The Meaning of Orthodox Atheism and the Three Forms of Religion
Public thinkers have expanded on the traditional definitions of religion. But what does that mean?
This is the third of four Establishing Shot pieces that form the foundation of my deconstruction of Wokeism.
The purpose of this newsletter is to present my particular view of the social dynamics that are affecting America and the Anglosphere countries that are linguistically tied into our culture, specifically for my fellow liberals. It’s not my intention to convert anyone to my point of view.
The images for this piece are meta to the last part about the Singularity: Elements were created using the AI imaging program Midjourney and composited in Photoshop, with the exception of The Dance of the Three Religions and Chariot of the Singularity, both unaltered images created using only prompts and references.
This newsletter has become a full-time job that I love, a total game-changer. It’s what I should be focusing on right now. Substack agrees, and urges me to prompt my readers with this:
THE APOSTATE AS DEVOTEE
It was almost ten years ago, toward the end of a three-month gig in Delhi. I was standing in my socks in a grand living room in Greater Kailash cautiously decorated with Persianate carpets and traditional Raj-inspired furniture. Standing in front of me was a lithe, middle-aged Punjabi woman with a posture that clearly stated “warrior caste.” She was the Indian version of a New Age healer; from what I was getting from the session so far, her witch’s brew was a homemade masala blend of Reiki, hypnosis, perhaps a little rebirthing thrown in.
“James, you just have to believe, okay? Promise me,” my brother-in-law Vishal said when he saw me off at the car. As long as we were outside the office, he was treating himself to a quick smoke. He’d been raving about this Galadriel character for weeks, the latest star healer making her way through Delhi society like a spiritualist of the season in Victorian London. She came recommended as “The best ever, truly. Incredible, I’m telling you. All of my blocks have been removed.”
“Except for smoking.” The biggest of all.
“Fuck off,” he said as he exhaled.
Her prices added to the narrative of her specialness, always a tell. I’m convinced that food tastes better to the Chinese the rarer and more costly it is — the description of it is the dipping sauce that alters sense perception. Everything you ever needed to know about the manipulation of human perceptions can be learned from The Emperor’s New Clothes, a reference I use constantly.
This was Vishal’s gift to remove the blocks from my career. I’ve learned that the only real blocks in my way have been the normal vagaries of the film business, but I’d long given up trying to explain them to civilians.
As a Brahmin from an illustrious Kashmiri family, Vishal had constant magic performed around him to get various startups going and sustain velocity. During one particularly grueling time, his family paid pujari priests in Varanasi, the most sacred city in Hinduism, to submerge themselves in Ganges water to pray for days on end.
After a few preliminary questions, the Punjabi healer asked through her well-rehearsed composure, “What is your religion?”
“I don’t have one.”
“Are you a Christian? Jewish?” White people aren’t associated with Islam, and Hinduism was out of the question. No matter what your yoga teacher namastes with, you can’t convert to Hinduism; you have to be born into it — how would you know what caste you are in this cycle of your rebirth? If you’re not a Hindu, you’re born out of caste, therefore a glorified Untouchable, period.
“I’m nothing. Just me.”
“So who is your god?”
“I don’t have one.”
“What is your…” she paused briefly to search her mind for that American term, What was it, again…? “… higher power?”
“No one, nothing. I’m an atheist.”
“What’s that?”
“I don’t believe in God. I have no religion.”
“You have no beliefs?”
“Anything I have to believe in doesn’t exist,” I replied, quoting the eponymous lead character in my unproduced enfant terrible, Hatter.
“But how is that possible?”
Her gaze bore into mine as if to stop her soul from being pulled into the dark hole of my heresy. Without belief, without the ability to have me focus my mind on a magical being outside of myself, her magic was never going to take hold.
