The prophet of healthy-mindedness pulls herself up by her bootstraps, while the sick soul sees that she needs an unearned gift -- from above (what I think Christians call grace) or from below, from her own fickle neurochemistry.

Would you say that like James's sick soul you'd find the idea that "natural evil [is] no such stumbling-block and terror" because in the end it doesn't really count, and is "swallowed up in supernatural good," a good basis for religious experience? Versus the healthy-minded view in which evil could be avoided, or reinterpreted out of existence, by acts of will, and the supernatural is limited to the power of "mind-cure"?

So, basically, fiction is my religion. It's what I use to reason about a lot of things. I spend a lot of time trying to distill patterns out of it; this is my brain's background process.

On good days, I think that there are forces at work in the universe that work against evil. They are purely naturalistic forces, like the laws of physics, but my belief in them is essentially a religious one. As an example, evil tends to treat people as a means to an end, whereas good tends to treat people as an end in themselves. Therefore, evil tends to use those around it in ways that weaken them, while good tends to use those around it in ways that strengthen them. Moreover, good allows others to grow powerful and have a hand in shaping outcomes, while evil desires to limit the power of others. Therefore, we should expect to see good coalitions of power-sharing individuals with diverse interests triumph over power-grubbing evil dictatorships with unified interests. Something like this theory drives the plots of many, many works of fiction; it accounts for the characterization of most villains in anything recent, say 1970 onwards (older stuff often characterizes villains as a racial other, and is content with that). And, one can interpret the major historical events of the 20th century as support for this theory. If one squints, anyway.

On bad days, I convince myself that some idiot is going to teach a computer neuroscience, and we'll all be as fucked as we can possibly be.

--
-Eric