Reframing the Divide Between Science & Religion

Recapture the Rapture Breakdown (Part 1)

In the beginning of Recapture the Rapture, Jamie Wheal dives headfirst into what he labels Meaning 1.0 & Meaning 2.0. And here I’m going to break it down for you.

In short, Meaning 1.0 refers to organized religion and Meaning 2.0 refers to modernism (the scientific revolution, rationalism). Both offer us tons of value, and we’d do best not to discard them.

Note: All quotes are from Jamie Wheal unless otherwise stated.

Meaning 1.0(⛪️) & 2.0(🧪)

In trying to create a new system from scratch, we’re almost sure to end up back in narcissism and close-mindedness. Instead, Wheal calls us to see the value in our multiple historical attempts at meaning-making.

Meaning 1.0—organized religion—has collapsed, the disconnected and disaffected have realized. But for them, a retreat to the fundamentalism of the faithful remains an unconvincing antidote to a hypermodern and cynical world.

But Meaning 2.0—modernism—hasn’t exactly panned out either. “We’ve all been raised on television to believe that one day we’d all be millionaires, and movie gods, and rock stars,” Durden continues. “But we won’t. And we’re slowly learning that fact. And we’re very, very pissed off.” For the frustrated middle children of history, nihilism—the view that none of this matters—is their refuge of last resort

New Atheism didn’t get it exactly right. To be certain, the edifice of mainline religion—Meaning 1.0—has collapsed, but secularism—Meaning 2.0—hasn’t been enough to hold the center in its place. As things fall apart, we’ve seen a migration to the extremes of fundamentalist beliefs on one hand and a drift toward nihilism on the other.

the spiritual-but-not-religious, a.k.a. the “Nones,” had surpassed all other organized denominations to become not only the largest but the fastest-growing category of belief in the United States.

Meaning 1.0 is effective at generating feelings of there being something larger than oneself, and that’s a good thing. Yet, it also carried a bunch of baggage such as dogma and irrational beliefs.

Meaning 2.0 is more transparent and open-sourced (eg: the scientific method), but it wasn’t all that great at helping us figure out why life is worth living in the first place.

What we need to do is harness the benefits of modernism and post-modernism without discarding the meaning that we found in organized religion.

🤯 The Loss of Meaning as a Sign of Hope

We’re witnessing a collapse of meaning altogether. We experience that gap every day as uncertainty, anxiety, and confusion.

Diseases of despair—anxiety, depression, suicide—are rampant. One in six Americans takes psychiatric medications just to cope with the banality of modern life.

A society that has no sense of the sacred is one in which you’ll have a lot of anomie, normlessness, loneliness, hopelessness.

Those not drawn to the promise of the all-in-one Megachurch don’t always end up where Harris and Hitchens would have imagined—in the realm of reason and rationality. They often drift to the other extreme and fall into nihilism instead.

You may hear all the meaning-crisis buzz lately. We’re facing many crises (what intellectuals are calling the meta-crisis), with the meaning crisis being a fundamental pillar.

Science and modernity have been telling us what is but stripping it of all possible explanations for what’s meaningful.

More and more of us are putting our attention into things that don’t really matter — like social media, virtue signaling, pride, and the pursuit of money. But what if more of us were called to focus our time and attention on working with the meaning crisis instead.

A friend of mine, Daniel Garner, describes the meaning crisis as a sign of hope. It’s easy to hear about the meaning crisis and respond with bleak hopelessness, yet this isn’t what’s being called forth. This isn’t conducive to actually doing anything about it. We skip over the fact that we’ve always been in a meaning crisis. Humanity has always been in a search for meaning, yet only recently have we upped our moral standards. We’re no longer okay with accepting fundamentalist religion, authoritarianism, war, violence, ethnocentrism, and tribalism as ways of making meaning.

We’re being called to integrate the best of both worlds and see the partial value of scientific modernity while noting that the meaning in religion is not something that we want to discard at face value like pop intellectuals Neil DeGrasse Tyson, Sam Harris and Christopher Hitchens.