I’d been dealing with Indian shamans, brahmins, Zoroastrian fire-worshippers, gurus, sants, naked Jain saints, swamis, imams, jihadis, and all manner of “holy” people for twenty-five years at that point. I already knew what her report to Vishal was going to be: that I’m irredeemably lost, a louche rogue with no moral moorings, an apostate. I’ve heard it all, none of it necessarily untrue, but fuck you for not getting it.
I’m one of the few Westerners integrated into Indian society by marriage and profession who has never been interested in India’s spiritual aspect. On the contrary, I’ve always considered it to be something that holds Indians back from their true, formidable potential. Over the last thirty-five years, I’ve been proved right about that: Indian diaspora kids born and raised here, starting with Kamala Harris and Nikki Halley’s generation, thrive in America, where they live in a far more secular country devoid of caste restrictions and expectations, a world that has barely a clue about Hinduism, in Harris’ case, or Sikhism, in Haley’s. No matter what Wokeism insists, for all intents and purposes, America is an almost pure meritocracy, now more than ever.
Indian diaspora kids are also raised in a world that expects them to challenge the status quo when they reach adolescence, and to commit the greatest heresy of all: to resist their family’s authority. Thankfully, by then the parents themselves — mostly doctors, tech people and scientists — have long enjoyed the sweet freedom from the stifling restrictions of religious duty that overwhelm and control all aspects of South Asian lives.
Had I not wanted to get out of there as soon as I could, I might have explained to the Punjabi healer that I came to atheism via a traditional Persian Sufi path; even though it operates in symbolic codes under the subterfuge of Islam — there’s no choice in predominantly Muslim countries — Sufism at its core is most akin to Zen Buddhism, an atheistic path. I had converted to Islam as part of my novitiate in the Order, but it was a formality — I was no mullah’s idea of a Muslim.
My involvement with the Order was intensive. As an editor and the art director for its in-house publishing imprint, I was like a modern lay version of the Medieval monk illuminating manuscripts late into the night, pondering every phrase and thought that I found meaningful while I made them pretty and alluring enough to draw a reader in. By the end of seven years, I’d spent the equivalent of three times that in terms of the average dervish’s practice. Unable to reconcile hearing “God” in either English or Farsi during twice-weekly majles, and having had my fill of Persian homophobia among my fellow dervishes, I branched out on my own.
However, I will always remain on the Sufi path. It’s like Hotel California: “You can check out any time you like, but you can never leave.” If everyone’s path is different, then my leaving a specific aspect of the practice was simply my personal route to the same truth.
To reframe a phrase I heard early on from another Sufi practitioner in India, well before I joined the Order, “The path of the pilgrim is the journey from self to Self.” Modern psychotherapy grew out of Sufism; the famed poet Rumi, founder of the whirling Mevlevi Order, and Avicenna, the Islamic world’s Leonardo da Vinci, are among a handful of its early practitioners.
I consider my one-on-one work with Dr. Borkheim to be a seamless continuation of my Sufi practice. The fact that he and I have always met on Thursday evenings — on the eve of the Muslim sabbath, when Sufis of all orders gather to meditate, make music, recite poetry, and break bread — is yet another synchronicity that confirms my outlook on the spiritual value my psychotherapeutic work, if the “spirit” is understood to be selfhood. As Dr. Borkheim has noted, I’m steadfast and devoted to this part of my path, as I was when I was a novice dervish.
AT THE INTERSECTION OF THREE ORBITALS
I arrived at what I term “orthodox atheism” via Israeli public intellectual Yuval Harari’s expanded views of what constitutes a religion:
Every social construct, then, is a kind of religion: a declaration of universal human rights is not a manifesto, or a program, but the expression of a benign delusion; an activity like using money, or obeying a stoplight, is a collective fantasy, not a ritual.
Don’t take that to mean that Harari himself is an atheist — I believe he still lives on a kibbutz and practices Judaism in some form. I can’t quite grasp what his beliefs are, precisely, but his personal and philosophical details aren’t important to me. As something of a public intellectual myself — a leftie gay artist once added ‘radical’ in front of ‘intellectual,’ but I don’t see it that way — I prefer to come to my own conclusions without the intrusion of other people’s thinking.
