RG: “I don’t believe in God.”

Me: “Do you believe there is such a thing as everything?”

RG: “Sure, but so what?”

Me: “That’s the God of Spinoza.”

Gervais is too sharp to fall for it. He immediately sees the move for what it is: “That’s just a rhetorical sleight of hand, redefining ‘God’ to mean everything. We have a perfectly good word for everything so why not just use that?”

He would have a point. It isn’t all that interesting or clever to simply move the definitional goal posts to something someone believes in and then shout “Aha! You do believe it God!”

For this argument to hold water, holy or otherwise, the definition of God as everything needs to be supported. For that we turn to Spinoza.

Spinoza didn’t argue for a supernatural being. He didn’t defend miracles or sacred texts as sources of truth. Instead, he made a move so simple — and so radical — that it still unsettles people today:

God is everything that exists.

Not just the natural world we see, but the totality of existence:

• Everything we can observe
• Everything we can infer
• Everything we cannot yet perceive or comprehend
• Everything that could possibly exist

Spinoza called this Deus sive Natura — “God or Nature.”

In modern terms, this is capital-N Nature: not just forests and oceans, but the full, unbounded totality of existence.

An Infinite Intellect Changes Everything

Spinoza argued that God has infinite attributes, of which we perceive only two:

• Thought
• Extension

If thought is an attribute of Nature, then every idea that has ever been conceived is part of existence.

• Scientific theories
• Philosophical arguments
• Religious beliefs
• Conspiracy theories
• Ideas beyond our ability to imagine
• Every God idea.

The confusion comes from the word “reality,” which we use in two different ways. In everyday language, reality means how things actually are — what is true. But in a broader philosophical sense, it can also mean everything that exists.

To avoid this confusion, I follow Spinoza in using Nature, with a capital N, to refer to the totality of existence — everything that is, including our thoughts and beliefs, whether true or false.

Reality, by contrast, is our current best explanation of what is true about Nature.

A false belief is part of Nature, but it is not part of reality.

If the only difference is that Nature includes false beliefs, why bother making the distinction? Who cares about stuff that isn’t true?

Anybody who is interested in human flourishing, that’s who.

Progress works like this: we develop beliefs — called theories in science — and then try to break them. Most fail. Some survive. Over time, we build better and better bridges between our ideas and reality.

Now here’s the kicker: If Nature is everything that ever has or ever will exist, all that we know, all that we don’t know and all that lies beyond our ability to perceive or understand, then it must include every idea about God any human has ever had or ever could have.

Ricky Gervais, as well as many other atheists, are fond of the “one God more” argument. They will often say to people of faith something like “You’re an atheist when it comes to Thor, Zeus and the Flying Spaghetti Monster, I just go one God more.”

I would reframe this not as an argument, but as a statement:

“There are many, many different God ideas in Nature. Some of these ideas have facilitated alignment among groups of people but none of them have enough evidentiary support to be considered aligned with reality.”

A God Big Enough to Contain All Gods

This leads to a remarkable conclusion:

Every God idea exists within God/Nature.

That includes:

• The personal, intervening God of scripture
• The deist creator
• The mystical ground of being
• The atheist rejection of all of the above

All of these are ideas — and ideas exist.

But here’s the crucial point:

How do we determine which God ideas are more closely aligned with reality?

Reason.

From Belief System to Meta-Study

Most religions:

• Define God
• Defend that definition
• Reject alternatives

Spinoza did something entirely different.

He created a framework where all God ideas can be evaluated using reason. Spinoza’s God is a meta study, putting every God concept into reason’s culture of criticism to form the most accurate picture of the divine.

This transforms theology into something closer to science.

• Ideas enter the system
• They are tested and challenged
• The strongest survive

Reality as a Moving Target

This is where the “current best explanation” becomes essential.

Reality is not fixed.

Reality is our current best explanation of what is true about existence — always subject to revision.

This preserves:

• Humility (we see only a fraction of existence)
• Progress (knowledge improves over time)
• Flexibility (today’s truth may be refined tomorrow)

Or more simply:

Reality is a moving target, refined by reason.

When atheists like Gervais say they don’t believe in God, they are rejecting a very specific kind of God — a supernatural, personal agent with intentions and judgments. But that is only one among many God ideas. Monotheism, polytheism, deism, and pantheism are all forms of theism, each describing very different kinds of “God.”

The real disagreement isn’t about whether something exists. It’s about which concept, if any, deserves the word “God.”

It’s one thing to say “I don’t believe the God you describe exists” and quite another to say “What you describe as God doesn’t meet the standard.”

What you can say is “You can call that God, but I wouldn’t.”

That’s a coherent position.

Now the conversation becomes “Here’s why I think you should call it ‘God’.”

The word God carries something Nature, existence and the totality of reality don’t:

• Historical weight
• Emotional resonance
• Moral significance
• The ability to align large groups of people

For thousands of years, “God” has been one of humanity’s most powerful organizing ideas.

Spinoza didn’t discard that.

He re-grounded it in existence itself.

Sorting Wheat from Chaff

Once you adopt this framework, every God idea becomes:

• A hypothesis
• A model
• A claim about existence

And like all claims, they can be evaluated.

Even when direct evidence is limited, we can assess:

• Coherence
• Consistency
• Plausibility

And importantly impact:

God ideas can:

• Unite people
• Promote flourishing
• Encourage cooperation

But they can also:

• Divide
• Justify harm
• Resist correction

One Story More

If all ideas exist within Nature, then stories — religious or otherwise — are not literal truths, but partial glimpses of that totality. Human flourishing has largely been accomplished by uniting around ideas, around stories. Divisions occur when two groups align behind conflicting stories they hold as literal truths. You can embrace a story, unite, flourish and cooperate without creating division by simply, and humbly acknowledging that your story is not literally true and other stories also have value.

A person of faith can read Greek or Norse myths, “Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance” or watch a Star Wars movie and extract moral truths and lessons – an atheist can add holy texts to that list — but all of them see these stories are part of a cosmic whole, an ever-unfolding everything. None of these imperfect glimpses of Nature tell our whole story, and none of them tell a literal story, but they all can be appreciated for how they touch the human heart and foster community, comfort and love.

A Truly Infinite God

A traditional “infinite” God is often still limited:

• Defined by specific traits
• Bound to a particular story
• Protected from criticism

Spinoza’s God is different.

It includes:

• The known
• The unknown
• The unknowable
• Every attempt to describe any of the above

It is:

• Maximally inclusive
• Epistemically humble
• Continuously revealed through reason

So where does this leave us?

Not with a “gotcha.”

But with a reframing.

I’m not trying to convince you that something extra exists.
I’m suggesting that what already exists might be worthy of the word “God.”

I’m saying we should shift the debate from “Does God exist?” to “Should existence itself be understood—and perhaps even revered—as God?”

The Fork in the Road

At the edge of knowledge, we face a fork:

• One path continues through reason, evidence, and revision
• The other branches into speculation and belief

Spinoza doesn’t forbid exploration.

He simply insists we don’t mistake speculation for reality until it earns its place as our current best explanation. You don’t have to believe in something more to believe in Spinoza’s God — you only have to take seriously what already exists.

Bottom Line

If God is truly infinite, then:

• Everything that exists is part of God
• Every idea of God is part of God
• Every attempt to understand reality is part of God

But reality is our current best attempt to correctly describe that totality and reason — the slow, collective, self-correcting process — is how we improve that description over time.

So, the question is no longer:

Does God exist?

It becomes:

Is existence itself worthy of the word “God”?

The post The Truly Infinite God of Spinoza appeared first on New Atenism.

Upon release, one of the most misunderstood concepts in New Atenism was The Gospel of Prosperity. While my attempt to reclaim the term from televangelist con artists may have been noble, for a new work from an unknown author, the burden of explaining “my” version proved too heavy.

I also came to see that my use of the term was influenced by the very tribal instincts my book aims to move beyond. It was something of a holdover from my more strident atheist days and sits uneasily with the more inclusive and pluralistic perspective I’ve since adopted. While the excesses of televangelists are easy to condemn, the motivations of their followers deserve more empathy than dismissal.

More fundamentally, the word gospel suggests doctrine—even dogma—which runs counter to New Atenism’s commitment to reason and criticism. The concept itself isn’t something to be believed; it’s something to be observed.

And the graphic makes that clear. It’s not a proclamation—it’s a process. A cycle. A feedback loop of reason, progress, and trust.

So “Gospel” is out. “Cycle” is in.

But what about prosperity? The term is closely tied to material wealth—houses, income, comfort. While I intended a broader meaning that included inner development and collective human progress, that, too, required explanation.

Flourishing does the job better.

So, to sum up:

“Gospel of Prosperity”

• Carries cultural baggage
• Requires explanation and defense
• Frames the idea as doctrine

“Cycle of Human Flourishing”

• Feels descriptive, not ideological
• Aligns with a systems-based, feedback-driven view of reality
• Frames the idea as something discovered, not proclaimed

It’s not: “Here is what you should believe.”
It’s: “Here is how things seem to work.”

