When I was in college, we used to play a game. It was called “The Game,” oddly enough.
There were but two rules in The Game: if you know the game exists, you are playing The Game, and if you think about The Game, you are losing The Game. This meant that when you learned about The Game, you began playing, and the longer you spent not thinking about The Game, the more you won The Game. Pretty silly, huh?
There were a few people who were content to be perpetual losers, and they made it their task to sneak “The Game” into every conversation, just to make the people they were with lose. Sometimes they would show up to class early, and write the words “The Game” in small letters in the corner of the board, so that anyone paying attention in class would see it, and lose.
The whole affair was funny for a while. There would be someone in class who would remember, and curse quietly to themselves, which would in turn remind other people, and soon after there would be a wave of whispered profanities rippling among the class.
The more popular (or at least, the more widely known) it became, the more losers there were, and the more obsessed people became with it. Unfortunately, the more you obsessed about it the more you lost. It was a trap for your mind.
We eventually grew out of it, I suppose. I can sit here writing about The Game and not feel like a royal loser, so I must have.
Where am I going with this? The Game is a lot like religion; it takes hold in a spot in your mind, and the more you think about it, the stronger it becomes. It sends out roots, and constantly reinforces that you are “playing the game.” In extreme cases, people stop doing everything but playing The Game. The sad part is that the rules of religion eventually require you to shut out anything that might put the game to an end.
If you don’t believe me, look at Calvinism. Now that that movement is over, we can analyze it objectively. This religion was specifically designed to be a trap for your mind. It said that since God knows everything, he also knows whether or not you are damned or saved, so when you are born, he has already decided whether you are going to heaven or hell. If you are going to hell, there is nothing you can do to save yourself, but if you are going to heaven, there are things you can do to fuck it up. At any moment, you can ruin it for eternity, so you better believe.
What greater of a penalty could there be than eternal damnation? That is seed that is planted, and it is a terrifying prospect. Fortunately, Calvinism offers the solution, if you join their cult, and live the life of an ascetic, you can ensure that you won’t ruin your chances of entry into heaven.
This isn’t too different from the way most religions work. They hold some terrible axe above your head, which most sensible people fear, and then they hijack your rationality. Ingeniously built into most of them is another failsafe, that if you come across any evidence that might challenge them, you have to shut it out, because if you even consider it, you are losing The Game.
They are like viruses. They implant themselves in your brain, and they take over. They become almost impossible to eradicate from the body of the host without killing them (9/11 for example).
They have institutions of propaganda that are designed to reinforce them over and over again. We have seen throughout history that people are remarkably susceptible to brainwashing of other types, and religion is no exception. It has been said that every time you repeat something, you make a copy of it in your brain, and it is therefore no wonder religions become so terrifically powerful, because they copy themselves over and over in your mind. I mean, just think about rosary beads for a minute. If you do something that challenges the religion, you have to repeat a prayer again and again, and The Game’s hold on your psyche gets even stronger. Or take Islam for example, which requires you to pray to the Kaaba a certain number of times a day. It only makes sense that religions would have developed reinforcement tactics like these, because if they hadn’t, they probably wouldn’t have lasted as long as they have in a world in which everything points to the fact that they are wrong.
In the end, just like a virus, they turn their host into a propagator of their seed. Most religions have some sort of conversion component, wherein you gain more points by spreading the word.
The really interesting thing is that they evolve, just like living organisms. If there is anything that threatens them, like the theory of evolution, heliocentrism, or other religions, they adapt. They create new dogma, like creationism (a response to the development of the scientific method) to ensures that The Game goes on.
The end result is people who are controlled exclusively by the The Game. They abandon rationality entirely (fundamentalist Christians, Scientologists, Cults), they give their lives (Islam, Christianity), they cut themselves off from their family and friends who aren’t members (Jehovah’s Witnesses, Mormons), they hurt other people (Jihadist Muslims, Christian Inquisitors), and they do shit that is just plain silly (Catholics, Jews).
Religions are just versions of “The Game” that have found a way to exist for thousands of years. Since our strength is theirs, the smarter we get, the smarter they get. When exposed to a new environment, the functional parts of the faith are encouraged, where anachronisms - like stoning people to death - are pruned out so as to preserve the integrity of the whole. In the Bible for example, we ignore all of the stuff about animal husbandry, because most of us are no longer keepers of livestock. We ignore all of the stipulations about the kinds of robes you should wear, because we don’t wear robes anymore.
Unfortunately, this pruning process will continue into the information age and beyond. As the world becomes less and less friendly to religion, religion will only become more fit, because the same minds that are creating all of these wonderful new sciences and technologies are still beholden to the game. As fast as our rational minds think up challenges to the game, they will find ways to rationalize a way for the game to go on.
Dammit. I can’t deny it. I just spent the last two hours losing bigtime.
