Things Hidden #5 - Religion

Greetings from Austin! I welcome the opportunity to bring to you the fifth post of Things Hidden! Episode #5 of the Things Hidden podcast is out now!

You can watch the YouTube by clicking the link here-

The script I wrote for Episode #5 can be found below. Whether you're a skeptic or a believer, I think this episode has some good stuff to chew on. The first half of the episode covers religiosity from a scientific perspective - regardless of whether God actually exists, what does science say about why humans would THINK God exists, and ACT like God exists? The second half of the episode is a comparative religion overview. We look at the five major world religions + secularism from a comparative perspective. I hope you find it helpful.

Please feel free to reach out with any questions or comments you might have. I’ve had phone conversations with three different people in the last week who reached out after watching Things Hidden and wanted to have a discussion about faith. I welcome those discussions, regardless of your vantage point.

If you want to follow along on socials too, they’re all linked here - https://linktr.ee/thingshidden

Be well.

- Travis

We ready? Let’s do this.

Welcome to Episode 5 of Things Hidden. Things Hidden is an exploration of the intersection of Faith and six factors that surround faith - Religion; Physics; Evolution; Consciousness; Philosophy; and Technological Innovation. The purpose of Things Hidden is to bring people into a closer relationship with God, and through that process coming into a closer relationship with God myself.

Episode 1 gave you the very basics of Things Hidden. Episodes 2, 3 and 4 covered Faith from a bunch of different perspectives. If you haven’t listened to those first four episodes, I would strongly encourage you to do that before starting this one. We’re still at the very very beginning of Things Hidden, and Episode 1 is definitely the best place to start.

Today we are going to talk about the first “petal” of Things Hidden - Religion. You will have noticed by now that Faith and Religion are treated separately - interrelated for sure, but still separate concepts. Faith is a belief system. Religion is the structure enacted by humans around something they deem important. Usually, the context of that “thing humans deem important” is their belief in God. Religion is the structure enacted by humans around their belief in God. But you can make money your religion. Make Ju Jitsu your religion. Make the Dallas Cowboys your religion. You can even make disbelief a religion - the religion of new atheism is the religion of disbelief. Simplistically, religions have 6 common elements - Community, Beliefs, Actions, Sacred Space, Sacred Time and Sacred Stories. It makes sense to me to think of these as the scaffolding erected around a Faith.

Putting aside whether God actually exists or not, religion has been with us humans going waaaay back. And it has persisted. Across time. Across geography. Across cultures. And religion remains with us today - dominantly so. Even with all the stats about the fading of religiosity in the US, Europe and other developed nations, nearly 85% of humans on Earth today still identify as religious. Why is that? Why has religion been with us for so long, and why has it remained so dominant? Answering those questions is a massive field of study - or more precisely, many fields of study that span six categories: evolutionary psychology, cognitive science, anthropology, sociology, archaeology, and theology. Some fascinating theories have emerged. Let’s briefly review some of the major ones across those categories.

First, from an evolutionary psychology perspective, two broad views on religious tendencies have emerged - religion as an adaptive trait that grants evolutionary advantages, and religion as a by-product of other cognitive adaptations. On religion as an adaptive trait, religion confers survival benefits because it promotes group cohesion and cooperation. We talked about this at length in Episode 3. Cohesive and cooperative groups survive challenges better. Religion enables cooperation that transcends kinship, so it’s not just your family you’re willing to sacrifice for, but your broader religious group. Religion requires costly sacrifice like fasting and rituals. Adhering to these costly sacrifices signals sincere commitment, which builds trust and cohesion. I find this view to be compelling.

On religion as a by-product of other cognitive adaptations, evolutionary psychologists posit that humans evolved powerful cognitive capacities - like agency detection, theory of mind, pattern recognition and attachment instincts. And these sorts of capacities then INCIDENTALLY led to supernatural beliefs. One prominent theory is the Hyperactive Agency Detection Device (HADD). This theory refers to our hair-trigger tendency to perceive agency - there’s a rustling in the bush nearby. We’re way better off ASSUMING the rustling is something potentially dangerous, and paying attention to it, than assuming it was the wind, ignoring it, and then the lion jumps out and eats us. Think of that simple example as a blanket concept, spread out over many millions of years of evolution.

