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In almost every form of religion, gods seem to have an insatiable appetite for offerings, with a hope by the believers that god’s attention will now be directed towards them and their wishes and prayers will soon be fulfilled. By the act of god (or chance) few of them do get fulfilled, carrying the ritual forward. For the unlucky ones, there is a simple enough explanation, you didn’t do it with complete faith.
Whether these are the gods of Olympus, Yahyeh in the kingdom of Heavens, popular avatars of Hindu gods, obligatory sacrifices of all kinds of vegetables, fruits, milk, and honey have been offered as atonement, asks, or thanksgiving by worshippers belonging to all classes of society.
The psychological angle of the whole thing seems obvious. First, there is a classical explanation of the religious effect of fear, love, and groupthink. But that doesn’t explain the mass illusion of how this continues to work for thousands of years. Obviously, Gods do need some wiggle room to account for all the times it fails to deliver and I am pretty sure that in every worshipper’s mind, there must be some ambiguity of outcome. I guess it helps that followers remain fuzzy about what is the specific sacrifice (things) and state of mind (faith) that will definitely give them what they want. Trial and error, keep them going. Once in a while, by random chance, something would happen exactly what they wanted and their faith affirms. Well, that is probably the best explanation I could think of. But is there another angle?
In every one of the religious events (including weddings, births, deaths, and every life event in between) that I have been to, I have noticed two classes of people. Ones, who fit into the above explanation, and others, who are somewhat mysterious. To understand them, let me digress.
I start thinking about the mass behavior of all of us on new pantheons of our age. What do we get when we tweet? publish a blog (like this one), dance moves on TikTok, travelogue story on insta, party pictures on Facebook, and videos of our cats and dogs on youtube? Yeah! some of us have a lot of time in hand, but what is the return we are looking for? Nobody has gotten rich with it. Is it just fear of being out of sight by being not active? Are we reaffirming our membership to our tribe? With every selfie we post, every sub-256-character joke we tell, every rant we vent, every second we stream, every retweet, like, upvote, and upload, we are making an offering to the modern gods, what’s the offering? Our vanishingly limited supply: our time, effort, creativity, and attention. We are sacrificing pieces to unseen forces that we believe control our destinies. What do we want? There probably is a feeling that we matter, our existence has meaning, and then some fame, being in the limelight.
Considering, the same fuzziness, ambiguity, and matters of chance are still part of the bargain, is the psychology similar to what followers sacrificed in a temple? Does this probably explain the psychology of the other set of people who must know that sacrifices are probably meaningless but they just go with it?
What would social media be without ever-flowing content, sacrificed in time and creativity by its followers (read monthly active users) to the new media giants (read Zuckerburg, Musk)? What would any religion be without everflowing sacrifice of material goodness and unwavering faith to its priests and establishment?
