 Disparaging religion has become a rite of passage for modern intellectuals. To become enlightened, it is now necessary to equate religious people with crazies. Indeed, if you want to join the club of elite modern thinkers, you must reject the irrational superstition and magical thinking of religious folks and stick to the hard sciences. I confess, I've never gained membership into this club. I'm just too fascinated by religious people to dismiss their ideas out of hand. I want to listen to their claims. Oftentimes, their ideas sound wild, but that doesn't necessarily mean that they're wrong. Now, growing up in a Christian evangelical household, I have a unique inside perspective, and I would be lying if I claimed that all religious people are crazy. That's just too easy. There's more going on with religion than simply irrational superstition. Now, this article will not focus on why religious people hold their beliefs. Instead, I want to focus on religiosity itself. There's some quality that religious people have. It's noticeable when you see it. But what exactly is it? What makes the religious? Religious. I don't find the popular explanations compelling. In sciencey crowds, it's fashionable to call religiosity essentially low-level schizophrenia or what they call schizotypalism. Or sometimes religiosity is about the nature of religious beliefs, the existence of God, a soul, an afterlife, etc. Still, other people equate religiosity with the method of religious thinking, blind faith and the rejection of reason. In my mind, all of these explanations are lacking. First of all, religiosity cannot be seen as a set of conclusions. Plenty of people believe in God or an afterlife, and they don't seem religious per se. They might believe in traditionally religious ideas, but they lack that essential religiousness quality. Religious ideas often seem crazy from the outside, but they really aren't. The world is a weird place, and it's filled with a weird phenomena, and every worldview will have seemingly bizarre theories in it. For example, think about the nature of consciousness. Let's say you take the standard physicalist approach that all phenomena in the universe are composed of matter or energy and are reducible to the laws of physics. So how do we explain consciousness? Well, simple. When lifeless matter gets clumped together in very specific ways, a self-aware being emerges, and he navigates the world from a first-person perspective. He starts referencing his self as I, and he eventually worries about his own mortality. That complex clump of matter even tricks itself into believing that it has free will, that somehow it can break the chains of what it calls causality, and choose to move matter around with its own conscious mind. Now, don't tell me that doesn't sound a little bit crazy. Or what about the techno-futurist ideas that are so popular today? Intellectuals commonly talk about the potential for human consciousness to be uploaded to the cloud, while people will be immortal androids for the rest of eternity. Now, if you think that's possible, does that make you religious? I don't think so. Radical beliefs do not equate to religiosity. So perhaps religiosity is the method of religious thinking. Perhaps it's the word that we assign to people who make conclusions because of blind faith. But last, this also fails the test for a simple reason. Plenty of religious people don't explicitly endorse blind faith. I've met many. I think all of their beliefs are well-reasoned and grounded in rationality. They might even agree with me that blind faith is a simple, unnecessary error. But they still remain passionately convinced that Jesus was God on earth. They still seem to exhibit religiosity, and they might even self-identify as such. But perhaps the most arrogant explanation is the one gaining the most popularity, seeing religiosity as a sign of mental illness, specifically schizophrenia. This explanation is most popular among the self-described skeptics who relish the thought of their own intellectual prowess and cringe at the lowly and irrational barbarism of religious thinking. Needless to say, I don't find this categorization persuasive. From my own experiences, I've interacted with a ton of religious folks in my life, and I've only had very few of them who exhibit signs of schizophrenia. For example, a clear sign of mental illness is articulating word salad, incoherent strings of words that lack any underlying sensibility. Now, if you're an arrogant and confused intellectual, you might equivocate religious arguments with word salad, but that's merely a reflection of your own shallowness, not the incoherence of religious ideas. In my mind, one example demonstrates why all the categorizations fall short. Imagine that all three of these qualities being embodied in one person, some guy who believes that Jesus was actually God because he has blind faith and he's also on the schizophrenic spectrum. Have we found a sure case of religiosity? I don't think so. Imagine that he tells you, yeah, I believe all those things, but that's just my own personal philosophy. I don't push it down anybody else's throat. I'm still a normal Joe like anybody else. I don't freak out about these ideas. Now, to me, even though he meets all those standard criteria, I wouldn't consider the person religious, kind of like the Catholics that you meet that consider themselves Catholic by birth. I mean, yeah, they believe in Catholicism, sure, but they're not obsessive or aggressive about it. So, I propose a new criterion for defining religiosity. It's the intensity of your commitment to act in accordance with the truth as you perceive it. Now, notice this says nothing about the content of your beliefs nor your method for arriving at them. If intensity of commitment is the defining feature of religiosity, it explains a great deal of things. First, it explains why the Catholic by birth Christians, or I might call them the casual Catholics, often don't seem