To Those Who Hold The Faith

This chapter is not written to deconstruct or insult anyone's living faith. If your religion is a source of coherence, compassion, and strength, then you are at an advantage that many do not enjoy.

Well-established, empirical studies have shown that participation in religious communities is linked to greater practical wisdom, better mental health, and overall flourishing. These benefits appear across various traditions, suggesting that the communal and ritualistic aspects of religion play a crucial role in human well-being.

But many people find themselves locked out:

For many people outside of a religious community, the way, is too easily barred by the patterning of a science-based upbringing, and modern Western narratives, embedded into us.

The Dangerous Idea

For those that did lose it; let's begin with a dangerous idea: religion was never primarily about belief. That's a modern misunderstanding .. one born of a scientific era that tried to turn all knowledge into propositional truth.

When people hear 'religion,' they think of creeds, commandments, and unverifiable claims; they think of miracles, gods, holy books, and supernatural punishments. But long before religion was a story, it was a structure, a system of psychological, social, and civilisational coherence, a cognitive architecture.

The real function:

Religion didn't evolve to answer cosmic trivia; it evolved to orient human minds within an ungraspable reality. It told us where we are, what we are, what matters, how to live, and what comes after, not as provable facts, but as shared frameworks.

Even if the cosmologies differed … Egyptian, Christian, Mayan, Sufi, Buddhist … the functions were astonishingly consistent:

Ritual: To mark time, integrate change, and renew collective memory

Myth: To encode lessons at the emotional level, not just intellectual

Moral code: To align individual behaviour with communal survival

Transcendence: To frame suffering inside a larger whole

Chesterton's Fence

I once took a transatlantic flight, at no notice, to address a very expensive situation that my biggest customer was experiencing, that was deemed to be 'our problem.' Within a few hours of arrival, I found myself looking at something that was actually 'their problem', and one we'd solved for them, two years earlier.

I asked their senior engineer why three lines of code; the software fix we had implemented, was missing. He said, 'Because I don't think it is necessary. It doesn't appear to do anything.'

What I felt in that moment … the blend of disbelief and inevitability … is exactly what I feel now when I look at the decline of religion in the Western world. We removed lines of code we no longer understood. We commented out the wisdom. We optimised for footprint, and forgot the nature of the hardware.

G.K. Chesterton's principle applies:

"The more modern type of reformer goes gaily up to it and says, 'I don't see the use of this; let us clear it away.' To which the more intelligent type of reformer will do well to answer: 'If you don't see the use of it, I certainly won't let you clear it away. Go away and think. Then, when you can come back and tell me that you do see the use of it, I may allow you to destroy it.'"

Bread Van Christians

In my early 20's, I drove a bread delivery van. On my Sunday round, I would be making my final trip back to the bakery as the local churches were emptying out. I used to notice, quite clearly, something about those families, individuals, and groups of people. They had something 'extra'. A kind of vitality, that I could sense but not see visually, something that was somehow missing from the general population of 1980's West London.

Later in life, I found myself entangled, through a third party, with a local Evangelical Christian Church, attending perhaps once or twice per month, plus baptisms and barbecues. They were a wonderful group of the nicest people and I tried several times to achieve a leap of faith, but my scientific mindset kept getting in the way.

In the end, a couple of visiting elders took dozens of music CDs and books from my shelves, and informed me that I must not listen to or read these things, and that I should try to avoid any secular friends from hereon. It had the opposite effect.

The recognition of fragility:

I became fixated on the idea that any system so fragile it could be collapsed by music I already knew and books I had already read .. couldn't possibly work.

But years later, a different understanding emerged:

I can reflect on this today, and see that those two Elders were strategically correct. At the time, I was conditioned to look at it as a system of mind control, recruiting donors. My logical rejection based on the weakness of the system, was an understandable, or at least predictable reaction for me.

I see now, I was indeed correct that it was a benevolent system of mind control that also needed funding. But what I failed to understand from that point in my life, was that so is everything else. Just without the benevolence.

What Got In There and How Is It Held Together?

'But I'm not religious,' we say. As if it's a badge of reason, or freedom, or some kind of post-enlightenment immunity. But the truth is: We're all religious. We're all living by inherited structures of meaning, even if we don't know their names, even if the original architecture has been buried or repainted beyond recognition.

For many of us: 'You just don't know what got in there .. or how it's all held together.'

Those Christian elders weren't merely pious men offering comfort or doctrine; they were living emissaries of a system .. an operating system, really .. designed not just to explain the world, but to make it liveable.

They saw in me a kind of unstructured node .. a soul with no working framework, running on patched-together, glitchy code from a spiritually directionless early life .. and they stepped in to offer what they had: a complete, functioning meta-structure.

The God-Shaped Hole

When the stripped-out shell of religion as the structure of the collective unconscious in the west collapsed, it didn't leave empty space; it left a vacuum. And human beings, like the rest of nature, don't tolerate vacuums for long.

The unconscious replacement:

We are meaning-seeking, pattern-making creatures, and when the cathedral falls, we build new temples .. out of ideology, identity, technology, and self. We think we've moved beyond religion, but look closer, and you'll see the shape is still there, only now, it's running without awareness, and it's running us.

Look at the patterns within western politics: a grand narrative of good vs. evil, a language of heresy and blasphemy, evangelism and conversion, symbols and sacraments, original sin and purity tests, in-group salvation, and out-group damnation.

