Worship

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Did Jesus ever indicate he should be worshiped?  That raises what do we mean by "worship?"  It's a weird idea if you think about it, and not something a deity or super being of some sort would have any reasonable use for, so if it is real it would have to be something commanded for our benefit: to teach us humility or something?  The problem is worshipers are not humble.  Humility is not making a big deal out of what we do.

We get statements like "God created us for His glory."  What is glory?  It is reasonable to think these things may stem from primitive submission/dominance instincts we evolved for social cohesion, and not spirituality.

By the way, yes it's "late-night." It's also early morning, and I'm an early riser; I had my eight hours.
4:08 AM

Good morning. Sharp question set — let me work through it.

Did Jesus claim to be worshiped?

The gospel record is genuinely ambiguous. Jesus accepts proskunesis (prostration, the Greek word translated "worship") in several passages — the healed leper, Thomas's "My Lord and my God," post-resurrection appearances. He doesn't refuse it the way Peter and Paul emphatically do when offered similar deference. But he also says things like "why do you call me good? Only God is good," which cuts the other direction. The fourth gospel's high Christology ("I and the Father are one") reads very differently from the synoptics' more ambiguous Jesus. What the historical Jesus actually claimed versus what the developing church attributed to him is genuinely contested — and was contested early, producing centuries of Christological argument.

The strangeness of worship

You've landed on something real. The concept is philosophically odd precisely because it's asymmetric in a way that serves the worshiper's psychology more than any plausible need of the object. A truly self-sufficient being would have no use for it — omnipotence plus neediness is an incoherent combination. Theologians have tried your move: worship exists for our formation, not God's gratification. But as you note, the empirical track record is poor. Collective worship tends to produce conformity, tribal identity, and hierarchical submission — the opposite of the humility it nominally cultivates.

Glory and dominance

"God created us for his glory" is a post-biblical theological formulation (prominent in Reformed theology especially) that has almost no good defense against the reading you're suggesting. Kabod in Hebrew means something like weight or presence — it's descriptive of God's reality, not a demand for applause. The doxological language metastasized in ways the original texts don't fully support.

The evolutionary reading

This is the most parsimonious account available. Submission displays, dominance hierarchies, and the social bonding that comes from shared ritual subordination to an alpha — all of that is deep primate hardware. Religion recruits it, scales it to cosmic proportions, and gives it metaphysical clothing. The phenomenology of awe in a cathedral or at a revival meeting is probably the same neural substrate as the subordinate chimp presenting to the dominant male, elaborated through culture into something that feels transcendent.

The interesting residual question is whether that evolutionary origin debunks the experience or merely explains its mechanism. The experience of mathematical beauty also has an evolutionary story. Most atheists (yourself presumably included) wouldn't say mathematics is therefore illusory. The debunking argument for religion requires an extra step — that the object of the experience doesn't exist independently of the experience — which is a strong claim and needs independent support.

But for worship specifically, the case for debunking is unusually clean: even granting a deity, the demand for worship is the part that looks most like projected human dominance dynamics. A genuinely alien intelligence of vast power would more plausibly be indifferent to our prostrations than gratified by them.

A Jehovah's Witness will decline to salute the flag, saying it's a form of worship of idols.  I don't get it.  I have no problem prostrating to the image of the Buddha to make the monks happy, and I kneel when appropriate in church.  I might as well be in a gym, as far as it has meaning to me beyond respect for the feelings of others.
4:14 AM

The JW position has a certain internal logic — if you take the Second Commandment seriously and read it broadly, any ritualized gesture of reverence toward a symbol becomes suspect. The flag salute issue actually went to the Supreme Court twice: first in 1940 (Gobitis, the Court ruled against them), then reversed in 1943 (Barnette), producing one of the more eloquent defenses of compelled speech in American jurisprudence. Jackson's majority opinion: "no official can prescribe what shall be orthodox."

