Deities considered helpful
Aside regarding the subject; there is a long tradition within computer science of "Foo considered harmful" essays. Some of these, such as Dijkstra's original "Goto considered harmful" are arguments trying to persuade the reader that Foo is, in fact, harmful. Others, such as Pierce's "Types considered harmful" are more like temporarily focusing on the harmful side of something that might in fact be on the whole helpful, or have both harmful and helpful sides. This is an example of the latter kind - temporarily focusing on the helpful aspect of deities.
Deities are created by humans for human purposes (see Pratchett's "Small Gods").
The faculty of deity-creation is fundamentally based on the human capacity for empathy.
Empathy is the technique of modeling another entity (such as a parent, child, spouse, friend or foe) as yourself-with-some-differences. As a strategy, it is particularly useful if you are likely to meet entities that are quite similar to yourself. We humans would not have evolved empathy if we did not live in tribes.
Artificial intelligence has studied chess playing for decades now, and basic adversarial game playing algorithms routinely use a crude form of empathy, predicting their opponent's likely moves by considering the question "what would I do?". More precisely, they consider the question "What would I do, if I wanted to minimize my score instead of maximize it?". This "with-differences" aspect of empathy is crucial.
Sometimes, empathy-based modeling is used to understand other parts of the world. For example, a teacher might say that water wants to flow downhill, or electrons want to orbit in pairs. A teacher saying such things is advocating that the student build a mental model of the phenomenon by using their faculty of empathy, with the stipulated goal as a primary difference from the student themselves. The model is not perfect (all models are wrong) - a mistake might be to imagine that water might flow uphill temporarily in order to get to a bigger drop later on. That is something that a human-with-a-goal-of-going-downhill might do, but not something that water, or electrons, would do. To correct this mistake, the teacher might say "Imagine that water is blind, thoughtless, or stupid.". That is another adjustment to the empathy-based model.
Extending this empathy-based modeling to all things is a form of animism. Saying that "You can understand it as, Foo wants Bar" or "In some not-quite-completely-true sense, Baz is Quxish" (where Qux is a personality adjective), is not substantially different than saying "Spiritually, Foo wants Bar", or "On the immaterial plane, Baz is Quxish". The dualism of the spiritual/material divide is not simply similar to, but actually identical to the theory/practice or abstract/concrete or sign/signified divide.
A child might, after growing up and/or moving away, find it helpful to ask themselves "What would Mother do?". That is, they have a repository of expertise that is attached to an (empathy-based) model of an entity that is not actually present. If they explain what they are doing to a third party, it would sound like "I'm asking So-and-So, who is knowledgeable about these things, what they would recommend in this situation.". This is basically praying to an ancestor for guidance.
Teachers and personal heroes can become deities (saints). If a student, confronted with a problem after graduating and leaving, thinks "What would my teacher do?", they're praying - even if the teacher or personal hero is alive and well. (And the teacher or hero is probably and richer and more complex in actuality than the student's model - as many people have remarked, gods are routinely paper-thin characters, less subtle and complex than humans).
Sometimes, thinking about a particular morally-terrible person, or very-foolish person, could be helpful in avoiding mistakes. For example, I've used "What would Christian do?" (where Christian was a particular terrible person that I knew in college). Confused rumors of this practice sound like trickster spirits or demons.
Totems, deities of a particular species, are directly analogous to genes. Someone might object that genes are "real". At first, Mendelian genes were invisible abstractions, with only a "mathematical" reality - which is not substantively different from saying that totem spirits have a "spiritual" reality. The adjective's purpose is simply warning the listener that some of the aspects or qualities that they might expect a gene or totem to have, such as weight, will not apply - it is still useful to speak of it as existing, and speak of its qualities, despite not being able to hold it in your hand.
A systematic worker might have checklists regarding each of several different tasks that they do as part of their work. The checklists consist of lists of prompts, each encouraging and reminding the worker to get into a particular mental state or look at the task from a particular point of view. Imagine that each checklist item is a deity, whose help is requested, or a demon of some particular mistake who must be propitiated or abjured. The relation "item X appears on checklist Y" could also be understood as "deity X has power over domain Y", or "deity X has Y in their portfolio". Organizing your knowledge this way might look like a pantheon.
Monotheism (which is dominated by the Abrahamic religions, of course) teaches adherents to empathize, to put themselves in the shoes of, an entity with the stipulated difference that it is omniscient, immortal, and powerful. This is quite similar to teaching adherents what an "objective" viewpoint would be. Furthermore, the entity is rumored to be deeply moral.
I don't know these fields well, but Marxism's "the people" or "society" or "the proletariat" might be an abstraction that it is possible to apply empathy-based modeling to, and therefore pray to. Legal experts might think about "the law" in a religious mode.
