Religion could be our best invention

I believe religion is robbed of almost all of its utility by a single mistake made by its proponents: Their assertion that it's true. Without that mistake it is an invitation to contemplate a genuinely fair and just world. A challenge for our species, the starting point in understanding the evolution of our values—the basis of our concepts of justice, fairness, freedom, and responsibility. And a single thread linking the very spirt of our species from distant past to uncertain future.

This single mistake prevents religion from becoming a wonderful and useful tool to induce cooperation, kindness, and thoughtfulness throughout mankind. Even worse, it turns religion into it's own opposite, and history is littered with the horrible consequences that prove this. Searching for the god that we know doesn't exist is a pretty good description of what the most basic sciences are trying to do. That statement is almost flatly nonsensical, but I get the feeling from my study of science that almost all scientists are atheists, yet also can't help but have some notion of an underlying order and deep intelligence because the sheer beauty and outrageous elegance of our universe just seems to imply it. They look for beautiful and elegant theories rather than simply trying to fit the data for this reason. They aren't satisfied with today's standard model partly because it isn't as beautiful as they'd expected it to be.

Correct that single mistake and religion becomes a true and beautiful part of science. The study of human values, passions, and the search for that which is sacred by its nature (which I would argue is actually law, and only law. But that's off the point.) We need a god like we need the square root of negative one. But there is no number, either positive, zero, or negative, that when multiplied by itself gives negative one. Nonetheless, just by claiming there is such a beast, and using it, we can correctly solve a vast panoply of hard problems that could not be understood without that screwy figment of our imagination. That is real magic. The magic of imagination can have a power which is very real and tangible, and not the least bit impaired by our knowledge that it's only a metaphysical device, not a physical reality. Just because something is admittedly imaginary doesn't seem to limit it's utility—quite the contrary. Maybe you have to be imaginary to accomplish supernatural feats. Obviously nothing real could. Why can't imaginary things be useful, powerful, and worthy of knowing well? It isn't really possible to know something powerful very well without worshipping it in the most sincere sense.

Without the single mistaken claim, the shift moves from trying to know god, to trying to discover godliness. That's a crucial difference. We know what the former approach leads to. But consider how useful the search for godliness is, for it puts us in the position of having to think about creating a just and fair society. It lures us to see the consequences of our actions, evaluate the impact we have on each other, our children's future, etc. It leads us to forms of cooperation, measurement, and fairness. It forces religion into the very role it had originally intended to achieve: the most competent and genuine technology for discovering a very meaningful, fulfilling, and enjoyable lifestyle. And it gets there honestly—by making a legitimate science out of measuring a myriad of the most important things that are presently poorly or haphazardly measured, like human happiness, the quality of relationships, the environment created for children, etc.

By searching for godliness, instead of trying to better know the god of our ancestors, we're more apt to become better ourselves at noticing mutualistic solutions to problems rather than self-centered ones. Instead of teaching people that god wants them to love their neighbors, it asks us how we might engineer our society so that there is no need to ask. So that the very geometry of our economy and social structures make our utility to each other readily apparent—filled our lives with opportunities to cooperate rather than compete as it does now.

Converting religions into different approaches to a search for the mostly godly ways we can imagine would probably offend some of its adherents, but I think most would be deeply intrigued. If the utility really does come from faith, then it doesn't really matter whether god is real or not. Placebos are better than drugs if they work. A god that we know is imaginary, actually can be all of the things we assume God is. A faith that there is a means to empower every human born with the capacity to achieve a oneness of heart and spirit with the rest of humanity is worth working towards. Why not take it more seriously? Why not approach the challenge as we do everything else we're serious about accomplishing, using every tool and technique we've discovered in carefully measured and directed searching?

It really is impossible not to sin—not to have any negative impact on those around you, for example. What matters in that case is whether we'll take the steps to deal with it. If religion was a search for the economy that best redressed the intrinsic consequences of our choices, both positive and negative, then how could it lead us anywhere but towards the deepest mutualism, most symbiotic products, lifestyles, and perspectives. How could it leave us with anything but love and respect for each other, as well as for the imaginary god we realize is worth serving, and finally know why.

'Technically just' is an oxymoron

What's the difference between a fine and a fee? If the answer is that the former is intended to punish, and the latter is just a price, then how could any fine punish people equally? We aren't equally wealthy, so the punishment from a given fine will be unreasonably small for an exceptionally wealthy person, and unreasonably large for an exceptionally poor one. This is a glaring injustice that undermines our respect for law itself.

You might counter this argument with the reasoning that perhaps the fine is simply to redress the damage done to the community by the infraction and thus does equate to a fixed cost which becomes the fine. There might be some cases where this is true, but it would have to be the exception because, for example, most of the infractions I can think of are crimes that don't so much harm the community, as they do particular people in it. Like parking in a handicapped spot, or fire zone. It also makes one wonder why we'd call that an infraction instead of just a service provided for a fee. If there is no punishment then why call it a crime?

