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I find the idea of externally 'atoning' for your sins and/or expelling them in some way disturbing. If you do wrong and feel bad you deserve it. These emotions are yours now and you must carry them on with you. Trying to get away from this burden or attempting to ameliorate the pain through some self afflicting physical process is an act of rebellion against your own conscience. You are running away from pain your 'being' is telling you to feel. Paying a price for wrongdoing, for example a legal price, should not be seen as an excuse to free yourself from your deserved emotional turmoil.
Reading about pious pilgrims flagellating for faith, I'm reminded of people who speedrun video games. I feel sad when I see videos of them getting a new best time, springing out of their crusty chairs in a dimly lit room, screaming in elation: A new world record! Who knows how much effort, how many hours these folks spend on this completely insular and self driven compulsion to get the best time that is of no consequence to anything at all. But this perversion of effort and strife gets paraded around as an important accomplishment by similarly minded people.
Much like a sad teenager playing Super Mario for the millionth time, a pious pilgrim will do a real life barefoot desert speedrun. This is not an external exercise. It's completely internal. Completely useless and devoid of value beyond the perverted compulsion of the speedrunning pilgrim.
Reflection is important. Twisting and contorting your body to push yourself towards a better understanding of what life is for you can be noble and good. Struggle and strife for its own sake can also be good. But it has to be done for the sake of something actually 'real'. I think it's universally recognized that the only actually 'real' thing is having children and raising them. Anything else that is not working towards this goal is ultimately fake.
As an aside: To that extent you can pinpoint an ultimate 'gotcha' on the new religious right. As far as Christianity being a proxy for people successfully having children, it is obviously good. Beyond that, it's very little beyond philosophical speedrunning.
Couldn't you say the same of any art or hobby without a practical use, though?
Could you? I think most normal people have a very immediate and visceral understanding of the difference between a 'good' hobby and a 'bad' one.
For example, kayaking doesn't seem to have any immediate 'practical use', but I can tell you with full confidence that it's a much better hobby than playing Donkey Kong Racing on repeat.
One could probably write essays on why and argue at length through whatever wordgames possible back and forth, but I think most people share this fundamental understanding on the matter.
At this point many speedrunners are living off of it, so it's more like a career path.
I don't think there are that many who can realistically look at speedrunning as a career path. Especially not relative to how many participate in the activity. On top of that, many of those that are living off of it are living a sedentary isolated lifestyle where they have no responsibilities or costs that reach beyond their personal needs. Needs that usually don't reach beyond their bedrooms. Their 'living' doesn't cost all that much, and, sad to say, probably isn't worth all that much.
I'd also add that, relative to a 'good' hobby, you don't need an excuse like 'it makes me money' to confidently partake in it. You spend money on kayaking to go out on the water to paddle around and you still look far superior to someone who takes five hundred to a thousand dollars per month streaming their speedruns of Mario.
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Every religion has this kind of ‘speed running’ rules lawyerism. Many Buddhists believe that instead of chanting mantras you can just spin prayer wheels with them inscribed. In Bhutan, when I visited, the natives would hold them in rivers or running streams, or even let them float away, or build water wheel contraptions. If it spins a thousand times, that’s a thousand prayers, right? Far more efficient than saying them yourself.
If it happens in faiths as diverse as Buddhism and Christianity, I would expect that pre-Abrahamic European folkways / religions would have similar things. It’s just who we are.
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