 Jared Anderson is the president and founder of the Olam Institute, a religious nonprofit that nurtures constructive approaches to religion and religious education. His primary goal will be to establish religious humanism, first online and then in physical communities. Jared has taught religion courses over the past 10 years at Westminster College, the University of Utah and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, where he is currently completing his PhD. Really grateful that Jared can make it out today. Thanks. Okay, thank you very much. I am really glad to be presenting this right here. I've been incredibly impressed as I've listened to you all and I'm glad to know you because as with others, I want my presentation not to be a one-way presentation but the beginning of a conversation and I think it also flows well with several presentations. I want to propose what reverse engineering religion might look like. First a couple of my presuppositions. Religion is a cultural technology that co-evolved with homo sapiens. It's at least as old as the cognitive revolution and it has proved uniquely powerful as I'll discuss in just a moment. Religion has been found arguably in every culture and it maintains stubbornly even frustratingly pertinent in our lives. As I said, I intend this presentation to be part of a conversation. Every point I make will require careful exploration, extrapolation, debate and nuance. Within the next month, I will have forums up at religioushumanism.org and this is where I want to organically hash out what the details of reverse engineering religion would look like. Does this look familiar to any of you? When you were younger, I feel like disproportionately this audience would have made codes in elementary school your own. To create an artificial alphabet is different of course than creating your own language and I feel like challenging someone, okay, inventor religion, come up with your own religion would be on par with asking someone, okay, now invent your own language. Of course there have been some fun and creative, you know, Klingon and Elvish and there are invented languages but it's very, very difficult and far beyond the ability of most individuals. You need a lot of specialization, a lot of creativity. I feel like when someone leaves the structure of organized religion in a sense they are being asked to invent their own religion but we can't even handle an alphabet. We can't handle a new alphabet let alone a new religion so this is the international phonetic alphabet. It is fantastic. There is one and precisely one character for every possible sound. You can write every sound in every language on the planet in this. Here's an example of Alice in Wonderland in the international phonetic alphabet but even though it's practically perfect it's not practical because no one is going to learn, we can't even handle the metric system in America let alone a perfect alphabet. So religion is incredibly powerful. In fact every semester I offer students an automatic A, first day of class they can walk away with an A in the class if they can name any cultural institution more powerful than religion. It doesn't exist. Yes on an individual level for lots of us religion may not be the most powerful influence in our lives but culturally, historically it is the most powerful force and it motivates what could be called absurd or at least extreme investments of time and resources and anxiety. People worry about religion it's an imagined reality that motivates tremendous investment. Now religion, these slides are not working I actually I'm going to see if I can pull up my PDF. Now the problem is that religion is the most powerful technology that we have in the world and yet it's aimed at the wrong targets and that's a serious problem. So the tragedy of religion is that even though it motivates like nothing else it motivates anxiety about things like but sex to be crass. When we are faced in the world with issues such as unsustainable use of resources, unsustainable systems, consumerism, pollution, waste, climate change, exploitation of human animals, the planet, mass extinctions, conflict, war, terrorism, America also qualifies as terrorist with its drone strikes, radical inequality, corruption and stability, disease, inadequate access to education, infrastructure, birth control with even with all of these problems because we are so focused on religion a lot of people not only don't worry or you know don't think about these problems they're barely aware of them or they don't they don't believe in them. That's the word. So we have these urgent problems so is it possible to take this uniquely powerful cultural technology of religion, improve it, make it more beneficial, more useful, more efficient and then aim it at the urgent problems that the world faces today as we have done with other features such as the domestication agriculture society itself in fact Daniel Dennett argues that religion itself is basically domesticated ritualized superstition which is why we still believe crazy things. So what would reverse engineering religion look like? Well first we need to start with what is religion? My proposal is that religion is an interconnected system of beliefs and rituals in the context of community with reference to a transcendent reality usually an agent. The transcendent reality usually has feelings about how we live our lives and a religion needs to have all of these elements. Now our culture is full of aspects that are almost religion. They motivate myths, they have ritualized behavior, they have superstitions. Sports is actually one of the closest near religions. In fact a quarter of Americans believe that God determines the outcome of the Super Bowl. That's a real statistic and also nationalism, patriotism, if you've ever been to court you notice the ritualized behavior, you know when a certain someone puts a piece of paper on your car it requires you to take symbolic action and give them money because of this improper taboo that you committed by parking in the wrong space. Nationalism is a near religion and you could argue that nationalism in fact Robert Bella has is that nationalism could even be considered perhaps a full religion because to be a good American you need to believe in God so it has that transcendent reality. So these are near religions but they're not quite religions. We'll look more closely at the components of religion. So once we've determined what religion is and we're on this task of reverse engineering and making it better we need to decide what flavor of religion we want to replicate. And two among many options but two options that we have are high church and low church. Low church began as a disparaging term but generally low church refers to a low liturgy not much embodied worship you know you have prayers in the full spectrum of both our evolution and the individual and collective advantages that religion gives. So when I think about reverse engineering religion I'm going to set as a target a high church tradition. In other words and I literally have this goal I want to help build religious humanist cathedrals not chapels cathedrals. I think we need that level of engagement. So how to make religion you know what goes into religion we have as I said in my definition we have beliefs we have rituals there's scripture usually myth scripture is written myth and then we have community transcendent reality fits into belief and this is where the conversation really needs to begin because there are so many possibilities and what I'm planning on doing is on these religious humanist forums I want to engage with a wide variety of people and there will be lots of areas in the forums to discuss the ethical issues the meta issues the application issues but there are a lot of questions to answer so when we talk about reverse engineering religion and what what should be in the religion so we need a lot of different things so for example we need a cosmology we need origin stories we need meaning we need morality we need stories