In season 1 of Westworld, around episode 3/4, there is a scene in which Hector is speaking with Maeve about the religion of the spiritual natives. And he’s sort of describing their situation in a cryptic, indirect way. “this life is hell, the gods are in the other realm controlling us,” stuff like that.
What's interesting here is that in isolation, this sounds like random spiritual babble, but its actually true! It's just true in a way that they can't know based on their range of experiences.
The implication for me here is, what if that’s also the function of our religion, for our existence. A cryptic formula of what’s going on, but not too specific, because we can’t know all the details (our nervous systems leave us with a limited sensory horizon). And then scientists take it super literally in order to "disprove it," not realizing that they've completely missed the deeper truth by approaching the language the wrong way.
This is my perspective on religion in general, so seeing it manifest in Westworld was rather exciting.
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