On Sense and Incense: sensuality and religious practice

I. 

I love the smell of frankincense in the morning. The sense of smell is the most primordial. It is said to have the strongest link to memory. Perhaps the smell of our mothers is the first memory we ever make.

In the morning I burn frankincense on my prayer altar at home, and it reminds me of church. My prayer corner is a little bubble of church. I sit down in front of it and I am no longer mentally in my apartment. I am not thinking my usual job and errand shaped thoughts. My eyes are drawn to the eyes of the icons. I sit in the gaze of Christ.

I am an impulsive person and I have a hard time keeping a routine. Many times I have failed to stick to a goal of daily prayer or meditation. But I love to light the incense and the candles. Instead of forcing myself into the routine, I am drawn into it by my sense of delight. When I used to be a Buddhist, my longest streak of daily meditation coincided with the period when I had built a similar altar with a statue of Buddha replacing the icon of Christ.

Growing up in a church tradition with "four bare walls and a sermon", who would have thought that frankincense or myrrh were real things? I remember reading the words in the Bible, describing the gifts the magi made to the child Christ. But there was always this unbridgeable gulf between the present and the past. The past had temples and gold and incense and priests. We had cheap carpet, low-slung ceilings, business suits, and boring sermons. Our aesthetic universe was 1950s Americana. I would not have thought to question that it could be otherwise.

But in Orthodoxy there is no break between past and present. The church grows forward through time like a tree rooted in the ancient world. If you dropped a modern orthodox in a church service in the imperial heart of Constantinople in 400 A.D., he would follow along without missing a beat. He would be delighted to see the liturgy celebrated by Archbishop John Chrysostom, a gifted homilist who wrote the liturgy we still use today. The roots of church practices stretch even deeper - drawing inspiration from ancient Jewish liturgies. That same orthodox time-traveler would not feel completely lost in a Jewish temple service, though he might draw puzzled looks if he reflexively made the sign of the cross.

I find the ancient church to be surprising and delightful. It is like living in a 2,000 year old treehouse. The history of the church is inscribed on the walls, in the icons and architecture. A natural question, "who is in that icon?" leads to a chapter of the story of the church in the world or a lesson in theology. My interest in reading icons has led me to learn the Greek and Cyrillic alphabets (invented by our Saints Cyril and Methodius, the "Apostles to the Slavs" in the 800s AD).

For most of my life I didn't even know that this kind of church was an option. In America, it seems to be a secret. And yet something like it was the norm for the majority of Christian history.

In my childhood religious experience, I was starved of beauty. Beauty was a factor that once drew me to Tibetan Buddhism. As an orthodox, I feel like a starving man who has been invited into a banquet.

I've been meaning to write and talk about my journey to Christianity over the past 18 months or so. Converting to Christianity is a strange thing to do for a modern man, especially one in my social circles (Buddhist, hippie, techie, San Franciscan). I hope some readers might be inspired by my journey. And I know some people will judge me to be stupid or deluded. I accept that.

The journey had an intellectual and an emotional component. It is a continuing journey of discovery that I suspect has no end. The emotional piece felt like falling in love. I fell in love with many facets of the church - the monastics, the historic continuity, the mystical theology. And one of the things I fell in love with was the sensuality of the church. My love, she is beautiful.

II. 

I remember the first time I saw someone prostrating, that is kneeling down and touching his head to the ground. He was a monk in long black robes and it was during a pre-dawn, candlelit service at the moment of the consecration of the Eucharist. I wanted to try it, but I felt too awkward. My mental habits were still too modern. After being around people prostrating enough times I worked up the courage to try it. When the initial awkwardness passed, I felt a sense of peace. In prostrating to God my body is implicitly teaching me about God and my relationship to him. Perhaps the peace I felt is because I had found a God worth prostrating to.

Orthodox worship emphasizes the majesty of God. The pageantry, the bowing, the kneeling, and etc. feels strange to a modern American. But a medieval peasant would recognize immediately the aesthetic universe that we are in - this is how you act in front of a monarch. The words we use in worship are applied to monarchs; "your majesty", "your grace" and "your worship" were forms of address for one. The design of the Orthodox church and its liturgy is to place us in the throne room of God with the Trinity enthroned as the monarch of the universe.

In this world of flattened hierarchies, there is a relief to finding something majestic and worthy of worship. It might even be a necessity for a good life. From a secular and symbolic perspective, Jordan Peterson identifies the concept of God with a person's highest human ideal. One could argue that everybody has a God, whether they know it or not.

I imagine the objection of some readers. Isn't it shallow to focus on aesthetics? Isn't the core of religion an intellectual activity? Isn't it about belief and instruction?

First, much of the aesthetics of the church are also instructional. In the early days of the church, most laity were illiterate Roman citizens and slaves, and the icons and hymns were used as teaching aids to instruct people in the Bible and church history.

But the ritual practices are not primarily for instructing the mind. Their purpose is to instruct the heart.

III.

I read a book recently by James K.A. Smith about the power of habit and repeated activities to shape our desires ("You Are What You Love"). The main thrust of the book is that repeated activities that shape our desires are called "liturgies", and our life is full of liturgies, conscious and unconscious. Checking twitter is a liturgy. I'm on a twitter fast, and I intensely feel how twitter usage has shaped my desire.

There is a vein of Christianity that rejects ritual practices that do not directly instruct the conscious mind, cutting out anything other than preaching, praying, and singing. It judges these other practices as unnecessary vain repetitions or superstitions.  I grew up in one such church. This kind of church life carries with it an implicit model of what a human being is. The human is primarily a mind, and so religion is about putting the right things in that mind.

This is the dominant kind of thinking that shaped American culture and our view of religion. We think that if you want to know a religion, the most important thing is to study its beliefs. That's certainly how I was trained to see the world.

James K.A. Smith is a different kind of protestant, the kind that calls himself a small-c "catholic" and sees value in re-embracing some liturgical practices of big-C Catholicism and older brands of Protestantism. He's even favorable to incense use in church! In focusing too much on the mind, he estimates that many churches miss the role of liturgical repetition in shaping the heart. Given all the secular and commercial liturgies we are exposed to, it is necessary to fill our lives with counter-liturgies to bring us back to God. It seems to me that he's on the right track.

I wish him luck in shaping a movement of more powerful and rooted churches. Secular modernity is waxing and the church is waning. Now is the time to grow our roots deep.

In reading Smith's book I reflected on just how many physical, repetitive and embodied practices we have in the Orthodox church to shape our minds and desires.

• When we kiss the icons, we teach ourselves that Christ and the saints are precious things
• When we cross ourselves, we remember that we are marked people of God
• The liturgical calendar reminds us annually of the important events of our faith. The 12 major feast days and the many minor ones mark the passage of time. Time itself is inscribed in the life of Christ.
• The human brain has special structures dedicated to facial recognition and processing. Seeing the faces of holy people in icons brings them to life and our minds build a relationship with them.
• Lighting candles teaches us that we can pray even when we don't have words 
• Bowing, kneeling, and prostrating teach us the majesty of God
• Incense during worship produces an instant visceral portal back into the mental space of holiness and provides a demarkation between the sacred and the profane. Sacred music does the same thing.
• When we fast, we learn how to control our desires, and that small sacrifices are not to be feared. "It is not a sin not to fast, but fasting teaches us how not to sin."
• Fasting together creates a shared bond as a congregation... as does feasting together at the end of a fast.

In answer to the more severe kinds of Christian that might criticize these tools and practices as unnecessary, I would agree with them. They aren't strictly necessary. Christ was a wandering rabbi, and his followers were mostly poor. The early Christians met in secret in underground graves, not in grand temples. However, though they are not necessary, they are useful. The practices and tools of ancient Christianity are an inheritance that has been built over time and passed down to us. Shouldn't we be grateful for the full inheritance and put it to use? Some of those pieces don't fit modern tastes, but should we change our practices to fit in?

I am 36 years old and I am not that great at being me. But I am better than I was. As I learn to navigate myself, I am learning the importance of my body. It has a strong hand on the rudder, to the frequent consternation of my mind. I am trying to live a good life one day at a time. And each of those days start with the smell of incense.

