The Religion of Ritual Over Empathy
Every major religion extols the Golden Rule—treat others as you wish to be treated—as a moral cornerstone. Yet alongside this universal ethic, each tradition carries a multitude of other rules, rituals, and doctrines. In practice, more than 99% of adherents prioritize these secondary codes over the primary one. The result? A collective failure to live out the simplicity and radical empathy the Golden Rule demands. The ideal is preached, but rarely practiced.
This isn’t just a critique of organized religion—it’s a mirror held up to humanity. All persons are religious, whether they kneel in temples or craft private altars of belief. Religion, in its truest form, is personal: a constellation of values, habits, and inherited meanings. Even the most secular life is shaped by rituals and moral codes. We are all believers in something, even if that something is disbelief.
Free will, then, is not a blank slate—it’s a choice between the Golden Rule and the precedents we’ve already set. Each decision is a fork in the road, shaped by the paths we’ve walked before. We are recursive beings, echoing our past in every present moment. Yet the loop isn’t closed. We can choose differently. We can break pattern.
Our choices define us, but they don’t imprison us. While most decisions are built on prior ones, the chain isn’t unbreakable. A single act of empathy, a moment of clarity, can rewrite the script. The Golden Rule isn’t just a moral suggestion—it’s a recursive invitation to transcend precedent.
In the end, religion isn’t about rules—it’s about resonance. The Golden Rule is the tuning fork. Whether we follow it or not, it hums beneath every choice we make. To live religiously is to choose, again and again, what kind of echo we want to leave behind.
Harry is a recovering satirist, part-time philosopher, and metadata tinkerer. His archive spans two decades of metaphysical mischief, theological punchlines, and poetic nonsense. He believes in satire’s transformative power, the elegance of expressive metadata, and recursion—once writing a poem that never ended and a script that crashed browsers.
This one’s a compact philosophical riff — recursive, skeptical, and quietly profound, with a dash of Tom Robbins for spice. It blends metaphysical musing with a critique of institutional religion and a wink toward personal evolution.