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Belief system vs. concept system (Or: Go to hell? An addendum) [1]

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Date: 2023-02-08  

One of the YouTubers I watch (whose channel I mentioned recently in another diary) gave me some pause the other day.

As I made mention earlier, Owen Morgan (host of Telltale), at some point after leaving Jehovah’s Witnesses—a group he describes as a cult—converted (deconverted?) to atheism. So he has grappled with a lot of questions about spirituality and belief. In fact, his channel began as a critical eye into various religious groups and structures, examining them for signs or evidence of cult dynamics. Over time, he’s expanded his focus to look at how religion has become increasingly prevalent in American culture, especially at the intersection of religion and politics.

Last week, in the same clip that I featured before, he had a segment where he covered several televangelists. At the end, referencing Kenneth Copeland, he broke down the Ponzi scheme (masquerading as a pyramid scheme) that embodies the prosperity gospel. At the end Owen said that though hell doesn’t exist, if it did, Copeland would be headed there for the way in which he’s taking obvious advantage of his audience. (Owen’s word was ‘predatory’.)

Yet he in that clip, couched in denial though it was, used the idea of hell just as a religious person would: that is, to use the (symbolic) threat of punishment to indicate the degree of a person’s error. This would, I’d wager, permit the same type of psychological use of the concept of hell, even though Owen now explicitly denounces hell’s existence. In this way, he retains the very same ways of dealing with the world. He may have left the belief system, but he’s still using the concept system. He’s still using the concept of hell to help him psychologically navigate the world. He may have abandoned his old religion, but the concept system still has him at the root.

It occurs to me that our culture is indeed, or may indeed be, changing, as our words are changing. Societies are made, foundationally, by words. Words give us ways to inhabit concepts and ideas. The valence (i.e., negativity or positivity) of words we use determines—perhaps only in the aggregate or plurality—the valence, the emotional stance of the community. And it occurs to me that people of all stripes and shades of the political community are becoming comfortable living inside certain concepts, like hard-heartedness, schadenfreude and spite, evidenced by the words they tend to use. That tendency is a reflection of a state of mind, a trafficking in those codes.

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[1] Url: https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2023/2/8/2151791/-Belief-system-vs-concept-system

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