We developed a brain that OVER-detects agency - it’s a “better safe than sorry” bias. It ends up becoming just a short hop from “there’s something out there” to “an unseen being is responsible”. Theory of Mind also comes into play - humans developed the ability to think about what others are thinking, and that includes thinking about what supernatural minds might be thinking. When you combine HADD with Theory of Mind, you get humans thinking there is a supernatural being that is responsible for all this, and then wondering what that supernatural being’s intentions are. Boom - religion.

Another view in this realm of religion as a by-product is Terror Management Theory - humans developed the cognitive capacity to contemplate our own mortality to a much greater degree than any other animal. This contemplation can destroy a man if left to ruminate on it too deeply without any guardrails. So religion emerged as a way to deal with the feelings that come along with the contemplation of our own impending death. HADD. Theory of Mind. Terror Management. I find all three to be compelling.

Second, the Cognitive Science of Religion is an entire field of study, and it points to religiosity as a natural output of ordinary cognition. Teleological Bias, Anthropomorphism and Intuitive Dualism are three related concepts that come into play here. Teleological Bias is the human tendency to assume that things exist for a reason - it goes hand in hand with HADD. There is solid research that even children at a very early age have this tendency - to assign reason to things even if that reason is not readily apparent. It’s easy to trace our teleological bias back through evolution - this tendency has a fast and frugal adaptive payoff. Guessing at the reason for something existing is much easier than deciphering slow, mechanistic causation, and has a small cost associated with occasional incorrect guesses. Evolution shaped us to assign meaning.

Anthropomorphism is the tendency to assign human characteristics to the non-human world. This is pervasive amongst humans and evidence of it exists going back tens of thousands of years. We see faces in clouds. The electrical socket looks like a face. Wilson the volleyball in the movie Cast Away. The list goes on. It was vitally important for our advancement as a species to be able to read the faces of others - both friend and foe. Anthropomorphism is the natural extension of this trait.

Intuitive Dualism refers to humans’ tendency to think of mind and matter as separable. There is strong research that shows children have this tendency from a very early age - under the age of 1. As children get older, the research shows that this tendency only strengthens. This tendency spans culture, race and geography. The separation of mind and matter is deeply embedded in us. Experts are divided about whether Intuitive Dualism emerged as an adaptive trait or a by-product of other adaptive traits. Specifically, intuitive dualism is closely related to theory of mind. Theory of mind attributes mental states that are unobservable - not able to be spatially located. So these ideas float free of flesh - likely setting the stage for intuitive dualism. In patients with autism, which is characterized by low theory of mind, research shows a much lower likelihood of separating mind and body.

Teleological Bias, Anthropomorphism and Intuitive Dualism - all push in the direction of a belief in a higher power. I find all three to be compelling.

Grouping three and four, spanning both anthropology and sociology, you have the concepts of Memes, Minimally Counter Intuitive Concepts, Credibility Enhancing Displays and Ritualized Behavior. Memes we’re going to talk a LOT about in future episodes. After all, the namesake for Things Hidden is in part from Rene Girard, the father of Mimetic Theory. For our purposes here today, we’ll keep the discussion of memes relatively tight. Simplistically, memes are units of culture, transmitted by imitation. And the strength of a meme is a function of its transmittableness. To quote Richard Dawkins, one of the most famous atheists ever, a potent meme is a virus of the mind. From this perspective, religions persist as imitated units of culture when their components exhibit maximum transmittableness. Let me say that one more time - religions persist as imitated units of culture when their components exhibit maximum transmittableness.

