Reading Sapiens changed my mind about this a lot because it always confused me too. It’s more about myths (of which we have a lot like the companies we work for and our countries) that allow us to cooperate, trust each other and work on larger more abstract ideas.
As for why it’s still around today – maybe it’s not as late as you think it is – We just made steam engines 10-15 generations ago
Besides the fear of death that many mentioned already, its also a need to find an answer to how the world works and the need to find purpose in life.
Without these we suffer: Without understanding our environment, we feel our circumstances are out of our control and become anxious. Without purpose we become depressed (there is an excellent book called “from death camp to existentialism” about this subject).
Our brains are asking us for an urgent answer and the best quick answer most people can come with is religion. This is why it exists in every culture in history.
Being a programmer, I was always just as baffled about religion, mysticism, and various esoteric stuff, because it just didn’t make logical sense, and it was hard to take people who are into it seriously.
tldr:Was sceptical, gave it a try just for fun and to see what’s the fuss, found out it’s net-positive as long as you don’t take it too seriously, let it define your whole personality, or use it as an excuse to be a dick. It’s basicaly just like playing solo TTRPGs, and it feels great once you get rid of your jugement.
Then, during high-school, I’ve stumbled upon the Psychonaut Field Manual, which is a nicely written guide about chaos magic. And I read into it, because the presentation seemed fun, and most importantly - it was the first book where the introduction and first few pages convinced me, that it makes sense and could, in a limited fashion, actually work.
What convinced me was looking at mysticism as something akin to “hacking your own mind” - by using symbols, rituals, meditation and whatnot, you convince your unconscious mind to push you slightly more towards doing what you need. And that sounded like something interesting, especially since I just finished reading the Art of Game Design, which had a few great chapters focused on the subconscious and how to work with it when being creative. Of course I still don’t believe that you can affect any external factor of your life through it, but now something like “I do a ritual to finish this exam”, and my subconscious may just give me a little nudge to study more, since that’s what it’s convinced we really want.
So I went into the rabbit hole of modern mysticism, and eventually discovered more about the whole movement of Chaos Magic, with authors like Phil Hine. And their reasoning has won me over - their main point is that all mysticism is the same - learning symbols and doing rituals, so you can convince your subconsciousness. And the flavor or dogma you attach to it doesn’t matter, so just do whatever you want. Want to do Wicca? Suit yourself. Christianity and angels? If it works for you. Invoke Spongebob with pentagram out of pizza, or go with Lovecraftian Old Gods? Why not, the only important thing is that you do really believe in it, because otherwise you probably won’t convince your subconscious.
And that’s why they work with something I find really interresting - they call it paradigm shifts, where you hop around various systems, dogmas and religions, immersing yourself into their rabbit hole and honestly giving it a try, to see if that’s what works for you. And that sounded like fun, letting go of the prejudice about religion or esoteric bullshit, and just trying it out for myself, log what results I have, and have fun learning about it.
There’s another point that won me over for chaos magic - one of their core principles is, that every mysticism was so full of themself and took it too seriously, that they’ve forgotten how to have fun. And having fun while doing it is important.
And so I throughout next few years went into the rabbit hole of Wicca, Golden Dawn, Enochian, and probably bunch more I don’t really remember, just trying to take it seriously and see for myself how does it work for me. The hardest part was getting rid of feeling absolutely stupid when you sit in your room with candles, incense, and memorize various bullshit, but it was still pretty fun.
To get to the point - Wicca is one of the only systems I’ve tried that is also a Religion, and works with deities. And I’ve enjoyed this system more than the others, which were more focused on occultism and abstract concepts, because it basically meant you got an imaginary friend. The small daily rituals, that are celebrating nature while also being appreciated by said imaginary friend were fun little games, that made my day pretty much universally better, just like it turned a simple walk through nature as something wonderful - because I started paying more attention to what is around me.
As long as you don’t take it too seriously, don’t let it control your life, don’t talk about it with others that are not interrested, or use it as an excuse to be a dick to anyone, and just enjoy adding a little bit of magic and fantasy into your daily life, I don’t think there’s anything wrong with that. It’s a net-positive change, and not too different than just playing a game of TTRPGs.
I’ve since forgotten about it and don’t really do anything in regards to religion or mysticism, but I still fondly remember the few years I’ve tried, and it has definitely changed my point of view on a lot of things in life. I’d recommend to everyone here to give it a try and see for yourself - you don’t have to tell anyone, it’s a fun rabbit hole to explore (if that’s something you find interresting), and most importantly - you can decide it’s not for you and forget about it at any moment.
I was born in a very interesting family. Both sides of my family were from very opposing denominations of Christianity.
One of the Church of Christ (not Latter Day Saints), believing that dancing and musical instruments were a sin, took the lords supper (wine and bread) every Sunday and believed that if you were not baptized in their church that you were going to hell.
The other, Baptists, who would regularly invite bands to play at their church, rarely took the lords supper and would not batt an eye if you visited a friend’s church of a different denomination.
