In conclusion, religious beliefs—and organized group religion in particular—have been a part of human civilization for thousands of years. Culturally, religion can have many benefits: it can help communities come together to celebrate and to grieve, to contemplate morality, to show gratitude, and to meditate. Religious faith is consolidated by human tendencies to be loyal (to one’s ingroup, to one’s family, to longstanding beliefs learned and practiced since childhood, and to idealized figures), and by the human tendency to internalize (for many believers, God functioning as an internalized representation of perfect goodness, power, or protection). Religions are further consolidated by many enjoyable and meaningful human cultural activities: a lot of the world’s greatest art, music, literature, and architecture is rooted in religion. Religions also help many people cope with the deepest, most painful, and most frightening experiences of life, such as facing the deaths of our loved ones, or facing one’s own mortality. And religious services can be a medium through which people meet friends or potential partners, sometimes with a better-than-average chance of meeting someone with whom they might share values, also with that person vetted by the church community. The congregation itself can act as a village matchmaker.
Yet religions and other spiritual or mystical systems hold beliefs that are not true. These beliefs are often taken literally, and dogmatic adherence to them—public profession of them, loyalty to them—is frequently required as a sign of belonging. Some of these fictions may be inconsequential much of the time; many people can live decent lives without a precise understanding of biology, astronomy, geology, genetics, or ancient history. But the darker side has to do with the extremity of group loyalty: ingroups and outgroups form, and religion becomes an emblem of identity that can seed mistrust, exclusion, and maltreatment of outsiders. Dogmatic pronouncements can also become oppressive to the group’s own members, particularly when people are pressured into literalistic interpretations of sacred texts, or when “faith” becomes a moral duty rather than an honest way of grappling with uncertainty. Furthermore, spiritual or mystical beliefs about causality can lead to dangerously poor judgment about important life decisions, yet the spiritually guided person can feel supremely confident while making these decisions.
The lack of accurate education about the way the world works is finally detrimental to any individual, group, or nation. It is like a pilot of an airplane who doesn’t understand how the engines work, and assumes that planes fly due to magic. Most of the time this may not seem to make much difference to the safety and navigation of the plane—until the weather changes, until something unexpected happens, until you need a sober understanding of what is real in order to respond well. A culture can coast for a long time on comforting stories. It is when conditions become difficult that false models show their true cost.
I think it is valuable that we live lives in which we strive toward understanding deep truths—about ourselves and about the world—and it is just not satisfying to settle for fictional belief, even if these fictions might comfort us. It is particularly troubling to me for children to be indoctrinated with dogmatic beliefs, especially if they are not exposed to accurate information about the world in terms of science, history, and culture. And it is troubling that there should be public financial support for religious groups, in the form of tax breaks and other privileges, unless these are clearly restricted to the charitable components of religious outreach rather than the promotion of dogma or political influence.
We certainly know that holding religious belief is not necessary to be a moral, kind, loving, gentle, humble person. In fact, in some cases religious beliefs can obstruct these positive qualities and add to the world’s problems. And it is possible to face the most difficult aspects of human life—grief, loss, pain, and death—while behaving honourably, peacefully, and nobly, without requiring belief in some eternal reward. In fact, moral behaviour done for its intrinsic good, rather than being motivated by fear of punishment or hunger for reward, seems to me a deeper ethical foundation. Such a stance does not require religion, but it does require effort: working on living well, striving to become a better person, and trying to be a stabilizing and humane influence on others.
In discussing religion, it is important to empathize with people who hold religious or spiritual beliefs. Respectful understanding of how and why people believe as they do matters—especially if the goal is genuine dialogue rather than tribal combat. It is also valuable to search for common ground, particularly with regard to values. Most religious people value integrity, loyalty, altruism, compassion, truthfulness, lawful behaviour, fairness, family, care of children, hard work, and the willingness to stand up for what is right even at risk to oneself. In a discussion about religious belief, it can help to emphasize these shared values, because it appeals to unity rather than escalating the feeling that one is an outgroup member disrespecting a sacred tradition.
