I'm going to make a statement that's bold considering I'm an atheist: I think it's totally relevant that the vast majority of people believe in God, and that billions of people believe in organized religion.

I think a lot of non-believers retort with, "well, who cares" or "people are stupid." But it is relevant. Because that many people can't be stupid.

Now when I say it's relevant, that doesn't mean I take consensus opinion automatically as truth. It just means that despite what I think about the existence of God, the appropriate approach to believers should be charitable. If somebody comes to me, and is trying to convert me, my first reaction in my head isn't, "this guy is stupid." Rather it's, "I wonder what religion does for this person."

I have a belief that some double-digit percentage of people that are into organized religion are smart, intelligent people, who are deriving honest value out of it. And that I have a lot to learn from them.

Do I believe that, perhaps, religion largely exists simply because it plays with our minds? Absolutely.

Do I believe that a lot of people are into religion simply because they're duped? Absolutely.

But I don't think that's the total story. Because so many people are into religion, I'm at the very least curious.

Last night, I read "Day 4: Made to Last Forever," in the Purpose-Driven Life, and it felt like I was taking Xanax (an anti-anxiety pill).

BTW, I'm an atheist, which makes this all the more interesting.

Before that, in the afternoon, I found myself really anxious about my work options, and I could see my whole evening already laid out: me lying on my bed, analyzing myself to death. I tried everything from "thinking positive" to "bearing the pain" to "working through the anxiety" etc., but nothing seemed to work. I then took a sort of random, maybe from-left-field course of action: continue through The Purpose-Driven Life.

The question at the end of "Day 4" is "Since I was made to last forever, what is the one thing I should stop doing and the one thing I should start doing today?" And so I opened up Notepad and typed in my response to that question. Go ahead, try it. It takes 5 minutes. Here, I'll make it easy for you:

After going through the process of imagining me in an afterlife for eternity, and then speculating about what that might mean, I felt this wave of muscle-relaxation come over my body. The gist of what I wrote down was that I would stop trying so hard. There's maybe three major areas of my life where I feel like I'm just treading water. I find myself really stubborn about aspects of my life. "My life has to be this way!" "Letting go of this would be unacceptable!" But cast in the light of eternity, I asked myself, "What if it's not unacceptable?" "Why don't you cut yourself some slack?" The attitude I felt was that, if I knew I was going to live forever after death, then really I should just be focused on "getting through" my life on earth, rather than trying to make a big deal about so much trivial crap. It seems like the kind of attitude that would also be useful if you were stuck in jail: "Just get through this."

I just really like the idea that five pages of rhetoric can cause the same physical impact that a Xanax would.

(cross-posted on Drunk Log)

I'm always interested in noticing the coming and going of my interest in faith. I remember in the 7th grade, when I was still somewhat attached to Christianity, learning more about Islam. I was stunned to know that Muslims believed in our prophets too, and even in our Holy books. Plus, Islam was founded later than Christianity, and had more, newer prophets. So to me, this meant Islam had everything in Christianity, plus more cool new stuff.

This is telling about the kind of person I'd develop into. In some ways, what makes me a liberal is a thrist for what's new. Somehow, in my mind, everything behind me is a work in progress toward a better future. Conservatives have an instinct for the opposite, where the burden of proof is on new ideas. Jonathan Haidt's political studies show that one of the strongest traits dividing liberals and conservatives is openness to experience. Conservatives have a natural tendency for nostalgia. "Everything was better in those golden days of yore," they seem to think.

A large part of the appeal of religion has got to be its timelessness. There is a natural human desire to be hitched to something that lasts longer than us. Even many atheists want to achieve some sort of immortality through fame or recognition. But being attached to a timeless future appeals to me more than connecting to a timeless past. My view of history is that life was "nasty, brutish, and short," and that my generation and everybody in front of me are proceeding to make the world a more happy, modern, and enlightened place

So of course, the idea that Islam (founded in the 7th Century AD) has more new stuff than Christianity (1st Century) appeals to me. By extension though, both Bahá'í and Mormonism (both 19th Century) have larger appeal to me. The logical conclusion is that I'll ultimately be excited by a religion formed today, or even one that has the promise of being formed tomorrow, which eliminates all current organized religions from my interest. To me, the following statement feels more right: "If it came about more recently, then it must be more relevant." While as an adherent to organized religion is likely to believe, "if it's been around for so many years, there must be something right about it."