I think Baruch Spinoza would approve.

The post Why The Gospel of Prosperity Became The Cycle of Human Flourishing appeared first on New Atenism.

Here is the excerpt from my chapter 24 of New Atenism:

Chapter 24: A Conversation at a Party

“Honestly, I think we had it better as hunter-gatherers. Fewer hours of work. No rent. No bosses.”

Alex raises an eyebrow. “Jordan, you almost lost your mind when you had no cell service on our backpacking trip last year.”

Jordan marches ahead. “Foragers had balanced diets, tight-knit communities, no income inequality. Agriculture brought tooth decay, slavery, war. We’re basically living in the aftermath of that mistake.”

“Seems like I’m always hearing how bad it was. You know, that whole ‘nasty, brutish and short’ thing.”

“There’s tons of research, it’s pretty settled. Life expectancy went down after agriculture. Hunter-gatherers had it figured out. We just romanticize progress because we’re stuck in it. There’s this guy, Jerry Douglas, who says agriculture was the biggest mistake in human history.”

“Jared Diamond.”

They both turn toward the new voice joining the conversation.

“Sorry, couldn’t help but overhear. I’m Blake.”

After an exchange of pleasantries Alex says, “Doesn’t Jerry Douglas play the dobro?”

Blake smiles and points “Yes, I think that’s right. I saw him with Alison Krauss last year.”

Alex beams. “I LOVE Alison Krauss. Voice like an angel.”

Jordan is getting a bit annoyed. “Okay. Whatever, the point is, this Diamond guy proves what I’ve been saying: We were better off before agriculture. Modern life is basically a downgrade.”

With a slight grimace and tilt of the head, Blake responds. “That essay’s headline gets quoted a lot, but there’s nuance there. We should be careful not to confuse early agricultural transition costs with the total arc of civilization. I think Diamond was comparing foragers to early farmers — transitional communities dealing with malnutrition, infectious disease, and poor sanitation. That’s not the same as saying we’d be better off going back to bone tools and witch doctors.”

“Sure, but the principle still holds. Foragers had way more leisure and fewer health problems. That has been well documented. Everybody knows it.”

“Well, it’s difficult to form hard conclusions about any primitive tribes. There’s no written record and the physical evidence is pretty limited. We do know that average lifespans were shorter, but that was mostly due to far higher infant mortality rates. Evidence about violent death is harder to come by and is highly regional.

“Some forager groups did have relatively healthy diets, although it depends a lot on where they were. Your doctor would give you a thumbs up for the whole grains, vegetables, fruit and game of the Lenape people in the northeast U.S. but be horrified by the whale-blubber-focused diet of the Inuits.”

Jordan stiffens. “Look, it’s not even controversial anymore. Serious scholars have shown we were healthier and happier before farming ruined everything. I mean, Diamond basically proved it.”

“Jared and I crossed paths when we were both lecturing at UCLA — anthropology is a small world. I don’t think he was arguing that we should abandon modernity. He just thinks we often underestimate the costs of progress. That’s not the same as saying hunter-gatherers lived better than we do today. He spent a lot of time living that life with tribes in New Guinea.”

“Right. That’s what I’m talking about!” Jordan interjects.

“But he was always grateful and relieved to fly back to LA.”

There is a brief, awkward silence as Jordan looks away and Alex suppresses a grin.

Blake smiles warmly and tries to let Jordan off the hook a bit. “It’s a fascinating topic and totally worthy of discussion. We just have to be careful not to turn speculative anthropology into sweeping judgment. Most of what we ‘know’ about pre-agricultural life is still guesswork and based on incomplete evidence.”

Jordan’s attention is pulled away to the bar. “I’m going to refresh my drink.”

After Jordan’s hasty exit, Blake turns to Alex. “I hope I didn’t come on too strong there.”

Alex chuckles. “No worries. Jordan will be fine. So, you’re an anthropologist?”

“Close. Archaeologist. Same big umbrella, different toolkit. I spend a lot of time in the dirt.”

 “What’s the oldest thing you’ve found?”

 “A basket fragment that was about 9,500 years old.”

“A basket?”

 “Yeah. Which sounds boring until you realize someone made it thinking about tomorrow. Food storage. Travel. Kids. It’s like this window into what someone was planning for their life ten thousand years ago.”      

“When you find something like that, what goes through your mind?”

“Mostly awe. And a weird sense of responsibility. As in, don’t screw this up because this might be the only way this person, and their people, ever get to tell us their story.”

“That’s . . . kind of amazing.”

 “It really is.”

*           *       *          

This is an example of a failed conversation — at least for Jordan. Conversation is simply one form of communication and all forms can suffer similar failures.

In this case, the conversation didn’t break down because Jordan was stupid or malicious. It failed because language, unconstrained by reason, defaults to emotion and ego.

At the same time, Alex, through humility and curiosity, was able to learn about something – and someone – that was new and interesting.

Failures like Jordan’s are a problem because language is the technology we used to cooperate in larger and larger groups. It is the key to our amazing progress as a species.

We use language not only to communicate with each other, but with ourselves. That little narrator inside your head — I call mine my “crazy roommate^[1]”— uses language. A big part of conscious experience is the constant chattering that bubbles up from our subconscious. This is your elephant’s go-to tool for telling your rider what to do.

This broad view of communication, and how to have more balanced internal and external conversations, will be the focus of the next four chapters.

Appendix Quiz:

When you were reading the party conversation piece, as what gender did you picture Alex, Jordan and Blake?

Your answers might tell you something about your internal gender bias. Please share your answers with me online at (link).

I’ll then reveal what was in my mind when I wrote it, which will, perhaps, reveal my own gender bias.

All answers will be kept totally anonymous.

[1] This comes from Michael Alan Singer s book “The Untethered Soul: The Journey Beyond Yourself” New Harbinger Publications 2007

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In previous posts we discussed how New Atenism’s core narrative integrates cosmological and moral ideas based upon what we know, what reason has revealed to be most likely. In this week’s post, we’ll expand that core out into The Four Tenets of New Atenism.

The First Tenet of New Atenism: Believe in the God of Spinoza

“I believe in Spinoza’s God who reveals himself in the harmony of what exists, not in a God who concerns himself in the fates and actions of human beings.” – Albert Einstein

Baruch Spinoza was a 17th-century Dutch philosopher. His Einstein-approved definition of God was simply “Deus sive Natura” (God or Nature). While the Latin word “Natura” Spinoza used directly translates to “nature” our understanding of nature is often far narrower. While we might think of nature as being the natural world, all those flowers, stars and otters we can see, Spinoza’s “Natura” was much, much more than this. To Spinoza, nature includes all matter, energy, natural laws[1], knowledge, and concepts that ever existed or ever will exist. Spinoza further defined Nature/God as having “infinite attributes,” of which we humans are able to perceive only two: thought (mind) and extension (matter and natural laws).

In short, when Spinoza said “Natura” he meant everything, all that we are able to perceive and all that lies beyond our powers of perception and/or beyond our ability to comprehend. By acknowledging there may be other methods of perception, Spinoza left the door open for an infinite number of things which are currently unknown, or will forever remain unknown or unknowable, to us. New Atenism uses “Nature” with a capital “N” to distinguish this all-encompassing definition of the word from the one found on packages of cookies at Whole Foods. This doesn’t imply mysticism or magic—Spinoza firmly rejected supernatural explanations—but it does reflect his deep intellectual humility: a recognition that our finite minds can perceive only a sliver of an infinite, rational whole.

Believers often adopt what they see as a reasonable position along the lines of “since science and reason can’t give me an answer, I’ll stick with the one in my favorite interpretation of a particular religious text.” The problem with this is that the stories religion and mythology developed to explain unknowns have a terrible track record of building any sort of evidentiary bridge to reality. In fact, what happens far more often is a competing idea emerges which builds up a strong enough evidentiary bridge to replace the mythological explanation. Spinoza’s “God/Nature” is on solid ground in that it relies only upon accepting that there is such a thing as everything there is, was or ever will be, all that is known and all that is unknown.

Certainly, believing in the existence of things for which there is an evidentiary bridge is reasonable enough–but doesn’t religion require worship and awe of the sacred and divine? What’s divine or sacred about reason? If the only path to learning about God is reason, then reason is both sacred and divine. What could be more sacred than building a better understanding of God? What could be more awe-inspiring than learning a new, true piece of God? To accept the God of Spinoza is to understand that true divine revelation is accomplished only through reason.

The Second Tenet of New Atenism: Balance; The Force That Shapes Flourishing

In New Atenism, the Second Tenet flows directly from the first: we are expressions of Nature, sustained by forces far larger than ourselves. The question is not whether forces shape us. They do. The question is whether we understand them well enough to live in balance with them.

The most obvious example is the Sun.

