I could have made better case. The advantages of organized religion:

• Social currency
  Religions provide people with notions that they can use to relate their experiences to each other uniformly and bond.
• Self-reflection
  The teachings are open-ended, which provokes inner reflection.
• Prescriptive ethics
  People are motivated to behave pro-socially, by using reward, punishment, acclamation of merit.
• Uncontested authority
  Religion can arbiter some of those disputes, where social interactions fail to decide the collective interest, on the authority of perceived institutional supremacy.
• Humility
  Secular culture merits people by competitive performance and can leave someone feeling marginalized. Religion shifts the perception of value. Most people think that they can deal more successfully with successful marriage, care for your offspring, being helpful to your relatives and friends. They become engaged more productively and better social contributors.

The disadvantages are:

• Conformity
  People express themselves in the same conceptual terms and forget to apply their personal flavor to their world view.
• Lack of objectivity
  People loose perception of the non-interpretative ways of describing reality.
• Lack of agency
  The prescription of ethics removes the individual from the discourse.
• Unaccountability
  The institutions are declared partially infallible and cannon texts undoubted.
• Demerit of ambition
  The satisfaction from the classical modes of being means that anything beyond that is ether depreciated overall or ascribed to one gender.

Your first comment was good as well. I have just been struggling to get round to replying today. I think that one particular point you make is the distinction around theism and other alternatives. In particular, you can control the Judaeo-Christian God with all the many gods of Hinduism. Personally, I am inclined to think that all these are representations of the underlying divine power. Here, I am drawing upon the way in which Jung speaks about God-images. Personally, my first realisation that I didn't really fit into mainstream Christianity was when I realised how the Hindu idea of Brahman merging into Atman from Hinduism made more sense to me than most of the ideas within Christianity. I have also explored the wide spectrum of Christianity approaches and I think that the one that I probably feel more comfortable with is the Quakers. It is a strict contrast to Catholicism because it so free from ritualism.

Your list of the benefits and disadvantages of organised religion is comprehensive. I think that I would side with the list of disadvantages. But that doesn't mean that I think that religion can be eradicated easily. This is probably because we probably do feel a need for some sense of an underlying divine sense over us, but, of course, it is possible to hold on to this and be apart from organised religion, although I am sure that many feel more at ease with organized religion. Personally, I have never found it easy to conform, so I prefer to think my own thoughts outside the confines of organised religion.

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.

I do have a strong interest in the gothic. This probably arose around the time I was questioning religious beliefs, especially as I was reading Jung on the idea of the shadow. I did a couple of courses on art therapy and that was where I read the ideas of Freud on Thanatos, and tried exploring my own shadow in art. This led me to explore the music of Marilyn Manson and go to see many live metal music events. But now, I do read a lot of dark fantasy literature and I have read some Poe and H P Lovecraft.

The whole experience of the 'dark' in religion is interesting, including gargoyles. I remember reading in one of Blake's prose pieces, the idea that Milton was part of the devil's party without knowing it, because he seemed to write better about the infernal aspects of life. This may have been said in Blake's-'The Marriage of Heaven and Hell' which really got me thinking about good and evil before I had got to the point of thinking analytically about religion.

I suppose that part of the issue of whether you find it hard to believe in anything is whether you really want to or not. Personally, I do believe that a major aspect of acceptance of an idea does depend on our motivation, to some extent. This may appear to make a mockery of serious religious beliefs, because many religious believers say that they believe because the ideas represent the truth. However, I am inclined to believe that it is not that straightforward and we often believe what we wish to believe,possibly on a subconscious level, and that is where the psychological aspect comes into play.

I am not sure why you think that some stories are not mythic. I take the view that just about all stories have some relationships to mythic structures, because some archetypal forces are coming into play. If the mythic is removed what is left of value in a story?

So no: we don't "need" religion. — Bitter Crank

Technically, we only "need" water, food, shelter, and beer, so the fact that religion has sprung up in nearly every culture suggests that such practices scratch a universal human itch. And it makes sense on all kinds of levels as have been pointed out by those partaking in this discussion who appear to have considerably most ambition to write about it than do I at this moment.

There is a long history of opposition between science and religion, especially when the ideas of Darwin came along. However, it is possible to reconcile these ideas if one chooses to do so, and this can be done through understanding the Bible as a story rather than a literal account. Perhaps the apparent conflicts between religion and science arise when people see the religious texts too concretely.

It does seem that there are phases when scientists seem to be dominant in thinking and times when religion is. Philosophy does seem to have given rise to atheism, but it is quite possible that other ways of seeing may become more accepted, such as the ideas of Kant or Spinoza. But it does seem likely that any attempt to bring forth religious views will need to be a view which takes into account the thinking of the scientists.

