I read something like that the other day actually. 90% of the entire world is religious. They believe in a higher authority of some sort. But only 30% of that 90 are Christians. And yes of course we are animals but I still have yet to see our fellow animals worshipping divine beings and practicing magick.
Honestly religion is always gonna cause hate. As above, so below is kinda the saying i guess?
Anyways, in my opinion religion is very useful. In terms of belief, if you have faith it can take you extremely far. In terms of some people whom are not so educated, they can be blinded by faith, thus claiming their way is the "true way" and if you don't follow it, you might as well live on the highway.
While debate of religion is good, and is expected. It should never be down to what religion is right. Because in reality, from other posts, religion was made by man to explain the world around them.
The bible, and the Adam's and Eve story, just proves this! Does it not?
In the old times, huge towns or country's made up exceptional myths that are still known, and followed today. Take the Greeks for example! There world evolved around a dozen gods and goddesses whom, all have had a major importance in one way or another. Demeter and persephone the myth? That showed or was believed to have been why winter happens, as we know it. In my practices i sometimes accompany this or value this. Because it shows how a mother and daughter will always be bound and loved forever. While the Greeks believed in a lot of wacky stuff, it created a fundamental ground for them. Encouraging them to live healthy, and be less discriminating. Unlike this day and age, some people say the Greeks were okay with homosexuality, or other things along those lines.
You can really see how over the years, decades, ect has changes the world. In terms of hopes, and beliefs.
Then there is the term of "Science". How the world was made, ahem...Big bang theory. Then that grew, and showed how us human beings were born from apes, and some other debate as we were first born from bacteria, or something along those lines.
So to me, what does religion mean to you? Because many claim to practice or believe something when in reality, they actually know little or nothing, of what they say they do.
That's because we have evolved a very complicated voice system. Very articulated. And very complicated languages. Other animals, as yet, do not have these. We have also evolved a higher intelligence. Although sometimes I doubt that! What that means is that we can think in the abstract; something other animals, as yet, cannot do. Although they do have "memory", so they are getting there!
I just find it very hard to believe that there are so many cultures, ethnic divisions, value systems and languages and people divided up all around the world from all walks of life and yet a good number of them have some form of religion. They weren't born with it they didn't learn it from animals, yet it's caught on and most importantly remained through wars, famines, ect ect for centuries. For me it's the very idea of religion and that it continues to exist. In the old days we attributed things we didn't understand to supernatural things but now we are more educated supposedly. We stopped believing in some things like the boogie man yet we easily accept wild ideas just because some scientists somewhere or another says it's true.
Science is realistic, but it doesn't always explain the unknown! They have explained so much however! The big bang theory, the laws of matter/states. Things like this, we would have never known. We would have never thought we would know it. Science though, has left the old ways, while we are more educated we are still blinded.
Vader, humans learnt from their parents, grandparents, and so on.Religion never happened over-night. It was always a very slow progress. Right from the very beginning when "someone,or something, powerful" was responsible for the many natural occurring events, Every volcano,ever earthquake, every storm, meant that some "higher power" was angry. And, as I have said before, we are, probably,the only animal that knows that one day we will die. Religions are always built on fear. Fear of storms,fear of volcanoes, fear of death. Religion is the belief that there "must be something after death".
I think that a belief, even a manipulation of a belief, cannot be based on dishonesty. That said, dishonesty can interfere.
As a child, I learned such things as a swimming pool full of water being soft, and the tiles in the swimming pool being solid. I could believe silly things such as inhaling water would not hurt, and experience would correct that. Or maybe I close my eyes in the water and swim around, expecting to move through more soft water, but actually there's a wall there. (Ouch, by the way.)
Later I learned that both the water and the walls in a swimming pool are made out of atoms, which are mostly made out of empty space. I still, however, believe in the difference between solid and liquid because that is my experience.
If I think that it is possible to turn mostly-empty-space matter into an experience of mostly-empty-space matter, then my own experience can teach me otherwise. I cannot swim through the wall of a swimming pool only because I did not know, and therefore did not believe, that it was there and solid.
If I tell other people that I have walked through walls, especially if I tell people here, then I might gain a "validating" experience by comments about how cool that is and for me to please teach it to the commenter. However, that is not enough for me to believe that I can do such a thing when the fact is I have not done such a thing.
In some meditations, I can feel the whole world, atoms and all, as illusionary. Or, I can feel that it is alive and personified by various animistic "gods" or personalities. Or I can feel that the latter is illusionary and the only real thing is the material world, that even those who study the material world say is not material! There are many interpretations of reality, and for all intents and purposes there can be many realities.
Our way of manipulating these realities is limited by our ways of interpreting them.
Actually you make a very good point. I don't tend to believe in things unless I've experienced them. I never believed in magick until I experienced it for myself! And most of my practice thus far has been digging through and sorting out the trash and superstition from the useful we have limitations in life so common sense dictates we would have it in magick too. The second lesson I was taught on my path is that the world is bigger then us. 3 dimensions or more! So unless we believe in magick or religion in blind faith then each of us I'll use the term believers has experienced something that causes us to believe. And not just storms and earth quakes. That might have passed for an explanation thousands of years ago but for me it's normal operation of the world around me. I'm educated now remember.
And yes we did get our knowledge of religion from our parents, and grand parents and so on but trace it back to first man and first woman. Or instead let's say first dozen men and women. Where did they learn it from. Again for me two possibilities exist. They cooked it up for themselves and myself and others like me have believed our entire lives in story book fantasy not to mention entire governments being founded on such principles or there is something to religion and some people who for whatever reasons that are their own just refuse to believe. Does not believing make it not true. No.
Note that here I speak of religion in general! I'm not pointing to any particular faith or path. And remember religion is defined as faith in a persons God or gods!