Organized religion is powered by the people's automatic belief in precedence.

I wonder how many living claimed prophets there are in the United States? Is it on the order of 1-100. Is it in the 1000s, or 10,000s? I'm guessing it's maybe between 5,000 and 10,000. If this is the case, by the sheer quantity and frequency of occurrence of prophets, a new major religion is bound to be formed every 50 years or so.

With so many candidate prophets, some of them are bound to be very charming and convincing. Plus, with the constant flux in social order, spiritual vacuums are constantly forming. As a result, opportunity meets talent frequently and produces new cults on a probably weekly basis. Some of these cults are bound to seem very credible, and some of them may resonate with the Zeitgeist. Combine the budding movement with a few all-star believers/promoters, and you have the genesis of a new religion.

When I ponder the way people behave today, I find it convenient to think back to a tribe or village setting, and imagine what kind of social roles get reliably fulfilled. Shamans and witches seem to be a regular and normal occurrence, so there is maybe a 1 in 2,000 chance that your son or daughter will specialize in awakening the spirits of others. While as most of these spiritual types will only be blessed with ordinary talent (like singers who only perform in local bars) a few will become superstars, and speak to the soul of the masses.

Modern theories of prophecy discuss schizophrenia as a possible cause. If that is the case, then it could imply that there is an evolutionary reason for prophets to regularly come along, shake things up, and form movements.

I have a strange feeling that The Purpose-Driven Life is very much a career self-help book. While Rick Warren states early on that it isn't a self-help book, you could replace the word "purpose" with "career" in the text, and the book would still mostly make sense. This thought came to me when I read this sentence in the chapter titled, "You Are Not An Accident:"

He [God] also determined the natural talents you would possess and the uniqueness of your personality.

This sounds like Rick Warren is sneaking in advice from career consulting canon. Career self-help books often talk about finding your "signature talents." In The Pathfinder, Nicholas Lore emphasizes that while you can train yourself to be good at delivering speeches, if it doesn't come naturally to you, you shouldn't form a career based on public speaking. And in What Color Is Your Parachute?, Nelson Bolles spends a lot of time helping you find out what your favorite transferable skills are by looking at pre-existing stories where your skills flourished. Other career self-help books focus on Carl Jung's typology theory, which sort of assumes that we have a fixed, God-given personality.

I don't fault Rick Warren for, intentionally or not, including career self-help into his book. A major part of my motivation to read The Purpose-Driven Life has been to help me with my career-search techniques. I had started 2008 off with reading The Pathfinder and What Color Is Your Parachute?, and I felt that they were helping to change my life. At the end of 2008, though, I still didn't have myself fully squared away with what I want to do career-wise. I felt I had exhausted all other options. This made me wonder if I had some other blind spots in my knowledge. And one potential weak spot could be my religious development. That's part of why I considered trying The Purpose-Driven Life.

Now, if I'm going to dabble in religion like that, I must somehow believe there's treasure there. Given religion's massive adoption rates in the world, it seems silly for me to write it off completely. At the very least, it should be one tool out of many I use to navigate life.

How did I come to think that there might be gold in religion? It may turn out that a small comment from The Autobiography of Malcolm X will be what ultimately triggered my recent interest. In the book, Malcolm X mentions that the secular man has thirty-three degrees of knowledge, while as the religious man has more, and Allah has 360. Although in actuality Malcolm X said "white man" not "secular man," the big picture of the idea is meaningful to me: the quantity of our knowledge isn't as important as the type of knowledge we have.

This idea also relates to our contemporary attitudes toward academia. On one end of the spectrum, academics could be evaluated as being the end-all be-all wisemen of the world, the ones who should provide the "right" answers at the decision-making table. On the other end of the spectrum, academics could be valued as secluded bookworms, like how monks have been treated for two millennia. At the zenith of their valuation, they are wise professors. At the valley, they are lowly scholars. In the current state of our culture wars, the Christian Right is trying to diminish our dependence on academia. They constantly ridicule the secular liberal elite of academics. And maybe they're gaining ground in the culture wars. It's seeming more-and-more in vogue to go on a religious missionary rather than join a secular "study-abroad" program.

