HOW TO START YOUR OWN RELIGION
Step Two: Choose Your Faith
We all must have faith in something. Without faith, there is no hope.
Nonreligious people bristle at the word
faith, but having faith is
inevitable. Evidence and science are based on past experience. Hope is based
on future experience. And you must always rely on some degree of faith that
something will occur again in the future.
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You pay your mortgage because
you
have faith that money is real, and credit is real, and a bank taking all your
shit is real.
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You tell your kids to do their homework because you have faith
that their education is important, that it will lead them to their becoming
happier, healthier adults. You have faith that happiness exists and is possible.
You have faith that living longer is worth it, so you strive to stay safe and
healthy. You have faith that love matters, that your job matters, that any of
this matters.
So, there’s no such thing as an atheist. Well, sorta.
Depends what you
mean by “atheist.”
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My point is that we must all believe, on faith, that
something is important. Even if you’re a nihilist, you are believing, on faith,
that nothing is more important than anything else.
So, in the end, it’s all faith.
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The important question, then, is: Faith in what? What do we choose to
believe?
Whatever our Feeling Brain adopts as its highest value,
this tippy top of our
value hierarchy becomes the lens through which we interpret all other values.
Let’s call this highest value the “God Value.”
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Some people’s God Value is
money. These people view all other things (family, love, prestige, politics)
through the prism of money. Their family will love them only if they make
enough money. They will be respected only if they have money. All conflict,
frustration, jealousy, anxiety—everything boils down to money.
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Other people’s God Value is love. They view all other values through the
prism of love—they’re against conflict in all its forms, they’re against
anything that separates or divides others.
Obviously, many people adopt Jesus Christ, or Muhammad, or the
Buddha, as their God Value. They then interpret everything
they experience
through the prism of that spiritual leader’s teachings.
Some people’s God Value is themselves—or, rather, their own pleasure
and empowerment. This is narcissism: the religion of self-aggrandizement.
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These people place their faith in their own superiority and deservedness.
Other people’s God Value is another person. This is often called
“codependence.”
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These people derive all hope from their connection with
another individual and sacrifice themselves and their own interests for that
individual. They then base all their behavior, decisions, and beliefs on what
they think will please that other person—their own little personal God. This
typically leads to really fucked-up relationships with—you guessed it—
narcissists. After all, the narcissist’s God Value is himself, and the
codependent’s God Value is fixing and saving the narcissist. So,
it kind of
works out in a really sick and fucked-up way. (But not really.)
All religions must start with a faith-based God Value. Doesn’t matter what
it is. Worshipping cats, believing in lower taxes, never letting your kids leave
the house—whatever it is, it is a faith-based value that
this one thing will
produce the best future reality, and therefore gives the most hope. We then
organize our lives, and all other values, around that value. We look for
activities
that enact that faith, ideas that support it, and most important,
communities that share it.
It’s around now that some of the more scientifically minded readers start
raising their hands and pointing out that there are these things called
facts and
there is ample evidence to demonstrate that facts exist, and we don’t need to
have faith to know that some things are real.
Fair enough. But here’s the thing about evidence: it changes nothing.
Evidence belongs to the Thinking Brain, whereas values are decided by the
Feeling Brain. You cannot verify values. They are, by definition,
subjective
and arbitrary. Therefore, you can argue about facts until you’re blue in the
face, but ultimately, it doesn’t matter—people interpret the significance of
their experiences through their
values.
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If a meteorite hit a town and killed half the people, the über-traditional
religious person would look at the event and say that it happened because the
town was full of sinners. The atheist would look at it and say that it was proof
there is no God (another faith-based belief, by the way), as how could a
benevolent, all-powerful being let such an awful thing happen? A hedonist
would look at it and decide that it was
even more reason to party, since we
could all die at any moment. And a capitalist would look at it and start
thinking about how to invest in meteorite-defense technologies.
Evidence serves the interests of the God Value, not the other way around.
The only loophole to this arrangement is when
evidence itself becomes your
God Value. The religion built around the worship of evidence is more
commonly known as “science,” and it’s arguably the best thing we’ve ever
done as a species. But we’ll get to science and its ramifications in the next
chapter.
My point is that all values are faith-based beliefs. Therefore, all hope (and
therefore, all religions) are also based on faith, faith that something can be
important and valuable and right despite the fact that there will never be a
way to verify it beyond all doubt.
For
our purposes, I’ve defined three types of religions, each type based on
a different kind of God Value:
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