Why are we so imperfect? -- Our need for religion.

I've been agnostic for a long time and enjoy a good religious discussion, and right now I'm super submerged in it because I'm taking Comparative Religions class in college. My mind was boggled when someone told me today, half way through the semester, that they were Catholic. There are a bunch of Christians in this class, which is spent learning about the vast number of religions and religions that are much ancient than their own, all with similar stories and mythology.. but they still think theirs is the right one? I don't want to get into a religious discussion (well that would be okay but isn't so much the point of this post), just why do we as humans need religion so bad?

I had a test today, the essay question was "Some scholars believe that religion arose to fulfill human psychological, emotional, physical, and intellectual needs. Give examples from two religions we've studied on how they fulfill some of these needs." Well, I completely agree that this is why religions exist, to fulfill our needs.

An acquaintance on Facebook just posted this status. "I am thoroughly disappointed with the things of this life and i am so thankful that i am not of this world and that Jesus is with me through it all." Exactly, it's just a coping mechanism. Why were we created...evolved...why do we exist already so unfulfilled? Why do I feel like I've spent so much of my life searching and searching for something to make sense of everything? It's just not right.

Most people get uncomfortable with this kind of conversation, so I thought only people that actually want to think and talk about it might be on here...maybe?! I really appreciate any responses, anyone who even understands, or thinks I'm nuts and have it all wrong, whatever.

 

Human consciousness is both a gift and a curse. Our level (and maybe style) of abstract, critical thinking leads inevitably to questions about fate, existence, and meaning.

Humans have a need for value and meaning in our lives. When we can't find these spiritual needs -- we look outside our current selves. We may look to the future, we may look towards escapism, focus on the needs of others, philosophize as you and I are doing, put our energies to constructive use, remember and relive our pasts, or we may make up meanings and values.

Really, there isn't that much of a difference between religion and drugs; or religion and philosophy.

They are following the traditions passed down to them -- it's what works for them.

Why does it bother you so?

I am also agnostic/atheist but I think it best to leave the religious to their own (not that I can resist the missionary temptation all the time), and only worry about their beliefs when they are using them on us.

I don't think it's a symbol of human imperfection any more than colds are. I don't think there is anything as perfection -- but humans definitely do have their moments.

 

You are assuming that religious belief is pathological. In other words, that the basic underpinnings of religion are un-true.

In fact, most traditions are founded as a result of a mystical experience: a non-verbal, irrational experience of transcendence that is called God, Enlightenment, Nirvana, Parabrahman, or whatever. The attempts to explain these (very real) experiences and the (very natural) desire of humans to connect with transcendent levels give rise to religious belief.

Your Christian friends may be operating on a different level than you are giving them credit for. It's possible their doctrines are deeper and more true than your knowledge of them would lead you to believe.

 

Peoples just trippin' thats all.. I mean literally trippin'.. our bodys produce these weird nuerochemicals (many of which resemble actual psychedelic drugs) that do things like regulate hunger, sleep, control parasympatetic reactions, and control our mood among many other things. So say one day you have a very traumatic experience, an injury, you get the shit scared out of you, whatever, it causes an imbalance in your nuero-chemistry and so long story short, maybe you hear the voice of god or some shit ya know?...

If you come to accept the idea that we are simply weird fuckin' creatures, you'll stop wondering why people entertain such bizzaro fantasies.

 

LOL succinctly put zombie!

Yet, it is a fascinating subject. So much about religion seems ridiculously absurd, implausible, outright fucking insane, but intoxicating as well!

I'm probably agnostic, but have recently gone back to church after a long hiatus. When the hypocrisy becomess too much I'll leave again... I'm just curious about spiritual things. I reckon the the Native Americans had it pretty well sussed out...:daisy:

 

religion is for people afraid of going to hell.spirituality is for people who have been there.

 

Not having the ultimate answer to life causes people to feel lonely and depressed, I think, and the flipside is that it causes our joy as well. It's easier to see how it brings people down when they're holding their head in their hands and wondering, "Why am I here? What's the meaning of all this anyway?" But I think if you examine this up-in-the-air nature of our lives more closely, you find that it's actually what makes life wild, exotic, and fun. I would go so far as to say it's ideal that there isn't a universally accepted answer. It's hard to imagine what life would be like if there was, but it actually might not be very pleasant.

 

I'm not convinced that we need religion, per se, but that it meets those needs you've presented and makes large societies easier to govern. A strong sense of community would meet those needs every bit as well, but would make central governance of large societies more difficult. It's instructive, I think, to consider the motives and the effects of introducing Christianity into "primitive" cultures who've already got their own workable mythologies.

 

Ah I don't usually care to get into discussions with athiests/agnostics because the result is always the same. I will try to describe some my own spirituality/experiences and hopefully you can respectfully dismiss them as I have nothing against people who do not believe.

Firstly as kid I had no faith in god, was not raised in church or anything. I can remember though being aware of spirit as young as 4. I just knew that spirit existed without being taught it. I had no way to look into this, expand upon this knowledge, pray to anything etc.

