I’m fascinated by rituals. Especially rituals that have physical outcomes.

Praying, spells, sigils, etc anything to affect a metaphysical conception of probability or god.

This is how I understand most magic rituals to promise to help affect change. Say I want to become a successful author.

Nearly every magic or religious system (which I don’t distinguish as different) promises that you can affect the probability of success so long as you devote yourself to your practice. Do the right rituals. AND, importantly, physically work towards that goal.

No system promises that you can simply wish to be a good author without you having to actually write. No, all serious systems promise that so long as you work on your writing and stay devoted to your system, then there is a chance that the cosmic controller of probability (god) will favor you.

Now this I think is a wonderful strategy for protecting the ego in that you now have two things to blame before you have to blame yourself.

“I must have performed the rituals wrong and displeased god”

“The gods don’t want me to be an author yet”

“I’m a terrible author”

Now, I think there’s an argument for both why this is good and bad.

Maybe you genuinely are deserving of whatever outcome you desire and it simply is out of your control that this didn’t happen. Maybe you finally finish your magnum opus and your house burns down or your files were stored on an AWS US East server and you missed the submission deadline.

That I think is a moment where the ability to stoicly accept what happened and move on is good.

On the flip side there is the problem where god and ritual are shielding yourself from introspection. Maybe your AI generated in universe spin off of Sherlock Homes: Watson invents Anime series just genuinely isn’t good. But it takes several rejections from publishers and a mountain of bad reviews on your self published amazon page to think “Maybe I’ve done the ritual wrong.”

You’re missing the problem because the layers of cope are too powerful. You have too many other thoughts before you even have to consider this probably is your fault.

To me, I think the bad ending is avoidable by simply constantly self reflecting. Being aware of myself and being aware of the sorta mental traps I can fall into.

Dogmatic religions I think lead to the bad ending here because its expected of X, Y, Z conditions are met then god will bless you. And then when you’ve tried nothing and you’re all out of ideas, the world is impossible to survive and becomes scary.

You can also certainly get the good ending without a religion per se, but I’m really proposing the Milk Jug experiment in a different way. Does it matter if praying to the milk jug actually does anything if it makes me feel better ?