When will religion die out or become irrelevant?

UPDATE - Your claim here, as the claim debunked above, is rubbish.

Dionysus was born of a coupling of Zeus and Semele (or possibly, Persephone). Neither was by definition a virgin, being as they were impregnated by the primary god in the Greek pantheon.

Mithra was born--or emerged--out of solid rock. I suppose you could refer to a mass of rock as "virgin", as it had presumably never engaged in intercourse with another mass of rock or a god or what-have-you before, but let us just say that your source here is fallacious at best, a perfect liar at worst.

Murdok. You can believe that Jesus never existed if you wish, but you will have alligned yourself against even the majority of liberal scholars on this point. Please disabuse yourself of the notion that the Jesus Seminar or whatever you've been reading is anything but a joke. Don't believe everything you read there or in Newsweek, hard to say which is worse.

 

I'm not very expert on art history, but I'm seeming to recollect having read somewhere that the Jesus of mediaeval Byzantine art history does look quite suspiciously like the Zeus of classical Greek art history. Maybe this is because many of the Byzantine cathedrals are just made-over Greek temples. - Theo.

 

Can someone explain to me what the Jesus Seminar was. Please correct me if I'm wrong, but I have some notion that it was a collection of theologians who got together and voted that Jesus never existed. Who were the major personalities associated with the Jesus Seminar? When did it happen? Did they ever publish a book that collected the various papers from said seminar? - Theo

 

It never works to try to kill God. Look at what happened during the French Revolution when the pseudo-intellectuals tried to replace the one true God with the Cult of the Supreme Being and the Goddess of Reason. Don't you realize that trying to force the
"little people" (who are usually very conservative) to give up their deeply-held notions of the divinity is basically a recipe for disaster?

 

As interesting as this thread has been up 'til now, I wish someone would address the very real REASON humans have religions.

As I see it, the fact of awakening one day to BEING is so utterly inexplicable in scientific terms. We all know, insofar as we can know anything about this stuff, that there was a time when each of us didn't exist. Then, in very early childhood, each of us first experienced the sense of "looking out through our own eyes".

No explanation is given to us about how each of us came to be ourselves AS SEPARATE IDENTITIES. Worse, we ALSO know, insofar as we can know anything about this stuff, that there will come a day when we each shall cease to be.

This phenomenon is a far more compelling reason to pursue religious thinking than any miracle in the Bible. It is far more important than whether the "science" in the Bible is "true". Indeed, the Kansas Board of Education, I think, has completely missed the point!

I am explaining this very badly.

Anyway, religion will never die out because it addresses THE fundamental fact of each person's existence and that fundamental fact CANNOT be addressed in any way other than religiously.

 

Ted, you're probably right.

Christian art has often imitated pagan. Commonplace. Though my UG degree's in Art, I'm not aware of the reference you make, but it wouldn't surprise me at all if Medievel Christian art imitated Greek pagan motifs, styles, etc.

In fact, that's about the only area in which a Mithra-Jesus comparison doesn't break down utterly and look silly upon close examination. It's entirely true that early Christian artists imitated mithra motifs in their work. Not surprising, as at that time in that part of the world, those were the two primary religions that competed for the hearts of the people. The Christians were obviously trying, rightly or wrongly, to reach out to the pagan world. Perhaps a modern parallel would be the so-called "seeker sensitive" churches with guitar-heavy pop bands and evening aerobic classes.

Edit: By stating that Mithra and Jesus worship were the two primary religions at that time in that place, I did not mean, of course, to exclude Judaism. Sorry about any misunderstanding, Nosborne. It's just that at that time many Christians did not really consider themselves separate from the Jews. Most actually considered themselves Messiah-worshiping Jews, even while calling themselves "Christians". The real separation came centuries later. And as you know, some modern-day Christians--i.e., me--consider themselves Messiah-Worshipping Jews as well.

 

I guess that I'd attribute religion to two psychological processes:

1. Intellectual closure. No matter how little people actually know, no matter how large the gaps in their understanding, they always have the sense that they understand the big picture. I expect that was just as true in paleolithic times as today.

2. People's optimization for dealing with other people. We acquire language, we read other people's inner states, we prefer to be around people.

OK, put the two together. Paleolithic man sitting around his campfire was confronted with an infinity of things that he didn't really understand. The sky, the sun, plants and animals, the campfire itself. But I doubt that people back then sensed the gaps in their understanding any more than we do today. They unconsciously filled them in.

And they had a natural preference for personalizing, for filling in the gaps with anthropomorphizations.

Storms were personal, they were the anger of higher occult powers. They weren't something abstract, the result of air pressure and humidity and atmospheric fluid dynamics. Disease was the expression of malevolence, whether of demonic spirits or of human witchcraft. There weren't any viruses or endocrinology involved.

