TPV in 5 From Stories to Religion

Total Perspective Vortex in 5 Minutes. From Stories to Religion. A scripted shareable version of the ideas explored in the Total Perspective Vortex. 

Transcript

The question starts with every spark of consciousness. The question, how do I live a good life? This is the question at the core of religion.  A solitary shark swimming in the ocean has only it’s instinct and experience to answer this question. A human being however, is social and has language. Language is a powerful tool. As human beings, we answer the question of how to live a good life by using language to develop religion.

Religion starts with stories. Stories are experiences real or imagined that we use language to share. The good stories stick with us, we remember them, we share them with friends and family. The details may get lost or changed but the good of the story stays with us through time. The quality of a story is determined by its morals. 

Has anyone ever asked you, what’s the moral of the story? Morals are patterns we can derive from stories. Patterns that we can apply to problems in our own life or we can use the patterns to help us navigate future potential situations. Stories rich with morals get remembered.  Stories with morals that have proven useful in our own life, also get remembered.

Naturally, we seek out the stories that will help us most in life. We also seek out the people who embody those stories. The search for more stories and better stories and the people who embody those stories is what sets a human being on the road to religion and a belief in God. 

The first step on that road is finding heroes. Heroes are people who have achieved things we want to achieve. We choose our heroes and learn their stories. We can extract morals both from a hero’s successes and from a hero’s failures. We learn morals from the stories of our heroes.

As a hero becomes more revered, the stories and morals become more important than the reality of the hero as a person. The best heroes then start to attract other stories with similar morals to them like gravity forming planets. This is the beginning of virtue. Virtues are an abstraction of similar morals. Virtues like beauty, honesty, mercy are like ropes woven out of moral threads

As a hero becomes supplanted by the virtues they exemplify they become a demigod or a superhero. They are no longer limited in their stories to the deeds of ordinary people rather they are extraordinary exemplars of virtue, superheroes like Batman or demi-gods like Hercules. When the virtue completely replaces the humanity of demi-gods we are left gods.

Just as there are a plethora of paths in life and virtues one must exemplify to excel at those paths, there are a plethora of gods that represent those virtues. A soldier may follow Ares the god of war. A craftsman may follow Hephestus, god of the forge. The pantheon of gods, represents the plethora of paths available to every human being. Gods are fashioned from the ropes of virtue which are in turn woven from moral threads.

The question of the spark of consciousness, the solitary shark in the ocean, the human being is how do I live a good life. A pantheon of gods offer a plethora of answers, answers a human being may use to live a good life. Yet one more level of abstraction is possible, one answer for one question, the good, the God, the three that are one. 

The gods and the virtues they represent can be abstracted one more time. They unify into a process, a practice, represented by three states. The father, the mother and the hero. A self referential, iterative process, that generates bounty, makes the world more harmonious, a horn of plenty. 

God, the good, the horn of plenty is hard for the mind to grasp so a religion must maintain the path from stories, to heroes, to superheroes, to gods, to God so people may have a clear path to live a good life. This is how the morals of stories build religion and illuminate a path we may choose to follow, a life worth living, a good life.