared Anderson is the president and founder of the Olan Institute, a religious nonprofit. that nurtures constructive approaches to religion and religious education. His primary goal will be to establish religious humanism, first online and then in physical communities. Jared has taught religion courses over the past 10 years at Westminster College, the University of Utah, and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, where he is currently completing his PhD. Really grateful that Jared can make it out today. Thanks.

Jared Anderson

Okay, thank you very much. I am really glad to be presenting this right here. I’ve been incredibly impressed as I I’ve listened to you all, and I’m glad to know you because, as with others, I want my presentation not to be a one-way presentation, but the beginning of a conversation. And I think it also flows well with several of the presentations. I want to propose what reverse engineering religion might look like.

Jared Anderson

So, first, a couple of my presuppositions. Religion is a cultural technology that co-evolved with Homo sapiens. It’s at least as old as the cognitive revolution. And it has proved uniquely powerful, as I’ll discuss in just a moment. It has been found, arguably, in every culture, and it maintains stubbornly, even frustratingly, pertinent. In our lives.

Jared Anderson

As I said, I intend this presentation to be part of a conversation. Every point I make will require careful exploration, extrapolation, debate, and nuance. Within the next month, I will have forums up at religioushumanism. org, and this is where I want to organically hash out what the details of reverse engineering religion would look like.

Jared Anderson

When you does this look familiar to any of you, when you were younger, I feel like disproportionately this audience would have made codes. In elementary school, your own. Now, to create an artificial alphabet is different, of course, than creating your own language. And I feel like challenging someone, okay, invent a religion, come up with your own religion, would be on par with asking someone, okay, now invent your own language. Of course, There have been some fun and creative Klingon and Elvish, and there are invented languages, but it’s very, very difficult. And far beyond the ability of most individuals. You need a lot of specialization, a lot of creativity. And I feel like When someone leaves the structure of organized religion, in a sense, they are being asked to invent their own religion. But we can’t even handle an alphabet. We can’t handle a new alphabet, let alone a new religion.

Jared Anderson

So, this is the International Phonetic Alphabet. It is fantastic. There is one and precisely one character for every possible sound. You can write every sound in every language. On the planet, in this. Here’s an example of Alice in Wonderland in the International Phonetic Alphabet. But even though it’s practically perfect, it’s not practical. Because no one is going to learn, I mean, we can’t even handle the metric system in America, let alone a perfect alphabet.

Jared Anderson

So, religion is incredibly powerful. In fact Every semester, I offer students an automatic A. First day of class, they can walk away with an A in the class. If they can name any cultural institution more powerful than religion, it doesn’t exist. Yes, on an individual level, I mean, for lots of us, religion may not be the most powerful influence in our lives, but culturally, historically, it is the most powerful force. And it motivates What could be called absurd or at least extreme investments of time and resources and anxiety. People worry about religion. It’s an imagined reality that motivates tremendous investment.

Jared Anderson

Now, religion, these slides are not working. I actually, I’m going to see if I can pull up my PDF really quick. Now the problem is that religion is the most powerful technology that we have in the world, and yet it’s aimed at the wrong targets. And that’s a serious problem. So the tragedy of religion is that even though It motivates like nothing else. It motivates anxiety about things like butt sex, to be crass. You know. But when we are faced in the world with issues such as unsustainable use of resources, unsustainable systems, consumerism, pollution, waste, climate change, Exploitations of human animals, the planet, mass extinctions, conflict, war, terrorism. America also qualifies as terrorist with its drone strikes. Radical inequality, corruption, instability, disease, inadequate access to education, infrastructure, birth control. Even with all of these problems, because we are so focused on religion, a lot of people not only Don’t worry or don’t think about these problems, they’re barely aware of them, or they don’t believe in them. Hold on one second. Let me where it’s full page. There, that should work. Um

Jared Anderson

Okay, so we have these urgent problems. So is it possible to take this uniquely powerful cultural technology of religion, improve it? Make it more beneficial, more useful, more efficient, and then aim it at the urgent problems that the world faces today. As we have done with other features such as the domestication agriculture society itself. In fact, Daniel Dennett argues That religion itself is basically domesticated ritualized superstition. You know, which is why we still believe crazy things. So what would reverse engineering religion look like?

Jared Anderson

Well, first, we need to start with what is religion. My proposal Is that religion is an interconnected system of beliefs and rituals in the context of community with reference to a transcendent reality? Usually, an agent. The transcendent reality usually has feelings about how we live our lives. And a religion needs to have all of these elements.

