The Purpose of Religion

What needs do mythology and religion serve in today's world and in ancient times? Here we discuss the relationship between mythology, religion and science from mythological, religious and philosophical viewpoints.

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nandu
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Post by nandu »

On 2006-05-29 21:53, NathanGear wrote:
...They think that because they are of a faith...say for example Christian...they must believe certain things. They think they must play by the rules or leave the club.
I agree wholeheartedly, Nathan. When your religion tells you that you must believe certain things, even when you feel in your heart of hearts that they are not true, you face a dilemma. Some people reject their religion totally: others close their mind to their inner voice, and go along with the crowd. Both of them lose their myth, and their religion becomes a hollow shell. Only a few have the courage and openness of mind to question the basic tenets of their religion, while still remaining within it.

Nandu.

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<font size=-1>[ This Message was edited by: nandu on 2006-05-29 22:35 ]</font>

Waka
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Post by Waka »

NathanGear, I disagree with you on one point only. I dont see religion as myth. I guess it is more of a practical myth. One thing you are definitely right about is the lost of non-religious myth in people's lifes. It allows for meaning and fullfulment in a person's life. But then with religion there are boundries and rules. And to bring up what Nandu says. What happens when you start breaking the rules?
The mythology of the religion conficts wiht your personal mythology. The religion constricts the purpose of the myth.
Better than a thousand useless words is one word that gives peace.- Buddha<br>Let yourself be free. :-)

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Post by NathanGear »

"But then with religion there are boundries and rules."

Only if you want them to be. You are stuck with the false idea that if you are of a specific faith then you have to march in step. That simply isn't true.

You say that religion is practical myth. All myth helps teach people how to live. All myth is practical. If it wasn't so, then why would you want it?

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Post by Waka »

I've been looking back on what you have said Nathan. I have one question. What do you consider a religion? It seems like you are Christian. You say it is a type of myth but I just dont understand where you are coming from, and I want to.

What I really see is two types of religions out there. Eastern and Western. And then there is Buddhism in which I really like. Now I can see the similarity in Christianity and Buddhism. They both try to reach to something that relates to each other, Nirvana and being close to God. But if I dont believe that Jesus is the son of God and He will come back for Judgement Day then I cant very well be a Christian, which is a Western religion. But with Buddhism you try find inner peace. I think the only real belief is reincarnation. Both prayer and meditation are pretty much the same. And both try to clear your mind of ego and confusion.

Then there is the point of faith. I really dont understand it. What is it? Is it the feeling you get when under the spiritual mood?

And one thing that I brought up with the conversation was bounds and rules on religions. You can't be a Christian if you don't belief in God. Now I guess I would be a Christian if there was no need for the bible. I'm all for living a better life and knowing my self better but I just don't see the need for all the beliefs.

I was reading an article on religion and they said one point it was invented was for the dealing of death. I see death as just another part of life; there is nothing to be afraid of. And one thing I see is to bring meaning for life. Why are we here? People can't say "Its just a some big coincidence." Its like what you say "I feel there is more to the universe than meets the eye."

I know Im ranting but Im trying to get something here. For me, my mythicism (if thats a word) depends on my mood. I am a man of reason and a man of spirit. I can see the point of there is nothing more to life then life; and then I can see where you are coming from in there has to be more. Now when I am writing this I remember of my grandfathers death. "There just as to be more. He just didn't die and thats it."

Alright I'm done. Thank you for your time.
Better than a thousand useless words is one word that gives peace.- Buddha<br>Let yourself be free. :-)

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Post by NathanGear »

"But if I dont believe that Jesus is the son of God and He will come back for Judgement Day then I cant very well be a Christian"

Say the Pope. Says Pat Robertson. Says a whole bunch a guys who want to control you.

Jesus was either 1) an emenation of Yahway 2) an emenation of the First Aeon or 3) just a dude who had special insight into human behaviour.

Is Judgement Day a specific point in time? Or is it a metaphor when human society goes totally corrupt, falls apart and pulls itself out from the ashes. Judgement Day was the fall of Rome. Judgement Day was WWII. And there will be more to come.