Bono's Six Thinking Hats or Ideo's Ten Faces of Innovation are examples of applied theological engineering - they are pantheons of mind-sets that, if you practice empathizing with each deity's described qualities, might help you solve problems.
Here's my attempt at applied theological engineering:
Suppose that you have a task that you want to become better at. A possible strategy would be to create gods to help you with this task. Often, gods come in pairs. Consider two contrasting mindsets, both of which are useful in this task, such as planning and doing. A mathematician might use hypothesis-forming versus theorem-proving, or proving-true versus counterexample-finding. I recently participated in the Ludum Dare game programming competition - a game programmer might use engine-programming and art-creation. List the benefits and drawbacks of each mode.
For example, engine programming helps things move, change, respond to the player's actions. Art creation helps charm the player and pull them in and keep them around, it is easier to influence mood and message with art, and suggests or sketches a rest-of-the-world beyond the events explicitly simulated. Engine programming may be invisible to the player, either because the player doesn't read the elegant source code, or because the player is put off by the amateurish art and quits before seeing the mechanics. Engine programming can be fun. Art can be unnecessary, or unnecessarily polished - nobody is going to see those fraction-of-a-pixel gaps, or care about the fine parameter-tuning of your sfxr-based sounds.
Then, reframe the benefits and drawbacks as personality qualities of new abstract entities. Athena-the-engine-coder loves cleanliness and routinely brooms magic numbers, positions, shapes, lists, text, out of her nice clean engine into configuration files. She's long-sighted, and thinks about the general case, not specifics. She thinks ahead, about the feasibility of reusing this engine for other games, unlike Apollo-the-game-artist, who focuses on the present game. He wants the player's experience to be a coherent whole, all supporting a premise or concept. He likes to work fast, and he demands that Athena provide tools, hooks, that will allow him to work fast. He's aware of the engine limitations, and works within them almost all of the time, but uses the engine to the full and even bends the limitations, demanding that Athena write some "ugly", "special-case" code if it is really worth it in terms of experience.
Then during work, bring one of these deities to mind first with something like a prayer, enumerating their good and bad qualities, and keep a representation of this deity in your visual field while you work. Then if and when this deity's bad qualities (as evidenced in your behavior) seem to outweigh the good, try to change your mind and break from that deity (for example, explicitly repudiate and abjure it by name, walk through a doorway, wash your hands and face, count backwards from 100 by 7s). Then summon the other deity, enumerating their contrasting personality qualities, and work in this other mode for a while.
I don't know if this strategy works, but it might; I'd like to try it.
Deities are created by humans for human purposes (see Pratchett's "Small Gods").
The faculty of deity-creation is fundamentally based on the human capacity for empathy.
Empathy is the technique of modeling another entity (such as a parent, child, spouse, friend or foe) as yourself-with-some-differences. As a strategy, it is particularly useful if you are likely to meet entities that are quite similar to yourself. We humans would not have evolved empathy if we did not live in tribes.
Artificial intelligence has studied chess playing for decades now, and basic adversarial game playing algorithms routinely use a crude form of empathy, predicting their opponent's likely moves by considering the question "what would I do?". More precisely, they consider the question "What would I do, if I wanted to minimize my score instead of maximize it?". This "with-differences" aspect of empathy is crucial.
Sometimes, empathy-based modeling is used to understand other parts of the world. For example, a teacher might say that water wants to flow downhill, or electrons want to orbit in pairs. A teacher saying such things is advocating that the student build a mental model of the phenomenon by using their faculty of empathy, with the stipulated goal as a primary difference from the student themselves. The model is not perfect (all models are wrong) - a mistake might be to imagine that water might flow uphill temporarily in order to get to a bigger drop later on. That is something that a human-with-a-goal-of-going-downhill might do, but not something that water, or electrons, would do. To correct this mistake, the teacher might say "Imagine that water is blind, thoughtless, or stupid.". That is another adjustment to the empathy-based model.
Extending this empathy-based modeling to all things is a form of animism. Saying that "You can understand it as, Foo wants Bar" or "In some not-quite-completely-true sense, Baz is Quxish" (where Qux is a personality adjective), is not substantially different than saying "Spiritually, Foo wants Bar", or "On the immaterial plane, Baz is Quxish". The dualism of the spiritual/material divide is not simply similar to, but actually identical to the theory/practice or abstract/concrete or sign/signified divide.
A child might, after growing up and/or moving away, find it helpful to ask themselves "What would Mother do?". That is, they have a repository of expertise that is attached to an (empathy-based) model of an entity that is not actually present. If they explain what they are doing to a third party, it would sound like "I'm asking So-and-So, who is knowledgeable about these things, what they would recommend in this situation.". This is basically praying to an ancestor for guidance.
