Why Religion is Like Football, TV, and a Drink Down the Pub

 

 

Presentation to The Agnostics Group, Existentialist Society, Melbourne, Australia

 

Thor May PhD, 12 July 2025

[Note: starting on page 22 is a presentation summary of this paper by Gemini LLM]

 

Bouquet2.jpg

 

 

Why Religion is Like Football, TV, and a Drink Down the Pub

Thor May, July 2025

 

1. Introduction

 

Last November 2024 someone called David Miller popped up in my email box with a request to host a meetup on a religious topic. This was a bit of a surprise since I’m neither a scholar of religion nor a celebrity influencer. Nevertheless I scratched together something on a topic, “Why Religions Are Sometimes Necessary”. It was duly delivered and I assumed that was the end of it. Religions are interesting, but not a big part of my life.

Now I’m somewhat nonplussed to be drawn into another presentation. My purpose here is not to play guru, nor to massage whatever opinions you may already have. Rather this talk will have served its purpose if it provokes you to think a little about some populist foundations of religion. Feel free to disagree with any or all of my proposals.

I’ve decided, perhaps a little provocatively, to talk  about “Why Religion is Like Football, TV, and a drink down the pub”. Religion is like lots of other things too, but popular thinking is our anchor point here. Football is clearly the serious side of this topic title. I tried to find some funny pictures of football, but Google shows me that they don’t exist. That’s a clear difference from religion. Anyway, as a non-serious person I have a cheek since I know even less about football than I know about religion. That’s no barrier. As American politics has been teaching us recently, know-nothing outrage is by far the most profitable way of reaching other minds. With luck I may manage to offend both the gatekeepers of Heaven and the ticket sellers of the big leagues. Now let’s get serious.

2. Agenda

 

Firstly, a short note on the organization of this presentation. To give you a preview, below I have listed a collection of discussion points. I will address each one fairly briefly with my own viewpoint. When that is done the convener may like to invite questions and comments from the Zoom participants. I will do my best to respond, but keep in mind that I am not here to pose as any kind of guru. So here is the point list:

1. Introduction

2. Agenda list

3. A Glimpse of Past Times

4. City Life

5. Supply and Demand for Religion or Its Substitutes

6. Religion or Football? The Same Yet Different

7. Wolves Among the Sheep

8.  The Stories We Tell God; The Stories We Tell Each Other; The Stories We Tell Ourselves

9. We All Live In Gilded Cages Or Chicken Wire Cages. So What?

10. The Moral Universe of Which We Do Not Speak

11. The Outside Track On Religious Populism

12. Religion Is Necessary And Useful

      

  

3. A Glimpse of Past Times

 

Let me set a scene for you from a different time and place – but not too different. My mother, no longer with us, was born in 1922. She grew up in a hamlet called Preston in NW Tasmania, about 15 miles from the nearest town, Ulverstone.

She was 12 y.o. before she saw a light switch, she told me. The house, I think, was pretty isolated, yet even this far from the evils of big city life her father had to nail chicken wire over the bedroom window hole after a man once tried to climb in where she and her four sisters were sleeping.

This hamlet, Preston, had just a small primary school and a wooden church. The school had two rooms. My grandfather was “headmaster” in this school. On Sundays he changed hats and became the Methodist minister in the church.

In the early 1950s I myself spent 6 months in this place. I recall that on Sundays farmers from around the district would arrive for church with their wives and children. Often the women would bring home baked food. In a small room out the back the children were shown lantern slides of biblical stories. Farmers would swap news, while young singles would eye each other off and shyly start conversations. Almost the entire social life of this district revolved around that little church. 

To this day there are many parts of the world where every week in churches and temples and mosques, the social and spiritual life of communities repeat that scene from Preston’s little church. God, like Santa Clause, hovers unseen among these people, giving them a reason and a validation for coming together. Why would we want to destroy that?

In the confusion of World War II my mother married a marine commando who brought her back to Sydney. He became an itinerant carpenter and drank himself to death by 57 y.o. We had no religion, no excuse to find a community like Preston’s church. Once a week my mother wrote, then in later years rang her sisters until they died one by one. Yet in the 75 years she lived in our many addresses around Sydney she never made a single friend. This is a common story in the modern world.

