Thread by @iwelsh

Religions almost all started as paths.

It is, for example, useful to believe in certain types of God. It has personal or social utility. (I could write a 10K essay on this topic.)

But what are, in Buddhist terms "expedient means" get reified into dogma.

also, we have changed the meaning of belief. For a Medieval European to say they believed in Christ was often to say they believed in his path to God, NOT that they believed that the world had literally been created in 7 days, say.

For a lot of mystical/meditative tasks and paths belief in a God, especially a benevolent and loving God is amazingly useful. Yes, at some point, if you encounter God/Kali/Zeus on the path, you'll have to kill them.

But the people who get to that level are insanely advanced.

I doubt more than three people (and I know exactly who they are) who follow me, are advanced enough that "kill the Buddha if you meet him" is applicable to them. You can be one of the great sages in history and not kill the Buddha/God.

As for social utility: one of the Zeus cult's major jobs was that wanderers, beggars and so on were sacred to him. You could not kill them. This, among other things, made trade possible.

One read of classical civ, including the Romans, is that it was a bunch of different cults, often household cults, coming together and creating common Gods, so that they had a relationship, and thus shouldn't kill each other and should trust each other.

Thus civic God: Athena

Anyway, Gods exist for reasons. When you forget the reasons, or don't understand how the reasons have changed: when you're doing it because you're following a tradition and programming you don't understand, that's when belief can run you into a propeller at full speed.

but, like a lot of things, Gods don't work if you don't actually believe in them. Like Democracy, or kindness, or justice, people who do these things for reasons of utility stop doing them when they're hard, and when they are hard is where most of the utility is.

the practical upside of this is that every religion/faith/God needs some senior people who are somewhat "enlightened" and thus able to believe and not believe at the same time, and advanced enough to know why original practices were adopted.

I can tell you why fasting, why prayer on knees with palms together, why certain types of prayer, why forbid (or use) images, etc...

Why? Because I know enough about mystical/cultivation practices to recognize principles. People who do this shit w/o knowing why... no.

this means, as well, that I know when things are being done as rote and have lost their utility. The founder(s) said "do this" and now people do them w/o knowing why, do other things that cancel out the benefit, and it's all crap.

It's interesting to me to see this in a lot of Hinduism, which I got a fairly pure/high form of (as foreigners often do. There are also advantages to the clarified foreign form of a religion, though modern left wing ideology mostly refuses to understand this.)

But it's also dead clear in a lot of Christianity. Some versions are so fucking perverted (most of evangelical Christianity that they have almost no actual spiritual value left. Like taking poison.)

It's sort of funny to me that I have this set of knowledge, quite advanced, which is very rare (even among enlightened types) that is mostly of little use/interest to my readers/followers.

(of course, there are also people who understand FAR more than I do. Those people almost all don't talk to the public, and when they do the terms they use are so opaque most people can't understand squat they're saying.)