 The two pillars of religious humanism that we're going to be interacting with is humans are limited and religion is powerful. I'm going to begin with the humans are limited note. Our minds are cozy comfortable places to live. With our own thoughts for company we are always right. We have staggeringly powerful mechanisms to prevent us from self-correction. We have confirmation bias to help us find those sources that best agree with us and we have the backfire effect to protect us from those opposing views we can't manage to avoid. David McRainy points out that when someone tries to correct you tries to dilute your misconceptions it backfires and strengthens those misconceptions instead. Yay humans! Over time the backfire effect makes you less skeptical of those things that allow you to continue seeing your beliefs and attitudes as true and proper. Yes we humans can learn but mostly we want to learn that we don't need to learn after all. In our heads everyone agrees with us that is until we talk to them and anyone who disagrees with us well that's their problem. As in they must have a problem if they can't see how right we are. In fact they're probably stupid if not malicious. It is our duty to correct them. We should get on Facebook and do just that and after every debate we can convince ourselves that we won. The best way to convince us the best ways to get around these limitations is priming and suggestion so we don't know that we're being persuaded. We need checks and balances fear and trembling and ironically what we are combating so heroically and diligently is our own misplaced comfort and misleading assurance. That is why we have methods and disciplines science and scholarship but even with our best efforts we still get it wrong. Feeding ego and following funding instead of rigorously and responsibly questing truth but it gets worse. If we humans are limited in the best of circumstances we are pretty much hopeless in most. Cognitive biases meet religion. The mind has probably never met a more powerful cultural force than religion. Can you think of any aspect of human culture that has convinced humans that it's not an aspect of human culture? Just think about that. Religious significance saturates human limitation. If we are religious nothing can possibly challenge that. Our kids will never leave surely. If we are non-religious the demise of religion is inevitable and imminent. It will be gone by the time our kids grow up. After all if we ourselves believe doesn't everyone and if we ourselves doubt doesn't everyone this is the false consensus effect or just general myopia and lack of consideration. So again my take home message is humans are limited religion is powerful religion is thus not going away so we might as well understand it harness its power and potential. And the Mormon Transhumanism Association pertinent question that ties this presentation into the others is the desperate question and that is how do we facilitate the continuation of civilization infrastructure until we can get to the singularity. Until we can get to that fundamental transformation. In other words we are in a race to the death between innovation and cataclysm. So as a corrective of the limitations that we are so prone to I am going to provide context. This is not coincidentally the very context that broke me out of my own Mormon mindset. I just rewrote Mormonism all through graduate school until I started teaching world religions and world religions gave me the whole puzzle and I saw how permeated by humanity religion was and I really love that puzzle and I've been enjoyed gauging with it. So past present religion. It's funny there's a comment I don't know if the commenters here and the Facebook group that this is a very negative view of religion but this is pro religion. If anything it's very sobering around humanity. So in the past religion scared us into cooperating and it worked. I'll unpack that. In the present religion sucks. I'll nuance that and saying it's actually an outdated cultural technology. The future is up in the air. As I said it is a race to the death between innovation and cataclysm. Well not a race to the death more a race back to the stone age without the fossil fuels to rebuild. I like the Edwards Deming quote it is not necessary to change survival is not mandatory. If we want to be highly uncomfortable we don't need to change anything we can continue. Okay how to make religion what are the ingredients of religion. So we have belief ritual community and transcendent reality. I've said before that religion is the interconnected system of beliefs and rituals in the context of community and reference with reference to transcendent reality. Beliefs there are explanations and myth taboos and morality and then ritual there are daily rituals that organize our days years lives rights of passage communal ritual. Religion requires community and again it has reference to a transcendent reality. Religion passed well why are we religious why is religion so pervasive ubiquitous in fact and then where did religion come from I'm going to be talking about some turning points tribal religion agricultural religion the axial age and then a conquering we go or conquering religions which are the monotheists ones. So why are we religious in the beginning there is not the happy helper god there were evil spirits and as best as we can tell I am building on the work of Pascal Boyer religion developed out of an a need to manage belief in evil spirits and this is how it worked there are type one faults positive and type two faults negative errors and this is why believing in evil spirits was evolutionarily advantageous and increased our chance to survive I'll explain. So a false positive if there's a rustling in the bush and you think it's a leopard or a wolf for the predator of the day and you're wrong you're just stressed you know you're going to be hyper worked up and anxious but that's a type one error you think there's a predator there's not you think