I am not sure that religion is an innate need, but perhaps the whole unseen dimension and symbolic aspects of life is. We have the various ways of seeing, such as the the shamanic picture of reality. I do wonder if in the future people will have more direct encounters with the symbolic realm, but perhaps even combining parts from various religious traditions, as so much information is available, rather than being combined to one. We could see more individualised quests with the dimensions arising from the unconscious, rather than people bound to specific doctrines and rituals of mainstream organised religions.

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

Religion is pro-family and pro-community, which is why it has thrived so long in human society. Even anti-family and anti-community statist societies like Communism have a difficult time stamping-out religion because the state can not replace a moral high-ground with authoritarian decrees enforced with totalitarian measures.

Although a religious-like fervor has recently manifested (in the Western Left) into a religious-like movement, those folks will discover what the poor souls of the Soviet Union and Maoist China did when the honeymoon ended and high hopes were replaced by the tips of bayonets and worse..

I think that it is true that religion is connected to family and community life and, of course, I would not be advocating abolishing religion. That would be a bit totalitarian. Perhaps it will be the people who are not so connected to family and community life who will be free to do more of the individual searching for themselves.

Personally, I do believe that a major aspect of acceptance of an idea does depend on our motivation, to some extent. — Jack Cummins

True! But sometimes motivation in our personal ideas goes dawn and you can feel the stress about to giving up. I guess this is the key where philosophy/religion/dogma, etc... show up to confront ourselves like “everything going to be ok. Move on and believe”
Nevertheless, it is interesting the nihilism criteria where sometimes one of us led into it. Why should we have a motivation in something? Why do not just live without emphasis? I guess this kind people who is very deep in nihilism probably is due to lack of goals and perspectives. So does humanity have as innate the feeling of pursuing dreams/goals?

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

Okay, we had liberal education starting with the day we entered school. Our school system strongly opposed government interference in education until 1958 when the US replaced liberal education with education for technology and began IQ testing, and educating everyone to be products for industry. That is the 1958 National Defense Education Act- education for the Military-Industrial Complex and adopting the German philosophy that goes with it. German philosophy has replaced Classic Greek and Roman thinking which was the cornerstone of liberal education. All that leads us to the storming of the Capitol and I would give anything, even my life, to have a voice like Bill Gates has. Do you know Neitzche's superman? That is Trump and his followers and what Germany had when Hitler was in power. I hate listening to the news and everyone questioning how such a thing could happen and being a nobody who no one with power listens to.

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

Many of the US founding fathers were Deist. They thought religion was important but did not hold the Christian belief in a God intervening in our lives. They saw the God thing as a machine that was put into operation and then God lets it run without interfering. More Toa, that way, and we need to come in harmony with it. I think Eastern thought is very important to our understanding. And that Christian Mythology of our founding is a disaster!!! What a mess to have Christianity without education in the Greek and Roman classics and come to almost worshiping Neitzche. That is a terrible combination! That brings us to the "Power and Glory" that was the invasion of Iraq against the judgment of the rest of the world, as well as Trump and followers storming the Capitol.

Absolutely nihilism fits into the picture. When there is no agreement on truth and how we should be governed, there is only power and people are reactionary and that leads to rule by the most powerful! We defended democracy against this, but without liberal education, we do not understand that. And with evangelical Christianity without liberal education, personal power gets confused with God's power. Today no one knows, democracy is rule by reason, and because we do not know that, we can not defend it and stop voting for idiots that impress us with the look of power, instead of with good judgment and good character, and the ability to work with others.

beer — synthesis

Yes, beer. Definitely.

so the fact that religion has sprung up in nearly every culture suggests that such practices scratch a universal human itch — synthesis

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.

So, we could ask, "Do people need art (or anything else that isn't one of the basic needs)?" I think the answer is yes. The itch that needs scratching is real.

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

Drawing on the computer metaphor, "Catholicism is your operating system. It is always in the background, no matter what applications are running." Even if you become an ardent atheist, your operating system (installed a long time ago) will still be there. That's OK. That's the way our brains works. The worst thing that can happen to someone is to grow up in a very chaotic home and community where chaos becomes the operating system.

Mainline Protestantism is my operating system, even though I have "officially" rejected much of what the church claims to be true.

Bertrand Russell observed that atheists resemble whatever religion they rejected. That seems to be true. People who grew up in narrow, hateful religious settings become narrow, hateful atheists. Broad church folk become broad church atheists.

One of the tasks of age seems to be accepting one's personal history -- good, bad, and indifferent.

If the mythic is removed what is left of value in a story? — Jack Cummins

What value does myth offer in the context of religion? The value of a hammer is in its ability to efficiently drive nails, for instance, so I suppose you could say that its ultimate value is in construction.

