Notes on Tanya Luhrmann's book "How God Becomes Real"

This might be a bit incoherent because I'm writing it late at night, so I will edit it tomorrow.

One of the things I think about a lot is the concept of belief, which this article highlighted. When it comes to real-making, I think that at some point, there needs to be some trust, somewhere. For example, if my biology teacher is demonstrating bacteria by licking a swab, wiping it on a slide, and then turning the zoom up, showing me the little wiggling things, even though this is "real-making" in a sense, there are still a lot of trust that needs to be present in order for the conclusion of "there is bacteria in my teacher's saliva" to follow:

- The microscope has not been tampered with,

- There is no secret slide above that slide with bacteria on it already,

- That thing is a bacterium, not a virus or a pigeon

and so on and so forth. I think that more generally, this relates to the concept of "trusting the cosmos" or "deep atheism", however is not merely a specific instance of this. This is not trusting the cosmos to keep you safe, it is trusting the cosmos to *tell you the truth*. I think on one extreme you have people who tend to take a lot of information as truth, which I believe is a common trait among religious people, with mythology and whatnot, and on the other extreme, are the folks who think we're living in a simulation / we're a bunch of brains floating in a vat of goo. I'm not entirely sure where on this spectrum I lie, but it's definitely closer to religion than to goo. I think overall the idea of decomposing religion into a bunch of different traits is interesting