Humans seem to be born with a hole in our brains where a language should go. Babies are programmed to take to language acquisition like a duck to water. I suspect that humans are also born with a hole in our brains where a religion should go. For most of recorded history, a religion, a pantheon, or perhaps earlier, an belief in something like animism, would arrive and take root there to explain the burning questions that humans perennially demand explanations to. What happens after we die? Why do bad things happen to good people? How will the world end?
But in our enlightened century, many people are born and raised without the influence of a religion, a pantheon, or even an animist belief system. I argue this leaves a religion-shaped hole unfilled, a naturally abhorrent vacuum. It drives people to try to fill it with whatever entirely inappropriate belief system is at hand. We all know people who’ve tried in vain to fill the religion hole with science, which is clearly not religion-shaped! Science tries to explain how and what, but not why. Why is there something instead of nothing? Why are we here? Science remains conspicuously silent.
Other people will search for something more religion-shaped to believe in. Maybe birds aren’t real. Or maybe you find your faith in QAnon, or PETA, or AI safety. Movements that are not conspicuously silent about why we were put here, what your reason for living is, and when it will all end. I’ve seen enough lost-but-seeking people find meaning in these new belief systems to bet there’s some strong force that naturally attracts people to them.
A consulting tip I’ve taken to heart is that when you’re trying not to do something, it’s a lot easier to find something else that’s incompatible with it and do that instead. It takes a lot of effort and willpower to continually not do something. It’s much easier to start doing the incompatible thing once and expend that effort on continuing to do it. For example, if you’re trying not to smoke this afternoon, it’s a lot easier to chew gum all afternoon than it is to not smoke all afternoon.
So a few years ago I searched my beliefs and constructed something religion-shaped from them. And I intentionally tried to fill my religion hole with my construct. And it worked! It worked better than I could have imagined. I was born and raised without the influence of a religion. I’ve never had faith in anything before. But I have faith now, in things I know I believe in, and it’s an incredible source of strength to be able to just believe in them, without the burden of proof. I feel like I now have a solid foundation that will never give way, and it grants me such a feeling of stability that I never knew I was missing and always wanted.
I offer my home-cooked faith as an illustrative example. This creed definitely won’t resonate for you in the same way it does for me. I don’t know that there’s a way to shortcut the introspection and experimentation it took me to get there. Still, you can hopefully see how arbitrarily choosing to define core axioms like these as true could robustly support a belief system.
“People are amazing. Every person has inherent worth and deserves a chance to be happy. When people put their minds to it, they can do anything.”