This maximum transmittableness immediately loops in the idea of Minimally Counter Intuitive Concepts, MCIs. MCIs are based on the view that ideas are more memorable and more contagious when they are slightly beyond ordinary experience, but not so far beyond ordinary experience that they’re incomprehensible. There are experiments that bear this concept out - MCIs are indeed more memorable than the entirely mundane or the wildly fantastical. A ghost that can walk through walls. A deity that knows everyone’s thoughts. A half man half God born of a Virgin. All outside the realm of normalcy for sure, but not SO far outside as to be incomprehensible. There’s a proven sweet spot for maximum transmittableness.

Credibility Enhancing Displays, CREDs, refer to the idea that the greater the sacrifice an observer witnesses someone make for their faith, the higher the likelihood the observer will view that faith as legitimate. This dovetails directly into the crucifixion of Jesus Christ and directly into the exaltation of martyrdom in the early Christian church. Martyrdom was very highly revered in early Christianity - it remains a central tenant of the believability of the Christian faith. The earliest followers of Christ believed He was resurrected and were willing to die for that belief. Some of them most certainly did indeed die for their faith, while the historicity around other accounts of early martyrdom are more dubious. In any case, it worked. Early Christianity proliferated in no small part due to the belief that the earliest followers of Christ died for their beliefs - so there MUST be something to it.

Ritualized Behavior is exactly what it sounds like. Emile Durkheim, considered the father of sociology, defined religion as “a unified system of beliefs and practices relative to sacred things... which unite into one single moral community all those who adhere to them”. Those beliefs and practices ARE the ritualized behavior. The ritualized behavior persists because the unification that results from that behavior provides social bonding, moral regulation, meaning making and coping with suffering and injustice.

Memes, MCIs, CREDs and Ritualized Behavior. Four intertwining, well-researched phenomena. I find all four to be compelling.

From an archeological perspective, it’s hard to pinpoint exactly how long ago religious practice emerged in humanity. One of the main things archaeologists look for in answering this question is ritualistic burial practices. The general thought is, if you put effort into burying someone, it implies some kind of belief in an afterlife, which is an aspect of religiosity. From this perspective, it appears homo sapiens MAY have been ritualistically burying their dead as far back as 135,000 years ago. By the time we get to 30-40,000 years ago, there is a good amount of evidence pointing to supernatural symbolism and ritualistic behavior that implies religiosity. So all of that to say, these religious tendencies have been with us a very, VERY long time.

Religion as an adaptive trait that grants evolutionary advantages. HADD. Theory of Mind. Terror Management. Teleological Bias, Anthropomorphism. Intuitive Dualism. Memes, Minimally Counter Intuitive Concepts, Credibility Enhancing Displays. And Ritualized Behavior. Lots of concepts, many of which are intertwined, that span at least a half dozen fields of study. They come together to paint a convincing picture for the emergence of religiosity in humans, and none of them are predicated on Faith actually being true - God could not exist, and yet science gives us a path for why we would THINK God exists, and ACT like God exists. And then. On the other side of all that, you have theology as the explanation for human religiosity. Humans are religious BECAUSE…God exists?

Can all of the above be true? Can all those fascinating scientific concepts be accurately characterizing humanity’s religiosity while simultaneously God actually existing? And all those concepts are just the logistics of the MANNER in which humans have come to interact with the existence of a Creator? Well yes, of course that could be the case. In fact, I think that’s exactly what’s going on.

Conversely, it is an unfortunate but undeniable truth that religion has been used by humans to control other humans for almost as long as we have records of any religiosity at all. Gobekli Tepe, the famous temple site built some 9,000 years ago, is in many ways still a mystery to us. But the sheer scale of archaeological findings there heavily imply a power structure in place - with leaders directing remarkably complex projects and workers executing the backbreaking implementation of those projects. This all happened some 6500 years before the pyramids were built. So it is fair to say that religion has been used by humans to control other humans for a long, long time.