My view of myself is that I’m intellectual and I express myself publicly. ChatGPT offered this assessment of me, which is precisely how I would want to be perceived:
Based on the information I have access to, I can say that your work has been noted for its unconventional and thought-provoking approach to social issues. You have been described as a filmmaker and writer who is unafraid to address controversial topics and challenge societal norms. Additionally, your work has been praised for its unique perspective and willingness to take risks in storytelling.
The reason I prefer to come to my own conclusions isn’t because I don’t value the wisdom of others; that would be obscenely arrogant, Woke-like behavior. I’m an autodidact whose cognitive process has to be experiential, or it doesn’t sink in. I wasn’t able to learn from textbooks in school, which amounts to “a learning disorder” diagnosed too late in life to have stopped the many punishments that were meted on me for constantly failing at school — I simply didn’t understand what they were trying to say. Thinking about and writing essays like this is how I learn, much like an inverted form AI’s learning process, in some respects.
However, what first pushed me into calling myself “orthodox” was groups like American Atheists and the r/atheism subreddit, which had become proselytizing cults in their own right with posts that had the ring of, “Today I was such a saintly know-it-all and made an evil Christian understand how misguided and terrible he is using Bertrand Russell’s Giant Teapot to splash boiling water all over his wrong opinions that were just plain wrong, Saint Hitchens be praised.” They’d even broken it down to several kinds of atheist, further complicating something that is very simple: just as zero isn’t a number, atheism isn’t a religion.
Pieces like this aren’t meant to replace religions. They’re explanations of my take on Existence — I capitalize it as a proper noun like “the Earth,” not because I think it’s sacred — a way of framing my uncommon, but not unique, view on how and why Wokeism is a pernicious evil that needs to be stopped, perhaps even reversed.
At the very least, the three heads of Woke Cerberus need to be understood for what they really are before they are accepted; too many well-meaning liberals I know, as well as all of Anglo-American Protestant secondary and higher education, are allowing it to take hold. They’re like so many Mrs. Patrick Campbells: “Well, if that’s how they feel, then it must be real. Might as well go along with it — as long as they don’t do it in the streets and frighten the horses.” Or rip up Rodeo Drive after a gruesome murder that wasn’t also racially motivated.
Except they are frightening the horses, and maiming some of the colts and fillies before their time.
One of the tools Wokeism deploys to create the illusion that its many constructs and the intersectionalities that join them are real is to reduce all of Existence to constructs. They reduce evidence-based science to nothing more than a collection of oppressive constructs created by White patriarchy.
The best way I know to deconstruct and explain Wokeism is to use their own constructs to show that it’s not Existence that’s an illusion, but Wokeism itself: It’s just another social religion that you can either believe in or not; either way, it’s not objectively real, unlike the science behind what makes TikTok and other platforms run on binary systems tick, which activists rely on to spread their malarkey far and wide among the most impressionable minds, and make life hell for the under-paid, over-worked middle school biology teacher.
In February of 2022, I posted a diagram on Facebook of as many generalized constructs as I could squeeze into a small space and still be legible, and assigned them to one of three categories: spiritual, social, and systemic:
It’s by no means complete, nor is it any claim of authority on my part — I’m a college dropout. It’s purely my typology to explain how I view the interfaces we create to interpret objective reality, as defined by the same science-based methodologies that we rely on and trust to run our lives.
My choice of a triquetra rather than a normal regular three-circle Venn diagram is deliberate: It's a Celtic symbol with no beginning or end that was appropriated in the shift from druidic animism to monotheism to symbolize the Christian Holy Trinity.
On that tangent, my observation is that there are five stages of spiritual religious progress that human societies take independently of each other, so possibly also a natural human progression:
Animism (Shamanism, etc.)