there's an agent but there's not type two errors are where you don't think there's an agent and there is you're going to end up dead because the tiger wolf or whatever is going to eat you therefore the people who were more anxious and who over attributed an over assumed agency because like lightning can strike you trees can fall on you but the thing that can hunt you down and eat you is the most dangerous force in your environment well no the most dangerous force in your environment are other humans and so our brains needed to develop hyper agency detection devices which meant that we personify we over attribute the amount of agents in our environment and this is where animism comes from animism is the world view that believes everything has a spirit everything has feelings if you ask a toddler how things got someplace like leaves or boulders many times they will assume that someone put them there in the middle of the night you wake up what is the first thing you think not oh that box fell over it's who's there this is because we need to survive we need to protect ourselves and we need to protect ourselves from agents um but we also have social mirroring um when other humans approach us when other agents approach us it is essential to our survival well-being status the next you know a tinder date whether we can accurately read their intentions are they aggressive are they interested it's really important whether you know uh Daniel Dennett has you know he answered a question that i never even thought to ask he said where did religion evolve from and he proposed that religion is domesticated superstition so what happened was superstition required ritual to manage that superstition so individuals developed rituals whether they're spells dances or so forth to protect yourself against the evil spirits and this ritual became shared ritual so when a predator comes to the tribal camp everyone cooperates and gets together to protect the tribe from the predator but how often does that happen but when they're evil spirits they are always dangerous and so this shared ritual as protection against probably false dangers became a uniquely powerful cultural technology to facilitate cooperation identity and all sorts of other goods that religion provides religion also provided what i'm calling ritual health insurance this is the placebo effect if you believed in the rituals you had real beneficial outcomes because of the way that our physiology psychology and culture all have co-evolved and then as a bonus anyone who doesn't believe like you you kick them out and they die that's really great you know and so religion has this unique power to facilitate cooperation unity and again it helps if you kill everyone who disagrees with you but then this is kind of how it played out you have harvest festivals you have the the commemoration of death as agriculture dies you have the rebirth in the spring and you will see those organizations in pretty much all religions if you want to blow a shot well it works better with teenagers and above ask someone around Easter which it is right now what eggs and bunnies have to do with Jesus well their fertility symbols because the spring festival celebrates sex basically you know reproduction and the return of life and of course the resurrection of Jesus and Jesus coming back to life that works kind of but there is definitely dissonance there and then we have the axial age i propose that all current religious technologies are axial age technologies Mormonism is a very interesting fan fiction science fiction update of Christianity masonry and so forth and so it has a lot of robustness that traditional Christianity does not but we're all working with the basic structure of axial age technologies this is basically 700s to 300s BCE about it's really fascinating we don't really know why but during this couple centuries we have Confucianism Buddhism Taoism Zoroastrianism Judaism Greek philosophy there are all of these developments that transformed culture and then we have the religious conquerors that changed the entire face of world civilizations we have the Aryans that invaded the Indus Valley civilization Buddhists were conquering to a degree Zoroastrians that conquered nicely and then of course we have the Greek Romans and finally Christianity and Islam that led us into the monotheistic age well or at least monotheistic western civilization so this is what's shaped the past so religion present where are we who is religious where is religion increasing where is religion decreasing why are people religious uh and i'll again i'll talk about why religion sucks but no religion sucks harder and i really did debate whether i could say sucks harder in a conference like this we need to be aware and cautious of the fallacy of assuming that everyone agrees with us and as i as i have taught college i have definitely seen this seen this phenomenon young americans will discount the power of religion it's not that important to them unless it is again we just if if we're religious we think religion is going to be around forever if we're not religious we wonder why anyone possibly would be let's look at what actually is going on in the world right now yes the nuns and on yes the non-believing sure it's increasing but even in and there are secular countries socialism really helps it turns out if you take care of humans they don't need to rely on um magical helpers so much so who's religious around 85 plus percent of people in the world are still are still religious now this is where it gets i could go into this but in the interest of time i'll move forward the interesting thing is projected change in religion by 2050 you have to love pew the religious profile is going to change and it will the world will continue to be religious in 2050 yes it's possible that we could hit these tipping points and things could completely change in unanticipated ways again technology is the biggest question mark i personally think that once Manhattan floods