From the pagan and animalistic rituals of early human cultures, to the pagan
gods of antiquity, to the grandiose monotheistic religions that still exist today,
the majority of human history has been dominated by a belief in supernatural
forces and, most important, the hope that certain actions and beliefs in this life
would lead to rewards and improvement in the next life.
This preoccupation with the next life developed because for most of
human history, everything was completely fucked and 99 percent of the
population had no hope of material or physical improvement in their lives. If
you think things are bad today, just think about the plagues that wiped out a
third of the population on an entire continent,^24 or the wars that involved
selling tens of thousands of children into slavery.^25 In fact, things were so bad
in the old days that the only way to keep everyone sane was by promising
them hope in an afterlife. Old-school religion held the fabric of society
together because it gave the masses a guarantee that their suffering was
meaningful, that God was watching, and that they would be duly rewarded.
In case you haven’t noticed, spiritual religions are incredibly resilient.
They last hundreds, if not thousands, of years. This is because supernatural
beliefs can never be proven or disproven. Therefore, once a supernatural
belief gets lodged as someone’s God Value, it’s nearly impossible to dislodge
it.
Spiritual religions are also powerful because they often encourage hope
through death, which has the nice side effect of making a lot of people willing
to die for their unverifiable beliefs. Hard to compete with that.
Ideological Religions
Ideological religions generate hope by constructing networks of beliefs that
certain actions will produce better outcomes in this life only if they are
adopted by the population at large. Ideologies are usually “isms”:
libertarianism, nationalism, materialism, racism, sexism, veganism,
communism, capitalism, socialism, fascism, cynicism, skepticism, etc. Unlike
spiritual religions, ideologies are verifiable to varying degrees. You can
theoretically test to see whether a central bank makes a financial system more
or less stable, whether democracy makes society fairer, whether education
makes people hack one another to pieces less often, but at a certain point,
most ideologies still rely on faith. There are two reasons for this. The first is
that some things are just incredibly difficult, if not impossible, to test and
verify. The other is that a lot of ideologies rely upon everyone in society
having faith in the same thing.
For instance, you can’t scientifically prove that money is intrinsically
valuable. But we all believe it is, so it is.^26 You also can’t prove that national