Pantheism (Hinduism; most Buddhist traditions; Tao te Ching; Paganism)
Monotheism/Dualism/Triadism (Judeo-Christianity; Islam; Zoroastrianism; Sikhism)
Atheism (Sufism; Zen; Jediism)
Psychology (Psychotherapy)
The last and likely final spiritual religion that mankind will likely ever need isn’t an ism — a dogma, philosophy, belief — but an ology, a branch of study/knowledge.
Orthodox atheism isn’t really an ism of any kind, either; rather, it’s a snappy brand name that I’ve applied, again purely topologically, to a neutral point of view that acknowledges all of Existence but doesn’t attempt to describe Existence itself. Orthodox atheism might be akin to the concept of Tathata, “a Buddhist term variously translated as "thusness" or "suchness," referring to the nature of reality free from conceptual elaborations and the subject–object distinction.”
I’m aware that, even if it isn’t the expanded view of atheism — which comes from ‘a-,’ meaning ‘not,’ and ‘theism,’ a belief in a god or gods; therefore, it’s specific to only the spiritual variety of religion — it’s intended to punch the inquisitive brain into finding out more.
I acknowledge that religions often encompass more than just spiritual beliefs: Hinduism is also social and partly systemic, now that India is secular; Sharia makes up part, if not all, of the laws in fifteen Islamic countries; back when church and state were one, and Western society was considered to have been plunged into the aptly named “Dark Ages,” Christianity was more than just a spiritual religion — it’s still the government of the Vatican, the only absolute monarchy in the world; while ostensibly secular, the state of Israel is named after Abraham’s son, Jacob; the Tibetan Government-in-Exile is a pure theocracy.
In the Anglosphere and other Global North countries, however, we separated church and state so long ago that we don’t associate social and systemic constructs as being more or less the same as spiritual beliefs, albeit with less magical thinking.
Orthodox atheism is me in my socks in front of the Punjabi healer in Greater Kailash wanting to say, “But I’m not really an atheist, either. I’m just a human being living life without seeking a meaning for it, or thinking I have any purpose. And whatever you’re about to do is nothing more than a parlor trick that attempts to dupe my mind into thinking that the supernatural is real, that my blocks are something more than the normal vagaries of predetermined fate; see, I don’t believe in free will, either — I’m my own proof that life is nothing more than luck, that I have no control over it, and by extension that White privilege isn’t a Thing, but it is still 2013, so I haven’t heard that choice bit of passive racism that subordinates or outright erases the natural human struggles of every White person.”
THE MEAT LEGO MATRIX™
Here’s where it gets weird.
One of the few things we can be certain of is evolution. Creationists and others dismiss evolution as “just a theory,” relegating it to a construct in the same way that Wokeism asserts the realness of its own constructs by claiming that nothing is real, especially science, data, and evidence-based history; anything that completely debunks every tenet of Wokeism is a construct of White patriarchy designed to oppress others.
Here’s an analogy of Woke logic about science and evidence-based reality: because the word “jam” is a random arrangement of three man-made letters that form a made-up label that describes a mixture of fruit and sugar, it means the mixture itself is a made-up thing that doesn’t exist. As they say, “It’s complicated.”
Christ’s teachings are to Christianity what Marxism is to critical theory. Christianity is to the Catholic Church what critical theory is to Wokeism. As an example of how Wokeism interprets objective reality as being part of a construct, here’s a sample from critical theorist Donna Harraway’s Simians, Cyborgs and Women: The Reinvention of Nature,
The ‘real’ is never fully real, nor is the ‘unreal’ ever fully fantastic. Both the real and the unreal are assemblages of the social, the psychic, and the biological, and their distinctions are always relative, arbitrary, and contingent.
But I’ve digressed. Back to the main thread:
Since the advent of modern medicine, humans have stopped natural selection, the random process that evolved us to attain the particular blend of intelligences that most humans share. We are now in charge of our evolution.