Teachers and personal heroes can become deities (saints). If a student, confronted with a problem after graduating and leaving, thinks "What would my teacher do?", they're praying - even if the teacher or personal hero is alive and well. (And the teacher or hero is probably and richer and more complex in actuality than the student's model - as many people have remarked, gods are routinely paper-thin characters, less subtle and complex than humans).
Sometimes, thinking about a particular morally-terrible person, or very-foolish person, could be helpful in avoiding mistakes. For example, I've used "What would Christian do?" (where Christian was a particular terrible person that I knew in college). Confused rumors of this practice sound like trickster spirits or demons.
Totems, deities of a particular species, are directly analogous to genes. Someone might object that genes are "real". At first, Mendelian genes were invisible abstractions, with only a "mathematical" reality - which is not substantively different from saying that totem spirits have a "spiritual" reality. The adjective's purpose is simply warning the listener that some of the aspects or qualities that they might expect a gene or totem to have, such as weight, will not apply - it is still useful to speak of it as existing, and speak of its qualities, despite not being able to hold it in your hand.
A systematic worker might have checklists regarding each of several different tasks that they do as part of their work. The checklists consist of lists of prompts, each encouraging and reminding the worker to get into a particular mental state or look at the task from a particular point of view. Imagine that each checklist item is a deity, whose help is requested, or a demon of some particular mistake who must be propitiated or abjured. The relation "item X appears on checklist Y" could also be understood as "deity X has power over domain Y", or "deity X has Y in their portfolio". Organizing your knowledge this way might look like a pantheon.
Monotheism (which is dominated by the Abrahamic religions, of course) teaches adherents to empathize, to put themselves in the shoes of, an entity with the stipulated difference that it is omniscient, immortal, and powerful. This is quite similar to teaching adherents what an "objective" viewpoint would be. Furthermore, the entity is rumored to be deeply moral.
I don't know these fields well, but Marxism's "the people" or "society" or "the proletariat" might be an abstraction that it is possible to apply empathy-based modeling to, and therefore pray to. Legal experts might think about "the law" in a religious mode.
Bono's Six Thinking Hats or Ideo's Ten Faces of Innovation are examples of applied theological engineering - they are pantheons of mind-sets that, if you practice empathizing with each deity's described qualities, might help you solve problems.
Here's my attempt at applied theological engineering:
Suppose that you have a task that you want to become better at. A possible strategy would be to create gods to help you with this task. Often, gods come in pairs. Consider two contrasting mindsets, both of which are useful in this task, such as planning and doing. A mathematician might use hypothesis-forming versus theorem-proving, or proving-true versus counterexample-finding. I recently participated in the Ludum Dare game programming competition - a game programmer might use engine-programming and art-creation. List the benefits and drawbacks of each mode.
For example, engine programming helps things move, change, respond to the player's actions. Art creation helps charm the player and pull them in and keep them around, it is easier to influence mood and message with art, and suggests or sketches a rest-of-the-world beyond the events explicitly simulated. Engine programming may be invisible to the player, either because the player doesn't read the elegant source code, or because the player is put off by the amateurish art and quits before seeing the mechanics. Engine programming can be fun. Art can be unnecessary, or unnecessarily polished - nobody is going to see those fraction-of-a-pixel gaps, or care about the fine parameter-tuning of your sfxr-based sounds.
Then, reframe the benefits and drawbacks as personality qualities of new abstract entities. Athena-the-engine-coder loves cleanliness and routinely brooms magic numbers, positions, shapes, lists, text, out of her nice clean engine into configuration files. She's long-sighted, and thinks about the general case, not specifics. She thinks ahead, about the feasibility of reusing this engine for other games, unlike Apollo-the-game-artist, who focuses on the present game. He wants the player's experience to be a coherent whole, all supporting a premise or concept. He likes to work fast, and he demands that Athena provide tools, hooks, that will allow him to work fast. He's aware of the engine limitations, and works within them almost all of the time, but uses the engine to the full and even bends the limitations, demanding that Athena write some "ugly", "special-case" code if it is really worth it in terms of experience.
Then during work, bring one of these deities to mind first with something like a prayer, enumerating their good and bad qualities, and keep a representation of this deity in your visual field while you work. Then if and when this deity's bad qualities (as evidenced in your behavior) seem to outweigh the good, try to change your mind and break from that deity (for example, explicitly repudiate and abjure it by name, walk through a doorway, wash your hands and face, count backwards from 100 by 7s). Then summon the other deity, enumerating their contrasting personality qualities, and work in this other mode for a while.
I don't know if this strategy works, but it might; I'd like to try it.