And that brings me back to the question that started many of these reflections: how to face transience without leaning on supernatural reassurance. I sometimes think of simple things: a firework, a meal, a fire, a cup of hot tea. These things are transient; they disappear. Yet their constituents are still present—they have merely dissolved and dispersed into the surrounding space in a different form. The structure ends; the ingredients remain, rearranged. We can’t expect the cup of tea to survive unchanged forever, and we can’t expect the firework to glitter permanently. In fact, it is normal—and even required for its enjoyment—that it be transient. A lot of religion tries to deny this, or to soften it with a story about eternity. I think there is another path: to accept that things end, to grieve honestly when they end, and still to love them fiercely while they are here.
There are examples of keeping the healthiest aspects of religion—the focus on values, morality, kindness, altruism, charity, humility, meditative self-care, self-improvement and sincere amends-making, caring for and accepting care from community members, enjoying beautiful music, art, and architecture, with a focus on gratitude and reverence—while not becoming captive to narrow dogma, false beliefs about science, or denigration of outsiders. Some interfaith movements aim to cultivate peace and mutual respect across traditions. Some branches of modern religion are simply less dogmatic and more open to science and cultural pluralism. And many people, religious or not, find ways to live with moral seriousness and spiritual depth without insisting that myths must be treated as literal facts.
Imagine a crowded church service at the moment the congregation rises. Each person hears the same words, sees the same gestures, and sees everyone else hearing and making the same display. This is more than shared belief. It is public belief. More precisely, it is common knowledge.
One of the most useful ways to understand religion is to treat it as a way humans achieve social coordination. Steven Pinker’s recent work on common knowledge offers a sharp insight about this. Common knowledge is not merely that many people know something; it is the further fact that everyone knows that everyone knows it, and everyone knows that everyone knows that everyone knows it—in principle without end. This sounds like a philosopher’s game, but human beings handle it with surprising ease in daily life.
And it is not just an abstract curiosity. It is one of the practical tools that makes civilization possible. A simple way to grasp this is to compare private knowledge with common knowledge. Suppose I text you to meet me at a certain cafe at noon, but I am not sure whether you saw the message. My private intention does not coordinate anything unless I know that you know it too. Or take money: a paper bill has value only because I believe you will accept it, you believe I will accept it, and both of us assume countless other people will do the same. Without that shared expectation, it is only paper. Or think of driving through an intersection: I stop at a red light because I trust that other drivers know the same rule, and that they know I know it too. Without that layer of mutual expectation, there would need to be a police officer at every intersection and a supervisor at every transaction.
In Pinker’s framing, common knowledge generates coordination. It lets people converge on shared conventions—driving on the right, accepting paper currency, agreeing on a meeting place and time—without needing a central enforcer to micromanage every choice.
Once one starts seeing this, ordinary public events look different. A wedding is not only a private promise between two lovers; it is a public event in which everyone witnesses everyone else recognizing the couple’s new status. A graduation ceremony is not required to make learning real, but it does make achievement visible and socially undeniable. A courtroom oath, a citizenship ceremony, even the singing of a national anthem, all have a similar structure: they are not merely expressions of a belief or promise, but public demonstrations that everyone present has seen the same commitment made.
But the same logic also helps explain the shadow side of social life. People often avoid saying obvious things out loud because speaking them changes the situation. A whole family may privately know that a father is drinking too much, or that a marriage is failing, yet nobody mentions it at Thanksgiving dinner, because once it is said, everyone is forced to respond. Hypocrisy can sometimes be stabilizing in exactly this awkward sense: a church may publicly praise a strict moral rule while quietly knowing that many members do not live up to it, and the polite silence around the mismatch is part of what keeps the community from splitting apart. Shaming mobs ignite because once condemnation becomes visible—especially on social media—each person sees everyone else condemning too, and joining in suddenly feels safer and more rewarding. Revolutions can seem to erupt out of nowhere for a similar reason: thousands may privately resent a regime for years, but only when protest becomes public does each person realize that others were ready all along. And public rituals—religious, political, civic—have force because they do not merely express belief. They make belief mutually visible.
