The Glade 4.0

The evidence suggests that we do, in fact, have special psychological needs if for no other reason than that our psychology is vastly more complex than the overwhelming majority of other creatures. A dog also has special psychological needs that, for example, a tarantula or a rattlesnake does not have.

Religion didn't form to fill some special human psychological need. It formed as a means of control, to gain power, to gain advantage over others. It is just another form of human social power structure.[/quote]

Aside from the fact that you are using your underlying disbelief as a reason to make this assertion, it's very hard to support this. For the most part, the people "in power" when any major world religion formed had just as much reason to think that some God somewhere was setting down rules as anyone else. If, for example, you notice that people regularly get sick after eating pork and you're the village elder, you're going to assume that they're being punished for eating the wrong kind of animal or something along those lines. you don't know the first thing about disease theory, and you won't know that just cooking it more will get rid of the problem.

This has nothing to do with wanting to "gain power" or "advantage over others" as a generalization, although obviously certain individuals would want control for their personal selfishness. It's a matter of survival. Religious rules in their formative times are about making the society stable and survivable. Sometimes they're ill-advised, but that's because the people making them are people, and as I pointed out, they don't have all the facts.

Even later on, enforcement of religious rules may be about power and control, but the reasons for wanting that power and control are not entirely selfish. A wealthy bishop might want the peasants suitably subservient because it's good for him, but he honestly believes that if the peasant does what he's supposed to he'll probably go to heaven. He may feel entitled to a lot more than the peasant, but he honestly believes God has ordained his lofty social position and that he's entitled to it. Religious leaders in the middle/dark ages up through the beginnings of modern science, corrupt as they might be, are not atheists coldly propounding something they don't believe a word of, like Soviet apparatchiks talking about socialism they care about only as far as it secures their personal positions.

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"Hysterical children shrieking about right-wing anything need to go sit in the corner and be quiet while the adults are talking."

I dont mind so much that Santorum is religious, it's more that he seems rather willing to use the government to further his personal ideology. Big government social con vrs Big government liberal 2012.

Although it looks like it will be Big Government Moderate Vrs Big Government Liberal.

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“Strong people are harder to kill than weak people, and more useful in general”. - Mark Rippetoe

Religion is not belief. A person who reads the bible and considers themselves christian and never attends church or follows any rules but their own "bible-trained conscience" is not religious. They might be spiritual, but not religious.

Religion is the organization and its structure. Christianity is not a religion. Catholic, Lutheran, Anglican, and Greek Orthodox are religions.

I hate religion. Spirituality and belief are fine, but they have nothing to do with religion.

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Well Ali Baba had them forty thieves, Scheherezade had a thousand tales
But master you in luck 'cause up your sleeves you got a brand of magic never fails...
...Mister Aladdin, sir, What will your pleasure be?
Let me take your order, Jot it down -You ain't never had a friend like me
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This is your personal interpretation. For many people, the two are interrelated.

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"Hysterical children shrieking about right-wing anything need to go sit in the corner and be quiet while the adults are talking."

Related, perhaps. Religion leverages spirituality (among other things) to gain power. But a person can be spiritual without being religious, and they can be religious without being spiritual. They can also be both, or neither. There are connections between them, but they are not interdependant.

Religious, as an adjective, beyond the denotation of "belonging to a religion," carries a connotation of structured, ordered, conscienciously following set patterns and rules. A person can "religiously" follow the same procedure every day when they get up in the morning of brushing their teeth, showering, making coffee, and reading the newspaper. Now, this is obviously a metaphorical use of the word religious, but even then it's because of its origin. Some religions stress a more "religious" form of worship than others. The number of religious rituals a devout Catholic performs by rote far outnumbers those that a Baptist may follow.

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Well Ali Baba had them forty thieves, Scheherezade had a thousand tales
But master you in luck 'cause up your sleeves you got a brand of magic never fails...
...Mister Aladdin, sir, What will your pleasure be?
Let me take your order, Jot it down -You ain't never had a friend like me
█ ♣ █

Not necessarily, but you can't say they're never interdepedent. That depends on the individual. It isn't up to you to decide whether someone is spiritual or religious.

