The Place of Religion

Camille Paglia was right—we need a way better education on this stuff

I just wrote a piece talking about my sense-making of becoming fictional characters during my psychosis in 2017.

So let’s finish this off and talk about my encounter with the more usual substance of meaning making, religion. And to accommodate the reader, we’ll ease our way into it through video games.

When you play a contemporary Fallout game, you have the choice of allying yourself with different factions, each with their own goals, ideologies, and enemies. For instance, Fallout: New Vegas features Ceasar’s Legion, whose creative repurposing of telephone poles is featured above.

To get friendly with one faction is, then, to determine the areas on the map you’re welcome in and not welcome in. Sometimes you can also be instrumental in forging alliances. This aspect of having many-factions, each with their own culture and history and leaders, really makes the Fallout series great role-playing games. The decisions require a lot of thought—a kind of anthropology and moral study. And the games are very replayable, since your group allegiances remake the games anew in significant ways.

This sort of diversity in plotline is more and more the norm. It’s easy to see how fandoms spring up, and comparisons are constantly made between different franchises. In television, there has always been the classic Star Trek vs. Star Wars rivalry—something which most nerds I grew up knowing acknowledged was more a put-on or manufactured thing than a really passionate issue. I mean, I could get passionate about it if we got really deep, but it’s all in good fun. These universes get very deep as years go on.

In a game like Fallout, the different factions are not like various fandoms in various pop-fiction franchises, or comparisons between game studios or comic book publishers. They’re more like national identities—or religions—claiming real territory. The stakes for your character, and the fate of the Wasteland, are death and life, there and beyond.

I argued in my Fictional Characters piece that Joseph Campbell’s hero’s myth was now central to all of these pop-culture stories. And there is something very strange about our world, now that it features so many many fictional worlds based around the hero’s myth. Campbell’s legacy both a handy structure, a tool, for trained writers to reliably pump out secular stories to fill demand and meet market demand—and it’s approaching something of a syncretic religion when pushed to the extreme.

All our pop fiction is the same damn story.

Religion and Secular Culture

Consider “real” religion. You’ve got Judaism and the sects of Christianity and Islam. Islam’s claim to the last prophet didn’t stop Mormons from claiming a one-up. There’s the Easter systems like Hinduism, Buddhism, Sikhism, etc. And then there’s a lot, lot more.

I’m obviously not aiming for completeness or fairness here. Nor is this an apologia. I’m just saying that, even with just this incomplete list, each of these religions has a complete, total universe inside of it. It would take many lifetimes over-and-again to do more than scratch the surface of any of them as world views.

The market for secular culture, I think, is being optimized in fandoms of convergence culture in pale, imitation of the this as-they-say “mythic” universe-forming aspect of religion.

Some readers may think it perverse to reduce the scope of religions to parity with pop-fiction franchises by comparison. I agree, it is perverse. Nobody claims the writers of television shows or movies are prophets, creating holy scripture. Popular fiction fandoms exist under the negatively-defined non-religion of “secular culture.”

And secular culture is, for better or worse, my culture. As I illustrated in On Becoming a Fictional Character, I worked through a great deal of analysis of television shows and movie references when my florid mind tore itself apart to create new interpretations of the world I lived in, and who I was in it.

Yes, I was very uncultured in a worldly sense. I was pop-science and theory smart, but not culture smart. I didn’t take electives in the humanities. I was a shallow reader of philosophy and history. I was nonplussed by religion. I was hardcore into television science fiction and any other captivating or cool serialized shit I could download and watch.

At least I read a shit-ton of Camille Paglia circa 2015 or so. Her art history definitely saved my bacon. And her advice that world religion should be taught, at least, as essential cultural studies in all schools is far more meaningful for me now.

Because that’s what’s behind everything—and the great world religions are not going anywhere.

Who’s the Main Character?

If you read On Becoming a Fictional Character, you’ll notice that I refer to the “main character” a lot. It’s a term which has entered into the pop-psychology lexicon to refer to narcissism. I believe that to be a direct effect of how media industries have optimized story-telling.

If you found it silly of me, in the last piece, to compare myself to characters from old television shows, then I’d like you to know that I also dabbled as much as I could stand in this more serious side of the speculation.