What kinds of knowledge are really important for living well? Maybe the best knowledge comes from experience. Obama would disagree with that statement. Maybe it comes from a great character. There are certainly some people who seem to go through life's basic rites with aplomb, doing things well the first time: they handled their first relationship well, it didn't take them long to find a career, their first marriage lasts forever, and their children are raised well. The ranking could go from those who never learn from their mistakes, to those who eventually learn through repeated trial-and-error, and then to those who don't seem error-prone at all. Finding out what the difference is between those types of people could probably be the most important knowledge we could have.

The basis of this entry has to do with these two principles:
- One of the most common causes of divorce are disputes over issues of child-rearing.
- All teams of equals need a tie-breaker.

Heated arguments seem to ultimately become a fight over who has a better handle on reality. But if both parties believe that neither of them are the end-all be-all, then they are humbled. They become open to ideas "out there." Belief in God has a "neutral third-party" feel to it. It assumes that there is a deity out there, separate from us, who has the real answers. If there are two people arguing with each other, a belief in God could lend itself to a sense, "well, it's not what I think, or what you think, but what some Third thinks." When an argument ceases (either through disagreement, agreement, or postponement), there may be less bitterness because the final settlement will occur during God's bookkeeping, not ours.

Of course, a belief in God doesn't automatically end dispute. A couple could argue with each other over their interpretation of God or religion. However, arguing over an interpretation of the neutral third-party seems less deep than arguing over "what I think vs. what you think." Plus, if both parties regularly attend the meetings of their organized religion, or maintain a strong belief in a particular dogma, there will be less room for misinterpretation.

In some ways, I'm arguing for the benefit of conformity in a relationship. I'm going to make the radical claim that "healthy" and "lively" patterns of disagreement deserve sarcastic quotation marks. While as debates are fun among friends or partners that don't have children, they're fatal to a relationship when you have disagreements about serious topics, such as how children should be raised or issues of money. Disagreement and debate can be fun when there are no serious consequences.

It's interesting that at the start of The Purpose-Drive Life, Rick Warren strongly urges you to go through the 40-day workbook with a partner. Warren says that all journies are better when they're shared. This jives with another important idea for strong, long-term relationships: it's important for both partners to grow together. Both of these are simply more charitable ways of saying that conformity in a relationship is better. Let's say Partner A takes off on their own for a vacation, discovers some amazing ideas about the world and life, while as Partner B stays home and develops a deeper relationship with their work/passion. When the two re-group, they may have disconnected from their cohesive and harmonious decision-making process.

One potential problem to the "neutral third-party" argument is that it requires both parties to be equal. If one partner is dominant, disputes seem sort of moot. But I don't know how prevalent inequitable relationships are over equitable ones. Some say not all relationships are 50/50, which may be the case in that no two people have equal levels of interest in each other. But, I more generally see partners talk to each other as if they're equals. Even among the households of immigrants from conservative countries, I've noticed that while women do behave like they're weaker, they will talk on the same level with their husbands when it comes to discussing affairs of the household or family.

All of the recent news about Rick Warren has encouraged me to investigate the nature of his success. In particular, I always wondered what about The Purpose-Driven Life has made it one of the best selling works of non-fiction (30 million copies sold).

The book has 40 sections, designed to be read once-a-day, and designed to help you find your purpose in life. And so, a few weeks ago, I decided to try to work through the book, as if I were truly taking the workbook seriously.

This is an interesting experiment given my personal religious history. My parents didn't pre-set a religion for me. My mom was raised Catholic, and my dad was raised Hindu, and initially they argued about what religion I should have. They eventually settled on letting me choose for my own as I got older. However, my mom managed to get me and my brother into church, and even into catechism school. At the age of twelve, I somehow got the notion that I wanted to be serious about religion, and I decided to get myself baptized. In the ensuing three years, I carried a cross with me at all times. I prayed every night and every morning. And I made sure our family regularly attended church on Sunday. Then somewhere in High School, I became disenchanted with religion, and kind of stuck with the agnostic label. In college, I felt I needed to define myself more firmly, since discussions about identity were so prevalent in the dorms. After thinking about it some more, I stuck with the atheist label. The compressed version of my argument for atheism is simply, "I believe in God as much as I believe in the tooth fairy."

I'm still an atheist, but I don't have a negative attitude toward religion. Now, I'm not saying I shouldn't have a negative attitude toward religion. I'm just describing what I happen to be, and maybe in the course of working through this topic, I decide I want to be more antagonistic. As it stands now, my friends and the circles I dabble in are mostly secular liberal. But among them, I tend to be the one apologizing for religion. This may or may not be a good thing, but I'm just describing, from a 3rd-person perspective, what my attitude toward religion is ahead of time.