will really start changing things um you know like oh there's there's a problem here how could we possibly address it and then i think like the Elysium model will happen where people with control over resources will create city states that may maintain that infrastructure but we still can't get avocados okay so with religious profile i do think that civilization globalization interconnection it's really fragile right now and the next decades are going to determine the degree of well-being and civilization that we're able to maintain so this is what's going to happen by 2050 at least the number of muslims so again islam is the fastest growing religion as i've been thinking about how to address religion how to redirect religion that's my goal with religious humanism i have to ask myself what can compete with islam that's kind of my my target um atheists agnostics and other people who do not affiliate with any religion though increasing in countries such as united states and france will make up a declining share of the world's population that that should be sobering um for a lot of us global buddhist population will be about the same as presently hindu and jewish populations will be larger muslims will make up 10 of the overall population in europe india will retain a hindu majority but will have the largest muslim population of any country in the world surpassing indonesia in the united states christians will decline for more than three quarters of the population to two-thirds in 2050 Judaism will no longer be the largest non-christian religion and muslims will be more numerous in the in the us than jewish and four out of every 10 christians in the world will live in sub-saharan africa so things are shifting in really important ways but religion as long as there is a foreseeable future as in we have the current civilization structure religion is roughly going to stay the way it is what time the do i have how many more minutes right does anyone have a time count i think two minutes at least but maybe more great okay um there we go i'll i'll wrap up why are people religious and this is the religion sucks no religion sucks harder when it comes to individual and collective well-being psychological and social goods religion outperforms secularism that's it um i live by the buckminster fuller quote that in order to effect change don't attack existing systems create an alternative that outperforms the existing system um so we've talked about perma before positive emotions engagement relationships meaning achievement collective well-being motivation cooperation productivity stability um let's think about a wellness report card uh fundamentalism progressivism and secularism basically fundamentalism if you fit in the box it works very well for you it makes you feel good it gives you a very strong sense of meaning um if i can have a bit of salty language liberals have really good idea conservatives get shit done and usually conservatives get distressing things done like things that are distressing to the liberals but again we have to take seriously the power that fundamentalist conservative social structures have i propose and i think this is why the mta is so robust it's interesting like why other religious and you know transhumanist groups haven't succeeded as much but i think that progressive movements have to piggyback on and cooperate with current religious structures it's very telling that during the um pride parade for example mormons building bridges where there's a very ambivalent relationship in the lgbtq community it's still the biggest and so with for all its shortcomings mormons building bridges has a force and a horsepower and a sustainability that other smaller groups didn't i think atheists of utah have like 10 people um so awareness motivation and change i'll wrap up in just a minute um this is something i i'm applying to be a humanist chaplain and i was really amused as i was applying to be a humanist chaplain because this isn't this is just a thought exercise not really representative because i can't make the circles that as small as they would need to be to actually be accurate so we have the people who are aware of what humanism is i don't know 20 percent it's again these these circles are too big as they are people who care what humanism is which is way smaller the people who care what humanism are secular humanists um and then the people who are engaged in humanism are secular humanists but they're tiny it's easy to be a passive secular humanist and then the humanists who are open to be a religion i mean open to religion we're dealing with a tiny tiny group and the humanists who are open to religion who want to invest in religion and i'm going to be their chaplain anyway to quote arrested development there are dozens of us so the future of religion again to finish up i think that current religions will continue to move full steam ahead and as civilization and current infrastructure gets more fragile these axial age religions will get only stronger because it especially islam you know people will lean on what is familiar what they know the future of near religions by near religions i mean things like popular culture sports the military government uh advertising uh consumerism these are not really great alternatives you know we have secularized badly they will get more and more and more of the resources you don't come up with new saints you have football saints that's basically how it works the future of future religions that depends on us but again i think that one area where the mta is really succeeding is progressive movements including innovative creative new religions are disproportionately ethical disproportionately impactful so for the dozens and dozens of us you know we do a lot of good but we're never going to get that critical mass we're never going to get that tipping point we're never going to be able to compete with the existing religion until we can get them on our team and come up with something better thank you