WHY META-RELIGION?

Beliefs are the foundation of all human experience. We can't even recall experiences prior to accumulating a critical mass of beliefs in childhood for a genuine personal understanding to emerge. We don't experience reality directly, we experience our constructed perception as determined by what we choose to believe.

The problem is we're loaded with large amounts of society's beliefs and obligations before we're taught anything about belief ourselves. Some people never get exposed to the philosophical and spiritual explorations that show just how little we know, both individually and as a species. 

As such, a huge portion of the population believes that they are experiencing reality and are right to feel certain about their absolutist beliefs. 

And I argue that it's this mindless dogmatism that poses the biggest risk to society, not any individual beliefs, no matter how ridiculous they may seem.

To unwind this tension, dasism seeks to provide a deeper understanding of beliefs themselves while offering conjectures that highlight how both scientific and spiritual explanations accurately describe reality well enough to be used. But let's just focus on the nature of beliefs for now.

Every decision we make, every judgment we pass, and every value we hold is structured around what we believe to be true. But beliefs don't serve the singular purpose of attempting to be true.

On the one hand, we strive to form beliefs that accurately reflect reality. On the other, we need beliefs that help us navigate the world—beliefs that allow us to function, maintain social cohesion, and feel like good people. 

These two purposes do not always align. In fact, they are often at odds, creating a fundamental tension in the way humans construct and maintain their worldviews.

For most of human history, survival was directly linked to material reality: food, shelter, and protection from predators. But in the modern world, most of the forces that shape our lives are not physical but social. The expectations placed on us, the reputations we build, the moral judgments we pass on others—these are all determined by belief systems that exist primarily in human minds and these potentially unreal beliefs are more important for many to adopt in order to survive and thrive.

Money, laws, political ideologies, social norms, and even moral frameworks are not objective features of the universe; they are emergent constructs that humans collectively agree to uphold. They are real in the sense that they shape behavior and structure society, but they are not real in the same way that gravity or thermodynamics are real. 

Yet, because these social constructs dictate the consequences we face—success, ostracization, punishment, praise—they exert as much, if not more, control over our lives than objective reality does.

Because of this, many of the beliefs we adopt are not about understanding the truth of reality but about ensuring that we function well within society. We believe in laws not because they reflect some universal justice, but because they create order. We believe in moral systems not because they are provably correct, but because they give us a sense of purpose and community. 

We believe in personal narratives—stories about who we are, what our lives mean—not because they are rationally constructed, but because they provide psychological stability.

While social beliefs help us function, they are often built on convenience rather than truth. Science, philosophy, and reason exist as counterforces—tools designed to strip away illusion and refine our understanding of reality. 

The goal of truth-seeking is to replace comforting narratives with accurate models of how things actually work. This isn't done to make people feel bad, but to ensure humanity is able to overcome the challenges that it faces as reality evolves around us.

But here’s the problem: absolute truth is always out of reach. Every belief we hold, no matter how rigorously tested, is constrained by human limitations—by cognitive biases, by the language we use to describe ideas, by the historical context in which knowledge is developed. 

Science corrects itself over time, but it never escapes the fundamental issue that we are creatures trying to interpret reality through imperfect senses, incomplete data, and flawed methodologies. It is also currently corrupted by authoritarianism and the prioritization of social status over argumentative merit.

Not only that, but even in science, gaps in knowledge are filled with theories that function like placeholders—explanations that are assumed to be true until they are inevitably revised or replaced. 

This is not a failure of science but a recognition that our grasp on reality is always a work in progress. 

However, when people treat scientific models as if they are objective reality rather than approximations, they fall into the same absolutist thinking that they often criticize in religion.

This is where the tension between belief as function and belief as truth becomes clear. Some beliefs help us function well but are not strictly real. Others move us closer to reality but may destabilize our ability to function.

• We believe in free will because it allows us to take responsibility for our actions—even though physics and neuroscience increasingly suggest that our choices are heavily determined by prior causes.
• We believe in human rights because they create a just society—even though, in a purely naturalistic sense, "rights" do not exist outside of human agreement.
• We believe in moral progress because it provides hope for the future—even though history shows that what we call "progress" is often just a shift in social consensus rather than an objective improvement.

Conversely, beliefs that are too aligned with reality can be psychologically damaging or socially disruptive. 

Nihilism, for example, may be an honest reaction to the lack of inherent meaning in the universe, but it does not help people live fulfilling lives. 

A hyper-rationalist approach to human behavior might recognize that people act largely on impulse and conditioning, but if taken too far, it can erode accountability and ethics. 

Truth without function can be just as harmful as function without truth.

The greatest mistake we can make is assuming that our functional beliefs are objective reality. 

This is the root of both religious dogmatism and the ideological rigidity of scientism. People become convinced that their particular framework—whether religious, political, or scientific—is not just a useful model, but the only correct way to see the world. 

This leads to intellectual stagnation, where ideas are defended not because they are the best available approximations of truth, but because they serve an existing structure of power, identity, or social order.

True intellectual humility comes from recognizing that our beliefs will always be a balance between function and truth. We should seek beliefs that allow us to live well, but we must also be willing to challenge and revise them when they are exposed as false. 

This requires a willingness to sit with uncertainty, to acknowledge that all beliefs are, to some degree, provisional.

Beliefs are not ends in themselves; they are tools we use to navigate existence. 

Some tools are better than others, but none are perfect. The healthiest approach is to constantly refine our beliefs—seeking ones that help us function without distorting reality, and ones that approximate truth without making life unlivable.

Instead of asking whether a belief is absolutely true, we should ask:

• Does it help us function as human beings?
• Does it bring us closer to reality rather than further from it?
• Are we open to revising it when confronted with better evidence?

A mature understanding of belief recognizes that we will never fully reconcile function and truth—but by acknowledging this tension, we can engage with the world more honestly. 

After all, understanding is just scaffolding building scaffolding, and the only true mistake is believing we have reached the final structure.