Buddism has some fantastic (meaning beyond belief) aspects to it. But it choses to modernize as man gains new scientific knowledge. Christianity has to follow suit. What we experience can't be worth less than what a 2000 year old piece of paper says. If the Earth is round the Earth is round. If there's evidence of evolution, then evolution is a fact. If man is much older than 6000 years old, then that's the way it is. Science however cannot as yet explain the origin of consciousness and compassion - it is these mysteries that we turn to religion and philosphy, which don't have to be kept seperate.



<font size=-1>[ This Message was edited by: NathanGear on 2006-06-01 00:11 ]</font>

Waka
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Post by Waka »

I another question to ask. What is the name of the church you go to if you go.

I can see along the lines you are seeing. We both take something from a bunch of different religions.

But what I am talking about is the people who take the bible for fact. One thing that I wanted to bring up on my last post was the big differences in the monks. The Buddhist monks don't try to convert people to Buddhism; they allow the person to follow what they want. And then you have the Christian monks well not really monks, but the people in the church who want to convert you from the wrong path that they say you're on the the "right path" of God and salvation.


Better than a thousand useless words is one word that gives peace.- Buddha<br>Let yourself be free. :-)

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Post by NathanGear »

I don't go to church.

This is why religion has to flexible:

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20060601/ap_ ... t_scroll_2

Because religion is an organic process. Every new religion is just a tweaking and repackaging of the previous. There's a direct line from Zeus and gang to God, Jesus and gang.

Over time people are going to pick up Christianity and give people different names. Maybe split the characters up, so one person becomes 2 or more new ones. Maybe even the role of Christ gets divided or reassigned. The locations get tweaked. The whole mythology gets a new name "Shermanism" and presto you've got a new religion.

Human intelligence and psychology evolve over time. We can only understand God as well as we are wired.

<font size=-1>[ This Message was edited by: NathanGear on 2006-06-01 23:37 ]</font>

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Post by SteveC »

Jesus says that "you are a generation that wants signs," in other words, without the miracles man will not believe. Did he mean his generation 2000 years ago, or all generations generically, or the generation of Earth, and life lesewhere had evlved differently?

Everyword anyone says can be interpreted in a myriad of ways. Does the speaker even know what he says sometimes?

I see lots of signs that affirm the existence of Christ as the son of God, but I could just as easily ignore them. There are many obstacles to believing, and any one obstacle is as good as any other. Ultimately, you have to choose to believe. Thus, it is not a question of indoctrination or "truth," it is a willingness.

Also, it is not about taking, it is about giving. Mercy and Grace is a gift to be shared. Most religions are embarassed, and they need to hide themselves behind all the "things" they have added to The Spirit. The Spirit doesn't need anything, we need the Spirit.

In many ways the need for people to go to the church is to give the church more Spirit. The church is divided just like the rest of society, it needs help, but not in the form that it expects. The Spirit has its own agenda, which is to bring us all together as one.
You can only see the height of a mountain from its valley.


The radical myth towards which the helix aspires is beyond the desire for money or power, yet which has greater returns than all the power and money in the world could not achieve.

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Post by sladeb »

A fascinating conversation - and a flow of discussion which is somewhat predictable. When ever this type of question is posed, one declares that there is no God, another declares that there is a God but he can't be found in any ORGANISED religion. Then a fundamentalist Christian speaks up and says that there must be a God and the proof of him is everywhere, and then the scientific step into the debate and start talking about the fact that scientific principles show that God is not needed at all. And on it goes. And then in the Campbell forum the conversation will inevitably contain an element of eastern vs western religion.

Is it not an interesting thing that this conversation just goes round and round and is never resolved. But then again, perhaps in that fact there is a pointer to the core of spiritual experience. If one understands the work of Jung, particularly that around the concept of the archetypes and the collective unconscious, then perhaps we begin to understand that we are all born with a sense of the mysterium tremendum . Belief systems (and I include in that the scientific belief system) are the human response to the mysterium. For the individual who finds their expression in collective religious experience, their sense of wonder is obtained through a modernised form of the primitive participation mystique . For the scientist, the sense of the mysterium becomes translated into a need to break through the shroud and replace the mystery with knowledge. Is this any less a participation in the collective than active worship in a medieval cathedral?