They both used the exact same version of the Bible (King James Version). Although, the baptists didn’t care if you used a newer translation to get a better understanding. This great divide in the interpretation of the word of a book drove me away from believing in the traditional Christian sense of a god.
Each denomination teaches their own interpretation. If the word is divine and should be read and understood in the same way everywhere, why should I believe one over the other?
Dude, we have people that think vaccines are giving people disabilities and that the moon landing was fake. There’s no shortage of morons out there. I’d go so far as to say many, if not most religious people are fairly rational, especially by comparison xD
For most religious people, religion is a way to be a better person and live a better life.
Let’s say you struggle with anger issues? How do you deal with it?
Religions have thousands of years of lessons about anger. Churches will have entire support groups built around helping with anger. You’ll often get sermons about anger. Ways to deal with it. Why it happens. Benefits of not giving into anger etc.
If you have a slip up with anger, religions have ways of handling it and helping you grow.
Probably the most visible thing is addiction. Churches have helped soooo many people deal with addiction who otherwise might be dead by now.
Religion is not for everyone, but there are certainly lots of people who feel they are better off because of it
I’m not sure if I agree with this explanation. Sure, religion is something some people turn to after having issues, but it’s also equally, if not probably more frequently, an excuse to cause issues.
I see it more often used as a coping mechanism, not a way to be a better person. It’s something to give hope of your problem just solving itself, and an excuse when it doesn’t work. It’s also used to excuse horrible behavior towards other people, not to be a nicer person towards them.
There’s both sides of all of this obviously, but I see it doing the inverse of what you said much more frequently.
The biggest boon I see from religion is that it creates community by default. In a time period so lacking in community, religion would be a good tool for this. I think it’d be better for people to form non-religious community, but there’s no force to push towards that.
This thread has plenty of anti-religious stances and oversimplified explanations that just mock those that are religious. Despite how exhausting it will be to think about the replies, I feel that some balance is needed for the sake of good content and discussion. I’m terrible at this shit, so take it with a grain of salt. Obligatory “I’m not religious” - I’m not defending those that have twisted religion to be used for personal gain, perversion, or for enacting upon hatred, but to say there’s zero benefit to religion and that it shouldn’t exist is naive; it is, however, in need of improvement.
Religion provides community, philosophy, and despite what everyone in the comments here are saying, education. You can deny a specific diety all you’d like, but it poses potential answers to questions science has yet to figure out. Did a diety create the universe via The Big Bang? When does life begin? What happens after death? What happens before we’re born? Etc.
Church provides support for those struggling. You can argue that praying to a diety may not do anything on its own, but to have a pastor say that someone in the church has been struggling with something and everyone includes that in their prayers - it helps a lot to cope with the passing of someone, addiction, debt, etc. Some churches will do events to help raise money for a cause. Some will pull you aside to help give direction to resolve the struggle in your life. Some host meetings for AA and other similar programs.
Einstein rejected a conflict between science and religion, and held that cosmic religion was necessary for science.
Multiple strong atheists including my college Language Arts teacher throughout my life have said that The Bible is one of the greatest books ever written - not for the diety, but for the teaching of morals, the poetry, the individual pastorals, and the story overall. Is it the only source to learn morality? No. Additionally, any source where you learn morality from will also have immoral characteristics, so don’t let any strawman arguments prevent you from learning from it.
Nothing and no one is perfect, so use your own judgement to discern the morality from the immoral, and question it. For those interested in pro-religioua debate, books on Apologetics can be an interesting read.
I have a minor in religious studies because belief in things outside science seemed ridiculous.
Then, a couple years ago I was walking my dog with my wife talking about Huitzilopochtli & a hummingbird flew from the top of a giant redwood to about a foot from my face, flew in a perfect square 7 times, then back to the top.
Then I was under a sycamore tree at the Rosicrucian temple in San Jose meditating on Hathor & inadvertently copied a statue of Plato when I tried to clean a cobweb off it with a walking stick & a single leaf fell gently to the exact middle of my feet.
Then I was driving & thinking about getting a tattoo of Horus when a falcon began flying next to my head outside my driver’s side window for about 5 seconds, flew past my windshield, perched on a freeway sign & watched me drive off.
I could go on but the gist is I always said I couldn’t believe unless I had concrete proof & now I have concrete proof.
I believe in science and have had a lot of experiences that lead me to believe math is a language used to describe the metaphysical, and whether divine intervention, there are patterns and things that happen that seem to appear in nature when they statistically shouldn’t. Things that point to more than my day job and Netflix. Maybe it’s monkeys typing Shakespeare over an infinite time, yellow car syndrome, projection, but it’s just so narcissistic and small minded to think we know it all and this is it, and we’re not connected to anything more than the mundane, ants scurrying about a spinning rock consuming our environment until our cave collapses becoming another dead satellite spiraling toward a burning star. I’ve experienced love. Wonder. The unexplainable. Just because we have Western words to describe something, doesn’t make it less magical or spiritual.
It’s amazing. I want to say what it is about this exchange that makes me suggest it but I don’t want to spoil it. I think you would enjoy it from this tiny bit of Internet sharing through which I know you 🤷
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