The Deep Interface of The Unknowable

Evolution, through either random genetic combinations or perhaps a more intelligent adaptation that we are yet to fully understand, has given us certain genetic and psychological tendencies.

It's no secret that humans everywhere, and throughout time have the same felt, experienced sense of 'something ineffable', seemingly real, but not consciously relatable to any understood material-world cause and effect.

This seemingly insignificant matter, winds up creating powerful social bindings in reverence of symbols, rituals and metaphysical descriptions, and giving real allegorical meaning, to what would otherwise be experiences capable of stripping the 'heart' out of people.

Tribes that lacked the spiritual strength to 'never give up', gave up somewhere along the line, and we are offspring of that other, metaphysically underpinned genetic branch.

The perfect framework:

What is profound about this is that the unknowable functions as the perfect shared framework precisely because it is impervious to disproof. Unlike belief in a specific, tangible claim (which can be tested and refuted), belief in an abstract, formless entity or principle cannot be dismantled in the same way.

Testable claims divide us. But the ineffable unites us, precisely because it can't be proven or disproven.

Rebuilding: What Does Religion Do?

So what now? We've seen that religion was more than belief .. it was a full cognitive framework, that its loss left a vacuum, and that the modern world is filling that vacuum with unstable substitutes.

But our expanding material knowledge means that we can't go back, not to literalism, not to blind faith, not to institutional control. We don't need to resurrect religion; we need to reclaim what it did.

When we discard old systems, we often forget that they evolved for a reason. We look at the surface .. the rituals, the robes, the rules .. and we judge them outdated. But underneath those symbols were powerful psychological technologies.

A Sabbath wasn't just a day off .. it was a rhythm that protected nervous systems. Fasting wasn't just asceticism .. it was a reset mechanism for metabolic and spiritual clarity. Prayer wasn't just talking to God .. it was structured metacognition.

Myth wasn't superstition; it was compression, a way to deliver deep truths through story, bypassing the rational mind and reaching the unconscious where real change happens.

The Multicultural Paradox

If the above is close enough to true it might explain why, while the overall objectives of different religious systems appear very similar from a high enough altitude, the fact that they are all competing descriptions of something beyond hard-material proof, we wind up with problems.

The integration challenge:

These limit, or more often prevent, integration creating zones where people of conflicting cultural 'laws' reside, where the presence of multiple systems leads to an overall breakdown in what any culture would regard as moral laws.

This perhaps explains the images of lawlessness and shaky morals in dock areas throughout history. The presence of people alien to your culture creates a situation: 'You don't look/dress/walk/talk like me... I don't know your limits and rules... so you don't know mine!'

This could explain why multiculturalism is so difficult. Because it might not be possible, without removing or compromising some degree of essential societal structure, either by enforcing one religion, across people from many, or forcing each to accommodate the others.

Mind the Gap

Years ago, I read or heard an account of an early Christian missionary to Africa. She had found herself stationed with a tribe who were by all accounts highly stable, functional, and loving people .. but not worshiping the Christian God.

She described how upsetting it was that, to convert them, she had to first destroy and demonise their existing belief system. What broke her, she said, was how many fell through the gap .. losing their old system, yet never quite integrating the new one.

These are the 'bad fairies' … not malevolent, but unmoored. Living in the space where a shared framework once guided them.

Two Routes Forward

To address the discomfort this might cause anyone of a religious persuasion, I should explain that I think religion works, and if you are in an environment where it is a practical reality, then you are at an advantage. But, whoever you are, it seems to me that we have two options:

The 'simple' route: 'Give your heart to Jesus', or pick your religion … but totally do it … go all-in if you want it to work; being, giving, and giving-up, everything it requires of you.

The 'difficult' route: Where you end up like me, trying to reverse-engineer enlightenment.

This isn't to say that the 'simple' route is easy .. it's not. In fact, it requires tremendous commitment, sacrifice, and surrender. But it provides a tested, coherent framework that integrates the conscious and unconscious effectively.

Our Inevitable Path

The most striking parallel may be found in the biblical narrative itself. The story of Eden, the tree of knowledge, and the subsequent exile from paradise, maps perfectly onto our civilisational journey.

We are conscious general intelligence, and as such are perhaps destined to go through a cycle whereby our intelligence will develop knowledge of its environment that 'overtakes it' (the apple from the tree of knowledge), leave the garden of eden, and then have to figure out how to get back, in full awareness.

All we have to do is understand ourselves well enough, and honestly enough, and the problem will correct itself. This is not about rejecting technology, rejecting science, or rejecting progress. It's about realigning them with the deeper reality we lost sight of.

What This Chapter Reveals

Chapter 6 shows that secularisation didn't eliminate religion—it made it unconscious and therefore dangerous. Political movements, corporate cultures, and social media platforms now function as religions that don't recognise themselves as such, making them immune to the traditional checks and balances that kept religion stable.

The chapter reveals that religion wasn't primarily about belief but about providing cognitive architecture for meaning, morality, transcendence, and social cohesion. When these functions are performed unconsciously by secular institutions, they become more dangerous because they operate without the humility and self-awareness that traditional religion cultivated.

Understanding religion as functional architecture rather than literal belief system opens the possibility of consciously rebuilding these functions in forms that work for our current reality. This isn't about going back to old forms, but about understanding what made them work and recreating those functions consciously.

This analysis prepares us for Chapter 7's examination of how these unconscious patterns scale up to create the systems that seem to run themselves.