We still see it today. Gods are almost always imagined as big human-beings in the sky. Yahweh is very passionate with his ranting and raving, and Biblical Judaism is built upon the interpretation of the events of Jewish communal life in terms of those supernatural passions. Christianity revolves around what it believes is God's incarnation as a human being. Christian faith is very personal.

India has been an exception, but even there the abstract philosophical god-head of Brahman is something for Vedantic religious philosophers, while the people worship Shiva and Vishnu and adore Krishna. Buddhism started out as something totally remote from the worship of personalized divinities, but today millions of Buddhists pray passionately to Amida for salvation in the Pure Land of the West.

If I was going to turn this into a longer essay, I'd probably write about some of the social and personal functions that religion fulfills, about the early desire to find supernatural sanction for human laws and customs (originally the same thing), and about quieting the universal human fear of death. (Even the Neanderthals practiced what look to have been ritual burials.)

I strongly agree. That's one of the things that makes me convinced that I don't have a clue what this... reality... business is all about.

Put simply, I don't know why there is something rather than nothing. I don't even know what an answer to the question would look like, or whether an answer is possible that doesn't fall into circularity or infinite regress. That's the fundamental mystery of being, I guess.

But if we are going to be honest with ourselves, I think that we have to admit that's all that it is: a mystery. The mystery perhaps, the ultimate mystery, but a mystery all the same.

A sense of fundamental mystery isn't much on which to hang an entire religion, unless it's personalized and filled out with myth. If the mystery is left unadorned and abtract, it's agnosticism.

 

Agnosticism?

Well, maybe. I'm not so sure.

It's true, certainly, that human reason is almost powerless to deal with this mystery but not, perhaps, COMPLETELY powerless.

Is it beyond reason that the experience of "selfness" depends on the physical hardware? That the reason we don't have experience of it at birth is that we are insufficiently "wired" at that point?

Sooo...once the plant shuts down, is it too far out to suggest that the experience of "selfness" disappears as well?

Now, I am not sure where to go from there...subjective experience of self is but one facet of the mystery; unique identity is a larger problem yet.

Is it completely outrageous to suggest that the identity that occupies the self, so to speak, comes from, and therefore in some way, pre exists, the hardware?

Or am I babbling again?

 

This very question once came up in a beginning graduate level philosophy class. I forget whether this explanation came up in Tom Nagel's _What Does It All Mean?_ or John Burr & Milt Goldinger's _Philosophy and Contemporary Issues_. However, whatever the source, it seems that this particular philosopher's theory was that one fine day a couple of cave men were walking along their happy hunting grounds. And one of the cave men fell down. And didn't get up. And didn't wake up. And his compadre wondered why. And his compadre wondered whether there existed some sort of life-force. Perhaps one could call it a soul. And maybe the compadre cave men who fell down and didn't get up and didn't wake up lost his life-force. And the still-living compadre cave men came up with a nice-sounding idea about where his dead compadre's life force went to. And so religion was born. May the force be with you!

 

Not QUITE the same question, though. Birth, or rather, the beginning of self consciousness is an actual EXPERIENCE whereas death is a mere theory until it happens...and then it's too late!

But, yeah, with that twist, it sounds like pretty much the same thing.

 

Sorry to disagree, but death is not a theory. Death has a definition and it happens to everyone eventually. If you find someone who sincerely believes that they will never die then you can bet everything you own that they are delusional. What happens after death is theoretical and I will leave it to others to debate that issue. However, there is no real question as to whether death occurs for us all.
Jack
(sorry for the injection of morbidity but, in my own opinion, the denial of death is unhealthy)

 

I do not disagree with you at all. Denial wasn't my point. Or perhaps it WAS, but in a different sense.

What I meant to convey was that we have each actually, personally experienced the awakening of self consciousness. We can't really make up fables about it. We KNOW what it is like. However, we HAVEN'T (yet) experienced the loss of self (or so I conjecture) that death will bring. Now, religious people have a great deal of room in Death to create, and then persuade others to accept (with a suitable donation, of course! ) their religious ideas. There is no comparable opportunity in life.

 

OK, I understand what you mean (at least I think I do). However, I'm still not sure I completely agree with you in that there are some significant sources of information regarding death. Some of these are philosophical in nature, some are religious in nature, some are medical in nature, etc. If you are trying to maintain the philosophical position that a person can not "know" anything unless/until they experience it for themselves then you essentially bankrupt human history. Personally, I don't think this is a debatable point. We don't have to reinvent the wheel in every generation. There is a substantial fund of knowledge on this subject. The fact that it is generally outside the realm of common knowledge only highlights the idea that there is a common social attitude of denial of death. Try reading The Denial of Death by Ernest Becker (Pulitzer Prize Winner). It's accessible to anyone on this forum.
Jack

 

Of course not! Retain what we know of wheel-making technology so that each and every generation can get bigger and better monster truck wheels! - Theo.

 

I'm not entirely clear what you mean by 'this mystery'.

