The Past, Present, and Future of Religion

The two pillars of religious humanism that we’re going to be interacting with is humans are limited, and religion is powerful. I’m going to begin with the humans are limited note.

Our minds are cozy, comfortable places to live. With our own thoughts for company, we are always right. We have staggeringly powerful mechanisms to prevent us from self-correction. We have confirmation bias to help us find those sources that best agree with us. And we have the backfire effect to protect us from those opposing views we can’t manage to avoid. David McRainey points out that when someone tries to correct you, Tries to dilute your misconceptions, it backfires and strengthens those misconceptions instead. Yay, humans. Over time, the backfire effect makes you less skeptical of those things that allow you to continue seeing your beliefs and attitudes as true and proper. Yes, we humans can learn, but mostly we want to learn that we don’t need to learn after all.

In our heads, everyone agrees with us. That is, until we talk to them. And anyone who disagrees with us, well, that’s their problem. As in, they must have a problem. If they can’t see how right we are, in fact, they’re probably stupid, if not malicious. It is our duty to correct them. We should get on Facebook and do just that. And after every debate, we can convince ourselves that we won.

The best way to convince us, the best ways to get around these limitations is priming and suggestion, so we don’t know that we’re being persuaded. We need checks and balances, fear and trembling. And ironically, What we are combating so heroically and diligently is our own misplaced comfort and misleading assurance. That is why we have methods and disciplines, science and scholarship, but even with our best efforts, we still get it wrong, feeding ego and following funding instead of rigorously and responsibly questing truth.

But it gets worse. If we humans are limited in the best of circumstances, we are pretty much hopeless in most. Cognitive biases meet religion. The mind has probably never met a more powerful cultural force than religion. Can you think of any aspect of human culture that has convinced humans that it’s not an aspect of human culture? Just think about that.

Religious significance saturates human limitation. If we are religious, nothing can possibly challenge that. Our kids will never leave, surely. If we are non-religious, the demise of religion is inevitable and imminent. It will be gone by the time our kids grow up. After all, if we ourselves believe, doesn’t everyone? And if we ourselves doubt, doesn’t everyone? This is the false consensus effect, or just general myopia and lack of consideration.

So again, my take-home message is: humans are limited, religion is powerful, religion is thus not going away, so we might as well understand it, harness its power and potential. And the Mormon Transhumanism Association pertinent question that ties this presentation into the others is the desperate question. And that is, how do we facilitate the continuation of civilization infrastructure until we can get to the singularity? Until we can get to that fundamental transformation. In other words, we are in a race to the death between innovation and cataclysm.

So, as a corrective of the limitations that we are so prone to. I am going to provide context. This is not coincidentally the very context that broke me out of my own Mormon mindset. I just rewrote Mormonism all through graduate school until I started teaching world religions. And world religions gave me the whole puzzle. And I saw how permeated by Humanity religion was, and I really love that puzzle, and I’ve enjoyed gauging with it.

So, past, present, religion. It’s funny, there’s a comment. I don’t know if the commenters here were in the Facebook group, that this is a very negative view of religion, but this is pro-religion. If anything, it’s very sobering around humanity. So in the past, religion scared us into cooperating, and it worked. I’ll unpack that. In the present, religion sucks. I’ll nuance that and saying it’s actually an outdated cultural technology. The future is up in the air. As I said, it is a race to the death between. Innovation and cataclysm. Will not erase to the death more erase back to the Stone Age without the fossil fuels to rebuild.

I like the Edwards Deming quote: It is not necessary to change. Survival is not mandatory. If we want to be highly uncomfortable, we don’t need to change anything. We can continue.

Okay, how to make religion? What are the ingredients of religion? So we have belief, ritual, community, and transcendent reality. I’ve said before that religion. is the interconnected system of beliefs and rituals in the context of community with reference to transcendent reality. Beliefs, there are explanations in myth, taboos, and morality. And then ritual, there are daily rituals that organize our days, years, lives, rites of passage, communal ritual. Religion requires community, and again, it has reference to a transcendent reality.

Religion passed. Well Why are we religious? Why is religion so pervasive, ubiquitous, in fact? And then where did religion come from? I’m going to be talking about some turning points, tribal religion, agricultural religion, the Axial Age, and then a conquering we go, or conquering religions, which are the monotheist ones.

So why are we religious? In the beginning, there was not the happy helper god. There were evil spirits. And as best as we can tell, I’m building on the work of Pascal Boyer. Religion developed Out of a need to manage belief in evil spirits. And this is how it worked.

There are type one, false positive, and type two, false negative errors. And this is why believing in evil spirits was evolutionarily advantageous and increased our chance to survive. I’ll explain. So, a false positive, if there’s a rustling in the bush and you think it’s a leopard or a wolf for the predator of the day, and you’re wrong. You’re just stressed. You know, you’re going to be hyper worked up and anxious. But that’s a type 1 error. You think there’s a predator, there’s not. You think there’s an agent, but there’s not. Type 2 errors are where you don’t think there’s an agent, and there is. You’re going to end up dead. Because the tiger, wolf, or whatever is going to eat you.

