Sunday, October 10, 2021

On True Religion

I did once get asked how to join my religion. I didn't answer correctly.

Correctly, my religion is self-made. The spiritual equivalent of autodidactism. Autosacralism? Hence, if you want to join my religion, you need to make your own. Turns out the recipe is short.

1. Imagine the ideal religion. 

2. Did you accidentally convert yourself?

A. If you didn't, you failed to correctly imagine the ideal religion. Repeat step 1, improving the religion, until step 2 is achieved. 


Key: there's nothing stopping you from being the only believer, except maybe your own weakness, fear, and incompetence. Sure it's suboptimal, but it's not impossible. Imagine the ideal religion of the ideal world, and you will involuntarily join that religion ahead of time. The world will become at least infinitesimally more ideal.

Check out the hundredth-monkey logic: if everyone joins a religion this way, what happens? Most likely, as each particular ideal religion is imagined in finer and finer detail, the religions converge on one single religion, exactly the religion you would get should there be a revelation from Gnon.

Rather, this is exactly the recipe for a prayer to Gnon asking for revelation, apocalypse; one he will in fact answer. If you want the true religion, you must be willing to be told what the true religion is. To ask, and to listen. To be wrong, but to correct.


P.S. I started by imagining, as best I could, the ideal government. I would then ask: why isn't the real government like my ideal government? Occasionally, it was because I had overlooked something, and my ideal government wasn't ideal. Usually, however, it was because of corruption. Having an ideal for contrast let me identify and characterize corruption much more easily.

Having found the exercise useful, I decided to try the process on religion. Now I'm a worshipper. Unexpected. Kind of transcendentally better than the fundamentally toy/hobby ideal-State version of the exercise. 

P.P.S. Notice how my conception of the true religion is the exact opposite of coercion. You cannot use this to troll for kratia in any way, shape, or form. This is a coincidence; I didn't design it this way on purpose, and that's not a coincidence.

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