The Sun (Aten) radiates energy outward in staggering abundance. Without it, life would not exist. Yet too much solar radiation would sterilize the planet. What makes flourishing possible is not the mere presence of energy, but its regulation. Earth’s magnetic field, atmosphere, and orbital position filter, buffer, and distribute that energy into a range compatible with life. Between solar fury and frozen darkness lies a narrow band of balance where complexity can arise.

This pattern repeats at every scale.

Inside our cells, metabolic processes must be tightly regulated. Too little energy and the cell dies. Too much oxidative stress and it self-destructs. In ecosystems, predator and prey populations oscillate toward equilibrium. In economies, too little risk leads to stagnation; too much leads to collapse. In our personal lives, stress can sharpen us, but chronic overload breaks us. Flourishing emerges not from eliminating force, but from calibrating it.

The Second Tenet invites us to recognize that flourishing is always shaped by forces — physical, biological, psychological, social — and that wisdom consists in balancing them rather than pretending we can escape them.

This is where New Atenism parts ways with both naïve optimism and fatalistic resignation. We do not worship raw power. Nor do we seek to extinguish it. We seek to understand it.

Consider human psychology. As Jonathan Haidt’s rider-and-elephant metaphor suggests, our emotional instincts (the elephant) are powerful drivers of behavior. Suppressing them entirely is neither possible nor desirable. But allowing them to run unchecked leads to tribalism, rage cycles, and self-sabotage. Flourishing requires institutions, norms, and habits that channel instinct into constructive ends. The force remains; its direction changes.

The same applies to technology. Social media algorithms amplify whatever captures attention — outrage as easily as insight. The force is engagement. The question is how it is shaped. If reasoned discourse becomes valued and demanded, the incentives will shift accordingly. The Tenet therefore has a civic dimension: we are called not only to manage our own internal forces, but to help design systems that balance collective ones.

Even morality fits this framework. Compassion without boundaries becomes burnout. Discipline without mercy becomes cruelty. Freedom without responsibility becomes chaos. Responsibility without freedom becomes tyranny. The art of flourishing lies in dynamic equilibrium.

Importantly, balance does not mean stasis. Nature is not static; it is a dance of competing pressures. The Earth’s climate system fluctuates. Populations rise and fall. Human societies cycle through innovation and correction. Balance is an ongoing adjustment — a continual recalibration informed by evidence and humility.

In New Atenism, this Tenet carries both descriptive and prescriptive force. Descriptively, it recognizes that all thriving systems operate within tolerances. Prescriptively, it calls us to act as stewards of those tolerances. We must learn which forces we can modulate, which we must adapt to, and which we must guard against amplifying beyond sustainable limits.

Flourishing is never accidental. It is the product of forces brought into proportion.

To balance the force that shapes flourishing is to live consciously within that proportion — aligning ourselves, and our institutions, with the narrow but powerful band where life not only survives, but thrives.

The Third Tenet of New Atenism: The Gospel of Prosperity

If you recoil at the term “prosperity gospel”, it’s probably because you saw some blow-dried marshmallow on TV claiming God wanted him to have a yacht or another Rolls Royce. The “if you give me your money, it will make God so happy that he’ll give you money” pitch is a clever, but morally bankrupt, manipulation of our greed urge. New Atenism is appropriating this term from these charlatans, because prosperity should be for everyone, not just TV preachers and their faithful contributors. As stated above, it is reason that creates the knowledge that drives the progress that delivers prosperity to humanity. New Atenism’s Gospel of Prosperity is a virtuous circle of reason, knowledge, progress and belief in reason. The good news of the Gospel of Prosperity is that the more you employ reason in your life, the more you’ll prosper; and the more you support its collective use, the more humanity will prosper. By spreading prosperity to more and more people we will make them more open to believing in the power of reason as they see how it has benefited them. As belief in the power and process of reason increases, the circle begins anew (figure 1).

Figure 1: The Gospel of Prosperity’s Virtuous Circle

Embracing the Gospel of Prosperity requires managing a number of powerful human urges including scarcity and negativity biases, greed and entitlement. It also requires embracing positive instincts like compassion, gratitude and humility. You must shun the negativity bias that denies human progress. You must believe that we are not in a zero-sum game where the only way to lift some boats is to sink others. You have to be humble about the level of your own knowledge and awed and grateful for the blessings of progress the power of reason has provided. You must commit yourself to doing what you can to spread those benefits to others and forge the connection between reason, progress and prosperity. In this book, I will be making reasoned, evidence-based arguments which support all these aspects of the Gospel of Prosperity.

While no part of the Gospel of Prosperity is easy, perhaps the most difficult is convincing others that their prosperity is a product of the power of reason rather than an entitlement, divine intervention or their own magnificence. As described in the book, New Atenism refers to these free riders of reason as “Followers.” Getting Followers to believe in the power of reason is hard because of how people come to believe things and how tenaciously they hold on to those beliefs–that whole hot reason/elephant thing. Telling them they’re wrong or stupid is not an effective method of getting them to question those beliefs. Showing them how reason can facilitate their personal progress, however, just might set them on the path to becoming a Seeker.

The Gospel of Prosperity is not a commandment, it is an invitation to embrace reason to prosper in your own life and to share that prosperity with others. Reason brings progress and prosperity to each of us and all of us. Live in the spirit of reason and you will progress individually. Support the power of collective reason and we will continue our amazing progress as a species. Venerate Aten for its power made life-giving by near-Earth space’s embrace of the helpful and rejection of the harmful. Resolve to do what you can to apply the power of collective reason to resolve the conflict between progress and that balance so that life continues to thrive in the biosphere. In my next post I’ll take a deeper dive into New Atenism’s first tenet, belief in the God of Spinoza.

[1] Spinoza actually used “forces of nature” rather than “natural laws” as “Ethics” was published ten years prior to Isaac Newton’s “Philosophiæ Naturalis Principia Mathematica.”

[2] There are those who argue that Einstein’s former math professor, Hermann Minkowski, was thinking about relativity around the same time, Einstein published his theory of special relativity in 1905. Minkowski later provided a mathematical framework for this theory in 1908, which helped to solidify and extend its implications.

^[3] “Aten” is a noun that means disk or sphere but carvings from the period make it clear that Akhenaten meant sphere.

[4] With apologies to our chemosynthesis practicing brothers and sisters living in deep sea hydrothermal vents

^[5] “The Constitution of Knowledge” – Jonathan Rauch Brookings 2021

The post The Three Tenets of New Atenism appeared first on New Atenism.

“The Constitution of Knowledge” – Jonathan Rauch Brookings Institution Press, 2021.
I’m not sure I’ve ever read a book where on almost every page I found myself wanting to drag my highlighter across at least one passage. Rauch’s constitution of knowledge is rulebook for collective cold reason. It defines how members of “the reality-based community” reason together to arrive as close to the truth as humanly possible.  

“The Righteous Mind” – Jonathan Haidt Pantheon Books    2012.
Any of the first six books listed here could have been at the top. Haidt’s updating of the relationship between reason and emotion/instinct/intuition with contemporary neuroscience and psychology provides a useful framework for developing self-knowledge. His analogy of reason being a rider atop our emotional elephant is, for me, the most relatable way to view Kahneman’s type 1/type 2, Baggini’s hot/cold reason, Gladwell’s blink etc. (which is why I shamelessly adopted and built upon it). Using reason to control instinct and emotion is the process of becoming a better elephant rider.

“The Edge of Reason” – Julian Baggini Yale University Press 2016.
This book really helped to clarify reason’s power and potential, but also its limitations. Baggini’s “hot and cold reason” are central to New Atenism’s four flavors of reason that make up reason’s eco-system.  

“Religion is Not about God: How Spiritual Traditions Nurture Our Biological Nature and what to Expect when They Fail” Loyal D. Rue Rutgers University Press, 2001.
This book has to be near the top of the list, as it’s what convinced me that New Atenism should be a religion rather than a philosophy (great news for me, since the qualifications for founding a religion are far less stringent). I draw from Rue’s model of religion in the book, and he demonstrates how five very different traditions—Christianity, Islam, Hinduism, Buddhism, and Confucianism—all conform to it. His inclusion of Confucianism, which many view more as a philosophy than a religion, both expanded and clarified what religion is for me.

“The Beginning of Infinity” David Deutsch Penguin Publishing Group 2011.
This book not only cemented the definition of knowledge as being our “current best explanation” in my mind, but the entirely of the process of reason. It is through continually “looking for errors” that we build better and better explanations and facilitate human progress. This book’s belief in knowledge’s proven ability to facilitate progress embodies an optimism that is heartening and compelling and core to New Atenist philosophy.

“The Sun, the Earth, and Near-Earth Space: a Guide to the Sun-Earth System – Comprehensive Information on the Effects of Space Weather on Human Life, Climate, Spacecraft” — Publisher: National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), World Spaceflight News · 2017.
This book, finished posthumously by Eddy’s wife, was surprisingly moving given its academic nature. Eddy’s passion for the life-giving miracle of radiant solar energy balanced by near-Earth space shines through on every page. It was this book, more than any other, that made me aware of, awed by and grateful for all that this balance brings us. The veneration of Aten is an awareness of that power, gratitude for that balance and a commitment to preserve it. This book doesn’t wag its finger at humanity for its role in climate change, rather it invites all to revel in the life-giving wonders of the sun and near-Earth space.