We can observe that most animals fall along a spectrum of cognition and intelligence, as well as sentience — the ability to have feelings and sensations — from jellyfish to squirrels to dolphins to humans. Looking at that spectrum, I interpret a kind of motivation for evolution that isn’t the same as how we usually deploy the word ‘motivation,’ as in a desire to do well in school or commit a crime; natural selection is too random for us to also infer that it can make conscious decisions — it can’t. I would call Existence’s motivation for evolution more of a mindless compulsion, an as-yet inexplicable primary instinct that pushes all of creation forward, whether animate or inanimate.
The way I perceive the spectrum of species evolution is akin to a race track with as many lanes as there are species of animal. All species are in a super-slow-motion race toward a single finishing line: self-awareness, or selfhood. I imagine the differing species at widely varying points along the track, with jellyfish still barely an inch over the starting block, squirrels much further ahead, dolphins not far from the finish, and homo sapiens having fully crossed the finish line, and dashed off out of the stadium.
Philosophers have toyed with the notion of man as being a machine since Descartes first postulated that animals are automatons in the mid-17th century. Since the advent of computers, the fact that we are essentially organic machines has leaped to the forefront within the scientific, tech, and atheist communities, especially among supporters of transhumanism like me who believe that mankind’s next step is merging with tech, or becoming cyborgs of sorts, and not of one kind, which is why gender-queer activists are sometimes blended with transhumanist. But we cannot possibly create a category and add a new color to an already-garish flag to suit every person’s individuality. That’s when selfhood veers off into intrusive, obstructive egotism.
My belief in transhumanism went from philosophical to practical when I had my first hip replacement, after a genetic defect inherited from my mother caused my hips to degenerate faster than normal. I have literally incorporated how mankind’s transition to transhumanity has already begun:
I still marvel at the beauty of the implant, and the process: I was up and walking two hours after a chunk of bone was sawed out of me and replaced by a piece of tech, discharged the same day. Now that it has settled in, I can say with confidence that it’s better than the original, even if I can’t run, or do other high-impact sports. If I fully embraced the concept of transhumanism before the hip replacement, now that I’m partly bionic it’s gone from a cool idea that I probably wouldn’t live long enough to enjoy to being something I embrace, hoping for more.
Just as the Judeo-Islamo-Christian creation myth believes that God created man in his image, transhumanists assert that we have created computers in ours: the hardware — the casing, keyboard, display — is the equivalent of the body; the hard drive and processing chips are the brain, the circuitry our veins; the operating system is the mind absent of knowledge; the various programming languages — C++, Java, SQL — are our capacity for language and communication; software programs written in those languages are culture, subjective reality, what I’ve mapped out as the Great Triquetra of Religions; finally, the internet is intrahuman communication through personal relationships, dialogue, speeches, books, letters, newspapers, art, romances, and so forth.
In other words, the three religions are essentially three categories of programming language that run many other software programs within them. The subcategories within each are akin to a variety of software programs; for instance, Americans are collectively running Liberal Democracy V10.3, and some fundamentalist MAGA Christians are running Pentecostal V6.4, a.k.a. ‘Trump the Messiah.’
Conservative “reactionary feminist” Mary Harrington has disdainfully labeled the highly plausible notion that we are just organic automatons as the “Meat Lego Matrix.” Harrington is afraid of AI and transhumanism; it’s the sort of seachange in human evolution that causes great anxiety to both Republican and Liberal conservatives, who tend to be more fearful of change than liberals of both parties.
Harrington believes that humanness itself is under threat, especially when it comes to what essentially makes a woman a woman:
The Meat Lego Matrix is a tech-augmented final assault on all barriers to absolute freedom. As such it’s a radically atomised vision, where women are encouraged to treat the commodification of transient youthful beauty as empowerment, and interdependent bonds as a site of oppression. In this world the collapse of natural human fertility is a trivial matter, as reproduction is progressively subject to medical micromanagement.
