Recently, a friend of mine asked me why people believe in the Holy Bible or religions in general. Here’s my response.

The main reason is that they were indoctrinated to think it’s the word of God and that they should believe every word of it and follow it, from an early age, by their parents and the church their parents took them to. It’s passed down from generation to generation that way. Children are very conditionable, and something like this that they learn from an early, formative age, they’re unlikely to ever change their minds about. Hence, they pass the same ideology down to their own children due to its perceived crucial importance.

Some others turn to Christianity later in life because they want a higher power in their lives (I think often to turn themselves/their lives around after a drug or alcohol addiction), or perhaps because they have a “religious experience” (better called a “divine experience,” “cosmic experience,” “spiritual experience,” or whatever) and the only God they can think of for their new ideology is the Christian God because it’s so prevalent in society.

But there are other reasons, I think. Christianity is a meme complex, as in it’s “designed” to take strong hold of the host’s mind and impel it to spread the complex of ideas. I’m not clear on many of the aspects of that, but I have a few ideas…

1. It says if you believe, you go to heaven for eternity, the best possible place to be, for the longest possible amount of time. It describes heaven as an environment with all the things that people would typically desire to live in.

2. It says if you disbelieve, you go to hell for eternity, the worst possible place to be, for the longest possible amount of time. It describes hell in nearly the most tormentive terms imaginable.

How convenient are these two points for a meme complex? You can’t get any simpler, more direct, or more absolute/superlative than that when it comes to components of an effective meme complex. It not only serves as a stronghold in the individual’s head, but i think it’s the main impetus in Christianity for people to want to spread it, including spreading it by passing it down to their children via direct indoctrination and indoctrination by the churches they’re forced to go to, trying to spread the “good word” from door to door, and going on missions to foreign lands to convert other peoples to Christianity. Maybe it’s a main impetus to spread Christianity via war and conquering, too, but I feel that’s probably more about other factors. You don’t really murder and subvert people because you’re concerned about their welfare.

3. It says that people or arguments that try to change your mind, including arguments based on reason and logic, are products of the devil trying to trick you. This helps insulate the host from changing their minds once infected.

4. The story of Jesus dying horribly to save us is a very powerful, archetypal, heart-wrenching idea. It’s also a very beautiful story and an exemplar for nobleness. And would you want to just throw away His alleged sacrifice?

5. Some of the teachings in the bible—I think pretty much its core teachings—are about how to be a good person, so people grow to associate being Christian with the self-perception of them being good. This creates an extremely strong bond between the ego and belief in the religion. (The self-perception of being good because one is a Christian also comes from one’s acceptability in a Christian culture or Christian family and/or church, but that seems more incidental than part of the meme complex itself.)

Beliefs about things that particularly matter to people are already strongly tied with the ego, which is probably why you can seldom change anyone’s mind about anything, but this is an exceptionally strong bond due to its effect on the most important aspect of self-perception.

6. The decrees of the religion reflect popular morality (specifically, the popular morality at the place and time it was invented, but some of those morals remain attractive to this day), so people like it because it validates their moral precepts and values. Some such decrees are that homosexuality is a sin, that women should be subdued in such and such a manner, and that we have “dominion” over every living thing on the Earth, which allows us to exploit the other animals for our purposes without guilt.

7. It promises a personal connection to a higher power, a father figure. Or, you could say it co-opts our connection to actual divinity, which is a bit different from Christian divinity in that it’s inseparable from ourselves, is 100% non-judgmental, and isn’t leveraged by praying to it asking for it to do things per se—it doesn’t work that way.

8. It’s a crude form of, or shadow of, spirituality, or you could say it co-opts our connection to or apprehension of the spiritual; e.g., it lets us know that we’re more than just meat-bags. It also allows the comfort of knowing that death is not the end (though it’s not very comfortable to think that our loved ones who are not Christians will burn in hell forever), but this could be considered to be a restating of part of point #1. It also provides some information about a universal/cosmic spiritual context, which provides the illusion of understanding the world. The reason it’s an illusion is that the information is fallacious, extremely simplistic, and quite absolutist.

9. The traditional version of the Holy Bible is written in Old English, and Christians paradoxically tend to cling to this version despite better and more modern translations. The reason, I think, is that having God supposedly speak to us in Old English makes it sound more authoritative or regal or stately or something, as well as sets it apart from all other, more “pedestrian” texts or voices in one’s mind.

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Some of these things are Christianity-specific—other religions probably have other memetic aspects—but the “indoctrination at an early age” and “passing down from generation to generation” thing probably applies to a lot of religions. Another, related reason for people believing in religions is the degree to which their respective cultures are immersed in the given religion (though I’ve said a bit about this above already).