 

4. City Life

 

So what do city folk do? It is true that some of them, fewer and fewer, do go to some church or mosque or temple. For many reasons, good and bad, church going for social or any reasons is a minority activity now. Are people less religious than they used to be, whatever ‘religious’ means. Perhaps. In the last Australian census around 40% nominated ‘no religion’. But I seriously doubt that the foundation architecture of most people’s inner thoughts and beliefs has changed hugely from those Tasmanian country folk a couple of generations ago. People still crave reassurance, they still want to justify their social activities, they still want to love and hate and find forgiveness.

Farmers tend to be practical people. One of the few childhood memes I took away from my brief encounter with a rural Methodist god was that ‘God helps them who help themselves’. So how do we, the more or less godless, help ourselves nowadays?

It is no secret to any of you that now, 24/7, marketers want to ‘help us’, governments want to ‘help us’, employers want to ‘help us’ …. That is, they want to help us spend our time or spend our money in exchange, they say, for something else. Some people are satisfied with the bargain, but in the end, many feel that this is a junk food spiritual diet. Somehow there is a lack of the old tribal enthusiasm and comfort which religions offered. There is a lack of validation that it is all worthwhile and serving a higher purpose, an assurance that life has meaning.

 

5.  Supply and Demand for Religion or Its Substitutes

 

Where there is demand, sooner or later there will be supply. I live in Adelaide. Adelaide is a forgotten city, 1000 km from anywhere, which does give the local mindset a certain tribal quality. It used to be called the city of churches. The churches dot the landscape like ancient, empty monuments. Now, on the days of big football or cricket matches, the government has enough political intelligence to make all public transport free. You see them in their thousands, these Adelaideans, of every size and age and gender, decked out in team colours, streaming towards the stadium. The pubs do a roaring trade. Games are hotly discussed in familiar, knowledgeable language about players and lessons learned. For those still at home, the TV match coverage is wall to wall.  

 

6. Religion or Football? The Same Yet Different

 

As with religion for the common people, football for the common people is meeting many of the same social and emotional needs. It is not a perfect match of course, more like a Venn diagram with a large overlap.

 

 

 

And it is not only football that tries to claim us of course. Religions mostly want to establish a monopoly on virtue and evangelize to draw in the heathens. Yet you can follow a football code and still respect the other teams, as well as respecting their fans. In fact our communities have fragmented into a wilderness of different sports, other hobbies and interest groups, endless ways to suck up your time and attention. Perhaps the confusion of choice is more than some folk can handle since there is also an epidemic of loneliness.

 

7. Wolves Among the Sheep

 

Here I am going to make a slight digression to deal with some categories of people. You will see the purpose shortly. IQ is a very rough tool for sorting humans into categories of cleverness. For that matter, so called EQ (emotional intelligence) also conceals a tangle of social skills. Still, whatever way you cut it, people do spread across a kind of

normal bell curve in any given category.

 

 

That is, normal people live in the big camel hump in the middle of the curve. The world is made for them. Trailing off at each edge of the curve are the simpletons and the very smart cookies. If we use an IQ example for convenience, an absolutely average person has an IQ of 100. Medical doctors, I’ve heard, average about 120. If you are below 83 the US military considers you a menace with a gun and won’t enlist you. If you are above 130 you are considered ‘gifted’ and probably live a miserable social life since most people may not share your interests and think you are a snob.

The point of bringing up this hierarchy of cleverness is a) that it has nothing to do with virtue, and b) following from a) some people are both more clever than others around them and also bastards, or at least opportunists. Whether it is grasping for power, or extracting riches, or craving the trinkets of status, there is a never ending scramble to get to the top of the pile. Clever players usually have an edge in making use of other humans. In any population there are always wolves among the sheep (and often in sheep’s clothing). 

Monolithic organizations like religions are ready made tools for the wolves among us. Historically religions have been exploited by the wolves, and where religions still have power, continue to be exploited. There is hardly a war fought, for example, where God isn’t on your side, whatever side that happens to be.

It is Politics 101 to rally the sheep to a war, a cause or an election using populist slogans and deceit. If religion is in the social mix, then that is a bonus for the manipulators. We are all familiar with this stuff but it never seems to fail. The Venn diagram illustration, where the role of religion overlaps with the present day role of mass entertainment fits well here. Amongst the ‘influencers’ on the Venn diagram we can prominently include those wolves in sheep’s clothing.

