Everything Is F*cked

HOW TO START YOUR OWN RELIGION
Step Four: Ritual Sacrifice for Dummies—So Easy, Anyone Can
Do It!
Growing  up  in  Texas,  Jesus  and  football  were  the  only  gods  that  mattered.
And  while  I  learned  to  enjoy  football  despite  being  terrible  at  it,  the  whole
Jesus thing never made a lot of sense to me. Jesus was alive, but then he died,
but then he was alive again, then he died again. And he was a man, but he was
also  God,  and  now  he’s  a  kind  of  man-god-spirit-thing  that  loves  everyone
eternally  (except  maybe  gay  people,  depending  on  whom  you  ask).  It  all
struck  me  as  kind  of  arbitrary,  and  I  felt—how  do  I  say  this?—like  people
were just making shit up.
Don’t  get  me  wrong:  I  could  get  behind  most  of  the  moral  teachings  of
Christ: be nice and love your neighbor and all that stuff. Youth groups were
actually  a  ton  of  fun.  (Jesus  camp  is  maybe  the  most  underrated  summer
activity  of  all  time.)  And  the  church  usually  had  free  cookies  hiding
somewhere, in some room, every Sunday morning, which, when you’re a kid,
is exciting.
But if I’m being totally honest, I didn’t like being a Christian, and I didn’t
like it for a really dumb reason: my parents made me wear lame dress clothes.
That’s  right.  I  questioned  my  family’s  faith  and  went  atheist  at  age  twelve
over kiddie suspenders and bow ties.
I remember asking my dad, “If God already knows everything and loves
me no matter what, why does he care what I wear on Sundays?” Dad would
shush me. “But Dad, if God will forgive us our sins no matter what, why not
just lie and cheat and steal all the time?” Another shush. “But, Dad—”
The  church  thing  never  really  panned  out  for  me.  I  was  sneaking  Nine
Inch  Nails  T-shirts  into  Sunday  school  before  my  balls  had  completely
dropped,  and  a  couple  of  years  later,  I  struggled  my  way  through  my  first
Nietzsche book. From there, it was all downhill. I started acting out. I bailed
on Sunday school to go smoke cigarettes in the adjoining parking lot. It was
over; I was a little heathen.
The  open  questioning  and  skepticism  eventually  got  so  bad  that  my
Sunday school teacher took me aside one morning and made me a deal: he’d
give me perfect marks in our confirmation class and tell my parents I was a
model student as long as I stopped questioning the logical inconsistencies of

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the Bible in front of all the other kids. I agreed.
This  probably  won’t  surprise  you,  but  I’m  not  very  spiritual—no
supernatural  beliefs  for  me,  thank  you.  I  get  a  sick  pleasure  from  chaos  and
uncertainty. This, unfortunately, has condemned me to a life of struggle with
the  Uncomfortable  Truth.  But  it’s  something  I’ve  come  to  accept  about
myself.
Now  that  I’m  older,  though,  I  get  the  whole  dress-up-for-Jesus  thing.
Despite  what  I  thought  at  the  time,  it  wasn’t  about  my  parents  (or  God)
torturing me. It was about respect. And not to God, but to the community, to
the  religion.  Dressing  up  on  Sunday  is  about  virtue-signaling  to  the  other
churchgoers, “This Jesus stuff is serious business.” It’s part of the us-versus-
them dynamic. It signals that you’re an “us” and that you should be treated as
such.
And then there are the robes . . . Ever notice that the most important moments
in  life  are  always  accompanied  by  somebody  in  a  robe?  Weddings,
graduations, funerals, court hearings, judicial committee hearings, open heart
surgeries, baptisms, and yes, even church sermons.
I  first  noticed  the  robe  thing  when  I  graduated  from  college.  I  was
hungover  and  on  about  three  hours’  sleep  when  I  stumbled  to  my  seat  for
commencement.  I  looked  around  and  thought,  holy  shit,  I  haven’t  seen  this
many people wearing robes in one place since I went to church. Then I looked
down and, to my horror, realized that I was one of them.
The robe, a visual cue signaling status and importance, is part of the ritual
thing.  And  we  need  rituals  because  rituals  make  our  values  tangible.  You
can’t think your way toward valuing something. You have to live it. You have
to  experience  it.  And  one  way  of  making  it  easier  for  others  to  live  and
experience a value is to make up cute outfits for them to wear and important-
sounding  words  for  them  to  say—in  short,  to  give  them  rituals.  Rituals  are
visual  and  experiential  representations  of  what  we  deem  important.  That’s
why every good religion has them.
Remember,  emotions  are  actions;  the  two  are  one  and  the  same.
Therefore,  to  modify  (or  reinforce)  the  Feeling  Brain’s  value  hierarchy,  you
need  some  easily  repeatable  yet  totally  unique  and  identifiable  action  for
people to perform. That’s where the rituals come in.
Rituals are designed to be repeated over a long period of time, which only
lends them an even greater sense of importance—after all, it’s not often you
get to do the exact same thing that people five hundred years ago did. That’s
some heavy shit. Rituals are also symbolic. As values, they must also embody
some  story  or  narrative.  Churches  have  guys  in  robes  dipping  bread  in  wine

