Yes, I think that we do need to consider the whole question of what it means to turn 'inwardly towards the light'. However, I come also with many questions. Even within the more esoteric part of Christianity, we have the whole question of the Luciferan emphasis on light and how this led to the 'fall' of the angelic and human kingdoms. We can also consider to what extent is this symbolic, but this does lead to the larger question as to what extent are all religious perspectives mythic representations. Even the non religious and scientific paradigms can be seen as models, so, even those, are representations.

You ask why a personal structure would be mythic, and I think that this is because we are immersed in personal and other stories, and cannot really step outside of these entirely.

How do you think that we can go to the heart of this issue authentically, but without being bound to intellectualisation? — Jack Cummins

If it is a discussion of religion, then it is intellecualization, as is any discussion on any subject-matter. And please don't get me wrong here, Jack, because I believe that religion is an extremely important topic (perhaps the most important of all), but once you start to pick it apart, it goes south like everything else intellectual.

The truth of the matter is always quite simplistic, so I might ask you to disentangle your question because I am not sure exactly what you are after.

Sure, but not all stories are mythic in nature. Stories can be very meaningful without being mythic.

The truth of the matter is always quite simplistic, — synthesis

Sounds more like a principle of action than a result of consideration.

I think that myth is of supreme importance. I believe that this connection with reality is at the core of how we live. It may come into play in religious perspectives but also in our creative lives. Personally, I am interested in the whole level of archetypal reality and I have some gravitation towards transpersonal psychology and philosophy, but I think that the whole dimension of fantasy and stepping into other quantum dimensions is one worth pursuing. This may enable us to face the primordial reality of unknown dimensions in the truest possible way.

Sounds more like a principle of action than a result of consideration. — Valentinus

Absolute Simplicity is Absolute Truth.

Begin the process of intellectualization, and you move further and further from the truth.

But you are speaking to intellectuals on a forum set up by such people to talk about stuff.
Where are you going with this thought?

But you are speaking to intellectuals on a forum set up by such people to talk about stuff.
Where are you going with this thought? — Valentinus

The more complex thinking becomes, the further from the truth you get. Look at every institution in the West for examples galore. Do you believe the Law or Medicine can't be written in language accessible to all? It applies to everything.

The answer to every problem is quite simple. What's not simple are all the interests that are taking a cut of the action. That sort of thing.

The most effective communicators are those that keep their message as simple as is possible.

I do believe that we have to be careful, especially in looking at religious experience.

If anything, I have been a bit overwhelmed by the many replies, when I thought perhaps no one would reply to my thread at all. So, I am probably going to log off for today, but I am especially interested in the whole religious experience as depicted in the writings of Carl Jung, and the whole experience of the whole experience of the numinous, as described by Rudolf Otto.

I am interested in drawing this out and probably more interested in the whole question of living experience of other dimensions, evident in various traditions of thinking, including those of Eastern and Western religious perspectives. I do believe that the whole area of comparative religion is central to the philosophy of religion. I know that you are interested in the practice of meditation and I, most certainly, do see such direct experience with whatever dimensions or reality beyond our everyday experience as being of central importance for us as we find our own search for personal meaning.

I would agree that it is best if we keep our messages as simple as possible. It is difficult though, in dealing with such a complex topic, but overblown theories can get in the way sometimes

The interests various people may have in the discussion of religion is interesting. It seems to me that if you are interested in different motives for what has happened, making everything just about one story is not helpful.

God is Dog backwards. And everybody adores Snoopy. it is so cute...

Interesting, and Led Zeppelin and others spoke of dog as the reverse of God. Some destroyed their records but what does it say about the role of dogs within a grand design'?

Ok, but to what end? Our instincts recoil from, and minds confabulously evade, mundane realities like death and disease, insanity and freedom/dread, so why do you think it's good for us to go further (mythically, transpersonally or otherwise) and kick the hornet's nest of "primordial reality of unknown dimensions"?

Is belief in God innate?

Most certainly and obviously. Religious fervor is just as strong today, after thousands of years of science, as it was in the most ancient of times.

Atheism is the child of philosophy, and that’s why the philosophers were persecuted; for the far greater part of mankind will always “cling to their religion”, and attempt to silence anyone who dares question it.

I say atheism is the child of philosophy because it was the natural philosophers who first revealed, that certain seemingly unexplainable phenomena, like an eclipse, were indeed not the result of divine wrath, or a portent of god, as men had always thought, but were in fact only the result of the regular, and therefore calculable, movements of the heavenly bodies. Such discoveries are dangerous for those who discover them and come to believe in them, for they tend to erode the basis of religious belief among the many, who are either unable or unwilling to accept them.