Therefore, the people who were more anxious and who over-attributed and over-assumed agency. Because, like, lightning can strike you, trees can fall on you, but the thing that can hunt you down and eat you is the most dangerous force in your environment. Well, no, the most dangerous force in your environment are other humans. And so, our brains needed to develop hyper-agency detection devices, which meant that we personify, we over-attribute the amount of agents in our environment. And this is where animism comes from. Animism is the worldview that believes everything has a spirit, everything has feelings. If you ask a toddler how things got someplace, like leaves or boulders, many times they will assume. That someone put them there.

In the middle of the night, you wake up. What is the first thing you think? Not, oh, that box fell over. It’s who’s there? This is because we need to survive. We need to protect ourselves, and we need to protect ourselves from agents.

We also have social mirroring. When other humans approach us, when other agents approach us, it is essential to our survival, well-being, status, the next, you know, a Tinder date. Whether we can accurately read their intentions. Are they aggressive? Are they interested? It’s really important whether you know.

Daniel Dennett has, you know, he answered a question that I never even thought to ask. He said, where did religion evolve from? And he proposed that religion is domesticated superstition. So, what happened was superstition required ritual to manage that superstition. So, individuals developed rituals, whether they’re spells, dances, or so forth. To protect yourself against the evil spirits. And this ritual became a shared ritual.

So when a predator comes to the tribal camp, Everyone cooperates and gets together to protect the tribe from the predator. But how often does that happen? But when they’re evil spirits, they are always dangerous And so this shared ritual as protection against probably false dangers Became a uniquely powerful cultural technology to facilitate cooperation. identity and all sorts of other goods that religion provides.

Religion also provided what I’m calling ritual health insurance. This is the placebo effect. If you believed in the rituals, you had real beneficial outcomes. Because of the way that our physiology, psychology, and culture all have co-evolved.

And then, as a bonus, anyone who doesn’t believe like you, you kick them out and they die. That’s really great. You know, and so religion has this unique power to facilitate cooperation, unity, and again, it helps if you kill everyone who disagrees with you.

But then this is kind of how it played out. You have harvest festivals, you have the commemoration of death as the agriculture dies, you have the rebirth. In the spring. And you will see those organizations in pretty much all religions. If you want to blow a child, well, it works better with teenagers and above. Ask Someone around Easter, which it is right now, what eggs and bunnies have to do with the of Jesus? Well, they’re fertility symbols because the spring festival celebrates sex, basically, you know, reproduction and the return of life. And of course, the resurrection of Jesus and Jesus coming back to life, that works kind of, but there is definitely dissonance there.

And then we have the axial age. I propose that all current religious technologies are axial age technologies. Mormonism is a very interesting fan fiction science fiction update of Christianity, Masonry, and so forth. Uh and so it has a lot of robustness uh that traditional Christianity does not. Um but we’re all working with the basic structure of axial age uh technologies. This is basically seven hundreds to three hundreds B C E. about. It’s really fascinating. We don’t really know why, but during this couple centuries, we have Confucianism, Buddhism, Taoism, Zoroastrianism, Judaism, Greek philosophy. There are all of these developments that transformed culture.

And then we have the religious conquerors that changed the Entire face of world civilizations. We have the Aryans that invaded the Indus Valley civilization. Buddhists were conquering to a degree. Zoroastrians that conquered nicely. And then, of course, we have the Greek, Romans, and finally Christianity and Islam that led us into the monotheistic age, well, or at least monotheistic Western civilization. So, this is what’s shaped the past.

So, religion present. Where are we? Who is religious? Where is religion increasing? Where is religion decreasing? Why are people religious? And again, I’ll talk about why religion sucks, but no religion sucks harder. And I really did debate whether I could say sucks harder in a conference like this.

We need to be aware and cautious of the fallacy of assuming that everyone agrees with us. And as I have taught college, I have definitely seen this phenomenon. Young Americans will discount the power of religion. It’s not that important to them unless it is. Again, we just, if we’re. Religious, we think religion is going to be around forever. If we’re not religious, we wonder why anyone possibly would be. Let’s look at what actually is going on in the world right now.

Yes, the nuns, N-O-N-E-S, the non-believing, sure, it’s increasing, but even in And there are secular countries. Socialism really helps. It turns out if you take care of humans, they don’t need to rely on magical helpers so much. So who’s religious? Around 85 plus percent of people in the world are still religious. Now this is where it gets I could go into this, but in the interest of time I’ll move forward.

