From the pagan and animalistic rituals of early human cultures, to the pagan

gods of antiquity, to the grandiose monotheistic religions that still exist today,

the majority of human history has been dominated by a belief in supernatural

forces and, most important, the hope that certain actions and beliefs in this life

would lead to rewards and improvement in the next life.

This preoccupation with the next life developed because for most of

human history, everything was completely fucked and 99 percent of the

population had no hope of material or physical improvement in their lives. If

you think things are bad today, just think about the plagues that wiped out a

third of the population on an entire continent,24 or the wars that involved

selling tens of thousands of children into slavery.25 In fact, things were so bad

in the old days that the only way to keep everyone sane was by promising

them hope in an afterlife. Old-school religion held the fabric of society

together because it gave the masses a guarantee that their suffering was

meaningful, that God was watching, and that they would be duly rewarded.

In case you haven’t noticed, spiritual religions are incredibly resilient.

They last hundreds, if not thousands, of years. This is because supernatural

beliefs can never be proven or disproven. Therefore, once a supernatural

belief gets lodged as someone’s God Value, it’s nearly impossible to dislodge

it.

Spiritual religions are also powerful because they often encourage hope

through death, which has the nice side effect of making a lot of people willing

to die for their unverifiable beliefs. Hard to compete with that.

Ideological Religions

Ideological religions generate hope by constructing networks of beliefs that

certain actions will produce better outcomes in this life only if they are

adopted by the population at large. Ideologies are usually “isms”:

libertarianism,

nationalism,

materialism,

racism,

sexism,
veganism,

communism, capitalism, socialism, fascism, cynicism, skepticism, etc. Unlike

spiritual religions, ideologies are verifiable to varying degrees. You can

theoretically test to see whether a central bank makes a financial system more

or less stable, whether democracy makes society fairer, whether education

makes people hack one another to pieces less often, but at a certain point,

most ideologies still rely on faith. There are two reasons for this. The first is

that some things are just incredibly difficult, if not impossible, to test and

verify. The other is that a lot of ideologies rely upon everyone in society

having faith in the same thing.

For instance, you can’t scientifically prove that money is intrinsically

valuable. But we all believe it is, so it is.26 You also can’t prove that national