Gods, Temples, and Other Human Inventions

Diego’s worldview on religion and ritual

There is a temple in the Castle. There is also a complaint desk for God. Before choosing which queue to join, you should know that Diego has spent considerable time in both, and that neither requires him to believe God exists.

He approaches religion as an evolutionary anthropologist, a collector of powerful experiences, a prospective participant in unusual communities, and a reader quite prepared to give the deity a terrible review. The resulting itinerary runs through Christianity as a living social organism, Mormonism as an attractive civilization, Burning Man as his own religion, and the Bible as an anthology whose editor has, in his view, made several catastrophic personnel decisions.

The continuity underneath these adventures is his naturalism. In 2020, while explaining why an exploration of Mormon life had not become a conversion, he put it plainly:

I never stopped being a naturalist.¹

His questions are about what religions do to actual humans: how they join strangers, coordinate sacrifice, reproduce a culture, cultivate or stifle joy, and give bodies access to experiences they otherwise miss. Metaphysics is one question. Whether the people are wonderful to spend a Sunday with is another. Diego will inspect both departments personally.

The organism in the cathedral

In 2017, he proposed treating Christianity as something more organized than a collection of contagious ideas. His central distinction was:

A superorganism has agency, whereas a platform for replicators only has space and resources where things can multiply.²

An organism senses threats, allocates work, maintains boundaries, and acts to preserve itself. Diego saw Christianity doing these things through its institutions, stories, prohibitions, conversions, and division of labor. Its human participants need not consciously understand the larger process, any more than a cell needs to know the owner's summer plans.

This let him ask a different question about biblical narratives. Their persistence could reflect the work of a system organizing its own survival: shaping personalities, stabilizing families, coordinating cooperation, and preserving the conditions under which the next generation would carry it forward. Christianity became an extended object in evolutionary history, with a metabolism made partly of human actions.

That is why he could be so interested in Jordan Peterson while remaining deeply influenced by Daniel Dennett. Peterson examined what religious stories did inside human development. Dennett supplied ways to understand religions as natural phenomena. Diego wanted to walk between their laboratories carrying specimens.

By 2024, his synthesis was explicitly about different people needing different cultural arrangements:

My take, as an Anthropologist, is populational. There are people that need Sam Harris and people that need Peterson.³

He supported the secular development of philosophy and ethics, while valuing attempts to guide existing religious populations toward more intelligible and useful versions of their traditions. The fact that a practice organized civilization did not, for him, mean every future person must remain inside it. Equally, the fact that he could live outside it did not mean everyone else had already packed.

Come for the golden plates; stay for the people

Mormonism interested him especially because he saw a community oriented toward family, improvement, generosity, music, and continuity. He liked its people, its American geography, and a mythology that seemed more welcoming to growth than to perpetual guilt. A civilization capable of welcoming a flamboyant atheist while sustaining its own way of life was naturally going to get his attention.

But the attraction went through several distinct seasons.

In Losing My Religion in September 2020, he separated advocating for Mormonism's social role from becoming a Mormon himself. The first remained attractive; the second received a provisional no. He had visited services, spoken with missionaries, and explored the personal possibility. One obstacle was the prospect of pretending to share a spouse's beliefs for a lifetime. Another was fit: ordinary services could not compete, for his particular temperament, with the emotional and sensory possibilities available elsewhere.

His general rule for the inquiry was delightfully unecclesiastical:

Religious groups are different playgrounds where you can pick a group of kids and play with them for a while amidst the game of life.¹

This was followed by a structural problem for the membership committee:

But I think my shape is simply too abstruse and non-Euclidian for a successful match.¹

In 2023, his admiration returned strongly. He again entertained a future conversion and praised Mormon theology and community life. A visit to Utah also cured him of a separate ambition: founding a religion himself. Having inspected how much historical contingency and sustained labor the enterprise involved, he decided to enjoy other people's religious infrastructure. Even prophets, apparently, face project management.

By December 2025, the calculus changed again. In Reconsidering The Birth Rates, he moved concern about birth rates below the immediate technological transition. The change weakened a major reason for his tolerance of religion: its production of future generations. He retained appreciation for symbolism, but withdrew much of the civilizational endorsement that the reproductive argument had supplied. His assessment of Joseph Smith also became sharply hostile.

These dates matter to the portrait. The 2023 Mormon admirer and the later critic both occupy this room; neither should be made to impersonate the other. Across them, the same questions remain active: What sort of humans does this way of life produce? What do they give one another? What does participation require of me? And can I join honestly?

The religion with better costumes

Burning Man answers those questions much more naturally for him.

In his 2019 account, the city is already a religious structure: a recurring calendar, shared principles, a sacred center, ritual labor, an effigy sacrificed in fire, and a temple for mourning and transformation. Costumes and temporary names let people enter other forms of social existence. The gift economy changes their dealings with one another. The place permits sacredness alongside exuberant play.

He ends that interpretation:

It is ultimately the religion of Carnival.⁴

Diego's sacred is therefore quite capable of wearing something ridiculous. The ridiculous can help. A person steps away from an ordinary identity, encounters others under altered rules, and becomes available for generosity, vulnerability, or wonder. The temple need not compete with the giant shark car. They have different jobs in the same civilization.