Looking specifically at the Christian religion, there is a long, long line of Popes of the Catholic church being bad guys. Doing really bad things. In 897, Pope Stephen VI dug up the corpse of the prior pope, propped the corpse up in a throne and put the corpse on trial. After finding the dead prior pope guilty, Pope Stephen cut off the corpse’s fingers used in blessings and then tossed the corpse into the Tiber river. Pope John XII in 950 turned the papal residence into a brothel. Pope Benedict IX did essentially the same, and then sold the position of pope to his Godfather. There’s a long list of stuff like this.

Even going all the way back to the first 12 followers of Christ ever, the disciples. They had one among them, Judas, that betrayed Jesus and helped get him crucified. So it is just an unfortunate fact that the Christian church has had humans acting REALLY crappy since the very very beginning, and all the way through since. From 2004 to 2023, the Catholic church paid out more than $5bn in settlements to victims of sexual abuse. During that time, 16,276 credible claims of sexual abuse were brought against the church by victims. So just sit with that scale for a moment. And the Catholic church did everything they could to hide it and allow it to continue happening. A structural enablement and coverup of the pervasive raping of children within the institution of the Catholic church. Just, sit with that for a second.

And it’s not like Protestants have done much better. A scathing report of the Southern Baptist denomination in 2019 reported that from 1998 - 2018, the Southern Baptist church in the US had more than 700 confirmed cases of sexual abuse in their churches, and they structurally covered it up, just like the Catholic church.

One more thing on this topic to drive the point home. There is a subreddit called Pastor Arrested. I stumbled upon this a few years ago and it changed my life. There’s 50k people in the Pastor Arrested subreddit and the only thing people ever post is links to news articles about church clergy being arrested, almost always for sexual assault cases. That’s the only thing in the subreddit. Just link after link after link after link of pastors being arrested. For the worst shit imaginable. I ran the numbers. The subreddit has averaged 2.3 posts a DAY over the last two years. And that’s JUST the cases that make it into the online news sphere and get picked up by a Reddit user and posted in the forum. Nevermind all the other cases. Nevermind all the victims that didn’t come forward. So that is the scale at which this evil is still going on. Today. In America. Under the banner of Christ.

And so it is just a fact that bad, bad things happen in the name of religion and it’s ALWAYS been like that. But there is good news. NONE of that makes God any less real. God is no less real just because the church is made up of people that do bad things, sometimes really bad things. It just means that we are dealing with a God that did not make us as robots. We have free will. Free will to do the right thing. The selfless thing. The agape thing. And free will to do the worst possible shit imaginable. This is how this world works.

So what do you do with that? Do you just say screw it, burn the whole thing to the ground? That’s what new atheism says to do, right? Do away with religion entirely? Dissolve religion because people do bad things in the name of God? Do we have any evidence of that working?

Well. It is difficult, although not entirely impossible, to go back in time and find a significant civilization that did not have a meaningful religious component to their societal structure. That has flat out barely happened EVER in human history. It is just a fact about our species that nearly every significant gathering of humans into societal structures EVER, has had religiosity as a foundational component. The sacred and the civic have been intimately intertwined for us humans going all the way back. So there really isn’t any sort of playbook to go off of on how to build a civilization without triangulating towards a God, or at least pretending to. It is only VERY recently, less than 300 years, that developed nations have really been experimenting with largely irreligious societal structures. You see some modern attempts. The USSR tried to do it - that didn’t work out. China is currently trying to do it, we’ll see how that works out.

I think atheists would say that just because religion has played a major role in nearly every significant civilization ever up until this point, doesn’t mean it has to be like that in the future. Times change. For a long time, people lit their homes with candles. And then things change and suddenly people don’t use candles to light their homes anymore. Atheists would say religion can be like that. We used to use it, we don’t need to use it anymore, so just stop using religion…This… does not make sense to me at all. Setting aside whether God actually exists. Suggesting we abandon religiosity, completely ignores all those scientific factors I just mentioned that characterize the emergence and persistence of religiosity. You would think a science-minded atheist would realize this, right? You can’t do away with religion, just because humans are using it to control other humans and do other bad stuff. Religiosity is WITH us.

