In fact, comparing it to a drug really fits my entire point… And fits what you’re saying about WOW nicely.

The obvious answer is “religion is different than World of Warcraft”, but for someone who’s been outside the fold of religion their entire life, this isn’t a convincing argument. If you never held religion sacrosanct to begin with, you just view it as one of those foreign things that other people spend lots of their time on, like World of Warcraft, rooting for professional sports teams, whatever.

Does this make sense? Perhaps the description of my fascination with the future is a bit overwrought in this blog post, but I can assure you it’s nothing close to what I imagine the single-minded devotion of the devout to their religion is like.

Anyway, my point is not that everyone will express this built-in tendency towards religion through animism, but that no matter what, people have a dependency on it. For you, for example, I’d say your replacement for religion is probably your anticipation of the technological future… but that’s just a guess. It’s not meant to devalue it or anything, or indirectly imply that you’re a hypocrite for having something filling the role in your brain while you rail against it. I mean, Einstein’s work came from what he replaced religion in himself with.

Also, I see you’ve been commenting a bit lately, so welcome to the blog. Regarding your comments, though: the URL field is entirely optional. Seeing as how you don’t have a website, you should just leave that field blank. It’ll save you some time and it also won’t display a junk hyperlink on your comment. Also, you should probably use a real email address. I don’t harvest them in any way — what they are used for is the spam filter, which you keep getting caught in because of gibberish email addresses. There’s also a per-email karma system, so regular commenters never get caught while first-time commenters sometimes do. Just something to think about.

I realized that being raised without any sort of religion, my mind has filled the vacuum. All kinds of examples where I’d actually find that I was personifying objects, and believing, for example, that a victorian-era-looking illustration of a duck painted on this old shelf clock was watching over me, like what Catholics must feel from their various saints. I believed my toys could feel neglected or unliked, and would try to be ‘fair’ to them, playing with all of them equal time even if I had favorites. Giving up my first car when it broke down was significant because it seemed to me like a real creature. I think of my computer an obnoxious surfer dude who doesn’t know anything, who I have to pound into submission to get working. I see, even though I know it’s ridiculous, spirits out in the woods that walk around… in the grass, in rivers, in gravel roads. I feel the accumulated relief of hundreds of weary travellers in particularly comfortable hotel rooms.

I don’t go around saying I’m an animist, and it never even gets encoded into words unless I analyze myself and my behaviors afterward. I’ve come to see it as a rather amusing and neat aspect of my brain, linking me to the more primitive past. And even though it makes no sense, I like having these feelings. That’s probably why it’s so hard for you to get rid of your original religion. You believe it’s something extra, something brainwashed into you by your parents and your society. It’s as much a part of you as breathing.

That’d be nice.

And then, kosher actually becomes “evidence” of the religion that believers can point at. If a whole group of people are arbitrarily eating some animals but not others, and the only reason offered up is religion, then that makes the religion seem powerful and relevant, when all the kosher rules really are is a biologically-incentivized propagation of memes. But it’s not as if we didn’t already know that religion is the biggest scam ever.

And don’t even get me started on acupuncture or chiropracty.

Then don’t google “digital homeopathy”, or you may weep openly.

The pork thing makes a certain amount of sense: our species evolved in an environment where some foods were good to eat, and others would kill you. So children need to learn from their parents which foods to eat and which ones to avoid (apparently this is related to the way toddlers get really picky about their food). At any rate, according to Steven Pinker, food icks are the hardest to get rid of.

Other than that, I like the house of cards analogy: many elements of your personality or “culture” or whatever you want to call it are based, directly or indirectly on religion. But since the whole thing continues to work, so there’s no life crisis that you have to deal with; you can just adjust things as you notice them.