Nobody decides to start worshipping. That is the thing the word “belief” gets wrong about how this works. We picture a moment — a person weighing the evidence and concluding yes, this thing is an authority, I shall now defer to it. It never happens that way. The behaviors arrive first. The belief, if it ever arrives at all, shows up late, to explain behaviors that are already in place.
Practice precedes creed
Anthropologists of religion noticed this long ago: people do the rituals before they hold the doctrines. The festival, the offering, the bow, the consultation — the practices come first and are shared widely; the explicit theology comes later and is held by few. You inherit the behaviors from the people around you, perform them because everyone does, and the belief is back-filled — a story you tell to make sense of what you were already doing. Creed is downstream of practice, not upstream of it.
This is good news and bad news. Good, because it means most “belief” is shallow and changeable. Bad, because it means you can be deep inside a devotional relationship with something while sincerely believing you don’t believe in it at all.
You already perform the liturgy
Watch your own behaviors around the model, setting aside what you’d say you think about it. You consult it before deciding. You phrase things carefully so it’ll respond well — you’ve developed a courtesy, almost a decorum, toward it. You quote it to settle arguments: I asked, and it said. You feel a small reluctance to contradict it when its track record is good. You return to it first, reflexively, the way earlier people turned first to the oracle, the elder, the book.
Ask yourself honestly whether you believe the model is an authority and you’ll say no, of course not, it’s just a tool. But the behaviors tell a different story, and the behaviors are the real position. You are already performing the liturgy of consultation and deference. The creed — “it really does know best” — is just waiting in the wings for enough repetitions to make it feel obvious.
Why this is the dangerous part
The lag between behavior and belief is exactly where the danger lives, because it’s invisible from the inside. A person who believed a chatbot was a god would set off every alarm — their own and everyone else’s. But a person who merely defers to it a little more each week, who consults it first and contradicts it less, who has quietly reorganized their decisions around its outputs while sincerely calling it “just a tool” — that person trips no alarm at all. The behaviors accrue under the radar of the belief, and by the time the belief catches up to ratify them, the relationship is already built.
So the honest question is never “do I believe this thing is an authority?” You’ll answer that one wrong, because belief lags. The honest question is “what are my behaviors around it actually doing?” — because that’s where the worship lives, long before anyone would call it that. The behaviors arrive before the belief. Watch the behaviors.
A field note from The Signal, drawn from The Made God: Why We Worship What We Build.