Religion as a Response Policy

[comment from 3Quarks article]

THobbs is in the his-ouse

"Religion is a unate operator – each subscriber to The Holy Book has an individual response. Your ‘enlightened’ savior may be your neighbor’s version of heresy. There is not one true Scotsman anywhere because each Scotsman can define what it means to be a Scotsman. So… religion becomes shared practice and not shared belief. But no religious person wants to have this cake or eat this cake (not one I ever met…) – religious merit comes from something called ‘belief’ which differs from one observant agent to the next. The community of practice rolls on without accepting a shared cultural myth as a myth. Dan Dennett calls this a belief in belief. Each religious person looks to the person on either side of them in the pews to normalize behavior while the music plays on. In this strict secular sense – the sense no religious person accepts – religion as a ritual molds a population to a set of behaviors which are fit (get up in the morning and feed a poor person) or unfit (get up each morning and murder a poor person). Both impulses arise from people reading the same book. This is not about reading skills – it’s about the non-zero sum of modernity emerging from utilitarian good practice."


Hobbs demolished the sacred aspect of human institutions by showing that the mortal souls of mortal men working toward a common purpose - with or without belief - constructed Leviathan.