“Akhenaten and his Religion of Light” – Erik Hornung Cornell University Press 2001.
Many academics, be they historians, archaeologists or psychologists, dismiss Akhenaten as a lunatic. While Dr. Hornung doesn’t ignore the many ways in which Akhenaten was a lousy pharaoh, he sheds light (sorry) on the remarkable ways Atenism was ground-breaking and prophetic. That Aten, and more specifically its rays, were seen as the power that brought life to our world and not an arbiter of morality and that Aten wasn’t anthropomorphized, or zoomorphized were all revolutionary ideas that reason has subsequently revealed to be true. In addition, Dr. Hornung was clear-eyed about the nonsense Akhenaten spouted and this balanced approach helped me to put the “new” in New Atenism.

“Transcend” Scott Barry Kaufman TarcherPerigee 2020.
This book is just a great read. Partly a fascinating biography of a giant in psychology, Abraham Maslow, part a relevant and clear update of Maslow’s work and part self-help/self-knowledge manual. Kaufman’s reimaging of Maslow’s hierarchy is foundational to New Atenism’s process of using reason to build self-knowledge and progress in your own life.

“The Ego Trick” – Julian Baggini Yale University Press 2011.
This is the best book I’ve read on consciousness. Baggini makes a strong, evidence-based case that consciousness is a result of brain function, thus solving what philosophers call “the easy problem of consciousness.” The “trick” is how our minds assemble the sensory information, emotion, instinct and memories, which all come from different parts of brain at different times, to create the illusion of a single, continuous entity, a self. He then goes on to say that while we haven’t figured out the “hard problem; why we have consciousness, or whether or not dogs, cats, horses or beavers do too, we can rest assured that any current explanation, particularly mystical or supernatural ones, are all but certain to be wrong.

“The Ego Tunnel: The Science of the Mind and the Myth of the Self” – Thomas Metzinger Basic Books, 2009.
While this book covers very similar ground to Baggini’s “The Ego Trick,” and reaches similar conclusions, it dives much deeper into the supporting neuroscience. I recommend both books, but Baggini’s is more targeting towards a general audience and Metzinger more academic—or least geekier.

“Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress” – Steven Pinker Penguin Books Limited/Viking 2018.
While this book goes over some of the same issues and updates a lot of the data presented in his most famous book “The Better Angels of Our Nature,” it is, in my opinion, a better book. Pinker, as always, provides copious and compelling statistical support for his plea for a new Enlightenment, a new age of reason—hear, hear !

“Age of Revolutions: Progress and Backlash from 1600 to the Present” — Fareed Zakaria Penguin Books Limited, 2024.
This is a terrific book about progress that clearly illustrates the problems with who gets left behind when huge cultural/societal transformations take place. From The Netherlands in the seventeenth-century to the French Revolution to,the Industrial Revolution, Zakaria provides a great background for the current globalization/technology we’re still in the middle of.

“Nexus: A Brief History of Information Networks from the Stone Age to AI” – Noah Yuval Harari Vintage Publishing 2024.
This remarkable book provides a comprehensive history of the information and communication tools humans have developed. All this serves as background for the book’s key message; AI is a totally new kind of information system which has unparalleled risk as well as unparalleled possibilities. The light bulb this book set of for me is that for the first time in human history, we’re bringing non-human intelligence into the process of reason.

“A Book Forged in Hell Spinoza’s Scandalous Treatise and the Birth of the Secular Age”– Steven Nadler Princeton University Press 2011.
This book, and the next two, are my Spinoza trilogy (but could also be called my “help me, I fell down trying to read “Ethics” and I can’t get up” trio). While Nadler’s “Think Least of Death: Spinoza on How to Live and How to Die” and “Spinoza A Life” are great, and probably better known, I found this book to be both informative of Spinoza’s philosophy and a great read. One of the challenges of reading books on philosophy for me is the emphasis that is put on the where a particular philosophy fits into context, sometimes over how useful that philosophy might be to the reader. In this book, Nadler deftly navigates this balance, weaving in Spinoza’s views on living a meaningful life which site in stark contrast to the “bronze-aged peasant” (yeah, that’s Hitchens) perspectives of his accusers.

“Spinoza’s Religion A New Reading of the Ethics” — Clare Carlisle Publisher: Princeton University Press 2021
This book is the ying to Nadler’s yang. Where Nadler sees Spinoza as a rationalist, he once wrote an essay calling him an atheist, Carlisle presents him as a thinker who redefines religion by integrating it with philosophy. Carlisle argues that Spinoza does not seek to abolish religion but to transform it, proposing a vision where religion is not about adherence to specific doctrines or institutions. Carlisle portrays Spinoza as offering an alternative vision of religion—one that is inclusive, philosophical, and centered on the transformative understanding of being intrinsically connected to God. Carlisle’s reading invites a reconsideration of the “Ethics” not as a secular or anti-religious text, but as a profound exploration of a redefined, virtue-based spirituality. My claim that Spinoza didn’t reject the existence of God but rather used reason to bring God into the reality-based community puts me more in her camp. This book play a significant role in coming to the belief that reason could not only be compatible with a religion, but fundamental to it.

“Pantheologies Gods, Worlds, Monsters” — Mary-Jane Rubenstein · 2018 Columbia University Press.
This book helped me to understand why Pantheism has been such a dirty word historically as well as reconcile my own problems with it. While historically, it’s been viewed as just putting a fig leaf (see what I did there?) on atheism, I had the opposite problem—that many self-proclaimed pantheists seem to believe there is some sort of agency and benevolence in nature. The “everything” view of God, including all that we don’t or can’t know, is clearly expressed here. It was this book that got me to put the capital “N” in the Nature that is synonymous with God.A Book Forged in Hell Spinoza’s Scandalous Treatise and the Birth of the Secular Age”– Steven Nadler · Princton University Press 2011

“Tiny Experiments” Anne-Laure Le Cunff Publisher Profile 2025.
This book is an extremely well thought out guide for how to progress in your life. By addressing issues in your life with a curious, scientist mindset, self-discovery becomes a series of, well, tiny experiments, rather than big audacious goals, which are rarely achieved. The image below alone is worth the price of the book. Favorite quote: “The problem with procrastination isn’t that you’re lazy. It’s that you shot the messenger.”
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“What’s Our Problem?: A Self-Help Book for Societies” — Tim Urban Publisher Wait, But Why? 2023.
Don’t let the goofy stick figure illustrations and smart aleck tone fool you, there is some serious meat on these bones. Urban lays out how we got so polarized and what we can do about it. Great book.

The post Reading List appeared first on New Atenism.

Spinoza defined God—or Nature—as everything that exists: all that ever was, is, or will be. Not a supernatural being outside the universe, but the totality of reality itself.

He also argued that while reality has infinite attributes, human beings perceive it through only two: thought (ideas, theories, imagination, memory) and extension (the physical world of matter, energy, and natural law). That limitation is not a flaw. It is the beginning of humility.

We live in thought.

We observe through extension.

Reason builds the bridge between the two. .

All ideas originate in thought. All evidence appears in extension. When reason tests ideas against observation—subjecting them to criticism, measurement, and revision—it strengthens the bridge between what we imagine and what is. When that bridge becomes sturdy enough, an idea becomes knowledge.

This bridge-building process is the engine of progress. It is why we live longer, healthier, and more materially secure lives than our ancestors. It is why disease is understood rather than attributed to spirits, and why divine right monarchies gave way to constitutional democracies. Reason does not merely accumulate knowledge; it filters norms and institutions, discarding those that fail when tested against reality.

That filtering function is crucial.

Religious narratives have shaped human cooperation for millennia. Whether literally true or not, their effects—both uplifting and destructive—play out in extension. They can unify tribes, justify cruelty, inspire charity, or sanctify oppression. Slavery, witch burnings, and the divine right of kings were once embedded in religious worldviews. They receded not because myths vanished, but because reason exposed contradictions between those doctrines and observable human flourishing.

This is where the fork in the road appears.

Many traditions affirm that God is infinite and beyond comprehension. But they then take a speculative step further—claiming specific divine intentions about dress, diet, love, or conquest. From that point forward, competing thought-domain stories harden into dogma.

Spinoza stops at the fork.

If God is everything—if God is the totality of existence—then the simple fact that something exists is sufficient evidence for God. The bridge is not mystical; it is ontological. We observe reality. We know something is. We apply reason to understand it more clearly. We call that totality God.

This is not faith without evidence. It is belief in proportion to evidence.

Critics sometimes object that this is merely semantic—rebranding “existence” as “God.” But language is a tool. For billions of people, “God” carries moral and psychological weight that “existence” does not. If the aim is to move humanity toward reality rather than away from it, reframing may be more powerful than rejecting.