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"Hysterical children shrieking about right-wing anything need to go sit in the corner and be quiet while the adults are talking."

It always amuses me how obstinately zealous the self proclaimed non-religious are in denouncing any association with any religious qualities (even those which ear positive or neutral) and even the word religion itself. Despite Khross providing a more accurate definition, that being the act of rationalizing answers to existential questions, they still kick and scream. It's as though the word religion itself has been conflated to mean precisely people such as Fred Phelps, Islamic Fundamentalist and Beryllin.



In order to gain power, religion had to exploit something. It can't just exist and grow in power. This is the same argument people use when trying to rationalize the concept or "predatory lending" or "predatory capitalism". What it exploited is the desire to have answers to existential questions. Because religion may have been used as a tool of social order early in the development of human culture doesn't mean it did not also serve to answer such questions.

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"It's real, grew up in trife life, the times of white lines
The hype vice, murderous nighttimes and knife fights invite crimes" - Nasir Jones

With dishonesty. It's made-up, random fairy tales treated as fact. (Even if you've decided to accept one religions set of fairy tales as "truth," that still means you believe the vast majority of religious answers to such questions are made-up, random fairy tales. You are just leaving an exception for your preferred dogma.)

My point above is Khross is confusing spirituality with religiosity. An atheist can be a very spiritual person, seeking the answers to the existential questions you mentioned in other ways. A religious person can be completely lacking in spirituality, seeking no answers to anything at all. And most religions certainly do not encourage such spirituality. That would involve questioning and thinking, which is an anathema to religion.

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Well Ali Baba had them forty thieves, Scheherezade had a thousand tales
But master you in luck 'cause up your sleeves you got a brand of magic never fails...
...Mister Aladdin, sir, What will your pleasure be?
Let me take your order, Jot it down -You ain't never had a friend like me
█ ♣ █

The honesty of allegorical material in the bible is irrelevant to my point. You act as though religion just came along and told some fancy stories and people have been giving it money and hating gay people ever since then. It's a ridiculous notion to think religion doesn't fulfill some deep seated human needs, even if subconsciously, and yet people are willing to kill over it.

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"It's real, grew up in trife life, the times of white lines
The hype vice, murderous nighttimes and knife fights invite crimes" - Nasir Jones

The "deep-seated human needs" are what we refer to as "spirituality." (I do not think they are needs, because the vast majority of people completely ignore them. Many people, in fact, just completely ignore the questions and never give them a second thought, living their lives without consideration for them. The few who bother to give their apathy a second thought might refer to themselves as "apatheists.") Religion doesn't fulfill them, it exploits them. There is a difference.

Philosophy, faith, belief...all these things can fulfill those questions without resorting to religion. Religion, in fact, often allows the average person to utterly bypass those questions and feel good about doing so. But regardless of what any one particular religion does in this regard, it helps to understand what religion is. Religions are the human organizational structures that leverage and exploit those "existential questions" to control people. The questions, the answers, those are not relevant to Religions directly. What matters is that those questions and the answers given allow them to parasiticly feed off society, and even control society to varying degrees.

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Well Ali Baba had them forty thieves, Scheherezade had a thousand tales
But master you in luck 'cause up your sleeves you got a brand of magic never fails...
...Mister Aladdin, sir, What will your pleasure be?
Let me take your order, Jot it down -You ain't never had a friend like me
█ ♣ █

This is not true. You are basing this on your own presumption that all the religious tales are of equal believability. You are not making any special "exception", you're looking at what's out there and deciding which one, or none, seems most likely to be believable to you.

All this nonsense about "random fairy tales" is just a way to use predjudicial language to affirm your own choice to yourself.