So if you can’t do away with religion, you change it right? When there’s a problem with the church, the people of the church push for reform. There is a long history of this. The message of Jesus Christ was, at its core, a reformation. Jesus looked at the Jewish Pharisees and the Sadducees of His day and He flat out said “you’re doing it wrong”. And then He taught a different way. And that way became what we now call Christianity. Some 1500 years later, Martin Luther nailed his 95 Theses to the door of the Catholic church and started Protestantism. 200 years after that, the first and second Great Awakenings. So the church just does this from time to time. And consistently, what you see is that crisis is the catalyst for reformation.

Which begs the question, Is the church in a crisis right now? Just looking at the Pastor Arrested subreddit, I would say, yes, unequivocally, the church is in crisis. And the crisis is clearly showing up in church attendance and religious affiliation numbers. When looking just at the Christian religion in the United States. Over the last 25 years, 40mm adults, about 16% of the US population, previously attended church at least monthly and now go less than once a year. Let me say that one more time - over the last 25 years, 40mm adults, about 16% of the US population, previously attended church at least monthly and now go less than once a year.

In 1990 (show graphic), 90% of Americans identified as Christians. As of 2024, that number has slid to 63%. 90% to 63% in 35 years. You can dig into the age demographics (show graphic) and extrapolate those numbers out, and project that reported rates of Christianity in America will likely fall below 50% by 2050. Americans have been leaving Christianity in droves, and this trend appears set to continue.

So yes. If you think Christianity is a good thing, it is safe to characterize this as a crisis. The data is clear. The question of WHY so many Americans have left the church is somewhat less clear. There are surveys that have been conducted to dig into the WHY, although you are dependent on survey respondents truthfully answering that question. And there’s good reason to think they might not always answer truthfully. But there are enough disparate surveys done that I think you can get a decent sense of the WHY landscape -

1) Loss of belief and intellectual doubt; 2) Logistics like moving or work schedule; 3) politics and culture war fatigue; 4) scandals; and 5) relationship frictions or feeling unloved. Those five factors show up consistently in size across surveys. And my guess is for #2, logistics, some meaningful portion of that would likely be included in the other four buckets, and people just didn’t feel comfortable saying it for one reason or another.

When I look across the board at those buckets of WHY, you can distill it down to a loss of trust. The relationship between a religious person and their religion is, like all relationships of choice, built on trust. And that trust has eroded. Significantly. (Show graphic). Over the last 20 years, Clergy is the profession that has lost the most trust out of all professions in America. I’ll say that again - Over the last 20 years, Clergy is the profession that has lost the most trust out of all professions in America. In the early 2000s, 56% of people surveyed rated Clergy honesty and ethics as high or very high. That number sank to 30% in 2024. 56 to 30 in 20 years.

And so the concept arises of rotten institutions. Institutions are simply organized systems of norms and structures that help regulate and govern specific areas of social life. Family. Education. Economy. Government. Religion. Human civilization is literally constructed of these institutions. And we humans have a LONG history of these institutions becoming rotten over time. Oftentimes an ebb and flow is present in the efficacy and trustworthiness of these institutions. There will be periods where a particular institution is working reasonably well, and periods where an institution devolves into a rotten, ineffective, untrustworthy mess. When the pendulum swings too far in that direction - it acts as a forcing function for the people to demand reformation. Reformation is enacted, and the pendulum swings back the other way. Many, many such cases.

This idea of rotten institutions is quite familiar to Bitcoiners - it is at the heart of the ethos of Bitcoin. Bitcoiners take the stance that the institution of money is rotten - the government creates dollars out of thin air and it makes the price of everything go up and erodes the purchasing power of the dollar. Bitcoiners point to the year 1971 - the year the US dollar stopped being backed by gold. And since then, the US government has been printing dollars and it’s destroying the institution of the dollar. In this way, Bitcoin acts as a radical reformation - a life raft in the tumultuous seas of inflation. If you’re not familiar with the phrase “chancellor on brink of second bailout for banks” - give that a quick Google. It is the rallying cry of the revolutionary Bitcoin reformation.

