Stream of consciousness: How does your material reality affect your worldview?

There's a quote that goes like this: Don't expect a man to understand something when his survival depends on his not understanding it.

Taylor Tomlinson made the joke that it's easy to believe in God when you've won the genetic lottery.

When I first moved out of the house, it was the first time in my life where being a Christian was not socially advantageous. I was still a Christian, at first, but I was shocked to see just how much my faith had been influenced by survival pressures. When your survival is tied to your parents, suddenly getting along with your parents is a matter of survival. If your parents are religious, then getting along with your parents means going along with their religion.

This applies beyond one's parents. If your survival depends on your job, then your worldview will be shaped by your work. What happens when your worldview is incompatible with your work? Then work will become agony for you.

Christians have a habit of disagreeing with their church, uprooting and going on to create their own Christian denomination. Internal beliefs and external survival pressures often clash. Remove the external pressure, and the internal beliefs show themselves in action. When slaves are set free, they usually don't hang around, but leave and build their own life.

Give any Christian a million dollars, and I think there is a 90% chance that their faith won't last. The reason why is because their survival will no longer be attached to their Christian community, and they will have the freedom to explore the world. And when you explore the world, you see just how non-Christian it is, and just how cult-like all forms of Christianity really are, and if they're observant, they will see how tribes and cults fit perfectly into an evolutionary viewpoint. People go where the money is and where the people are, and there's money and people in religion. People are naturally social creatures who rely on social structures for access to resources and for a sense of meaning, and religions provide all these things that are directly or indirectly tied to our survival.

When you look around, you are seeing that which survives. So there is no surprise when you look around and see those beliefs that attend survival. If your beliefs happen to conveniently line up with what evolution would select, that's reason to be suspicious of your beliefs. That doesn't mean your beliefs are false, only that you should take a second look and ensure you have reasons for them grounded in the public tools of inquiry.

You may think that everything I'm saying is so obvious that it's embarrassing that I would say it as if it needs saying. But sadly, it does need saying, as people like Justin Brierley, Jordan Peterson, and to some degree Alex O'Connor keep trying to make things out to be as though religion is anything more than an artifact of human biology. Really, what Peterson seems to be grasping at is that consequences are very, very, very consequential. Flourishing is really good, so good that it may be worth taking on a lie of sorts, like religion, to obtain it, and certainly flourishing requires a degree of unified social success, and certainly religions are useful (even necessary) for creating unified social success. And if it's true that flourishing is that good, and that suffering is that bad, and if it's true that getting rid of religion results in suffering, then it's like, what truth are we attending to here? The truth of literal scientific descriptions of empirical reality, or the truth that flourishing is overwhelmingly and absolutely better than suffering? Other "pseudo Christians" like Douglas Murray or Tom Holland seem to be grasping toward this idea as well.

I wonder what the ultra wealthy believe? I doubt many of them believe in an afterlife, given their ambition to live as well as possible in this life. In that case, it might be less of materiality affecting one's worldview and more of one's worldview ("you only live once") affecting one's ambition.

This won't apply to those who inherit that wealth. So then I wonder, for those who inherited wealth, how do their beliefs differ from the general population? Are they more or less likely to be religious? I would guess they would be less likely to be religious, as they have the freedom to go their own way, and, like Nietzsche would say, they have no need for the "slave morality" that religions trade in. (As indicated by the scare quotes, I don't care much for Nietzsche's views on morality.)

But maybe it's easier to believe God loves you when you've been blessed? And yet, those who inherit wealth probably are aware of just how arbitrary it is that they would be blessed when so many others are not. That kind of arbitrariness does not engender confidence that the world works according to a divine plan. Life is too random, chaotic, meaningless, boring, and too indifferent for that. After all, if God meant for me to inherit all this wealth and do something specific with it, then wouldn't there be a burning bush or something? And yet for all the billionaires and millionaires there are, there is a striking lack of burning bushes, or Gideon threshing floors, or pillars of fire or burning chariots or prophets or prophecies of any kind.

What do people believe when they are free to believe according to what makes sense to them instead of what enables their survival? Not in religion, not in politics, not in social trends, and not in jobs, I suspect. To be truly allowed to go your own way is an incredible privilege.