As for "deciding all the other ones are "random, made-up fairy tales", no, it means nothing of the sort. For one thing, while I don't believe Mohammed was correct in what he had to say, I do think it's entirely possible he did experience the things he said he experienced. I don't say it's necessarily true that he did (given his personal history, he's one of the most likely candidates to have simply made something up) but I don't dismiss it altogether. Perhaps he misunderstood what God was saying to him. As for other religions, I don't see why they have to be either entirely made-up or random. There could very well be elements of truth to them even if they don't have very good spiritual answers on the whole. I certainly don't think they're "random"; they fit the time and place they came into being at for the most part.

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"Hysterical children shrieking about right-wing anything need to go sit in the corner and be quiet while the adults are talking."

The ACT of seeking those answers, whether done alone or in a congregation of 3000 others every Sunday is religion. This notion that a religious person is only a person who goes to a church, synagogue, or temple every week is sheer nonsense.



Exactly, despite being contrary to what you state above. The needs are not the act of satisfying the needs. I eat food when I'm hungry. I do go hunger to fix my hunger.

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"It's real, grew up in trife life, the times of white lines
The hype vice, murderous nighttimes and knife fights invite crimes" - Nasir Jones

Most people do not "completely ignore them".



According to you it "exploits" them, but that's based on your own distatse and disbelief int he first place. It is certainly not universally true.



That is not what religion is at all. There are elements of human organizational structure to it, but it is not inherently exploitive, nor does it have anything to do with some abstract desire to "control people". As a general rule, the ones wanting the "control" actually believe what they are teaching. It is not simply a desire for "control". The answers to the existential questions most certainly ARE relevant to the religions directly. In point of fact, most religions move away from control, with the people supposedly wanting the control rapidly schisming over the answer to the existential questions.

As for philosophy, faith, and belief, yes those CAN be ways to answer existential questions, but for most people that simply doesn't work because you're just creating more questions. The structure of religion is a way to keep everyone on the same sheet of music while doing the looking for answers. Each religion does that in different ways, but that's the major goal. Each religion beleives in itself, and people want checks and balances to prevent it from simply going off on some tangent. When it does go off on a tangent, you usually get a schism.

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"Hysterical children shrieking about right-wing anything need to go sit in the corner and be quiet while the adults are talking."

Of course they do. That's why a spiritual person can remain spiritual their entire life. There are always more questions. This is partly how religions discourage spirituality, and also says something about many of the people they attract. You can wrap up the answers with a ribbon and bow, and anything not in the box can be ignored, because your religion says so, and you can just stop asking questions. Religion defines boundaries for questions, by decreeing certain things "beyond human comprehension," or part of the "mystery" of God, etc. It provides people with a way to stop being spiritual, if they so desire it.

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Well Ali Baba had them forty thieves, Scheherezade had a thousand tales
But master you in luck 'cause up your sleeves you got a brand of magic never fails...
...Mister Aladdin, sir, What will your pleasure be?
Let me take your order, Jot it down -You ain't never had a friend like me
█ ♣ █

Religions do not discourage spirituality. They don't do any of those things as some sort of universal; the errors of certain religious teachers notwithstanding. Teachers are human and often don't want to admit to not having all the answers; that does not mean religion discourages answering questions. Then there's the simple fact that people often ask "questions" with no desire whatsoever to pay attention to an answer, or knowing perfectly well that the answer is "we don't know", and both religious people and religious teachers eventually get tired of entertaining this nonsense, and say "look, this is the belief, and here's why. If you have a problem with it fine, but take it somewhere else." People accepting a question as answered when it isn't answered for you doesn't mean they've "stopped questioning."

As for it "saying something about the people they attract" - no, it doesn't say a thing. That's just a form of prejudice.

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"Hysterical children shrieking about right-wing anything need to go sit in the corner and be quiet while the adults are talking."

Taly:

I'm not confusing spirituality with religiosity. You're conflating religion with an organizational expression of dogma.

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Yeah!

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“Strong people are harder to kill than weak people, and more useful in general”. - Mark Rippetoe

I don't see a problem with getting together with your 12 favorite bros and trying to spread the idea that you should be good to each other.

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"...the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being. And who is willing to destroy a piece of his own heart?" -Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn