Towards a Periodic Table of the Gods

Peter A. Taylor
February 17, 2023
Rev. A, May 27, 2024

The question isn't "Can you believe in God?", but "Can you define 'God' in a way that's useful to you?".
— Rev. Davidson Loehr

This is partly a reaction to Jordan Peterson's speech to Sam Harris near the end of the first Vancouver debate on the meaning of the word, "God", partly a reaction to Paul VanderKlay's resulting comments on "God 1 and God 2" (second Melbourne talk), partly a reaction to some 12-step doctrines about a "higher power", partly an attempt to organize my thoughts about managing my own life, and partly an attempt to flesh out the Church of Glaucon. For context, I was raised Protestant, but I'm now an atheist, at least with respect to the God I grew up believing in. But I take religion seriously, and I'm spiritually homesick, as I think many other people are.

Does the Church of Glaucon need theology? (Pascal Boyer seems to think so.) How flexible can it be? To whom can I pray with a straight face? How friendly can the Church of Glaucon be with Christianity? My (Christian) brother used to say that spirituality is the wine, and dogma (theology) is the bottle. How much can I tamper with the bottle without ruining the wine? (VanderKlay uses the wineskin/wine analogy in this conversation with James Croft on the Ethical Culture Society.) A better metaphor might be whiskey aged in charred oak barrels. There is no question that the barrels affect the taste of the whiskey. Can I make a synthetic whiskey barrel that produces tolerably good whiskey?

Peterson's relevant remarks are between 1:26:10 and 1:29:36 here.

Part of the conception of God that underlies the Western ethos is the notion that whatever God is, is expressed in the truthful speech that rectifies pathological hierarchies. That isn't all it does. It also confronts the chaos of Being itself and generates habitable order. That's the metaphysical proposition, and that that's best conceptualized as at least one aspect of God. And so I would think about it as a transcendent reality that's only observable across the longest of timeframes, the longest of iterated timeframes, to your point [pointing at Sam Harris], so okay, so here's some propositions, and they're complicated, and they need to be unpacked. I'm just going to read them, and that will just have to do for the time being.

• So, God is how we imaginatively and collectively represent the existence and action of consciousness across time as the most real aspects of existence manifest themselves across the longest timeframes but are not necessarily apprehensible as objects in the here and now. So what that means in some sense is that you have conceptions of reality built into your biological and metaphysical structure that are consequences of processes of evolution that occurred over unbelievably vast expanses of time and that structure your perception of reality in ways that it wouldn't be structured if you only lived for the amount of time that you're going to live. And that's also part of the problem of deriving values from facts because you're evanescent and you can't derive the right values from the facts that portray themselves to you in your lifespan. Which is why you have a biological structure that's like 3.5 billion years old.

• So God is that which eternally dies and is reborn in the pursuit of higher being and truth. That's a fundamental element of the hero mythology.

• God is the highest value in the hierarchy of values. That's another way of looking at it.

• God is what calls and what responds in the eternal call to adventure.

• God is the voice of conscience.

• God is the source of judgement and mercy and guilt.

• God is the future to which we make sacrifices, and something akin to the transcendental repository of reputation.

• Here's a cool one if you're an evolutionary biologist: God is that which selects among men in the eternal hierarchy of men. So you know men arrange themselves into hierarchies and then men rise in the hierarchy and there's principles that are important that determine the probability of their rise and those principles aren't tyrannical power, they're something like the ability to articulate truth and the ability to be competent and the ability to make appropriate moral judgements, and if you can do that in a given situation then all the other men will vote you up the hierarchy so to speak and that will radically increase your reproductive fitness and the operation of that process across long expanses of time looks to me like it's codified in something like the notion of God the Father. It's also the same thing that makes men attractive to women. 'Cause women peel off the top of the male hierarchy. The question is what should be at the top of the hierarchy and the answer right now is tyranny as part of the patriarchy but the real answer is something more like the ability to use truthful speech in the service of, let's say, well-being. And so that's something that operates across tremendous expanses of time. And it plays a role in the selection for survival itself, which makes it a fundamental reality.

In a recent interview with Lex Fridman, Peterson also said,

• God is the spirit that you must emulate in order to thrive.

A couple of Rev. VanderKlay's talks are relevant here. One of them is "What do Jordan Peterson and Sam Harris Mean by 'God'?" About 12 minutes in, he reiterates Peterson's laundry list. There is also his "Melbourne 2" talk, "Jordan Peterson Rediscovers God #1 after the Enlightenment Split". The part I care about is between 12:38 and 16:13. From his written YouTube comments,

This is the second of the talks I gave in Australia in March 2019. The Enlightenment split God into God #1 (the whole earth is full of his glory: impersonal, Mother of all structures, immanent) and God #2 (Holy Holy Holy, Father of all personhood, transcendent agent). Jordan Peterson against Sam Harris identifies what I call God #1 as being essential for human psychology after post-deism Darwin made God #1 an impersonal backdrop for diminishing human agency.

(In John Vervaeke's terms, God #1 is the "arena" and God #2 is the "agent".)

Update, 4-4-20223: Here's an interesting and relevant new PvK commentary on a panel discussion on Peterson's recent Exodus series.

VanderKlay is a minister in the Christian Reformed Church (CRC, i.e. Dutch Calvinist), and is committed to monotheism. He talks about God 1 and God 2 in order to clarify how people misunderstand God, but ultimately he is trying to combine all of these uses of the word, "God", into a single, cohesive whole.

I'm going in the opposite direction. The God of Christian monotheism appears to me to be a hopelessly overloaded metaphor. Yes, there are the Trinity, angels, and saints (if you're Catholic), but this metaphoric division of labor doesn't go nearly far enough in my opinion. On the other hand there was a Santerian priestess, Dr. Mary Ann Clark (Rice University Ph.D in Religious Studies), who used to be a member of my Unitarian Universalist church. As a result of Dr. Clark's talks, I have had more exposure to Santerian theology than the average honkey aerospace engineer, and frankly, it makes a lot more sense to me than Christian monotheism. Santeria is polytheistic, with a hierarchy. There is a high creator god, Olodumare, with whom humans don't interact^*, along with a large number of lesser spirits (orisha), with whom humans do interact. Pascal Boyer writes in Religion Explained (ISBN 0-465-00696-5, paper, p. 141), "This is in fact a common theme in African religions, where a supreme god is both supreme and in actual fact of little importance to people." There is a particular orisha, Elegua, who acts as a gatekeeper. I was raised Protestant, so the idea of a supernatural gatekeeper or intercessor goes against my formal upbringing, but I find it intuitively appealing.

^*An army private normally doesn't have the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff on speed dial.

I'm also quite comfortable with anthropomorphisms. My father taught physics and electronics at a community college, and he liked to anthropomorphize electrons. He said that the reason why electrons repel other electrons is because they dislike one another's "smell". Basically, I think gods are mostly, and probably entirely, anthropomorphisms. But I'm okay with that. Anthropomorphisms are useful.

As I said, I'm going in the opposite direction from Paul VanderKlay. I don't think Jordan Peterson's list of "god" meanings ought to be smushed together into a single baffling, and in my view, inconsistent conglomeration. Instead, not only does Peterson's list seem to me to point to multiple gods, but even different categories of gods. Santerians seem to have about a hundred of them, and they say that there's always one more that you don't know about. Combining these sorts of numbers with different categories suggests to me something like the Periodic Table of the Elements. Some of these orishas remind me of the "elementals" from Western mythology, so this is sort of a pun. I don't have ideas for anything like a hundred of them, but here are my ideas for some categories that may be very loosely analogous to the columns in the Periodic Table. I don't really think I should be using integer arithmetic here.

My proposed categories:

1. Ground of Being — Paul Tillich wrote of God as the "Ground of Being". I think of this as the answer to the question, "Why is there something rather than nothing?", one of the seven questions that Sam Keen says any good religion has to answer. This corresponds to the Santerian Olodumare. But does the Ground of Being have to be conscious? I don't see why. It also seems impersonal, not something humans can interact with. Rev. Davidson Loehr complained that Tillich's Ground of Being is not "cuddly"; the Ground of Being might have a soft spot in its heart for the Law of Universal Gravitation, but it doesn't seem like something that would be very interested in humans (if it's conscious at all).