One thing worth noting is that, when a Christian believes the Bible is true, it’s not really about the contents of the Bible per se. Most of them don’t even know most of what’s in the Bible. (There’s the atheist meme that says “I don’t always argue with atheists but when I do, I realize they know more about the Bible than I do.”) It’s just the idea that the bible is true that’s part of—what should I call it—”folk Christianity” maybe; that is, the aspect of Christianity as it actually exists in people’s minds and culture, as opposed to what’s in the literal Bible.

There seems to be a considerable distinction between “folk Christianity”—or maybe I should say “cultural Christianity”—and the contents of the actual Bible. As evidence, I could point to (1) how much Christianity has changed over time, and (2) the existence of various denominations of Christianity, some of which are very different from each other—different enough that there has been historical animosity between some denominations.

Christianity overemphasizes the importance of some parts of the Bible (such as “homosexuality is a sin,” which is only mentioned in the Bible a couple of times), completely ignores some parts (such as slavery and not eating Crustaceans—see https://www.beliefnet.com/columnists/areasontosmile/2011/11/dear-dr-laura-why-cant-i-own-a-canadian.html), and arbitrarily interprets some parts. There are also some pretty prominent tenets of Christianity that are merely the products of mistranslations of the original writings. Also, some of it is just made up, such as the popular depiction of Jesus as being a Caucasian with a specific set of facial features and long, wavy hair, and the Holy Trinity that was apparently invented to apologetically accommodate for contradictory mentions of different divine beings in the Bible.

In an e-mail exchange with a friend, I claimed that science is an ideology, and I listed all of its ideological components that I could think of, which I will include below.

But before I include that, I’ll clarify what I mean by “science,” since my friend argued that I wasn’t being consistent because I claimed that at least one of science’s ideological components, namely scientism, piggybacks the scientific method, which implies it’s something distinct from the scientific method, yet I also said that it and all the other -isms I named are components of science.

What I responded with was this:

If we define science as the scientific method per se, then most (perhaps not all) of the -isms I mentioned are not science per se. But I’m not really using “science” in that strict a sense. I’m using it more colloquially. And I’m using it sort of in reference to a place it holds in people’s minds. It’s sort of nebulous. It has an aura. Or, if you really want to define science as being the scientific method, or you think I’m being too poetic in my description of how I’m using it, we could just be more technical and say, “Science itself is not an ideology, or at least most of the ideologies I mentioned are not part of science, but the important thing is that science is virtually inseparably linked with these isms in our current culture.

So, here’s my response to my friend with the list of ideological components of science, modified:

I very much see science as an ideology. I think people see science as *not* an ideology because science is seen as merely the rational and neutral search for truth, whatever it might be. Of course, there is some truth to that notion, but there’s also a lot more to it than that. Here are some aspects of the scientific ideology: 

• A tendency to have faith in the Establishment, in whatever the scientific community currently happens to believe, and in the claims of individual scientists and other sources purporting to be scientific, such as journalists and corporations selling a product. All of these sources are more fallible than they’re taken to be.
  
  My friend replied with the following:
  
  trust in the scientific community is not blind faith but is based on the rigorous process of peer review and validation. again, while some individual scientists and studies can indeed be fallible, the collective process of scientific inquiry tends toward self-correction over time.
  
  To which I replied with this:
  
  I know that there is good reason to listen to science, and that good reason is what has catapulted the faith in science, but I maintain that the faith is somewhat blind, in that it gives all scientific and purportedly scientific sources too much credit. It believes what they say without enough critical thought or research. And yes, we can’t all spend our time researching scientific topics, nor do we have the necessary education to do so, but we can say that people “overestimate the likelihood” of a given scientific claim of being correct. It’s more or less seen as infallible. Yes, the process tends toward self-correction over time, but there’s still incorrectness in the current time, and secondly, some things never get corrected. For example, there are several nutritional claims that scientists have vacillated back and forth between one claim and its opposite many times.
  
  And there are systemic problems with the scientific community that self-correction just isn’t enough to fix. Basically, there are various incentives to fudge results, and it happens quite often. (a) If the results are fudged once, they can be fudged the next time, and (b) self-correction doesn’t apply if there are no subsequent investigations into a topic because it’s not a prominent enough topic.
• The ideology of strict empiricism. This doesn’t just refer to science’s reliance on physical observation/measurement/evidence to arrive at conclusions, but on the ideology that physical evidence is the only legitimate basis in inferring truth.
• Positivism (maybe not as popular as the other things in this list, at least in its most strict sense). This doesn’t mean being positive; it’s the doctrine that a claim has no meaning if it doesn’t ultimately resolve to a claim about the physical state of things/empirical observation. I say it’s not as popular as the other things, though, because it seems to have fallen out of popularity.
• Atheism/anti-spiritualism/anti-mysticism/anti-“woo”/anti-paranormal/anti-parapsychology
  
