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Originally Posted by Liminal Chris  The article made me think of Occum's Razor for some reason. "All things being equal, the simplist solution is best". Perhaps, Steve needs to make an eleventh reason. Organized religions are just simply unnecessary. Why do we need religions to be good people? |
Religions weren't made for people to be good, but for them to be on line. Since the time of Hammurabi, the laws come from "God".
People don't need religion for being good, that's up to them, they can be good and bad with or without religion. People need beliefs to make peace with death, because death sucks. Recently we had to bury a 21 year-old cousin of my husband. And you know what? It sucked. Science can tell about being one with the leaves of grass and the dew drops, but it still sucks. The father was an atheist... but when he was clutching the coffin of his 21-year old daughter, he cursed the god he never believed in with every profanity, blasphemy and foul word that exists in the Spanish language... and us Spaniards have an extremely high tolerance to foul words.
Stop treating believers as idiots. The problem with believers is that during thousands of years, they've been told that a religion, to be true, must be the only one. So they cling to the one they were born in, or if they do some research, to the one that resonates the most to them. It's all to make peace with death, and man, is that something needed! Not for morals, but for enduring some things that are otherwise unendurable.
Religions do not function because of their attachment to ethics. Ethics are the result of reason. Religions work because of the existence of death. Because it sucks. What Steve is saying is that to fight your fear of death, you DO NOT need organized religion. Your own thoughts and research will do. And that's true.
I myself found the most beautiful and resonating description of a god, source or whatever you call it, and the human soul, in the role-playing game Mage: The Ascension. When I think of a God, I think of that description. Tolkien wrote that his elves had beliefs, but they were private, with no churches or cult: I liked the idea, so I defend it. Some people would think that taking ideas from "non-divine" sources is wrong. But point is, every "sacred" book is supposed to be sacred, but all others are not... If you choose any book "officially" sacred to follow, you risk choosing the wrong one and going to whatever hell stored for you. I chose not to believe that. But people with a need for beliefs find it very hard to do such a thing, because they have been conditioned to do so.