2. Fixer — One of the arguments for the existence of God is the "argument from fine tuning". As Fred Hoyle put it, "The universe is an obvious fix." There are a number of parameters in physics (Plank's constant, the speed of light, the charge on an electron, etc.) that have to be in a very tiny sweet spot in order for the universe to be an interesting place to live. Tamper with any of these very much, and the Big Bang doesn't happen, or chemistry doesn't produce anything complicated enough to produce life, or stars and planets don't form. I don't know enough about physics to have a feel for whether I should be impressed by this argument. People who do know more than I do, do seem to take it seriously. If I accept this argument, that gets me as far as Deism: a belief in a God that set things in motion, but doesn't necessarily involve Himself in the continued operation of the universe. This sort of God, Hoyle's Fixer, is the answer to the question, "Why is the universe complicated, interesting, and capable of supporting life?" But this Fixer doesn't seem cuddly, either. It doesn't seem like the sort of being that would be likely to care enough about humans to create a Heaven or a Hell.

   Is Hoyle's Fixer conscious? At first, it seems obvious that it would have to be, to care whether the universe was interesting or not, and to design one that was. But remember, we've been here before in biology (see Richard Dawkins, The Blind Watchmaker). It looked like we needed a conscious deity to design such intricate mechanisms as living organisms, but it turned out that there was a process that created complicated things from simple things. The Fixer might or might not be conscious. The Fixer also might or might not be the same thing as the Ground of Being.

3. Mother Nature — "God" is often used synonymously with "Mother Nature". That is, "God" is a personification of forces or processes of nature, such as natural selection. These tend to be impersonal, and are often unjust and often inscrutable. I vaguely recall there being a Jewish tradition that God is beyond any human ideas about good and evil. Mother Nature is like that. It's often said that "Mother Nature is a bitch." She is not conscious, and she is not cuddly in any consistent way. "He who made kittens put snakes in the grass", as the Jethro Tull song has it. Lady Fortuna (dumb luck, "acts of God") is an aspect of Mother Nature. She doesn't answer prayer.

   Mother Nature "wants" me to propagate my genes, but doesn't necessarily care about my happiness. She also tends not to care very much how I treat people I'm not closely related to. Furthermore, She wants that leopard that's stalking me to propagate its genes, too. I may or may not live through the night. She's happy either way.

   Note that these first three "gods" are anthropomorphisms for things that exist independently of humans. These phenomena existed before humans evolved, and will continue to exist after humans become extinct. They are also universal (monotheistic); the laws of physics are the same for all people, even though people's understandings of physics will differ.

4. Supernatural Benefactor — Atheists commonly interpret "God" as an adult version of Santa Claus, a conscious, supernatural gift bringer and miracle worker who exists independently of humans and who helps us out in this life. Santa Claus is like a superhuman parent that one can have a personal relationship with. You can write Him letters. You can make deals with, or at least influence, Him. You can do things or not do things to get on His "nice" list and off of His "naughty" list. He tends to be universalistic, and tends not to fight with other gods. His rewards are this-worldly, and He is motivated more by benevolence than by wanting to manipulate people's behavior.

   I'm making this sound like a straw man, but Sam Harris has a point. Lots of people really do believe in a benevolent God who sometimes bends the laws of nature in order to answer prayers. And Jordan Peterson is evasive about whether or not he believes in Jesus' resurrection.

   Full disclosure: I used to describe myself as a "recovering Pentacostal". My mother died when I was young, and she took my brother and me to an Assembly of God church during much of that time. The question of whether faith healing is a realistic hope is a sore point for me.

   If you believe in an afterlife, does the same Supernatural Benefactor operate in both realms? If so, what is the relationship between this world and the next? Christians seem inconsistent about whether to expect help now or later. An afterlife makes God's benevolence non-falsifiable. But if we believe in an afterlife, why do we expect any help in this life at all? Perhaps it would make more sense to have a separate god to help us in the afterlife.

5. Supernatural Artillery — The God of the Old Testament often functions as an unreliable supernatural artillery piece. He may knock down the walls of Jericho for you. Or not. Victory is assured, if He doesn't have other plans, and if you are holy enough, but no one can be sure what His plans are or if you are holy enough until afterwards. (Or maybe He isn't as powerful relative to other gods as His priests say He is.) This God is similar to the Supernatural Benefactor, but this one is particularist, and often does fight with other gods (or Satan, who doesn't count as a "god" in Christian theology). The Benefactor and the Artillery Piece could be combined, but I prefer to keep them distinct because of the particularism vs. universalism issue. It may help to think of Archangel Michael as opposed to Santa Claus.

   As an aside: Why is labor distributed between God and His people the way it is? Is God trying to teach us to be self-reliant? He gives hope against impossible odds, but He still needs or at least wants us to participate in the joint effort. Does God have constraints He doesn't want us to know about, or can't explain to us?

   This God could be seen as a false promise to motivate people during wartime. Alternately, it could be seen as an attempt to create a self-fulfilling prophesy. We'll win because we think we'll win.

6. Highest Ideal — This is Peterson's "highest value in the hierarchy of values". I think this traces back to Ludwig Feuerbach's statement that, "a God who is not benevolent, not just, not wise, is no God." This God is a projection of everything that humans consider good. This God does not exist independently of humans.

   From a Darwinian perspective, ideals may be objective in the sense that there may be one particular set of values that is optimal in terms of passing your genes on to the next generation in a particular environment. But happiness and genetic success are not the same thing, and environments differ in part because your neighbors' ideas will be different in different neighborhoods. Social norms are emergent, i.e. "socially constructed". In game theory terms, there are "multiple equilibria". Happiness is somewhat subjective, but social scientists who try to talk about this sort of thing end up using words like "transjective" or "inter-subjective". Are the highest ideals of the Aztecs the same as the highest ideals of the Jains? If you are monotheistic in the sense of saying that there is one set of values that is ideal for all people, you will find that other people have a lot of "false" gods. Or as James Henry Breasted wrote, "Monotheism is but imperialism in religion."

7. Idealized Tribal Leader — I am using the word, "tribal", metaphorically here, as a synonym for "ingroup". This is an ideal image of a tribal elder or leader, and the source of the moral authority of actual leaders. "Leadership" includes both dispute avoidance and resolution within the tribe (de-conflicting people's roles, compromise, redistribution, charity, and judiciary functions) and war leadership (including strategy and external negotiations). Usually, the ideal leader wants burdens to be distributed fairly, but sometimes, especially in war, He may have to ask someone to take a bullet for the team, or for some even higher cause. Sometimes God seems less like Santa Claus, and more like General Patton: If you're in the Third Army, General Patton has plans for you, but they may involve getting you killed. The Ideal Tribal Leader may have to take responsibility for dirty work that you don't want to be too closely associated with the Highest Ideal.

   Every tribe is likely to need its own particular divine leader, especially when going to war. This ideal leader doesn't need to exist outside of people's heads. But the actual leader sometimes probably needs to be able to say something equivalent to the crusader slogan, "Deus vult" (God wills it). The ideal leader doesn't have to be supernatural (i.e. able to throw lightning bolts), but it has to be sacred.

   The ideal leader doesn't need to be conscious, or need to exist independently of human beings, but it may have to be in some sense a hive mind, or "egregore". (I discuss egregores at length later. You can think of an egregore as a flock, except that an egregore has to define an outgroup and has to offer a feedback loop.) Gary Lachman described Pepe the Frog as an egregore. Paul VanderKlay describes "school spirit" as an egregore, or what St. Paul described in terms of "principalities and powers". Elsewhere, VanderKlay gives "Uncle Sam" as an example, but I can't find an appropriate link. I'm thinking of "corporate culture", but that doesn't sound very sacred. If I want to get a large group of people to cooperate with one another, and sacrifice for the common good (or some other higher cause), I may need an egregore.

   In episode 35 of Awakening from the Meaning Crisis, John Vervaeke talks of "symbols" as opposed to "signs". Symbols are metaphorical and participatory. If I understand these terms correctly, an egregore is both distributed software that runs on many minds, and the symbol that acts as a sort of interrupt signal that causes the software to run.

