0 Summary

Many believe that religious behavior is only justified if one has religious belief. I disagree, argue that religion should be managed according to its membership in what I call the category of “Adaptive Distorted States of Perception”, and attempt to make the rationalist case for moderate orthopraxis.

I Intro

One of my philosophy professors at university adopts a seemingly pathological behavior; he attends Church every Sunday, despite lacking belief in God. It may be worth mentioning that the university in question is not a Christian college, but rather your run-of-the-mill secularized Ivy. Of course, he is not alone in doing something like this. But, perhaps somewhat uniquely, he does so neither due to a failure to parse his beliefs nor because of inertia. Instead, he chose to adopt this practice as a result of first principles reasoning, reasoning which I ultimately do not find compelling, but which nonetheless centers a question which I believe allows for a productive reframing of the problem:

Do we make a category error when we speak of religious belief?

Here, I’ll seek to argue that we ask too much of religious experience when we seek to espouse global beliefs which accord with it. I will seek to instead identify a category of adaptive imperatives, place religious experience in this category, and suggest that we ought to evaluate its value and its place in life in the same way in which we evaluate that of its categorical peers, such as romance and appreciation of art.

II Alief and Possession

What do romance and appreciation of art have in common? They are rationalizable only if with alief; that is to say, by some perturbation to the rationally-assented-to world-map.

On some level, many people recognize that infatuated love presupposes strange beliefs — that the object of our love is particularly fascinating, good, or even divine among the alternatives. Jungian Psychology seems silly until one remembers the vivid imagery which the mind constellates around one’s lovers in the heat of youth. In the arms of a lover, we adopt a map of the world that is a radical distortion of the one we rationally ascribe to in our more clear-headed moments. Even if in the back of our minds we recognize that this map is not correct (useful) in a global sense, we nonetheless feel its weight. In a sense, we are blissfully unable to reject the peculiar ontology of love.

The st...

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