↪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

Plato distinguished between knowledge and opinion. Socrates said "I Know Nothing." What then is knowledge and what does it mean "to know?"?

Knowledge is a mental faculty/power that allows us to apprehend "being" (i.e., reality).

Ignorance is the opposite of knowledge.

Conclusion from 1 & 2:
Opinion is subject to error, but knowledge is not.

Can the essence of religion offer an influence that helps us to grow to experience knowledge of the transcendent level rather than remaining lost in a world of opinions at the exoteric level? Does knowledge exist for Man on earth or is Man doomed to the struggle between competing opinions?


Excerpted from a letter Simone Weil wrote on May 15, 1942 in Marseilles, France to her close friend Father Perrin as she was near death:

At fourteen I fell into one of those fits of bottomless despair that come with adolescence, and I seriously thought of dying because of the mediocrity of my natural faculties. The exceptional gifts of my brother, who had a childhood and youth comparable to those of Pascal, brought my own inferiority home to me. I did not mind having no visible successes, but what did grieve me was the idea of being excluded from that transcendent kingdom to which only the truly great have access and wherein truth abides. I preferred to die rather than live without that truth.

Was Simone a misguided teen caught up in fantasy and in dire need of professional help or was she one of these rare ones drawn to the transcendent level and willing to risk everything in order to experience it? If the transcendent level is real how can we respect it while acknowledging that we know nothing?

My two cents worth...

The need for god can be, in my humble opinion, inferred from how we've defined faer - as all-good, all-powerful, all-knowing. In essence, we're looking for someone, maybe even something (I'm not sure whether these 3 attributes constitute a "someone") who/that wants to take care of us (all-good), who/that can take care of us (all-powerful) and who/that knows how to take care of us (all-knowing).

The underlying premise in theism seems rather parochial - we want to be taken care of - and, of course, the reason for that is not at all surprising - we can't take care of ourselves - and the obvious conclusion from that is once we've figured out how to take care of ourselves, god would immediately become redundant i.e. god would no longer be needed.

I think that most people seem to be satisfied with what religion has to offer and do not wish to take it further (or are not aware that there is any further to take it). After all, who among us would not give just about anything to enjoy a very simple life gainfully employed, with a wonderful spouse, a great kid or two, in a really nice community?

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

Although keep in mind that when a new form of communication is introduced, it is pornography, politics and religion that are the BIG THREE initial users.

All of these concerns appear to have a significant following.

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

I'm not so sure it's "belief in God" that's "innate".
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.
Taken together with childhood impressionability (indoctrination), this stuff easily leads to superstitions, "seeing faces in the clouds" as it were, etc.

it is pornography, politics and religion that are the BIG THREE initial users. — synthesis

Just joking, but pornographers never used the telegraph, as far as I know, but they did pick up on the potential of photography pretty quickly. It took them something like a century to devise phone porn -- the "1-900 XXX xxxx" call-in numbers introduced in the 1980s. That probably had something to do with deregulation of the telecom industry. There was a debate over who was being exploited more, the women who answered the phone or the men who called.

Was there such a thing as Fax porn?

Just throwing this out there: even if God exists, maybe he doesn't want us to believe or pray to him. Maybe God created us wanting us to be atheists.

innate ...but so is science! — Todd Martin

I'd say a development of our natural way of learning.

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), ...

A cat doesn't type weight, wind angles, force, gravity, etc into parabolic formulae and calculate, to jump onto a prey just the right way.
We might by formalizing the scenario, taken all the way to self-guided missiles.

In principle at least, it doesn't really matter exactly and exhaustively what it all is, as far as the methodologies go.

A few other disadvantages of organized religion could include:

- justification for prejudice
-Justification for bigotry
-justification for violent behaviour

Religion like corporations or governments can often be thuggish, intolerant and appallingly behaved.

I see religious thinking as full of mythic narrative and symbolic truths. Some of these can be traced back to Egyptian ideas and other ancient pictures of life. But, probably I am fairly esoteric in my own understanding.

I think that you are right in the sense that the idea of God as presented in Christianity does imply that of being looked after by God, the father. Definitely, when I was growing up, I felt that I did not need to take full responsibility because that was God's job. It was probably when I stepped outside that picture that I began to feel that I needed to take responsibility for my choices. However, even when we think about it all from the standpoint of personal responsibility, it does seem that we cannot control everything. We are still unable to determine what happens in our fully.

I asked about the value of myth in the context of religion. The value of a hammer is in its ability to efficiently drive nails, for instance, so I suppose you could say that its ultimate value is in construction. You mentioned the value of myth in religious narratives. How does it express its value?

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 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.

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

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.

- justification for prejudice — Tom Storm

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 bigotry — Tom Storm

This I also believe is unjustifiable epistemic error for a sensible human being.

-justification for violent behaviour — 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.