META – I’ve noticed that I’m way more comfortable posting things to facebook that posting on the bog. I’m going to try out a thing where whenever I post on facebook about ritual I mirror it here. Because so far I’ve been failing pretty hard at the “actually share knowledge gained from Ritual Lab.” (I keep feeling intimidated by the prospect of writing things up)
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Rational/(trans)Humanist ritual has two main challenges:
1) How to create something meaningful
2) How to create something safe, that doesn’t end up rehashing the harmful things that atheists are trying to get away from
The problem with 1 is that we’re not very skilled at it. We need to get more skilled. The way you get more skilled is by trying things, seeing what works, iterating.
The problem with the problem with 1 is that iterative feedback loops have a long history of outputting unintended consequences (like causing humans to spend 10,000 years doing backbreaking farm work that didn’t end up actually making individual people’s lives better until after the industrial revolution).
((See also, centuries of rituals that were coercive, punished questioning, etc))
The past century is littered with attempts at humanist ritual that failed, are in decline, or are failing to attract new blood. I think there are several reasons for this, but among them is that while we had individuals and groups trying to create beautiful things, we didn’t have a collaborative system that allowed us to gain knowledge over time (standing on the shoulders of giants, et al)
So….
Creating *good* ritual requires at least some degree of recursive self improvement. Creating *safe* ritual requires a lot of upfront work to make sure that recursive self improvement doesn’t spiral out of control.
This problem seems familiar.