Religion is, among other things, a machine for manufacturing common knowledge. Private belief is psychologically real, but socially weak. It does not coordinate strangers. A society cannot run on invisible beliefs that no one can observe. What rituals do—prayer spoken aloud, communal singing, congregational responses, public confessions, initiation rites, sacred calendars, distinctive clothing, a crucifix necklace, shared dietary rules—is turn inner states into public signals. They convert “I believe” into “we can all see that we believe,” and then into “we all know that we can all see it.”
This matters because people are extremely sensitive to the social risk of being the odd one out. If belonging is the reward and ostracism the punishment, the most dangerous condition is uncertainty: Do they believe this? Do they know I believe it? Do they know I’m wavering? Rituals collapse that uncertainty. They make allegiance visible. They create an emotionally saturated version of a contract—less like signing a document, more like standing under a spotlight and letting the group watch you sign with your whole body.
This is why religions place such emphasis on public acts. Private prayer is meaningful to many, but communal prayer is socially decisive. Singing alone is esthetic; singing together is social glue. An individual moral intuition is fragile; a moral intuition recited in unison becomes harder to question, because questioning it is no longer just a solitary cognitive act—it becomes a social offense. And once a belief is entangled with common knowledge, its truthfulness often becomes secondary to its coordination-value. The belief may be fictional, but it is socially efficient.
This logic also helps explain why cost matters so much. A cheap signal is easy to fake. A costly signal is harder to fake, which is why social groups are so attracted to cost. High-demand religions—those that require many hours of weekly participation, tithing, conspicuous behavioural restrictions, sexual policing, or public displays of devotion—often look irrational or excessive from the outside. But through this lens, some of that irrationality is exactly the point. If a group can get you to do something inconvenient, stigmatizing, or effortful, it has a way to distinguish true loyalists from casual tourists. The sacrifice itself becomes evidence. The burden is part of the proof.
This is also why initiation rituals recur across wildly different human groups, religious and otherwise. The ordeal is a signalling device: I paid a price to be here; therefore I must value being here; therefore I am one of you. The group sees the price, and the price creates common knowledge of commitment.
Pinker makes an additional point that is deeply relevant to religious life: people do not always want knowledge to become common knowledge. They often go to great lengths to ensure that even if everyone privately knows something, no one is forced to acknowledge it publicly. Many communities function because people tacitly collude in not pressing certain questions to the point of explicitness.
Examples of this are everywhere. A family may quietly know that one relative has a severe drinking problem, yet conversation glides politely around it for years. A workplace may quietly know that a promotion was unfair, but no one wants to be the person who says so in the meeting. A teenager in a devout household may stop believing a doctrine years before saying it aloud, because the moment the words are spoken, the issue changes from an inner uncertainty into a relational crisis. Even in a congregation, several people may have serious private doubts about a sermon, a miracle claim, or a moral teaching, yet each person may assume that everyone else is more convinced than they are, and so the silence preserves the appearance of unanimity.
The moment a doubt is spoken plainly, it stops being a private flicker and becomes a social event. It demands response. It forces alignment. It threatens the shared story.
I can’t help thinking about the present political world. Within large partisan groups in parts of the world today, I suspect there are many private doubts about very alarming world events, and about the conduct of one very prominent leader who seems to dominate the news, yet too few people inside those groups are willing to speak their doubts aloud, because doing so would risk the loss of community. It reminds me of the old fairy tale The Emperor’s New Clothes. The force of that story is not that the child discovers some hidden fact. The child simply says aloud what everyone can already see. He turns private knowledge into common knowledge. Some of the truths of the current world situation, and of the behavioural problems of major leaders, are so obvious that a very young child could understand them clearly. Perhaps the innocence and humility of a child’s voice is exactly what is needed to pierce a collective performance of denial. One definition of heroism, in my opinion, is the willingness to speak one’s private knowledge of the truth to a group that may at least initially reject you for it.