Having said that, in going through The Purpose-Driven Life, I'm striving to take it seriously. When I read the word God, I want to really feel/think/believe that I'm referring to the same muscular, gray-bearded God in Michelangelo's The Creation of Adam in the Sistine Chapel. When I sub-vocalize the phrase, "God will take care of me," I want to really feel what the devout feel. Of course, I'll never be able to fully appreciate what believers feel, but you'd be surprised how much you can approximate the religious experience. I'm only two days into the book, but so far, I'm liking what I've read. Rick Warren is a fantastic writer, and his work seems largely directed at someone like me, who, in his viewpoint, is a lapsed Christian and a secular liberal.

I, of course don't believe that I'm "lapsed," but rather "enlightened," but somewhere in the back of my mind is an adventurous voice saying, "What if this changes you? Wouldn't that be crazy?" And I don't think I'm alone in that feeling. I know two, smart, young ladies who last year both independently intimated similar fears/desires. One of them was hitting a rock bottom in the management of her neuroses, and pondered a few times, "What if my solution is to I end up finding God?" And another friend, who was hitting rock bottom in the management of her social life, echoed with half-seriousness, what her mother told her, "Maybe this is just God's way of teaching me something."

I'm curious to know how the Ancient Greeks treated religion. Was Zeus semantically equivalent to our God? Also, we tend to refer to a Greek mythology, but did they refer to their myths with words like "gospel" and "revelation"?

When we think of the word "religion," often we are imagining a Abrahamic religion. While as with Buddhism, I often hear it referred to as "Buddhist practice." And with Shinto, I often hear about "Shinto rites."

What is up with the Japanese who, I've heard, have "Buddhist births, Christian weddings, and Shinto funerals"? While I'm sure that is not exactly the case for the Japanese, there is some element of truth to that. For example, 64% of Japanese don't believe in God. However, the atheists in Japan are not militant. The basic attitude that would fly in Japan (or at least in Tokyo) is that "belief in religion has some benefits, though there probably is no God."

An anthropologist or sociologist could go to town with trying to classify the varieties of religious attitudes. For example, according to a Baylor University study in 2006, 91.8% of Americans believe in God, but that there are four different Gods we believe in: An Authoritarian, Benevolent, Critical, and a Distant God.

Maybe each of those Four should have different names.

Or better yet, why not try to come up with an inventory of all the different words (in their native languages), that people use to refer to religious concepts. What do they call their God. What do they call angels? What do they call their afterlife? Following that, it would be interesting to learn about the etymology of those words, or understand what those words mean in the context of their own culture.

For example, I think it's interesting that Americans think that Muslims believe in "Allah," while as Christians believe in "God." That's not exactly true, Allah is just their word for God, so they believe the same thing. (At the same time, that's also not completely true either, because Muslims in America still refer to Allah, not God). Is Allah splitting off from God?

Our culture is probably more secular than it has ever been since the Ancient Greeks (were they even that secular?) And so, where do people turn to learn Life Skills? Traditionally, people have turned to religion. But, for many, the mixing of supernatural ideas and "how to live" is an undesirable combination. Take even Buddhism, for example. The Buddhist practice of Theravada meditation has widely understood benefits to your entire life. However, it's hard for some people to adopt because the practice is taught together with alien concepts such as samadhi, nirvana, or chakra points. Those extra ideas can be a distraction from the basic, core teachings of mindfulness.

By Life Skills, I'm referring to knowing how to manage your happiness, your relationships, your health, career path, the development of your character, and your communication skills. Stuff like that.

We generally acquire Life Skills passively, such as through parenting, observation, and trial-and-error. But there is an incredible demand for taught Life Skills. That's partly the reason people gravitate to organized religion. But even outside of religion, there's still an obvious, unsatiated demand for Life Skills. Look at how successful the following books are: The Secret, The Alchemist, The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People, and The Purpose-Driven Life. All of these books attempt to answer that most awesome question: "How shall I live?" We are all hungry for answers.