Jared Anderson

Now, are Culture is full of aspects that are almost religion. They motivate myths. They have ritualized behavior. They have superstitions. Sports. Is actually one of the closest near religions. In fact, a quarter of Americans believe that God determines the outcome of the Super Bowl. That’s a real statistic. And also, you Nationalism, patriotism. If you’ve ever been to court, you notice the ritualized behavior. You know, when a certain someone puts a piece of paper on your car. it requires you to take symbolic action and give them money because of this improper taboo that you committed by parking in the wrong space. Education is a near religion. And you could argue that nationalism, in fact, Robert Bella has. Is that nationalism could even be considered perhaps a full religion? Because to be a good American, you need to believe in God. So it has that transcendent reality. So these are near religions, but they’re not quite religions.

Jared Anderson

We’ll look more closely at the components of religion. So once we’ve determined what religion is, and we’re on this task of reverse engineering it, making it better, we need to decide what flavor of religion we want to replicate. And two among many options, but two options that we have are high church and low church. Low church began as a disparaging term. But generally low church refers to a low liturgy, not much embodied worship. You know, you have prayers in the full spectrum of both our evolution. and the individual and collective advantages that religion gives. So when I think about reverse engineering religion, I’m going to set as a target A high church tradition. In other words, and I literally have this goal: I want to help build religious humanist cathedrals. Not chapels, cathedrals. I think we need that level of engagement.

Jared Anderson

So, how to make religion? You know, what goes into religion? As I said in my definition, we have beliefs, we have rituals, there’s scripture usually myth. Scripture is written myth. And then we have community. Transcendent reality fits into belief. And this is where the conversation really Needs to begin because there are so many possibilities. And what I’m planning on doing is on these religious humanist Forums, I want to engage with a wide variety of people, and there will be lots of areas in the forums to discuss: the ethical issues, the meta-issues, the application issues. But there are a lot of questions to answer. So, when we talk about reverse engineering religion and what What should be in the religion? So we need a lot of different things. So for example, We need a cosmology, we need origin stories, we need meaning, we need morality, we need stories of identity.

Jared Anderson

I want to speak for a moment about the question of literal belief. Because a lot of the people we talk to as liberal or fringe or post, in the spectrum of Mormonism, there’s a lot of disparagement. About literal belief. In fact, I pushed back really hard when a good friend of mine said that he is trying with his podcast to promote a post-literal Mormonism. And I had a really hard time with that because I asked him, I said, aren’t you just affirming a new dogma? You’re affirming a new target that everyone has to adhere to? And that’s the same problem as people who say literal belief is the only way to believe in Mormonism. Now, I think the ideal technology of belief is one that allows for a spectrum of approaches depending on need, depending on personality. So for example, literal belief does work, that figurative belief just can’t. So for example, the placebo effect is dosed. based on your belief, the authority of the person administering that placebo, and our physiology, Chelsea Shields does research on this. Our physiology actually responds to our literal belief. I laugh when I see these pharmaceutical commercials where they’re like, and the placebo effect helped in 40% of the cases, and our drug That makes you poop blood and may kill you helps in 50% of the cases. It’s like, please give me the sugar pill, and I want to have that amount of benefit.

Jared Anderson

So what should be our target with what I will call religious humanism, which is this reversed engineered religion that I propose? I think that we do need literal belief. We need concrete, specific, engaged narratives that allow for literal belief, but do not require literal belief. Now, it’s in human nature to give each other a hard time if people believe differently than you, but that’s unavoidable. So, to jump a little bit ahead, and I’ll come back to this: one humanist denomination that I’ll talk about is Earth Church. An Earth Church is religionized, environmentalism, neopaganism. And so, Mother Earth. What is Mother Earth? Is Mother Earth an anthropomorphic goddess with a really great rack? Maybe. You know, I mean, if that is the kind of Mother Earth that you believe in, that’s great. Is Mother Earth literally the spirit of planet Earth? Maybe, you know, that is one option. Is Mother Earth a symbol to remind us of the importance of environmentalism? Demonstrably, yes. And so it’s this range of Belief.

Jared Anderson

So not only is there belief, but there has to be ritual, and there are so many wonderful questions. When it comes to what should be in religion, I’ve also thought about a companion app, kind of like SimCity or something, where you need to design your own religion and see if the little Sims will. Follow your religion. But first we need to have a conversation. What are the individual rituals? What are daily rituals? What are weekly rituals? What are yearly rituals? What are rites Pass it What do you do at birth? What do you do at maturity? What do you do at initiation? And what I mean by high church tradition is these are, this is rigorous religion.

