Let me just toss out this idea of connectedness and the meaning of life. A little playful idea for the hell of it. This is what I think about when I’m bored at work and the world around me stops interesting my mind for a moment…

If you think about all life as following the same basic rules of information gathering and dissemination, creating meaning and structure in how to live better in the environment in which they live, to have a place in the universe and to expand that place to further reaches, and you assume that the same underlying basic organization principles are the foundation of ALL life from cell colonies to human societies (I think this works and makes sense, most people of a scientific nature would scoff at the lack of good experimental evidence, except maybe for those meme-concept loving bastards of which I consider myself one, but this is the only conception that makes sense to me, a kind of fractal pattern repeating and repeating and repeating on different scales) then you can end up at this conclusion that comes out of nowhere in this context since I don’t feel like writing a book right now. Go do some research and come back. I’ll wait, I’ve got nothing but time…

Religion’s entire purpose is to build communities, to organize and to vitalize people towards common goal and hopefully a common good. The actual religious beliefs are incidental.

People like me, a self-defined scout ants of the world, the artists, the creatives, the philosophers, scientists, thinkers, plain old ponderers like myself who do it as a hobby, tend to be questioners and by that very nature they often can’t easily deal with religion. It’s just so silly and enraging to be told that everything is set and there are no questions, no places to explore, when your entire being is telling you that it’s obvious that the bullshit they’re selling is bullshit and that meaning and understandings are vastly deeper than the simplicity they offer.

So…so fucking what?

Good question I tell myself. Here’s an answer I say to myself too.

It doesn’t matter except that most of us agnostic/atheist/scientist/scout ant types do not understand that the nature of religion is to organize and not explore. And if we do we still end up in this place where it’s just so damn silly we can’t believe anyone actually pays attention to that stuff.

So this is what I’ve been thinking about. Can a system be created that can foster exploration and real understanding, drilling deeper and deeper and encompassing wider and wider bits of knowledge into the understanding of the universe, creating meaning and more meaning, while still, at the same fucking time, holding a wider, grander, constantly expanding and growing community together?

The paucity of community building that, the secular humanists, the rationalists, the scout ants, actually do is amazing. Yeah, I know you bastards do some community building, arts councils and science conferences and tiny groups defending tiny bits of society. The big things, the organizations that do all the charity work and garner all the charity acclaim that convinces people they’re worthwhile as organizing principles are religious in nature or origin.

This was especially prevalent when the hurricane laid waste to New Orleans and the coast around it a few weeks ago. Before the governments and FEMA and the army could get there, religious organizations imbued with a sense of community, of connectedness, of a need to pull in more people thought example, were streaming into the area.

This is the essence of the failure of the vague and poorly defined humanist community to have a significant effect on the general understanding of people, to be able to define the debate, or effect grand change or any kind of change at all.

Maybe it doesn’t matter and it will all work out in the end.

Although, being the science-based mystic seeker that I am, I can’t help but think that it matters greatly if the world at large thinks angels are pushing them hither and tither like leaves in a breeze. Or that ghosts are lurking in the shadows. Or that there is only one answer and that answer is [insert answer here]. The complexity of our modern world grows exponentially. Complexity demands flexibility and standard religious understanding is not the paragon of flexibility.

I don’t know what all of that means other than that I’m disaffected with the current state of the world and it seems to me that the ruling paradigm is too destructive to do anything other than destroy itself in the long run (let’s say 200-300 years). The only conclusion I can come to is that the organizing principle needs to be shifted and it cannot be shifted or modified by reason and debate arguments alone.

Organizing principles need to organize and not philosophize. They need to actively engage the world, to reach out to people and help them in ways that show the power of the organizing principles. They need to engage the emotional needs people have for connectedness to others and by engaging them, engaging the natural clumping state of all of life.

[note: I’m talking about branding, advertising, marketing, and all that goodness here. This is all too apprent to me. A brand creates a community of likeminded people who may have accumulated or may have been created. It’s a related topic but integral to the question I pose to myself.]

Imagine for a moment that such a thing could happen. All the world’s religions have been dynamic and explosive idea/meaning/understanding generators at their beginning and soon thereafter solidified into a quagmire of rigidity of doctrine and thought.

The question I ponder then is if that is the inevitable nature of the nature of ideologies. Could you design a system of thought embracing constant churn in knowledge while still building communities that expand and grow and embrace the churn in their own understanding of themselves and the meaning of the universe created by the exploration of that churn in knowledge?

Could you create a religion that is not a religion yet serves the same purpose as religion now does? And if you could what would the consequences be?

Yep…I’ve been really bored at work lately.