In Middle School I took a class on Life Skills, and it was fascinating to me. We were taught how to resolve conflicts, manage anger, and effectively communicate our needs. Unfortunately, we were much too young to appreciate the lessons. These ideas would have been better delivered as a High School class or a Freshman seminar. Unfortunately, there's no room for Life Skills teaching. The emphasis for late teens and adults is usually placed on topical competency in major fields, such as mathematics and science. Even Literature—an indirect, secular vehicle for Life Skills—is dwindling as a respectable use of time at school.

A Life Skills school is needed. This school could ride on the wave of the positive psychology movement. Or it could house researchers in philosophy, communication, and psychology. Or better yet, this Life Skills school could just be an ordinary University that just so happens to require all Freshmen to take a heavy load of Life Skills courses. Whatever strategy the regents use, if a University could provide a world-class education, and somehow incorporate the concept of "Life Skills" in its title (just like Brigham Young University implies Mormon life philosophy, and Liberty University implies Baptist), then people will send their sons and daughters there.

Empathy, compassion, respect, honor, dignity, humanism. Where do we pick up those ideas? Some atheists, funnily enough, will send their children to Bible school. For many non-religious (not anti-religious) people, it simply sounds better to send your kids to Catholic school than public school. It'll make them "good," so the thinking goes.

I don't think modernism killed religion. It doesn't take a rocket scientist to poke holes into religion. I presented the Adam & Eve story to my dad, and he asked back, simply, "I just don't understand how Adam & Eve populated the Earth. What, did they have kids and those kids have kids? That doesn't make sense." It took my dad about five seconds to come up with that, and that's the kind of logic that could have been prevalent even in 100 AD.

So the question is, is the inaccuracy of the Adam & Eve story a deal-breaker? Perhaps humans have an innate need for authenticity, or some sort of reality principle wherein we only like to believe things that we know are real. Skeptics and science-minded people who cling to evolution theory would believe that a research paper is essential to have a proper origin story.

But I don't believe that scientific rigor is a prerequisite for a story to be meaningful. For example, I don't believe that Tarot cards have any special power, and yet I find that the readings I get are meaningful. We should separate logical consistency as one dimension of a story, and meaningfulness as another. In my opinion, the meaningfulness is what really matters to us.

The ordinary person hasn't read The Origin of Species, or any of the addendums to the theory of evolution. Nor has the ordinary person looked at all the arguments for and against intelligent design. At some point, we just pick a story that is satisfying enough and run with it.

One of the most interesting chapters in What Color Is Your Parachute? is "What to do if you get stuck." The author, Nelson Bolles, goes deep into a discussion about how getting stuck on the career search is a symptom of an over-active left-brain. The left-brain, the one that controls logic, he argues, is the safe-keeping part of the brain. We use the left-side of our brain to order our world. And ordering our world is an anxiety-relief gesture against overwhelming complexity. However, this is an inappropriate response in many cases, especially in something as thorny as finding purpose. An over-reliance on order will paralyze our thinking as solutions seem to dry up.

The right-brain, on the other hand, is the experimental, creative side. Bolles offers some simple suggestions, such as going for walks, listening to music, and being open to risk. But I think we can go even further and suggest that you turn to religion. It is my belief, that in order to engage religion, or anything supernatural for that matter, you have to activate the right-side of your brain. One of the principles of right-brained thinking is in imagining connections where there are none. Believing in angels, demons, and that "everything happens for a reason," all help to activate a creative style of thinking about the world. Creativity and dabbling in fantasy go hand-in-hand. Both require a leap of faith that transcends the protective logic of the left-side of your brain.

I guess I could call it/him/God my "Maker" and still keep my atheist conscience. I was made, indeed, inasmuch as I was caused by something; something complicated, something sublime, something beautiful, something with all the same wonderful features of life itself. Does that something have intent? Sure, it has as much intent as we can be said to have intent. Our intent is, after all, a creation of Its intent, and therefore a subset of It.

Okay, I have a Maker.

So, what swirls in my mind when I imagine my Maker. I'll tell you what is not in my head. There isn't some Dude in the sky, with a white beard (thank you Michelangelo). My Maker is smarter than an sagacious, muscular grandfather. My Maker is orders of magnitude more interesting than we can comprehend currently.

"My Maker will take care of me." Sub-vocalizing that sentence in my head, by itself, acts as a mild palliative for my generalized anxiety.

One of the benefits in believing in God, or in things higher than you for that matter, is that it forces you to take your life less seriously. There's a danger to not taking your life seriously at all, but your life should be put into the broader context of the world and cosmic order. If you, for example, over-imagine the responsibility you have to everybody around you, it'll make you arrogant, haughty, and overly anxious. It could also make you indecisive and paralyze you.

