Now no new religions are taking root — Ashwin Poonawala

This doesn't seem quite right. Off the top of my head, Mormonism, Scientology, and Christian Science are relatively recent inventions (though it's perhaps debatable to what extent the latter two are "taking root").

And science is destroying myths at an accelerating pace. — Ashwin Poonawala

Indeed science is doing a great job - destroying myths - but take note of the nature of what you call myths. They're trivial, almost childish, compared to the real BIG questions such as ''how did the universe come into existence?'', ''who framed the laws of nature?'' So far, the answers to these questions have eluded science.

God, being only a tool for this purpose, is slowly taking a back seat. — Ashwin Poonawala

As I've said above God is still in the game.

So far, the answers to these questions have eluded science. — TheMadFool

I'd go a little farther and suggest that some questions are "structurally" unanswerable. We can form these questions in Standard English, but what can they mean exactly? There seems to be something in the notions of causation and time that works against the possibility of a deep answer. In short, the human mind understands things as machines. We can enlarge and enrich our notion of the "reality machine," but I don't think we can get beyond. If we think in terms of one thing coming from another then we seem to make a final answer impossible. And yet that is naturally how we think. I guess I am talking about "thrusting against the limits of language."

As I've said above God is still in the game. — TheMadFool

These days I divide the God issue into two separate issues. There is the necessarily anthropomorphic God game and (for me, beyond this) those impossible questions about the ground of all being. The first issue involves human ideals and desires. The second is a more intellectual perception of the "brute facticity" of reality as a whole. (I realize that many people experience this as one issue.)

Science moves forward at its own pace, even though the pace is always accelerating.
Unfortunately, we know what we know, but we never know how much we don't know. I don't think science will be ever able to unravel all the mysteries of nature.

But our basic purpose is not knowledge, but happiness. If I can find pills that would take all my pains of life away, then why do I need to learn?

But the quest for happiness is quite illusive. Great ones have pondered on the question for years and decades throughout the history.

Fortunately a handful of exalted minds have left us some pearls of wisdom. But those ideas are way above our heads. Therefore we call them spirituality, and look down on them. Actually if we try them in our small feeble ways, the results over the time amaze us. I have found the teachings of Jesus, the Buddha, and few like them (but watch out, there are a lot more misguided and crazy teachers too) to be quite good. Amazingly they all give us the same thing, the logic of living. My opinion is far from conclusive, but I enjoy trying them according to my small abilities.

I find that they all tell us the same thing: life is like a mirror, you love life and it loves you back, you cheat life and life cheats you. A loving person creates a loving world around him, and a criminal lives in constant fear.

Jesus said 'Do unto others as you would have done unto you', and the Buddha said there is no sin like hate. Another one said pride is the root of all sins, and kindness saves you. To me, they all are saying the same thing.

But our basic purpose is not knowledge, but happiness. — Ashwin Poonawala

Some may disagree. I think everyone suffers from pangs of ignorance - we have an inclination for knowledge. Ignorance is suffering. Isn't that the very base of all what we call progress.

Of course, since the universe is not obligated to make us happy, some knowledge is painful.

Knowledge is the accumulation of data. When we have enough dots connected to make a comprehensible mental picture of a subject, it creates a meaning in our mind. The ability based on discerning quality helps us connect different pictures to create mental patterns. The popular word to describe this status is smartness. The imaginative ability to interpolate and extrapolate the patterns to deal with probabilities of unknown situations is called vision. These are the different stages of dealing with the basic data.

The purpose of knowledge is to enable us to manipulate the forces affecting us to suit our purpose. The purpose of life is happiness. The trick lies in defining the happiness correctly. The meaning of happiness is defined by our passions. As a result the definition is different for each of us.

We apply our knowledge according to our definition of happiness, which is based on the knowledge of the self. For the sake of simplicity let us call the knowledge of the world/universe as outside knowledge, and the knowledge of the self, of our mind, as inside knowledge. The outside knowledge is a two edged sward; it cuts both ways. The effectiveness of the application of the outside knowledge is proportional to the level of our inside knowledge, the level of self-awareness, which we call wisdom. We have seen smart persons with self defeating or self punishing attitudes plunging into disasters. Knowledge without wisdom is a curse, not a blessing.