There's a mystery of being itself: the question of what accounts for reality as opposed to nothingness. I conceive of that as the bottom-line mystery that underlies all others.

And there's the related but different matter of each person's own individual awareness. (And awareness of that awareness.) I guess the most troubling problem arising with that is the prospect of it terminating.

I suppose that you can collapse the two problems together in the manner of subjective idealism (the theory that 'external' reality is constructed from experience), in which case we face problems ranging from solipsism (the idea that nothing exists except for me) to the prospect that our own death is the same thing as the destruction of the universe and the end of being itself.

I've had those ideas occasionally, and it's very scary.

Of course not. I gravitate to that idea myself. For one thing, I've seen the devastating effects of brain damage and I've abused a few drugs in my day. So I'm sensitive to the dependence of subjective state on neural state.

That's what I expect happens.

Do we really have to go anywhere? I guess one place to go is to a state of equanimity and to emotional acceptance of the prospect of personal termination.

The Buddhists, or some of them at least, might suggest that there isn't any persistent self that continues on from moment to moment in our waking lives either. What people think of as their 'self' is revealed upon analysis to be a constantly changing and fluctuaing aggregation of states (the Pali term is 'khandas'), linked together by a chain of causation or 'dependent origination'. Basically, it's stuff like memory that gives us a illusory sense of temporal continuity, but our awareness is always right now.

These sort of Buddhists would suggest that everyone is being born and dying at every instant anyway. It's like Heraclitus, you can never step into the same river twice.

So what people are afraid of losing at death is something that they never really had anyway.

The Hindu philosophers often address that by distinguishing between subject and object.

They identify two senses of 'me'.

On one hand there's the transcendental self, the self of one's subjectivity. This is the inner eye that's always watching, the witness that observes all of the events of 'our' private interior and public exterior lives.

On the other hand there's the phenomenal self, the self of 'name-and-form' (Skt. 'nama rupa'), the self that's generated out of the content of experience. This includes all the data and determinations: our birthdate, our appearance, our memories, our jobs and relationships, our skills and joys and fears.

This sort of Hindu conceives of each life as a persona, a mask, a role that the transcendental self plays. At death the mask is dropped and a new persona assumed, in accordance with the peculiar ethical-causal law of karma.

So in each rebirth, a Hindu occupies a different station in life (usually in a different world, a heaven or a hell, and not as a human being), in a different body, with different memories and a completely different phenomenal identity. They get different names and photos on their incarnation driver's licenses each time.

But the witness, the transcendental 'me' that experiences it all, remains one and the same identical throughout.

No, I don't think so at all. Maybe I am, though.

 

Jack:

All of the data you describe come from near death of someone else. Once death intervenes, there is literally nothing left to study, I think. I think that dying and being dead are two very different things.

Bill:

When I posted, it crossed my mind that certain Eastern religions DO attempt to spin fables about life. The thing is, I don't believe that more than a small handful (if that) of adherants actually ACT as if this life is an illusion. The Dali Lama comes to mind. He certainly takes this life very seriously indeed.

No, Orientals are born, live, reproduce, and die pretty much the same as Westerners do, whatever they may claim about Nothingness.

Still, I personally find taoism to be very attractive. (You can probably tell from the way I argue in my posts!)

I too am disturbed that my entire universe ceases with my death but really, that's a non issue, don't you think? I won't be here to notice!

 

I have had the opportunity to see plenty of evidence about the Moor presence in some parts of what today is Spain. Nevertheless, we agree, those guys bombed those trains probably influenced by those events you mentioned. Yeah, I thought you were serious when you referred to that territory imperialized by a bunch of mean nasty white European Christians in 1492. Sorry about that.

 

As I said in the beginning of the discussion, I think the evolution of religion (from fertility gods to what it is today) reflects the changes in our human collective psyche. I think that humans fell back on (a) god while they needed him. The French Revolution probably signified the end of this tutelage. At least for a few. That’s what I think I meant. Of course, I realize that god is a crutch that many use for different purposes. Some use it as a tool to control others. Others utilize it as a way to confer some meaning to their existence while others rely on art, philosophy, women/men or alcohol/drugs for the same. I just wonder how the world would be today if we had buried those silly ideas of gods, religions and life beyond the grave. I bet it would be a lot better.

 

If it is difficult to rely on reason to justify the presence or the existence of a god, imagine how is like to trust on "revelation", like all major religions do.

 

I think my earlier statement was a tongue-in-cheek way of pointing out the fundamental ridiculousness of any charges of imperialism. Just using Spain as an example, one could accuse "mean nasty white European Christians" (Ferdinand & Isabella & their cronies) of imperializing Spain from the Moors (Spanish Moslems) in 1492. But then again the Moors imperialized the Visigoths in Spain in 711. And the Visigoths imperialized some Celtic group in Spain in 500. And the Celts imperialkized the Old Europeans ca. 1900 BC. And so it goes. Oy vey!