So no: we don't "need" religion. — Bitter Crank
The reason I say this is because many people adopt the religious beliefs which they are brought up with as children. That seems to make it all seem too relative and I am in favour of understanding the religious quest on a universal level of meeting the human need for understanding and truth. — Jack Cummins
Personally, I do believe that a major aspect of acceptance of an idea does depend on our motivation, to some extent. — Jack Cummins
This point is so much important. I totally agree with you that educational system is flawed since the day when states decided teaching us the "principles" to just work and pay our taxes. Probably yes we are more practical but we lost the path of wisdom and questioning everything.
When I say questioning I mean the key of not feeling "full" of what ever our teachers in the school/university teach. — javi2541997
Thanks for replying to my thread. I went out for a walk in the park after writing the question and have spent the evening going through the replies, and worked upwards.
I do believe that the ideas of William James are essential to the understanding of why religion is important. I also believe that other writers' views are important too, including those of Carl Jung, Mircea Eliade and all ot those who have explored the psychological and comparative aspects of religion.
When you speak of the possibility of destruction in relation to this, I do wonder how nihilism fits into the picture. Personally, I do have times when I feel that there is no objective meaning. I cannot always separate this from depression on a personal level. In other words, it is not always clear whether my own depression leads to lack of belief in any higher power being involved in the enrollment of life, or the opposite way round. Nevertheless, I am still inclined to the view that personal and collective survival matter still matter, but I can see that it is a dodgy area because once we get into the area of a godless world it is possible for all meaning to collapse. — Jack Cummins
beer — synthesis
so the fact that religion has sprung up in nearly every culture suggests that such practices scratch a universal human itch — synthesis
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. — Jack Cummins
If the mythic is removed what is left of value in a story? — Jack Cummins
↪Nikolas
I have always found the esoteric traditions of religion more interesting than the exoteric ones. Within Christianity, there are the ideas of Celtic Christianity as well as the whole tradition of Gnosticism. The early Church was hostile towards Gnostic thinking but, nevertheless, it seems likely that a lot of Gnostic thinking did get incorporated into Christianity on some level, as the Gospel of St John and the Book of Revelation seem to be part of that tradition. There is even speculation that one of the founding fathers had some affinity with Gnostic thinking.
Of course, esoteric ideas have a whole history, as expressed in the Rosucrucian movement, alchemy and, more recently, as well as the ideas of Emmanuel Swedenborg and Rudolf Steiner. More recently, drawing upon the ideas of Eastern thinking, we have the whole movement of theosophy. I have been to a few meetings run by The Theosophical Society. One particular thing that I was impressed by within that organisation is the whole idea of recognizing the truth underlying all religions and creeds. Religion understood on that level makes more sense in some cases than just confining ideas to one viewpoint. The reason I say this is because many people adopt the religious beliefs which they are brought up with as children. That seems to make it all seem too relative and I am in favour of understanding the religious quest on a universal level of meeting the human need for understanding and truth.
The role of the devil in Christianity is interesting. Having been brought up as a Catholic, I had immense fear of the devil, sin and hell. This was the point at which psychology stepped into the picture for me. I found the ideas of Carl Jung extremely important. In particular, his book 'Answer to Job' looks at the whole problem of evil within Christianity, and the whole idea of the devil critically. Jung is controversial in his approach because he sees the idea of the image of God as a Trinity as inadequate and suggests that psychologically the idea of a quarternity is more consistent with the needs of the human psyche. The fourth aspect which he suggests is the the devil, and, or the feminine principle because he thinks that these have been repressed and suppressed within Christianity. In particular, he thinks that we need to become aware of our own dark side, the shadow, which if not faced cconsciously can result in evil being unleashed in a horrific way. Rather than seeing the devil outside of us, he sees it arising within us as destructiveness, especially in the possibility of nuclear devastation which could be carried out. Jung was writing this in the 1950s and I am sure that there are other threats, including terrorism. — Jack Cummins
The thing I want to bring forward is that people have MANY itches, scratched with art, politics, fashion, music, fiction, drama, and so on. Religion "works" because it offers rituals, a world-view, social activity, and so on. Clearly it isn't a unique necessity because lots of people scratch the ritual/world-view/social itch with other activity. — Bitter Crank
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. — Todd Martin
it is pornography, politics and religion that are the BIG THREE initial users. — synthesis
innate ...but so is science! — Todd Martin
I wish I wrote that. Even someone like Jordan Peterson, who is a hardliner cultural and religious conservative describes a lot of the religious texts as mythos. However, being a pragmatic utilitarian, he seems to perceive them as socially constructive mythos. I have never heard him express the need to have the degree of metaphysical skepticism that he himself has. His claims to be a Christian, who does not believe in God, but acts as if there is one. Or, differently put, that he is raised and remaining under the influence of the Judeo-Christian system of moral values. Being a psychologist, he has also discussed the compulsive nature of knowledge-gap-filling. It isn't something you can easily turn off, and turns on automatically whenever you are faced with the need to ascribe features to unknown parts of reality. It seems to me that certain advocates of organized theism are themselves rather aware of our cognitive biases, but contented with the population at large being a naive recipient of the religious benefit.Rather, we're prone to a variety of known cognitive biases or "features", like apophenia, patternicity, personification (abductive), autosuggestion (and the reiteration effect), knowledge-gap-filling, confabulation, wishful/magical thinking. — jorndoe
I am always coming back to the idea that we are applying induction "on faith". We can argue that our practice is confirmable, but that is also inductive retroactive argument. It only demonstrates the internal consistency of empiricism. Or similarly, with statistics, we use chances to justify our decision making. But in the end of the day, we are not actually observing chances, we are observing satisfactory outcomes and apply confirmation bias. If we consider such intuitions productive for science, can we really disallow religious intuition and biases, as possibly being truthful. As challenging as such concession might be to empirically grounded person. I would not consider asking that we accept them or not to critique their internal inconsistencies and methodological errors (such as lack of hesitancy), but still.We learn from accumulating experiences, interacting with it all, ...
We might then extrapolate (induction) and formalize (for deduction), systematically do away with errors (or demarcate domain of applicability), ... — jorndoe
Xenophobia and ingroup mentalities run strong in our genes. Religion is another trigger that we might not have otherwise had, but we would have found other reasons to be xenophobic.- justification for prejudice — Tom Storm
This I also believe is unjustifiable epistemic error for a sensible human being.-Justification for bigotry — Tom Storm
This appears to be gradually weeded out, albeit very slowly. I think that it is prevalent in violence-prone subcultures and strata of society, where they are practicing violence to defend all sorts of personal subscriptions.-justification for violent behaviour — Tom Storm
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