Anyone who understands human psychology knows there is no "one-size fits all" model for... just about anything. There is no one house that all humans would enjoy living in. There is no one style of clothing all humans would want to wear. There is no one diet that all humans would want to eat. And so on.
This applies to every single facet of human life. This especially applies to personality, aesthetics, and taste. We cannot help but like the things we like, to be attracted to the things we are attracted to, and to be compelled by what we find compelling. Different shapes and colors appeal to different people. Different sounds and genres of music appeal to different people. One person loves an outfit, another person hates it. One person loves a song, another person hates it. One person loves a movie, another person hates it. And that's okay. Different things fit better or worse with other things. Beauty and aesthetics involve, maybe more than thing, cohesion. Cohesion and aptness. There are also connections between aesthetics and truth, function, and usefulness. Things can be beautiful because they are rich and complex. Things can be beautiful because they are simple and efficient. Style and taste is all about being able to recognize what fits with what, with how cohesive, apt, or appropriate things are. A provocative outfit might be in order for a red carpet photo shoot. That same outfit would be a crime at a funeral. A song about nostalgia should sound dissonant and sweet, capturing the ambivalent bittersweetness of the feeling. If someone composed a song, called it Nostalgia, and it was funky jazz pop or angsty screamo metal, we would naturally be confused.
Christianity is one religion. Christianity demands a one-size fits all. Even worse, per Christians, you're not allowed to choose a denomination; each denomination insists that they are the exact right one and all the others are deeply mistaken. So God, being all-wise and knowing how human psychology works, and understands how aesthetically- and personality-driven humans are, knows that by setting up a One True Religion he is excluding millions if not billions of humans poorly on the basis of psychology, personality, and aesthetics, which are things we cannot control.
The Christian will protest: Of course the truth is a "one-size fits all." It's the truth after all.
But this is missing the point. Badly. Religion is very aesthetically driven, because religion is, well, mythology, and mythology is related to fiction, and fiction is aesthetic. Whereas fictions are explicitly imaginary, mythologies are "accidental fictions," meaning imagination-based speculations on the way things really work. The difference between mythology and fiction is that people really believe in the former, but not the latter.
But the boundary between mythology and fiction gets fuzzy when it comes to ritual, performance, and the backdrop of scientific knowledge. If mythologies and fictions reveal metaphorical truths that we believe in, then in some sense there is belief in the myth.
We enjoy the aesthetics of Arthurian legends, of Norse mythology, of Greek and Roman mythology, and of Egyptian and Asian mythologies. Christianity and Islam can be very aesthetically satisfying as well, with their grand battles between angels and demons, like Michael versus Satan, with striking imagery like the burning sword at the Garden of Eden. Our fictions constantly borrow from myths.
Lord of the Rings takes the aesthetics of Christianity and the aesthetics of Celtic druidism and fashions a kind of Christian paganism. Gandalf dies and rises again, more powerful than ever, like Jesus. And Lord of the Rings is very aesthetically compelling to a lot of people. It's a good blend. But some people feel disconnected to it, and that's fine. Star Wars achieved something similar by combining samurai, Buddhist, and Christian concepts using the Force and the Dark Side versus the Light Side. (I just realized that Gandalf is the same character as Obi-wan Kenobi! They are both wise wizards that set the main character on their journey only to die and come back later in a more powerful form. Is that a coincidence, or...?)
If God were truly wise, then, he would give us a true substructure, which can be grounded in science, philosophy, logic, history, and all the bits about objective truth. Those things tend to be aesthetically lacking, and lacking in terms of helping us find our personalities, styles, and which communities we best fit in.
I think it's not a coincidence that astrological signs are so popular. People desperately need personality tests. It gives us a way to categorize people and to adjust our expectations of their behavior, and how well they will be compatible with us. Given our social nature, social success is a precious commodity, and social failure, loneliness, and the inability to connect to others is a dreadful problem. Anything that aids us in achieving social success, and avoiding social failure, is a precious tool, and personality tests are an essential part of that. Astrological signs are not accurate. Myers-Briggs, from what I hear, is not accurate either. The problem is that personality systems tend to massively oversimplify things. But trying to develop more accurate personality systems requires increasing their complexity, which makes them more difficult to communicate, which defeats their purpose of being able to quickly and easily communicate social expectations. I bet Myers-Briggs is more accurate than astrology, but it's less popular perhaps for aesthetic reasons.