What I’m saying is a personal account of my own experience—not an exegesis.

I’m just saying, in my psychotic, unquenchable thirst for meaning when I was becoming fiction television characters, I also did in fact spend a while seriously contemplating what it’d be actually like to be the guy carrying the cross. It was absolutely unbearable.

I dwelt in the contemplation of this mystery just long enough to formulate my own understanding of how it is that “Jesus died for our sins.” Simply put, the price of every would-be hero’s failure to be perfect has already been paid, in advance. Rendering him the “main character.” And not you or I, thank god. With that realization, I was saved at least from having to worry about a great deal of delusional what-ifs and move on to more pertinent matters.

Actual contemplation of the “mystery” of the story of Jesus’s crucifixion puts a real damper on the megalomania of “hero’s journey,” I tell you hwat. It forces you to think through, to the very extreme end, the potential price of heroism. Yes, movies do that too—but the Christian story kinda set the bar. It’s like a magazine poll: “How Much of a Hero Could YOU Be?” except less fun—and far more revealing.

If, in an insane moment of total vulnerability of imagination and empathy, you ever putting yourself in that predicament and speculate “would I go that far to be a hero?” then you will know self disgust. You’ll watch yourself—feel yourself—surrender and cave, tap-out, and betray everything true and good, out of cowardice.

And then the relief comes in with the realization that you’re not in that predicament. And you’ll understand the salvation is that you’re spared the miserable disgrace of failing at an impossible goal of doing the ultimate good.

I didn’t convert to Christianity, or find God in those moments. I went down a speculative avenue, saw what was there, got really humbled real fast, and then scampered back to creating a reality I could live with, a self I could live as.

But that little taste of religion was very instructive. In just a few days, it learned way more about our world than years of living in it.

Religion is a serious subject, because humans do chase after ultimate meaning. Not all the time, but sometimes—especially when their old-world and old life is falling apart. The process of re-equilibration which is sudden and violent in my psychosis is, in a tamer, more controlled sense, universal in the human condition, and religion has always been there to provide meaning for those moments.

If often goes terribly wrong. Hell, to get back to video games, there’s a whole side-quest in Cyberpunk 2049 about an NPC believing themselves to be Christ. (He wasn’t the main character either!)

Lucky for me, my experience of religion in the moment of psychosis, it was enough to help me move on from cosmic and religious speculation and focus on the more practical, human-scale matters of my recovery and my “art.”

New Age Religions

One thing that I find repelling,, as a consequence, is the New Age conceit of a generalizable “Christ Consciousness” as an enlightened state which can be arrived at by “many paths.” Just picture Oprah pointing at her audience, saying, “You can be Jesus! And you can be Jesus! Everyone can be Jesus!”

The problem is that I don’t see any hard-wired mechanisms preventing “main character syndrome” in these belief systems. Self-important megalomania seems to be insufficiently mitigated against—and that’s unworthy of anything claiming inspiration from Christianity.

I don’t need to be a Christian to be offended at this failure, either.

Believer or not, everyone ought to be cultured enough, at least, to realize that the whole point is that there was only one Jesus, and that you’re not him. It’s a real simple test: are you going to willingly surrender yourself to slow, certain, agonizing torture and death and betrayal to save total strangers and your betrayers? Are you that perfect of a spirit?

It’s a heavy question, but it’s rather cut-and-dry. Basically a trolley-question of self-knowledge.

Christians aspire to live up to Jesus’ example, and that is inspiring. That aspiration is the core of the whole religion, but inevitably falling short is accounted for. Being merely human is expected from the get go. Sin wouldn’t need to have been forgiven in advance, otherwise.

The Catholic Chruch canonizes those who do make great sacrifices as Saints. World history is full of many awe-inspiring heroes who do reach incredibly saintly acts of courage and sacrifice—Christian or not.

There’s doubtless more to all this than I’m saying—I haven’t even touched any miracles and I’m not going to.

Surely these grounds alone—the basic factual failure of getting plainest meaning of the story wrong—are sufficient to call bullshit on New Age usurpation of the name of Christ to peddle spiritualism.

That’s something I intend to do, many different ways, in future posts on Less Wrong. Thanks for reading.