Welcome to the final instalment of my essay on The Religion of Society. You can find previous parts on my essays page. I’m going to try and draw everything to a conclusion now and see what we have.
I think I’ve successfully made my point that there are a great many comparisons that can be drawn between a society and a religious system. The more interesting question is why.
It could I suppose be speculated that if the structure of a religion is divinely inspired, that the divine structures inspired those of society. I have to say that I’ve not seen any evidence of a divine inspiration in religion that sways me, so I would tend towards shelving this idea pending further evidence.
This leads to my own view. I think that both religions and societies have a common source, a source that can easily be seen by everyone. It’s in plain view, just look in the mirror. Human beings tend to form power hierarchies and have a tendency to follow a leader, form social structures and codify rules. We respond to incentives and avoid punishment, both systems follow this “carrot and stick” approach. There’s a pay-off for following the system. This also means that if something comes along to threaten the carrot (be it atheists or anarchists) then we attack to protect the pay-off. Not just for ourselves, but for those we care about.
Both systems do just that and inspire these sort of responses. Religion came first, but the growth of secular society came later with the divine element left out of the recipe as science subjected it to a withering hail of fire. My view on the future is that secular society will keep growing, it’s a view that seems backed up by the figures I’ve seen on the subject. I do, of course, write with a British perspective on these figures.
Drawing this to a close, I’d like to talk about things that have occurred to me since I wrote this essay. It occurs to me that this could all be viewed as tribalism, both systems could be said to be tribal, with leaders, followers, rules, social structures, etc. But that discussion is a bit big for this post, so maybe another time. Secondly, when I started writing this post, I realised I hadn’t discussed for corporations in all of this. But that too is something I will leave to another time and for your own reflections.
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