A note to myself about the tools I reach for under load.

When anger is a heat in the temples and better judgment has left the room, I ask: What would Jesus do? Not aloud. It’s a circuit-breaker. A mechanical redirect.

When panic is a free-fall, I recite the Lord’s Prayer or Psalm 23. The old words, rhythmically. A handrail.

When my moral level feels off, I tap the Desiderata. A quick check. A trueing-up.

These are religious implements. I’m not a religious person. This creates friction. The easy verdict is hypocrisy but a more useful one is engineering.

Religion, at an operational level, is a set of social and psychological tools. Forged, tested, and handed down in the long, messy field trial of human survival.

The problems are basic: isolation, moral confusion, cognitive oversignal, existential vertigo. The tools are specific.

Community is a scheduled, repeatable gathering with a low barrier to entry. Shared song, shared food, a shared script. People who mark your absence. An architecture against isolation.

Ethical coordination is a practiced system, with moving parts in use: confession, forgiveness, repair, accountability. A gym for moral muscle, used when strength is inconvenient.

Contemplation is prayer, chant, ritualised silence. Call it meditation now; the label is new, the function is ancient. A manual override for the nervous system.

Meaning-making is the liturgy for life’s thresholds. Birth, death, loss, gratitude. A language for suffering that isn’t clinical or melodramatic. A way of saying this mattered to a universe that doesn’t.

You can explain this through evolution or neuroscience. The fixtures remain. Millennia of field testing.

So: the fixtures.

“What would Jesus do?” inserts an idealised standard into a moral conflict.

The Lord’s Prayer is a cognitive stabiliser. The value is in the memorisation, the cadence, the structured familiarity. In free-fall, it gives the mind a fixed sequence to occupy the channel panic was flooding.

Desiderata is calibration. A checklist for a humane orientation. You run through it to true yourself up. No mysticism required. Just maintenance.

That song lyric “What if God was one of us?” is a compassion prompt. It shrinks the distance. The stranger on the bus stops being scenery. They become a proximate moral event.

Efficiency proves a solved problem. Metaphysics can wait.

The private question underneath is about replacement.

We’re adept at debunking the supernatural claim. We’re less adept at building the secular substitute that works under actual load.

A Tuesday night. The phone is a slab of blue light. Loneliness is a quiet toxin. The book club met twice, then dissolved. The meditation app sits unopened. The group chat is performative care with no follow-through. You’re isolated in a city of two hundred thousand people, and there’s no structured place that expects you, no repeated ritual that absorbs you, no one who’d notice if you stopped showing up.

The church down the road has evensong at six. Same time, same hymns, same twenty people. They’d notice.

People return to the old tools because they’re hungry. The needs are non-negotiable.

Some religious tools are designed for control. Some produce guilt that corrodes instead of corrects. Strip those. The test is practical: does using this make me more truthful, more capable? Or more fearful, smug, and cruel?

I don’t accept the metaphysics. But I’d be a fool to ignore the engineering.

The fixtures work. They’re grasped by a shaking hand. They provide leverage. That’s their verification.

The future of a secular society lies in reverse-engineering the old tools. Strip the dogma. Retain the function.

Community. Ritual. Moral practice. Contemplative discipline.

I keep the fixtures. I just know what they’re for.