Uploaded June 2026 | Updated September 2026, 2 weeks ago
Which came first: the belief or the practice? I'd have said belief. But that's only because I'm modern.
Here's the thing I can't shake — humans were doing religion for a couple hundred thousand years before anyone asked "do you believe the following propositions?" That question has a date.
So what was religion before it was about believing the right things?
This is the live conversation where we crack open Lecture One and take your questions. We'll get into the stuff that makes this whole series tick:
— The knife's edge: why we're an animal whose sociality fails at exactly the size we need to survive
— Three centimetres per second (yes, that's a real number, and yes, it explains more than you'd think)
— Why rituals don't express belief — they generate it, and the proposition shows up downstream
— Sunghir's 13,000 ivory beads, a cathedral cup in Edinburgh, 100,000 people singing at the Rose Bowl, and the businessman who was sure he had a demon
— Whitehead calling the whole shape of this in 1926, from the philosopher's chair, with no fMRI in sight
And then the claim I keep landing on, the one we'll argue about live: the cosmos is awakening to its own value through us. That is religion. There's no other religion than that.
Bring your questions, your pushback, your "wait, but what about—." That's the whole point of doing this live. Drop them in the chat and let's think out loud together.
Want the whole thing? This Q&A is part of a four-lecture class with Ilia Delio and Tripp Fuller. Join us at TheFutureOfReligion.com to get all four lectures, sit in on the live Q&As, and become part of the online community thinking through this together.
The class is donation-based — and that includes $0. If this is for you, it's for you. Come anyway.
Which came first: the belief or the practice? I'd have said belief. But that's only because I'm modern.
Here's the thing I can't shake — humans were doing religion for a couple hundred thousand years before anyone asked "do you believe the following propositions?" That question has a date.
So what was religion before it was about believing the right things?
This is the live conversation where we crack open Lecture One and take your questions. We'll get into the stuff that makes this whole series tick:
— The knife's edge: why we're an animal whose sociality fails at exactly the size we need to survive
— Three centimetres per second (yes, that's a real number, and yes, it explains more than you'd think)
— Why rituals don't express belief — they generate it, and the proposition shows up downstream
— Sunghir's 13,000 ivory beads, a cathedral cup in Edinburgh, 100,000 people singing at the Rose Bowl, and the businessman who was sure he had a demon
— Whitehead calling the whole shape of this in 1926, from the philosopher's chair, with no fMRI in sight
And then the claim I keep landing on, the one we'll argue about live: the cosmos is awakening to its own value through us. That is religion. There's no other religion than that.
Bring your questions, your pushback, your "wait, but what about—." That's the whole point of doing this live. Drop them in the chat and let's think out loud together.
Want the whole thing? This Q&A is part of a four-lecture class with Ilia Delio and Tripp Fuller. Join us at TheFutureOfReligion.com to get all four lectures, sit in on the live Q&As, and become part of the online community thinking through this together.
The class is donation-based — and that includes $0. If this is for you, it's for you. Come anyway.
