I don't know if it's so much that we need religion or that we need to understand the world. Or even that we should need religion at all. Let me explain.

The difference between science and religion fundamentally lies in the relation both have to the world and truth more generally. Religion explains the world. Science tries to describe the world. Because of this, religion is a belief as it can never be proven : you need faith to believe in God. On the contrary, science does not need faith to hold true, and relies on proof. Yet science is never exact and theories are wrong or incomplete. Because of this, science as a whole has a faulty or incomplete relation to truth. Quite paradoxically then, it is science that is never true but tries to get closer to truth, while if you have faith in a religion then that view of the world is entirely true.

Suppose that we are naturally curious, which by all means we appear to be. Then it would only be natural for us to try and understand the world around us. If science can only give us a partial view of what the world is like without ever fully being able to understand it, then it is unsurprising that people use religion as a relation to the world. This form of relation to religion is known as the theological state, and is the explanation of the world through belief.

While this is a possible answer, and most certainly is the case for a lot of people, I believe that need in of itself is a bad reason for belief. This is because need is essentially desire and this makes us consider religion only from a functional point of view, despite that not being the case. Religion is fundamentally irrational in the sense that it cannot be apprehended through reason. Because of this, if we try and see religion as functional then we are dutifully mistaken since function is associated to reason.

Some people have a need for religion, whether it is for reassurance, understanding or anything else. But I believe that if we are religious out of need then our belief isn't strong enough. Religion should flow through you instead of us trying to use it as a tool, and that I think is why people have a need for religion -but shouldn't.

Let me precise that I am an atheist. This does not mean that I disregard religion. Or faith. I believe that the principles that I just outlined should be applied to belief as a whole : we shouldn't believe in a cause if we expect something out of it in return. The same holds true for religion.

I wish you best,
Eliot.

That's very interresting, I haden't thought about this problem from that point of view before. Is there any other source you would reccomend to learn about this subject in the way in which you presented it ? In any case thank you very much for sharing your ideas.

This would make sentient beings seperated from nature. Which invokes a very weird notion of "nature". — javra

You're quite right, however it might be intresting to consider sentinecy apart from nature: we ourselfes are part of nature but our way of thinking is not. Perhaps here again this is ambiguious. I am considering that nature isn't obviously what is natural but what is exterior to us. Again, I am assuming that who we are can be reduced to our conciousness/way of thinking. In that sense our body is not us and is part of the outside world: even if other people resemble us they are not us, which means that we can't be defined by our bodies. Maybe it would have been clearer if instead of refering to nature I had referred to "the outside world". Please tell me if you think this makes sense.

Are you, in contrast to this, saying that the quenching of wants is not "a goal in life"? Or else somehow not real? How so? — java

Good point, I haden't thought about that. However are all wants intrinsic to us ? The desire to create art for example is something we do not see in other species, nor the desire to explore without need. What I mean is that "want" itself is not always necesserary, and there are some goals we pursue that other people don't. Therefore wanting depends on ourselfs and not on our surroundings, which reinforces the idea that there isn't purpouse that we don't give. The following might be a bit of a strech, but strictly speaking it is you who chooses to eat, and we see this in people who fast. Therefore, even basic desires such as sutenance are imposes by yourself on you. The only difference would be that we are made so that to cease pursuing such desires would be edadly. We can therefore make a difference between biological desires, which are part of the ouside world (if we define "outside" as what isn't us) and personal desires. I think this lets us lay a basis to the world with biological desires being the only ones which motivate us to pursue a specific goal in life, least we were to die.

Thanks for correcting me !

philosophy too believed nothing mattered, and then, just like you, decided that everything is simply absurd — counterpunch

Just to clarify, the train of thoughts that I am following is that even though the world is absurd -which is to say it has no specif goal in mind- it still has meaning. The only nuance I am trying to proove is that we assign meaning ourself, and if that is the case the world still has values yet they are artificial. The reason I beleive this is important is that we tend to interact with the world striclty based on these values and without considering the world itself. This leads us to be trapped within societal constrains, whereas I beleive we would be happier if we were also able to consider the world seperatly from the values we assign it whenever we makes decisons. As such we would need to ask ourselfes: "Are the values I impose upon myself only shackles to my freedom that are not made to guarantee the freedom of others ?".

Both these philosophies are wrong. — counterpunch

How so ?

I think this question is very interesting, however we have to lay some groundwork before we are able to aswer it.

First of all, the idea that the universe is absurd poses the notion of worth. If we have that impression, it is because we contrast our vision of life -that of a journey with a beggining and an end to it- to the absence of purpuse of the cosmos, setting aside any divinine purpouse if you beleive in God. Religion aside, it is interesting to notice that in this sense we impose our values on nature: it is therefore only normal that nature -the cosmos- seems devoid of meaning because meaning is something that we assign to our surroundings. Something isn't inherently meaningful, it just IS. Therefore, we need to keep in mind that the very notion of meaning is artificial and is seperated from nature.

If we choose to continue this train of thoughts, one might wonder: "but then how did meaning come to humanity if nature is inherently irrationnal ?". We can reformulate this question as: "Was it humanity or the notion of purpouse that came first ?". If we base ourselfes on purpouse as being the construction of society to make sense of the world, then humanity must have come first since humans first existed before society. This means that purpouse is an artificial concept not just for nature, but also for us: we do not have any goal in life, rather we tend to create objectives upon which we set ourselfes to make sense of the world around us. But if rationality is just a construct, where does that leave us ?

So far we have established that nature is inherently irrationnal in the sense that it has no specific purpouse in mind. In the same way, humainy as a part of nature does not have any inherent purpouse: you don't wake up in the morning because some cosmic law makes it your goal in life to do so: you wake up in the morning because the contrustion we have of life is that it is necessary to wake up at a certain time to do a certain job for a certain wage before repeating the cycle again, allbeing with much more nuances and various events. What I am trying to get to is that we tend to too often see the world through the lenses of society, assigning meaning to our surroundings when really there is none, just a constant state of existence.

The problem with the notion of purpouse is that it has led us not only to see the world in a false light, as always mooving in some direction, but our life too. There is no meaning to today, tomorrow or even yesterday. The universe is absurd, and so are we. And we should not beleive the contrary, because by doing so we are trapping ourselves in a vision of life that does not fit reality. We must learn that there really isn't any point in chasing purpouse in life. This vision of the world is largely the fault of our education system, whihc teaches us to conform to society rather than forms a critical mindset. But if there is no purpouse in life, just like in the universe itself, what is life itself ?

Here we have touched the heart of the question you asked, and what it can teach us. If we continue to look at our existence in analogy to the rest of the universe, one thing that is certain is that we are constantly in movement: it is impossible to say that because the world lacks purpouse it lacks life, and therefore life is the action which takes place in the world. Our life is therefore defined through our interaction with the rest of the world, and this is where I beleive lies a profound message. If we choose to view our relationship with the world as a series of interactions without any further purpouse, then life is esentially playful. In the abscence of meaning, all that is left is experiencing the world around us. The universe isn't going anywhere, and neither are we. We only live in a present which ends one day and if we want to fully enjoy this present we should stop treating life as a meaningful journey from point A to point B, but rather as game we play between the world and us every waking day.

This is, I beleive, the meaning we can extract from your question, by realising that not only the universe is absurd, but so are we, and that isn't a bad thing. I hope you found this itnteresting. And if ever you feel I am wrong I would be happy to keep discussing this and finding a definitive aswer to your question ;)

Peace out,

Eliot