And you might feel that all of this is much ado about nothing. You might be right. I disagree and see it more as the death of a thousand tiny cuts. No single defect in our laws undermines our respect, but collectively they seem to be doing just that. From a five year old essay by an intellectual property attorney on the public's ambivalent attitude towards IP to a recent essay from an ex deputy attorney general on the dysfunctional perspective of legal advisors at the highest levels of leadership the message is the same; I'd call it jurisprudential liquefaction. It really is akin to the evaporation of the very soul of our nation--what made America most endearing to a fairness hungry world.

Law works only because we respect it. The kind of respect we have for what we consider sacred--not just essential, but irresistibly attractive, awe inspiring, and deeply cherished. The machinery we can build to enforce law will never amount to more than a selective pressure to evolve better criminals. That's just a consequence of the geometry of our reality. Nature will engineer something to fill every niche. (To really be rid of something you have to destroy the environment that it is suited to fill.)

We must love our law for what it genuinely is--the embodiment of justice, the fastener necessary to build enterprise, and the test to which we subject all policy. It must strive above all else to be fair in the sincerest sense we are capable of imagining and measuring. Law, and every shred of the infrastructure involved in enforcing it, must earn that admiration by being honestly worthy of it.

And that's why I started with something so seemingly trivial--because what makes it seem so trivial is only our attitude towards the injustice. Our laws are the true religion of our nation and it really is our faith in them that bring us the gifts of freedom and prosperity. It's too easy to lose respect and too hard to earn it to be so reckless with something so precious.

Especially when it is so easily fixed. There are other nations that deploy more equitable mechanisms to levy fines (for example Finland's day fines scale by income.) There are policies we could adopt that would require us to craft laws with more care, reengineer any that are not or can not be reasonably well enforced, and even ways to force a rethink in strategy periodically by requiring laws on vice, for example, to have expiration dates. It took a private attorney to force the justice department to use the new technologies of DNA testing to check prior convictions for serious crimes and that resulted in the release of many people that had been wrongly convicted an spent many years in prison, some even scheduled to be executed. This should be deeply embarrassing to our nation and infuriating to citizens. Can't the folks who work at the justice department read the name on the building? What do they reckon it means? Just ice?

Perhaps we should start with a better map of our laws that depicts everything we know and can measure about them; the socioeconomic background and reasoning behind them, the measured impact after enactment, the ongoing costs/benefits of enforcement, the case histories of their application, and our discussions about them. A resource that would help us all better see and understand the role law plays in our lives, how it is created and maintained, and why it so deserves our gratitude and respect. It's a lot easier to respect something when you can actually see and touch the sense of it.

My America, the body of an enchanting meme

I've always thought a lot about truth, justice, and the American way. But not because I'm a fan of superman. Because I'm a human being and can't help but find those things sacred. Even a crook has a code of honor. That emotional reward is most likely why we have minds designed to cooperate, master a language, and outwit the various things in our world. Discovering truth feels so good because it leaves us better at working out the consequences of some hypothetical we're contemplating. Our sense of justice is no different, complicated by the fact that fairness isn't as easy to test as truth. And I love the American way most of all. I didn't know why as clearly for much of my life, but I do now. It's because for me, America stood for nothing so much as a deliberate effort to make those metaphysical ideas more robust and tangible than even we are. America was the flesh and bones of justice itself.

America to me seemed more like a process than a place--we were a nation of immigrants from all over the world. It was the very formula for fairness; the honest desire to create the most liberating and genuine parity of opportunity that the best and brightest of us could engineer. It seemed so incredibly ingenious, like life itself--create an environment suitable for useful things to grow and thrive and they will. We call those things enterprises. They combine land, labor, and capital to create profit using a recipe called a business model that is really just the DNA of the enterprise. Those recipes that generated the most profit per unit of input were the basis for the next enterprises that emerged. How could a system like this possibly fail?

What gets in the way of living up to our principles? In a word, I think it's design. We aren't sufficiently wary of our own designs. Good design just doesn't come from a conscious deliberate attempt to build something, but from creating the environment where what you want can evolve and will be best suited, and then waiting for it to show up. If you take the former approach, you're constantly trying to shore up a poor design. But with the latter, you're constantly getting closer to an environment that permits nothing else. It's a fundamental shift in perspective that sees human force as the most expensive and therefore worst solution to any problem and gravity as the cheapest and best. Don't look for a law to prohibit what you should be trying to use geometry to leave impossible or never worthwhile. Does it strike anyone else as curious that punishment is such an obvious solution to humans while utterly absent anywhere else in nature?

Laws, and the infrastructure needed to enforce, adjudicated, and punish the condemned is often more expensive than the actual damage done by the injustice all that infrastructure is intended to dissuade. In my reality, that's a red flag that something more fundamental might be broken. Like our perspective on what crime really is. And that's what I needed all this context to get to and what I'll write about next because one the greatest problems I see facing our world is that when law was spun off from religion, the geometry of those memes didn't allow sacred respect to go with it. For law is little without the respect that makes obeying it pleasurable. And threats are the very poorest way to motivate behavior working only when the consequences are perfectly predictable and utterly unavoidable. When it's less than that we call it a challenge. And that's one of the main things that makes us so remarkable to begin with--the love of challenge.