The Myth of Perfectability

After thinking about religion for many years, wondering why it came about and is so popular, and acknowledging that it couldn't be because it actually represents any kind of truth, I've come up with many ideas but none that have really seemed to fit.

But this one seems different.

One might call it, "the myth of perfectability."

At a certain point humans became conscious of their power to affect the environment, which also brought with it awareness of our absolute inability to accomplish many things.

We can't always get what we want, and often we achieve something only to ruin something else, like with climate change.

But we never do anything that is perfect and has no bad consequences.

This true for everything we do, including social relationships where we try to do the right thing but it gets misconstrued, like getting the best, must advanced vacuum cleaner for your wife: it's a great present, why didn't she appreciate it?

We seem to always be wrong about something.

I think this might be uniquely human, because there's no sign that animals are trouble by the things the can't do.

Everyone is always trying to improve, accomplish new goals, overcome boundaries, barriers and personal shortcomings. Everywhere you look there are self-help gurus and books, clubs, religions, that all seem to look to a perfect vision, whether that means you are perfectly in control of everything you do, or you are the perfect disciple of your god.

You eat a proper diet only to find out that the good things you eat aren't that good and the bad things you don't aren't that bad.

You run miles everyday for fitness and health, but then you knees break down, and you have a heart attack anyway.

You memorize the Quran, you pray perfectly and at every appropriate time.

You control your thoughts so you're not thinking of vengeance, or you're not selfish, or maybe you ARE selfish in a perfectly self-actualizing way.

In the East people are working for enlightenment, or nirvana.

In the West you want to get to Heaven because everything is PERFECT there.

It's been thought by many that religion is the default answer to the question, "how did i and everything else get here, and why are things the way they are?"

And this is a very valid idea.

But perhaps even underpinning this is they idea that life isn't perfect, but there must be a way to achieve this.

After all, perfection can be tantalizingly easy to imagine. 

There should be a way to write perfectly bug -free code, but no one ever does.

If you concentrate you can get close to perfection, but like Xenon's paradox, you can never quite get all the way there.

In our quest we always fail, but we can't stand the idea of just giving up. We keep trying to understand physics, and we keep inventing things that seem to get us closer, but there's always one thing that eludes us, and we never give up because that's too much like death.

We find the smallest thing in nature, the atom, only to find out that it's made of smaller things, which are themselves made of smaller things, so when will we actually know everything?

Believing in a religion helps us feel that ultimately we have a way to get to perfection, even if it demands that we accept supernatural things.

It's the only route to perfection that we can believe is absolute, so that as we thrash around in our lives we can feel like one day, it's possible we'll be perfect.