About me: I'm just a beginner, a recently baptized member of the Eastern Church. I'm pretty excited about it at the moment, and I like to share things I like. Please forgive me if I unintentionally say anything that misleads or offends. 

Building a Better Anti-Capitalism

In my first political awakening, I became an ardent pro-capitalist libertarian. There were some anti-capitalists to debate around my university and on the internet, but the average quality of their arguments were so poor that engaging with these folks deepened my convictions instead of challenging them.

But over the years I have seen first hand some of the failures of capitalism. Burning Man and its ethos of public contribution was a major turning point in my attitude towards capitalism, illustrating the great good that can be created outside of formal exchange relationships. Now I see that there are plenty of circumstances where free markets fail to create an optimal outcome, either by failing to properly incentivize things that we value, or by failing to disincentivize bad behavior. Market capitalism alone is not a complete recipe for growing a good society.

Today the world still suffers from low quality anti-capitalists. To protest capitalism, they break shop windows, burn cars, block streets, and fight with the police. This makes little sense. Plentiful shops and safe, convenient vehicles are some of the good parts of capitalism. And the streets and police are non-capitalist institutions that may be imperfect, but also provide vital services for society. I bet that neutral observers are turned off.

It's because I take the failings of capitalism seriously that I'd like to offer a better playbook for protesting capitalism. Each of the following opportunities for direct action addresses a failing of capitalism while making the world a better place

1. Love thy neighbors. Invite them over for dinner and don't charge
2. Volunteer to pick up trash in your neighborhood for half an hour
3. Volunteer at a Boys and Girls club or old folks home
4. Learn how to make something that you would normally buy. Knit a sweater, grow some vegetables
5. Produce a piece of public art that will delight people, amaze them, or make them think. Put it in your front yard or window
6. Host an adult sleep-over. Talk, play games, and read stories 
7. Perform a piece of music in a public space. Go caroling at Christmas time, or if you're not Christian, offer songs for the holy days of your tradition
8. If it's your thing, become part of a church
9. Sit at a table in a public place with a sign inviting people to play chess with you or converse with you
10. Share knowledge. Offer a free class in yoga, art, juggling, or something else you know how to do at your home for your friends and neighbors. For bonus points, make it a regular event

In a market-driven society, life can be cold. It seems like every option to enjoy oneself costs money. Every smile is a customer service. These practices take back a portion of life's activities and relationships from the marketplace. 

In many American cities, there is little public space where a person can simply be without paying money. For a certain sum, you can buy a temporary right to exist in a theatre, restaurant or yoga class, but when your time is up you gotta get going, buddy. For every hour you spend away from home there is an invisible meter following you, running up a tab. In some small towns, I hear people repurpose Walmart as their public square, sitting and chatting with friends in the furniture aisle, or strolling through the store on a late-night date. Walmart is the closest approximation to the missing commons. 

I suggest we protest capitalism by providing what the market doesn't. Create social connections that are based on mutual enjoyment instead of formalized exchange. And create space and time for people to simply exist without a running meter.

Do you have any ideas for how to better protest capitalism? Leave a comment.

My Interchange Journey

Like a lot of people I know, I used to be afraid of experiencing other people’s emotions. At restaurants, I said my food was good when it wasn’t so that the staff wouldn’t experience anger or shame. I avoided talking about problems in my relationship with my girlfriend because who knows what box of emotions that would unleash. If I saw someone in visible distress, I avoided them. I figured it was someone else’s responsibility to help them. What could I do?

That changed drastically over the last 12 months. I am a hundred times more free in expressing my thoughts and feelings in all sorts of situations. Whatever outcome I feared would happen doesn’t happen. Most of the time kindly expressing my opinions makes my relationships more real and satisfying. 

Ignoring emotions didn’t make them go away. I used to have this voice in my head ruminating on all the things I wished I had said but didn’t. But when I speak up, I find that inner neurotic voice is silenced. In some circles, they call this achievement “inner peace”. The trade-off is that I live a more vulnerable life because people know what I really think. It's a worthwhile trade. 

Another big change for me is that I go towards people in distress instead of away from them. I think I’m a pretty good person to have around when you need somebody. This change in my self-concept still feels new to me and I'm proud of it. 

I trace these changes back to the year-long counseling training I went through at Interchange. I learned from some other places too[0], but Interchange was the biggest piece. It bills itself as a counseling and personal growth program. But what I learned about was how to be a human. I learned how to let people see my emotions and how to be with other people’s emotions. My EQ went through the roof.

It turns out to be easy to be useful to people in distress - acknowledge what they’re going through and don’t try to fix them! Americans need to be trained out of fixing people and denying negative emotions. You have to be able to tolerate what’s there instead of pasting happy faces all over everything. The first counseling practice at Interchange is literally sitting in attentive silence while the client tells you about their problem for a few minutes. If you can do this successfully then you are in the 90th percentile of the population in terms of counseling.

Me and Steve at Interchange, demonstrating an exercise designed to examine our anger through simulated road rage

The most valuable thing about Interchange is that it provides a safe container for people to practice being real with each other. During the training, I spent hundreds of hours having real interactions with people. We helped each other explore our inner emotional landscape. They cried. I cried. It was intense, magical, and cathartic. 

On a larger scale, I think all people need safe spaces to be real with each other. We have a massive deficit of it in our society - it’s emotional malnourishment. Most of us hide what we’re feeling from our friends and family, some of us hide our emotions from our fucking therapists. 

Our culture still suffers from the idea that therapy is something you do when there is something wrong with you. You are broken and need to be fixed. For a lot of us, the only time we open up to anybody is when something is terribly wrong. It’s the same way we mistreat our bodies by only caring about health when we get sick. 

Humans are not machines that sometimes break and need a mechanic. Humans are organic creatures that are constantly growing and changing. If you’re going to use a metaphor, use a plant. It constantly needs a certain amount of water and nutrition and if it gets what it needs it grows. We need some amount of constant emotional nourishment to stay healthy.  

Modern life is confusing. Things have changed so fast. We’re not built for it. The institutions that people relied on for emotional nourishment for centuries are disappearing or changing. And maybe they were never very good to start with. We need to help each other feel like we aren’t alone and have a home in this world. 

I feel uncomfortable giving a full-throated endorsement of something, even Interchange. It's the best program I've ever done but it isn't perfect. So I want to end with some criticism to provide you with a balanced cross-section of my judgements of it. 

Interchange is based on an optimistic humanism that comes from people like Carl Rogers and Harvey Jackins. In the program you practice believing that other people are fundamentally good, interesting, and capable. It’s a powerful counseling stance. But sometimes it sounds naive and it might not be the right approach for a counselor working with a smart, skeptical client. 

I worry about groupthink at Interchange. There isn’t much nuance in what is taught and there aren’t many skeptical voices. This is partly because a community based on this kind of Humanism feels so nice to be in. When I brought up a skeptical point of view, I was the one harshing the good vibes.

Also, most of the students came from similar ideological places. I grew up in a cult so I feel uncomfortable being around unanimous ideological agreement. But when I expressed this discomfort, other students reached out to me and didn’t push me away. There may not be a lot of critical discussion but it feels like Interchange can handle it when it does happen.

Interchange is a great place to practice emotional intelligence and learn counseling. It is not a complete source of all the spiritual nourishment that you need to grow as a human. In particular, between the humanism and the social justice, it’s an epistemically sloppy place. Truth is not highly valued besides the supposed "truths" taught by humanism and social justice. If there were a package deal with Interchange and CFAR training together, that would balance out Interchange with the values that are missing.

Being founded by a progressive teacher named Steve Bearman, Interchange promotes some ideas from the social justice movement which are divisive and, in my opinion, poorly supported[1]. It's a harsh note mixed in with the humanism. White men were unkindly singled out and stereotyped a few times. Marxist models of the world are presented without consideration of other points of view that better map to reality. I spent a few nights lying awake and composing angry messages to the Facebook group. Gradually, I built more social and emotional resources and it bothered me less.

Most of the time when social justice and humanism conflict at Interchange, the humanism wins. For example, during exercises where we were instructed to practice radical honesty with each other, one of the more radical progressive students inevitably objected to the exercise on the grounds that people who aren't white men might be exposed to "oppressive" opinions. In response, Steve gently expressed that he had faith that the students could handle it. Learning goals were valued ahead of progressive orthodoxy.

Between the bitter taste of righteous anger in social justice and the sweetness in humanism, the sweetness wins out by something like a 9 to 1 ratio. Interchange is a personal project of Steve's and this reflects his background and values. You can't really change Interchange without changing Steve, and Steve's been into social justice for 2 or 3 decades. I've made my peace with it and I highly value my experience and expect to learn more from Interchange. 

Despite these caveats, I found Interchange to be a brilliant, daring, creative program. It catalyzed an incredible year for me. I believe in myself and I believe in my capacity to grow and change for the better. Check it out, or something like it. In terms of happiness, investing in your emotional intelligence is the highest-yield investment you can make.



[0] Stanford Business School's "touchy-feely" class, Nonviolent Communication, Buddhism, and eXperience the Game were other resources that led me down this path.

[1] For example, Steve often uses the concepts of class conflict, oppression, and privilege to model how the world works. These are a staple of the social justice/progressive worldview, but I think they are simplistic and overused.

"Too Far"

A common obstacle in personal growth work is the fear of going too far.

For example, I recently attended a retreat to learn how to be more open to connection with other human beings. I had an impulse to hold back. I thought, what if I’m 100% open to everybody? I live in a crowded city full of human suffering. My life would become unlivable if I stopped to take in the humanity of each person that I passed. I would have to become like Jesus or something.

I see the same type of worry about “going all the way” among the participants in a workshop I teach based on the book Radical Honesty. Wouldn’t it be hard to live 100% honest all the time?

As we stretch into new ways of being, the fear of going too far is mostly unfounded. Naturally, I’m about 5% open. Most people are probably ~10% honest (I’m just a little bit more, and I practice it). The chances are tiny that any person will achieve 100% openness or honesty even for a second.

The purpose of personal growth activities is to give ourselves more options for how we relate to the world - more tools in the tool kit. It takes purposeful effort to hold ourselves in the new practice for the hours or days that a workshop lasts. At the end, we naturally return to our old ways of being. Our default patterns of behavior have momentum.

If all goes well, your growth process will look something like this:

So don’t sabotage your learning by holding back. Commit to the practice for a set period of time and play hard. Commitment is an important meta-skill in personal growth.

At the retreat I attended, commitment worked well for me. I went into it knowing that I had some philosophical differences with the leader. But rather than spend the week in philosophical debate I made a commitment to fully engage with the teachings. I’d try it on and see what was good about it.

I caught myself in a cynical mindset holding back from the practice about once every two days. But my commitment to fully engage helped me become mindful of my internal state and dive back into the practice.

The result was that I achieved a new state of openness and empathy that feels good to inhabit. I'm a low-empathy, "tough", independent male who has been shaped that way by circumstances. Practicing empathy is good for me - it corrects my natural imbalances. Having the memory of this new empathic state, I have the option of choosing more empathy in other parts of my life. And I’m still comfortably far from Jesus levels of empathy.

Fearless

I get nervous or scared if I focus too much on the outcome of an upcoming event. Hope for a good outcome causes nervousness, and dread of a bad ending causes fear. In turn, these feelings hurt my performance under pressure and make bad outcomes more likely.

I find the best way for me to approach important events is to pay attention to how I conduct myself rather than the outcome. I can't control all the variables of fate, but I can control my actions. Focusing on what I can control gives me peace, confidence, and strength. And regardless of results, I can be proud if I conduct myself well.

So I make note of qualities I admire in people and I try to embody those features myself: Be polite but firm. Stand up for your interests. Speak slowly and look people in the eye. Never reach the end of a hard workout and regret that you could have gone harder. It's okay if your body gives out, but your will should not. Be forthright. Address the elephant in the room. Start conversations with interesting strangers - don't pass by opportunity for lack of guts. If you make eye contact with someone, smile and say "hi". Ask for what you want. Accept failure graciously knowing that experience leads to excellence. Take pride in your work. Tell the people you admire how you feel. Be slow to judge people, but act on your judgements.  Don't hide your beliefs - be an ambassador of undervalued wisdom. Look for opportunities to do something good for others. Be truthful, even and especially when it hurts. Keep an optimistic attitude. Feel painful or joyful emotions deeply, but don't linger over them for too long. When it's time for fun, have fun! And when it is time for work, do work.

I am a very flawed individual and often fail to embody these traits. For example, I severely lack boldness. But keeping them in mind gives me something to strive for.

In poker, the right question to judge your performance is not "did I win?" but "did I make the right calls?". There is too much chance in the game for even the best player to win every time. But if you play well, you will end up ahead in the long run. Life is the same way.

Charity: the forgotten virtue

One of the most attractive features of the Christian religion is the practice of Charity. In church, Christians are regularly encouraged to give of their time and resources for the benefit of the poor, sick, elderly, and destitute. They are not required to tithe, but many do anyway. Christian charity is a force for good in the world.

I believe that every person, Christian and non-Christian, can benefit by practicing charity. The paradox of charity is that it leaves you better off, even though it costs you.

One way charity benefits you is by improving your relationship with money. As a founder of a technology startup, my money is a subject that often stresses me out. But giving to charity helps me be grateful for the material blessings I have, instead of worrying about the things I do not have. Interacting with the truly poor gives makes me appreciate the abundance of resources at my disposal.

Recently, I've adopted the practice of giving a small portion of money away whenever I get some. I used Give Well to help me find an effective charity with a cause that touches my heart. Last month I gave about 3% of my income to a charity that provides necessities to Indian street children, and I plan to do so again. 

The desire to help people is common in Silicon Valley. But many people plan to start someday after they get rich, like Bill Gates did. Too often, that someday never comes. If you desire your life to be a force for good in the world, as I do, then why not start now? Why wait for an uncertain future? You may spend all your life consuming and hoarding for your own benefit and get hit by a bus before you can do any good for others. 

Also, by waiting to help others, you miss out on all the benefits that giving does for your peace of mind today. Contributing to charity will make you a happier, more peaceful person. And you can rest easy at night knowing that regardless of what happens, your life has already made a positive impact on the world. 

  

The Time Value of Experience

I owe credit to New Zealand entrepreneur Michael Moore-Jones for creating and introducing me to the concept of the time value of experience. It's a riff off the economic concept of the time value of money, which asserts that a dollar that I receive today is more valuable than a dollar that I receive at some day in the future. This is true because I could put the dollar to work in the meantime - at the very least I can earn interest on it! That's why people have to pay for the privilege of borrowing your dollars even if they promise to give back the same amount of dollars in the future. Future dollars are less valuable than present dollars.

The time value of experience says that wisdom gained today is more valuable than wisdom gained at some point in the future. I can use that wisdom in the meantime to make better decisions; in a sense it pays me interest. This suggests a heuristic method for making life decisions that is very risk-seeking - gain as many experiences as you can right now. Start that business, write that book, join that cause. Don't wait until it's safer or your life circumstances are better. If you hesitate, you'll miss out on the compounding wisdom that you could have been earning in the meantime.

Read the whole thing.

On Practice

A life philosophy is useless if it doesn't have a training regimen. Habits and desires are powerful. They nearly always win in a battle with will-power. That is why New Year Resolutions are notorious for petering out after a month or so. Inertia is the default condition of the human race.

Professional athletes need to put themselves through a brutal training regimen. None of them could do it on their own in their rookie season. So they have coaches and camaraderie to push them through it. But over the years, the hard training becomes habit. Veterans like Kevin Garnett practice in the off-season automatically, without questioning it or thinking about it. It's part of who they are.

If you want to successfully adopt new principles and behaviors into your life, you need to get them into you deeper than the brain level - down into your guts, your instincts. You need practice to train your  habits and your emotions. The first step towards being 100 pounds thinner or a marathon runner or an elite hacker is to change your self-beliefs. You surround yourself with people you want to be like and you take the first small steps along the path until you see yourself as one of them.

Religions know the importance of practice and use it. Christians are taught that they should be in control over their physical desires. But instruction doesn't stop at the end of church services. To help them practice restraint, they have the tradition of Lent. For 40 days in the Spring they give up some pleasurable activity that they normally enjoy. Rather than being a burden, Lent is popular - even in Christian sects where it is not required and among secular people!

The will is weak. It needs every help it can get. When you become convinced that a change in your life is necessary, don't stop at the stage of mental belief. Ask yourself, how am I going to practice this? How am I going to convince my subconscious, my heart? How can I form a support community? How can I get this change into my self-conception?

Ethics and Wisdom - what Atheists can learn from Religion

Morality/Ethics is about how we should treat other people. On the other hand, Wisdom is the art of living well and thriving in our personal lives. Both subjects interest me, but few people in the secular world study them in a serious or systematic way. The exceptions I know of are academic philosophers and the small hyper-utilitarian demi-cult centered around Eliezer Yudkowsky.

Religions have a lot to say about Ethics and Wisdom. Since religions survive and spread by serving the needs of the human psyche, we should expect that we can learn something from their approach to two topics so vital to human interests.

Many religions, including Christianity, have the peculiar habit of conflating ethics and wisdom together. They transform the art of living well from an individual choice into a moral duty. This is accomplished by inserting a second person, God, into our private lives. Private actions thereby gain an ethical dimension since they now effect a third party with an interest in seeing us thrive. In the secular world, a similar thing happens when we enter into a romantic relationship.

This explains the phenomena of religious prohibitions on vices, such as smoking or drinking - activities that hurt nobody but ourselves. Religions also push followers to observe positive virtues, such as staying loyal to their spouses, being thrifty, or working diligently at their jobs. Extensive interference in people’s private lives gives religions a pushy quality, and many people find this attractive. They want a third party to force themselves, and their children, to live well. Others are repulsed either because they disagree with religion’s conception of the good life or they simply dislike having their personal life choices audited by an external authority.

I like the idea of being responsible to someone else for living well. My moral feelings are stronger than my will to act wisely. If an action or inaction hurts only myself, I am far more likely to succumb to it than if it also hurts another person. The secular person is by default a lonely creature, and it is hard for a person to live well when nobody is watching and judging. But a religious person always has someone with them.

Atheists resent the old prejudice that one has to be religious in order to be moral. These prejudices go too far, but it is true that religion offers its followers a powerful infrastructure to help them be moral that atheists lack.

The first way atheist moral practice fails is by lacking an explicit moral code. Our ethical principles are absorbed piecemeal from the art, literature, and philosophy we consume over the years and by osmosis from the culture surrounding us. This serves well under normal circumstances, but we are lost when faced with difficult moral trade-offs or high-pressure situations. Religious morality is better codified. When emotions run high, religious people have explicit aphorisms, principles, and parables that their minds can latch on to.

Next, religions teach us that ethical and moral principles are not merely mental facts, they are skills. Like any other skill they must be practiced and honed over time. Just as you cannot read a book about ballet and then perform a perfect dance, you cannot merely read about morality and then expect to behave morally. Religions know that we need regular reminders for moral principles to sink in, so they schedule weekly rituals where their codes of conduct are reinforced. Service events are scheduled to give followers the opportunity to practice altruism.

Lastly, we can learn from religion's understanding of human social psychology. If there is one fact that has become abundantly clear in the age of social networking, it’s the powerful influence that a person’s friends have on his taste’s, beliefs, and actions. Religions have long been aware of the power of social pressure and they surround the believer with a community of faith to help them all live up to their shared standards.

Atheists practice their morality as atomic creatures, lacking a community of like-minded practitioners. They are more likely to stray from their principles and revert to the mean of the world around them.

The combination of 1) explicit morality, 2) regular reminders, and 3) peer pressure creates a powerful incentive for religious people to behave morally. Over the years, many small groups of atheists have recognized the advantages that religions have in propagating ethical behavior and wisdom and have attempted to organize atheist analogues of churches and community groups. None have been spectacularly successful. But we shouldn't stop trying.