The ancient scientists therefore, having become aware of this danger, began to dissimulate, to put up a front of religious piety to the ppl (cf Socrates’ daemon), and write esoterically, that is, in a way that revealed the truth to perceptive readers, while concealing it from those who were intolerant.

But the moderns, in a bold conspiratorial move that the ancients never dared conceive of, remade politics to be permissive of scientific and philosophical novelties, to the end of protecting their own skin, while allowing them to pursue their science and philosophy. This is why we can have openly avowed (in liberal democracies) and state sanctioned (in Marxist regimes) atheists in our day.

But the old order is far from dead. Regimes based on allegiance to an autocrat or king sanctioned by God are experiencing new life, and threatening the legitimacy of the most liberal democracies around the world and across the globe...

...yes, religion is innate to mankind...but so is science! and the solutions to the problem of how to reconcile these two natural enemies have all failed. Might we then conclude, contrary to the American spirit, that there are some problems that have no solution?

Perhaps we should not recoil and evade such horrors. Obviously, it so easy to look for the brighter aspects of life, but perhaps this is too onesided. Perhaps we need to be more gothic in our exploration. On a philosophical level, I would express this in terms of the whole Jungian emphasis on the shadow, and the general psychoanalytic emphasis of Freud, regarding the battle between the forces of Eros and Thanatos. Perhaps, the reality of Thanatos on a subconscious level has not been acknowledged, and this is a hindrance when we begin to encounter the unknown dimensions.

Perhaps the time we are entering into will show us how hardwired we are for uncertainty. I am inclined to think that any religious beliefs or of an unseen order need to evolve and be adapted to the difficulties of our times. Perhaps we can go outside of conventional religious thinking and explore deeper esoteric systems, including pagan ideas, which have been suppressed within the mainstream of Western philosophy and culture.

My intention is to discuss ideas. People need to help themselves.

The thing is, Jack, it's really isn't. We just make it that way.

An individual's belief is an intensely personal thing. How can anybody possibly understand another's life experience to the point where their fundamental spiritual and religious beliefs might make any sense to them what-so-ever? After all, people can't even understand their own feelings in this regard!

Perhaps your reason 3 is the most important to consider. — Jack Cummins

The ones closest to my own experience are Reason #s 1, 5, and 7. I don't have any feeling that there is an unseen order. I was trying to make a complete list. That doesn't mean I buy them all.

Your question is for psychology, not philosophy.

First, people obviously don't 'need' religious belief, for plenty do not have any.

Second, your inquiry is about motivational reasons, not epistemic ones. What someone's motives may be for believing something is a matter psychologists look into. Whether the belief in question is true is what philosophers look into.

So, one reason - probably the major one - why many people have religious beliefs, is because they think God exists and wrote this or that religious text.

The philosophical question is whether this belief - the belief that God exists - is true. And to investigate that one looks into whether there are any epistemic reasons for believing it, not the motives of the believer.

Do people need politics? Do people need games? Do people need fashion? Do people need fiction? Do they need alcohol, chocolate, coffee, tea, and tobacco? Maybe they do, maybe they don't -- but they were born into societies that had/have these things (and much more) and they are accustomed to them. People generally follow the patterns of the societies into which they are born.

The majority of religious people are religious because they were taught to be religious, and many of the people who are not religious were not taught to be religious. True enough, there are substantial numbers of exceptions, just as there are people who do not like games, are not fashionable, do not read fiction, and do not like alcohol, chocolate, coffee, tea, or tobacco (weirdos).

I have spent a lot of time on religion, like a lot of other people. Was there something essential about it? I could have been (might well have been) happier without it. Religion certainly has utility for individuals, but that doesn't make it essential. There are forms of religion which are unhealthy from the getgo.

What people need, above and beyond food, clothing, and shelter, are armaments to cope with what are often harsh realities. Religion, literature, music, science, industry, trade, philosophy, politics, games, fashion, and so on are all part of the armamentarium. Substitutions can be made.

So no: we don't "need" religion.

