Hello, my name is Greg Lewicki, I am a philosopher by training, so I am entitled to say weird things and I will make use of this.
I will be speaking about salvation of the soul and computer simulations. It's possible that these two things have something in common.
But give me a moment now. Think please. Think of what were your musings before you arrived here at TEDx.
Do you have anxiety in your soul? Maybe you experience difficulties in your school, maybe your children experience such difficulties, or you have a gigantic loan to repay, or you have some problems with your health.
Well, today in a globalised society we all suffer from anxiety. 
Today, more frequently than ever, we are saved from anxiety by psychologists. 
Once, when such a profession didn't exist, we were saved from anxiety mainly by religions.  Among these religions - Christianity.
It might be that amongst us there are some Christians present. But definitely, for all of you who know the city of Gdansk the abundance of Christian sacral architecture is evident.
For example, here we have Saint Mary's Church of Gdansk, construction of which started in the 14th century. It's the biggest brick place of worship built in gothic style in Europe.  
That's the 14th century, but to understand the genesis of a religion we have to travel back further in time, to the times of its origin. Let's do that. 
Christianity emerged in the Roman Empire, a great political entity, something almost like the European Union, but was centered around the Mediterranean Sea. 
A very dynamic system, with lots of demographic flows, instable politically, lots of religions in a vehement competition for recruits, for converts.
Jesus Christ used to teach in this setting, in Judaea. He was a renegade Jewish Rabbi, who turned Judaist religious terms upside down. He claimed salvation from anxiety is for everyone. 
He gathered a great crowd of followers, so great that he became a political threat.  Politicians were afraid his social authority may generate political unrest.
As we know from history, Jesus was neutralized, through crucifixion. But this great emotional ferment, this great upheaval caused by his teachings on how to save people from anxiety -- survived.
A known story, there were 12 apostles who undertook the mission of transforming Jesus' thought into a social and organizational project.
Only twelve of them? Wait a minute. Think about it. They say "twelve", but he was speaking to enormous crowds. Apart from the twelve, there were hundreds and thousands of self-pronounced apostles.
Thousands of people wanted to employ his thought for their own agendas or at least to interpret this thought subjectively.
And now let's return to the Roman Empire, imagine we live there, whatever the city, after the crucifixion. 
We wake up in the morning, we set off to buy some bread, quite a normal thing to do in the morning.
We start at point A to reach the bakery, we have to wander around a bit. Who will we meet on our way?
Many social groups. To the left some pagans, somewhere in the back -- a synagogue and a bit further down a group of people discussing the crucifixion of Christ. Crucifixion was a hot media topic those days.
Mind you, they agreed that Jesus was an extraordinary character, who spoke out something really important and was killed for his words. But that's all they agreed about. 
The first Christians who struggled to interpret Jesus' teachings were totally unable to reach any consensus, apart from respecting Jesus as a saviour from anxiety.
A great plurality of different standpoints. While studying philosophy I thought: let's process this somehow. But make it different from what's already present in tons of books written on the issue. 
I thought of computational social science. It's a trend in social sciences which says something along the lines of: if you want to draw cool sociological conclusions, you should extract a few constitutive relations you observe, throw them all into a simulator and see what happens. Then you analyse all this.
Ok, but how to do it? We have these books, but... imagine we're back in the Roman city on our way to bakery. Now... 
Simplify this! Simplify! Let's tinker around and simplify Rome. Reduce it to the form of a torus populated by agents. Different colours marking different religions. 
Ok, cool, we have a torus. What's next? Take a grand work, like the Christian history by Eusebius of Caesarea and take some contemporary book on the issue, say by journalist Robert Wright.
From this book emerges an image that's contrary to our popular image of early Christianity seen as an ideological monolith.
What emerges is multitude of different strategies of salvation. I will spare you the doctrinal peculiarities of all the Roman religions, I'll make it short. 
You can order the relations between religions according to some general criteria. For example, here we have "the complexity of ritual and doctrine" together with the criterion of "proselytism", which is about goals and range of missionary action.
So we have Pagans in Rome. The white colour. Numerous religious groups, yet chaotic and disorganised. They didn't manage to get organised into a great social movement, as they were only aiming to be a bond for local societies.
Another faith, Judaism, green, perceived Jesus as a renegade Rabbi, a revolutionary, who wanted to make their religion unduly, universally accessible.
At that time Judaism had quite a complicated ritual. Among others, the adepts were asked to keep strict dietary rules and they had to undergo the ritual of circumcision.
Other religions, blue, red and yellow are the branches of Christianity. 
Paulines, blue, were the followers of Saint Paul, forefathers of Christianity as we know it today. They said: take the Jewish ritual, simplify it, but universalise its reach.
Marcionites, red, were quite similar to the Paulines with one exception. They said: "don't preach to the Jews". They were anti-Semites. Among others, they refused to utilise the infrastructure of synagogues for preaching and spreading their own ideas.
Now, Ebionites, yellow, an interesting case, they said: "Christianity must be universal, but the ritual must remain complex. Before accepting Christianity you have to go through all rituals typical for Judaism".
I might have already made you bored, but I say this, because in principle you can transform all this into an algorithm.
That is to say, you may formalise the behaviour and relations between the religious denominations to analyse it.