8. Objective Source of Morality — There was a book review by Arthur Leff known as The Memorandum from the Devil. Arthur Leff's God is the source of objective morality. This differs from both the Highest Ideal and the Idealized Tribal Leader in that it purports to be universal rather than tribal (universalism vs. particularism). In Leff's view, all tribes are united under one God, the source of all moral authority. Again, this looks to me like imperialism in religion.

   Monotheism is essential to the way Leff approaches moral philosophy, as objective and universal. But is morality really objective? I claim that it's possible to set things up differently, but if you've abandoned monotheism^*, you really need to start over from scratch in order to do this.

   ^* Some people believe in multiple gods, but only worship one god. This is called henotheism or monolatry. It's close enough to monotheism for my purposes. (Is Satan a "god"? As long as you don't worship Him, it doesn't matter.)

   In The Theory of Moral Sentiments, Adam Smith anthropomorphizes the conscience as an "impartial spectator". If this is really impartial, it is a synonym for this sort of god, who defines objective morality. In practice, in Smith's view, morality is socially constructed, and different cultures will produce different gods' opinions. (F. A. Hayek similarly describes morality as an emergent phenomenon in The Fatal Conceit.) This morality isn't really objective. Within a particular culture or religion, it may function as if it were objective, but the apparent objectivity disappears when one comes into contact with outsiders.

   Many Western atheists and agnostics don't seem to realize that their "self-evident" moral premises are often only self-evident to people who grew up in a society that has been heavily influenced by Christian monotheism. Some people (e.g. Jerry Coyne) believe in "moral scientism", which claims that moral propositions are objective scientific facts. People like Coyne will likely want to separate their claimed Objective Source of Morality (or source of moral authority) from any image they might have of an Idealized Tribal Leader.

   A second reason (besides the universal/objective vs. particular/socially constructed divide) to separate an Objective Source of Morality from an Idealized Tribal Leader is that moral philosophy might not be enough. A moral philosophy can tell you in general to be loyal to your nation, and possibly who has moral authority over you, but it may not be able to tell you in detail what hills are worth dying on. The tribal leader should generally conform to "objective" morality, but has to decide details, edge cases, and exceptions. Such leadership may require more flexibility than an Objective Source of Morality can give.

   In my case, a second reason to separate Highest Ideal from Objective Source of Morality is that I have libertarian prejudices regarding morality. I think of "morality" as being about rules for avoiding sins of commission, whereas Highest Ideal may involve breaking the rules in order to avoid sins of omission. But maybe that's just me.

   I don't take moral scientism seriously. I don't believe that morality is objective, or that there exists a God who exists independently of human minds and who cares enough about human behavior to provide supernatural rewards or punishments. So for me, this kind of god appears to be a legal fiction.

   Arthur Leff's God may not exist as an independent, supernatural, conscious being, but it can still exist as an egregore, which we might want to depict using an anthropomorphism. But if I'm wrong, and this God exists independently of human beings, then He would have to be conscious.

9. Source of Evil — Another of Sam Keen's seven questions is, "Why is there evil?" Christianity has problems with "theodicy": If there is an omnipotent, good God, why is human life full of suffering? "Lucifer" entered the Christian mythos as a result of a bad translation of Isaiah, but the idea stuck because it mitigates the theodicy problem. (According to Elaine Pagels' The Origin of Satan, ideas about Satan have varied enormously over time. Sometimes Satan is depicted as God's assistant, and sometimes as an implacable enemy.) Christianity is monotheistic in that Satan is not considered a "god", but I refer here to supernatural beings in general as "gods".

   Satan is depicted as supernatural and conscious, but the answer to the question, "Why is there evil?", need not be. The musical, Avenue Q, had two characters called the Bad Idea Bears, who were depicted as conscious and non-supernatural. There is also no reason why an egregore can't be evil, and they don't need to be conscious. Gnostics typically believe in a high god who is good, and a lower ranking god (demiurge) who is evil. But the reverse is also possible: a high god or gods who tend to be legalistic and pitiless, and a less powerful god or gods who are benevolent (e.g. Prometheus).

   Note that Jordan Peterson uses the word, "evil" in a strong sense, meaning deliberate, gratuitous cruelty. "Evil is the production of suffering for suffering's sake." (See also M. Scott Peck's The People of the Lie.) I am using the word, "evil", here in a weak sense, that also includes behavior that is self-destructive for me in the long term (often due to bad impulse control), selfish on my part (bad for my tribe), or selfish on my tribe's part (bad for humans in general). Selfish behavior on the part of supernatural beings may not be "evil" in the Petersonian sense, but it is "evil" in the weak sense of being bad for humans.

   Once you drop the assumption that there is a supreme, omnipotent God who is good in an objective, yet humanly recognizable sense, the theodicy problem goes away, and with it, much of the need for evil deities. Different gods simply have different opinions and loyalties. But I still want anthropomorphisms for certain kinds of bad behavior.

   A common theme on the internet is a "Rationalization Hamster", something internal to each person's mind, but which performs the same function as the Bad Idea Bears, of rationalizing self-destructive behavior. But the Rationalization Hamster is also a lawyer, who opposes the Idealized Tribal Leader and tries to get us individually off the hook for breaking the rules. This involves self-deception, which is evil in the weak sense because (A) it often leads to self-destructive behavior and (B) it makes us better liars, which makes cooperation more difficult. Evil in the strong sense, e.g. the Columbine shooters, also typically involves rationalizations, such as misrepresenting revenge or jealousy as justice.

   Some people's brains are simply broken, e.g. schizophrenia. Is that "evil"? Demon possession doesn't appear to me to be a very useful model for schizophrenia.

10. Collective Unconscious — It's been a while since I've dabbled in Jungian psychology, but one of his ideas was the collective unconscious. I don't recall whether Jung talked about "God" in these terms, but in episode 24 of Awakening from the Meaning Crisis, John Vervaeke talks about Hegel's idea of "Geist", which was intended as a reinterpretation of the God of the Old Testament. Hegel's "Geist" is at least partially conscious, but seems to include the collective unconscious.

    This sounds like another class of egregores. A collective unconscious can exist on multiple levels, i.e. for multiple different groups and sub-groups. It seems to me that a collective unconscious could be combined with some of the previous gods, such as an image of an Idealized Tribal Leader or an Objective Source of Morality, but these combinations seem to me like a bad idea.

    There is a Jewish tradition about God and man as co-creators of the world. Vervaeke mentions this in episode 3. "Axial age Israel is more and more about participating in the ongoing creation of the world, shaping the future, moral improvement." This sounds like a job for a collective unconscious.

    Again, why is labor distributed between God and His people the way it is?

11. Jungian Archetypes — Carl Jung also wrote about the "objective psyche", or "archetypes", parts of the human mind (sub-personalities?) that are common to all people. These are commonly represented by Greek gods. I think of these as invariant over time and not dependent for their existence on interaction with other people. This puts them in the realm of personal psychology rather than social psychology. But I don't remember Jungian psychology very well, and I may have to eat my words here.

    The Rationalization Hamster mostly lives here, as I see it. You'll notice that several of my categories of gods overlap (e.g. Source of Evil), especially when we're talking about archetypes. It's even more confusing to talk about egregores. I think of "The Rationalization Hamster" as referring to an archetype, which doesn't depend for its existence on social interactions. But when people do get together to form an egregore, their Rationalization Hamsters will probably want a piece of the action.

    The Trickster (e.g. Coyote and Nasreddin) also lives here. I'm going to put The Muse, or The Source of Inspiration in here as well, although this could arguably belong in either the Collective Unconscious or The Shadow. Anacreon will do as an example, as he seems to have been posthumously elevated to godhood.

12. The Shadow — Jung also wrote about "the shadow", the parts of someone's personality of which he is not fully aware. These parts exert a powerful influence over someone's life precisely because he is not fully aware of them, and are sometimes described as someone's "demons". These are also in the realm of personal rather than social psychology, but they vary from person to person, and can change over time.

    The Shadow is not necessarily bad. If I present myself as a tough guy, tenderness will be part of my Shadow.