Had some experience in the first house I lived in up til 10 years of age. I'll spare you those details but will go on to explain that the house had previously be owned by people practicing some type of magick. I'll try not to bore you too much with this either. I mentioned it because I feel it is why I had encounters. I found a coin as a kid with apicture of Eliphas Levi on one side and an odd star on the other. Eliphas Levi is a big name in magick.

Before you write me off as a stoner trying to sound interesting and spiritual please hear me out. My mother still has the coin to this day. My front door had a pentacle carved in it and we were too poor to replace it so I remember it well. Further evidence of some kind of magick crap happening there before we got it.

Anyway out of town visitors had encounters at that house and left in the middle of the night. so possibly at this point I may have recieved some brainwashing from adults talking about the happenings there. I'm cool with that.

Then we moved. as an adolecent I was spiritually attacked repeatedly by some negative spiritual entities. I lost sleep and was scared to go to bed at night for quite awhile. The attacks were violent and I had no way to fight back. I finally broke down and talked to my cousin about it because she asked why I looked like crap. She was catholic...still there?

She told me to command them to leave in Jesus name. (I know I know, but I'm not that guy just give me a sec to wrap this up.) I was desperate and of course that night when the cieling fan began to spin as it always did before I was attacked I did as she said and the fan stopped and I was not attacked. I did get saved a year or so later(what can I say) but didn't attend a church for years later.

I began to have a more normal life without this kind of crap always going on. Still having an instictual awareness of spirit and other small encounters with more positive spiritual influence every now and then. I reached a point after my senior year where I had a lot of stress, a terrible home life, lost my first love and for the first time I truly reached out to the omnipotent force in the universe as sincerely as I could for help because I was truly at the kill yourself stage.

I have written about this event on here before about two years ago, I am not making this up for the sake of this thread. I heard audibly weeks later from this being. I communed with it for a period until I asked it to leave me be for reasons only a young dumb kid would.

I attended a church for a few years that I was drawn to when I heard one of its members say you can hear the voice of God. I found all the things there that people hate about christianity. The gossip, the liars the you name it...I left after a few years and did not hear the voice ever again.

Since then I have practiced Wicca and Buddhism and looked into Native American spirituality and so on. I have had my ups and downs with all of them. Had many great meditations. I have developed. I wrestled with who was that voice those years ago? What does it mean about religions? I don't have the answers to these questions but my experience. I am not a saint. I am flawed.

I have developed a few opinions on what I am though. I beleive my body is the vehicle that ties my spirit to this physical plane. Any chemical reactions that take place when I feel emotions or crazy sensations when I meditate are there by design. The physical and the spirit in cooperation. I don't see the things that happen in the physical explaining away the spiritual no matter how much detail science goes into regarding it.

I am a spirit on a path to enlightment and I don't stress for answers to what that means. I don't know about heaven or hell. I don't hate gay people. I do think that Christ, Buddha, Mohammed etc were enlightened.

Do I use my philosophy to cope? Yes, I consider pain and suffering to be part of the deal and I look for growth with in it. I don't feel though that I developed this state of mind for the sake of coping even though it helps me to deal with life to some extent.

I realize that what I just wrote could be and should be dismissed by those who have never experienced anything spiritual at all but there it is.

 

We are devoted by nature.

 

What draw me to this thread in the first place was the thread title. We are imperfect because perfection is an abstract human-invented concept. Yes indeed, just like religion. So perhaps everything we strive for can be said to be done out of our state of imperfection I see after I read the first post this is not the essence of the thread though.

What is so strange about this? Does the age of another religion makes a later by default less credible? Can't a religion share the same origins with another one from your point of view? Isn't the context, dogma's and your personal faith what should decide which religion a person want to follow?

Why do we exist already so unfulfilled. - Because we aren't born with any answers...

It's just not right. - Why do you think it's not?

If you are entitled to this opinion than I am entitled to call it ridicilously oversimplified.

 

Maybe it can be said that we are perfect in our imperfection. After all, when something is perfect, it can neither become more or less, or even change in the slightest, without becoming imperfect.

Perfection, by definition, is static. Humans are not static. But it is nonetheless true that you are perfectly you.

Of course, whatever I just said was pretty imperfect.

 

Which you realized perfectly :2thumbsup:

 

The world has always been a hostile environment for human beings (as well as animals), and it used to be a thousand times more hostile to us than it is now. And in the early stages of human existence, there was no way for us to interpret the things happening to us (no science or technology), so we were forced to construct the reasons for ourselves using superstition and imagination, which led to religion. For thousands of years religion served us well, it kept us alive and relatively sane. But since about the time Nietzsche announced that God was dead humans haven't needed this kind of reassurance. Unfortunately, most people have not realized this yet.