I sit and I write, and I listen to Bach and ponder the fact that as a human I am conscious that I am conscious - and wonder at that - and in doing so I obtain in that experience, my own sense of participation in the human experience of the mysterium. Are any of these less credible than any other.

Rosanov said "all religions will pass, but this will remain: simply sitting in a chair and looking in the distance"

And is it not that sense of wonder as we sit and look into the distance that lies at the root of human experience. When we remove that sense of wonder - when any individual loses that sense of wonder - it appears to me that we are left with an individual who struggles to find any sense of joy in life and in the struggle - whilst claiming to believe nothing ends up actually believing anything - thus we have a new age movement - so called - which it is impossible to put any frame of reference around. If one accepts that human experience is a thinking animal wrapped up in a social fabric and it is that social fabric which defines us as humans - then one has to accept that to destroy that social fabric is become an animal once again. The problem is that as a thinking animal one is then left to struggle for a meaning in life - which ultimately leads to a suicidal level of despair or a grasping to find meaning in objects, shopping, sex etc. In fact if one is ever game to wander as an observer into adult online chat realms, one sees an interesting response to this loss of meaning. Addiction to sensuality, even sensuality as empty as cybersex seems to be preferable to facing emptiness.
SteveC said:

Without God, nothing can make sense. At least that is what I have found.
Now for SteveC that works. The Christian heritage is, after all the root of what makes us "western". For most westerners outside the United States, however, the christian symbols have lost their meaning. The epistomological putty that the christian god provided to medieval man to fill in the unknown is found wanting by most in seeking meaning in their lives. As science has prised out the putty of god and replaced it with scientific knowledge, for most the christian symbols have become impoverished as a source of meaning.

For those who remain within the christian belief system and actively participate in the symbols of christian worship there is a sense of ongoing participation in the symbols which gave meaning to their ancestors. Waka struggles to deal with the persuasive self centred goals of those who direct organised christian religion. I concur. It does not mean, however, that for those who choose to participate in that environment the experience is any less real.
Nandu tells us about the eastern experience of the mystique. That is the core of the eastern mind. And because it is a belief system that is fairly new to the western mind, it is easy to abandon the impoverished god of christian experience for something about which less is understood and around which, therefore, there is a sense of the mysterium still. Likewise in many eastern countries there is a scramble to participate in , to them, new christian religion. The ancient symbols of their civilizations have lost meaning and christianity is a new approach to the mysterium.

So what happens when east and west have both come to a realization that all of the symbols have been robbed of meaning. A fascinating question and one that Campbell spoke to the heart of.

I think the saddest part of modern existence is that we in the west have let our symbols be robbed of meaning. The earnest attempt to subject everything to the scientific principle and in particular to Popperian falsification testing has meant that if something can't be measured then it can't be real. And - here I must side somewhat against those who have earnestly striven to place christianity in stasis. Christianity itself arose out of the death of the gods of Rome and Greece. The gods of olympus had become hackneyed and robbed of meaning. They had erected symbols of stone to gods and goddesses that tried to fill in where human knowledge stopped. In an attempt to cover all bases there was even a statue to the "unknown god" - the one that Paul referred to in the New Testament. But these gods were robbed of meaning. And so they died and in the ashes of their funeral pyre arose the christian god - seemingly equipped with many of the attributes of the greek and roman gods fully realised and in that aggregation of skills empowered with the capability to crush the remnants of the old gods. And to finally round out the conquering capability of this new christian god, an emperor decided to embrace this as a means to unite a disparate empire. And succeed it did. And perhaps it would continue to succeed if it had been allowed to morph over time instead of being placed in stasis and therefore might have continued to be a source of real meaning for today. And that is, I believe, the core of the problems that Waka struggles with. Much of organised christian religion has become tied up in struggling to maintain a stasis of belief systems in the interests of ensuring the cashflow continues.
Even that great American christian religion, mormonism, which was supposedly built on continuing revelation, is frozen around a desperate attempt to hold up the unchanging nature of god as expressed in books which claim their authenticity through a process of internal proofs. Why not instead allow belief and myth to change as the sum total of human knowledge increases – then it might be a source of meaning to a much larger part of humanity.


