on religion
04-06-2023 • Ryan Prendergast
Written April 6th, 2023. Edited and published March 25, 2025.
Two of my coworkers were talking about going to church. They haven't been since they were kids, but they were thinking about going on Easter, to one of those Unitarian ones, where you chit chat with the pastor about the Bible. It's an interesting attitude: being inclined toward religion, but not wanting to be unfashionable. You might even get a little defensive and justify it with something universal like "a sense of community". You can mix it up: maybe you're feeling a little Episcopalian today, maybe a bit whole-body essentialist in the summer. If one of the churches gets a little problematic, then you remark how that's unfortunate before you righteously chit chat with your friends where you'll move to next.
I don't go to Church, but I grew up Catholic. I went to Catholic school, where we went to Church every week, and I was an altar server. Unitarian chit chat religion is weird to me. It's very foreign. I never once considered whether my religion is the best one, as if it were college admissions or plans on a Friday night, riddled with fomo dynamics and hype trains. I've never considered switching religions. I don't think it would even be possible for me to be not-Catholic. I see my Catholicism as something close to an ethnicity-- something permanent that taints a person, a tattoo, rather than an active practice that can be removed.
I never really cared how literally correct religion is. That always confused me about the atheists: they have this intensity of focus on correctness. How could the flood have happened in 40 days?! How could this or that contradiction be present in the bible? I never cared about any of that, because the correctness of the details is not going to make me not-Catholic. It's like your father, like your dad. If your dad is wrong, you don't start shopping around for other dads. That doesn't make sense. Even if your dad is a raging alcoholic, a bad man, he's still your dad. Some guy on the internet is like "well actually your dad said that he'd take you to play catch but he stayed in, so that's a contradiction". No shit, but he's still my dad! That's what God is to me.
What religion "is" is an attempt to distill previous generations of human wisdom into a package. There's a balancing act between optimizing-for-correctness and optimizing-for-survival. The Catholic church is the oldest institution that exists, successfully optimizing for survival. The Protestants are not WRONG with God-as-metaphor, but they optimize their way into obsolescence. Protestants optimize themselves into atheism and then they don't have a church.
Yes, religion is fake. It's metaphoric. God doesn't literally exist; he's a metaphor for the collective consciousness that coalesces around shared abstract ideas and stories. If you're interested in God-as-egregore, I recommend Metaphors we believe by. But that's too damn complicated for me to understand. That's too complicated to explain to a kid. I need a noble lie. if you metaphor-icalize God and try to explain that he's real-but-not-real, you kill him. That's why we lie. What we can picture, and what we can pass down, is A Guy.
Metaphor as man, so metaphor survives.