In practice, a religious community often survives not by answering every question, but by managing which questions are acceptable to ask out loud.
Religious spectacles—miracles, exorcisms, dramatic conversions, speaking in tongues, revival meetings—are not just theological events. They are high-powered signalling events. They take a private feeling—“I felt something”—and turn it into a public fact: “We all saw her fall, shake, cry, speak strangely, rise transformed.” The group witnesses a performance that is emotionally contagious, and the witnessing itself becomes part of the evidence.
The crucial move is not merely that an unusual event occurs, but that everyone sees everyone else seeing it. This is how common knowledge is made at high speed: a shared spectacle that forces a shared interpretation, or at least a shared posture. If you stand in the room and do not respond, you are not merely unconvinced—you are socially deviant. The power of the event is partly the power of mutual surveillance.
This is also why sceptical outsiders often have a dual reaction to certain public charismatic performances: amusement at the apparent absurdity, mixed with unease at the very real influence such spectacles can have when they become fused to political power. The performance may look ridiculous, but its social function is very serious: it converts theatrical intensity into tribal certainty.
A frequent defence of religion is that it provides moral structure. That claim is not wholly wrong—at least at the level of group coordination. A community that repeats moral language weekly, that teaches children shared scripts for gratitude, restraint, charity, and self-scrutiny, will often produce decently socialized people. The group is continuously manufacturing common knowledge about what counts as admirable, shameful, or forbidden.
But this cuts both ways. It can coordinate kindness; it can also coordinate cruelty. When a group makes contempt for outsiders common knowledge—through sermons, jokes, or political messaging—the moral atmosphere shifts. People become emboldened. What was privately felt becomes publicly permitted. The difference between a prejudice that quietly lingers in someone’s mind and a prejudice that is openly shared is enormous: the second is actionable. It becomes policy. It becomes bullying. It becomes violence with a clean conscience.
One part of what we are seeing today in the rise of bullying and prejudice is this same effect: various groups are coordinating a social norm in which prejudicial thinking is shared openly within the community, until the prejudice itself becomes an emblem of partisan belonging.
The frightening historical efficiency of religious persecution is, in part, a story about common knowledge: it is easier to harm others when the justification has been made publicly shared, ritually repeated, and socially rewarded.
This dynamic is not only created in sanctuaries; it also spreads through networks. Here the work of Nicholas Christakis is a useful complement. His research suggests that behaviours can cascade through social networks—spreading from person to person to person, sometimes out to several degrees of separation. Human behaviour is not merely individual choice; it is often contagious.
Religion has always understood this intuitively. Congregations are network structures: friendship graphs with rituals attached. Conversion is rarely solitary; it is more often a relational event. People move toward belief because a trusted person pulls them toward a group in which belief is already visible and shared. Doubt spreads similarly: not primarily through reading an argument, but through watching someone you respect begin to question the sacred story. The moment that questioning becomes visible, it becomes socially thinkable. It becomes sayable. It becomes a potential cascade.
This is one reason religious authorities, across centuries, have been so preoccupied with public dissent. Private doubt is manageable; public doubt threatens contagion.
The “New Atheist” era often tried to treat religion as though it were primarily a set of factual claims—claims that could be refuted, one by one, by geology, evolutionary biology, textual criticism, or cosmology. Those refutations matter. But they often fail to persuade for the same reason a spreadsheet rarely defeats a love affair: the object is not merely an idea; it is a social world.