religious. They aren't intensely committed to their ideas. Think about it. If you have a strong belief in the existence of an afterlife, your neighbor might live in paradise or hell for eternity. Wouldn't you feel some strong obligation to tell everybody about it? I mean, eternal damnation is a pretty big deal if it happens, yet I rarely see the casual Catholics talking about it publicly. Your stereotypical evangelical by contrast frequently bugs their neighbors and friends about this idea. Now, self-described Jesus Freaks might believe identically with the casual Catholics about the nature of Jesus, let's say, but the Jesus Freak wears his religion on his sleeves while the casual Catholic rarely brings it up. Now, of course, I'm not saying, oh, Catholics aren't religious or any such nonsense. Neither am I saying that if you're intensely devoted to your ideas, you have to be loud about it. Passionate evangelizing is only one form of religiosity. I'm just illustrating my point using common stereotypes. Consider another group of people, the radical environmentalists. I'm not talking about, hey, let's help the planet by driving a Priests-type environmentalist. I'm talking about, hey, humans are parasites and they should all kill themselves for the sake of the planet type of environmentalist. For my conversations and observations with these people, I would say they qualify as equally religious with the most fervent evangelical. It's not that their conclusions are radical, it's that they're intensely committed to them, even willing to die for their perception of the truth. Or how about two other groups, Buddhists and Muslims? By my definition, an intensely religious Buddhist would be a monk, somebody who sacrifices their whole lives to the worldview. A casual Buddhist might be the stereotypical Westerner who thinks that Buddhism is a nice and pretty theory, but whose life looks virtually indistinguishable from his non-Buddhist neighbors. One version of an extremely religious Muslim is a jihadist, willing to kill himself and others for his ideas. Now, less religious Muslims might believe the same things, they might desire Sharia law, for example, but they're not willing to strap on an exploding jacket for it. But this is a two-edged sword. By my definition, being religious isn't necessarily a bad thing. In fact, it's kind of admirable. We should couple our pursuit of truth with a commitment to act in accordance with it if we were to discover it. But fortunately there's one catch. We better make damn sure our beliefs are accurate in the first place. The problem I have with most religious people isn't their religiosity, it's their inaccurate conclusions. All the zealous devotion to their ideas almost nobody takes the time to carefully reason through their justification for their beliefs in the first place. They're committed to being committed, but they don't analyze what they're committing themselves to. You can think of it like a powerful car, the engine is firing on all cylinders, the driver is super focused and slamming on the gas pedal, but he's not thought about where he's headed in the first place, he's just going fast. Of course this kind of mistake in religiosity isn't unique to traditionally religious topics. The political left, for example, is unwaveringly committed to government welfare programs or raising the minimum wage regardless of their real world effects. Mathematicians have some of the most intense religiosity of any group I've ever met. Question the foundational axioms of mathematics and you are immediately dismissed as a heretic and a crank. They are so devoted to their axioms they literally cannot conceive of the possibility for errors being in their world view. But also especially religious is the modern skeptics movement, the young atheist materialist empiricists who are intensely committed to their conclusions yet who are sorely lacking in justification for those conclusions. Now without a doubt, by my own definitions, I would be considered religious too. I am fanatically devoted to logic and rationality and I will spend my entire life evangelizing about these ideas. Logic is the foundation for all rational thinking. It's the key for understanding the universe and I will talk your ear off about it. I'm not a casual philosopher, I am a zealot. But in contrast to almost every other religious person I've met, I have a sound philosophic justification for my beliefs. My commitment first is to the truth, not to any particular set of conclusions. So from the outside, especially if you disagree with my conclusions, I probably come off as crankish. But because I'm a zealot, I couldn't care less. Similar to the Christian who firmly believes that his conception of God and eternal life is objectively true. One quality I find endearing about religiosity is the utter disregard for social norms. If the truth demands it, then religious people are willing to give the finger to popular opinion. They aren't willing to bend to political correctness or flow with public opinion. If something's false, it's false and it doesn't matter how many people say otherwise. Now to me, I think this is a wonderful quality as long as the individual can rationally justify his beliefs. So in conclusion, I don't think that insanity or stupidity is a sufficient explanation for the phenomena of religiosity. Instead, it's the intensity of commitment to live in accordance with the truth as you perceive it. And from my perspective, it's only respectable when it's coupled with philosophy and critical reasoning. Intense commitment, by itself, is pointless and probably dangerous. Intense commitment to the truth, that's something to admire. If you like the sound of these ideas, if they resonate with you, then make sure to subscribe. And if you want to help create more content like this, then check out patreon.com. And you can help support the creation of a more rational world view. To read this article or to learn about my books, check out steve-patterson.com