🤬 Curing Our Addiction to Ethnocentric Polarization

“In study after study, religious moderates and secular humanists around the world share a desire for stability and prosperity. Most people, across cultures, just want to live in peace and see their children get a chance for a better life. That desire unites us.”

“Our loyalties must transcend our race, our tribe, our class, and our nation; and this means we must develop a world perspective. . . . We must either learn to live together as brothers or we are all going to perish together as fools.” —Martin Luther King Jr.

“So how can we make the move from ethnocentric to global-centric perspective—where we invite all those Others into an even bigger tent—a “We” that includes everyone everywhere? It follows that the surest way to experience a global point of view is to go one whole step beyond it to a universal perspective. ... Sometimes all it takes is a hint of Cosmic Otherness to bring us together.”

“Might a definitive contact with the Other be enough to knock ourselves out of our tribal fixations? That Terrible-Two-year-old needs to realize there’s Mommy in order to become fully aware of Me. The tribe has to define the Other across the river to affirm the Us that lives in our village. Could we actually live into a shared humanity by spying the Great Unknown that lies beyond us?”

Yet Meaning 1.0 is not without its flaws. Namely, the demonization of other. The task ahead of us is to discard the us vs. them mentality while keeping the meaning.

It starts with each and every one of us. In how we exist in relationship to ethnocentric ideologies. In a world that demonizes fundamentalist religion at every corner, we can choose to respond differently. We can choose to honor every position.

We can grapple with the dialectic of honoring every perspective while not contributing to the spread of ideological narratives.

And trust me, it’s going to be a messy process.

“The larger ecologies within which the transgressions of humiliation, exploitation, and vengeance are found require a response with far more capacity for complexity than surface - level forgiveness” - Nora Bateson

• What might it look like to speak to the virtue in each human being, rather than to their attached beliefs?

• What might it look like to bring the conversation to our shared desire to make the world a better place?

• What might it looks like to speak from empathy and not dominating strategies (to win the argument)?

• What might it look like to become conscious of the pull towards judgemental and critical energy while speaking with others?

• How do I honor the truth in every individual?

The dialectical tension (aka the liminal space) that exists between our viewpoints is the value. It’s the very tension between two opposing true but partial viewpoints that gives rise to reconciliation.

The question then becomes “How can I learn to be more okay with the uncertainty of relating from the liminal space between perspectives, knowing that nothing is ever truly black and white?”

“It is my hope that we can develop this important conversation so that it can continue across disciplines, religions, cultures, age groups, demographics and more — for the sake of a healthier world . The trophy of this learning was the healthy confusion that came with the realization that there is more than one way to see something that at first appeared as ‘fact.’” - Nora Bateson

The approach that Jamie Wheal takes is quite unique. He basically says that until we glimpse something beyond our individual humanity, we’ll continue to compare and contrast humans in an unhealthy way.

We’ll talk more about architecturing states of cosmic otherness at a cultural scale in the next part of this series on Recapture the Rapture.

For a species that seems to forever trip over our own sense of importance, a healthy dose of awe, wonder, and humility could be good for what ails.

🏙 The Infinite Game

It’s entirely possible that the Great Sorting Hat at the End of Time won’t give a damn which side we thought we were on—Rebel or Stormtrooper, Red Pill or Blue—but only on our intentions. Which flag we flew, which uniform we wore will yield to something much simpler. Were we coming from fear or love? Were we standing for all of us or only some of us? Were we playing for Team Finite, or Team Infinite?

the Infinite Game—which, instead of having winners and losers, creates conditions where the purpose isn’t to end the game victorious. The purpose is to tune the game so everyone can keep playing it indefinitely. ... provided they commit to keep expanding the game to include everyone—whether their side wins or loses.

Imagine living a life of fear, yet winning over the entire globe to your particular ideology. Is that a world that you’d want to live in? A world in which everyone is subscribing to your same ideology, yet they’re doing it out of fear, not love.

I know for damn sure that’s not a world I’d want to live in.

Now, this may seem simple and reductionistic, to think that the solution to all of our problems is simply to come from love and not fear. Sure, it’s simple. Yet it’s the most difficult thing in the world.

What it means to come from love rather than fear is not always straightforward.

Much Love,
Ethan

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