New Atenism does not smuggle mysticism into rationalism. It draws a firm boundary between what crosses the evidentiary bridge and what remains in the thought domain. Religious stories, Shakespearean tragedies, and modern mythologies all live there. They may be profound. They may shape character and culture. But none become knowledge unless they survive contact with extension.

This distinction protects both science and meaning. It prevents myth from contaminating empirical inquiry while preserving space for narrative, metaphor, and moral imagination.

We can cherish religious narratives as powerful human creations. We can recognize them as “useful fictions” that comfort and inspire. But we must resist elevating any one of them to literal, unquestionable truth.

True religious tolerance begins at reason’s fork in the road. There, we stand united in what knowledge has revealed. Beyond that point, we are free to explore symbols, stories, and speculation—without confusing them for reality.

Spinoza’s God is not personal, jealous, or interventionist. It is not tribal. It is not supernatural. It is the unfolding totality of existence itself—visible in every photon, every equation, every conscious experience.

Because it is universal, it can unite us in a way no sectarian deity can.

We observe reality.

We use reason to understand it.

We continually revise our understanding.

That ongoing, self-correcting bridge between thought and extension is not merely a method. It is the sacred process by which humanity aligns itself with what is.

And that is the God the reality-based community can stand behind together.

The post Reason’s Bridge to Knowledge appeared first on New Atenism.

Most of the time, the rider thinks he’s in control. In reality, he is often perched atop a 6,000-pound animal that goes where it wants.

An Elephant Herder is not simply a rider who controls his own elephant. An Elephant Herder is someone who helps design the paths that many elephants travel. They create the norms, incentives, institutions, and cultural narratives that channel instinct toward flourishing rather than destruction.

If Seekers are committed practitioners of reason, Elephant Herders are architects of the systems that make reason effective at scale.

The Four Roles in the Prosperity Project

To understand Elephant Herders, we need to situate them among the other roles in the collective prosperity project.

1. Strivers

Strivers are those whose lives are dominated by instability or material insecurity. When you are worried about rent, safety, or food, your elephant is in survival mode. There is little cognitive surplus for long-term institutional design. Strivers are not lesser; they are constrained. History shows that when material prosperity rises, more people gain the bandwidth to contribute beyond survival.

2. Followers

Followers operate within systems shaped by reason. They obey traffic laws, vaccinate their children, use smartphones, and trust plumbing systems — often without thinking about the knowledge structures behind them. Followers benefit from and reinforce rational systems but rarely design them.

3. Seekers

Seekers are consciously committed to reason and knowledge humility. They recognize their elephant’s biases and attempt to discipline them. They support institutions that promote truth-seeking. Many scientists, judges, educators, and thoughtful citizens fall into this category.

4. Elephant Herders

Elephant Herders go one step further. They do not merely practice reason personally; they structure incentives and institutions that guide others.

They ask:

• How do we align self-interest with the common good?
• How do we make the rational path the easiest path?
• How do we design systems that nudge elephants toward cooperation?

They are institutional engineers.

A Brief History of Elephant Herding

Humans have always herded elephants — just not always literal ones.

From early law codes etched in stone to the Roman Senate, from the Magna Carta to the printing press, history is a story of people designing structures to channel human behavior.

Consider:

• Legal codes constrain violence.
• Markets align self-interest with production.
• Scientific institutions channel curiosity into replicable knowledge.
• Democratic systems redirect power struggles into ballots instead of bloodshed.

These are all elephant-herding technologies.

Modern Elephant Herders have included reformers, founders of institutions, civil rights leaders, and even entrepreneurs who structure systems that change human behavior at scale.

The rise of traffic laws, public sanitation, universal education, and human rights frameworks did not happen because individuals spontaneously became virtuous. They happened because someone designed the road.

A Contemporary Example: Candy Lightner

In 1980, Candy Lightner’s 13-year-old daughter was killed by a repeat drunk driver. Rather than retreat into private grief, Lightner founded Mothers Against Drunk Driving (MADD).

Before MADD, drunk driving was often treated as a minor offense. After sustained advocacy, public pressure, and institutional reform, the United States raised the drinking age, strengthened DUI laws, and reshaped social norms.

Lightner did not personally stop drunk drivers. She changed the system that shaped them.

This is elephant herding: shifting incentives, stigmas, and legal consequences so that the elephant’s impulse — “I’ll just drive home carefully” — becomes less attractive and more costly.

Other examples abound:

• Reformers who improved food safety laws.
• Designers of public health campaigns.
• Architects of microfinance systems.
• Builders of platforms that incentivize truth over virality (at least in theory).

Elephant Herders operate where culture meets structure.

What It Takes to Become an Elephant Herder

Elephant herding is not a title; it is a developmental stage.

1. Material Stability

It is extremely difficult to design institutions while in survival mode. As Kaufman’s sailboat analogy suggests, the hull (safety and physiological needs) must be reasonably intact before one can focus on shaping society’s trajectory.

2. Self-Knowledge

You must understand your own elephant. If you are blind to your biases, resentments, or need for status, you will build systems that serve your ego rather than the commons.

3. Knowledge Humility

Elephant Herders must accept that they are fallible. Systems should include feedback loops, transparency, and mechanisms for correction. The scientific method is powerful not because scientists are saints, but because it institutionalizes criticism.

4. Incentive Literacy

They must understand how incentives shape behavior. Humans respond predictably to rewards, punishments, and social signals. A well-designed system makes virtue easier and vice harder.

5. Moral Imagination

An Elephant Herder must ask not only “What works?” but “For whom?” Policies and institutions have unintended consequences. Moral imagination requires empathy across class, culture, and time.

Elephant Herding and the Gospel of Prosperity

In New Atenism, the Gospel of Prosperity does not mean material excess. It means expanding the conditions under which humans can flourish — materially and inwardly.

Elephant Herders expand the space in which Seekers can thrive and Strivers can rise. They reduce chaos so that more people can participate in collective reason.

They are not saviors. They are system designers.

The Dark Side of Elephant Herding

Every power casts a shadow.

The same skills that allow someone to guide elephants toward prosperity can guide them toward destruction.

History offers sobering examples:

Charismatic leaders have harnessed fear, resentment, and tribal identity to devastating effect. Totalitarian regimes perfected propaganda systems. Corporations have engineered addictive technologies that exploit cognitive vulnerabilities.

Dark Elephant Herders understand incentives just as well as benevolent ones — but they align them with domination, profit at any cost, or ideological purity.

The difference lies not in skill but in orientation toward reason and humility.

A healthy Elephant Herder:

• Builds in criticism
• Encourages dissent
• Welcomes data that falsifies their assumptions

A dark Elephant Herder:

• Suppresses feedback
• Demonizes critics
• Treats dissent as betrayal

Without humility, herding becomes manipulation. Without reason, it becomes fanaticism.

Why Elephant Herders Are Rare

Elephant herding requires a convergence of:

• Stability
• Intelligence
• Emotional maturity
• Long time horizons
• Institutional knowledge
• Moral commitment

Most of us will not spend our lives redesigning legal codes or founding reform movements. That’s fine, but healthy societies must produce at least a few Elephant Herders per generation — or stagnation and decay follow.

Wanna Herd Some Elephants?

You may not found a national movement. But elephant herding can occur at many scales:

• Designing fair policies in your company
• Creating norms in a community group
• Structuring incentives in a classroom
• Writing code that nudges users toward healthier behavior

Every system shapes elephants.

The question is not whether elephants will be herded. They always are. The question is: by whom, and toward what end?

The Fork in the Road

In New Atenism, we stand at a fork in the road of knowledge. Reason has revealed both extraordinary power and extraordinary danger. We can design institutions that reduce poverty, disease, and violence. We can also design systems that polarize, addict, and manipulate.

Elephant Herders stand at this fork more visibly than most. They hold tools capable of amplifying either flourishing or fear.

To become one is to accept a burden: to channel instinct without denying it; to design incentives without dehumanizing; to guide elephants without forgetting that you ride one too.

And perhaps most importantly: to build systems that outlast you.

Because in the end, progress is not the product of solitary genius. It is the result of structures that allow collective reason to do its work.

Elephant Herders are the architects of those structures.

The post Elephant Herders: Architects of Collective Progress appeared first on New Atenism.

Let’s start at the beginning, long before Homo sapiens, mammals, or even plants. Life’s earliest ancestors—cyanobacteria—emerged in Earth’s primordial oceans around 3.5 billion years ago. These microscopic beings evolved the ability to harness sunlight, converting water and carbon dioxide into energy. In doing so, they released oxygen into the atmosphere for the first time. This was not only the beginning of photosynthesis—it was the beginning of the transformation of Earth into a living world.

Since that ancient moment, every organism on this planet—every leaf that sprouts, every animal that grazes, every human that dreams[1]—has been powered by the same radiant solar energy. Plants capture it, animals consume the plants, and humans consume both. The entire food web is a beautifully intricate cascade of sunlight.