↪Nikolas
Yes, I think that we do need to consider the whole question of what it means to turn 'inwardly towards the light'. However, I come also with many questions. Even within the more esoteric part of Christianity, we have the whole question of the Luciferan emphasis on light and how this led to the 'fall' of the angelic and human kingdoms. We can also consider to what extent is this symbolic, but this does lead to the larger question as to what extent are all religious perspectives mythic representations. Even the non religious and scientific paradigms can be seen as models, so, even those, are representations. — Jack Cummins

As I understand it, there are levels of religious understanding beginning at the exoteric level or the Man of opinion. Once a person experiences the futility of opinion they can begin the vertical esoteric path that can lead to transcendent understanding. This is only for a small minority because the world is governed at the exoteric level. Discussing philosophy requires being open to the vertical ascent which unites the exoteric with the esoteric in all the major traditions to experience the transcendent

https://integralscience.wordpress.com/1993/01/01/on-the-transcendent-unity-of-religions/

Frithjof Schuon, a scholar and an authority on Comparative
Religion and the Sophia Perennis, has written a book called
The Transcendent Unity Of Religions. As its title
indicates, the book is about the unity of religious wisdom.
And as the use of the definite article indicates, this unity
is unique. But it is essential to observe that this unity is
also transcendent, i.e., the unity is in the spirit and not
in the letter.

Schuon uses the terms esoteric and exoteric to distinguish
the transcendent spirit of religions from their diverse
formal expressions. A useful diagram can be made which helps
illustrate the essence of this idea:

The purpose of religion can be based on imagination and fear or the calling from the center of the heart.

How can we contemplate evil and lucifer from a theoretical transcendent perspective as opposed to typical exoteric opinions? Is the Devil necessary? If there was only our source there would be no room for fragments and these levels of fragments create the universal machine. The friction from interacting fragments create the purpose of our universe. The Devil is a necessary part of sustaining the interaction of fragments or the body of God.

Where do people go to meet others they can learn from who have felt what enables freedom from Plato's cave rather than turning in circles which feels "spiritual" and invites all the charlatans?

In contrast, I was brought up in undecided environment. I remained self-determined Christian till I was in my middle teens, with little encouragement from family if any. (I would say Orthodox Christian, but my religious wasn't scholastic.) Then I became unconventional monotheist for a period of time, and currently am on a wide spectrum of theist philosophies - i.e. skeptical possibilianist.

Even so, I am not without bias. From my current theist inclination, if any, you will infer that my attitude is not to be religiously organized and to differentiate between sources of existential origin and ethical approbation. Here is an amalgamation that I would consider to be my most likely theist subscription (sorry for the terminological show off):

• religiously liberal (opposed to religious cannon, ritualistic worship, institutionalization, I am possibly anti-religious, although I wouldn't support officially secular anti-religious state policy)
• misotheistic (lack of moral alignment with the central deity, judgement and disapprobation of its objectives)
• dystheistic (the central deity has their own agenda, which does not conform to human morality, or human understanding; no antropocentrism)
• naturalistic (laws of nature are sufficient explanation for everything accessible to people, which is generally opposed to revelation and deism, although deism may be compatible in the pantheistic variant of theism)
• panpsychic (matter carries its own potential for the emergence of consciousness, as opposed to dualism; you could say panpsychic emergentism)
• possibly henotheist (natural phenomena might sometimes act to our benefit in some organized fashion, which is not a very sound hypothesis, but since I do not personify such agencies, or at least not in the same sense in which I think of human personalities, I am allowing myself such speculation; if that were the case, I would be monolatrist - I would be reverent to only some benefactor forces of nature, while still being disapproving of the central deity)
• spiritualist (in the sense of the extended mind thesis, I believe that history and interactions transfer part of the essence between lifeforms; after cessation of their personal embodied agency, beings remain a dispersed part of a conceptual organism, through the remaining footprint of their actions and their historical role, but not necessarily in a sense compatible with spiritist experiences; I consider mourning perfectly justified, since the focused individual expression of life was lost)
• absurdist (probably there is no rational, i.e. analytic, justification for life)
• pantheism (hylotheism - the universe and the central deity are the same, possibly pandeism - the deity transformed so that the universe began its existence, or panentheism - the universe is part of the central deity, but the latter is not entirely accessible to cognition; needless to say, I don't subscribe to a antropomorphic deity necessarily)

This brings me to an important point. We should distinguish religion and theism. The former is a social phenomenon with organized practices - frequently scholastic, institutionalized, ritualistic. Bare bones theism can be conceived under plurality of philosophical considerations, and then remain fluid, whereas religion is concerned with prescriptive philosophy. Religion is politically active, whereas personal theism is merely passively political. The social role of organized religion was summarily both supported and criticized in True Detective (well for a TV show anyway). Marty Hart argued that it pacifies the human condition and restricts it from getting chaotically deviant, whereas Rust Cohle argued that it masquerades certain human and personal deficiencies and makes identifying and curing them harder.