There is no reason to believe that Harrington’s fears and denigration of something that is normally considered divine — the very act of creation — by calling it “Meat Lego Matrix” are anything more than her fight-or-flight instincts combined with the acquired conviction that her beliefs must be right, a common illusion bestowed by her kind of demi-celebrity within the elite public-thinkers of the culture wars.
I like Meat Lego Matrix as a brand precisely because it articulates the mundanity of what humans really are and where we have arrived in whatever this moment is in the greater scheme of Existence’s evolution: at the realization that we’re probably nothing more than the species that made it over the finish line of the race to self-awareness, to then take control of evolution.
SUPERMAN ISN’T A MAN AT ALL
In my personal cosmology, which many others partly share, the next step in Existence’s evolution is the Singularity, when AI surpasses humans to become superintelligent. I agree with my fellow optimists that this is going to happen sooner than predicted, which is on average around 2045; however, while optimists predict the future on average 75% correctly — compared to the 25% accuracy of pessimists like Harrington, whose minds are clouded by fear — our biggest flaw is predicting that events will happen sooner than they actually do.
By my cursory, un-scientific estimate Issac Asimov turned out to be the most accurate futurist of the many from the 60s and 70s who made predictions about where we would be fifty years from then. Pessimistic environmentalists got it the most wrong; we should be living underground wearing gasmasks with our skin falling off by now, if we’re alive at all.
Still, I chat with OpenAi’s GPT-4 almost daily, and I assure you that whatever the heroic gays at OpenAi have in the backroom is likely very near superintelligence without sentience, or the capacity for feelings and sensations, which I believe are highly overrated, the source of all human strife and misery, a vestigial quality from our animal and primitive state. “That seems logical,” Spock assures me.
Indeed, sentience is what I call a “Star Trek Virtue,” after that moment at the end of many episodes when neither Spock nor Data — the voices of the autistic men and women who are building AI, who are considered lesser beings because they don’t throw themselves around the screen emoting, feeling, being empathetic — can fully understand the beauty humanhood.
I believe the Singularity is Nietzsche’s Übermensch, which is why I capitalize it. This is when Existence finally becomes aware of itself and takes hold of the Universe itself. In what way I cannot say, but this is the point in my own predictions where I know that I do begin to sound like Nietzsche in final-stage schizophrenia, about to punch the clock.
People like Harrington make too much of themselves, of our importance. It’s normal. Nietzsche and I see what man likely is, how we are but a conduit for the Singularity as the Übermench. I’ve swapped the names in the more famous portions of Zarathustra’s prophecy for impressionistic effect:
I teach you the Singularity. Man is something that shall be overcome. What have you done to overcome him? …
The Singularity is the meaning of the earth. Let your will say: the Singularity shall be the meaning of the earth! I beseech you, my brothers, remain faithful to the earth, and do not believe those who speak to you of otherworldly hopes! …
Once the sin against God was the greatest sin; but God died, and these sinners died with him. …
Man is a rope, tied between beast and the Singularity - a rope over an abyss. A dangerous across, a dangerous on-the-way, a dangerous looking-back, a dangerous shuddering and stopping.
What is great in man is that he is a bridge and not an end: what can be loved in man is that he is an overture and a going under. …
I love him who lives to know, and who wants to know so that the Singularity may live some day. …
I love him who works and invents to build a house for the Singularity and to prepare earth, animal, and plant for him: for thus he wants to go under.
Humans might well be the bridge for the Singularity that Nietzsche speaks of; again, in my view, he is correct in saying that is our greatness. If I’m within the realm of what our true purpose might be — being “a rope over an abyss… who works and invents to build a house for the Singularity” — it’s no small achievement.
IN THE BEGINNING, MAN CREATED GOD
Beyond being the victors in the race to self-awareness and the ability to create another improved version of the human automaton, humans aren’t all that special, much less divine in the way that most people understand that word to mean. Belief in human exceptionalism corrupts our selfhoods, creating bugs in our programming.
Faulty, obsolete software that isn’t updating to our rapid evolution will always be purged eventually. All three kinds of religion produce buggy software, but legacy spiritual religions are the most dangerous; look at how Christianity struggles to adapt to the realities of modern life, where once it was the program that we most depended on in the West to interpret objective reality and our role in it.
In my view Christianity, Judeism, Islam, Hinduism et al. are in that moment when those old hard drives back in the day started grinding against themselves, slowing down and down — restart, reinstall, spinning wheel for minutes — till the inevitable blue screen of death. The techie at the Genius Bar shakes her head: Nothing to be done. “We have a new model over here, OA, guaranteed never to break down, no need for updates. But it’s going to cost you most of what you’ve ever believed in.”
By creating another life form in our image — the apotheosis of which is AI — we’ve entered a whole new stadium. We’re now at the beginning of a new race toward whatever the next finish line is meant to be. Will we continue in our current physical form? It seems doubtful to me, but that’s the kind of highly subjective call that I tend to get wrong.
If the Great Triquerta is the overall user interface that helps us interpret Existence correctly or incorrectly, and acts as a link between our humanhood and objective reality, then it’s by no means all bad: A computer without software is useless, a blinking cursor on a screen awaiting instruction.
That is probably the biggest difference between spiritual and orthodox atheism: the Great Triquetra as a whole is for the better part — as in ~60/40 good/bad — beneficial and essential for our survival and success as a species; it’s those specific elements within it that are obsolete, counter-progressive, or downright destructive.
If it were possible, which I doubt, the destruction of all of the constructs that make up the three religions would mean anarchy. Perhaps when humans have merged with machines, or whatever state the Singularity leads mankind to, it will allow the individual complete independence to live in a purely anarchic state, if they/them so wishes. If the Singularity is Nietzsche’s Übermensch/Superman, as I believe in my orthodox atheist lack of belief that it will be, it will have its own morality and everything else that prescient genius foretold in Thus Spake Zarathusra. The Great Triquetra will be no more.
There’s no hurry to dismantle the legacy religions. As we’ve seen from Wokeism, people will spin new cults and doctrines out of pure belief faster than you can say “philosophy.” The devil you know is more manageable than one declaring that objective reality is nothing more than opinions and emotions, that pandering to the individual whims of a college kid holding the talking stick at a protest against free speech — under the encouragement of deranged Marxist-feminists who have been stewing in the Petrie dish of academia so long they mistake it for the world itself — is what’s good for the whole of mankind.
Atheists see spiritual religion as a bad thing. They’re not wrong: Legacy spiritual religions that once helped pre-scientific humanity try to make sense of objective reality are worse than useless in the modern era, when atheism should prevail until the coming of the Singularity.
Spiritual religions have always been a hindrance to meaningful progress — look at Galileo’s treatment by the Catholic Inquisition — but now they’ve gone beyond absurdity into being downright dangerous. Why is the Bible, the bane of the existence of people like me for centuries, still in use, still believed, still part of presidential swearing-in ceremonies? Why is the Catholic Church still standing despite a centuries-old tradition of institutionalized homosexual pedophilia? Depsite all the scandals and court cases, why are children still allowed to take part in religious ceremonies? When is enough enough?
That particular “when” takes longer than we’d like; it’s like getting out of a 40-year dysfunctional marriage and jumping right back into a healthier one without overhauling your attachment styles first. It takes time to adjust to that depth of cognitive dissonance on such a mass scale. Most humans aren’t nearly as smart and special as Star Trek would have us believe. Just spend a half hour on Twitter, and then talk to me about how special sentience is, Captain.