The interesting thing is projected change in religion. By 2050, you have to love Pew. The religious profile is going to change, and it will, the world will continue to be religious in 2050. Yes, it’s possible that we could hit these tipping points and things could completely change in unanticipated ways. Again, technology is the biggest question mark. I personally Think that once Manhattan floods, we’ll really start changing things. You know, like, oh, there’s a problem here. Hmm, how could we possibly address it? And then I think like the Elysium model will happen, where people with control over resources will create city-states that may maintain that infrastructure, but we still can’t get avocados. Okay. So with religious profile, I do think that civilization, globalization, interconnection, it’s really fragile right now and the next decades are going to determine the degree of well-being and civilization that we’re able to maintain.

So, this is what’s going to happen by 2050, at least. The number of Muslims, so again, Islam is the fastest-growing religion. As I’ve been thinking about how to address religion, how to redirect religion, that’s my goal with religious humanism, I have to ask myself what can compete with Islam. That’s kind of my target. Atheists, agnostics, and other people who do not affiliate with any religion, though increasing in countries such as the United States and France, will make up a declining share of the world’s population. That should be sobering for a lot of us. Global Buddhist population will be about the same as presently. Hindu and Jewish populations will be larger. Muslims will make up 10% of the overall population in Europe. India will retain a Hindu majority, but will have the largest Muslim population of any country in the world, surpassing Indonesia. In the United States, Christians will decline from more than three-quarters of the population to two-thirds in 2050. Judaism will no longer be the largest non-Christian. Religion, and Muslims will be more numerous in the US than Jewish. And four out of every ten Christians in the world will live in sub-Saharan Africa. So things are shifting in really important ways, but religion, as long as there is a foreseeable future, As in, we have the current civilization structure. Religion is roughly going to stay the way it is.

Jared Anderson

What time do I have? How many more minutes? Your machine’s not working. Right. Does anyone have a time count? I think two minutes at least, but maybe more. Great. Okay, there we go. I’ll wrap up.

Why are people religious? And this is their religion sucks, no religion sucks harder. When it comes to individual and collective well-being, Psychological and social goods, religion outperforms secularism. That’s it. I live by the Buckminster Fuller quote that in order to effect change, don’t attack existing systems. Create an alternative that outperforms the existing system. So we’ve talked about perma before: positive emotions, engagement, relationships, meaning achievement, collective well-being, motivation, cooperation, productivity, stability.

Let’s think about a wellness report card. Fundamentalism, Progressivism, and Secularism. Basically, fundamentalism, if you fit in the box, it works very well for you. It makes you feel good. It gives you a very strong sense of meaning. If I can have a bit of salty language, liberals have really good idea, conservatives get shit done. And usually conservatives get distressing things done, like things that are distressing to the liberals. But again, we have to take seriously the power That fundamentalist, conservative social structures have.

I propose, and I think this is why the MTA is so robust. It’s interesting, like, why other religious transhumanist groups haven’t succeeded as much. But I think that progressive movements have to piggyback on and cooperate with current religious structures. It’s very telling that during the Pride Parade, for example, Mormons Building Bridges, where there’s a very ambivalent relationship in the LGBTQ community, it’s still the biggest. And so, for all its shortcomings, Mormons Building Bridges has a force and a horsepower and a sustainability that other smaller groups didn’t. I think Atheists of Utah had like 10 people.

So, awareness, motivation, and change, I’ll wrap up in just a minute. This is something I’m applying to be a humanist chaplain, and I was really amused. As I was applying to be a humanist chaplain, because this isn’t, this is just a thought exercise, not really representative, because I can’t make the circles as small as they would need to be to actually be accurate. So we have the people who are aware of what humanism is. I don’t know, 20%. Again, these circles are too big as they are. The people who care what humanism is, which is way smaller. The people who care what humanism are secular humanists. And then the people who are engaged in humanism are secular humanists, but they’re tiny. It’s easy to be a passive secular humanist. And then the humanists who are open to be religion, I mean open to religion, we’re dealing with a tiny, tiny group, and the humanists who are open to religion who want to invest in religion. And I’m going to be their chaplain. Anyway, to quote Arrested Development, there are dozens of us.

So, the future of religion. Again, to finish up, I think that current religions will continue to move full steam ahead. And as civilization and current infrastructure gets more fragile. These axial age religions will get only stronger because, especially Islam, you know, people will lean on what is familiar, what they know.

The future of near religions. By near religions, I mean things like popular culture, sports, the military, government. Advertising, consumerism, these are not really great alternatives. You know, we have secularized badly. They will get more and more and more of the resources. You don’t come up with new saints, you have football saints. That’s basically how it works.

The future of future religions. That depends on us. But again, I think that one area where the MTA is really succeeding is progressive movements, including innovative, creative new religions. are disproportionately ethical, disproportionately impactful. So for the dozens and dozens of us, you know, we do a lot of good. But we’re never going to get that critical mass. We’re never going to get that tipping point. We’re never going to be able to compete with the existing religion until we can get them on our team and come up with something better. Thank you.