church as lottery investment pool

Followers of supernatural beliefs are advised to band together. This advice has some savvy reasons behind it. One is the social pressure to keep followers from deviating. Each individual wants to avoid the loss of status in others' eyes, so none will dare even one step toward withdrawing. Another reason is that being surrounded by a large group of followers offers comfort about the reasonableness of the beliefs. It's much less unnerving than the feeling that their belief is like walking out alone on a ledge, clinging to ideas that nobody else accepts. Yet another reason to encourage solidarity is so that the followers can consult each other to justify their beliefs. They can ask and answer each other's questions. This is especially handy because some beliefs provoke a very predictable set of questions. The group can continually repeat the common set of responses to those common questions. Beyond helping to address each other's questions in words, followers can model the beliefs. Seeing the beliefs demonstrated is more compelling than reading the beliefs from a book. 

For all these reasons and more, shepherding followers into tightly packed flocks is widely recognized as important, if not indispensable, for maintaining their beliefs long-term. A follower who is merely starting to break away is like a flashing warning sign that their beliefs might be at risk. No wonder followers who move are strongly urged to rejoin other followers nearby. And followers who don't show up regularly can expect to be asked about their absence ("for their own good").

But there's a more subtle reason also at work. A huge difficulty with any supernatural idea is that its impact on detectable reality is normally so slight. In fact, someone who examines the impact in a neutral and careful way may begin to wonder whether it's there at all. Needless to say this could reflect very badly on their confidence that the idea is real. It might seem to "pay off" about as frequently as a lottery ticket.

To some degree, followers can cope by conveniently forgetting almost all times when the idea "misses its chance" to have an effect. (I once compared this to playing Battleship without any white pegs, so the player can go on thinking whatever they like about their opponent's fleet positions.) However, they can do even better through the combined effort of a group: the more followers there are, the more players are contributing to the "supernatural confirmation lottery". The group can pool their results by eagerly keeping in touch about anyone's payoff. Perhaps follower A hasn't seen any good signs lately that their supernatural ideas are credible, while follower B has seen an adequate sign last week—or a sign that meets the need if the viewer tilts their head and squints just right, anyway.

The lottery comparison is apt because some events are certain to happen eventually purely by chance. There are such things as beneficial coincidences from time to time; these would occur naturally without any behind-the-scenes supernatural fiddling. Assuming beneficial coincidences are reliable signals of the supernatural intersecting with reality (a bad assumption in my opinion of course...), then a sizable group of followers can expect to see these signals more than an isolated follower. This is just the same phenomenon as how a pool of investors buying lottery tickets can expect to experience a greater total of winnings over a specific period. 

And it's boosted further when the group doesn't keep track of the group's total number of misses any more consistently than an individual does about their own. For that matter, the followers simply don't bother to report their misses to the group anyhow. (Neither do they exchange notes with groups of followers of drastically different supernatural beliefs. If they saw this strategy working equally as well for groups who follow "false" religions then that might lead to hard questions.)

Far too often I've gotten the impression that followers of supernatural beliefs are viewed as sloppy or lazy thinkers. This stereotype might be about as accurate as their stereotype that atheists are amoral schemers whose goal is to outlaw every form of religion. The truth is more interesting and could be described with many metaphors. Their thinking is compromised. It's functional but infected. They've been fed skillful misinformation. They're aimed at the wrong targets. They're viewing the world through colored goggles that filter out contrary clues. They're perpetuating a time-tested system of beliefs that have endured because so many humans are susceptible to this system. I wouldn't say that this is a full excuse for how they think and especially not for how they act, but it's a basis for understanding them.