1: Start to think that one ideology you like – which contains genuine benefits, truths, and positive moral elements – might be the only valid perspective.

2: Surround yourself with believers until you’re convinced that your view is common and normal.

3: Ignore your own doubts so that you can fit in better. Join in on chastising (and eventually ostracizing) insiders who doubt too much. Punish slightly more harshly than you feel is fair in order to prove that you are one of the good guys.

4: Since challenging the ideology is punished, pretend to believe more than you really do – contributing to the sense that almost everyone else has no doubts – in a self-reinforcing cycle.

5: Assume that since your view is obviously correct, normal, and morally good, those who strongly oppose your view are bad people.

6: Since you are good and they are bad, conclude that you, as the good guys, should try to destroy them (figuratively, or in extreme cases, literally).

7: But how can you tell who is bad? Decide that a set of beliefs that sound similar to the bad people’s beliefs are off-limits. Anyone who believes them is probably bad. In those cases, humane treatment is no longer necessary.

8: Even just spending too much time with one of the bad people, or speaking well of them, is morally suspect. Why would you do that if you weren’t bad too?

9: Unfortunately, some true beliefs were accidentally put on the “bad” side of the good/bad dividing line. Now there are true things that you would become a bad person for believing.

10: Because of that, you and your group must avoid looking at reality too closely, lest you become bad too.

11: If you start to notice something true that you’re not allowed to believe, look away quickly or contort reality to make it seem different than it is.

12: Intensify your self-delusion and your punishment of non-believers so that you can make sure that still more people in your group will delude themselves out of fear.

13: Start teaching children (before they are old enough to think for themselves) that your belief system is the only correct one, perpetuating the system for future generations.

14: Congratulations! You’ve succeeded at being a good person who harms the world. Your mostly good ideology has eaten itself and has become more bad than good.

This has happened many times throughout history, and it will happen many more times. Watch out for this pattern so that you (and the people you love) don’t end up as “true believers” who do harm by accident.

This piece was first written on August 7, 2020, and first appeared on this site on April 29, 2022.

Click here for a high resolution version of this image.

As you can see in the diagram, there were well over 60 Abrahamic religious splits, each of which changed one form of religion into another. Since I made the diagram quickly and used Wikipedia as the source for a lot of it, I’m sure it contains plenty of mistakes and typos and still leaves lots of splits and denominations out (my apologies for any egregious errors!)

I learned some things from making the diagram that I think most people don’t realize:

(1) We tend to view the religions of today as a linear progression from religions of old (perhaps with some modification in ideology along the way), but in fact, a more accurate model is that religion has minor schisms over and over and over again but most of those offshoots die out. It’s like a branching tree where most branches have been removed, so what we end up seeing is a tree with only a few branches that each seem to have had a smooth progression from the root. We see a few winners and assume those were the only ones in the race. We do see a bunch of twigs at the end of the branches, though (which represent the newest offshoots – presumably, some of these will die out as most of the offshoots did in the past).

(2) Where one should draw the line at something being an entirely new religion now seems a lot more arbitrary to me than it used to. The most clear-cut cases are when an entirely new religious text is added which gains widespread popularity (e.g., Christianity branching off from Judaism), but with new religious groups offshooting regularly, there are a lot of minor branches that are now separated from each other by so many prior splits that they seem so distinct as to essentially be different religions despite happening to use the same religious text.

It’s also interesting to consider that almost every one of these groups believed or believes its religious doctrines and practices to be more accurate or good than all the other groups. Religious truth has never been something we humans have been able to agree on!

This piece was first written on August 3, 2017, and first appeared on my website on June 16, 2025.