Art = a guided experience – to empathically relive or experience something intended by the artist : whether to relive a chilly morning landscape, or the freedom/joy the artist felt covering themselves in paint and rolling around on a large sheet of paper.

Religion = the art of guiding people to particular moral, emotional and spiritual experiences. Hardly a surprise that the main motor for this is artistic, in the form of storytelling/myth, religious painting, and of course, music.

In Religion we witness the power of art when combined with repetition, i.e. the power of behavioural training. Repeat something often enough and the experience/memory becomes persistent enough that it can be easily recalled and used to compare and contrast against other experiences.

Defining experiences, and making them repeatable, brings structure to life. It directs your energy (by limiting what you do and how you do it) and enables larger, cohesive social groups (who implicitly agree on the basics of what is acceptable in their shared experience). It is not the case that any experience has an impenetrable boundary, that it floats freely distant from any other experience or interpretation – all experiences are by necessity (neurologically) linked to the same structures that enable us to experience life itself. Therefore it is hardly surprising that people do feel a very strong need to define “what belongs” and “what doesn’t” based on small differences, because ultimately all experiences are linked.

How might this be used in a modern context? Socially, the thought leaders are in a place where they are more aware of relativism in values, and the arbitrary nature of our indoctrination, than ever before. As this dissolves our social norms (by making it acceptable for individuals to define their own life experiences, and recruit others to come with them) it generates enormous uncertainty, and destroys many of the basic social assumptions which people either do need, or believe they need.

This is where Active Politics is called for, to find new social structures which can work and which are sustainable. To reassess whether any shared beliefs/assumptions must be held sacred and immutable (by means of force and imprisonment) and if so, what they are.

The current system evolves piecemeal (as individual occurances within an abstract anti-repressive liberal framework falsify existing social or legal constraints as repressive), but one of the largest catastrophic collisions which this will not defuse can be seen between the followers of religion (as preservers of the local society group identity) and the followers of science (as the pioneers of the individual identity).

Biologically, it seems that (as Maslow pointed out) we need a bit of both. The group is our foundation, but without individual fulfillment, the human suffers under tyranny and in misery.

It is possible, given our knowledge of psychology, sociology, and the anthropology of religious and artistic practice, to assemble structures on a scientific basis which rapidly train/indoctrinate people into particular experiences. In an open society they would be free to choose, and to leave, to experiment with the alternative experiences – as they increasingly are now.

In that sense, this is nothing new, but I am interested in whether it would be possible to establish a bridge between the sciences and religion, which removes the inaccuracy of myth and dogma, but recreates the essential positive elements of *religious experience* which serve to make life both tolerable and enjoyable, within a scientific context.

In this sense, the scientific context simply means moving people on towards a current understanding of the world. However, it also means a context where *nothing* is regarded as absolute truth, where dogma should be actively resisted as one of its central tenants. It is also a context in which we should *not* loose the spiritual, and social experiences which make life wonderful. Partly these have been lost in the enlightenment, made subservient to the three pillars of economic, scientific and bureaucratic power – perhaps because (being embedded in the religious paradigm) it was not possible to extract the dogma from the underlying experience and recognise how important it is.