Here's the code of a small program I made. And here you have a control panel. 
Some variables can be modified and adjusted. The environment is called Netlogo and  a torus with a game is on the right side.
Let's launch it now. Each turn, every single agent tries to convert a selected neighbour into their own religion in accordance with historically specified rules. 
Now it's on. The rivalry is quite dynamic, the amount of Pagans, coloured white, decreases. The amount of blues, reds and yellows increases.
The amount of greens stabilises at a certain level. 
Now it slows down. The market for religious services becomes saturated, the majority is now following an expansive religion. It's quite important. Expansive agents start to convert one another. 
A trend becomes visible, a game was not fully won by the blues, but they dominated it. This means the game will continue, but the proportions will not be changing too much anymore. Anyway, the market of religious services became dominated by the Christianity of Saint Paul. 
Where does this success come from? Historically, indeed, Saint Paul's doctrine dominated the Roman Empire. 
It is all due to the genius of Saint Paul, who created an organizational model for Christianity. How? I think it's simple in a sense, he was just a master, a true master in overcoming the barriers.
He broke many barriers and complexity of ritual was one of them. If you have many religions that offer salvation from anxiety, then religion with too complex a ritual may end up with a smaller amount of recruits.
If you must spend time to perform a very complex ritual only to receive in exchange peace and salvation identical to peace and salvation offered by others at "cheaper price", well, then you might start to wonder.
That is why Paul said: simplify the ritual. You only need to proclaim Jesus as your saviour and its all you need at the beginning. This mattered a lot.
Exclusion, another thing Romans were struggling with. The vast majority of religions at that time were excluding some social groups from their herd. There are many reasons why they did it, like political, which made them fraternise with these men but not others. 
Saint Paul said: "devil take it!". Devil, Greek word "diapal" means division, discord. So devil is the one who divides, God is someone who joins, who washes divisions away.
You could see this with an example. It is a graph representing our game. 
Look at the competition between the blues and the reds. 
The reds, these anti-Semites, were performing like the blues, but after a certain time the religious market becomes saturated. But the reds were excluding Jews so they started to lose with the blue ones. This mechanism was decisive for the rest of the game.
Another barrier for effective growth is a lack of continuity. Psychologists among us can confirm this. We are like the passengers from the Polish movie "Journey" who will only like the things they already know.
Saint Paul said: "devil takes it" and he decided to root his faith in a great, attractive narrative of Judaism. He said: "We will support ourselves on the books of Judaism to show the continuity of God's message to the world".
This surely made Christianity more attractive in the eyes of the first believers. 
Compare the blues and reds again. Marcionites, the reds, claimed that they follow Christ, but they are a completely novel entity and they don't want any ties with Judaism, they would not pretend to have a long history behind them.
This proved bad for their survival. People, if they are believers, they want to believe in something important, with a touch of eternity.
Another barrier was bad organisation. Pagans were disorganised. 
The groups had different habits of proceeding, no one united them. In turn Saint Paul created a decent business model of Love. 
No, it's not a joke, this is how it was. We'll see.  Let's look at the "Hymn to Love", I'll read the first line: 
"If I speak in the tongues of men and of angels but do not have love, I am a noisy gong or a clanging cymbal" (1Kor 13).
It's a cool piece of poetry, in terms of artistic quality. But looking through the eyes of Paul we could read this piece a bit more profoundly.
"If I am a great Christian preacher, so great that people follow me and I have the authority to reinterpret the teachings of Christ on my own, should this be the case, but if don't love my own congregation, I am nothing". 
This might have been an encoded message of Paul to his followers, possibly, to prevent them from detaching from the big Christian society and creating competing churches.
You could notice two similar types of love in Paul's division of Love.
One of them was "universal love", with the other being "familiar love". Universal love is something early Christianity has been known for: spreading religion, voluntary work, charity, saving from anxiety, helpfulness and openness. Come, check out our mass, stay if you like it, but if you don't that's ok. It's altruism towards the world.
But after a recruit gets converted, the familiar love becomes more restrictive. It says: "if you don't have love, you're nothing". Which means: you must be obedient to the hierarchy to make the community flourish.
In this spirit, Christianity created Canonical Law, based on Roman Law, which has been regulating inner relations and relations with the world. It also worked out a model for generating money in order to spread "universal love" through charity.
Inner relations were based on cooperation, the mood of familiar love, joy. The alienated people of a globalised Roman Empire appreciated this mood. 
It is then, when an idea of a parish was created, a social group centered around a temple. Parish after parish Christianity spread through the whole empire. 
Now its spread was impressive. Emperor Constantine adopted it as a state religion. Why? There is a story about it. 
Before a great battle Constantine decided he must pray for victory. Historians say he had a vision. He saw a cross on the sky and heard the words "Under this sign you shall conquer".
Was this really what was revealed to him from Heaven? We don't really know. 
But there's one thing... I really feel I understand the choice of Constantine.
If your empire is crackling, you experience a political impasse, then support yourself with a religion which is not only popular, helpful to others, but also consistent and disciplined. That was Constantine's secret.
So let's end with this. If in your organisation, society or corporation there is difficulty, maybe you should just adopt Saint Paul's model and, simply speaking, love one another!