In Gore Vidal's Judgment of Paris, the main character Philip and Sophia are in Egypt, talking about a similar concept:

Philip said, "I've never felt so relaxed before. For the first time, nothing maters . . . no anxiety, no memory . . . nothing but the present and the past."

"The ruins," she said. "That's what does it, of course. It's very hard to dream of the future when the past is all around one, reminding one that what is has been before and will be again, over and over and over. . ."

"Proving, perhaps, that individual acts are nothing in themselves, except to the doer at the moment he acts."

"Yet human beings love the idea of posterity." She smiled. "It makes us feel important. Think how confident Thutmose, the great king in these parts, must have been that his name would be immortal, a household word until the end of time; that Egypt under his descendants would remain unchanged, very much as it had been for the thousands of years that preceded his own reign. One consolation, of course, is that he doesn't know his corpse has been dug up, the wrappings removed, the bones x-rayed, the skull measured and compared with his portraits, his diseases duly noted, as though he were some prehistoric Java man instead of a successful soldier and politician. There's no long fame for mortals. None at all."

I'm not really advocating a nihilism, but I see the salutary benefits of believing yourself to be small in the grand order of things.

A recent study finds that abstinence pledges are ineffective. Teens who make the pledges have as much premarital sex as teens that don't, and are more likely to be unprotected. Will this matter to the Christian Right? Probably not. To be part of the Christian Right is to hold Christian principles and ideas foremost in your mind. It means that you are largely defined by Christianity, and not by other towers or fonts of principles, such as science. You can still believe in science and be a Christian, but to define yourself as a member of the Christian Right, you put the burden of proof on everything outside of Christianity.

But there is something charitable in the way that members of the Christian Right think about things that I don't think secular liberals get. To the Christians, intent is very important. They believe that at the very least, abstinence pledges represent a well-intentioned response, and that is what they want to drill into their children.

Plus, there is a logical fallacy in the side of the debate taken up by the secular liberals. Abstinence pledges don't preclude the teachings of sex education. Just because you encourage your children to take abstinence pledges, does that mean you shouldn't teach them about safe sex? On the other hand, that might create too much cognitive dissonance, because why would you worry about condoms if you made a pledge?

I also read one other study that abstinence pledges work in some cases, like about 20%, for pledgers who go to Church regularly. If that is the case, that wouldn't show up on an study that looks only at the average. The result would still be, "there is no noticeable benefit to abstinence pledges," which in our media reads as, "Abstinence pledges don't work!"

It's also possible that the presence of abstinence pledges reduces premarital sex in general in a community, whether or not the pledges are taken or not. If everybody believes that nobody is having premarital sex, then maybe it loses its cool. For example, members of the boy band Jonas Brothers wear purity rings, and there are a few other pop teens who talk about saving themselves. Plus, the popular teen vampire romance Twilight has an undertone of abstinence. These kind of events wouldn't have been cool when I went to High School, in the 1990s, which was all about the ethics of Clueless.

Secular liberal get really torn up about hypocrisy among church-goers, while as Christians don't seem to care so much. Christians think to themselves, "hey, at least we're trying!"

What if there was a music album in High School that really moved you. In fact, you tell people it "changed your life." Someone then asks you why or how it changed your life, and you say, "I was going through a depressing period and I don't know, it just really helped me get through it. It's really hard to explain." He then pulls out excerpts from the lyrics, points out how ridiculous he thinks they are, and then reminds you that critics universally find the album horrible. How would that make you feel? Wouldn't you be righteously offended?

That, to me, summarizes why Bill Maher's Religulous left a bad taste in my mouth.

Previously I believed that there is no Being affecting our lives, that only forces of nature and humans are in play.

But you can't deny the specialness of our existence. Even if the universe is random, by the anthropic principle, we're in that one special universe out of the set of infinitely and randomly possible universes that allows us to be conscious of this universe. That specialness is so strong that perhaps there is a third force beyond nature and humans. The same specialness that made nature and humans is also at play in ways we don't understand completely. We often feel the impact whenever life appears to form narratives. Whenever fairy tale endings occur, when everything seems to lock into place, there is this feeling of the divine.

This special-ness has most of the properties of a divine being, so why not avatarize it and believe in God?

