For proper context, be sure to read part 1 (Intentional Coincidence)! :)
I experienced something similar today to Day 19, where I first posted on intentional coincidence. I happened across someone I hadn’t actually had a full conversation with, and we spent a few hours talking about what it means to spend life exploring instead of honing in on one or two things. Which one more so gives you life, and does committing to one over another sap your time away?
I’m not going to talk about that, because the entire encounter reminded me I have more I want to say on the topic of intentional coincidence. So for the first time, we have a part two!
In part one, I talked about structures that make certain outcomes more likely, even if the exact detail of the outcome is left up to random chance - hence the term “intentional coincidence.” The two examples I used were that of the Camino and that of policing.
I want to synthesize my thoughts from that post, and my second post on this Substack, entitled “Systems and Symptoms.” (Link, because hyperlink is failing me right now: https://andrewsun.substack.com/p/systems-and-symptoms)
My proposal is that we can use the idea of a system, just as it is defined in politics (eg. systemic racism) to understand God and religion. Yes, I am saying it has become useful to me to understand God and religion as a system. God is in some sense the “physical” manifestation of religion as a system, yet it is still invisible and only appears through a hodgepodge of symptoms, just as systems and symptoms are defined in politics.
That is to say, we might understand systems to cause symptoms. So even though logically not perfectly consistent (converses of true statements aren’t necessarily true), we might come to define a system through the various symptoms that appear in the world around us.
To use religion as an example, we might take the ideas of submission, incredible and magical coincidences, and biblical texts together to represent the consortium of symptoms that points strongly toward the underlying system that is God, or the existence of a higher power.
Just as we might take the array of racially disparate outcomes in American society to suggest the existence of a system or institution of racism.
The reason that I am making this classification is because it allows us to study religion as an example of a system that, although impossible to prove its existence definitively (just like any system, as I elaborate in “Systems and Symptoms”), nevertheless has persisted for thousands of years through the collective faith of billions upon billions of people. Why is such belief so persistent and comprehensive through time, but systemic racism remains a hot button, controversial issue in the US?
Please please do not assume I am casting religion as racist or conflating the values of these two things. I am not saying either that there is more or less evidence for God vs. systemic racism (I personally believe in systemic racism but not God, but that’s not relevant to the argument). I am simply saying that their mechanics work very similarly, albeit to very different ends:
Both are impossible to prove definitively, yet we have many symptoms to suggest the system’s existence.
Both create intentional coincidences, as I defined on Day 19.
So how can we understand their difference in popular understanding? I have a few thoughts.
First, belief in religion is convenient. It grants you access to a deep community that stretches time and cuts across skin color, income, and more. In many cases, belief in religion goes hand in hand with belief in afterlife, which is comforting to the many of us that think morbid thoughts about what death actually looks like. It promises us retribution from suffering. It comforts us when times are tough.
Belief in systemic racism does the opposite. It demands accountability to your implicit bias. It condemns pure equality (think colorblindness as a “solution” to racism), which many consider a laudable goal, as oppositional to the preferable goal of equity.
Second, belief in religion is comforting because it is popular. I know of friends who were not religious before college, but became friends with people who happened to be part of the school christian community, which thus provided a strong impetus to consider pursuing faith. When the people around you believe something, anything, it feels credible to believe it as well. I would go as far as to argue that your environment influences your deepest beliefs more so than anything inherent to your being, although I can’t really prove this.
Humans are social animals, and religion capitalizes on this.
But belief in systemic racism in the US is for some reason controversial (maybe because of my earlier point about convenience vs burden), and it is a popular political strategy to go after it. When a belief is controversial, the tendency is to look the other direction instead of engaging the belief, out of fear of social capitulation.
Humans are social animals, and belief in systemic racism has suffered because of it.
None of this is to judge anyone who believes or doesn’t believe either of these two things. Seriously.
I just would point out that for whatever systems you believe in, there are factors out of anyone’s control that affect how popularly those beliefs are shared. And they don’t speak to the validity of those beliefs. I believe that plenty of systems exist even though belief in their existence is in some sense a burden as is also not popular (which makes it a burden). But they could be just as or more valid than systems that are convenient and popular.
Maybe symptoms is the wrong term for the religious system. The ways in which religion appears and folds into the lives of those who believe it seem to give them energy and strength instead of sapping them away like an unwanted plague. Where terminal disease is permanent life.