Gods and worship have been quintessential aspect of the human experience since all of known human history. Yet, there are those of us who have chosen to defy these well established rules of society. Why you have chosen to abandon a creator framework for life is, to me, irrelevant, but I do want to make a claim that the conception for god is a useful tool for navigating life and our journey of self discovery and self improvement.
Why should I care about “god”?
Gods have always been a societal tool and a personal tool in my eyes. It’s an abstract rallying point that gives common language and experience between otherwise wholly unrelated humans. Think of a modern Church, Synagoge, or Temple of any sort. They are less interesting as a lecture hall on a thousands year old book than they are as communal halls to give people from all walks of life a reason to interact with each other. It’s a neutral ground where teachers, laborers, bankers, and so on may meet and form relationships that may have otherwise never happened.
You have a language with which to describe feelings and an actionable framework with which to define “doing good”. You have a place to talk about experiences of your higher self in a, ideally, judgement free space. Take the Unitary Universalist service experience for example. The idea there is to just share art and poetry that inspires you to do good and feel the warmth of being a kind person. The sermons are similar in that they simply promote what their community views as virtues that make you feel good.
Is it correct to say you felt god channeling through you when you did a good dead? No probably not, but it communicates the idea that you felt really good while doing the good deeds. It’s actually a pretty complex emotion that is highly personalized, but by abstracting it in a vague language of a religion one is able to share those feelings easier with the subtext of this complexity.
Now yes I do understand the more cynical readings of a religious community. Believe me, I’m well aware of the stats of abuse and brainwashing that goes on there under the guise of maintaining Communal Cohesion or maintaining the community. But this work is to highlight the good parts of a religious community and further a conception of god.
Gods are as much a personal tool as a community tool. In a personal practice, I like to call gods an “Ego Saver.”
My favorite atheist debunking of religion is The Milk Jug Experiment. For those unaware, the Milk Jug Experiment is this logical thought process to debunk prayer. Imagine, when you pray to god there are three possible answers to your pray: yes, no, maybe. Yes, god has favored you and will assist you. No, god does not think you deserve the outcome or this is part of his plan so it must happen. Maybe, it might be granted but not in the way that you intended. The idea is that these are just how probability works and praying to a Milk Jug will garner the same results so long as you still ascribe the outcome of those prayers to the Milk Jug.
Now, the point of that exercise is to demonstrate the pointlessnes of prayer, but I think it demonstrates the abstract benefit of prayer in that you now have a scape goat to save your ego.
Ego and gods
Consider the convenience of blaming your problems on someone else. Sure, it’s a dick move to throw someone under the bus, but it really is a convenient mental load balancer if you don’t have a conscious or you hate that other person. You have worked hard to reach a goal, but that goal was always dependant on many stars aligning that are far outside your control. You can only do so much to manifest the outcome that you desire physically but you have no control over these, from your perspective, completely probabilistic events. This is where Prayer comes in.
Random Chance is just a fact of the universe in terms of our perception. Sure most all events could theoreticalyl be controlled but the effort to do so is cartoonishly high. The example I like to give is a sports event. You want to win the sports event so you spend months training for it, but all of that effort may be for nothing if you say, get sick, you’re out trained, or you’re simply off your game at show time. That randomness causes uncertainty that can be anxiety inducing. Yes, obviously you could just accept this is part of the joy of these types of events, but I’m proposing Prayer to a god as a means to displace this anxiety as well.
“Please, Lord Cthulhu, let me win this Ping Pong Championship”
You have now psychologically tied your odds of winning to the will of a probably fictitious Old God. The act of this alone should be absurd enough to calm someone’s nerves. Yet, now you have someone to blame other than yourself if you don’t win and that is the ego saver or atleast the absurdist grounding technique to not ruin your self esteem. You now have a thing to blame when forces outside your control do not go your way instead of only stressing about not being good enough, not being worthy, and so on.
There’s even something to be said for the perks of ritual worship.
Habits, Rituals, Gods
A feature of mine if my love of occult rituals and the book “Atomic Habits” by James Clear. In “Atomic Habits”, James talks about affirmations and “Habit Stacking”. The idea is that to reach a goal, you are more likely to achieve that goal if you build a solid habit around working towards that goal and those are two tricks to building those habits.
Affirmations are pretty ubiquitous these days, but according to James Clear there is research that indicates saying out loud often what your goals are and affirming you will reach them, does in fact increase the likely hood you will do such a thing. Habit Stacking is similar in that the idea is to do something small to trigger a mental response to then do what ever good habit you want to complete. For me, I use my altar as a ritual habit catalyst. I light a red candle to symbolize focus and burn a rose scented incense because I like rose scented incense. This is no different to Pray or Spell casting.
I used to play football for a church league (which was interesting since I did not attend any of these churches). In that league we would pray before every practice and every game. We prayed for protection from injury and for success in either training or on the field. This was always a good mental focus on working out since before I’d be horsing around with the other boys and we would all get serious after the prayer. It also had this interesting mindfulness aspect in that we were aware that you can get injured and this was just as much asking to not get hurt as it was to gain something from the event.
So we used prayer as a affirmation and as a habit stack. So why not use it secularly? Except now our options of prayer targets is grand since it doesn’t matter who, it’s the action that matters.
This was such a good video.
There is no shitty YouTuber treatment of the octopus BTW.
Tap for spoiler
He does pump fake releasing it into the ocean, but ye doesnt