All religions

Please be so kind and discuss personal beliefs in Religion not CR subforum.
Thanks
 
The guy asked me a question. I'm not about to ignore it. That'd be rude. A thousand times more rude than simply posting in the wrong subforum.
 
Hapsburg said:
The guy asked me a question. I'm not about to ignore it. That'd be rude. A thousand times more rude than simply posting in the wrong subforum.
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A tough call for the Moderator. I'm glad this isn't my board. The discussion is about definitions. Sometimes a definition isn't worth much without an example. At least you're arguing about what a particular belief is, not about which one is "true" or "better."
 
Avatar said:
All religions offer the experience of the divine to their followers, which mainly is a psychological experience of "epiphanic rapture" that mostly is created through ritual.
The rest is just local interpretation and some particular ethics which are not essential to the experience.

That's why, I think, it could be said that all religious people worship one thing, but that thing is not some god, is not an entity or a personification of something, it's an experience of their own psyche or self which, if experienced fully, is the godly bliss, paradise, lavondyss, avalon.
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Suppose, instead however, that the real function of religion is to enable, us who have evolved as social animals used to some forty individual-sized groups (instinctively), to adjust to living in huge mass of people united by a common belief system. Just as howler monkeys will gravitate to the edge of their territory in the wild and mock those in the next group who gather and howl back threateningly. This "us" against "them" sense is important to have for people who need to feel as "one". Remember how united the U.S. was after 9/11 and we felt powerful and wanted to smash the Taliban? We stopped seeing social problems in the newspapers because the press and the social researches realized no one wanted to read that stuff any more. People waved flags, went to church and cheered "God Bless America."

This is the way I explain the role of religion in http://humanpurpose.simplenet.com
Also, I show the formula that all religions have to shape to in order to do that and that formula has nothing inherently to do with "spirits" of any kind. It is just a matter of what questions the religion purports to answer and if those answers are consistent with each other.
 
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