Friends wanna introduce friends to Scientific Animism, but won’t (yet) because “religion” is scary.
Maybe this is a “spiritual pathway” instead of a religion?
To this I initially waved my hand and sighed, “Is a hot dog a sandwich?”
Our languages drew arbitrary lines around fuzzy concepts; one person’s spiritual pathway is another person’s religion. Semantic arguments like this always bore me.
Still, though, if I went into business selling hot dogs, I’d probably confuse potential customers if I called my restaurant a sandwich shop.
What else could we call it?
If we’re not going to frame this project as a “religion,” what other word do we use?
Spiritual pathway? I have personal baggage with this term! “Spiritual, not religious” has always low-key bothered me because
the terms are ill-defined and overlapping enough to be a sort of useless distinction
to the extent that they are distinguishable, “spiritual” connotes something more like an individual’s journey. While likely a beautiful part of someone’s life, it might also lack community support. Groups at their best can help individuals become their truest selves. (But at their worst, groups are terrible! Especially in the context of religion.)
back to “spiritual pathway” and Scientific Animism: many pathways like Buddhism, Taoism, or other mystical traditions all seem like generative companions to Scientific Animism. For Scientific Animism itself, I have a firmer grasp on the collective aspects we might create, like shared ritual. Doesn’t this fall more squarely in the court of “religion”?
Philosophy? This only encompasses one aspect of the project: beliefs. Like, yes, this is a philosophy. But wouldn’t it be cool if it were more than just a philosophy?
Collective? I’d consider this one. “Let’s start a collective!” rather than “Let’s start a religion!” Although this might:
focus (exclusively?) on the material dimension of the project?
imply a co-op/business-entity type organization, like an artist collective?
Community? Maybe, but it feels kind overused and watered-down. Every Discord server and comment section are sold as “communities” these days. I’d love to have a local community of Scientific Animists that I meet with, but calling the whole effort/entity/project a “community” seems bland, imo.
Society? As in the Society of Friends, aka the Quakers? Maybe.
But even then, the full phrase is Religious Society of Friends. Like, any outside observer would say there’s something… religious about them, even if they’re not “a religion,” per se. But dang, “Religious Society” feels unnecessarily belabored. “Religious Society of Scientific Animists”? 😱
Just “Society of Scientific Animists” feels kinda ok? (If you want a fun Wikipedia hole, look up “society,” wow.) What do you think?
Church? lol
Coven? 🧙🏽♀️
Maybe some adjectives on “religion”?
Or words around it?
“A playful religion for a post-religious era”
“A religious add-on”
“Religion play,” like “cosplay”
Please come up with something better!
I wouldn’t need to write this if I lived in Northern California
Your geographic location shapes the scope of your imagination. The fact that I live in Lancaster, Pennsylvania means that Scientific Animism will grow into, or at least start out as, a different shape than if I lived Northern California.
In many ways, a project framing itself as “starting a religion” seems very at home in Northern California. I’ve been thinking about this as I compare the reaction I got at a discussion titled “Let’s invent a religion!” at a Burning Man-meets-anarchist-tech-conference in Northern California vs the reaction I get in Lancaster, Pennsylvania.
The conference attendees—assembled from all over but still united by the culture of the event itself, which was v Northern California—certainly took it in stride. They were ready!
Lancaster, on other hand, has high levels of religious trauma. Lots of religious refugees. People who haven’t unpacked their baggage yet.
If you’ve never had any religious trauma, or if you’ve worked through your trauma, then maybe the word “religion” doesn’t bother you as much.
Would calling it something else undersell it? Or feel sneaky?
On the one hand, there’s a fairly large segment of people out there right now feeling atomized and disoriented, who maybe lost the religion they grew up with or who never had much of one to begin with, and who are maybe interested in something with “religion-like force” (to use Ezra Klein’s phrase) to give them community, to hold space for wonder and grief, to make meaning. They might not mind the term “religion.”
On the other hand, lots of people are understandably wary of cults (thanks to my friend Audrey for telling me about this podcast). All those atomized, disoriented people are prime cult targets, after all! If the goal is something with “religion-like force,” something that encompasses philosophy and ritual and art and myth-making, something that in fact could be an antidote to proliferating cults, then could using some other term actually backfire?
It could at once rob the project of force while making it seem sneaky or dishonest. Like, maybe being upfront, even over-the-top, about what the project might contain causes people to be both intrigued and wary, in a way that’s actually good.
The case for calling it “a religion”
In my introductory post, I linked to an explainer on The Seven Dimensions of Religion (props to my friend Marshall for telling me about this). Religious scholar Ninian Smart wanted to avoid the impossible-to-settle argument of what counts as a “religion” and instead identified seven behaviors/patterns that many people agree seem pretty religious. These seven dimensions are:
Ritual: “All aspects of performed religion. This includes formal ritual (Christian baptism, Hindu yajna, and Zoroastrian navjote ceremonies) as well as more informal, everyday practices (yoga, prayer, and meditation).”
