Comment on Engineering Religion

Tue, 08 Dec 2015 05:55:23 GMT

A successful religion must serve Moloch, and your designer choice is how much and what exactly are you going to sacrifice first.

Not a bad first approximation, however, let's examine Gnon, or Moloch if you insist on that terminology, a little bit first. Notice that of the four of Gnon's sub-processes all but Cthulhu naturally, if in some cases rather brutally, converge towards making people believe true things or at least having an accurate working model of local reality.

Cthulhu is different, it causes people to engage in signalling completions that may very well result in them competing to believe ever more false things. In a way this signals "I'm so high status I don't need to have an accurate model of what the peasants are doing". One thing religion can do, when it's working right, is keeping a throttle on this kind of status competition, by accusing anyone who starts saying anything too outlandish of heresy. Of course, there are several ways this can go wrong. For example:

1) some outlandish thing may turn out to be true.

2) once it ceases to be conservative (as is happening with the quasi-religion of "social justice") it starts accusing anyone saying insufficiently outlandish gets accused of heresy.

Discuss