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As far as we can discern, the sole purpose of existence is to kindle a light in the darkness of being.
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<font size=-1>[ This Message was edited by: sladeb on 2006-06-02 17:00 ]</font>

<font size=-1>[ This Message was edited by: sladeb on 2006-06-03 05:04 ]</font>

SteveC
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Post by SteveC »

Religion itself is a vague concept.
While there are different generally accepted "religions" I also see poltics and governments as religions, as well as economics and businesses.

Some genuflect to a cross but almost everyone genuflects to an icon, be it a national flag, a corporate logo, a sports team, the pine tree, etc. These are all "spiritual" actions, but they lack Spirit, imo. They represent a struggle.

Like the John Lennon song Imagine, imagine just people without the idea of sacrifices, rituals or identity in their heads, and yet agreeing on everything and existing in perfect harmony with one another and the universe spiritually. Empires/institutions will always exist in practical terms. Hospitals need medicines which are made in factories which are made from the Earth. Man will always have a need to build and grow things, but he does not need to form intellectual empires that are divided one against the other.
You can only see the height of a mountain from its valley.


The radical myth towards which the helix aspires is beyond the desire for money or power, yet which has greater returns than all the power and money in the world could not achieve.

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Post by nandu »

On 2006-06-02 09:43, SteveC wrote:
Ultimately, you have to choose to believe. Thus, it is not a question of indoctrination or "truth," it is a willingness.
As long as the choice is there, you can choose not to believe also. But the organised religions do not give you this choice: if you choose not to believe, you are a sinner and an infidel.

Whatever name you call it by, this is coercion.

Nandu.
Loka Samastha Sukhino Bhavanthu

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Post by Clemsy »

Not so much coercion, Nandu, unless such belief is legislated... which is always a danger. Here in the U.S., Christian Nationalists (I've seen them referred to as 'Chritianists' to seperate them from Christians who would rather leave life up to individuals) would love nothing more than to coerce us back to a pre-Renaissance social structure.

For most, you do get to decide even if you decide yourself right out the door of your faith. many of those, however, pay little attention to the fine print in the doctrine, and worship on their own terms.

This is techinically heresy. After all, 'free will' grants you the right to sin or not to sin. It doesn't give you the right to querstion the validity of the sin.

People do so anyway. Good for them. Questioning got the bootheel of Christianism (not Christianity) off our necks.

Cheers,
Clemsy

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SteveC
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Post by SteveC »

On 2006-06-03 03:43, nandu wrote:
On 2006-06-02 09:43, SteveC wrote:
Ultimately, you have to choose to believe. Thus, it is not a question of indoctrination or "truth," it is a willingness.
As long as the choice is there, you can choose not to believe also. But the organised religions do not give you this choice: if you choose not to believe, you are a sinner and an infidel.

Whatever name you call it by, this is coercion.

Nandu.
You are a sinner or an infidel in the eyes of the accuser, not in "religion" itself. Huge difference.

Also, you can choose whether to love or hate this person, based on their treatment of you. It makes little difference what they do, the choice is always about how you will respond.

Politics is about getting other people to change (via force), religion is about getting yourself to change (via example).
You can only see the height of a mountain from its valley.


The radical myth towards which the helix aspires is beyond the desire for money or power, yet which has greater returns than all the power and money in the world could not achieve.

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Post by Waka »

I would just like to bring up what sladeb about the "mysterium tremendum". I have been thinking of this recently about how it doesnt matter where you are in the world you will always find some form of religion.

I just still wonder why so many people are converted to the main orginized religion Christianity?
Better than a thousand useless words is one word that gives peace.- Buddha<br>Let yourself be free. :-)

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Post by nandu »

It may be different in the United States, but in India there is a lot of social coercion. I have a lot of Christian friends whose religion is very flexible: but they are forced to follow all the rituals of the Church because of the fear of social ostracization. Either you have to be a total believer, or a rebel.

And Steve, any religion that seeks converts believes that all other belief systems are wrong, otherwise what is the need for conversion? The fact that some religions are aggressive while some are not is only a difference of degree. All organised religions are intolerant.

That is why I consider any belief system that requires "conversion", cancerous.

Nandu.
Loka Samastha Sukhino Bhavanthu

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