(I’ve heavily edited their words here, but it’s still all their words, so I’m using quotation marks. Oh look, another semantic argument! Does this count as a quote? A paraphrase? Something else? Do you care? I don’t! I’m using their words, unchanged more than 5-10%, so I’m using quotation marks to give credit where credit is due.)Experiential/emotional:
“Personal experiences felt by the individual (joy, bliss, mystery, anger, despair, etc) in relation to a religious experience”
“Encounters with… an unseen world, sources of inspiration, and moments of revelation”
Mythological: “the storytelling aspect of religion, whether the stories are believed to be true, fictitious, historical or mythological.”
Doctrinal/philosophical: “formal ideas about the world and logical systems of meaning.”
Ethical/legal: “The promotion of a happy and harmonious life, woven into a larger context, placing human action within a universal system of right and wrong, good and evil.”
Institutional/social: “The way that religious adherents, as they group together, will tend to form organised bodies that behave collectively… Decisions about what the religion is, and where it’s going, might be made in a top-down fashion, but equally (as in the case of the Quakers) might be made in a distributed, democratic way.”
Material: “The creation of material artefacts – from sculptures and artwork to buildings and cities.”
The whole post from UnderstandingReligion.org.uk is great; it goes into more detail on each dimension and then also contemplates “interdimensional travel” and the spectrum between personal and collective experiences of various religions.
I kinda want Scientific Animism to include all of these?
Ritual: Let’s make new rituals! And let’s re-cast as sacred various everyday acts like neighborhood walks and gardening and hiking in the woods.
Experiential/emotional: Let’s mourn and marvel our ever-dying, ever-transforming world together. Let’s make space for mystery, curiosity, awe, grief.
Mythological: Let’s rediscover lost stories. Let’s create new ones.
Doctrinal/philosophical: Let’s formalize the marriage between Science and Animism to help us make sense of the world, our place in it, and how we might grow with the rest of our biosphere into an uncertain future.
Ethical/legal: This one I’m personally less excited about than the others, but there’s already a strong strain of eco-minded morality thriving in our cultures. Don’t ecological “sins,” whether individual or systemic, strike many of us as one of the worst categories of wrong-doing? I’m less certain how more human-to-human morals could be contained within a Scientific Animist framework, and I’m not sure it’s necessary to make the attempt (one of my beliefs is that religious narratives are used to rationalize morality, not construct it). But given enough time, I suspect that a Scientific Animist subculture would arrive at an ethical system with novel properties, and I’m curious to observe that process and its consequences.
Institutional/social: This is probably the part of religion that makes people dislike it the most. In a word: Authoritarianism—the way many religions are used as a means to control people and entrench power. FWIW, I’m not trying to control Scientific Animism, or be its sole spokesperson (or “leader”, shudder). I’m just inviting people to come play with me; I’d love to de-center my own opinions as soon as possible. If this becomes some sort of Movement (unimaginable!) and fierce disagreements arise over its Proper Use, I would hope to see (and work toward) a distributed/democratic means to settle the conflict.
Material: Back to the good shit. Let’s make artifacts! (“Artefacts,” if you’re British??) Let’s highlight existing artifacts! Poems, books, art, exhibits, videos, memes, t-shirts, all of it!
Spiritual promiscuity: expected and encouraged
Maybe another reason people don’t like “religion” as a concept is that religions, or at least familiar Western religions, often expect you to pick your religion (or switch to theirs) and stick with it. Even being curious about other religions might get you tortured for eternity!
I guess I left this assumption behind so long ago that I forget the sway it holds.
Just as people valorize intellectual promiscuity, I think spiritual promiscuity is a virtue.
Or, if fucking around isn’t a metaphor that sits well with you, try one of these:
Drinking from many wells (Ursula K. Le Guin’s metaphor from her Tao Te Ching intro)
Swimming in many streams
Reading many books (maybe not even a metaphor 😂)
Eating from many gardens
Viewing the world through many lenses
Feeling multiple parts of the elephant
One of my Mennonite pastors pictures it as cups full of mist. Like, so many of us have this sense that there’s so much more to reality than our tiny measurable human world, and maybe that “something more” is blurry; misty. The mystical traditions of the world each have their uniquely-shaped cup in which they’ve tried to scoop up some small amount of this mist. Drinking from many isn’t bad, but it might mean you don’t drink as deeply from any specific one.
I’m not asking anyone to convert to Scientific Animism. Heck, I’m not converting to it. I’m inviting you to play. To try it on, see how it fits, see how it colors your perception of the world (including your existing faith practice, if you have one).
Do we have a good word for something that contains many aspects of religion, but which isn’t making exclusive supernatural truth claims, nor asking you to leave your existing beliefs?
Maybe who cares, you just need an elevator pitch?
Maybe the specific category into which you fit Scientific Animism matters less than being able to explain it to people quickly? Like, you need a 30-second elevator pitch.
Let’s ask GPT-4:
Animism perceives an inherent 'anima' or consciousness in all things, while science urges us to prioritize empirical evidence over personal bias. Merging these, Scientific Animism offers a reverence-filled engagement with reality, presenting a naturalistic approach to religious domains like ritual, myth-making, art, and transcendent experience. Everyone's encouraged to host events, share notes and thoughts, and co-create this transformative exploration of existence.