Third Thoughts

Finding God

1. The problem religion solved

Religion solved one hard problem better than anything else for most of human history:

How to trust an acquaintance almost as much as family.

Family trust comes from predictability.
Religion manufactured predictability among non-kin.

2. The mechanism (simple, not mystical)

Religion did this by requiring people to follow the same small, repeatable rules:

None of this is costly.
All of it is binding.

Once someone follows shared rules:

Predictability is trust.

Belief explains the rules later.
The rules create the trust.

3. From trust to coordinated agency

Once a group trusts internally, it gains immediate payoffs:

A coordinated group can out-produce and out-fight a larger uncoordinated one.

This is an agency multiplier.

4. Why religions expand

Once a religious pocket gains advantage, it expands.

Expansion offers outsiders a narrow menu:

This pattern repeats everywhere in history.

Belief follows survival.

5. Conversion is not ancient history

This is continuous, not medieval.

Colonial Christian missionaries converted populations across Africa, the Americas, and the Pacific, often alongside force and administration.

The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints still runs a global, door-to-door conversion system.

Hare Krishna movement recruits through public ritual and lifestyle adoption.

The Catholic Church continues missionary expansion worldwide.

Different doctrines.
Same mechanism.

6. Geography decides convergence or bloodshed

Where geography allows dominance, religions converge.

Where geography blocks it, religions collide.

Mountains, deserts, rivers, islands, and trade corridors mark religious fault lines.

The conflicts were not about theology.
They were about which coordination system survives.

7. The built-in flaw

Religion's strength is also its failure.

Rules become sacred.
Sacred rules cannot be criticised without weakening trust.

At scale:

This produced wars, purges, forced conversions, caste systems, and persecution—harming or killing untold billions.

This is not accidental.
It is structural.

8. Group cohesion requires an out-group

Strong cohesion requires a boundary.

Every cohesive group needs someone to be "not us."

Religion made this explicit.
Modern pseudo-religions pretend otherwise.

Christianity and homosexuality (direct)

Some Christian movements oppose homosexuality because it functions as a clean boundary marker:

This is not primarily about sex.
It is about maintaining the edge of the in-group.

Australia, bloodless but real

The Australian Marriage Law Postal Survey showed this clearly:

Same machinery.
Lower lethality.

9. Removing God did not remove religion

Modern societies did not remove religion.

They tried to remove God.

They got a long way.

What remained was the religion module:

These now appear as:

Same structure.
Different symbols.

10. China: Communism as the remaining religion

China did not become post-religious.

It replaced religion with Communist Party of China.

Communism there functions as an organised religion:

God was removed.
The structure remained.

That is why it still works.

11. Close-mindedness is a feature

Religion works because it limits permissible thought.

Open criticism weakens shared rules.
Weak rules weaken trust.

That trade-off shapes capabilities.

The numbers (plain)

If prizes were random by population, these gaps would not exist.
A chi-squared test makes the probability of randomness effectively zero.

This is not genetics.

It reflects:

High coordination suppresses exploration.
Low coordination enables it.

12. The modern inflection

Religion was humanity's most successful trust technology—until networked systems like Tailpipe and blockchain made trust scalable without shared belief.

Religion used conformity and exclusion.
Modern systems use records, rules, and verification.

No gods required.

13. Why Paragentism is not a religion

Paragentism fails the core religious requirement:

It has no stable out-group.

Anyone who follows it will:

Everyone is a fuckwit at times.

That makes Paragentism incompatible with religion:

Cohesion is harder without enemies.
Badges or markers may help—but they must be:

The moment Paragentism defines a permanent "them", it collapses into the thing it rejects.

14. Final line

Religion was a brilliant coordination innovation.
It scaled trust, agency, and survival.

It also froze belief and required enemies.

God can disappear.
Religion does not.

The only real question is whether we can now build trust systems that keep coordination without sacred ground, permanent out-groups, or immunity from criticism.

That is what Finding God is actually about.