This George Orwell meme which turned up on my Facebook page sums up the power dynamic nicely:

 

8.  The Stories We Tell God; The Stories We Tell Each Other; The Stories We Tell Ourselves

 

Whatever the individual level of cleverness there are some things which bring us together as humans. Religions celebrate and depend upon some of these common human qualities. Equally, many activities in our modern lives also turn on timeless habits and preferences.

For example, we are a story-telling species. This is a bit peculiar. Only a handful of the species are gifted story-tellers, while the rest are imitation or fake story-tellers, mindlessly retelling borrowed ideas. In fact some friends may become quite upset if you tell them a story which is not on the standard menu, like satirizing the end of a familiar TV drama. Depending upon your global postcode, a god or gods has also given you stories to retell in the form of sermons and prayers.

I once toyed with the idea of becoming a journalist, but lost enthusiasm when I realized that I would have to tell the same stories over and over again – the same murders, the same scandals, the same family tragedies and national disasters. That is what sells newspapers. The more negative the better, since fear is an attention getting mechanism. Those pub stories about today’s football match triumph or wipeout are person to person with body language and slang, so in a sense more memorable than the newspaper sports page. However they are rarely more original. It’s the same tale of familiar talk about familiar things.

When it comes to familiar stories you have to hand it to compilations like the Christian Bible or the Q’ran, or religious lessons wrapped in mythology the world over. Plagiarism has been with us forever, one of humankind’s most useful tools. Think for a moment about Aesop’s Fables. Aesop, I understand, is said to have been born about 620 BC. Hands up if you can’t see Aesop’s Fables repeated again and again in biblical parables, supposedly the newly minted words of God. That’s smart marketing, exactly what the target audience wanted. The rules today are exactly the same for you and me. If you want to be socially accepted for heaven’s sake don’t be too original.

 

9. We All Live In Gilded Cages Or Chicken Wire Cages. So What?

 

Perhaps the tone of this talk has drifted a bit towards suggesting that we, the wannabe clever observers and anthropologists, live on a higher plane of pure reason and superior understanding to the masses. A glance back at my own life journey,  from dockyard labourer to university lecturer to zero status ancient living in a rented room on a safety net pension to me quickly makes a mockery of such pretensions. Our journey is not necessarily more fun on a first class ticket versus economy, and after all, the destination is the same. 

Yet back on the mean streets of earning a daily wage, attitudes and  philosophies are expressed in mass circulation headlines, not genteel discussion. Let’s think about this for a moment. Take identity politics. Politics is supposed to be the art of reconciling conflicting values and interests. Yet, identity politics exploits the very opposite of reconciliation. Identity politics has been the flavor of the age for a while now. It comes and goes through history with the regularity of a tide. For example, depending upon the mood of your neighbours, in social media today you might be tagged as ‘woke’ or a small-brained MAGA type creature. That’s not quite as bad as our ancestors’ habit of calling you a witch or a heretic and having you burnt on a bonfire. Heck, didn’t Jesus Christ say something about loving your neighbor?  Ancient or modern, the animosities are similar, and at some level will probably always be with us.

 

10. The Moral Universe of Which We Do Not Speak

 

Religions have always claimed a special right to define what is moral among humans and what is not. (It has been a bit of a puzzle to me why gods would care, but that’s just my  dim understanding). In modern Australian society, among its 300 or so immigrant ethnicities, some folk still do give gods a vote on morality, but amongst the majority, probably not. Nowadays morality is outsourced in a variety of ways. A couple of more obvious examples would be secular law, and the fondly claimed Australian characteristic of giving everyone a fair go.

Among the chatterati of Australia’s fancier coffee shops, just as in pubs and McDonalds hamburger joints, religion as a topic has long been something to be avoided, unless it attaches to some disliked public figure – e.g. think of the late unmissed Prime Minister, Scott Morrison with his special attachment to God. This doesn’t mean that moral judgement, once channeled  through a god’s opinion, has lost its power. Now it is more likely to be projected anonymously in Youtube comments, or on social media like Facebook, carefully curated to give a good impression. Certain public figures do still see profit in publicly expressed virtue, and have some licence to channel higher values,  whatever their private inclinations. Hence grand speeches hoping to stir the torpid masses. Luckily Australia on the whole has less of this public moral posing than some other countries.

