And the Ordinary Religious Heuristic by Thomas Laperriere
The Ordinary Religious Heuristic
A very wide range of systems of religious belief share a set of common characteristics that shape their beliefs and practices. On the face of things Christianity and Pantheism are very distinct religious systems.
Prayer, a practice common to most religions might be practiced in both but the manner and content of prayer in each will be very distinct.
However, each of these religious systems operate using The Ordinary
Religious Heuristic as do other systems of theistic religious belief.
If you look at the beliefs of the major theistic religions, there are three core elements present in some form. Their Deity, deities or whatever stands in as Deity is anthropomorphic. This Deity is authoritarian. Rules of behavior emanate from the Deity. And the relationship of the Deity to the believer is transactional. This structure is explicit in conventional religious systems and obscured in unconventional ones.
In Christianity there is God, the Father whose personality is exalted far above ordinary human personality but understood using ‘theory of mind’ (using ourselves and our own understanding of human behavior as a reference for understanding others). This idea of our use of ‘theory of mind’ to understand a Deity extends to the Pantheist. Nature or the Universe has a mind, albeit on a higher plane than ours, Nature feels and can become offended and it’s motives are calculated using ‘theory of mind’ methods. The Pantheist sees disasters resulting from climate change in terminology that echoes divine vengeance. In Pantheism the anthropomorphism is obscured but the constraints of narration make that impossible to fully accomplish. The ‘theism’ in Pantheism comes out in its narrations.
While massive differences define each major religion most if not all of them operate in human personality by the Ordinary Religious Heuristic.
Consider this conception using the lens of personality structure, that is mind, heart and will, alongside the three parts of the Ordinary Religious Heuristic. Our minds anthropomorphize, our hearts recognize common feeling, and our wills use our own various intentions to gauge those of others, even when the other is a deity.
As humans we frame any form of intention in human terms. It’s how we understand stories. Using the Ordinary Religious Heuristic to form an understanding of deity is normal human behavior. Ignoring the error generation aspect of the heuristic is also ordinary human behavior.
When the heuristic fails, the user says the deity is inscrutable, not my
method of understanding the deity has failed.
As normal human behavior the Ordinary Religious Heuristic can be
considered within the two thinking systems cognitive model which
Daniel Kahneman makes plain in Thinking, Fast and Slow. The
Ordinary Religious Heuristic forms the basis for intuition, system one,
and provides a framework for the philosophical theorizing of theology, system two. Religious faith shapes the believers intuition so that speech and action consistent with the faith happen without forethought and then believers defend system one religious behavior with the complex articulations of system two thinking.
Mutual understanding amongst believers results from collective efforts using the heuristics cognitive methods. The shared method tunes believers to broad agreement on the general terms. Because errors arise from method and not user originality, a humanlike, authoritative deity to whom they are transactionally related becomes their common possession.
The only religions exempt from the Ordinary Religious Heuristic are
those with no deities to anthropomorphize, which are, the non-theistic religions and the theological system made plain in The Logic of Limitless.
As a theology, the Limitation Philosophy’s premise is that the Deity is
not humanlike with non-authoritarian and non-transactional following from the non-anthropomorphic premise. As the culmination of its theme The Logic of Limitless proves that, as a form of perception, the Ordinary Religious Heuristic hides reality, the ultimate reality of God and the nature of the universe of things.
It’s natural and in some ways impossible not to anthropomorphize. We do it all the time with our pets. I know how I think. I believe I know how you think, but do I really know how my cat thinks? We tend to frame any form of intention in human terms. The self-reference of our own human intention plays a large role in how we understand and follow stories, especially fictional stories. A Non-Anthropomorphic Deity cannot be given a dramatic role in a story. Such a Deity can be discussed by the characters, but the role of any non-human character in a story requires its intentions to be anthropomorphized.
The True Source of Social Darwinism
Critics of Social Darwinism cite Evolution and Natural Selection as the
origin of Social Darwinist theorizing. They ignore the fact that genocides and every other moral outrage proposed or carried out by Social Darwinists were present in wars of religion long before the Social Darwinists came on the scene.
Social Darwinist thinking begins with a pantheistic deity. Nature is
made into an anthropomorphized deity with humanlike intention. In the Social Darwinist narrative, nature has decided that one group is fit to fix survive, and another is not. Natures intention stands in for ‘God’s will’ in the Social Darwinist narrative. This is analogous to the narrative of every holy war. Social Darwinists embrace an unconventional form of theistic religion operating within the ordinary religious heuristic.
Evolution and Natural Selection are functions of a deified nature’s,
moral authority and will. Nature as a rule making authority demands
that believers destroy those whom their god has marked for destruction.
Nature is to be obeyed as if it were a humanlike king or queen.
Having abandoned the holy war model of ages past, Christian
denominations can now point out the immorality of Social Darwinism.
Most Christians today are very different from those of the Crusades and the Wars of Religion. There is nothing hypocritical about modern
Christians denouncing Social Darwinist faith and practice. However, a
modern Christian advocating some form of holy war while decrying
Social Darwinism might be considered hypocritical.
In Limitation Philosophy, the Deity does not have the humanlike
intentions to “will” a holy war, and the manner in which the earth, life, and human beings ‘come to be,’ by ‘process not intention’ does not license any subset of any species to destroy others because they are the favorites of some anthropomorphized pantheistic deity which animates that process.
There is a humanlike intention evident in the decree ‘survival of the
fittest.’ Limited beings, because they are local and temporal, use laws,
which are by nature a form of heuristic. The Deity described in the
cosmology of Limitation Philosophy is non-authoritarian because
Limitless Personality can handle infinite exceptions, so laws play no role in Limitless Being. The will aspect of Limitless Personality is, according to our imperfect understanding simply that things ought to thrive. This is accomplished by process not intention, and this means it is not some law decreed by a theistically understood pantheistic deity.
Social groups of limited beings concoct stuff like Social Darwinism by
manipulating the Ordinary Religious Heuristic to justify doing in groups the kind of things their innate moral sense as individuals tells them is wrong. Far from being the expression of paradigmatic natural law, Social Darwinism generates so much moral error that most social groups see it as just plain wrong.
The way the earth, life and human beings come to be as part of the
universal process is far too enmeshed with the rest of Limitation
Philosophy’s cosmology to be explained in isolation. The best way to
understand it is by a careful reading of The Logic of Limitless.
The cosmology of Limitation Philosophy is more distinct from than
similar to General Darwinism. The risk of associating the cosmology of Limitation Philosophy with Darwinism is troubling to me. In our culture, the anthropomorphizing of the terms evolution and natural selection is a deeply ingrained language habit and thinking in terms of paradigmatic laws like survival of the fittest is mostly what General Darwinism is all about.
Darwinism is often used to deny the existence of God while being
spoken of in what my discerning eye sees is very theistic language. The cosmology is not Darwinism, and the way the language of Darwinism is spoken of is the opposite of Limitation Philosophy.
By Thomas Laperriere