But radiant solar energy does more than just feed us. It sculpts and sustains the conditions that make life possible. As sunlight floods the Earth, its interaction with the atmosphere and oceans creates weather patterns, drives the water cycle, and maintains the delicate climate equilibrium in which we thrive. Solar heating evaporates water, powers winds, and determines regional climates. That process also helps keep the Earth’s temperature in a livable range, creating seasons, day and night, droughts and monsoons. In short, the biosphere—the layer of life around Earth—is formed not just by the energy of the sun, but by how that energy is filtered, scattered, and regulated by our planet’s unique environment.

In New Atenism, we call this intricate balance between radiant solar energy and near-Earth space “Aten’s balance.” It is not divine in the mythological sense but divine in the Spinozist sense—it is reality. It is the power of God/Nature made knowable through reason. And it’s not just powering forests and farms; it’s powering you, right now.

Every breath you take, every bite of food you eat, every movement your body makes is fueled by sunlight that was captured, stored, and transformed into usable energy. This is not a metaphor. Your breakfast was sunshine—the very sunshine of your life. The wheat in your toast used photosynthesis to grow, the cow that produced your milk ate grass that did the same. Even the fossil fuels that power your home, your car, or your laptop are just ancient, condensed sunlight—prehistoric plants and animals that stored solar energy millions of years ago, now released in an instant. Installing solar panels on your roof not only cuts out the photosynthetic middleman—plants and animals–it helps to maintain Aten’s balance by reducing carbon emissions.

So if life is powered by sunlight, what does that mean for us individually? For starters, it means that our bodies are constantly radiating. A living body, warm at about 98.6 degrees Fahrenheit, is a dynamic engine converting food energy (sunlight) into motion, thought, metabolism. When we die, that process stops. Our temperature falls to match the surrounding environment. The difference between a living body and a dead one is the ongoing processing and re-radiation of that solar energy. Life is not something breathed into the body by a supernatural force. It is a thermodynamic state: the ongoing flow of energy through a system that resists entropy, temporarily.

And it goes deeper. Solar energy doesn’t just keep us alive—it choreographs our lives. Human beings, like all living organisms, are governed by circadian rhythms—internal clocks that sync with the sun’s cycle. Light exposure affects everything from mood to sleep to metabolism. Your hunger patterns? Solar. Your sleep-wake cycle? Solar. Even your trips to the bathroom follow a circadian rhythm governed by the presence or absence of daylight.

We often think we’re experiencing life as independent beings, but in truth, we are satellites of the sun. We orbit not just physically but biologically and emotionally. The sun is everything to us and yet we almost always take this well-established fact for granted.

Consider two scenarios. First, you’re driving to work on a cold winter morning. The sun breaks through the clouds and spills across your dashboard. You don’t think much of it, but your mood lifts, your body relaxes, and your circadian chemistry adjusts in real time. That beam of light isn’t just warming your skin—it’s syncing your hormones, modulating serotonin, and nudging your sleep-wake cycle. Now consider a summer hike. You crest a hill and feel a blast of heat. You instinctively reach for water. What just happened? Your hypothalamus, reading your skin’s solar absorption, triggered a thirst response. You didn’t choose it—your body responded to the sun.

You are, in essence, a living solar panel. And like all solar panels, your function depends on the quality and availability of sunlight—and your ability to regulate that energy within the context of Earth’s atmosphere. Without that regulatory layer—what we call near-Earth space—life could not exist. The balance between incoming solar radiation and outgoing infrared radiation keeps the Earth within a narrow band of temperatures conducive to life. Disrupt that balance, and you disrupt everything. Too much energy trapped by greenhouse gases, and we overheat. Too little, and we freeze. This balance is as sacred as anything you’ll find in religious texts and, unlike those texts, is supported by overwhelming evidence.

In fact, this idea of a “sacred balance” is echoed in the Overview Effect—a phenomenon reported by astronauts who, upon seeing Earth from orbit, experience a profound shift in awareness. They see Earth as a fragile sphere bathed in sunlight, wrapped in a thin veil of atmosphere, teeming with life. There are no national borders from up there—just Aten’s balance, glowing in silent harmony. That moment of realization is not just spiritual—it’s thermodynamic. They are witnessing the cosmic miracle of radiant energy being transformed into living systems.

Many ancient cultures sensed this mystery but lacked the knowledge to explain it. They invoked spirits, souls, or vital forces to account for the spark of life. Ancient Egyptians believed in ka, a vital essence. Greeks spoke of pneuma, the breath of life. Christians described the Holy Spirit as the giver of life, breathed into Adam’s nostrils. Across time and place, humanity has intuitively grasped that something special animates the living.

Our intuitive sense of the sun’s impact on our world also made worship of it ubiquitous in ancient myth and religion. Virtually all of these described the sun as a person or animal. The outlier is Akhenaten’s Atenism which described the sun as a sphere in the sky that emitted life-giving rays. That Akhenaten got that part right is why he wins reason’s door prize of having a modern religion named after his creation. The ‘new’ in New Atenism is reason’s invitation to keep what Akhenaten got right—and to revise what time and evidence have revealed he got wrong.

We’ve now mapped the pathways. We’ve traced the photons. We’ve followed the carbon and nitrogen cycles. And what we’ve discovered is not a mystery at all. It is radiant solar energy, those life-giving rays, converted by photosynthesis, consumed by animals, stored in molecules like glucose and ATP, and released again in heat and motion. The spirit that animates us isn’t metaphysical—it’s physical. It’s outside your window, right now. And it is used only by living things. We have found the vital force. And it is sunshine.

To become aware of the sunshine of your life is to be awed by its power and grateful for its many blessings. You don’t need faith in a mythological deity to feel blessed. You don’t need to believe in imagined spirits to be spiritual. You can marvel at what is real. You can let reason guide your wonder. In the religion of New Atenism, we choose to believe in what we know, rather than have faith in what we choose to believe.

We call that sunlight Aten. Not the God that Akhenaten described but a manifestation of Spinoza’s God/Nature. Aten is the radiant energy that fuels life, and near-Earth space is the filter that makes it possible. That’s our true creation story. And it is unfolding every second of every day.

What was once told in myth—the idea that God gives life—is now understood through reason. God/Nature gives life through Aten. The spirit that breathes life into us is not supernatural. It’s not a mystery. It’s not hiding. It’s pouring down upon us, bouncing off leaves, pooling in lakes, heating our bones, and dancing across the clouds. And if you choose to see it for what it is, you’ll realize you don’t have to give up spiritual wonder to embrace reason. You can have your reason cake and eat it spiritually.

So go outside. Feel the sun. Take a deep breath. You are alive because of what you are feeling in that moment. That warmth on your skin is the blessing of life itself.

[1] Once again, apologies to our chemosynthesis practicing brothers and sisters living in deep-sea ocean hydrothermal vents for their omission.

The post The Sunshine of Your Life appeared first on New Atenism.

“…give a few grains of food to each returning bird as a reward.” – excerpt from a US Navy guide on training homing pigeons

In the above quote, Ms. Alder, a prolific and highly quoted author, is saying that any attempt to get an “idiot” to engage in reasoned discourse is a waste of time. The second quote offers more practical advice. Rather than dismissing the pigeon, it shows how a mutually beneficial relationship can be formed. How cool would it be to train a pigeon to deliver a valentine? Way cooler than having my chess pieces knocked over and my board crapped on. I understand that Ms. Alder is not offering practical advice on developing mutually beneficial pigeon relationships, but neither is she offering any helpful ideas about how one should deal with “idiots.”

In my last post, I defined two forms of stupid; 1) stupid acts, which we all do from time to time regardless of our level of intelligence and 2) stupid people, humans judged by others to have limited intellect and/or ability to think critically. By comparing “idiots” to pigeons Ms. Alder is focused on form #2. Someone who refuses to accept, or even listen to, her no doubt reasonable arguments is a pigeon-level idiot. A pigeon that knocks over chess pieces is just following its nature, but so is a person who reflexively rejects anything contrary to their beliefs as well as those who call them an idiot for doing so. It is human nature to be guided more by emotion than reason. It is more often the self-satisfying sense of superiority and the praise from your tribe that drives not only the “idiots” but those who oh so reasonably call them that.

The main point of my last post was that rather than calling each other stupid, we should try to form a greater understanding of the emotions that drive all of us to do stupid things. I have many such moments I can pull from my own life to offer as examples. Once, in a somewhat mocking and incredulous tone, I asked my wife “Do you really think you’re smarter than me?” This was a decidedly un-smart thing to do, likely driven by my emotional need to be recognized as being like, all smart and stuff. My wife was gracious enough to calmly reply “there are many different kinds of intelligence” which was a diplomatic way of telling me I was being super-stupid.

Physicist Max Tegmark, talking with Sam Harris on his Making Sense podcast, compared measuring intelligence as a single thing (IQ) to measuring athletic ability as a single thing (AQ). Nobody thinks a great athlete can be an NBA star and an elite jockey, but many seem to believe that if you’re “smart,” you’re smart about everything, like the Professor on Gilligan’s Island. Stupidity is just as varied as intelligence and these different forms can be found across the entire IQ spectrum.

