The 3 ways in which religion tries to meet our deepest needs

Ok, technically, Professor Roberto Unger calls them “the 3 religious orientations to the world”.

In his view, the major religious traditions fall into one of 3 groups. These groups have separate and distinct ways to understand our world and our individual and collective purposes within.

I came upon his theory in the below YouTube video and had the proverbial mind-blown moment (actually, moments, very plural) and was compelled to share:

I can only give a very simple, laymen’s description of his system, but I think you’ll find it fascinating.

The 3 orientations are:

1. Overcoming the world = Buddhism
2. Humanizing the world = Confucianism
3. Struggling with the world = Christianity

Or as I think of them:

Buddhism = Air (floats away, detaches, avoids)
Confucianism = Water (works around, negotiates, softens)
Christianity = Fire (changes, transforms, engages)

Buddhism teaches you to overcome the world. Buddha thinks the ultimate goal of a person’s life is to go beyond the world, to detach and remove yourself and rise above the suffering, the emotions, the vicissitudes of daily existence. Through this process you will reach nirvana. That’s why I compared Buddhism to air. It floats, it’s there, but you can hardly feel it.

Confucianism humanizes the world. What matters to Confucius is our society and its system of roles and responsibilities, created and maintained by us. There are 5 big roles in Confucian thinking: parent-child, older sibling-younger sibling, ruler-subject, husband-wife, and older friend-younger friend. What gives life purpose and meaning is to perform our given roles as well as we can. In a sense, life is a play, and our job is to know our character’s responsibilities and perform them well. That’s why I see Confucianism as water. It’s about flow and harmony and respect.

Christianity struggles with the world. Professor Unger believes this orientation (if not Christianity itself) will grow in prominence relative to the previous two. Struggling with the world is about effort, engagement, and conflict. It says, life can be better, but it is up to us to make it so. That’s why I see this orientation as fire: fire transforms, fire burns hot, fire can destroy a forest but in so doing can also nurture life and provide warmth and cook food.

So if we think about the world’s enduring religions, where do Hinduism, Islam, and Judaism fit in? I didn’t even know people saw Confucianism as a religion or a spiritual orientation, but I’m sure Professor Unger has a good answer to that. I should ask him…

PS. An update on the above question, straight from Unger’s book draft: The struggle with the world has spoken in two voices. One voice is sacred: that of the Semitic salvation religions—Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. The other voice is profane: that of the secular projects of liberation. These projects have included the political programs of liberalism, socialism, and democracy as well as the romantic movement, especially the global popular romantic culture, with its message of the godlike dignity of ordinary men and women and the unfathomable depth and reach of their experience.

Notes from Sam Harris’s interview of Will MacAskill

Here’s the episode, it’s fantastic and dense and requires a more attentive listen than your average podcast:

I wanted to share a few particularly powerful comments:

  • Obligation versus Opportunity paradox: an obligation is when you have the moral imperative to help a person or cause because your life is better, which doesn’t seem to convince either Sam or Will. An opportunity is when you help because you’ll feel better and improve your reputation as a result, and this is more convincing to both. Will’s Effective Altruism movement is based on this
  • 90/10 problem: 90% of r&d funds are spent on 10% of humanity’s problems. For example, Will mentions male pattern baldness as an example of a problem that attracts a lot of research dollars but it mostly affects a small, well-off minority, while new antiobiotics aren’t being invented because the profit motive isn’t there
  • Will describes patents as “two wrongs trying to make a right”. Very interesting. The first wrong is that companies can’t capture the full market value of their r&d, and the second wrong is to grant a legitimate monopoly in the form of patents and hope the two failures cancel each other out

A Personal Bible: how to collect and review life’s most valuable lessons

April 2020: Here’s the latest PDF version

I read a lot, but I forget even more. Frustrated with the forgetting, I began to save my favorite readings into Evernote: Blog posts. Book excerpts. Forum threads. Poems. But once inside Evernote, all this wisdom was lost in the crowd, rarely to be discovered again. I didn’t have a reliable way to remind myself of what to review and when. Didn’t allow for serendipity or habit.

So I created a Personal Bible.

It’s a Microsoft Word document of my favorite text from over the years. Passages and sentences and excerpts that I want to read and re-read and absorb and marinate in. Whenever I have an aha! moment with text, I add it to my collection. From David Brooks columns to Malcolm Gladwell passages, from bucket lists to the Beatitudes, from writing advice to religious anecdotes. I try to read from it every day. Sometimes just a few sentences.

If we use the computer as an analogy, this document helps me keep life’s important lessons loaded onto my mind’s RAM. Lying just beneath conscious thought, available for quick and ready access.

Here’s the latest version you can download. Feel free to read it, edit it, use it as a template for your own.

I load the Word doc onto my Kindle and update it monthly. You may find some gems that you like. Better yet, I hope you’re inspired to create your own. If you do, please share it with me. I’d love to see what you curate for yourself.

A person must constantly exceed their level. If it kills you, it kills you.

“Bruce had me up to three miles a day, really at a good pace. We’d run the three miles in twenty-one or twenty-two minutes. Just under eight minutes a mile [Note: when running on his own in 1968, Lee would get his time down to six-and-a half minutes per mile]. So this morning he said to me “We’re going to go five.” I said, “Bruce, I can’t go five. I’m a helluva lot older than you are, and I can’t do five.” He said, “When we get to three, we’ll shift gears and it’s only two more and you’ll do it.” I said “Okay, hell, I’ll go for it.” So we get to three, we go into the fourth mile and I’m okay for three or four minutes, and then I really begin to give out. I’m tired, my heart’s pounding, I can’t go any more and so I say to him, “Bruce if I run any more,” –and we’re still running-”if I run any more I’m liable to have a heart attack and die.” He said, “Then die.” It made me so mad that I went the full five miles. Afterward I went to the shower and then I wanted to talk to him about it. I said, you know, “Why did you say that?” He said, “Because you might as well be dead. Seriously, if you always put limits on what you can do, physical or anything else, it’ll spread over into the rest of your life. It’ll spread into your work, into your morality, into your entire being. There are no limits. There are plateaus, but you must not stay there, you must go beyond them. If it kills you, it kills you. A man must constantly exceed his level.” – John Little

…a person must constantly exceed their level. this story never fails to motivate me and get me going.

“I have come to realize that I had everything that was important before I left”

“I was the ambitious one, the one that strayed far from home, chasing the dream, getting caught up in the consumerism. I’m glad that by the age of 38 I have come to realize that I had everything that was important before I left. The remainder was a constant cycle of churn, want more, want bigger, want better, want newer, want more convenient. Except it’s hard when it’s being fed to you every day by every billboard, every sign, every menu, every advert, every press release, every news story, every TV show to differentiate between want and need. When you stop to analyze what you actually need – I mean really need: clean air, clean water, shelter, nutrition, sanitation, family, community, companionship; how much of what you’re being sold every day is truly ‘needed’ and how much of it is a want to fulfill some notion that has been sold to you by the media?”

…from Hacker News.