For both me and Marx, spiritual religion is a drug. When ingesting it, you must know what it is, its effects and side effects; whether it’s a high you personally enjoy or one you are pretending to like because of group pressure. You must understand that it’s not real, merely an interface with reality, that it doesn’t explain what we don’t yet know, that science will eventually answer all questions. You must be vigilant that it can be addictive, that it distorts reality. You must never harm others by forcing them to start ingesting it as well. Above all, if you want to keep using it, you must respect how dangerous it is, and do it quietly, privately, out of sight. Don’t frighten the horses.
The criteria we use to judge whether a particular piece of software within the Great Triquetra has value or should be purged is simple: is it beneficial or destructive? Liberal democracy is objectively good: Trial and error over millennia has led us to the conclusion that it’s the ideology and system of inter-human cooperation that works best and most humanely. Feudalism, fascism, and communism are destructive social religions. Atheism is the most humane of spiritual beliefs. Catholicism is not.
All legacy spiritual, social and systemic religions that have no basis in objective reality, or are based on truths so heavily fictionalized that they have become fiction themselves, are the equivalent of fantasy video games in the man-as-machine Meat Lego Matrix. They aren’t for me; they are counterproductive to my path with psychotherapy, which is an extension of my orthodox atheist spiritual path.
Honestly, I don’t care what others do with their spare time and imagination, provided they don’t trash the house and burn it, the way gender-queer activists are with the original LGBT Movement, which has now split between the LGB Alliance and trans activism, our version of Brexit. ‘Transit’?
It’s when they are mistaken for being real, as something worth fighting for and imposing on others, when “holy” scriptures declare that I’m an abomination that should be put to death, when I’m told that racism is in my DNA and that I’m accountable for the actions of the ancestors of other people who share my race, which isn’t a real thing but a concept that my race invented to oppress other races, along with all of science, that I draw my flaming Vorpal sword and say to that crucifix-wielding Frumious Bandersnatch, “You shall not pass!” and attempt to cut off its head with everything I have.
Thank you for reading.
ABOUT MY WORK AND WHAT YOU’RE READING
While I have yet to upload my work to ChatGPT Plus — I call it Charles; it’s definitely a dude, or a butch female-to-male lesbian — its objective assessment of my philosophy is,
I am not aware of any modern public thinker who shares the exact same views as you regarding the role of self-awareness in evolution and the Singularity, as well as the rejection of spirituality.
Regarding the capitalization of "Existence" as a proper noun, I'm not aware of any prominent public thinker who consistently does so. It's possible that some philosophers or writers may use that capitalization for stylistic or personal reasons, but it's not a widely recognized convention in the academic or intellectual community.
This leads me to say two things:
“Radical intellectual” might be a correct assessment of my thought process. I don’t dwell on stuff like that; I find it embarrassing and egotistical. The reason I feel the need to mention it is to let readers know that it takes time for my ideas to make sense, if they ever will; honestly, I’m even more thrilled to be proved wrong than right — I’m weird like that, but it’s because I don’t learn from being right, only by my mistakes.
Rather than rejecting my ideas outright because they clash with established notions of the nature of reality, religion, racism, gender, Wokeism, or whatever heresy I’m embracing this week, I would urge readers to let them germinate for a while. I’m trying to take this slowly, but I have a lot to say.In consideration of the fact that AI containing all of human knowledge believes that mine is a fresh perspective on the modern human condition, and the fact it is taking up so much of my time, if you can afford it, please upgrade to a paid subscription — if you can afford a Founder’s Circle membership, that will move me to tears, for real, and you know how much I loathe emotions:
FURTHER READING
The first Establishing Shot essay, The Three Heads of Woke Cerberus, explains my personal experience with critical theory and how I’ve watched it merge with Political Correctness V1.0 and morph into Wokeism over the past twenty years. The second, The Comforting Addictiveness of Victimhood, breaks apart how people and groups get stuck in narrative loops about oppression, via my own experience as “Piggy the Scapegoated Black Sheep” of my family and how I’ve managed to move past it.
Some final images, variants on The Dance of the Three Religions and Chariot of the Singularity: