We're Giving Gods Another Go, But What Religion Will We Get?

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We humans seem to be built to find higher meaning in the Universe. By that I mean we can't really let it lie that 'this is it', that the universe is a series of weird rules playing out across time and space (whatever they are) with no underlying guiding entity.

Google Gemini 2.5 Flash: an image of a human-centric and photorealistic universe with no meaning, featuring only one person with stars and galaxies, in a landscape, long and thin format:

Back in the day we ascribed to invented supernatural entities ("gods") the reasons for everything that the Universe was doing. Answers to, "How did we get here?" had many creation stories ascribed to a divine creator, as well as, "Why did my neighbour blank me in the street yesterday?" were down to a lack of religious behaviour on one party or the other.

The gods created by the individuals were soon co-opted into organised religion by the chiefs and priests to be used as a means of control and power.

In the "Western" world this was challenged again by individuals as they rallied against this power, the Protestant approach to the god(s) was to remove the religious organisations with a focus on individual faith. This came as individuals were also unlocked from the chiefs with the printing press and flow of greater information and the growth of states - we became citizens.

But we humans need a higher meaning to the Universe and can't let it be all about us, religion stuck around and we allowed the growth of yet another higher meaning; state institutions and the growth of corporations provided new set of chiefs that made successful grabs at control and power.

The Internet is our most recent addition to this ever evolving "individual - [thing] - chiefs" approach. It is only now, with the rise of  "AI", we are seeing how it's likely to play out. We are all doing our own Individual thing on the Internet, news was socialised for instance, but then AI started to bring it all together, the centralisation starts again, and the new chiefs are coming to grab at control and power - I personally don't think these chiefs will be the current pretenders to the throne, it won't be Google, Amazon, Baidu, Meta, etc it'll be something else. Maybe it won't be human chiefs this time.

Individual - gods - Chief [religion] - Individual - states - Chief [corporation] - Individual - global / AI - ?

Who's the "Chief" in our current "god" paradigm?

Maybe it doesn't matter as the Chiefs that end up grabbing control and power are always supplanted / augmented by new ones, maybe because there is no control or power in a Universe that has no meaning to give and it is down to each Individual to find their own.

“To be sure, man's search for meaning may arouse inner tension rather than inner equilibrium. However, precisely such tension is an indispensable prerequisite of mental health. There is nothing in the world, I venture to say, that would so effectively help one to survive even the worst conditions as the knowledge that there is a meaning in one's life. There is much wisdom in the words of Nietzsche: "He who has a why to live for can bear almost any how”

― Viktor Emil Frankl, Man's Search for Meaning

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