But the theological reasoning requires collapsing a distinction you're making naturally and correctly — the difference between performative and sincere assertion, extended to gesture. When you bow before the Buddha or kneel in church, you're performing a social script whose meaning is relational, not confessional. You're saying "I respect this space and these people," not "I believe this object has supernatural power." That's a completely coherent position. Liturgical gesture and metaphysical commitment are separable things.

The JW view, and the fundamentalist Protestant tradition generally, can't make that separation because they've imported a hyper-literal reading of divine jealousy — God is monitoring not just your internal state but your physical posture, and the gesture is the belief regardless of your inner life. Which is actually a rather low view of divine intelligence.

What's interesting is that the tradition most associated with "personal relationship with God" and interior faith ends up being the one most fixated on external gesture — while traditions with elaborate ritual (Catholic, Orthodox, Buddhist, your Theravada neighbors) tend to be far more relaxed about what the ritual actually means to the individual performing it. The monks aren't worried about your soteriology when you prostrate. They're probably just pleased you're being respectful.

There's also something worth noting about the flag specifically: nationalism as a quasi-religious system is a real phenomenon, and the JWs aren't wrong that flag ceremonies have liturgical structure — pledge, salute, reverent posture, communal recitation. Their diagnosis of the phenomenon is arguably correct. Their response to it is where the reasoning goes sideways: the solution to one form of tribal ritual isn't to substitute another.

Oh I certainly agree with the court, there should be nothing mandatory about patriotic symbols.
4:16 AM

Yes, the compulsion is the problem regardless of what's being compelled. A voluntary flag salute is just a social gesture; a mandatory one is an oath extracted under duress — and at that point it's the state that's degraded the symbol, not the refuser.

Barnette is one of those rare cases where the Court got it right and said so memorably. Jackson understood that compelled orthodoxy defeats its own purpose — a loyalty you can force isn't loyalty, it's performance, and a government that can't tell the difference has confused the flag for the thing it represents.

Which loops back to your original point about worship in a way. The moment you make it mandatory — whether it's flag salutes, church attendance, or prostration — you've guaranteed that most of what you're getting is exactly the kind of empty gesture you yourself perform in the monks' presence. Except you're honest about it. The compelled patriot and the compelled churchgoer are in the same position as you before the Buddha, with the added degradation of not having chosen it.

The deeper irony with the JWs is that their refusal — genuinely voluntary, genuinely costly for them historically, involving real persecution — is a more authentic expression of conviction than the reflexive hand-over-heart of someone who never thought about it for thirty seconds. You can disagree entirely with their theology and still recognize that they're doing something the mandatory saluters are not: actually meaning it.

I was in a movie theater in Bangkok with a Thai friend, and he tells me they are going to play the Thai national anthem and everyone will stand.  Then he adds, knowing I'm American, "don't put your hand over your heart."
4:19 AM

Perfect advisory. He understood exactly where the category error would occur — the gesture that signals sincere patriotism in one context reads as either mockery or dangerous confusion in another. Standing is the universal baseline; the hand is the American gloss that would have imported the wrong meaning entirely.

It also says something good about your friend that he anticipated the problem. He wasn't embarrassed by the ritual or apologizing for it — just making sure you didn't accidentally perform a different ritual on top of it.

Thailand takes the anthem seriously in a way that has legal teeth — the lèse-majesté framework extends broadly, and a foreigner doing it wrong in a theater full of Thais could have had an awkward evening at minimum. He was being practically useful as much as culturally informative.

There's a nice little epistemology of cross-cultural gesture in that moment though. You knew to stand because standing is readable across contexts as "I respect what's happening here." The hand-over-heart is a layer of specificity that only works inside the system that generated it. Your friend was teaching you to operate at the right level of abstraction — specific enough to show respect, general enough not to assert membership in something you're not a member of.

Which is essentially what you do before the Buddha. Correct level of abstraction. No false claims embedded in the gesture.
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