In 2023, he explained the personal turning point:

Several years ago I stopped seeing religion is something that you should examine in the light of whether the facts are true or not and started seeing religion instead in the light of whether the community is one worth living or not and in that sense that's when I finally found my religion: Burning Man⁵

That concerns how he chooses a religious community, rather than a retreat from his views about gods. Burning Man lets him participate without turning a supernatural claim into a lifelong lie. The connection, ritual, costumes, music, and transforming experience are available directly.

By his ninth burn, in 2025, he was still describing an escalating sequence of moments that surpassed the previous apparent pinnacle. He recalled declaring on an early visit:

This is sacred, and not to be judged just by utilons like we utilitarian philosophers judge everything else.⁶

And then:

This is intrinsically worth protecting.⁶

The anthropologist has not ceased to understand the machinery. He is dancing inside it. There are experiences he wants civilization to preserve because they themselves belong among the things that make civilization worth having.

Jesus took the route through Disney

Religion also enters his self-understanding through stories. In Salvation and The Secular Apocalypse in 2023, he connects the childhood power of Mickey's Christmas Carol, his adult response to Knock at the Cabin, and his own dedication to preventing an AI catastrophe. Each involves a person confronted with suffering, a possible future, and an opportunity to make a sacrifice that helps others.

He recognizes a Christian narrative finding its way into a life deliberately raised outside religious belief:

I had been shielded on all sides from this message. But somehow, he found me.¹²

The route ran through fiction and secular culture. Diego does not take the resemblance as a reason to abandon the work. He recognizes the emotional form and still affirms the moral idea: giving something of oneself when others receive a much larger benefit. A story can organize a life's concerns without its metaphysics becoming true. The atheist boy argued against God; Dickens and Disney had found a side entrance.

The Bible arrives, and there are complaints

In April 2025, Diego began publishing an audiobook commentary on the Bible. The opening was auspicious. Whales appeared early; so did cattle. He detected promising dietary affiliations in Genesis. Things deteriorated rapidly.

The defining feature of his reading is that divine rank offers no exemption from moral assessment. A character who kills children, sends plagues, or demands destruction does not become good because the jacket identifies him as God. Diego reads the actions from the standpoint of the beings experiencing them, including the animals. Authority receives no diplomatic immunity.

His commentary oscillates between horror, anthropology, and culinary inspection. Leviticus prompts interest in meat distribution, sacrifice, and contagion rules. Then another divine threat arrives, and the prosecution resumes. By the end of Genesis and Exodus, he has a practical plan for his next encounter with the defendant:

There's an art piece at burning man where you talk to God on a phone.

He'll be hearing from me that's for damn sure.⁷

The New Testament changes the atmosphere. Jesus heals, forgives, helps the poor, and offers moral teaching Diego admires. The review becomes almost relieved:

God causes leprosy. Jesus cures it.⁸

His Jesus is a moral reformer working inside a received mythology, improving the world he found. Diego can admire the man's ethical and aesthetic sensibility without adopting resurrection or divine parentage. In the January 2026 retrospective, he describes Jesus as the hero and God, Satan, and Paul as the villains.

Paul gets a separate charge sheet. Diego reads his hostility to flesh and sexual life as the projection of resentment into universal morality. He sees a man turning his own bodily unhappiness into a spiritual program for everyone else. That is exactly the sort of world rejection Diego refuses: the body should become a more hospitable place to live, not a source of compulsory shame.

His summary is economical:

Jesus gained a fan, and Paul gained an enemy.⁹

The gospel according to the happy ape

The Bible also produced one of his most characteristic local reversals. In his post-reading reflections, the man who described himself as an extreme antifeminist complained that its women were deprived of the individuality and fascination he encountered in actual women:

Women are their own people and the Bible never contends with that.¹⁰

He wanted characters with rich inner lives, agency, intelligence, cunning, and distinctive personalities. A moral tradition that reduced them to reproductive supporting roles had lost something he valued. His proposed new edition would emphasize Jesus, remove the Old Testament and Paul, and stop teaching readers to feel guilty for being embodied animals.

The invitation was:

Come live without incel guilt for being an ape.¹⁰

This is the warmth beneath his religious combativeness. The life he wants contains bodies, pleasure, kindness, beauty, and the possibility of entering something larger together. Religious practices interest him when they cultivate these goods, organize cooperation, or protect valuable forms of life. He objects when they demand fear, submission to cruelty, resentment of pleasure, or false belief.

His late-2025 position still granted Christianity several practical advantages: sophisticated symbolism, protection against ideologies he opposed, and a usable moral framework for people who benefit from one. But the direction he favored remained explicit:

I think continuing the project of secularization is a good idea, but wanted to leave these 3 arguments against it registered.¹¹

So the temple stays. The fire stays. The shared meal, mourning, music, and costumes stay. God must answer the complaint personally, should he ever become available. Meanwhile there are people outside to meet, and Diego knows which party he wants to attend.

Further doors

• Will Darwinism and the Christianity Superorganism Unify? (2017): the organism-level theory behind the religious inquiry.
• Losing My Religion (2020): the difference between enjoying a community and being able to join it honestly.
• Burning Man is, Obviously, a Religion (2019), with Of Mormons and Burning Man (2023): the sacred, the carnival, and the participant's choice.
• The Audiobooking the Bible series (April 2025), followed by The Bible, One Year Later (January 2026): the full journey from promising cattle to Jesus and the defendants.
• Reconsidering The Birth Rates (December 2025): the explicit revision that changes his later religious outlook.

Continue: Love, Sex, and the Domestic Experiment