I know many extremely bright people who are religious, but I do agree with what your saying. Nothing wrong with having existential dread. Such is the human condition.
Why not? It makes sense to me, it carried me through some very difficult times and is a good way to think about how I interact with the world and my moral framework.
I find the prevalence of faith makes more sense if you think of it like a living organism. It only exists because it’s built to exist. If it didn’t, it would die.
That’s why faiths often have rules around birth control and sex out of wedlock. Kids often take the beliefs of their parents, so the religion has to keep ‘traditional’ families together to keep itself alive. It’s also why they threaten eternal damnation if you drop the faith or don’t try to force it on the people around you. A lot of this often isn’t the conscious effort of the members, it just kinda slowly crops up, like evolutionary mutations. Key word there being ‘often’, as I’m sure members of these religions have also figured this out but have used it to their own advantage.
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.
I mean, in this day and age why isn’t [insert what I know to be true] accepted by [everyone who I perceive to be wrong]. Hegel leads to another Russian smart man who argues a bunch of it might be due to this idea of perezhivanie; how we make sense of what is happening (particularly dramatic events) through our cognition, our emotions and filtered through our needs.
How we make sense of stuff leads to how we behave/believe. This is impacted by our social environment, how we are brought up, our experiences, and our reasoning of those experiences.
It’s why it is argued that information alone will never change someone’s mind about something, it needs to be attached to an emotion and an experience to unpack.
Humans are not rational creatures, and despite all the knowledge we have gained, people will still find what they want to be true the most believable of all
Besides, you can talk about all of the science we have discovered, but the overwhelming majority of people don’t really see it. We see the technology and all that, but we don’t truly understand it, so you ultimately are just taking someone else’s word for it. To me, the word of the scientific community is credible, but to some it is not
Some people are flat-earthers. People aren’t swayed by reason. We’re dumb animals, and the conceit of us as “rational” is hubris
I really like the holographic theory but again that’s a theory which gives us answers, but then opens up a bunch more questions. The point of my comment was about as long as we have these fundamental questions about reality, we will have religion. I wasn’t trying to say god did it.
As a former Catholic, I can say at least personally, religion did not make me feel good. It made me feel like many thoughts and feelings I had made me a bad person. It made me smug and judgemental.
I think more people practice religion than actually believe it. If it improves their lives to live within a set of rules, to have a community, etc. There’s plenty we don’t know and most people have some sort of “belief” about the unknown, I don’t think most people actively believe all the dogma even if they follow the steps.
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