> This scapegoat's death unites the community again. The victim gets mythologized, inscribed into sacrificial rites that control future rivalries. When these sacrificial mechanisms weaken, rivalry intensifies.

People like Thiel, Musk or Trump certainly became sacrificial lambs. You don't have to like either of them or any of the ideas they propose. But I think the "criticism" of them certainly looks like they might be onto something.

I don't personally believe it is correct in generael, but there certainly is a subset that needs this religious hate. There is little self-reflection, only that they often tend to diagnose this hate in others.

Out of all of the tools we use to form and stabilize societies, religion is one of the most potent. But it’s still just that, a tool of our own making without any bearing on reality, or any cosmic consequences.

So, I think like any tool religion can be shaped or applied as needed, but for those religions which rely on linear-time fiction, the difference is that their usefulness is tied to their integrity, or how close they remain to their original forms. Luckily though, humanity has developed more than one tool for shaping minds and putting ideas to use. I hope people can divorce themselves, and their futures, from the stories they tell, and start probing reality how and where it matters. Religions are useful as philosophical frameworks more so than as recipes or prophecies.

It doesn’t make sense to me to put stock in any type of religion for determining the direction of societies or civilization at large, at least not in the 21st century. Why? They’re all incomplete in their analytical scope, and were borne from the minds of people who knew infinitely less than those who are present now. I think we can do better, and we should. We need better ideas, ones which do the cosmic improbability of the human mind some kind of justice.