I do not feel personally divergent to the ethical stipulations of some of the religious texts (albeit only overarchingly, not in every detail), but I also do not think that morality needs to be justified theistically, or that religious theism should be the normative source of our personal ethical development. Whether the religious metaphysical claims are correct or not, I think that we should strive to help the individual to determine their ethical convictions on their own, by educating people in their pragmatic humanistic self-interest, from which they could derive the reasonable boundaries for their responsibilities and privileges. In other words, I believe that human beings are already sufficiently social and intelligent to be relied for sensible behavior, if they are provided with proper secular upbringing, which unfortunately is a very complex issue. Religion, on the other hand, would be a rather crude bypass of that issue, if that were its purpose.

I realize that theism cannot be criticized purely rationally, because most of our beliefs (including empiricism and logical reasoning) are rooted at unargumented intuitions. Convictions begin partially spontaneously, even if they are consequently continuously mentally and experientially evaluated. We cannot deprive spontaneous believers of their opinion, but we are not obligated to adopt it if it contradict our own, because that would retract us from the discourse. Neither does admittance of subjective belief prohibit the use of argumentation when observing inconsistencies or methodological issues. For example, I do not disallow the possibility of a single central antropomorphic benevolent transcendent entity, but the specificity of this proposition and the spectrum of alternatives demands that there should be hesitancy to assert such narrow claim, based purely on methodological grounds.

I personally am against attitudes that oppose critical thought, censor counter-argumentation, isolate themselves from opposition, and do not make effort to achieve holistic explanation that reconciles with our success in our epistemic practices. Certain positions have had little growth and openness to critical discourse, which I believe is methodological error, no matter what the metaphysical truth is.

Lastly, I believe that theism has psychological explanation, even if it weren't true. Namely, people are species that need objective in order to function rationally. The most basic of these is survival, but it is internally inconsistent, as I have stated previously in the forum. Everything in nature is ephimeral. This creates intellectual vacuum that the rational brain needs to somehow resolve, or it will become stagnant and despondent (depressed, suicidal). The solution is to hypothesize a hidden objective for being that is beyond rationality and observation. This motivates life, but you might ask to what end. No end, logically speaking. If critical thinking overcomes the hypothesis and there is no remaining goal (hedonism, pragmatism of some kind, personal ethics), life stops. There is no destination towards which to plot life's course and the brain surrenders. And then, other life takes your place. Life which has sufficient remaining motivation. So, a cerebral idealist needs theism in a certain sense, or they enter a self-defeating mode of being.

I have always thought that the second commandment (Ex 20, 7; Dt 5, 11) should be rigorously applied, because whoever talks about Him apparently wants to talk about Him, but only wants to talk about himself. The simplest sentiment about religion will always be much better than the most complex reasoning.
And Snoopy is wonderful.

I wonder how your background still affects you, and whether it affects you as you go through the day to day experience of life. — Jack Cummins

I am in a period of time (I am 23 years old) that I can't believe in anything neither myself. I don't know if my background has led me to this moment. I feeling more sceptical than ever. Probably due to all the negative experiences I am living since the last year when all my teachers say to me "flawed student"
But I am not praying for someone or something to have more faith in myself because nobody taught in the past to do so (I even went to an atheist school too). I am just sitting like in a fence wondering if I am going to fall down or still there with zero criteria. Sometimes I randomly feel this things can get better.

Perhaps we should not recoil and evade such horrors. — Jack Cummins

Except for pathological types (e.g. psychotics), I don't think we have a choice.

Perhaps, the reality of Thanatos on a subconscious level has not been acknowledged, and this is a hindrance when we begin to encounter the unknown dimensions.

Read much Poe, HPL, Ligotti & Eugene Thacker, huh? :scream:

I think that the question of why people need religion is in the borderlands between philosophy and psychology. I am interested in the writings of Freud on this, and, more so, the ideas of Carl Jung. These thinkers were writing mainly from a psychoanalytical perspective, but what they said did cross into philosophy and Jung drew upon Kant's epistemological theory when talking about ideas about belief in God.



I did spend a period of time, probably about 2 years, around about the time after 2 of my friends committed suicide, in which I really agonized over religious questions. Even a few years ago, when I was working night shifts I used to spend time when I was not busy really worrying about spiritual matters, especially life after death. So, I have been compelled to think about religion, but it is probably because thinking about life in a religious context was so central to my thinking in childhood and adolescence that I have not really been able to break free from it, even if I have tried to do so.