of identity I want to speak for a moment about the question of literal belief because a lot of the people we talk to as liberal or fringe or post in the spectrum of Mormonism there's a lot of disparagement about literal belief in fact I pushed back really hard when a good friend of mine said that he is trying with his podcast to promote a post-literal Mormonism and I had a really hard time with that because I asked him I said aren't you just affirming a new dogma you're you're affirming a new target that everyone has to adhere to and that's the same problem as people who say literal belief is the only way to believe in Mormonism now I think the ideal technology of belief is one that allows for a spectrum of approaches depending on need depending on personality so for example literal belief does work that figurative belief just can't so for example the placebo effect is dosed based on your belief the authority of the person administering that placebo and our physiology chelsea shields does research on this our physiology actually responds to our literal belief I laugh when I see these pharmaceutical commercials where they're like and the placebo effect helped in 40% of the cases and our drug that makes you poop blood and may kill you helps in 50% of the cases it's like please give me the sugar pill and I want to have that amount of benefit so what should be our target with what I will call religious humanism which is this reversed engineered religion that I propose I think that we do need literal belief we need concrete specific engaged narratives that allow for literal belief but do not require literal belief now it's in human nature to give each other a hard time if people believe differently than you but that's unavoidable so to jump a little bit ahead and I'll come back to this one humanist denomination that I'll talk about is earth church an earth church is religionized environmentalism neo paganism and so mother earth what is mother earth is mother earth an anthropomorphic goddess with a really great rack maybe you know I mean if that is the kind of mother earth that you believe in that's great is mother earth literally the spirit of planet earth maybe you know that is one option is mother earth a symbol to remind us of the importance of environmentalism demonstrably yes and so it's this range of belief so not only is there belief but there has to be ritual and there are so many wonderful questions when it comes to what should be in religion I've also thought about a companion app kind of like sim city or something where you need to design your own religion and see if the little sims will follow your religion but first we need to have a conversation what are the individual rituals what are daily rituals what are weekly rituals what are yearly rituals what are rites of passage what do you do at birth what do you do at maturity what do you do initiation and what I mean by high church tradition is these are this is rigorous religion one of the problems of religion as Nathaniel said so well is that we need to motivate people to do more than they themselves want to do we need to motivate people because as human beings we don't know what we want to do we only know what we are glad to have done or regret to have done think about a workout routine or a challenging diet in fact as we look back some of the most rewarding experiences of our lives are some of the most difficult experiences of our lives and I think one of the greatest failings in American culture right now is the idolatry of individualism and the privilege of preference that what so I think young Americans they're not bad they're not selfish but they are very individualistic and the idea is they want to do good on their own terms they want to do good when they want to and I think this is a major limitation of a lot of liberal organizations so liberal organizations and I'm drawing on Jonathan height here usually have superior ethics fairness and so forth but conservative organizations get things done much better than liberal organizations do so what I propose in religious humanism if we can pull it off is that we have a conservative structure and a conservative organization or framework with liberal ideas and conservative ideal at the same time so what is scripture I'll get back to that in a moment I'm thinking about if we were to reverse engineer scripture a quick moment about why I'm using the Christian or post-Christian terms Bible church and so forth I think Americans are the ones who most desperately need this new form of religion and these words have entered our wider vocabulary so a Bible needs and there's going to be a geek Bible that I really hope to present to Stanley so we need to get on that geek Bible earth Bible life Bible and so forth so we talk about origins virtues morals motivation range of emotions co-ons parables saints heroes commandments legends stories we need creeds these rigorous religions need community what are the leaders what is the hierarchy what is worship service accountability and again this is what I mean by rigorous and we'll get to this question with the dark side the dark side of religion and this is another limitation when it comes to these liberal ideal ideals and liberal values is well okay heaven forbid we ask anyone to do more than they want to do because that'd be bad my thesis is that in order to get anything done in order to address the urgent problems of today's world and human civilization may be hanging by a thread based on how well we can address these problems it will require more horsepower than preference can engage and yet all the conservative groups aren't even looking at these urgent problems so I'm hoping with religious humanism to bring these together I think that we need to embrace the totality of human experience we need to embrace the dark side we need to embrace in group out group behavior elitism fear-based motivation helmets dogma now there are limits I don't want anyone to die for religious humanism I don't want anyone to kill for religious humanism so I don't think religious humanism should be cult strength even though I think it should be rigorous and high church so what do we do with this engineered religion my three approaches that I'm working on are what I call religion better than true a spiritual training app and religious humanist denominations so religion better than true I've spoken on this before this is a hypothetical ideal version of existing religions that is created by a mediation dialogue between a former member atheist and a literal believing member of the religion and they need to agree on their religion and this is what pope Francis is basically doing by himself is that he is pushing Catholicism to its limits in fact he I think maybe more atheists love pope Francis than conservative Catholics love Francis and I have a Sunday school podcast engaging gospel doctrine where basically I teach humanism in Mormonese and I've done it for four years and sure enough both literal believers and atheists love this podcast because it's Ted talks mingled with scripture and it sounds it sounds Mormon so it's recognizable and it's distinctive so a spiritual training app I'm running out of time but I literally want to develop this it is a personalized rigorous religion where there's a personality test and preference and you ritually you choose your scripture what are five texts that are meaningful to you and you check in through social media you ritually drink whatever your sacred beverage is and then you you check in and you know that they go to your sacred space and finally in conclusion I want to realize humanist denominations life church which is religionizing in high church religionized education science earth church religionized environmentalism geek church religionized popular culture and then tech church which this is a really good audience to first talk about that which is religionized technology transhumanism and so this is what I want to spend my life doing and you are ideal interlocutors to help make that happen so thank you