What is the motivation in spreading one’s religion? Isn’t it an individual belief system?

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Have you ever done something so amazing that you just had to share it? Let’s take for an example video games. Back in the 80s we had the Nintendo Entertainment System.

The NES is mostly known today for having really really hard games. You had to work at mastering them. Once mastered, you could wow your friends with all this cool stuff you could do. Just being able to beat a game like Ghosts and Goblins would make you the talk of the neighborhood.

These days you don’t have to just keep your video game love to yourself, you can share it with other people. Video game tournaments are million-dollar affairs. You can show off all the amazing things you can do at the tournament with other people who love the game.

But these tournaments don’t just happen. You have to let people know somehow that this game exists and that you can do cool things in it.

Video game tournaments exist for the purpose of glory. Glory is when you do something for the pure sheer joy of it, and in the act of doing it, you make both yourself, and that thing better. When you win a Street Fighter tournament, you’re not just making thousands of dollars in prize money, you’re also advancing the state of the art of Street Fighter.

Analysts will look at your gameplay and work out the elements that made you win out over the opponent. All the pretty ladies that were hired to lend their good looks to the event will be looking your way because they’re interested in what all the ruckus is about, even if they only barely understand the actual game. You, the game, and all the people who love the game, all came together to celebrate it in a way that just makes everything more and more amazing.

That’s what religion is, only more distilled. Instead of just focusing on one activity, religion celebrates the existential fact that we are actually here, in this reality, able to do things.

Glory is shared by all. By you, winner of the tournament, by all the people paid to be there, by all the people watching. People coming together, sharing the pure joy they get out of doing a particular thing.

Street Fighter is a religion. Football is a religion, celebrated at the Super Bowl every year. Any time you collect humans together to glorify a thing, that thing acquires aspects of religion. Good and bad aspects.

You have to work hard to get good at Street Fighter, the difficulty is intrinsic in what makes it so amazing. The only reason watching a Street Fighter tournament is so interesting is precisely because it’s so hard. You just wouldn’t care otherwise.

And so grasping religion is very hard. But religion is unlike Street Fighter and football in that anybody who grasps religion, at all, has won the tournament. God blesses them and their lives with sheer ineffable, wondrous magic. The magic can take many forms, but it’s core essence is a pure joy in simply existing. God may not deign to bless you with riches and prosperity, but by the time you’re done you won’t care about those things anymore.

God makes life meaningful, and that’s simply, utterly, purely, amazing. All by itself. Once you apprehend that, you can’t help but want to share it.