If God wanted to truly wow me with his wisdom, he would have set things out by creating the optimal personality system that balances simplicity and aesthetics with accuracy and comprehensiveness. Then, God would give us many different religions to choose from corresponding to those personality types. This would achieve a beautiful balance between individualism and collectivism. Overemphasize collectivism and you end up with conformity, homogeneity, a lack of creativity and self-expression, an aesthetic dullness, the excruciating death of the individual, and the destruction of originality and novelty. Overemphasize individualism and you have division, instability, the fracturing of community, the loss of a sense of unity, and a lonely, every-man-for-himself, empty, meaningless life. There is an aesthetic loss too, as all the responsibility to find an aesthetic, and to find one's path, is placed entirely on the individual, and there is a loss of a shared aesthetic which brings warmth and a sense of belonging.
By giving us an optimal personality test, and an optimal list of religions to choose from, God would achieve that balance between the individual and the collective. On the individual side, we would have known and communicable personality types, and we would have a choice as to which religion we fit best with according to that personality. Religions could be divided according to which types work best with each other, ensuring optimal social success and sense of belonging for each member. We enjoy the feeling of belonging and being a part of something bigger than ourselves, and of participating in a shared aesthetic and shared way of life by joining the religion of our choice.
The religions would differ in their mythologies and aesthetics and lifestyles, but they would not differ in their adherence to the truth. The mythologies are surface structures that exist on top of the deeper structure. Just as religions currently co-exist with science, logic, and philosophy, these religions would too exist with these things. So all religions would share in the objective truth of things. But science, logic, and philosophy give us basically nothing in terms of community, personality, and aesthetics. That's where mythology and religion come in and provide these deep-seated psychological needs. These myths, as ritualized fictions, would be entirely compatible with objective truth, as they would be understood by all inhabitants as entered fictions. (The work of Kathleen Stock might be relevant here, as she has written on fiction and on the usefulness and necessity of participating in fictions.) This is really no different than what we already do in fandoms. Fans of Star Wars, Lord of the Rings, and so on, often write fan-fiction and participate in these imaginary worlds. These are deeply creatively and aesthetically satisfying experiences. Some of my favorite gaming experiences have been playing Star Wars games like Dark Forces and the Jedi Knight games. So aesthetic! And some of my most powerful aesthetic experiences have come from playing classic World of Warcraft, a game so powerful and compelling that it was brought back in 2019, fifteen years after its release. I played it in 2005, 2006, starting at the age of ten. Imagine playing a game that powerful at that young of an age! It was mindblowing. Playing these games and exploring these worlds is an aesthetic, quasi-religious participation of its own, especially when gamers play together or bond over their shared experiences. It's difficult for me to separate out these kinds of powerful aesthetic, social, shared gaming experiences with the religious experiences of Christianity and church.
And yet God doesn't give us any of this. Instead, we get a single religion: Christianity, and we are demanded to contort ourselves and throw away our psychologies, individualities, personalities, and aesthetic preferences, and conform to a homogeneous system. There are so many problems with this! First, Christians are not remotely on the same page as to where Christianity mythology begins and ends, and to what extent exactly it's supposed to be myth versus something like science, history, or philosophy. So there is a gross "muddiness" to Christian belief. Some Christians believe that Genesis 1–11 is literal history and that denying this excludes you from the group. Other Christians believe Genesis 1–11 is basically myth, largely borrowed from Ancient Near-Eastern creations myths around at the time. There is no absolute canon, either of scripture or doctrine. There is too much division. Catholics complain about how ugly Protestant churches are, which Protestants find hilarious, as they find Catholic doctrines to be hideous and they see the beauty in doctrine and community as being a much higher priority than something as shallow and unimportant as buildings. The truth is that the beauty of the teachings, lifestyles, and yes, the buildings, all matter. We should be free to choose different options according to our personalities, and inevitably that is exactly what humans do because that is exactly how human psychology works, and apparently God is clueless as to how human psychology works.
But if religion is man-made, then we would expect exactly the chaos and disorder that we see. There is no fine-tuning for human lifestyles, for human psychology, personality, or aesthetics. If there were fine-tuning of that sort, that would be extremely powerful evidence of God. But as is, things are exactly how we would expect them to be if there were no God wise in the ways of human psychology.
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