However gifted you are intellectually; you will do stupid stuff from time to time. However self-aware you become, you will still at times be led to stupid acts by your instincts and emotions. It can be challenging to rise above these emotional urges and recognize them as the motivations for your, perhaps less than brilliant, actions. When you call someone stupid it should be clear to you that you’re not making a serious attempt to reason with them. It’s also virtually certain being called stupid will get them to dig in rather than reconsider. You’re sure you’re right and they’re wrong and the fact they don’t agree with you, and won’t even listen to you, leads you to dismiss them as stupid, not worth your time. When you do this, your (Haidt) elephant’s frustration and anger lunges towards a dismissive insult and your (Haidt) rider rationalizes it with a comforting story of your intellectual superiority.

It should also be clear to you that this person you’re so frustrated with is probably equally frustrated with you. Do you doubt that if presented with Alder’s pigeon quote or an outline of Bonhoeffer’s thoughts on stupidity they would heartily believe they apply to you and not them? This stupid circular firing squad played a big role in the great rise of stupid I outlined in my last post. If we remove the condescension of comparing a chess player to a pigeon, we’re left with two creatures whose nature leads them to do different things incomprehensible to each other.

In her extraordinary book “Strangers in Their Own Land,” author Arlie Russell Hochschild chronicles her time spent with deeply religious conservatives in rural Louisiana. Hochschild is professor emerita of sociology at the University of California, Berkeley where she also resides. She’s about as deep in a progressive bubble as one can be. She is also, it turns out, a remarkably intellectually honest sociologist. This led her to want to understand where all this “Anger and Mourning on the American Right[1]” was coming from. It seemed so clear to her that these people were supporting policies, like tax cuts that primarily benefit the wealthy and reductions in federal aid, which were clearly not in their own interest and opposing ones, like environmental regulations which clearly were. Rather than join in the chorus of voices in her bubble dismissing these people as dummies, she got on a plane and went down there to see if she could find out where these people were coming from.

What she found were tight-knit communities, usually centered around a church, that looked out for each other. This communal support is what they felt could be counted on rather than remote institutions with little understanding of their values or interest in their needs. She found people keenly aware of how they are dismissed as “hillbillies” and “rednecks.” She found people who saw projects like the dredging of swamps to find natural gas as creating much-needed jobs, dismissing the disastrous and even deadly environmental consequences.

She presents an allegory where people who have worked hard for the American dream are patiently waiting in line for that dream to be delivered. They see women, immigrants, and racial minorities being allowed to cut in line by the Government. It’s not fair! We worked hard to move up the line and they’re getting a free pass! She shared her allegory with the older, white, and almost all male Tea Party/MAGA[2] supporters she met with who told her it accurately reflected their feelings. She still didn’t agree with them, and neither do I, but she developed an understanding of the emotions and instincts that were driving them.

She learned that what these folks want is what everyone wants, prosperity. She came to understand that preferring the job-creating gas companies to the “elites” who dismiss them as stupid hicks was, in the context of their lived experience, reasonable. If presented with better opportunities for prosperity they would jump on them. If those opportunities were eco-friendly and beneficial to humanity, that’d be a nice bonus, but it’s the potential for prosperity that would move them. Once Ms. Hochschild saw for herself how a common faith and the social networks centered around churches were a major source of material and emotional support, their distrust of remote institutions became easier to understand.

While I haven’t found a right to left literary corollary to Ms. Hochschild’s book, Morgan Spurlock’s TV show “30 Days” had three episodes where someone from a conservative bubble was immersed in a liberal one. The premise of the show is to follow someone living completely outside of their world for 30 days.

Here is an overview of the three 30 Days episodes which explore the political, cultural and ideological divides from a left to right perspective:

1. “Immigration” (Season 2, Episode 1)

Frank George, a member of the Minutemen, a civilian border patrol group that opposes illegal immigration lives with a Mexican family in Los Angeles which includes undocumented members. Frank follows the family’s daily routine, including working physically demanding jobs that many undocumented immigrants take. He learns about the economic and personal hardships they face, such as low wages, job insecurity, and fear of deportation. He witnesses how the children, who are U.S. citizens, struggle with the uncertainty of their parents’ status. He visits an immigration processing center and speaks with both legal immigrants and those who have been detained.

While Frank remains firmly against illegal immigration and questions the family’s decision to come to the U.S. without documentation, he acknowledges the humanity of the people behind the issue. He comes to a better understanding of why many undocumented immigrants risk their lives to enter the U.S.

2. “Muslims and America” (Season 1, Episode 2)

Dave Stacy is a Christian man from West Virginia with strong negative views about Islam, including that Muslims pose a threat to America. Dave goes to live with a Muslim family in Dearborn, Michigan—home to one of the largest Muslim-American communities in the US. Dave lives according to Islamic customs, including dietary restrictions and daily prayer. He visits mosques and interacts with local Muslim leaders who attempt to dispel myths about Islam. He engages in deep conversations about the Quran and the perception of Muslims in American media. He meets young Muslim Americans who are culturally similar to him but face discrimination due to their religion. He participates in a public discussion where he expresses his initial fears and biases, leading to a debate with the community.

Despite his initial skepticism, he slowly begins to appreciate the similarities between Christianity and Islam. He still questions Islamic teachings and expresses concerns about extremism and continues to have difficulty embracing cultural differences but acknowledges that his views were shaped by media portrayals rather than direct experience. He expresses respect for the family and the Muslim community and recognizes that the vast majority of Muslims are peaceful and patriotic Americans.

3. “Straight Man in a Gay World” (Season 1, Episode 4)

Ryan, a young man from a conservative background in Michigan who openly states that he believes homosexuality is unnatural and wrong is welcomed into the home of an openly gay man. Living in San Francisco’s Castro district, Ryan attends LGBTQ+ events and meets people who have faced discrimination for their sexual orientation. He speaks with same-sex couples about their relationships and struggles. He even participates in a drag show, stepping far outside his comfort zone. He engages in discussions with LGBTQ+ individuals who challenge his preconceptions. He visits a church that is inclusive of LGBTQ+ members, challenging his belief that religion and homosexuality are incompatible.

Ryan remains opposed to same-sex marriage and does not change his core belief that homosexuality is a sin. However, he acknowledges that LGBTQ+ individuals are not inherently different from him and deserve respect. He leaves with a softened stance, admitting that personal interactions have made him more aware of the challenges faced by LGBTQ+ individuals.

Each of these episodes follows a similar arc: the participant enters with rigid beliefs, experiences the daily life of people they disagree with, and emerges with a more nuanced understanding, if not a complete change of opinion. In each case they return home and share their experiences. While this doesn’t lead to any mass conversions, it does represent an honest attempt to try and understand where someone you don’t agree with is coming from rather than just continue to dismiss or condemn them.

The key is immersion—living with people of different backgrounds forces personal engagement that breaks down stereotypes. These episodes, and Ms. Hochschild’s book, illustrate how polarization thrives in environments where people don’t interact with those who hold different views. The great rise of stupid is rooted in a vicious circle of dismissal supercharged by social media. True Elephant Herders should be focused on building a virtuous circle of empathy and understanding which fosters collective reasoning on how best to spread progress. This requires a high level of self-awareness, an understanding of your own tribal biases, and a willingness to understand the desires of others. It is through this understanding that solutions which meet those needs and ultimately benefit all of us can be found.

[1] This is the subtitle of “Strangers in Their Own Land”

[2] Ms. Hochschild’s time in Louisiana was just prior to the MAGA phenomena but makes the connection in the book’s preface.

The post Stupid Part II: Of Pigeons & Partisans appeared first on New Atenism.

Google Ngram chart of   of “stupid ” in printed material.

There is a curious correlation between mentions of “stupid” and the explosive growth of social media over the same period.

Social Media use between 2004 and 2018 – Our World in Data

While this doesn’t prove causation, it seems reasonable to assume that the symbiotic relationship of social media and polarization/tribalism were a primary driver of stupid’s rise. It’s also worth noting that the Google Ngram stats are for printed materials only. Do you think “stupid” gets used more often or less often online than in print?

In the minds of most people there are two kinds of stupid:

1. Stupid actions where stupidity is a temporary state. Even the most intelligent among us will sometimes do stupid things.
2. Stupid people. Those with low IQs and/or a lack of critical thinking skills.  

“Well, that was stupid of me” (#1) can be a constructive inner dialog. “You are really stupid” (#2) is probably not going to get someone to question their beliefs or behavior. It seems unlikely that the 2004 rise of stupid is dominated by people evaluating their own actions in order to better understand their own minds and become better people. But if calling someone, or a group of someones, stupid is unlikely to move anyone towards a new way of thinking, why are so many people doing it?

