Religion Is Merely a Mechanical “Closed System”

Earlier, I compared the religious fanatics described by Hoffer to the Cybernetic feedback system of the genetic “purpose machine” described by Dawkins. For example, the thermostat on your central heating is designed to respond to negative feedback. The furnace fires up, the house is heated, and when it is heated to a pre-set temperature, the furnace reaches a “positive” feedback and shuts off. But if you crank the thermostat to ninety degrees and open all doors and windows during the dead of winter, the thermostat will cause the furnace to run perpetually, with negative feedback being increased due to open doors and windows.

The more systems that depend on the negative feedback, the greater the chain reaction of “chaos” resulting in the system overall.

Cults and mass movements, as described by Hoffer, follow the same principle. If the system begins to break down, if profit decreases, or if membership falls off, members will be asked to “pray harder” or “redouble your efforts”, or try to give more than your tithes, etc. What is defined as “God’s work” must grow and continue, but the implication is that it must grow and continue with no change, with no analysis of the negative feedback or its possible cause. If there’s a “hole in the toilet tank”, it has no way of checking or analyzing the cause, so it simply keeps on filling, drawing energy from the pump, which simply keeps filling, until the motor or points burn out. Religions expose the exact same mechanical nature when they focus on redoubling your efforts, tithing more, or praying harder, rather than simply finding ways in which they can alter their message to apply to a wider audience. The greater the discrepancy between their desired effect and reality, the harder they work to reach equilibrium, as in the cybernetic feedback “purpose machine“.

What is the ultimate result? Obviously the discovery that “there is no purpose”, except for the purpose of the leader to live like a king, feeding off the “closed system” of the members. This, quite obviously, will result in a number of atheists, which is simply the logical result of such pursuits.

As Hoffer pointed out, the “True Believer’ once he leaves the system, doesn’t actually leave it, but “swallows” it. Instead of being a “cog in the machine”, he becomes the full meaning of the machine himself. But as I quoted earlier, the collectivism of true believers, merely amplifies their capacity for hate, murder, lying, cheating, stealing, in the name of God. As Hoffer pointed out, it is the unification of believers that magnifies the evil, not the deceit and trickery of the leadership. Power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.

The atheist or ex-member is simply saying, “I can respond to negative feedback as an individual, and make decisions according to my own needs”.

The flaw in religious thinking is the idea that we can create a flawless set of rules, and if everybody obeys, the system itself will be “self correcting” according to the external rules supplied. But in fact, you simply get the mechanical results described above. The greater the contradiction between the system, its rules, and the external reality, the more intense the efforts of the system itself to bring renewed equilibrium with the external system, therefore simply magnifying individual efforts and collectivizing the very hatreds, lusts, desires, and pettiness that we endure as individuals. If they system cannot “convert” others, it begins to feed off itself, because it increasingly has no other choice, and you see results such as Jim Jones and Jonestown.

Slater, in 1974, described this as “circular thinking” before terms such as “feedback loop” was popularized.(EarthWalk)

“Therapists are not usually hopeful that an obsessional patient will achieve serenity by devoting additional hours each day to ordering his thoughts, or that a paranoid patient will achieve security by taking additional precautions against pursuers, or that a heroin addict will vanquish his dependence on the drug by taking a particularly large dose. The circularity of our thinking about technology suggests that we are in some way recreating the problem in our efforts to solve it”.

Yet religions AND governments follow this same path by demanding that we try harder, pray harder, pay more taxes or tithes, make more laws to keep us in line, etc. Yet the problem arose because our former efforts were simply no longer achieving the desired results. More of the same will only increase the discrepancy between “desire” and “reality”!

The instant this becomes the proposed “solution”, you can be sure the system has gone into “feedback loop” and is a closed system. Instead of looking to see where the “hole in the toilet” is, the system will demand more water be pumped in at a faster rate, about the same as the government today demands that more money pumped at a faster rate will cure the very problem caused by that same attitude earlier. In Slater’s terms, the paranoid patient is seeking security by taking extra precautions against pursuers.

Ray Kurzweil, the brilliant author, entrepreneur, and inventor, gives insight into a very different view of evolution, that will also give us a different conception of “God”, should you wish to maintain the belief:

“…only a tiny fraction of of the stuff in the universe, or even a life-and-technology-bearing planet such as Earth, can be considered to be part of evolution’s inventions. Thus evolution does not contradict the law of increasing entropy. Indeed, it depends on it to provide a never-ending supply of options….Technology is the continuation of evolution by other means…it builds on its own increasing order” (From The Age Of Spiritual Machines)

The various interchanging and exchanging system of life, in the universe, says Kurzweil, actually feeds and grows off the entropy or chaos created in the system we call Earth. Evolution, writes Kurzweil,

“…takes place amid great chaos, and indeed depends on the disorder in its midst from which it draws its options for diversity”.

The problem is, with humans, intelligence is linked to immunity, or to the immune system. Once we identify a problem, we seek to isolate or neutralize it. In cults or mass movements, we cannot tolerate those who disagree too much. We must find ways to make them “get with the program”, or be cast aside. But as Jesus pointed out, “the stone which the builders rejected becomes the chief cornerstone” of the new system. it is this principle I will explore as we become familiar with the new science called epigenetics.