Rocket Scientists' Guide to Religion

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Rocket Scientists' Guide to Religion

The Rocket Scientists' Guide to Religion is an upcoming Lightning Path monograph by Mike Sosteric that provides a definition of religion which captures the phenomenon's complexity, stimulates thought and research, and sensitizes readers to the profound manipulation, colonization, and destruction of human spirituality by elites — and to how we have all participated in that colonization. E.T.A. 2027. For notifications of this and other LP materials, register at https://www.lightningpath.org/register..

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• Rocket Scientists' Guide to Religion

Rocket Scientist's Guide to Religion >

• Boundary Fetish
• Boundary Problem
• Epistemic Attachment
• Ontological Bias

Notes

TLDR:' Religion is an institution set up to meet various and specific needs. What needs a particular religious institution meets depends on the intent of the people who set it up. If the founders are members of the Accumulating Class, the religion will typically prioritize elite needs — an Elite Religion. If a religion is built up from the grassroots teachings of a charismatic avatar, it will typically prioritize the needs of the masses — an Authentic Religion.

Argument of the book: Our collective understanding of religion and human spirituality is inadequate, caricatured, and colonial. Scholarly attempts to define religion have been hamstrung by (1) religion's genuine complexity and an Occam-driven desire to reduce it to a sound byte (Marx's "opiate," Freud's "infantile delusion," Durkheim's "projection of society"); (2) Ontological Bias — rigid adherence to theological and philosophical worldviews that closes minds to alternative explanations and evidence; and (3) a Boundary Fetish — the structural, often racist Eurocentric drive to hierarchically bound Western science above Western monotheism above Indigenous spirituality, repackaged in the secularization thesis and the "world religions" framework (Masuzawa).

The definition developed in the book: Religion is a complicated and flexible human institution set up to meet essential and non-essential human needs. Religions are organized around a core emphasis on providing answers to our big questions, with a usual emphasis on the satisfaction of alignment and connection needs as the institutional core. A religious institution itself consists of social, ritual/practical, experiential, narrative/mythic, doctrinal, ethical/legal, material, and healing dimensions all geared towards the satisfaction of various human needs. Essential needs are those of the Circle of Seven Essential Needs (physiological, emotional, cognitive, psychological, environmental, alignment, connection); non-essential needs — an emperor's need for power, a patriarch's need for control of women, capital's need for a compliant workforce — are the hooks by which elites hijack authentic spiritual systems, as with Ardashir's seizure of Zoroastrianism and Constantine's co-optation and patriarchal editing of Christianity (Ehrman).

The book's deliberately boundary-free definition does not solve the boundary problem; it dissolves it. Substantively and functionally, science, Hollywood, sports, the New Age movement, and the Boy Scouts all bleed into religion — the boundaries simply do not exist. Putting aside the superiority project and embracing the complexity is "the first step in any serious and authentic attempt to decolonize not only the study of religion and spirituality, but religion and spirituality as well."

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Footnotes

References