FBEOH includes a review of the Tautrix. For the uninitiated, the Tautrix is a fictitious polytheistic system that I invented for the purposes of mapping deities to my scientific beliefs, such as the Church-Turing Thesis, or the Central Limit Theorem. It provides me a proxy through which I can get the same perks as a religious-person without the aftertaste of participating in something inauthentic.

Note, a common criticism of the Tautrix is that it lacks morality or family values. Indeed it is an individualist's religion. However, I'm still not settled on the idea that one can make a philosophically sound morality. In practice, I believe in morality for sure, but I'm not convinced that there is a good enough moral system that can be set into stone. Every system I've seen has always had holes in it in one way or the other that make it inconsistent or inauthentic. Plus, I'm no expert on morality, or ethics, or even understand the difference between the two, so I wouldn't be an expert on that.

I encourage others to make up their own Tautrix that they believe in, come up with different names and different underlying principles, like Panexperientalism, and possibly include ethics that they believe in. It would be nice to see a Principher Kantas to represent Kantian Ethics.

It's been about a month since I invented The Tautrix. The Tautrix is my spiritual glue, my religious fix. In the first week after I made it up, I was excited making the signs and invoking the various Principhers. My initial excitement tapered off afterwards. Recently, though, I found myself in a pretty deep emotional hole, and I couldn't dig myself out with my general thought processes. I then invoked my Tautrix stuff, and voila, I was immediately set. So, the conclusion, these mental drugs and spiritual invocations do have a positive effect on you if used correctly.

Is there a problem? Don't worry, X will take care of it.
Worried in general? Y ensures that everything works out in the end.
Need advice? Consult Z and he'll give you the answer.

Thus spoke Nietzsche in the Gay Science, Book III Verse 143:
The greatest advantage of polytheism.— For an individual to posit his own ideal and to derive from it his own law, joys, and rights—that may well have been considered hitherto as the most outrageous human aberration and as idolatry itself; the few who dared as much always felt the need to apologize to themselves, usually by saying: "Not I! Not I! But a god through me!" The wonderful art and gift of creating gods—polytheism—was the medium through which this impulse could discharge, purifiy, perfect, and ennoble itself: for originally it was a very undistinguished impulse, related to stubbornness, disobedience and envy. Hostility against this impulse to have an ideal of one's own was formerly the central law of all morality. There was only one norm: "man"—and every people thought that it possessed this one ultimate norm. But above and outside, in some distant overworld, one was permitted to behold a plurality of norms: one god was not considered a denial of another god, nor blasphemy against him! Here the luxury of individuals was first permitted, here one first honored the rights of individuals. The invention of gods, heroes, and overmen of all kinds, as well as near-men and undermen, of dwarfs, fairies, centaurs, satyrs, demons and devils was the inestimable preliminary exercise for the justification of the egoism and sovereignty of the individual: the freedom that one conceded to a god in his relation to other gods one eventually also granted to oneself in relation to laws, customs, and neighbors. Monotheism, on the other hand, this rigid consequence of the doctrine of one normal human type— the faith in one normal god beside whom there are only pseudo-gods [falsche Lügengötter]—was perhaps the greatest danger that has yet confronted humanity: it threatened us with the premature stagnation that, as far as we can see, most other species have long reached; for all of them believe in one normal type [Ein Normalthier] and ideal for their species, and they have translated the morality of mores definitively into their own flesh and blood. [See 43.] In polytheism the free-spiriting and many-spiriting of man obtained its first preliminary form: the strength to create for ourselves our own new eyes and ever again new eyes that are even more are own: hence man alone among all the animals has no eternal horizons and perspectives. (url)

The religion for the 21st Century is finally here. The word "religion" does not even compile anymore. The new "spirituality" is The Tautrix or "Matrix of Truth." It's replete with comic-book style deities and myths that represent contemporary mathematical, computational, and theoretical physical principles. If you're an atheist who loves technology but can't find a suitable God construct, hopefully, the Tautrix is your solution. If you disagree, it's also personalizable to suit your own purposes.

Most of my philosophistric energy in the past couple of days has been pouring into the Tautrix. I'm going to form a blog specifically designed for the Tautrix or maybe combine posts about the Tautrix with my Philosophistry.

You can expect my language from now on to be cultured with terminology from the Tautrix: resonating with Graphen and syming the Singularity symbol has indeed been addicting!

More fun to come!