We Have Deified Three Things: Wealth, The Erection, And Being Right
Worshiping each has caused its own assorted mess.
We all want something to believe in. Something larger than ourselves to place our faith in. A set of precepts and principles to offer a set of clear and immutable tracks to guide our path towards a potential greater purpose. Recognizable indicators and characteristics clearly marking the good from the bad. It’s a natural impulse. The difficult part is finding the right concepts, ideals, and symbols to align with. Ones which will actually do what we are hoping they will do and not create more mess and complication instead.
The main goal of faith, the main thing we want, is for it to make sense of things we do not understand or are fearful of. Before we understood things like lightning strikes, volcanoes, or the changing of the seasons we assigned them a preternatural identity. We viewed them as manifestations of specific entities with personas which could be prayed to and appeased and negotiated with.
This changed them from random occurrences beyond our understanding or ability to control to something knowable we could interact with by performing rights of supplication and prayer. Whether or not those things worked was not particularly material. It gave us a feeling of having agency, it freed us from feeling powerless.