Calling others stupid is a way of telling yourself “I’m smart,” or at least smarter than they are. In addition to this personal satisfaction there are social rewards. Declaring that someone outside of your tribe is stupid is a quick way to get approval from inside yours. Regular readers of this blog or my book will be familiar with Jonathan Haidt’s analogy of an emotional elephant and a rational rider. The idea is that instinct and emotion (the elephant) drive us more than reason (the rider). The reasoning rider is far more likely to rationalize what the elephant wants than evaluate it. This rider submission trait does not seem to be related to an inability to think critically. In fact, there is evidence which suggests that individuals with greater cognitive reflective capabilities are more likely to use those skills to support ideologically motivated reasoning. In other words, a deeper understanding of critical thinking is often employed to adopt the mantle of a critical thinker while doing precisely the opposite.

All this has created an environment where people use their reasoning and rhetorical gifts to seek emotional, and sometimes financial, rewards from massive online communities of the like-minded. For these folks, just saying “Man, those dudes are so stupid” won’t do. A more reasonable-sounding way of calling people stupid must be found. A popular reference for their arguments is the German Lutheran pastor and Nazi dissident, Dietrich Bonhoeffer. Bonhoeffer’s letters and papers, written in a Nazi jail cell, made him the great philosopher of stupid. Bonhoeffer saw stupidity as more dangerous than evil or malice.

“Stupidity is a more dangerous enemy of the good than malice. One may protest against evil; it can be exposed and, if need be, prevented by use of force. Evil always carries within itself the germ of its own subversion in that it leaves behind in human beings at least a sense of unease. Against stupidity we are defenseless…In all this the stupid person, in contrast to the malicious one, is utterly self-satisfied and, being easily irritated, becomes dangerous by going on the attack.” – Dietrich Bonhoeffer

Bonhoeffer’s writings are often cited by both sides of a debate as pseudo-intellectual support for calling people who disagree with them stupid. For example, here in the U.S., the anti-MAGA crowd is fond of citing Bonhoeffer to explain why it’s useless to try and reason with those stupid Trump supporters. Conservative evangelicals, on the other hand, describe Bonhoeffer as a Christian crusader who battled the Nazis, mirroring their noble struggle with stupid, Godless lefties.

While Bonhoeffer did have a lot to say about stupid people, he also said this.

“The impression one gains is not so much that stupidity is a congenital defect, but that, under certain circumstances, people are made stupid or that they allow this to happen to them…If we want to know how to get the better of stupidity, we must seek to understand its nature.” – Dietrich Bonhoeffer

That sounds a lot more like stupid #1, a temporary state which can afflict people regardless of education, intelligence or belief in critical thinking. If otherwise intelligent people can “under certain circumstances” be led to do stupid things, and can often do a better job of rationalizing those actions, shouldn’t our focus be on those circumstances? What were the “certain circumstances” that led the German people to follow Hitler and resulted in Bonhoeffer being imprisoned?

Germany was humiliated at the end of World War I. More than 10% of the population was either killed or wounded. With over two million soldiers killed, another four million wounded and at least seven hundred thousand civilian deaths from blockades, famine and disease, few households avoided tragedy. As bad as this was, the treaty of Versailles, which formally ended the war, made things even worse. Unlike the post-WWII Marshal Plan, which focused on rebuilding Germany, the treaty of Versailles was designed to extract additional punishment from the German people. This led to the hyperinflation of the early 1920s, which devastated the savings of millions, caused mass unemployment and desperation. It is difficult to describe just how bad life was for Germans during this time. A loaf of bread that cost 250 marks in January 1923 cost 200 billion marks by November. Bank notes literally became not worth the paper they were printed on, so people burned them to keep warm. Unemployment skyrocketed and the government had no money to pay benefits. Starvation and suicide became common.

Along came Adolf Hitler with his story of economic salvation, national pride, and scapegoating. He promised to fix their problems and told them who was to blame for them. He claimed Germany didn’t lose WWI, but were betrayed by Jews, communists, and weak politicians. He promised to restore Germany’s greatness by crushing its enemies. He promised law, order, and discipline in contrast to the chaos of Weimar Germany. Just imagine how good that would sound to you if you’re huddled around a bank note fire watching your family slowly starve to death. It would take one hell of an elephant rider to be able to pull away from that. Hitler is an extreme example of what I call an Elephant Herder. He rose to power with a story the German people wanted so badly to be true, they would reject any information or evidence which questioned it.

It is a mistake to interpret Bonhoeffer as claiming that stupid people (#1) are more dangerous than evil ones. Evil fosters and manipulates stupid #2 in otherwise intelligent people. Hitler, the very personification of evil, was dangerous because of his ability to manipulate emotions to get otherwise smart people to do something stupid. By calling Hitler’s followers stupid, especially given his relatively privileged life, Bonhoeffer was more likely to further entrench their belief in Hitler than get them to question it. His life was quite different from that of the average German during the 1920s and 1930s. He was raised in relative affluence and his well-connected family remained relatively untouched. While millions of Germans struggled to find work during the Great Depression, Bonhoeffer spent time studying theology in Berlin, and then briefly at Union Theological Seminary in New York. This gave him exposure to progressive Christian thought and racial injustice in America, but it also meant he wasn’t directly suffering like the German masses.

When Hitler rose to power in 1933, Bonhoeffer was already an ordained pastor and academic, moving in elite circles that largely rejected the Nazi movement. From his lofty perch, Bonhoeffer saw the danger of Hitler’s rise and became a vocal critic. While this was incredibly courageous and noble, his background and education made him more of an observer of German suffering than a direct participant in it. This may have led to his less-than-compassionate view of why people fell for Hitler’s rhetoric.

Bonhoeffer’s opposition to Hitler, which may well have included being involved in a plot to assassinate him, was morally courageous, and it ultimately cost him his life, but perhaps he wasn’t able to fully understand the emotions which led so many Germans to be swept up in Hitler’s movement. It’s possible his privileged upbringing insulated him from the worst of Germany’s desperation and made it harder for him to empathize with those who followed Hitler out of emotional need rather than pure ideology. The understanding of how people can “be made stupid” under certain conditions, may have eluded him as he sat in a prison cell. Perhaps emotion prevented him from being able to see that the reasoning of the German people wasn’t absent, it had just been overridden by emotion. If that’s the case, it is understandable that he would lean more into stupid #2 and dismiss Hitler’s followers as fools rather than attempti to understand the “circumstances” that led them astray.

This is the great irony of stupid. Bonhoeffer’s warning about stupidity often applies to so-called enlightened critics as much as it does to the people they call stupid. Their ability to employ reason or feel empathy gets overridden by emotion; frustration about what they perceive as mindless acts, their own tribal loyalties, and that warm, fuzzy feeling of superiority. Instead of engaging with people who hold contrary beliefs to try and understand where they’re coming from, they react emotionally, dismissing them as stupid. They are engaging in the same emotion-driven behavior they identify as stupid in others.

The German people were desperate, humiliated, and grasping for hope. Hitler understood this and crafted a compelling narrative that spoke to these emotional wants. To call them stupid and expect them to question their choices was never going to stand up to Hitler’s emotionally charged narrative. Hitler was as dark and evil as it gets, but refusing to acknowledge that he was a master Elephant Herder—just because it feels wrong to say anything remotely positive about him—ignores history, and we all know where that leads.

If we overlay our improved understanding of how emotion leads us more than reason, it yields a universal insight. What we think of as stupid acts, done by stupid people, are more often the result of this fundamental human trait. The less prosperous, the more desperate someone is, the more susceptible they are to stories that play on the emotions that desperation causes. While Germans in the 20’s suffered tangible, material desperation, materially prosperous contemporary individuals are often desperate enough for social acceptance and that feeling of superiority, they leave reason behind and say and do, well, stupid stuff. This is the connection between the rise of stupid and the rise of social media.

The problem with calling people stupid is that it makes you a shitty Elephant Herder. A real Elephant Herder rises above their own instincts, understands the emotions of others, and leads them to a better path. If we’re interested in uniting humans in a common goal of progress and prosperity, then we need to bend the curve of that stupid mentions graph I started this post with back down. Calling someone stupid is the essence of illiberalism. It not only prevents the free exchange of ideas but, crucially, allows you to avoid any effort to try and understand those ideas and what circumstances may have caused someone to arrive at them.

It shouldn’t require any deep thinking or self-reflection to realize that the desire to call someone stupid is not an honest and well-meaning attempt to get them to reconsider a belief or change a behavior. Critical thinking is most challenging when turned inward. We all find it easier to question the beliefs of others than to question our own. To truly be a critical thinker you must constantly question your beliefs. Why do I think that? What biases might I have that drive that belief? Am I making a valid argument or just summarily rejecting anything that counters an intuition I’ve attached myself to? It is often difficult to answer these questions inside your own head so seek input from others. Try to develop a culture of criticism inside your own social group rather than just getting together to rail about all those stupid people. Building your own internal culture of criticism and expanding it to your social group will be the subject of my next (stupid) blog post.

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