When it comes to the political sphere, it is no accident that in Australia’s parliaments, politicians who claim to practice a faith can be counted well above a comparative proportion of the general population. Nor is it any accident that these self-same politicians come election time invariably show great enthusiasm for football and all the mass enthusiasms of the general population. As the punters say, this is taking a bet both ways. They will declaim a brand of morality as the opportunity arises, either in a church or to a football crowd. This moral patterning of church and state has been going on since the Roman Empire in the West, with analogues in other civilizations. It won’t change.

 

11. The Outside Track On Religious Populism

 

The Agnostics Group, and its fellow travelling association, the Atheists, do take a non-mainstream interest in the topic of religion, mostly (I think) with the aim of discounting it, though you dear doubters, not me, have the inside information on this. Such groups may never attract huge participation, even when a large part of the population shares a general attitude that religions are no longer a one stop shop for all their hopes and dreams. In other words, it seems to me that there is not really a big market for evangelizing religious non-belief or religious indifference.

In the 20th Century various state brands of communism proclaimed that god was dead and all good Party members should adhere instead to a statist flavor of atheism. This whole official kind of atheism has been a miserable failure everywhere. Ordinary people in their ordinary way have kept on taking the short cuts of magical thinking when it suited. They have kept on following rituals of hope and prayer when it gave them comfort. It will ever be thus.

I taught in China twice, 5 years altogether. In 1998 a Chinese friend and her police relative mischievously took me to what had been a quaint little Christian church in Wuhan. The Christian furnishings remained, now added to with racy posters and lots of booze. It was a nightclub. The political fashion in Wuhan at that time was to lock wannabe priests up with prostitutes to compromise them.  A decade later in the city of Zhengzhou I came across an entire street of busy shops devoted to selling artifacts for the dead, items like printed pads of iPad images – I kid you not – and fake money which might help the departed on their journey along Huangquan Lù (黄泉路) to the realm of Diyu (地狱) where they would be judged for their earthly deeds. Sound familiar?

 

12. Religion Is Necessary And Useful

 

Now I am going to put some proposals on the table that some of you will reject, perhaps vehemently. I too would have rejected them out of hand at 20 y.o.  In September this year I turn 80. That doesn’t necessarily imply an accumulation of wisdom. With eyes wide open though it has been impossible not to notice a few thing about my fellow humans. One observation is that people, in spite of having so much in common, also differ in some important ways. Maybe that is why half of marriages fail. Whatever. I have also learned that some differences are so built into the mental architecture of individuals that you can rarely educate or persuade them out of those tendencies. Perhaps that is why ideologies never fit everyone in the end.

Let me give a short political analogy first, before turning back to religion. Kings, I have come to believe, are very, very useful so long as they are impotent. The British political solution of a powerless king + a prime minister & parliament who do the actual work of governing has been a great solution. Why? Look at our American cousins. All across the United States there have recently been huge “No Kings” demonstrations. Meanwhile back in Washington a mentally incapable President has presided over a farcical military parade on his birthday, hoping to bath in Potemkin glory like a Putin or a Kim Jong Il or Xi Jinping striding past serried ranks of clockwork soldiers. Trump wants the glory of pomp and circumstance without the drudgery of having to make the trains run on time. He wants to be a king. And there is a big chunk of the population who want him to be a king. Those people won’t go away. Well let him be king. Just don’t give him power. There is a dilemma  and a solution here for all populations at all times in history.

Let’s consider religions. What properties do religions share with the king problem? Again and again we have seen that banning religions just doesn’t work. It’s like trying to ban alcohol and cigarettes. In no time a black market springs up, shysters proliferate, and resources are sucked up trying to squash a product for which, amongst some people, there is insatiable demand. Equally, I think it is futile to ban kings or their equivalents. The psychological craving by many people for a king is just too great and too persistent. What we can do is to limit the damage that these kings can do. Have your kings. Let them soak up the population’s need for pomp and circumstance, for tinsel glory. Soak it up like blotting paper. That’s a useful, even essential function. But give the real work to someone serious like a Prime Minister. The Trump types will be far less attracted to this less pompous Prime Ministerial career path.

And so it is with religion. This is hardly an original observation. Long ago some wise clerics noticed that it was best to render unto Caesar what was Caesar’s. With luck, sooner or later the mullahs in Iran will arrive at a similar conclusion. Back in our sleepy shire, back in Australia, so far we’ve mostly been smart enough to let religions find their own level. My father, for all his faults, got one thing right. He would often say that it takes all kinds of people to make the world go around. If some folk want to repopulate those empty Adelaide churches, well good luck to them. If they want to go the football instead, that’s OK too.