If religion is partly a technology for manufacturing common knowledge—about belonging, virtue, status, and identity—then a purely evidential critique will bounce off the surface for many people. The deeper structure is social. To leave a religion is not only to change one’s beliefs; it is to risk becoming unintelligible to one’s own tribe. In the harshest cases, it is to risk exile. The mind treats that as a danger.
This also helps explain why political leaders so often perform religiosity even when their lives show little evidence of it. Performance creates common knowledge. A staged photo with a sacred symbol is not primarily addressed to God; it is addressed to the crowd. It signals, “I am one of us,” and it invites the crowd to become complicit in acting as though that were obviously true. Once that performance becomes socially established, dissenters inside the coalition pay a price for pointing out the obvious.
Therefore, the secular task is not only to critique supernatural claims. It is also to build non-supernatural forms of common knowledge that can do some of the same social work. Something like this is already happening in the modern world. People gather around causes, institutions, professions, civic rituals, scientific identities, mutual aid networks, even exercise cultures. These can be silly or beautiful, freeing or authoritarian. The point is not that secular life lacks ritual. It is that secular rituals are often fragmented, unstable, less grounded in family history and ethnic continuity, and less explicitly oriented toward moral formation. Secular life is not short of art or beauty. What it often lacks is a comparably thick set of shared rituals that bind esthetics, morality, ancestry, and public belonging all at once.
Religion persists not only because people are credulous or fearful, but because religion solves hard social problems. Pinker’s concept of common knowledge helps explain how it solves them—sometimes in ways that elevate human life, sometimes in ways that deform it. And once one sees religion as a social technology of visibility—of signals, rituals, and shared scripts—one can critique it more honestly: not as a childish mistake, but as an ingenious human invention that exacts a price.
The deeper question is whether we can build a life, and a society, in which the best human goods that religion has traditionally coordinated—community, moral aspiration, awe, mutual care—can become common knowledge without requiring that we pretend, together, that comforting fictions are facts.
There are many unanswered questions about how the universe works. Part of the wonder of science is appreciating that for every advance in understanding, there are always new horizons of the unknown to explore further.
I find that one existential frontier in understanding has to do with consciousness. Regardless of the various physical explanations about why we have conscious, subjective experience (of memory, drives, sensations, emotions, etc.) it remains truly miraculous that this occurs. It is true that consciousness exists on a continuum; it has definitely been sculpted by evolutionary forces, and is subject to a lot of variation, with diminished or gradually altered consciousness caused by sleep, fatigue, anesthesia, substances, neurological disease, etc. It is interesting to consider whether consciousness could be a property of nature itself, as opposed to a property only of a neurological system such as the brain. Some great scientists such as Roger Penrose have theorized about the mechanisms of consciousness; while I think such theorizing is interesting and worth following, I'm not sure that the result would impact my opinion of this matter too much. Even if there was a precise physical explanation, it does not lessen the miraculousness of it.
I find consciousness even more miraculous than "free will" since even if the universe was entirely deterministic or superdeterministic, there would still be human consciousness, which is something which deserves a feeling of wonder and awe. Some people would say that the phenomenon of consciousness is a manifestation of the divine -- and I guess I'd have to be ok with that, perhaps even as a foundational definition of the word "divine."
The combination of religion with narcissistic style is not hard to find, but the issue is more specific than religiosity alone. Some forms of faith are associated with humility, service, and genuine care for others. The darker pattern emerges when belief fuses with status-seeking, certainty, and group superiority. Then people insinuate—or directly assert—that their beliefs, culture, and moral footing are simply better than those of outsiders. Confidence is mistaken for virtue; self-importance masquerades as conviction; and the group may reward precisely the traits it should distrust.