 

its not a opinion asmo.its my truth.theres a lot a things i don't believe ta be truth that i hear an read,but i respect that everyones entitled to their own truths an i would never be so arrogant as ta call anyones spiritual truths ridiculous as everyones truths are there own and it dose'nt make them untrue just cos their not yours.and trust me my truths, there was nothing simple about how i came ta know them.i simply do know them now ta be true.an whats wrong with simply anyway?why dose something havta be overcomplicated to be true?anyway your welcome ta your own as i am mine.the only difference being unlike you as yet i feel totally fulfilled in my soul an have no need to question what i know ta be true in my reality of living and learning.and long may it continue.i am glad i'm still teachable.cos theres nothing you can teach people who think they know everything.a flower is simply and uncomplicated but yet so intricate in its presence and beauty.but everyone knows it just needs one little seed an water an sun ta grow.but thats probably not over complicated enough for ya either.i like simply.jesus was a simple person.if its good enough for my best friend j.c. its good enough for me.my truth is mine.get over it!

 

I wonder if most people do believe they're perfect. Some religions in this context could be seen as a way of bolstering self-esteem. Because people are inherently weak, sensitive creatures...Christianity, for example, grants self-confidence to the weak. It says it's all right that you're weak; somebody great loves you. And even though Christians will espouse that they're sinners, I think overall what's happening is that they're becoming confident in their weakness. It's no surprise that such a philosophy sprung up during the time of the Romans, when power was status, and people granted themselves narcissistic authority.

 

which of these needs is not fulfilled by the primal existential family
and community ? the intellect , the adventurous intellect . it needs a
special love .

the question you were presented in class is pedestrian , and
the student is trained to walk in a circle around the altar of
predictability .

 

Before man learned to plant and herd, or as a CHristian would say, before he ate of the Tree of Knowledge, he had a spiritual connection to nature. Where it still exists, it can be seen to be quite powerful, even enabling manipulation of our physical environment. When game was needed, the person who had the strongest connection--the shaman, or shamaness, called forth the game. When a healing was needed, the shaman or shamaness would do the healing. When something else beyond human control was needed this person would help achieve or get that too. Certain of these things were so crucial, that if the proper outcome did not occur the holy person was killed. We still see that tradition in some tribes and rural indigenous communities today. Imagine if someone was layig his life on the line for superstitions, and ritual things that he made up---he would not live very long.

Over time this spirituality gave way to an institution---religion. The institution forms around mystical spiritual experiences, but it is still an institution. It therefore seeks power, and growth, and perpetuation. It does this through control, manipulation, and fear. But religion is a far watered down version of the older spirituality, and often times people turn to it for the reasons your class discusses---comfort, to meet unmet psychological needs, etc.

But religion is more than just the watered down version of the older spirituality. It is trapped in dogma and based on dualistic principals (which ultimately boil down to a black and white universe of good and bad). It also has a bad tendency to separate people from spirit. The priest, for example, stands between you and spirit.

Christians may have an issue with that---but I challenge them to consider it this way---how long would they keep a priest or minister if everytime he was called upon to pray for something crucial that if the first time he failed to deliver, or came back with the response 'it was not meant to be,' that he would be killed?

Native American tribe generally did not kill their medicine people, but they dealt with spirit at the same levels. I am part of a lodge (sweat lodge) community, and October of last year we had a woman come to us who had lung cancer. After two healing sweats, the first of which she was too sick to physicaly attend, she was cured---the Doctors could find no more cancer. The Lakota man who pours the sweat, also performs several other ceremonies. He takes each of these very seriously, for if he fails in someway, or fails someone, he pays for it with his life or the life of a loved one---so yes, there is still the same kind of seriousness about it.

A while back he was having a lot of bad luck, and there were bad things happening within his family. He went to his medicine man, and they had a ceremony, and then the medicine man told him that someone he had helped had not done a wopila for what they received. This means that they had not thanked spirit for whatever they had asked for----this is usually done by having a giveaway, or bringing food for everyone at the sweat, or even just doing a community service----any way that you can say thanks, usually by giving back to the community. To make up for this, and bring peace and balance back to him and his family, he had to drag a number of buffalo skulls in a sundance---(i.e he had pegs pierced into his skin which where then tied to a number of buffalo skulls that he dragged on the gound behind him---until at some point they would catch in the ground, and rip the pegs out of his back). He did that, and the balance was restored. This is the kind of responsibility that is involved with working directly with spirit.

Is this superstition? Do they get results because if you believe in something hard enough...? I was very skeptical for a very long time, an atheist at one point in my life---but no----I have seen too many things that cannot be faked. I too have written on some of these things in other places within Hipforums.

But read the book, Where the Spirit Ride the Wind, by Dr. Felicitas D. Goodman. She started out researching bodily change during religious trances, and got onto a tangent that took her down an unbelievable path with her students and other researchers researching and physically experiencing the mystical state of shamanic consciousness.

 

i am perfectly imperfect

 

Because you are a rational being in a universe which is beyond your comprehension.

We're not qualified to judge the rightness of ultimate reality since it is beyond our comprehension.