13. Delayed Gratification — One of Peterson's "God" meanings is "the future to which we make sacrifices." I think of this as an anthropomorphism for delayed gratification. You can negotiate with this God, unlike Mother Nature. You are negotiating with a future version of yourself, or perhaps I should say, with one of your sub-personalities who doesn't like your current plans. This "God" doesn't need to have supernatural powers, or to exist outside of your head. Bring your own consciousness.

14. The Author — Paul VanderKlay likes to talk about God in terms of J.R.R. Tolkien writing The Lord of the Rings. Where is Tolkien in TLotR? In one sense, he isn't in the book at all. Frodo doesn't pray to Tolkien. In another sense, the whole book is Tolkien. Tolkien isn't concerned with the well-being of his characters, and may be happy to tell a story where the good guys lose. He isn't necessarily trying to do allegory. He isn't "good" or just in any consistent way. He's not cuddly. He just wants to tell an interesting story. He is conscious, though.

    This storyteller analogy may make sense in terms of VanderKlay trying to explain the difference between immanence and transcendence, but for me, it doesn't paint an attractive picture of the God that VanderKlay wants me to worship.

15. Bringer of Justice — One kind of supernatural being or force is a supernatural bringer of justice. Justice could arrive in this life or in an afterlife. Christians seem inconsistent about whether they expect justice in this life or not; again, there seems to be an unexplained division of labor between this-worldly and posthumous delivery of consequences. Arthur Leff's Devil dispenses justice, or at least divine revenge^*, in the afterlife. In some cultures, Santa Claus is paired with Krampus, who punishes bad children in this life. The relationship between Leff's God and his Devil is unclear. Is the Devil a rebel who works against God's wishes, or a subordinate who enforces God's will? (Again, this ambiguity has a long history: see The Origin of Satan, by Elaine Pagels.) But the functions of defining morality and enforcing it seem to be separate in many mythologies. Neither Krampus nor the Devil have the authority to redefine what "sin" is.

    ^*I am lumping justice and revenge together here. The difference I see between them is mostly proportionality, although revenge could be more about jealousy on the part of the person seeking revenge than about objectively bad behavior on the part of the target.

    What justice means to us is precisely that the world be filled with the storms of our revenge.
      — Friedrich Nietzsche, 'On the Tarantulas', from Thus Spoke Zarathustra: A Book for All and None, translated by Walter Kaufmann

    Krampus and the Devil also don't seem to have the authority to offer grace. That decision is made at a higher level. They seem to only be agents of legalism.

16. Divine Snitch — Some of the gods Pascal Boyer describes in Religion Explained (e.g. the Kwaio people's adalo (ancestors), p. 157) are supernatural information conduits. They can tell when you're lying. They are likely to snitch on you, so you'd better be honest.

17. Peacemaker — A lot of people want to believe in a God who has a soft spot in His heart for humans in general, not just members of a particular tribe. Consider the following quotation from God Is Not One: The Eight Rival Religions That Run the World — and Why Their Differences Matter, by Stephen Prothero (p. 180):

    In a Purim sermon I heard once at the Wailing Wall in Jerusalem, an Orthodox rabbi spoke of driving into the city every day through an Arab section and greeting the people he saw there with joy rather than panic. He then urged his listeners to drink of wine and God until they could not tell the difference between enemies and friends, Arabs and Israelis, the cursed Haman and the blessed Mordecai.

    While I share David Sloan Wilson's skepticism of religion eliminating inter-group conflict and bringing about the universal brotherhood of man, I see a need for a complement to the General Patton-like Idealized Tribal Leader god who leads his tribe in war. Somebody also needs to lead the tribe out of war. Someone needs to be able to throw the "off" switch.

18. Bridge to the Supernatural Realm — Earlier, I mentioned the Santerian orisha, Elegua, as a supernatural "gatekeeper". A better metaphor might be a "bridge". There is a Catholic tradition of praying to saints, who perform a similar function. Saints are minor supernatural beings who can lubricate communications with God, or the gods, or other supernatural beings. While the Christian God is supposed to be capable of hearing prayers, a lot of us have trouble imagining that He would want to. One Catholic woman explained why she likes to pray to Mary by saying "Jesus wouldn't listen to me but he'd listen to his mother."

19. Subjective Sources of Morality — A lot of Santerian orishas seem similar to nature elementals. I am tempted to treat them as fragments of Mother Nature, except that you can have personal relationships with them in ways that you can't have a personal relationship with Mother Nature. Different orishas might have different ideas about morality, and issue different orders. If I recall correctly, you're not supposed to shop around for an orisha who tells you what you want to hear, but some of that probably happens. In any case, you can have different members of the same community with different sources of moral guidance, which will sometimes conflict with one another.

    Some of the pre-Axial Age gods that Pascal Boyer writes about seem to have no particular interest in morality, but are prone to throwing snit-fits, so you have to propitiate them.

20. Motivator — David Sloan Wilson writes (p. 176), "Loving and serving a perfect God is vastly more motivating than loving and serving one's imperfect neighbor." I'm having a hard time separating Motivator from Highest Ideal or Idealized Tribal Leader. They could easily be combined, but they bring up different images for me. What motivates me is highly idiosyncratic. I think of my maternal grandmother. In my mind, my grandmother cares very little for what the neighbors think, and vice versa. She's not helping me coordinate with others. She does have the authority to ask me to take a bullet for the team, but she seems very different from General Patton, who would sacrifice me a lot more readily. I don't require her to be perfect, I just need her to be on my team, and to care what I do. This sort of god doesn't need to exist anywhere outside of my head.

    The Santa Claus/Krampus carrot-and-stick combination is another way to motivate people. I mentioned them above in the contexts of benevolence and justice, but they make sense in this context, too.

    D. S. Wilson claims in Darwin's Cathedral (ch. 3) that the forgiveness of sins is important as motivation; that it is more effective than belief in Hell (or metaphorical kinship, for that matter). If I understand him correctly, he's saying that guilt is a powerful motivator regardless of whether or not justice will ever be served.

    Neither justice nor revenge is necessarily an attempt to influence someone's behavior. As Dr. Strangelove so memorably pointed out in the movie, deterrence (e.g. a doomsday machine) only makes sense if the person you are trying to deter knows about it. Is the Christian Hell about incentives for good behavior or about revenge? (Some versions of Hell may be about justice, but the stereotypical versions, such as Dante's, are too far over the top.)

21. Spirit of Agape — John Vervaeke's Jesus is a personification of agape (parental or sacrificial love). "God is love" makes sense when Vervaeke says it. St. Paul elaborated on this. (See Episode 15, Marcus Aurelius and Jesus, starting at the 44:13 mark, and Episode 16, Christianity and Agape.)

    The Spirit of Agape is not necessarily distinct from the Highest Ideal. Your highest ideal may well be agape, although it may also be a lot more complicated than that.

    The Spirit of Agape is also not necessarily clearly distinct from the Supernatural Benefactor (an adult version of Santa Claus) or from role of Motivator. But Santa Claus (or the actual historical Saint Nicolaus) brings you money or things that can be bought with money. Jesus sacrifices himself for you (He "takes a bullet" for you, so to speak) and transforms you. Jacob Faturechi, about 2 minutes into this Paul VanderKlay video, describes some people as thinking of God as a divine vending machine. Santa Claus, especially in conjunction with Krampus, may look like a divine vending machine, but Jesus, in the role of the Spirit of Agape, does not, and there is no question that there might be a quid pro quo.

22. Supernatural Exchange Partner — The idea of gods as supernatural exchange partners figures strongly in Laurence Iannaccone's writings about religion. According to Iannaccone, "magic" is supernatural production, where "religion" is supernatural negotiation (see Religious Extremism: Origins and Consequences). D. S. Wilson quotes Rodney Stark and William Bainbridge, who write, "Religion consists of very general explanations that justify and specify the terms of exchange with a god or gods."

    Supernatural exchange doesn't necessarily have anything to do with morality. Boyer, p. 198, talks about the Kwaio people having an exchange relationship with their adalo (ancestors), and complaining that sometimes the ancestors are "pushing it". Sometimes a divine vending machine may steal your quarter, and sometimes may even engage in extortion. Some gods are just selfish jerks. Zeus comes to mind.

