Science Quote by Gregory Bateson

Bateson’s sentence lands with the cool inevitability of a systems thinker describing a feedback loop that’s already in motion. The key move is his dry “of course”: a little verbal shrug that treats the outcome not as an accident but as a predictable property of the environment. If a family’s religion is “weak,” he implies, it isn’t merely low-intensity belief; it’s low-connectivity to the institutions that would normally reinforce it. No church community, no shared rituals, no elders with authority, no periodic calibration of doctrine. The family becomes a closed circuit.

The subtext is less about faith than about transmission. Bateson, steeped in cybernetics and anthropology, is interested in how cultures reproduce themselves through patterned learning. Religious training is a case study in how a worldview becomes “second nature” only when multiple channels converge: home, community, school, public ceremony. Remove the outside nodes and you don’t just get diluted religion; you get religion deprived of redundancy, which is how traditions survive the inevitable noise of daily life.

There’s also a quietly sharp sociological observation embedded in “outside the family.” Weak religiosity can look like a private preference rather than a public identity. And private preferences don’t recruit institutions to do the work of teaching, disciplining, and rewarding adherence. Bateson’s intent isn’t to scold; it’s to point out a structural reality: when belief stops being social infrastructure, it stops being reliably teachable, and the next generation doesn’t so much rebel as simply fail to receive the code.