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Your views of Religion as it should be

LuisDantas

Aura of atheification
Premium Member
Allow me to propose a little exercise of gauging worldviews and understandings of the word "Religion".

Please picture in your mind an ideal yet achievable world. One where religion is consistently expressed in its very best forms with the most auspicious of all conceivable results.

What are those results?

How, if at all, will you know that they are the best possible?

How much of those results is discernible by other people? How much effort, good will and cooperation does it require of them?

What do you see as the way forward from that most fortunate state of things?




I intend to post my answers for these questions in this thread, but not quite yet. I am truly eager to see what others say first.
 

Brickjectivity

Turned to Stone. Now I stretch daily.
Staff member
Premium Member
Fun question! Best guess for me...

Religions as with economic systems, as with machines and other kinds of systems are prone to fatigue. An unchanging system cannot work. Systems break down, and they wear and weaken. Lets say that there is a religion which does not change. That religion becomes less understood as people in it change. Lets say those people do not change. Then you have both an unchanging religion and unchanging people. Has this ever happened in the whole of History?

By the way I am not speaking irreverently or as irreligious. I think a lot of the above is alluded to in the NT, and it is not incompatible with my liberal Christian religion. It is beyond the scope of the thread to explain, but it has been explained before.

Allow me to propose a little exercise of gauging worldviews and understandings of the word "Religion".

Please picture in your mind an ideal yet achievable world. One where religion is consistently expressed in its very best forms with the most auspicious of all conceivable results.

What are those results?
They begin very well, but they cannot end well unless there is a living system. People will change, and the world will change, and that "Religion consistently expressed in its very best forms" will cease to be so expressed. With knowledge we have today, with our wonderfully inexpensive books and access to digitized information we can see this evidenced in the Past. It is not difficult or expensive to do so. We can see that even if the religion stays the same its people do not, and they and their understanding of it changes.

How, if at all, will you know that they are the best possible?

How much of those results is discernible by other people? How much effort, good will and cooperation does it require of them?

What do you see as the way forward from that most fortunate state of things?
In answer to the question there is an ideal and achievable world in my mind, but the religion supporting it must be something which remains undefined and which eludes definition. We need definitions, however; because we have to communicate between generations. We are therefore incompatible with a changing religion while our ideals are incompatible with an unchanging one, so we are between a rock and a hard place. On the other hand its impossible in my opinion not to be in a religion, because even our irreligion becomes religious in nature and like all other systems progresses to a thing which we no longer recognize.
 

metis

aged ecumenical anthropologist
To me, simply love. Love of all people and our entire environment where people cooperate with each other much more than they conflict. Where people appreciate what they have rather than moan and groan about what they don't have. Where people are far more apt to say "What can I do to help you?" than "Get out of my way!".
 

joe1776

Well-Known Member
I don't see a future for religion because, IMO, religion is a failed human experiment. Morally, it has been a wash: neither a good nor a bad influence. For example, legal slavery was abolished in every culture in the world but the sacred texts of Christianity, Judaism and Muslim religions condoned it. And yet the fact that it was condoned in the sacred texts could not stop this conscience-driven moral advance.

I think the movement that will displace religion has already begun. Global Citizenship is an old idea beginning to gain momentum in the world. A global citizen might be legally a citizen of the USA but would oppose any national policy that was in conflict with the welfare of the global community.
 
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sun rise

The world is on fire
Premium Member
Please picture in your mind an ideal yet achievable world. One where religion is consistently expressed in its very best forms with the most auspicious of all conceivable results.

What are those results?
It's a world where peace, love, harmony, beauty, truth and joy are the living experience of everyone; where our bond with the Earth is felt and honored.

How, if at all, will you know that they are the best possible?

I can't conceive of anything better.

How much of those results is discernible by other people? How much effort, good will and cooperation does it require of them?
People know it because it's their living experience. It's a golden age where effort as we know it does not exist but live is lived as a wonderful dance where the only effort is to become a better "dancer".
What do you see as the way forward from that most fortunate state of things?

The only way I can think to approach an answer to this question is to quote C. S. Lewis "The Last Battle"

“...the things that began to happen after that were so great and beautiful that I cannot write them. And for us this the end of all the stories, and we can most truly say that they all lived happily ever after. But for them it was only the beginning of the real story. All their life in this world and all their adventures in Narnia had only been the cover and the title page: now at last they were beginning Chapter One of the Great Story which no one on earth has read: which goes on for ever: in which every chapter is better than the one before.”
 
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