    John Vervaeke describes Bronze Age gods in general as not being very interested in morality. As Judaism evolved from the Bronze Age to the Axial Age, it became far more moralistic. See Episode 3, Continuous Cosmos and Modern World Grammar.

    Earlier, I associated Peterson's talk about sacrifices with Delayed Gratification. This may be a distortion of Peterson's message (e.g. the Cain and Abel lecture from his Biblical lecture series), but it is definitely only a subset of the cases where gods are viewed as Supernatural Exchange Partners. My take on Delayed Gratification is that I'm negotiating with myself, for non-supernatural stuff, in the future; other kinds of Supernatural Exchange Partners are supernatural, conscious, and external to me, and in some cases I may be looking for immediate gratification. I also suspect that it makes a great difference whether sacrifices are made in private or in public. A public sacrifice could be part of a commitment strategy, and be completely sincere, but it could also be an attempt to show off for the neighbors.

    Boyer writes that gods are helpful for communicating ideas, because other people understand gods intuitively. Supernatural Exchange Partners may be useful for communicating ideas about risky behavior (i.e. informal statistical observations about "bad luck"). Perhaps the ancestors will protect me from disease if I perform the appropriate cleansing rituals, especially after handling corpses.

    I tend to regard religious life as more transactional than most people realize. Nicholas Phillipson says that much of what goes on in a typical social interaction is an exchange of sentiment. Phillipson may have been thinking in terms of goodwill, but I tend to think of this in terms of social status, or at least self-perception of moral stature. Church volunteers make donations and perform labor for the church in exchange for modest increases in social status. People like having "bragging rights", even if they don't openly exercise those rights. (and in fact, bragging can't be done openly if it is to be effective.) In these sorts of institutions, bragging rights are the coin of the realm, and they are distributed to a large extent by authority figures such as clergy. The clergy, in turn, typically get their authority from gods acting as Objective Sources of Morality. A clergyman needs something functionally equivalent to an Objective Source of Morality from which he can derive his authority to hand out social status Pokemon points. And in many cases, I may decide that the number of social status points that the minister is offering me for going on that mission trip isn't enough to justify the amount of trouble he's asking me to go to.

23. The God of the Gaps — Richard Dawkins made a comment in one of his books to the effect that when someone says, "God only knows", what he really means is "I don't know". God is sometimes a metaphor for ignorance, i.e. gaps in our knowledge. Someone else offered this as a definition: "God is the set of all research questions that have not yet been funded."

    Isaac Asimov objected that taking all of our ignorance, wrapping it up in a bundle, and labeling it "God", doesn't actually explain anything. Maybe not, but God-language is useful in communicating awe, wonder, and the need for humility regarding human knowledge.

Do I need a god of forgiveness? Someone who hears confessions? Is this distinct from agape and peacemaking? Peacemaking seems more about forgiving others than about asking for forgiveness. Supernatural Benefactor doesn't seem right, either, because Santa Claus is too legalistic, not so much about grace. I currently have forgiveness of sins lumped in with Motivator because of a remark by D. S. Wilson, but that seems awkward. Again, many of these categories overlap a great deal.

Do I need a separate god for wisdom? This could easily be combined with other gods (e.g. Highest Ideal), but it might be helpful to have one that was more specialized and didn't have other commitments.

God as a source of unconditional love and acceptance is lumped in with Agape. I might want to separate these.

1. Supernatural in the C. S. Lewis sense (see Miracles), VanderKlay's "metadivine realm", unbound by any rules that are not self-imposed.
2. Supernatural in the common sense (e.g. Zeus) of being able to violate certain of what seem to humans like laws of nature
3. If a god's function is defined in terms of human knowledge or interactions, it's not clear what "exists independently of humans" means. What about gods that start out as mortal but become supernatural after death as a result of humans putting energy into them? Are ancestors independent of humans?

What about egregores/hive minds/superorganisms/symbols? Part of my problem here is that I talk about egregores as if they were supernatural, but I don't think they really are. But if I'm using "supernatural" as a metaphor, a bridge to the supernatural realm would be metaphorically supernatural. If I change this to "bridge to the spirit realm" or "bridge to the software realm", it is no longer necessarily supernatural.

I'm tempted to try to lump these gods into broader categories. Some make sense when viewed as archetypes, some as egregores, and some as aspects of nature or the universe that predate homo sapiens. There are others that seem to me like useful fictions. I will refrain for now.

Egregores:

Various people have tossed around the terms, "principalities and powers", "spontaneous order", "emergent phenomena", and "egregores". These aren't exactly the same things, but they're all pretty close. I brought up the word, "egregore" in discussing god #7, and described it as a "hive mind". Several other gods are also candidates for being egregores, but not all of them. From my perspective, Jesus may be an egregore, but Tillich's Ground of Being is not. In fact, I believe Jonathan Pageau described "egregore" somewhere as "a materialist cope".

I am a "materialist". I regard the human brain as being like a computer, that generates consciousness internally, rather than like a radio that picks up consciousness waves from elsewhere. There is a very good science fiction short story, The Martyr, by Poul Anderson, that explores this theme. I tend to think in terms of "hardware" (a human brain) and "software" (consciousness), although I probably need to add a third category for things like the Law of Universal Gravitation and the Pythagorean theorem.

I forget where I heard the term, "subtle bodies", but that's the kind of body (hardware) an egregore has. John Vervaeke talks about modern cognitive science as being "embodied". Bodies are important. I have never encountered a piece of computer software that didn't require some sort of physical storage medium, even if that medium is a human brain. We could classify supernatural beings according to whether they depend on having bodies made out of created stuff. C. S. Lewis' "supernatural" creator God (see Miracles) does not and can not need such a body, because God has to predate the creation.

John Vervaeke, 12:45 into this talk with Jonathan Pageau, talks about collective beings (i.e. egregores) in terms of "zombie agency", having agency but not consciousness or self-consciousness:

An ant colony solves problems collectively, but we think it doesn't have consciousness. The city of New York doesn't have self-consciousness. People feel pain, but neurons don't. (Beware fallacies of composition and division, confusing the properties of a set with the properties of the elements of a set.) Can a nation feel pain other than as individuals, more than the sum of its parts? Vervaeke talks of "we-agency". What if you kill someone while sleepwalking? Are you morally culpable? The internet is like a bronze age deity, with power, but no moral compass. Some of these gods are bronze age style, and some of them are axial age style (modern, moralistic gods). (See my notes on Vervaeke's Awakening from the Meaning Crisis for an explanation of the bronze vs. axial distinction.).

Someone recommended The Book of Enoch as a resource on egregores, but I gave up on it fairly quickly. I also tried to read Egregores, by Mark Stavish, but gave up after chapter 2. For me, it was "too much woo".

Update: However, there was an interesting recent Universal History video by Richard Rohlin and Jonathan Pageau on Beowulf that refered to The Book of Enoch repeatedly. So maybe I'm missing out on something. I thought the video was worth my hour.

The best resource I've found on egregores is "Against Egregore Absolutism", by Joseph B. Ottinger (a guest at Handwaving Freakoutery). According to Ottinger, to be an egregore, it has to define an outgroup and offer a feedback loop. A flock is a better analogy than a wave. What is the relative weight that you put on propagating your DNA vs. propagating your ideology? Beware the Lindy effect.

A number of possible examples or perhaps edge cases occurred to me while trying to read Stavish's book or were mentioned by it.

• A self-fulfilling prophesy necessarily creates a feedback loop, so it might be an egregore by Ottinger's definition. Kurt Vonnegut's The Sirens of Titan was full of self-fulfilling prophesies, some involving the Army of Mars, and the Army of Mars definitely had an outgroup.

• Sets of rules sometimes might also meet Ottinger's definition. The US Constitution probably does. The rules of ice hockey probably don't.

• Certain projects, e.g. the space program, are edge cases. It has certainly taken on a life of its own.

• Paul VanderKlay uses Uncle Sam as an example of an egregore, or at least of "principalities and powers". This is not exactly the same thing as the US Constitution.

• Languages often are deliberately invented in order to create ingroups and outgroups, and this often involves feedback loops, as seen in French Canada.

• Religions, per D. S. Wilson, can usually be thought of as group strategies for living. It's not necessarily clear where the religion ends and the god begins.

