About this episode
This is episode 5, Toward a Functionalist Understanding of Religion, Pt. 2This is a continuation of my previous episode, and the analysis I am about to present will make a lot less sense if you haven’t heard that one.Part 1 - intro and genealogyRecapMy purpose in this series is to explain how I think about religion using a functionalist framework.To be successful in this analysis, we must approach the topic from the outside, with as much impartiality as possibleI have identified six components of religious belief:* Gnosis - the life-changing hidden knowledge* Nemesis - the enemy who wants to hide it from you* Ecstasy - the transcendent mental states that are given to the elect* Taboo - the forbidden actions which those with gnosis understand to avoid* Eschatology - a model of how the world will end* Telos - a prescription for how to spend your surpluses beyond the necessities of survivalMy functional taxonomy is not the gospel truth. It is a model, and all models are wrong, but some are useful.The power to understand the distinction — understand it in your heart — has not been granted to everyone. And there are many who, no matter how you explain it to them, they cannot grasp itIt’s like trying to explain to a human being how to fly by flapping his arms. He doesn’t have the hardware to soarWhat I have tried to model for you, in part 1, is what you might call our metaphysical needs. We think of physical needs or psychological needs, and most people are familiar with that moral abomination called Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs.And we have also heard, mostly from religious people admittedly, that men possess a yearning for god, they say there is a god shaped hole in man’s heart.But rarely have I seen anyone interrogate the shape of the cardiovascular chasm, as if to learn something about the shape of the deity therebyI have observed purely on my own, by making a study of myself and the people around me, what yearnings, or longings, men are trying to satisfy when they search for religionIn the Screwtape Letters, C.S. Lewis describes a man who is kept from all manner of devilry and vice by his mundane enthusiasm for liver and onionsLewis believed that everything good and wholesome flowed from the Christian God, no matter how trivial. So for him there is an inexorable wholesomeness to simple earthly pleasures which could very well stave away sinful temptations.And I invoke this story because I think it illustrates how our metaphysical needs don’t have to be complex or profound.But in everyone you meet, if you get to know them, you can begin to divine their personal religion, their gnosis, their eschatology, their taboos and so on.And sometimes those things bear a family resembl
