Religious convictions, in this discussion, are not taken to entail a belief in God, or in a supernatural world, or even revealed moral law. Religious convictions are instead regarded as providing the framework within which life is lived and decisions are made. Religion is about where we came from, who we are, and where we are going. It is concerned above all with the long run of human history, less with the individual lives that make up that history.
In Idle Theory, the circumstance of humanity is taken to be one of toil and difficulty. The primary human task is to mitigate those difficulties, and to free men from toil. It is as if humanity was crowded aboard a leaky boat, with everyone toiling with buckets and pumps to keep the ship afloat, and where the goal is to seal up as many leaks as possible, freeing the passengers from the task of continually bailing water, and allowing them to begin to exercise freedom of choice. Only when the emergency has passed can the passengers return to an idle life of parties, dances, games, sightseeing.
This pessimistic assessment of the human condition reflects or parallels the Christian idea of a Fallen World seeking Redemption or Salvation. Some of the parallels of Idle Theory and Christianity are explored elsewhere.
In the view of Idle Theory, moral codes are all about decreasing human toil, and increasing human leisure. That is, decreasing the constraints on human action, and increasing human freedom. If we have inherited from our ancestors strict moral codes, we should not see them as divinely revealed, but as having evolved over many centuries and millenia. Moral codes are human inventions, just like tools and trade, and they are to be judged by whether they actually increase or diminish human freedom.
Yet, in the modern world, the idea of the human condition as being in any sense "fallen" appears meaningless, or as part of the incomprehensible theology of a largely lost Christianity. Heaven and Hell once bulked large in human eyes, but now, in a secular age, they have been quietly discarded, along with most of the Christian cosmos. It is seen as grim, unpleasant, benighted superstition and credulity.
For several hundred years in Western civilization, Christianity, and the Christian cosmos of Heaven and Hell, Fall and Redemption, Judgement and Damnation, have been in decline. Christianity has disintegrated into multiple rival sects. Western culture has become increasingly secularised, as its Christian symbols fall into disuse.
Moderns would say that this decline of religious belief is simply part of a process of emancipation, of becoming less credulous, less willing to be bullied and browbeaten by self-serving religious authorities. The emancipation of men from religious dogma is a process that parallels the emancipation of slaves, and of women. Ideas of Heaven and Hell, and the Christian drama of Fall and Redemption, simply make no sense within a modern rational, scientific view of life. They are fairy tales which only ignorant people believe.
But since Idle Theory - which is itself as rational, scientific, and mechanistic as any other modern outlook - is able to reconstruct an understanding of Heaven and Hell, Fall and Redemption, it is not inclinesd to dismiss such religious beliefs as fairy tales believed by our credulous forebears.
Instead it offers an outline rationale for those beliefs, and for the quite different secular beliefs that have succeeded them. It is as follows. In the past, particularly during the Christian era, life for most people was one of inescapable toil and drudgery, and for them the prospect of a future Heaven of idleness and ease (and a Hell of still worse torment and trouble) were very real. They saw themselves as living in a fallen world, a world in travail, hoping to be somehow saved. Keeping faith, above all, meant maintaining hope and expectation of salvation, and not lapsing into despair. All the primary Christian myths and symbols speak allegorically of such a world, of such a condition.
But in the modern, post-Christian world, life - for a great many people in Western society, at least - is regarded as something really rather pleasant, to be enjoyed. Modern secular society was born of the growing conviction that the ship of humanity, after many centuries on windswept, storm-wracked seas, had at last dropped anchor in the port of Heaven. We had arrived. We were free. And once the passengers stepped off the ship, they dispensed with its clerical captains and their lieutenants - because they no longer had any need of them and their maps, compasses, and disciplines. For them, the problem was not how to reach a heaven of freedom, but what to do now they had got there. For Christianity had never offered any advice as to proper conduct in Heaven: they had to work it out for themselves.
In Western society, this sense of having arrived was first felt in increasing rich and opulent monastic organisations, and among the nobility, but above all among a growing class of wealthy merchants. For these people, life had become good. To the extent that they retained a Christian mentality, they tended to regard themselves as an elect, peculiarly favoured and blessed by God. It was this newly-leisured elect which began to produce treatises on morality, politics, and economics. And underlying all their work was the presumption of the reality of human freedom. They tended to believe that they had a right to pursue happiness in whatever way they liked. Their economic philosophy considered a world of free agents, manufacturing and trading products which satisfied desire.
The various political revolutions that followed in the wake of this shift of mentality arose from the desire on the part of the still-toiling mass of humanity (those who were not clerics, nobles, or merchants) to themselves partake in this new freedom. Once the mass of humanity had caught wind of these new doctrines, they refused to accept that only a select minority could enjoy freedom while they continued to work. The clerics, and later the nobles, regularly found themselves rapidly dispossessed of their wealth and status.
Despite the failures of the new philosophers to construct a new ethics or a workable account of economic systems, and the failures of political revolutionaries to construct paradises of equality and liberty, the conviction of a very real human freedom underpins almost all cultural movements, up to the present day. Existentialism, for example, is all about facing up to freedom, honestly and authentically. The hippie subculture of the 1960s was an attempt to drop out of still-toiling human society, and live a free and idle and self-indulgent life.
From the point of view of Idle Theory, this whole shift of mentality was premature. The ship of humanity never actually dropped anchor in the port of heaven: the crew simply caught sight of its distant peaks on the horizon, and mutinied. The modern belief in human freedom - that we have arrived, and are free to act as we wish - is simply wishful thinking. Moderns desperately wish this world to be free, to the point where they regularly declare that it must actually be free. And this wish is the oldest and deepest wish of humanity.
Some day, disillusionment will set in again. And men will return to seeing the world as fallen, not saved. Global wars, Auschwitz and Hiroshima, and the continuation of poverty, disease, starvation, have been eating away at an optimism that first flowered in the Renaissance.
The return of realism will entail a return to something like the lost, pessimistic Christian perspective.