• Recipies and other sets of instructions can take on a life of their own in some sense. A procedure that seems to work can cause people to gain experience with that procedure, so it may cause a feedback loop, but this usually doesn't create outgroups.

• Ottinger says an egregore is a mass movement, not a trend. He says, "...wearing bell bottoms in a given subcommunity is usually a trend, not a movement...."

Update: Here's a Paul VanderKlay video on egregores, ("Hermes, Set, Spirits behind Technology and Subtle Exorcisms to Free the Hearts of Men").

My personal gods:

A good religion needs to work in terms of both personal psychology (e.g. Carl Jung and Jordan Peterson) and group psychology (e.g. Jonathan Haidt and David Sloan Wilson). What seems to work for me on a personal level is so ideosyncratic that I think it very unlikely that my metaphors or practices will ever play well with ones that work on a group level. I've already mentioned some of my personal stuff, but not all of it.

One of my problems is that I have bad skin and hair. I feel scuzzy all day unless I shower in the morning. That is part of the sacrifice I have to make to the Greek goddess, Hygieia. Showering the night before isn't good enough. I think of Hygieia as an aspect of Mother Nature more than as a Jungian archetype, but some of the details of my relationship with her are peculiar to me.

I'm also kind of into ancestor worship. My late family members live in my head, or at least, I am running simulations of them in my head. Their opinions matter to me. They act as Subjective Sources of Morality. I mentioned my grandmother as a Motivator, but I also think of her as someone I can negotiate with. Bret Weinstein once said that Heaven is not a perfect place that you go after you die, but if you live well, it's a place that's just a little bit better than here, that your children get to live in. I also think of my grandmother as a representative of the Queen of Bret Weinstein's Heaven, similar to Elegua or the Catholic saints I mentioned as Bridges to the Supernatural Realm, except that I don't really think anything genuinely supernatural is going on.

The Motivator blurs together with the Spirit of Agape to some extent. I tend to play "Aunt Frieda music" on a boom box or headphones when I'm doing chores. (The difference between hymns and drinking songs is strangely unimportant to me.) The second half of that Cain and Abel lecture addresses resentment, and I found it helpful. I'm not sure whether to say that agape is an antidote for resentment, or that this is an example of serving an idealized image of someone ("a perfect God") rather than the highly imperfect people in my real environment.

When I really need to bring out the big guns, I play Händel's Messiah, which was my mother's favorite piece of music. I don't know whether to think about this in terms of Motivator, Spirit of Agape, or Supernatural Artillery. Motivator seems best, but I may need to add another category of gods, because it doesn't seem to capture fully the soothing effect that this music has on me.

Essentially, I'm an atheist, LARPing as a Shintoist, who is in turn LARPing as a Christian, because most of my recent ancestors were Christian. The term "Christian atheist" grinds my gears, because it makes absolutely no sense theologically, but it makes sense culturally, and I find myself reluctantly embracing it. I blame Tom Holland.

I tend to over-think prayer. In Vervaeke-talk, it should be more about participation than about propositional knowledge. Lighting a candle should get me at least part of the way there. But to whom am I praying? Plausible answers to me would be anything that is part of the objective psyche, part of my personal unconscious, or part of my personal experience (e.g. dead family members). These are mostly relevant for private prayers. Public prayers make more sense in terms of egregores or the collective unconscious. But as long as I am in communication with other members of my community, the distinction between praying to something in my own psyche and praying to an egregore may not be important. And for what can I pray with a straight face? It seems natural to pray to a supernatural being for a family member's health, but what I think I can reasonably hope for is emotional support for me in dealing with my family, and indirectly, emotional support for the sick family member.

There is a German hymn, Ich bete an die Macht der Liebe, that starts out, "I pray to the power of love, which revealed itself in Jesus." Theoretically, I don't have a problem with praying to Jesus as an avatar of the Spirit of Agape, but it feels very awkward, especially in a public setting, when I know that most other people who might be involved will have very different ideas about what we are praying to. It seems dishonest.

Why Christianity is the way it is:

Earlier I asked, "Can I make a synthetic whiskey barrel that produces tolerably good whiskey?" If I try to start some sort of ersatz Christianity (my Church of Glaucon) that has theological beliefs that make sense to me, while trying to preserve the aspects of Christianity that I like, what advantages and disadvantages will I have?

1. David Sloan Wilson writes repeatedly in Darwin's Cathedral of the conflict between factual realism and "practical realism", by which he means the problem of motivating people to behave in the interests of their peer group. He writes (p. 208), "The Gospels pull out all the stops in their motivation of behavior, as only a religious belief system can." Christianity promises eternal salvation, supernatural artillery support, and posthumous justice or revenge (and typically threatens eternal torment). I can't promise (or threaten) any of these things. All I can promise is less cognitive dissonance. For modern people, I think this is a good trade, but compared to Christianity in its heyday, the Church of Glaucon seems like weak tea in terms of its motivational power.

   My impression is that this emphasis on motivational power was an adaptation in the past (e.g. enabling Calvin's Geneva to maintain independence from the Duchy of Savoy), even though it came at the price of theological implausibility, but it is now a maladaptation. Or at least, these promises contribute to making Christianity increasingly implausible. Mainline Protestantism has collapsed in the US. Christian teachings about the supernatural realm no longer seem plausible for enough people, and the clergy who depend for their moral authority on those teachings have largely lost their authority. (It's not clear to me how much of the loss of plausibility of Christian theology is due to the success of post-Aristotelian science, technology, and philosophy, and how much is due to politics and corruption in the Western intellectual fashion industries, i.e. the news and entertainment media and much of academia.)

   One might say that Christians "cheat" at community organizing by making promises they can't keep (as do other religions), but they are having more and more trouble getting away with it.

2. A Catholic coworker once explained to me the difference between an engineer and an economist. An engineer working on an "optimization" problem has to have a single, unified figure of merit (a scalar "objective function"). An engineer can only serve one master. An economist, in contrast, in dealing with a "multi-objective decision-making" problem, potentially has to serve 8 billion masters, each of whom has a valid opinion of what's good (a vector-valued "objective function"). Engineers talk of "optimal solutions", but the best an economist can do is to talk about a "Pareto horizon" (the infinite set of possible end states from which no further mutually beneficial trades are possible).

   Christians are monotheists, at least in the sense that they approach moral philosophy with the belief that, ultimately, there is only one being whose opinion really matters. I, on the other hand, am in the "moral sympathy" school of moral philosophy, and believe that morality is an emergent phenomenon, like language. (See The Theory of Moral Sentiments, by Adam Smith, and the first chapter of The Fatal Conceit, by F. A. Hayek.) From my perspective, monotheists "cheat"^* at moral philosophy.

   ^*It occurs to me belatedly that "cheating" is what an industrial engineering professor would call "using a heuristic".

   This is an enormous advantage for Christianity. Economists put a tremendous amount of effort into dancing around the problem of how to do inter-personal utility comparisons. Economics-type morality is soooooo much more complicated and uncertain than "divine command theory" (or what Paul VanderKlay calls "the monarchical vision"). But this advantage comes at a cost in terms of plausibility. This God #8 (Objective Source of Morality) requires monotheism, but God #7 (Idealized Tribal Leader) more or less requires polytheism. Gods 7 and 8 never really played all that well together. There is also the practical problem of who gets to interpret the will of God? The Catholic approach to this problem is "apostolic succession". With the Great Schism of 1504 and the Protestant Reformation (say, 1517), this monarchical vision started to look less like a telescope and more like a kaleidoscope. I suspect that modern communications technology has also tended to make the tension between Gods 7 and 8 increasingly obvious, and has made it increasingly difficult to maintain an illusion of consensus within Christianity over who has interpretive authority.

   James Fowler writes in Stages of Faith about how religion needs to work at multiple levels, from a child's level to increasingly mature adult levels. Divine command theory may still be useful on a child's level, but it is becoming increasingly useless on the adult levels. Again, I suspect that what was an adaptation in the past has now become a maladaptation. At the very least, divine command theory makes it hard for Christians and most other monotheists to talk about moral philosophy to anyone else, whether they be atheists, polytheists, or even deists.

3. Good theology has to be consistent with The Serenity Prayer:

   God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, courage to change the things I can, and wisdom to know the difference.