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(or grape juice) and feeding it to a bunch of people to represent the body of
Christ. The symbolism represents Christ’s sacrifice (he didn’t deserve it!) for
our salvation (neither do we, but that’s why it’s powerful!).
Countries create rituals around their founding or around wars they’ve won
(or  lost).  We  march  in  parades  and  wave  flags  and  shoot  off  fireworks  and
there’s a shared sense that it all signifies something valuable and worthwhile.
Married couples create their own little rituals and habits, their inside jokes, all
to reaffirm their relationship’s value, their own private interpersonal religion.
Rituals  connect  us  with  the  past.  They  connect  us  to  our  values.  And  they
affirm who we are.
Rituals  are  usually  about  some  sacrifice.  Back  in  the  old  days,  priests  and
chiefs would actually kill people on an altar, sometimes ripping out their still-
beating  hearts,  and  people  would  be  screaming  and  banging  on  drums  and
doing all kinds of crazy shit.
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These  sacrifices  were  made  to  appease  an  angry  god,  or  ensure  a  good
harvest,  or  bring  about  any  number  of  other  desired  outcomes.  But  the  real
reason for ritual sacrifice was deeper than that.
Humans  are  actually  horribly  guilt-ridden  creatures.  Let’s  say  you  find  a
wallet with a hundred dollars in it but no ID or any other info about whom it
belongs to. No one is around, and you have no clue how to find the owner, so
you keep it. Newton’s First Law of Emotion states that every action produces
an  equal  and  opposite  emotional  reaction.  In  this  case,  something  good
happens to you without your deserving it. Cue guilt.
Now  think  of  it  this  way:  You  exist.  You  didn’t  do  anything  to  deserve
existing. You don’t even know why you started existing; you just did. Boom
—you have a life. And you have no idea where it came from or why. If you
believe  God  gave  it  to  you,  then,  holy  shit!  Do  you  owe  Him  big  time!  But
even if you don’t believe in God—damn, you’re blessed with life! What did
you ever do to deserve that? How can you live in such a way as to make your
life worthwhile? This is the constant, yet unanswerable question of the human
condition,  and  why  the  inherent  guilt  of  consciousness  is  the  cornerstone  of
almost every spiritual religion.
The  sacrifices  that  pop  up  in  ancient  spiritual  religions  were  enacted  to
give their adherents a feeling of repaying that debt, of living that worthwhile
life.  Though  back  in  the  day,  they’d  actually  sacrifice  human  beings—a  life
for  a  life—eventually,  people  smartened  up  and  realized  that  you  could