 

end

Postscript

 

a) Thor May’s Bio

Thor May has made a career of not having a career. Along the way he has been a researcher, lecturer, teacher, teacher trainer and writer. Born in 1945, he came from a working class family in Sydney and in the first decade after leaving school had a wide variety of unskilled jobs. Since 1976 he has taught in universities and colleges in Australia, New Zealand, Papua New Guinea, Fiji, China (5 years) and South Korea (7 years). The PhD he eventually wrote was on teaching productivity, using 20 personally researched case studies from 7 countries where he had taught. In the 1980s and 1990s he walked away from two other doctoral projects on cognitive linguistics, concluding at the time that the models in play could not in principle do what they claimed to do.

Thor has diverse interests – perhaps too diverse -  and has written articles on a wide variety of topics. Over 150 of his articles and papers are available in his online repository at https://independent.academia.edu/ThoroldThorMay . A five minute video of his teaching in China is online at https://youtu.be/OmGVsC7OshA .  Retired in Adelaide, Australia, Thor now runs a meetup for new immigrants, another for critical thinking called Active Thinkers For & Against  on Zoom, and a café equivalent called Adelaide Shallow Thinkers. He has been a lifelong distance runner.  Thor can be contacted at thormay@yahoo.com .

 

 

b) Thor May's Meetups:

 

i) Adelaide English Conversation Practice - this is designed for people using English as a Second Language. ( https://www.facebook.com/groups/1678127882281980 )

ii) Active Thinkers For & Against, now run on Zoom every second Tuesday evening ( https://www.facebook.com/groups/1668079356593059 ). Active Thinkers has been running since 2011, firstly in Brisbane, then in Adelaide. It has become extremely unpopular since it turns out that only a vanishlngly small number of people are interested in any idea or opinion which is not their own.

iii) Adelaide Shallow Thinkers - a Friday evening cafe version of Active Thinkers ( https://www.facebook.com/groups/497784706090301 ).

 

c) Thor May's Websites:

 

i) The Passionate Skeptic - https://thormay.net  [legacy]

ii) Academia.edu repository - https://independent.academia.edu/ThoroldThorMay [150+ articles]

contact: thormay@yahoo.com

 

d) Links to a few of Thor May’s articles which have a bearing on the talk topic:

 

1. Thor May (November 2024) "Why religions are sometimes necessary, and the gods even more so" @ https://www.academia.edu/125437962/Why_religions_are_sometimes_necessary_and_the_gods_even_more_so

2. The Agnostic's Survival Manual http://thormay.net/unwiseideas/TheAgnosticsSurvivalManual.htm  [an eclectic collection of about 20,000 words, scratched down over the years and sometimes contradictory]. PDF at https://www.academia.edu/3486693/The_Agnostics_Survival_Manual 

3. Does religion emerge as a product of complex systems? – exploring an allegory http://thormay.net/unwiseideas/Religion.htm  . PDF at https://www.academia.edu/9924682/Does_religion_emerge_as_a_product_of_complex_systems_exploring_an_allegory 

4. The peculiar interest of god(s) in human morality http://thormay.net/unwiseideas/peculiargod.htm  . PDF at https://www.academia.edu/19528937/The_Peculiar_Interest_of_God_s_in_Human_Morality 

5. Unseen Grammar - Suspecting the God of Cracks Between the Floorboards http://thormay.net/unwiseideas/godofcracks.html  . PDF at https://www.academia.edu/2312782/Unseen_Grammar_Suspecting_the_God_of_Cracks_Between_the_Floorboards

6. What will be the dominant ideologies of the 21st Century? PDF at https://www.academia.edu/5681348/  . PDF at  https://www.academia.edu/5681348/What_will_be_the_dominant_ideologies_of_the_21st_Century 

7. Super-Culture And The Ghost In The Machine http://thormay.net/unwiseideas/skeptic/philos7.html  . PDF at https://www.academia.edu/3653431/Super_Culture_And_The_Ghost_In_The_Machine  

 

e) Other Relevant References

 

News Breakfast - ABC News (Australia) (2020) "Do Australians have an "allergy to organised religion"?" @ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gp7AE2_wt98