   In other words, there has to be a sensible division of labor between man and god. After all, the motivational power of a religion is pointless unless it is directed toward things that are (A) possible, (B) desirable, and (C) not to be taken for granted. On the one hand, I don't want my children tilting at windmills, but on the other hand, I also don't want them to fall into learned helplessness.

   Christianity, to its credit, has long encouraged humility and taught that "pride" (i.e. arrogance, hubris, or excessive pride) is a sin. This is a feature, not a bug, at least up to a point, and one that Progressives would do well to embrace. But if the theology depicts God as too powerful and too intrusive into human affairs, i.e. a "Mary Sue" in literary terms, then there is a tendency to think that too many things that are desirable are either impossible for humans or can be taken for granted. Christianity tends to get into trouble with God being a Mary Sue in part because of monotheism, combining the creator of the universe (Santeria's Olodumare) with the functions of partisan leaders (Athena) and moral leaders (Feuerbach's God), etc.; roughly all of my gods 1-8, 15, 20, and 22. D. S. Wilson's observation about the motivational power of "a perfect God" also encourages Christians to depict God as a Mary Sue.

   There is also a tendency for sloppy language or hyperbole by enthusiasts to result in bad theology. The atheist mathematician, James A. Lindsay, wrote a book, Dot, Dot, Dot: Infinity Plus God Equals Folly, complaining that theologians don't understand what the word "infinity" means, and they should stop using it.

   I'm in the James Lindsay camp. The Christian God is too powerful and too intrusive in human affairs for a lot of the soteriology (theory of salvation) to make sense. The Christian God is a Mary Sue. It's bad storytelling. It also creates a free will vs. determinism paradox.

   I probably need to explain this. It's possible that I misunderstand the free will vs. determinism argument, but I see it as an essentially theological argument about whether or not traditional Christian teachings about Hell make any sense. Christians typically claim that God is omniscient, including knowing all future outcomes of all of His own hypothetical decisions. This could either be because God exists "outside of time" (whatever that means), or because He has perfect information about the present and infinite computational power. If God can predict the outcomes of apparently non-deterministic events, then these events are deterministic for purposes of the free will/determinism paradox. If God can't predict these events, then He is not omniscient. In other words, if God rolls dice, does He know in advance how the dice are going to land? If he doesn't know, then He's not really omniscient. If He does know, then physics is deterministic as far as God is concerned.

   If God is not just vastly knowing and fast, but infinitely knowing and fast, and the workings of my brain are governed by deterministic laws of physics, does God still need to regard me with what Blaise Pascal called "the spirit of finesse", or is interacting with me like an adult playing tic-tac-toe, and I am something He can regard with "the spirit of geometry"? Christians talking about the relationship between God and man in terms of parent and child make it sound like they believe God is merely relatively knowing and fast. But the fact that the formal theology claims that God is infinitely knowing and fast is what creates the free will vs. determinism paradox. How does Hell make any sense? Why would I build a mousetrap using a design that I know is not going to work, and then get mad at it and smash it with a sledgehammer? (The idea that the doors of Hell are locked from the inside appears to be an attempt to walk back the excesses of infinite punishment for finite crimes.)

   As I understand it, John Calvin tried to resolve the free will vs. determinism paradox, but failed to come up with a satisfactory answer. Calvinist "predestination" seems to mean that either you can take your salvation for granted, or your salvation is impossible, but either way, your behavior doesn't matter. Every since then, his followers have been trying unsuccessfully to paper over the problem. (On the other hand, Paul VanderKlay has said some things about Calvinism that I was not expecting (e.g. Can Calvinists be confident of salvation?), so I apparently don't understand the theology. But Jacob Faturechi argues that it's the theology itself that is confused.)

   Luther (salvation by faith alone, not works) and Calvin, in trying to glorify God, deprecate the work assigned to man to the point of fatalism. Calvinist theology is particularly bad in terms of explaining the division of labor between man and God, but he didn't create the free will vs. determinism paradox. And there are other problems with making God a Mary Sue. What is the point of praying to an omniscient God? And how does Lucifer's behavior make sense? Lucifer's defiance would make a lot more sense if God were not overwhelmingly powerful and able to predict the future reliably.

   And yet, Calvinism was wildly successful. I would like to argue that the hyper-glorification of God (and hyper-deprecation of man) was an adaptation in the past, but is now a maladaptation, and is something that could be improved upon by adopting something more like Santerian theology. But why did Calvinism catch on in the first place? Was it adapted to a less well-educated population? Was it adapted to bravery on the battlefield? Or was it a spandrel, an accidental and not terribly important byproduct of something else that was important? And why is making theology consistent with The Serenity Prayer a bigger problem now? I will cautiously suggest that D. S. Wilson is mostly right to view Calvinism in Geneva in the 16th century mostly in terms of group psychology, but that in modern times, religion is more a matter of personal choice, and personal psychology has become more important. But I'm just speculating. What I can report from my own experience is that, as a child, I found Christian theology thoroughly crazymaking.

   Sometimes man is depicted as a co-creator with God. But then we get Jonathan Edwards saying "You contribute nothing to your salvation except the sin that made it necessary." Can this be reconciled with The Serenity Prayer?

   In some ways, the Christian God acts like someone who is trying to build a ship in a bottle. Either He has limitations, or He is handicapping Himself to make things interesting.

4. Two of the strengths of Christianity are openness to strangers and being quick to forgive, but these come at the price of making Christians (and Christian-adjacent people) easy to exploit if they aren't good at "discernment".

   I mention forgiveness because D. S. Wilson has an entire chapter in Darwin's Cathedral devoted to it: "Forgiveness as a Complex Adaptation". What makes this complex is the need to avoid allowing one's group to be exploited. This is especially hard because generosity to outsiders is often a feature rather than a bug, but it can look like exploitation. Christianity spread in ancient Rome in part because Christians were willing to support the poor (including poor Pagans), adopt other people's abandoned infants, and risk their lives by nursing dangerously sick people.

   I mention "Christian-adjacent people" because a lot of the people I accuse of being bad at discernment are often either "Churchians", who are not regarded by serious Christians as real Christians, or people who have been influenced by Christianity but are not theologically Christian. The latter include the people Joseph Bottum calls "Post-Protestants". It's not clear to what extent I can reasonably attribute the foolish behavior of Christian-adjacent people to Christianity. But some real Christians are genuinely bad at discernment, and there are plenty of grifters around trying to exploit them. Many of the people I'm complaining about are the ones Robert Frost called "liberals".

   A liberal is a man too broadminded to take his own side in a quarrel.

   The question about what counts as "exploitation" is further confused because it isn't necessarily clear what counts as a "good" outcome. See Table 1.1 in Darwin's Cathedral. Decisions that are good for Christians collectively may be different from what is good for the individual Christian decision-maker, and maximizing the spread of Christianity could sometimes come at the expense of people who are already Christian.

   But what's left of modern Christianity puts so much emphasis on telling Christians not to be ethnocentric that it is currently allowing itself to be severely exploited. Modern Western governments (and many church institutions) are transferring wealth and power (e.g. citizenship) to immigrants and internal demographic groups who vary between indifferent and overtly hostile to the majority populations. There are racial double standards. Some of this exploitation consists of manipulating the labor market for the benefit of the wealthy. A lot of exploitation involves attempts to manipulate real estate prices and election turnout. Essentially, Western political elites are hiring mercenaries with the middle class' money to displace the middle class. Douglas Murray has a book out called The Strange Death of Europe, and Thilo Sarrazin has one called Deutschland schafft sich ab (Germany abolishes itself). Where the US Marines have a motto of "No better friend, no worse enemy", Western leaders such as Angela Merkel (daughter of a Lutheran pastor) seem to have a motto of "No worse friend, no better enemy."

   Regarding immigration, I recommend looking at Garrett Hardin's metaphor of lifeboat ethics. What is the political analog of metacentric height on a boat? How stable is Western civilization? I also highly recommend Spandrell's series of articles on bioleninism for an explanation of how political, educational, media, and religious institutions are taken over by people of bad faith.

