(no subject)
Here are a pair of axioms upon which I'll build all my arguments.
First- You can always imagine something better than what is real.
Then - You can make the things you image real with enough time & effort.
Applied to religion now, we say we imagine a god because we want one, it's better if here is a god. I've been reading a bunch of Wonder Woman lately & the gods appear and are super nice to her all the time. Like - you can imagine a god that would appear & help you out of jams, like Superman, speaking of comics. The logical proof for the existence of god is also the logical proof for the existence of superman. People exist & are imperfect, god is perfect & so must contain properties that people have as well. Missing the point. If you find yourself in hell or paradise you'll still be able to imagine something better.
The trick is that I think religious people take their imagination more seriously, but they're stuck with a pretty limited imaginal space to work within. The guidance of their scriptures & holymen have a pretty conspicuous resemblance to the DMG & the DM, guiding imagination, trying to bring people to a higher/different understanding - opening third eyes. The principles are the same because the function is the same - to guide people to dream of what's better.
But the thing is, we can imagine things & make them real. More & more real over time even. This is the magic of writing shit down, the accumulation of knowledge over time. We imagined ourselves into sedentary comfort, we built upon prior efforts for generations until we could live in comfort that kings of old would envy. But we also have the capacity to imagine people of a better future looking down upon us as we do upon the privation-plagued kings of old. We feel shame & pity & horror that the majority of people died shitting themselves to death. But think about future people who feel shame & pity & horror that any people ever died. We can imagine these future people, those who have attained more through continuous improvement over time.
I posit that we imagined spirit worlds in the past, creatures of the woods who live behind each tree, who explain the inexplicable ruins that are found wherever people are. We imagined a heaven, a hell, a world in dreams or a plane of mind - a spiritworld. Now we're creating it, the internet. A trite observation & certainly the internet is far short of heaven - but it's the iterative effort of collective creation - we're involved in it & we'll create the things we imagine. The internet as spiritworld is, here, just intended as an easy example, though I think the case could be made with much more puissance, I'm not interested in doing so.
Material improvement improves the imagination's range & scope. What was once imagined as a god - a person who could command others & who wielded power over life and death became manifest as a king. As a king proved inadequate to the task of ruling the city through time a being that could do so was imagined, a god who inhabits the city, who is bounded by it as a manifestation of aspects of the city, timeless aspects. The God ceases to be despot & becomes the indwelling spirit of phenomena. In time the people are driven from the city, they migrate as people do & bring their gods with them, now abstracted their identities coalesce around the gods of fading relevance. They conceive of a single god, a king of the gods who is primary but who is not the god of place or feeling but of a people - conflation of faith & ethnicity continues into the cosmopolitan periods of empires, but is steadily supplanted by gods of virtue & wrath, barrier gods that define the boundaries of whole civilizations. At each turn the religion is proposing a better idea than what is currently present, what is being experienced. We came to enlightenment after wearying of fighting too much over opinions about god & started accumulating facts about god. Of which there have been scanty few to go by.
Now, all of that is a theoretical framework that likely only vaguely resembles reality. No doubt it's a series of ideas fraught with no shortage of problems. But it's still one that is legible & that matters, it matters that it can be told as an identifiable story because it can be built into a narration into the future. Restating the above, We begin with a god who we imagine to be a bit better than the despots who govern us, then imagine gods who make our world more significant & who enrich our places with their own narratives. Then we imagine a god that is a step further abstracted, a god of these local gods, the one above them which is the god of ideas & personas - who can be a father or a son or purely incorporeal who is useful when we are in a cosmopolitan period of global trade & international cities. A god of ideals that supersedes the gods of place & phenomena, a rationalizing force that is portable & polity-agnostic. Which is supplanted by an enlightened rationalism that denies the presence of god at all as it loses utility for explaining real phenomena in comparison to empirical practices. Now we're at the phase of things where we've discarded god as an explicating force but also as a useful concept. That is to say, since we figured out god didn't make the world, we decided that we probably don't need god. Which? Fair. That was the heavy lifting of god in the past - to explain mysterious things. The delicate work though was in moderating emotions & training virtuous behaviors. The religiously devout will say that the purpose of the church is to save them from perdition - they are selfish. But the idealistic people involved in these churches see it rather as a method of moral correction, a training regimen for selfish people to get better. Cynical people will see it as a handle granting more control. But in all cases it doesn't describe a world better than the one we're in. That's become the work of technology & that's the locus of hopeful imagination nowadays. And not for nothing but in technology we've delivered on a lot of the promises of god - healing the sick, occasionally raising the dead. Here & there, brining about apocalypse.
I just don't think it's good enough, nor do I think it's on a useful path. Not right now because the imagination that fuels it primarily is simply imagining their own domination of others. Money is allowed to rule too much of life & it's had a noxious effect on the spiritual & moral development of people, they're denied these advantages so that they'll be more lustful & violent in their denial. Just a feeling, something I can see whether it's real.
The real is always a cage & the imagination is always the escape. Whether the real is full of idle comfort people will still imagine something better. We now imagine a religion that is better than what exists now, we imagine a god that is superior to the ones offered us & we imagine a world improved & people perfected. Because not to imagine things as better than the real is a waste of the most useful gift.