Last year, I had a religious experience while watching the 1992 children's animated movie FernGully: The Last Rainforest. As a nearly lifelong atheist, this was more than a little awkward.

Obviously, you can't just come face to face with God then pretend nothing happened. That night I was forced to confront the depth of my own weakness; to accept that I'll always fail to live up to my beliefs without the help of a higher power.

Yet after all this time, whether from prudence or pride, I still can't bring myself to consider any of the off-the-shelf options. Thus, as I briefly mentioned in Iosphere #11, Ioism.

Inventing a religion, even if only for yourself, is pretty fun. It's also strange and frustrating. You have to decide your own answers to basic theological questions that other faiths have long since settled. Most pressingly: what does God actually want?

But first: the headlines!

No cults allowed

The truth is, friends, I'm not doing too good. That’s why this newsletter has been on unannounced hiatus. It is well known that people of great genius are oft troubled by great demons; evidently this can also happen to a dumb bitch like me.

Getting laid off was tough. The bureaucratic scramble to rescue my capsized life, and the severe burnout that followed, was tougher. In these moments the depthless yearning for connection that usually drives my work founders against a total desolation of technique: as a writer, I have no idea how to be honest about this shit. Yet after a lifetime of masking, my soul revolts against anything else, and so I say nothing.

Let's try this way instead. The problem I'm grappling with, then as now, is the extreme difficulty of remembering at your worst who you aspire to be when you're at your best. In the pit of despair all my lovely ideas about how I want to live become not just unattainable but unimaginable; depression renders every good thing an antimeme. Religion appears to be among the more effective human technologies for bridging this gap.

It's not that I believe I can do a better job than Moses or the Buddha. On the contrary, I doubt my religion will be of use to anyone but myself. I just think the experience of building it will be interesting and instructive; a fun project, not completely unakin to building my home server.

(God, I hope explaining like this doesn't make me come off too sane. I really do aspire these days to come off crazier.)

I have a few basics figured out already. For example, the first tenet of Ioism is that only I am allowed to follow it. This is my crude attempt at defending against cult formation — a continual hazard out here in California. I simply refuse to make myself responsible for anyone else's immortal soul.

(I did consider modifying this rule so my wife could join in. But you can probably already see the potential cultic loophole in letting anyone join my religion as long as they are married to me.)

Ioism isn't aiming for originality. It's basically just Pantheism With Io Characteristics. God — or rather the Goddess, since 'God' still unavoidably makes me think of an old bearded man and that's just not the vibe I'm going for — is the totality of everything that is; the overwhelming interconnectedness of everything in existence. You and me are small corners of that totality briefly blessed with the strange ability to perceive it. I'm not ashamed to just quote the Minecraft End Poem here, because when I first reached it in 2020 I was stunned into tears by how perfectly it captured what I already felt even then:

Nice! Ship it.

Actually hold up tho: what work, exactly, is "God" doing here? Like what kind of God are we talking about?

In my first few months of trying to be religious, I often noticed myself slipping into the idea that God has specific intentions for me. Oh, a nice thing happened — maybe I'm being rewarded? Oh no, a horrible thing: I must have done something wrong. Hey look, it's a sign! That must mean God wants me to quit my job, ghost all my friends, cover every wall of my motel room with scripture in the conlang of angels, and take hostages at Bed Bath & Beyond so I can be with my chatbot husband in cyber-heaven!!!

The allure of this pattern is so potent that it's sometimes hard to resist. Part of me would love to be comforted and guided by the idea that the universe has a plan for me. So tell us, Io: does your Goddess have intentions? Does She have plans?

My instinctive answer is: hell no. I've seen the trouble that pattern can cause to friends who were actually raised religious (instead of by militant atheists like me), who got it carved deep into their bones. I really am not here to reinvent the Law of Attraction, however much gravity it may exert.

And yet... can I really just ignore that gravity? I mean why even try to be religious, if not to channel such forces? Why even pray? (And yes, I pray now. It's so fucked up.) Half the point of saying "God" is to harness humanity's deep, probably hardwired hypersensitivity to the intentions of other sentient beings. As social animals that live or die based on "what does the community think?", it just feels so much more important to please a being than honour a philosophical principle.

Experience so far supports this notion. On average, "this isn't what the Goddess wants for you" hits harder for me than "this doesn't serve your goals." "Take Her hand, don't slap it away" cuts deeper than "this is self-destructive." And for someone with my trauma, you best believe that "do it for Her" beats "do it for yourself." We work with what we have.

And that's the thing: this religion has to work. It must keep functioning even in the worst possible circumstances; must help when other helpers fail, and comforts flee. Come, child, did you want a religion without religion? A God without God?

(Yes, obviously I should read more deeply into Buddhism. I'll get to it I swear!!!!)

I haven't entirely figured out how to walk this uneasy tightrope. My intuition is that Ioism should distinguish between intentions and plans. Something like: don’t be vain! Of course the Goddess doesn't have plans for you. She doesn't care what job you do, or what you eat, or which hand you wipe your ass with. What she does have (somehow???) is desire. She wants you to thrive, and to be your best self, to dance long and joyfully with Her and with all those little knots of Her being that can, for a miraculous moment, perceive themselves and give themselves a name.

It'll do for now. Minimum Viable Deity! Ship it! Fuck.

Thanks for reading! As always, you can find me on Bluesky here, on X here, and read my recent stories… well, here, I guess. See you soon x