Sanctimony is a related phenomenon: moral language used not primarily to understand right and wrong, but to signal superiority, enforce conformity, or punish dissent. In its mildest form it is performative piety. In harsher forms it becomes a social weapon. Psychologists now sometimes describe a similar pattern as moral grandstanding: using public moral speech partly as a way of gaining admiration, status, or dominance. The content may sound righteous, but the motive can be vanity. Ordinary people end up feeling belittled, corrected, and morally diminished, less because a truth has been clarified than because someone wants to stand above them.
A different but overlapping pattern is rigidity. Some people are deeply uncomfortable with ambiguity, exceptions, shades of gray, or the possibility that decent people may disagree in good faith. They are drawn toward fixed rules, sharp boundaries, and moral bookkeeping. In religious life this can take the form of scrupulous rule-mindedness: a chronic need to monitor, confess, correct, classify, and control. Religion does not simply create these tendencies, but it can give them language, structure, and social reward. Families and communities shaped by this mentality can become tense, cautious, and punitive—more concerned with avoiding wrongness than with cultivating goodness.
To be clear, these are not “religious” traits. They are human traits. But religion can bless them with sacred language, allowing vanity to pass as conviction and control to pass as virtue. At its best, religion tries to humble the ego and enlarge compassion. At its worst, it gives the ego a halo, and makes severity look holy.
Some religions feature unusual behaviours that are accepted as manifestations of divinity. One example is glossolalia (“speaking in tongues”). Every cultural group has rituals that symbolize transcendence or divine intervention somehow, but it is concerning in modern times that people would treat this as a literal case of God “speaking through” someone, rather than as a human psychological and social phenomenon.
So what do we actually know about glossolalia? It usually isn’t the dramatic idea some imagine—suddenly speaking a real foreign language you never learned. Instead, it’s speech-like vocalizing: it has rhythm, emotion, and a kind of “word-like” flow, but it doesn’t reliably carry stable meaning or grammar the way a normal language does. When linguists study recordings, they tend to find that it draws heavily on the sounds and speech habits the person already has in their ordinary language—almost like a voice improvisation that feels like language, without functioning as one in the usual sense. When glossolalia happens in a context where it is expected, taught, and socially supported, it looks like a learned trance or skill—comparable to hypnosis, flow, or dissociation.
One can find examples online—there are widely circulated clips of a high-profile “faith leader,” close to a major political figure, performing “tongues” in public. I think a lot of people seeing this for the first time have a mixed reaction: perhaps, with a nervous smile, followed by some discomfort, and then a sharper concern once it lands that the performer has a large following of fervent supporters, and has mainstream political influence. It is deeply ironic that a communicative tool which does not carry any semantic meaning can be so persuasive to otherwise logical observers.
From a psychiatric point of view, glossolalia can be understood as a particular kind of altered attention state that can be learned, practiced, and performed. Put someone into the right mix of conditions—music, group emotion, high expectation, authority cues, shared language about the sacred—and a person can produce vocalizations that feel deeply meaningful. The speaker may experience it as surrendering control; the group experiences it as proof that something “beyond” is present. Others practice it quietly, in private prayer, and describe it as calm or soothing. So the phenomenon is broader than revivalist spectacle, even if spectacle is where its social force becomes most obvious.
This is where the social function matters most. Like “miracles,” and like behavioural restrictions that visibly mark membership, glossolalia can work as a signal: it makes the group feel special, chosen, and close to the divine in a way outsiders “don’t get.” That feeling is intensely bonding. It strengthens loyalty, rewards conformity, and makes doubt feel not merely intellectual but socially dangerous—almost like betrayal. The experience itself becomes the evidence, and the shared intensity becomes the glue.
Of course, the same machinery can be used for darker purposes. A leader who is skilled at spectacle and emotional orchestration can use these displays as tools of persuasion: not by offering reasons, but by creating awe, certainty, and a sense of “we are witnessing the sacred.” The danger is not the oddness of the behaviour; it’s the way the resulting belief and allegiance can be redirected into real-world authority—sometimes including political authority, or as a tool to obtain financial donations—under a banner of divine mandate.