The accuracy of our definition of happiness is proportional to the level of our inside knowledge, the wisdom.

As we go through life we constantly receive reactions from the outside, in the forms of affection, anger, gain, loss, peace, quarrels, and so on. We ponder over each of this stimulus to figure out the cause and effect.

Pride makes us feel that we are right, and the world is wrong. A proud person has a closed mind. On the other hand, an open mind keeps figuring out the more correct direction to steer toward in future.

What we feel is what we become. A surgeon and a murder achieve different levels of happiness out of their actions of cutting others open. Our mind is the sum of our desires. Desires manifest themselves as fear and greed, the former being the feeling of not having enough for the present, and the later being the feeling of not having enough for the future. Again, the feelings of shortages become us. A mother of an infant, sacrificing deeply her sleep and comfort, is one of the happiest people in the world. This brings us to the concept of dedication. Craving for gratification increases the ‘Me’ factor in our equation of happiness, while dedication to causes higher than our self decreases it. Of course, we need to sustain our existence to serve our causes. But confining our efforts to easy sustenance is ample. Anything more that comes our way, we accept as God’s mercy, but we ought not to crave for it. This brings us to the need for hard work, or say, applying ourselves to the best of our ability to the tasks at hand. Another way of saying this is to live in each moment.

I agree with Arkady that new religions are still appearing. There are lots of 'new age' groups and religious ideas that have emerged in the last few decades. The LSD excitement in the late 1960's/early 1970's had many people trying to achieve chemical transcendence. What I call the 'flying saucer faith' seems to me to be a new current of quasi-religious myth that seemingly emerged in the mid 20th century, repackaging divine and demonic visitations in pseudo-scientific form. Marxism might be another more apocalyptic quasi-religious eruption since the 1840's or so, announcing an inexorable unfolding of history leading to an ultimate paradisical kingdom of (no)God.

I'm inclined to speculate that belief in gods is likely a by-product of our innate human 'theory of mind'.

We evolved as social beings, able to live cooperatively in groups with others of our kind. That requires that we be able understand others, intuit or otherwise model their psychological states and attribute intention to their actions. It's probably advantageous in an evolutionary sense to be able to attribute intention and purpose to the behavior of animals as well.

My speculation is that early man tended to think about everything, about all of nature, in the same way. So they attributed psychological states and intentions to inanimate nature as well as to what we would call sentient creatures. Thinking that way just came naturally to them. Storms, thunder and lightning were perceived as manifestations of some exceedingly powerful being's anger. If a tree branch fell and hit a hut, people wondered what had motivated it, or the unseen power that controlled it, to want to do that.

So we get animism and the idea that all of reality is inhabited by mind-like spirits and that all natural events are purposive. People begged, pleaded and sought to buy off the spirits that seemed to control their lives and fates. Rituals and sacrifices appeared. Stories about the spirits and their actions elaborated and were told with great solemnity around campfires, gradually becoming traditional myths.

Another tendency visible in the history of religion is the tendency for supernatural powers to become more and more grand and to recede higher and higher into heaven over time. People want the spiritual powers that they worship and ally themselves with to be as powerful and as transcendent as possible. So the spirit they worship no longer inhabits a particular mountaintop, but lives high above in the sky and only manifests "himself" on the mountaintop in storms or when laws need to be promulgated in Sinai.

Gradually, often in historical times as philosophy is beginning to appear in cultures, the idea appears that there is only one animating spirit that controls and is responsible for everything that happens in this worldly plane below the heavens. We see that in movement towards monotheism in India, the Middle East and in the appearance of Greek ideas of monotheism.

The highly rationalistic Greeks in particular were impressed by the idea that a single logical order or 'logos' is evident in the behavior of all of nature. So some of them (the Stoics and the Middle Platonists for example) imagined a single transcendent mind that creates and imposes the order. Christian and Muslim Neoplatonism seized on that idea and tried to merge it with their founding myths. We even see a non-psychologized version of it in the form and structure of modern mathematical physics.



.