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Originally Posted by Megan  What I would offer for your consideration is that the religious impulse can move from pre-conventional to post-conventional type thinking. Post-conventional religious thinkers are not as visible or vocal as their more dogmatic counterparts, but they do indeed exist. |
Question is, how much of the post-conventional religious thinkers beliefs still stem from their religion and how much of their religion did they have to dismiss to arrive at their current beliefs? Shouldn't an ideal belief system lead to a strong majority of post-conventional thinkers? Religions seem to produce very little post-conventional thinkers, while the majority are conventional with another small group of pre-conventional.
Religions have done alot for society and for better or worse they helped bring us to this point in human evolution. Personally I believe religions are outdated beliefs systems that will likely be extinct in approximately 1000 years. With 6 billion people in the world and with the population growing exponentially, our societies will grow far more complex. You'll have billions of people all living in the same existence but with each person having a slightly different way of living it.
The absolute laws and ways of living set by the god/s of religions will gradually make much less sense in a world full of such wide diversity. To survive, religions will break off into different sects where the followers will pick and choose beliefs from the old religion to give their faith more relevancy in the changing world. Eventually, religions will become too diversified and will collapse as they try to keep up with the rapid changes that occur in a society of 12+ billion people.
What we will be left with, is a religion free - understanding, intelligent, and compassionate society that is better able to put themselves in the shoes of others and understand where they come from. A society of people that live more in the moment and respond to new social situations in a more dynamic way instead of relying on beliefs of how they believe things should be. Instead of that suicidal man needing to believe in eternal hell to save his life it will be clear to the man that his self-worth is likely determined by the company he keeps. He understands that by finding a new peer group he will improve his self-worth and his life. The man didn't have to be taught this in school, it is apparent to him because of the society he lives in.
The thing to keep in mind is that religion has served us well but religion does not have the exclusive on morality. It is also not designed to handle the societies of the future in my opinion. These are the reasons I do not believe in religion and why I feel religion needs to go even if it does help some people make it through the day. Because, like I said, when the world's population really starts to balloon, people will either come to a deeper, intellectual, understanding or the world will see unprecedented violence as religious beliefs and old ways of thinking collide.