21-03-15: Churches

I am not religious.

I used to feel nothing about churches. Large buildings, dark inside, old, weird, abandoned. When I was inside a church, I always felt like everyone knew I was an intruder, so I would keep silent and pretend being respectful.

This changed when I realized that people really like coordinating — see 21-03-14: Morality and fighting.

Religions are tools. Religions help people feel better (clearer rules, more meaning in life, etc), but more importantly, religions help people coordinate. A society with low resources probably needs a religion in order to survive.

In fact, a high-resource society could probably also be more efficient with a religion, but instead we are looking for different ways to exist, although I don't know why exactly. I'm fine with religions not coming back — we'll figure out something else that fits the current state of the society better.

Anyway. After deciding that religions are coordination tools, I started feeling much better about churches. Something like "Whoa, you guys built an impressive huge coordination center here". The more effort put into a church, the more I feel like "Yes, those people cared about coordination an awful lot and were willing to put a giant amount of resources into it". This translates into immediate respect for the societies of the past, and a feeling that we both care about the same thing — coordination — despite all the differences.

This also helps me not feel like an intruder in churches. I don't share the religion, but I respect the goal.

In conclusion, here are two cool/weird Polish churches. Someone sent me a bunch more, so if I find anyone willing to go with me, I might visit some of them soon.