Jared Anderson

One of the Problems of religion, as Nathaniel said so well, is that we need to motivate people to do more than they themselves want to do. We need to motivate people because, as human beings, we don’t know what we want to do. We only know what we are glad to have done or regret to have done. Think about a workout routine or a challenging diet. In fact, as we look back, some of the most rewarding experiences of our lives are some of the most difficult experiences of our lives. And I think one of the greatest failings in American culture right now is the idolatry of individualism and the privilege of preference. That’s what, so I think young Americans are not bad, they’re not selfish, but they are very individualistic. And the idea is they want to do good on their own terms. They want to do good when they want to. And I think this is a major limitation of a lot of liberal organizations. So liberal organizations, and I’m drawing on Jonathan Haidt here. Usually have superior ethics, fairness, and so forth, but conservative organizations get things done. Much better than liberal organizations do. So, what I propose in religious humanism If we can pull it off, is that we have a conservative structure and a conservative organization or framework with liberal ideas and conservative ideas at the same time.

Jared Anderson

So, what is Scripture? I’ll get back to that in a moment. I’m thinking about if we were to reverse-engineer scripture, a quick moment about why I’m using the Christian or post-Christian terms. Bible, church, and so forth. I think Americans are the ones who most desperately need this new form of religion, and these words have entered our wider vocabulary. So, a Bible needs, and there’s going to be a geek Bible that I really hope to present to Stan Lee, so I need to get on that. Geek Bible, Earth Bible, Life Bible, and so forth. So, when you talk about origins, virtues, morals, motivation, range of emotions. Koans, parables, saints, heroes, commandments, legends, stories. We need creeds.

Jared Anderson

These rigorous religions need community. What are the leaders? What is the hierarchy? What is worship, service, accountability? And again, this is what I mean by rigorous. And we’ll get to this question with the dark side. The dark side of religion, and this is another limitation when it comes to these liberal ideals and liberal values. Is, well, okay, heaven forbid we ask anyone to do more than they want to do, because that’d be bad. My thesis is that in order to get anything done, in order to address the urgent Problems of today’s world and human civilization may be hanging by a thread based on how well we can address these problems, it will require more horsepower than preference. Can engage.

Jared Anderson

And yet, all the conservative groups aren’t even looking at these urgent problems. So I’m hoping with religious humanism to bring these together. I think that we need to embrace the totality of human experience. We need to embrace the dark side. We need to embrace in-group, out-group behavior, elitism, fear-based motivation, hell myths, dogma. Now there are limits. I don’t want anyone to die for religious humanism. I don’t want anyone to kill for religious humanism. So I don’t think religious humanism should be cult strength, even though I think it should be rigorous and high church.

Jared Anderson

So, what do we do with this engineered religion? My three approaches that I’m working on are what I call Religion Better Than True, a Spiritual Training App, and Religious Humanist Denominations. So, religion better than true, I’ve spoken on this before. This is a hypothetical ideal version of existing religions that is created by a mediation dialogue. Between a former member atheist and a literal believing member of the religion, and they need to agree on their religion. And this is what Pope Francis is basically doing by himself. Is that he is pushing Catholicism to its limits. In fact, I think maybe more atheists love Pope Francis than conservative Catholics. Love Francis. And I have a Sunday school podcast, Engaging Gospel Doctrine, where basically I teach humanism in Mormonese. And I’ve done it for four years. And sure enough, both literal believers and atheists love this podcast because it’s TED Talks mingled with scripture. And it sounds Mormon. So it’s recognizable and it’s distinctive.

Jared Anderson

So, a spiritual training app, I’m running out of time, but I literally want to develop this. It is a personalized, rigorous religion where there’s a personality test and preference. And you ritually, you choose your scripture, what are five texts that are meaningful to you, and you check in through social media. You ritually drink whatever your sacred beverage is, and then you check in, and you go to your sacred space.

Jared Anderson

And finally, in conclusion, I want to realize humanist denominations, life church, which is religionizing and high church. religionized education, science, earth church, religionized environmentalism, geek church, religionized popular culture, and then tech church, which this is a really good audience to first talk about that, which is religionized technology. Transhumanism, and so this is what I want to spend my life doing, and you are ideal interlocutors to help make that happen. So, thank you.