   Much of the attraction of Neo-Paganism in Europe is that traditional Paganism is believed to have had a far stronger tradition of not allowing itself to be exploited. But Christianity used to be much better at discernment. I don't know how resistant to exploitation Pagan traditions really would have been in Christianity's place. Would Paganism have survived what wrecked Christianity? It isn't clear whether the problem is that Christianity has gone off the rails or that the thing that went off the rails is no longer Christianity. But I think that part of the problem is that Galatians 3:28 was overstated in the first place:

   There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither slave nor free, there is no male and female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus. (Galatians 3:28, ESV)

   D. S. Wilson writes in Darwin's Cathedral of "multilevel selection". A well-balanced biological organism competes with other organisms on many levels; individual, kin, and group (e.g. religion in this context). As J. W. von Goethe put it, "Most sects are right in what they affirm and wrong in what they deny." D. S. Wilson correctly affirms people pursuing their interests on all of these levels. St. Paul appears to go wrong in Galatians because he affirms the pursuit of group interests too singlemindedly, to the point where he appears to deny kin selection.

   A bigger problem is probably supererogation. A lot of Christians are trying to virtue signal by taking Galations 3:28 to extremes, and not taking the hint from 1 Timothy 5:8:

   But if anyone does not provide for his relatives, and especially for members of his household, he has denied the faith and is worse than an unbeliever. (1 Timothy 5:8, ESV)

   Another problem is probably church polity. This is mostly a criticism of Protestantism, particularly the Congregationists, but Catholicism has caught a lot of the splash. The process of selecting leaders is crucial. The object is not to select particularly good leaders, but to avoid selecting particularly bad ones. Some Shinto shrines in the far East are inheritable. This may be the least bad option. Primogeniture may not select particularly good leaders, but it has the advantage of being a hard system for sociopaths to game.

5. The commenters, "Thales" and "Adam G.", on Nick Land's old Xenosystems blog, pointed out that the Christian crucifixion story has very powerful positive psychological effects, in terms of both group and personal psychology. Thales wrote:

   Likely this was the killer-app of Christianity: the ability to push through the whole issue of scapegoatting in heterogeneous societies (via a story from the goat's POV), thus lubricating (cautious) mutually-beneficial exchange with those outside their monkeyspheres. [I.e., by forcing people to look at the scapegoating process through the eyes of the scapegoat, the crucifixion story discourages scapegoating, and this may be crucial to enabling people in Western nations to cooperate in groups larger than clans. -- PAT]

   Adam G. replied:

   I'd add that undermining the conspiracy mindset is personally useful too. You have to stop looking to blame somebody for being a screw-up before you can really tackle being a screw-up, and the man on the cross is a good tech for that, especially for down-and-outers.

   Substitutive atonement would make so much more sense in a polytheistic system where the sacrifice is from a different tribe from the god who is to be appeased (and the god being appeased is not especially admirable, and is driven by coalitional psychology).

   Pascal Boyer discusses coalitional psychology in several places in Religion Explained. He was looking at this mostly from the perspective of religion in general, and gods in particular, being useful devices for regulating inter-tribal violence. But starting on p. 126, he has a list of eight necessary conditions for coalitions. The fifth through seventh elements of his list are (quoting):

   • You represent the behavior of members of other groups as being in some sense the whole group's behavior. (If you are a Tory and a Labour militant attacks you, you think of that as an attack from Labour, not just from that person.)

   • Your reactions to how a member of another group behaves are directed to the group, not specifically to the individual in question. If the Labour militant has attacked you, it makes sense for you to retaliate by attacking another Labour member.

   • You represent the various groups as "big agents." For instance, you think what is happening in the political arena is that "Labour is trying to do this..." or "the Tory party is doing that..." although parties cannot literally be trying to do anything, as they are not persons.

   If we have two different tribes of gods with their respective vassals, having a feud, then it makes sense that one tribe may view members of the other tribe as interchangeable. But in a monotheistic frame, it makes no sense at all to me for God to appease Himself by punishing Himself for someone else's disobedience.

I mentioned earlier that Christianity is monotheistic, at least in how they approach moral philosophy. But the Judeo-Christian tradition has had a lot of trouble sticking to the script. Robert Wright writes about this in History of God. Sometimes the ancient Jews practiced polytheism, sometimes monotheism, and sometimes "monolatry". I don't understand what angels are for. Eric Raymond described the Trinity as a compromise produced by a standards committee. Sometimes God is depicted as omniscient and unchanging, and sometimes He (or Jesus) acts surprised, or changes His mind. (But God also kind of needs to be omniscient and infallible in order for believers to be afraid to cheat one another even when worldly enforcement mechanisms fail. As Wilson says in Darwin's Cathedral, the rules have to be internalized, and God's judgement has to be reliable, in order to make enforcement of the rules less of a problem.) Sometimes He is ostentatious as a supernatural artillery piece, but other times He makes His existence (and the existence of Hell) a guessing game, which makes no sense if Hell is supposed to be a deterrent. Sometimes God is depicted as being threatened by a near-peer competitor (some versions of Satan), and requiring human cooperation; and sometimes He is depicted as outclassing any opponent so overwhelmingly that there is no meaningful role for humans. Sometimes God is depicted as loving, sometimes cruel, and sometimes inscrutably indifferent. Dispensationalism appears to be an attempt to cover up the fact that the story keeps changing. I regard Gnosticism largely as a retreat from monotheism in order to explain why there is evil in the world.

It seems to me that I should be able to convince Christians that a human being, trying to understand God, is like a dog trying to understand quantum mechanics. Even if it's Richard Feynman's dog, it's still just a dog, and we shouldn't expect much. So Christians should be open to the possibility that they have some deep misconceptions about the nature of God. Maybe we shouldn't be using integer arithmetic.

Again, Santerian theology makes much better sense to me than Christian theology.

Twenty stones for twenty birds

I was going to say something about tying up loose ends, but that seems backwards, because what I am trying to do is add theological degrees of freedom. A better metaphor would be getting more stones so that I don't have to try to hit multiple birds with one stone.

One thing that would make better sense to me with multiple classes of gods is prayer. I don't need to come up with explanations for why I am passing messages to someone who's omniscient. A polytheist can have an omniscient god if there is a theoretical need for one, but there is also room for more modest gods, who might act differently based on new information, pleas, or negotiations. I also note that public and private prayers seem very different. Matthew 6:5-6 severely disparages public prayers, but it seems to be an important ritual, because Christians do it all the time. It makes sense to talk privately to "gods" that represent things that exist within my own head. It also makes sense to pray publicly to an egregore.

Negotiations with gods also make better sense in a polytheistic system. There are some gods you can negotiate with, and some you can't.

What sacrifices should I make, and to whom, and why? Laurence Iannaccone has a paper, Sacrifice and Stigma: Reducing Free Riding in Cults, Communes, and Other Collectives, but it is a game theory analysis of what I would describe as "loyalty signaling". As the title says, the phenomena are not limited to religious organizations, and so it isn't clear what a sacrifice that is nominally made to a god actually has to do with the god. People signal their loyalty to the organization, whether there are gods involved or not. But if we are talking about egregores, the distinction between a god and an organization that serves said god may break down. Again, sacrifices that are made in private presumably have different purposes than those made publicly.

I'm not sure what to say about rituals. I don't understand what's going on, and Pascal Boyer didn't seem very satisfied with any of the explanations he considered in Religion Explained, either. I presume that some gods are interested in rituals and some aren't. John Vervaeke talks about ritual as a form of "serious play", especially in Episode 17, but it isn't obvious to me that this has a lot to do with theology.

John Vervaeke (Ep. 35 starting at 47:15) talks about wanting to separate sacredness from supernaturalism. I think it helps to separate gods as psychological archetypes (e.g. Highest Ideal, God of the Gaps) from gods as above nature (Ground of Being, supernatural in the C. S. Lewis sense), as exceptions to human understanding of nature (e.g. Zeus), and as useful fictions.

In short, I have nothing against anthropomorphisms. They make fine metaphors. But despite all of my retractions of my comments on Neopaganism back in 1994, I stand by Dogma #4:

The more different metaphors I use, the more helpful they are, and the less dangerous they become.

If you want to be a great painter, don't limit yourself to black and white. Paint with a full color palette.

Comments?