[extropy-chat] Engineered Religion (was atheism in decline)

[john-c-wright at sff.net]

Samantha asks:

>Aren't all religions engineered?

If I were a wag, I would say, certainly religion is engineered, merely not by
any being inside creation.

But I am not a wag, so I will answer the question soberly: no, Virginia, there
is no Santa Claus, because the adults who tell their children of him do not
actually think he exists. But, unlike Santa, people who preach the word of God
actually and sincerely think it is the word of God, and those who revolutionize
with religion attempt to modify an existing tradition to bring it into better
alignment with a spiritual vision they believe to be the case. 

The fatigues, persecution and penury of religious revolution is, no pun
intended, legendary. I might tell my child about Santa, but I am not going to be
hanged to death on a Christmas tree defending the point. Heck, I would recant
Santyism if they merely showed me the red-hot stockings, or held the
cruelly-sharped candy-canes too near my eyes. No one dies a martyr's death
defending snake-oil. No one embraces death to promote a confidence scheme in
which they have no belief.   

If you look to the roots of religion, you find figures like Buddha and Mohammed
and Jesus, not figures like Tom Eddison or the Wright Brothers. The Wright
brothers did not claim to be inventing a system for restoring man to his ancient
and pure right to flying. They were inventing something new. The prophets who
revolutionized religion were all claiming either to fulfill a previous form of
law, or to be restoring it to original purity. 

The one exception I can think of is a modern one: L. Ron Hubbard. I don't know
the man, and I am not familiar with his doctrine, but the ugly rumor is that he
invented his religion out of whole cloth, to fool the rubes.  

John C. Wright