Pop Trigger (6 Jul 2017) "Australia's "Biggest Religion" is NO RELIGION" @ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1HzTJV9q_zg

Advocates for Dignity (2022) "Q&A with Professor Douglas Pratt - Populism & Religion" @ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dUyqERw3mMk

TalkingSoutheastEurope (11 May 2025) "What Is The Connection Between Religious Nationalism And Populism?" @ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WToKPTiO-1U

David Voas  (19 Oct 2024) "Why Belief in God Is Disappearing in the West". A Dose of Reason channel @ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O6TEaHyXrsg   [Quote: "When god is indifferent to people, people become indifferent to god". ]

Wikipedia (2024) "Gaia Hypothesis" @ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gaia_hypothesis 

Chris Williamson (1 Sept 2024) "Is This The Most Absurd Time In History? - Rudyard Lynch". @ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hXr8FFm6TDA   [Quote: "Is the modern world weird? Whether it's incels, brat summer, a broken media landscape, godlessness or a decline in institutional trust it seems like lots of modernity is kind of odd. From the fall of empires to the rise of new world orders, how does our current timeline compare to the rest of recent history?"]

Wikipedia (2024) "Irreligion in Australia" @ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Irreligion_in_Australia  

Aperture (8 Sept 2024) "How Stoicism Became The World's Greatest Scam." @ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h8REOHfdVZQ   [Quote: "As someone who has covered and studied Stoicism for years now, I’ve noticed something strange happening. This ancient philosophy that was once a guide to living a good and fulfilled life has been co-opted by the manosphere and turned into snakeoil, sold as the magic pill to fame, fortune, and everything in between. My question is why stoicism? Out of all the other philosophies out there, why this one? In fact, why philosophy at all?"]

Robin Dunbar (20 Oct 2024 DENMARK) "How Religion evolved and why it endures". @ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w_BRofevrCw   [Quote: "Why are humans the only species to have religions? Does religion provide genuine evolutionary benefits? Why are humans uniquely susceptible to the “mystical stance”? When did religion first evolve? Why do religions keep reinventing themselves? // Religion is the one thing that clearly differentiates humans from all other animals. That in itself raises a whole series of questions: Why did religion evolve? When did the capacity for religion first evolve? What cognitive abilities allow humans to be religious but apes not? Is religion at all beneficial? // In this episode Robin Dunbar will argue that religion evolved to help bond our unusually large social groups, and became especially important after we started living in increasingly large villages and towns from around 8000 years ago. He will suggest that religion built on very ancient psychological traits that, while playing a crucial role in creating both friendships and bonded communities, can, under certain circumstances, give rise to what he calls “the mystical stance” – a capacity that, through trance states, allows us to feel that we engage directly with mysterious forces that control the universe. Leaving us with one tantalizing question: did the Neanderthals die out because they weren’t religious?"]

Brian Greene with David Chalmers and Anil Seth (20 Jul 2024) "What Creates Consciousness?"   https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=06-iq-0yJNM   [Quote: ".. exploring how far science and philosophy have gone toward explaining the greatest of all mysteries, consciousness--and whether artificially intelligent systems may one day possess it."]

Dr. Boz [Annette Bosworth, MD] (19 Oct 2024) "I quit medicine" @ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HZFfNteRBcA    [Thor, comment: The medical topic apart, this video is interesting in the way it explains an individual solving a personal/professional life crisis by using their god (or claimed belief in god) as a helper to overcome mental and emotional barriers. Getting strength in this way may be genuine - and thus a clear instance of 'needing a god' - and/or in some cases a way of banking reputational capital in commerce, politics etc.]

 

Why Religion is Like Football, TV, and a Drink Down the Pub

Summary by Gemini LLM of this paper by Thor May, July 2024

1. Introduction & Agenda

 

2. Key Discussion Points:

3. Religion's Role in Past Times

4. City Life & New "Substitutes"

5. Supply and Demand: Religion vs. Substitutes

6. Religion vs. Football: Similarities & Differences

 

7. "Wolves Among the Sheep"

 

  • Human Variation: People vary across a "normal bell curve" in categories like intelligence (IQ) and emotional intelligence (EQ).

 


8. The Stories We Tell God; The Stories We Tell Each Other; The Stories We Tell Ourselves

10. The Moral Universe of Which We Do Not Speak

11. The "Outside Track" on Religious Populism

12. Religion Is Necessary And Useful

end