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The supernatural, modern scriptures & other thoughts

The 20th century has seen an unprecedented technological progress. This has had the equally unprecedented side effect of confining the supernatural in a much narrower spot.

Briefly, before the 20th century it was a lot more common for humans to attribute this or that event to the divine, or “fate” or whichever other deus ex machina-type of entity. Gradually, science started to replace God in explaining everyday events. Amazingly, more and more natural phenomena were clearer and exploitable for all sorts of purposes, including writing or reading this piece on your device of choice.

Of course, just like before, said phenomena might get quite convoluted, and understanding them requires either a considerable amount of reading, or faith in Arthur Clarke’s sarcastic remark, as indeed any sufficiently sophisticated technology is indistinguishable from magic. Luckily though, one doesn’t need to know much quantum mechanics to actually use an SSD, so we can be content with praising the magic and keep using our computers.

We live longer and we can reach vast amounts of people on the other side of the globe. Hard not to recognise that our new supernatural entity has helped us significantly more than our prayers have.

What did religion mean to us?

Religions aren’t always about the supernatural. Sometimes they aren’t at all, some more than others. For instance, the prophet Mohammed never performed miracles, and neither did Confucius. Jesus did, and just like Islam, the Divine is much closer to Christians and Muslims who speak to God directly, as opposed to Eastern religions who rely more on ancestors and nature.

Briefly, you don’t need to believe that natural laws are an act of God to be religious.

This is because seeking truth is another essential part of religion. Some are very explicit about this, as الحق (al-haqq, the truth) is one of the 99 names of God in the Quran. There are other features.

People these days have some fancy way of saying they’re not really religious by claiming they’re somehow spiritual but don’t believe in any organised religion. This is obviously a modern belief, what they actually mean is that their source of truth, supernatural and commonality doesn’t come from an organised religion. It usually comes from somewhere else.

Here we can debate extensively whether that somewhere else qualifies as a religion or not.

Secular spirituality

Political ideologies are a recent phenomenon, the grandchild of communities governed by the rule of law. In the west, the rule of law is one of the best candidates to fill the shoes of the supernatural. We don’t really know what exact power it exercises upon us besides the threat of constant violence by the state - a feature shared with those systems where حرام (haram), forbidden by religious doctrine gets conflated with illegal, forbidden by the law. In Islamic civil law systems the excuse for a law can be that the crime makes God angry. In Western civil law we don’t have that excuse. We can argue that “it is the way it is” and the West doesn’t need supernatural artifacts, but from an abstract perspective the one such construct is the very foundation of the community: the aforementioned rule of law.

Congregation is also an essential part, as we don’t just want to have a dry set of rules without any carrot to teach schoolkids that the law is good for them. We believe that we’re rational beings, but we don’t have explanations for gathering to put branches on rocks (literally) during certain celebrations like the commemoration of the liberation of Italy from Fascism, or blowing things up in the summer to remember the storming of the Bastille, in France.

In case one missed the holy scriptures, every now and then we are gifted modern versions, as in certain countries some pieces of paper really hold almost sacred value: any average intellectual in Italy can show what this means when you bring up the Constitution.

Spiritual disagreements within a particular faith aren’t always reason for a fracture. There are mountains of literature showing the culture of disagreement and mediation among different schools of thought within Islam, the overarching dogma being that disagreement is a healthy aspect of life within a community. Political ideologies within the framework of the nation state occupy a similar space, as much as we might disagree on core domains such as the environment or the economy, we are mandated, in a non-negotiable way, to our citizenship pact, either as enfants de la Patrie or as subjects of the Queen, or as brothers, from our land, ready to die for it.

Universalism

In the early days of Islam, with the sudden expansion of the Caliphate (الخلفاء الراشدون, the righteous caliphs, 632-661 CE), the hip idea of the time in that part of the world was that we were all Muslims and we didn’t know yet. The expanding armies were on a mission to let everyone else know.

This becomes an interesting philosophical dilemma. We as humans were very familiar, and still are, with the concept of conversion by human means, e.g. the exercise of strength, or, less violently, by democratic processes. If the belief that is being pushed upon us is human, with no superior legitimacy this gives us the right to coexist with it. Deep down those who want to push said belief upon us also know that. If on the other hand what we are pushing is truth, there is no room for coexistence¹.

I see where this is going…

Yes, 2020s woke culture.

Not unlike the good old righteous Caliphs, we have once again a heterogeneous movement chaotically gathered under one flag, and a very controversial feature of said movement is the material incompatibility with previously commonly-accepted social norms or dogmas.

This incompatibility makes it a universalist ideology, an ideology that can not coexist with some of the ideas it opposes, and just like Islam of the early days, it is an internationalist movement, Arabic as its vehicular tongue being replaced by English, cascading particular reforms such as pronouns and gender-neutrality to the languages of the converted, just like the Persian ezafe² made its way into central Asia³.

At its core there are scientific beliefs, or, rather, beliefs that search for their explanation in science, as opposed to an obvious supernatural entity.

The science is controversial, and there isn’t general agreement on what part of the beliefs constitute scientific facts or social and cultural norms, but here is where we close the circle.

We still aren’t done

There is much less bloodshed than centuries ago where conversion was an act of violence, as our bar for violence has been progressively raised over time.

We might have forgotten Jesus’ miracles and Conficius’ heavens. We may even have dismissed the specific concept of God. We created “secularism” ourselves, in the West, and then linguistically applied it everywhere else, regardless of whether it applies. We didn’t really notice that the one God didn’t have that much influence in Far Eastern ethics, but we’re happy we got rid of the one entity, that, allegedly, makes us irrational.

Yet, we have not eliminated the supernatural and the absolute, which we don’t understand deeply but we connect to, and it tells us how to spend our time in this world. We haven’t even eliminated universalist ideas, despite the dangers of any risk of fracture in our societies.

We haven’t managed to cancel religion yet.