Religious musings

These are not only things that are, they are things that must be.

1. People crave moral legitimacy and moral justification.

2. Sacrifice is continual.

3. You can’t get rid of the need for sacrifice, it just goes somewhere else.

We are piñoned between past and future, caught at their intersection. We must be released by aligning them, placing one behind us in the direction necessitated, placing the other before us in the direction desired, so that we can move along them. We do this by defining our relation to them through enacted rituals, embodied actions. We speak the right words. We make a display, to ourselves, to others, to God and the universe itself (however we conceive the moral order). We stand with our backs facing one way and our faces another.

Rituals express the ideal and vision and morality that drives the nation. The ideal is what makes action possible, because it’s what’s creates the incentive to drive action in a motivated state toward the reward. No ideal, no motivated state, no action. No understanding of movement out of the last. No conception of movmenet toward the future.

We need a justification for action, to make sense of it in the present, future, and past.

We carry the burden of knowdge of the past and responsibility for the future. And it’s enormous. So we have to have mechanisms to help us manage it. Religion is the architecture of the mind and of society. You can’t remove it because it’s what makes action possible and understanding of ourselves across time coherent. It is bearing the weight of the most immense psychic burden you could conceive of, unprecedented in known existence.

Religion isn’t only something that covers up or makes palatable or bearable the weight of consciousness and existence within time; it’s not merely a sedative. It’s the actual superstructure that makes bearing it and acting within it possible. It’s the bones, not the skin. It doesn’t obscure the mechanisms of consciousness, it is the expression and iteration of those mechanisms that make thought and action possible at the scale of human understanding and capability. This is what those mechanisms of the mind (motivated states, etc) look like at the level of developed human complexity, where knowledge of the past, conception of the future, understanding of finitude and temporality, comprehension of cause and effect and responsibility, and potential efficacy at navigating these currents of space, time, and thought all come together.

Religion is a realm of thought, of spirit, that gains power over the world, over nature, and over ourselves and others, by grasping these abstracted realities. By comprehending and invoking the power of a word, a concept (even a number, as a number is both), we can lift stones over our head and make them stay, make food come forth from the earth as we desire, even lift ourselves up into the heavenly realms, to the very surface of the heavenly bodies themselves. All because we grasp the true names of things. The words, the concepts that give you power over them.

It’s a long standing belief, that if you can gain or discover the true name of a thing (which is merely an embodiment of a concept of its nature), that you can control it. Because that has been our experience. And we still do that. Professionals are always looking to put a name to a thing. It gives it definition, separates it conceptually from the vast, undifferentiated miasma of phenomena, and gives us something we can understand and manipulate. It makes it something we can grasp. And if we can grasp it, we can treat it as a tool, or use tools on it. It becomes possible to act with and on and against it.

When are the gods satisfied? Never. They are appeased. And they must be continually appeased. Because time and action are never done. History is never dealt with. You conquer one issue, in one moment, and then it’s on to the next. And you have a whole new fight and a whole new problem. Life never lets us rest on “happily ever after.” So the rituals are continual. The sacrifices must be repeated.

The Aztecs would say that sacrifice was what literally kept the world itself turning. And that repetitive nature, that need to return continually to the altar, that is common across all cultures. With maybe one partial exception. Christianity, by positing Christ as the ultimate and complete sacrifice, names his specifically as a sacrifice that was “once, for all”. It is a complete work. Peace has been made, a bridge has been forged, a safe space carved out, permanently between man and God (God as representative of the particular nature of the universe we inhabit, with all its laws of cause and effect, time, individual consciousness, etc).

But there is still a need, even in Christianity, to be continually reminded to turn toward that sacrifice and invoke it. The demands of life and time continue to be perpetual. You just have access to a perpetually adequate sacrificial response. It’s also unusual in that it attaches particularly to the individual. It’s personal and private, not societal or social. The forces of time and guilt and authority and alignment and motivation aren’t dealt with at a collective level, a societal level, they’re internal and personal. And that is considered to be adequate. Everything, presumably, scales up from there by nature, rather than needing to be fixed deliberately at any higher point.

Our society tells us, and we tell ourselves, continually, what our ideal is. And we continually make sacrifices to it and enact rituals to reaffirm it and our relationship to it. This aligns us within it, aligns us to the past and future, defines our motivated states, releases us from our piñon, and makes action possible. Our sacrifices either eliminate what is pernicious or give up what is precious. Those seem by their nature to be what is required. Any other kind of sacrifice is fundamentally unacceptable and inadequate to place us into proper relation to the past and future.

All cultures seem to know this. They all have some code of what is or is not an acceptable or adequate sacrifice, some hierarchy. And people are always looking to make a display of what a great evil they have captured and sacrificed, or what a great good they have contributed, for the sake of their ideal. They’re proving their efficacy, their justification. Their ability to align themselves, their past and future, along the trajectory of the ideal. That makes them able to act, worthy of acting. Worthy of following, maybe.

All this exists in all societies, it merely takes different forms. It’s especially obvious in our own society. But it’s such a deeply ingrained thing, and we take so much for granted, that we can’t really see it objectively for what it is. Why do all our modern books and media articles focus on identitarian grievances (race, gender, etc) as the locus of moral attention? Because that’s our religion. It is the greatest (and perhaps only that we allow ourselves) moral axis upon which we judge and criticize ourselves. It is how we conceptualize evil and sin (and personify it, which is a very key act) and how we conceptualize the ideal and personify and represent it.

We feel that we must continually bring up the sins of the past and sacrifice them in the present, to align ourselves properly to the past. We must reaffirm and reiterate our commitment to an envisioned future. And that lets us take action and have justification in the present. It frees us to act, to engage in motivated states.

It also lets us separate the sheep from the goats (another very fundamental instinct), those who are in the proper alignment and who have made the proper sacrifices and rituals, and those who haven’t and who will damn us. Those who resist and imperil our actions and motivated states, because they won’t accept our vision of either the past or the envisioned future. And they must be cast out, purged, lest they drag us with them into hell.