  My friend replied with this:
  
  science does not inherently promote atheism or anti-spiritualism. instead, it focuses on what can be empirically observed and tested, nothing more/nothing less. btw many scientists hold personal spiritual or religious beliefs, demonstrating that science and spirituality can coexist. (see my point about how science and religion are actually not at odds when you consider science as methodology)
  
  I replied to that with the following:
  
  Most people who are into science seem to be anti-spirituality. Maybe actual scientists are more open-minded than armchair scientists, I don’t know. I’d like to know what percentage of scientists hold spiritual beliefs, actually. Science doesn’t “inherently” promote atheism in that that’s not a part of the scientific method, but this comes back to my comments above regarding my use of the word science. Another thing, there seems to be a strong taboo against spirituality in the scientific community. Some scientists may hold spiritual beliefs, but they have to keep them to themselves, or at least they can’t venture into research into those spiritual or parapsychological beliefs, because they’d lose all credibility in the community. They’d lose their livelihoods. There’s a video explaining this here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qw_O9Qiwqew&ab_channel=GoogleTechTalks (Science and the Taboo of Psi)
• Physicalism and mechanicalism, and, by extension, the tendency to see living things as non-living, such as your own flesh, trees, the sun, etc. (Trees are technically living according to science, but we don’t see them as alive in the sense of being beings or having any meaning beyond that of an object.) And, to a lesser degree, determinism, implying we have no free will and further cementing the idea that we’re merely complex machines.
  
  I realize it’s contentious at the very least to say the sun is a living thing, so, in that case, let’s just say, “potentially living things..”
  
  We see our own and others’ flesh as essentially non-living, a thing, at least on some level of consciousness, because we know it’s made of matter, and we see matter as non-living. These preconceptions are so deeply ingrained into us by our culture that we don’t consciously notice them. So, this perception serves to deaden us by deadening our own self-perception. It also facilitates mad dreams of replacing parts of our living body with non-living machines because of their supposed superiority, i.e., transhumanism.
• Rationalism. The meaning of rationalism is hard to put a finger on, but maybe you have a feeling for what it means already. Rationalism is to rationality as scientism is to science, simplistic is to simple, and complicated is to complex. I wrote more about it here: https://exalumen.blog/2018/04/13/notes-on-science-scientism-mysticism-religion-logic-physicalism-skepticism-etc/#Rationalism
• A fixation with understanding everything via theoretical models of those things
• A replacement of actual philosophical thought and insight with strictly evidence- and statistics-based methodologies. A good example is how psychology moved away from being creatively insightful to being merely a practice of data collection and pattern finding. Another example is the popular belief among scientists and scientifically minded people that philosophy in general is bunk and has been obsoleted by science. (It hasn’t; philosophy addresses many questions that are inherently outside the purview of science and never will be within it. The very definition/methodology/nature of science determines its inherent limitations.)
• Scientism. I know, I know, scientism isn’t science, or the scientific method itself. And you could say the same about the other things in this list. But, as I said before, these things are inextricably intertwined with science given the current zeitgeist. And the fact that they go along with science, or with being particularly science-minded, is invisible to us because they’re so widely/deeply accepted/entrenched in culture/ideology.
• Separationism/compartmentalism as opposed to holism. The anti-holism inherent to science is due to the fact that separating things into parts and compartmentalizing/objectifying their relationships to each other is necessary for effective scientific analysis and modeling. The anti-holism probably also stems from the proliferation of technological devices (which are themselves a product of science), which are modular in nature because that’s the easiest way for our puny brains to design them. This anti-holism becomes unconsciously assimilated into popular culture; we operate under the ideology that, by default, the various components of reality, things or beings are separate from each other, don’t affect each other, and are uncorrelated, unless proven/known to be otherwise.
  
  An example of this anti-holism in popular culture is the belief that a person’s facial features have nothing to do with their personality. This is bunk. We may not know how to predict personality from facial features, but, if you think about it, there are tons of cases where, if you were to take two people and swapped their faces, it would be obvious that their personalities actually starkly clash with their respective (swapped) faces.
  
  Another example is the ideology that personality is totally independent of what sex someone is, and additionally that what sex someone is just boils down/reduces to what genitals they have. There are obvious, profound inherent psychological/energetic differences between males and females, and it’s sad that people aren’t perceptive enough to see that. 
• Reductionism. I mentioned the term “reduces to” in the above entry because that entry reminded me of this ideological component of science, reductionism. By “reductionism,” I mean where all larger-scale objects are thought to be nothing more or less than the sum of their smaller-scale parts and their interactions, and ditto for every possible successively smaller and smaller (or larger and larger) scale of consideration.
• Technologism. By this I mean the tendency to ascribe or compare various things that have nothing to do with technology (basically, natural things) to various technologies. For example, likening people to mere complex machines, likening the brain to a computer, likening minds to software and brains to hardware, or thinking the universe might actually be a giant computer simulation.
  
