what is the point of religion?

[nebula]

My discussion in the philosophy and religion thread got me thinking, what is the point of religion? I was wandering around the bookstore yesterday and noticed that there was an atheist section with all kinds of books about the destructive nature of religious belief and how stupid the whole thing is. One book provided atheists for a rhetort for all the major reasons people believe in God. All the answers are standard empiricist and even positivist replies- anything that isn’t confirmable through direct experience, or falsifiable through experimentation doesn’t exist. Normally I am so steeped in American culture which has drunk in this philosophy as its standard for centuries now that I would’ve found part of myself sympathizing even though I do believe in God. However yesterday I got thinking on a different track.

It really hit me, as a reality, just how odd existence is. The fact that we are here, thinking about ourselves as ourselves, and looking around at a world which affects us and which we can affect struck me as extremely odd. Why is there anything at all? What is the underlying structure of it? What are quarks made of? If they are vibrating strings in 13 different dimensions, what are those strings made of it? What is spacetime made of… ultimately… fundametnally… and no matter what answer science gives, you can always ask about the next layer, what’s the next deepest layer to what we see? I think there are many different ways of putting this sense of discomfort, and you don’t have to have sophisticated philosophical ideas to wonder about this either. It’s a sense we all have of our contigency, deep in our bones, that gets us thinking, why?

I argue that the ultimate purpose of religion is to answer that question, to tell us what the really real is. I think about the sense of mystery that religions tend to invoke through ritual, music and architecture, through chanting and prayer, through meditation and even drugs. It’s all to transcend this world of ‘seeming’ to the world of the Real, the world at its deepest core, its substance, its essence.

From there I argue that only God can be the full answer to that human striving. Only God can be the ultimate ground of reality and source of all. Positing anything less than Him, a force with no personality and so no will to create or arguing that there is nothing more than the appearances, there is no ultimate essence all falls short of answer the question- what do you get when you cut through everything that you can observe, what is there, what is it that is the source of what we see?

 

[RebeccaJ]

My discussion in the philosophy and religion thread got me thinking, what is the point of religion? I was wandering around the bookstore yesterday and noticed that there was an atheist section with all kinds of books about the destructive nature of religious belief and how stupid the whole thing is. One book provided atheists for a rhetort for all the major reasons people believe in God. All the answers are standard empiricist and even positivist replies- anything that isn’t confirmable through direct experience, or falsifiable through experimentation doesn’t exist. Normally I am so steeped in American culture which has drunk in this philosophy as its standard for centuries now that I would’ve found part of myself sympathizing even though I do believe in God. However yesterday I got thinking on a different track.

It really hit me, as a reality, just how odd existence is. The fact that we are here, thinking about ourselves as ourselves, and looking around at a world which affects us and which we can affect struck me as extremely odd. Why is there anything at all? What is the underlying structure of it? What are quarks made of? If they are vibrating strings in 13 different dimensions, what are those strings made of it? What is spacetime made of… ultimately… fundametnally… and no matter what answer science gives, you can always ask about the next layer, what’s the next deepest layer to what we see? I think there are many different ways of putting this sense of discomfort, and you don’t have to have sophisticated philosophical ideas to wonder about this either. It’s a sense we all have of our contigency, deep in our bones, that gets us thinking, why?

I argue that the ultimate purpose of religion is to answer that question, to tell us what the really real is. I think about the sense of mystery that religions tend to invoke through ritual, music and architecture, through chanting and prayer, through meditation and even drugs. It’s all to transcend this world of ‘seeming’ to the world of the Real, the world at its deepest core, its substance, its essence.

From there I argue that only God can be the full answer to that human striving. Only God can be the ultimate ground of reality and source of all. Positing anything less than Him, a force with no personality and so no will to create or arguing that there is nothing more than the appearances, there is no ultimate essence all falls short of answer the question- what do you get when you cut through everything that you can observe, what is there, what is it that is the source of what we see?

Good thoughts there nebula, the sort of thoughts that led me out of atheism.

 

[nebula]

Good thoughts there nebula, the sort of thoughts that led me out of atheism.

Rebecca,

Yeah, I think a lot of atheists don’t get that far in their thoughts. And I have to be honest, it hadn’t hit me as real as it does now until recently. It certainly makes sense of having a mystical tradition.

 

[RebeccaJ]

Rebecca,

Yeah, I think a lot of atheists don’t get that far in their thoughts. And I have to be honest, it hadn’t hit me as real as it does now until recently. It certainly makes sense of having a mystical tradition.

Hard to say where every person gets to and how they get there.

For many years I was satisfied with “don’t know”. And that is where most atheists are, don’t know and won’t guess.

Closed off to possibilities other than what science knows now, today, at this moment. I found that to be very limiting. Others find it to be as solid as it gets.

Short of it is, I found that I was defining God. And God cannot be defined. Not even as “non-existent”.

 

[Della]

A great book for you (and us all) to read that deals with this very issue is: The Everlasting Man by G. K. Chesterton, a prolific 20th century writer whose wit and brilliance are just about unsurpassed. He wrote this book in answer to H. G. Wells atheistic treatment of world history, very much along the lines of the sorts of atheistic writing we see today. GKC shows how crabbed and out-dated their thinking on this truly is.

 

[jrcarr]

nebula,
You seem to have beautifully answered your own question about the “point of religion”.As man has wizened over time, we tend to marvel at the knowledge we come to, the things we can “create”, our perception that we can rely solely on ourselves and our ingenuity. Isn’t science nothing more than the discovery of what God has already created? If a child is presented with a wonderful toy, he doesn’t care at all how it was made. It gives him pleasure and he “idolizes” whoever came up with this wonderful thing (think primitive man).

Take the same boy all grown up ( man today ), who grabs his old toy out of storage and now proceeds to disassemble it to see just how it is made. After every piece is placed before him and studied, he realizes that it he can put it back together himself, so there is really nothing magical about it. Does this mean that the toy was NOT “created” by someone else originally? Certainly not, he owes the existence of this thing to a “higher authority”.

If religion were truly pointless, it’s usefulness would hve died out long ago, as in the case of Egyptian and Greek religions. Catholicism, in particular, has shown how Faith in God is rational and logical. If there is doubt, we have the existence of Jesus in history. If Jesus was NOT who He said He was, than just who is He? Any answer but His answer is really stretching the validity of what history recorded.

Atheists enjoy the here and now, so to speak. They hate any moral boundaries put on them or their actions. They loathe being subject to an invisible force, a myth, a smothering Higher Power. So they dismiss Him, and say that He isn’t real. “Poof” He’s gone, now I am truly free. The simple fact is, they are in no place to dismiss their own Creator. When Mom and Dad step out for the night we can pretend we own the house and wreack all kinds of havoc, but eventually Mom and Dad will come home.

 

[grandfather]

I argue that the ultimate purpose of religion is to answer that question, to tell us what the really real is. I think about the sense of mystery that religions tend to invoke through ritual, music and architecture, through chanting and prayer, through meditation and even drugs. It’s all to transcend this world of ‘seeming’ to the world of the Real, the world at its deepest core, its substance, its essence.

It is possible that we would transcend this world of seeming to a world of unreal.

There are many religions positing different and contradicting ideas about the unseen.

Which one if any is real?

 

[cathopologist]

You know, the latest fad from Protestants is saying “we don’t need religion”. I am like .