So where does that leave us with religion in the United States? With Christianity in the United States? How do we move forward, acknowledging the enormous responsibility that religion is owed in pushing humanity forward, while also acknowledging the consistent and significant evil that has been done by the church, under the banner of Christ?

Can we turn to another religion other than Christianity? As of 2015, with a global population 7.3bn, 2.3bn people identified as Christians, 3.9bn identified as some religion other than Christianity, and 1.2bn identified as non-religious.

You can assess the worthwhileness of a religion while sidestepping whether it’s true. It’s the Receipts Test. What are the receipts of the various major world religions, including the non-religious? It’s a human flourishing approach. How much has each major world religion contributed to human flourishing, NET of the damage those religions have done? Good trees produce good fruit. Bad trees produce bad fruit. What are the fruits of the major world religions? You can assess this. I could spend two hours addressing that question and only just begin to scratch the surface. So take the next 10 minutes with a grain of salt, because I’m skipping over a lot of nuance. But the underlying point is important.

First you need a framework for looking at the receipts. A framework for assessing human flourishing. A framework for assessing the fruits of the trees of major world religions. Let’s do 8 different buckets- 1- Literacy & Education 2- Science & Innovation 3- Charity & Hospitals 4- Abolition & Reforms 5- Women’s Status 6- Democracy & Rights 7- Social Trust & Cohesion and 8- Modern Well-Being (or, HDI). When you look at Christianity, Islam, Hinduism, Buddhism, Judaism and Secularism, how does each group stack up through the lens of those 8 buckets? Imagine you assign a 1-5 ranking for each of the six belief groups in each of the 8 buckets of human flourishing, then you added up all the points for each belief group? What would that look like? I want to hit on a few major points for each belief group.

For Islam, the most significant contributions to human flourishing come from the Islamic Golden Age in the 8th-12th centuries. This Golden Age was objectively one of the most scientifically fertile eras in human history. Huge advancements in mathematics, astronomy, medicine and chemistry. Islamic civilizations were far ahead of Christian Europe during the early middle ages in literacy, education, science and technological progress. And yet, it is undeniable that Islam stagnated in terms of human flourishing. Today, if you exclude the oil countries like UAE and Qatar, many countries with the highest rates of Islam are some of THE worst places on Earth - Niger, Chad, Somalia, Yemen, Afghanistan. Islam is also undeniably the most violent major world religion - it is the religion that has historically spread the most through the sword - by conquest and forced conversion. It is the only major world religion that currently permits the concept of jihadi terrorism. I am not trying to talk any Muslims out of their Faith. I’m not trying to say Muslims are going to hell. I’m not saying Islam shouldn’t exist. But for America, mass conversion to Islam is not the path to maximize human flourishing and minimize human suffering.

For Hinduism, in my view the most significant contribution to human flourishing is meditation. It’s impossible to quantify something like that, but I can say with total certainty that the concept of meditation has radically altered the world for the better. The single biggest negative for Hinduism is the caste system - relegating huge portions of a population to abject poverty and telling them it’s because of the sins they committed in a past life. That just strikes me as… really, really not the best way to go about human flourishing. When evaluating Hinduism, India dominates the statistics. It’s the most populous country in the world and the epicenter for Hinduism. Life in India is much, MUCH better now than it was when India gained its independence in 1947 - life expectancy went from 32 to 70. Extreme poverty went from 60% to 10%. And yet, when compared to America or western Europe, it is not close in terms of human flourishing. I am not trying to talk any Hindus out of their Faith. I’m not trying to say Hindus are going to hell. I’m not saying Hinduism shouldn’t exist. But for America, mass conversion to Hinduism is not the path to maximize human flourishing and minimize human suffering.

For Buddhism, I think the most significant contribution to human flourishing is the exaltation and practice of peace. Buddhism has punched so far above its weight in the flourishing of peace, and that is worth a lot. Historical buddhist societies had significantly lower rates of violence at a time when violence was extremely commonplace throughout the world. The single biggest negative is how inwardly-focused Buddhism is. At its core, Buddhism’s goal is to transcend all worldly desire and suffering. It is undeniable that this focus leads to indifference towards material progress. The receipts are right there when you look at the material progress led by primarily Buddhist nations. There has been relatively little. Human flourishing requires material progress. I am not trying to talk any Buddhists out of their Faith. I’m not trying to say Buddhists are going to hell. I’m not saying Buddhism shouldn’t exist. But for America, mass conversion to Buddhism is not the path to maximize human flourishing and minimize human suffering.

For Judaism, the Jewish people have punched massively above their weight across the board in every category of human flourishing. Jews are a people defined by their outsized contributions relative to their population. As a reminder, there are 2.3bn Christians, 1.8bn Muslims, and 15 MILLION Jews. 15. Million. So just a massively massively different scale of people we’re talking about here. Judaism brought to the world the worship of Yahweh as the one true God. Judaism didn’t quite invent monotheism but it gets the most credit in proliferating monotheism. Judaism also gets significant credit for Christianity. Jesus Christ was a Jew preaching to other Jews. Jesus’ message was entirely based on, and intimately intertwined with, the Old Testament. The biggest governor Judaism has on its contribution to human flourishing is simply its size, and its size is a function of its exclusivity. Judaism is not a religion of evangelism or conversion. Core to Judaism is the identity as “God’s Chosen People”. Judaism is simply not for everyone. I am not trying to talk any Jews out of their Faith. I’m not trying to say Jews are going to hell. I’m not saying Judaism shouldn’t exist. But for America, mass conversion to Judaism is not the path to maximize human flourishing and minimize human suffering.

For the non-religious, or secularism, it is important to note that this is just not something that’s been occurring at scale for very long at all on planet Earth. Really the very large majority of secularism being enacted at scale has come since the 19th century. There were secularist IDEAS that were sprinkled in with various groups at various times going back more than 2,000 years. And some one-off secularist concepts have been implemented ever since - the separation of church and state in the first amendment of the US constitution is a secular concept - but it happened within the context of a deeply Christian nation being formed. So when you go looking for the receipts of secularism, you’re really only looking at 2 or 300 years. You have 1400 years of Islam, 2,000 years of Christianity, and Hinduism, Buddhism and Judaism are all older than that.

In terms of secularism’s contribution to human flourishing, it is undeniable that over the last 100 years or so, increasingly more science is being conducted by secularists. It is a fact that in America our business leaders and government officials are less religious, or more secular, than they were 100 years ago. And the last 100 years has an enormous amount to show for itself in terms of human flourishing. It is also true that secular nations, specifically Scandinavia, currently have the highest ratings in the Human Development Index, they consistently rank at the top of happiness surveys. But that story is not entirely what it seems. I present my view on this in Episode #3 (CUT IN #3 SCANDINAVIA).

Secularism’s biggest negative is the scale of atrocities that have occurred, in the worst instances, in the short amount of time the secularist experiment has been ongoing. The USSR, Maoist China, Pol Pot and North Korea are four brutal examples of how bad things can go under a secular regime. And these are some of the very worst situations ever to happen to humanity. You cannot talk about secularism without talking about communism. Historically they have gone hand in hand. Communism is responsible for the largest death toll of anything ever. Add up all the purges and famines and forced labor camps across communist USSR, Maoist China, Cambodia, North Korea, Vietnam, all of it. Comes out to 85-100mm deaths. That’s more than the Nazis in WW2, which also owes at least partial credit to secularism (although not all).

In very recent times, we have the rise of “spiritual but not religious”. I’m not sure what that means, but I know of no track record for how that worldview is working out for folks over the last decade or two. I understand how the “spiritual but not religious” stance emerged - it is undoubtedly a function of the rottenness of the institution of the church. People are looking to get the “vibes” of God without dealing with all the mess of the church. I’m sympathetic to that. I get it. That said, I struggle to imagine that the “spiritual but not religious” crowd have cracked the code. Secularism simply cannot be the answer for humanity at scale. The receipts are too bad. For modern day America, mass deconversion to secularism is not the path to maximize human flourishing and minimize human suffering.

Islam. Hinduism. Buddhism. Judaism. Secularism. That leaves us with Christianity, which was covered at length in Episode 3 and additionally earlier in this Episode. It is the largest religion in the world. Christianity is a religion that has produced high highs and low lows. Big wins and big losses. Christianity has spread by the sword - second only to Islam in that regard. The Spanish conquistadors that conquered the Americas? That was a Christian movement. And the indigenous people that died in the process, mostly through disease? It’s hard to have an accurate number on that but 50mm deaths is probable. That’s one of the largest losses of human life ever. That’s on Christianity. Christians also get partial credit for the Holocaust. Nazism is, at its core, an utterly secular movement. But the Holocaust, that has undeniable roots in the radical antisemitism in certain pockets of Protestantism, namely Lutherans. Martin Luther became a bitter antisemite in his later years. And that Protestant antisemitism was one of the main ingredients in the ideology that became Nazism. We already went over the pervasive sexual abuse of children and the structural coverup of that abuse. But just as a reminder, Christianity did that too. Like I said, some low lows. Some big losses.

And yet, when you line up Christianity next to other major world religions, the highs net of the lows still puts Christinaity on top (SHOW TABLE). Of course you can have a discussion about the methodology and the assigned weightings. And those are good discussions to have. The main point I want to make here is that I think Christianity wins out on receipts, but that it’s kinda close in some cases. Christianity is not a runaway winner. That’s part of the reason why I hesitate to outright condemn religions other than Christianity. To do so would be to ignore the results of Christianity relative to other belief systems. I do honestly believe Christianity has the most to show for itself, but it’s not like a blowout.

Christian apologists - those who speak in defense of Christianity - need to understand that they only have a leg to stand on because of the fruits of the tree of Christianity. I know that Christian apologists would vehemently disagree here - they would say that Christianity’s leg to stand on is that’s true, where all other religions are false. This does not hold water to me in the context of grasping at the ungraspable and the overall messiness of the Bible. The fruits of the tree of Christianity are how we know that Christianity is true. Imagine if Christians, as a whole, acted like ISIS. If Christians acted like ISIS, Christianity’s claims to “truth” would be meaningless. As the saying goes, the proof is in the pudding. I do absolutely believe that following the life and teachings of Jesus Christ is the most beneficial thing for you and the most beneficial thing for humanity.

But Christianity is a religion that needs reformation. The path forward must be a path of reformation. 2.3 posts a day on the Pastor Arrested subreddit. There must be significant changes made in church hiring and oversight practices until that 2.3 number is something much lower. How can you expect people to do anything other than leave the church when the church is acting like that and apparently not doing much to fix it? I have a baby daughter. If I would never leave my daughter alone in a church, what does that say about church?

These are tough questions but they demand attention. The situation demands reformation. Because the life and teachings of Jesus Christ are the best framework in human history upon which to build a flourishing society. You lay it out vs Islam, Hinduism, Buddhism, Judaism, and Secularism - Christianity has the most to show for itself. But that is not necessarily an absolute truth. Much, much damage has been done under the banner of Christ, and that continues today. Reformation is required.

Ok. That’s it. We covered a lot here. Again, many of these topics are deep and we barely began scratching the surface. But these will set the stage for future episodes down the road. Gives us a place to work from.

The next episode will be about Physics. If you enjoyed this, hit like and subscribe. If you want to sign up for the blog, it’s in the description. If you’re looking for the online community, it’s coming soon. If you know someone that would be interested in Things Hidden, send this to them. I really appreciate your time, and I wish you the best.