  As ski on IRC once said, “well, it’s tradition to try to understand ourselves through technical revolutions (mechanical, steam, electrical, information, communication).” So, today’s “people are only complex chemical machines” is just yesterday’s “people run on steam engines and hydraulics.”

While I’m elucidating my grievances with science (or the modes of thinking attendant to it), I should include the ones that don’t take the form of ideologies per se. I should first note that, as with many of the ideologies listed above, these thought-tendencies may be just as much the facilitators of the excessive proliferation of science, scientism, technology, etc. as its consequences.

One such grievance is the tendency of scientific thinking to actively quash any and all magic in the world. This behavior is so tragic it’s downright evil, although not in a deliberate way. You may say that such thinking could surely only quash the perception, interpretation, or belief in the magic of the world, rather than the actuality of it (in the case that it exists), but the nature of magic is such that the perception or the belief in it and the reality of it go hand-in-hand.

It may be difficult to explain why that is, but a key point is that one of the composing attributes of magic is that it’s miraculously connective, and, in this case, the relevant connection is between the observer and the observed, between internal experience and external reality, between mind and matter, or whatever.

It would be fair if you’re wondering what in the heck I actually mean by the word “magic.” I wrote an essay on it here: https://exalumen.blog/2017/07/12/the-meaning-of-magic/. I would add here that magic, as I see it, is very close in meaning to that of life itself. The nature of life is magical. So, if you quash or deny magic, you quash or deny life. If this seems nonsensical to you because “life” refers to specific classes of complex chemical processes, see my essay at https://exalumen.blog/2020/10/29/life-is-not-a-scientific-concept/.

Another grievance is the overly analytical, representational, left-brained thinking that obsessively models everything, totally misses any holistic perception of events and reality, and is constantly lost in the map while ignoring the territory. Maybe that’s actually a lot of grievances put into one sentence, but they’re all closely related. For further elaboration on some of these ideas, see Dr. Iain McGilchrist, such as in the video at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v4IeuIg9nGY, and also my friend Darin’s writings at https://www.facebook.com/darinstevenson and https://organelle.org/.

Regarding the “overly analytical” aspect, I once saw a very bold and insightful Twitter post that basically said that constantly analyzing and evaluating things is actually a trauma response, and that’s exactly what scientists do for a living. So, this group of people among those that are admired most and listened to most and that make the world go around is actually even more neurotic/pathological than your average person.

My final grievance is with the proliferation of technology itself, which is the direct result of, and can only happen due to, scientific advancement. I wrote about why technology doesn’t ultimately help us, but rather does quite the opposite, at https://exalumen.blog/2023/12/17/on-simulation-theory/ and https://exalumen.blog/2019/09/13/no-were-not-living-in-a-simulation/. Theodore Kaczynski wrote a good essay on this at https://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/national/longterm/unabomber/manifesto.text.htm.

This is important.

Tarot is not the universal oracle you probably think it is if you’re a believer in tarot. It’s not necessarily the objective truth (even when it seems to make perfect sense), and it’s not necessarily a sign of what you should do.

I’ve realized from the tarot readings I’ve had done, both personal ones and electronic ones, that what the cards actually reflect is the “energies” you send out at the moment the card selection is determined. This includes your unconscious beliefs about the situation, which is why the readings can seem to make sense. But, while the subconscious mind is very wise and connected, the subconscious take on the situation isn’t always correct.

One experience I had (but not the totality of everything that led me to the above realization) was the time my friend and I were using an online, automated tarot reader and sending each other links to our results, and he sent me a bunch of links in a way to tarot readings that were strikingly similar. I mentioned to him how similar they seemed, and he said that he had been focusing hard to project the same energy/thought when initiating the readings to see if it would give similar results.

Inb4 ‘Tarot is bunk, there are no magical or psychic forces in the universe, therefore this essay/”realization” is meaningless.’: my actual, practical experience with tarot trumps your baseless/axiomatic preconceptions/physicalist bias.

Inb4 “You interpret your experiences how you do because of cognitive biases such as confirmation bias, and the fact that the tarot card meanings are just vague enough to apply to anybody. This is how people in general become convinced tarot works, just like with astrology.”: no; actually, that’s an assumption used to maintain a narrow-minded, mechanistic worldview. You imagine that those principles could theoretically account for such beliefs, so you assume that they necessarily are the reasons, because it’s convenient. In reality, those principles are insufficient to account for such experiences and interpretations, but, due to the lack of objective ways to determine the matter one way or another, it’s easy to deny this for someone who lacks general astuteness.