What are the benefits of religion?

Above is one consideration of Religion.

 

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I know that non-religious organizations can and do provide charity to people.

However the fact remains that the Catholic Church has been the forerunner of charity for the better part of the last 2000 years. Even today it is the largest charity in the world.. providing education, medical care, food, etc to many million a year worldwide.

My question is, Do secular entities capable of replacing religion based charities? :shrug: (This should be a whole new thread)

 

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Whether I believe in everything he writes is one thing, but his comment about being "in a state of grace" is absolutely valid. Just because we have stepped away from the shackles that continue to bind the unenlightened (there being no Santa Clause, Religion and God) that doesn't mean we have to rub their faces in it. Believing or otherwise is a choice.

 

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If a person is still miserable, then those adaptive coping strategies are not helping.

 

Can you cite any actual studies to support that?

 

These cognitive processes as you say are not limited to religious ideas, though.
In fact, if we agree that those cognitive processes are universal, then the kind of ideas that traditional religions provide will be provided anyway, as long as we humans have those cognitive processes.
The only difference there may be is that some of thus generated ideas are preferred over others.

Are you suggesting here that in reality, the way things really are, the Universe is an uncaring machine and that human suffering and their whole lives are actually meaningless?
That the default of reality is meaninglessness?

If yes, how did you arrive at this notion?

 

Why?

In principle, being aligned with "how things really are" is the optimal situation, is it not?

So if the reality is that there is no God and human life is ultimately meaningless, then we should derive the most satisfaction from believing and acting as if there is no God and our lives are ultimately meaningless.

Why would someone who lives a "really tough life" have to indulge in delusion in order to make their life more bearable??
Why would anyone be better off indulging in delusion rather than face reality?

If the reality is that there is no God and human life is ultimately meaningless, then people who live really tough lives would do best to believe and act as if there is no God and as if their lives are meaningless.

 

Tell me something: What is the natural/normal/default state for human beings?
Happiness or misery? Or nothingness? Something else?

 

It bonds people together and this facilitates cooperative behavior and greatly increased survival success.

 

Hey Signal, you know, honestly, I don't know what our default state is. But what I have observed is that each one is born with a clean slate - what we exposed to, what we are taught and how we perceive those exposures eventually define our default stat - in my opinion. But if I were to choose between Happiness, misery or nothingness, I'd venture - Happiness. I find that being in a 'state of grace' suites me great.

 

If happiness is our default state, then why would people get crushed if religion were to be taken away from them, as you suggested earlier -

-?

 

http://www.adherents.com/misc/religion_suicide.html
http://www.mentalhelp.net/poc/view_doc.php?type=doc&id=13737&cn=9
http://journals.cambridge.org/action/displayAbstract?fromPage=online&aid=25493

I didn’t post that because I knew about the studies, I posted it because I know it from experience of observing the people around me. Some people pass through many unsatisfactory circumstances at a given time of their life, and I have had conversations with lots of people that have told me something like: “If it wasn’t for god and the church, I would commit suicide”, because they don’t see any meaning of life, and science cannot help them in that matter.
These are extreme situations, and nobody can blame these people to cling to a certain religion to have some kind of support, when their consciousness is dormant by negative thoughts and emotions.

 

The main benefit of evolving religion would be life evolving a purpose for itself, a unifying survival mechanism. A circular equation whereby individuals engage with each other to form a community that reinforces the value of the effort required to sustain itself by projecting a future reward system to compensate. Interesting that the religions with which I am familiar have 'God' creating mankind in his own image, and granting dominion over the creatures and resources needed to continue the process. Or more likely it is we who have created 'God' in our image, so that we may conceptualize an engagement.

I can only speak of the religions that I know, and the strongest teachings of them is an affirmation of life and ethical teachings of the means by which to perpetuate a rewarding life, with an emphasis on the surrender of the ego and strong personal desires that detract from the benefit to the collective.

The benefit of religion, to date, has been a collective survival strategy.

There is a theory that our propensity for religion and transcendental experience has a genetic component that is not shared by the entire population. VMAT2, which stands for 'vesicular monoamine transporter no. 2.

Read more: http://www.beliefnet.com/News/Scien...hemistry-Of-The-Buddha.aspx?p=1#ixzz1N8PTFefW

One could also hypothesize that we might evolve away from this genetic marker if we reach a point where it is no longer required.

 

You said:

The studies you cited do not support that, though.

We would need studies of people who were non-religious, in great distress (clinically depressed, long-term unemployed, chronically severely ill and such) and who then joined organized religion expressedly viewing it as a tool to "cope with life as it is".

Comparing people who have been religious since early childhood or for a long time with people who have not been religious at all cannot lead to instructive results, since such a comparison trivializes the problems and challenges that a person faces when they try to become religious as adults.

Show me people who consider themselves both genuinely religious, who are respected members of religious communities - and who also believe that their religiousness is merely a tool for coping with life as it is because they lack any other adaptive coping mechanisms.


If religious people themselves do not view their religiouness as a mere coping tool, then the psychological abstraction that you work with is just speculation, based on the assumption that religiousness is for weaklings.

 

Yes, when we're all dead, this "genetic marker" will no longer be "required".

 

My hypothesis is that we all carry this 'religious' marker, and that it is our USB port for engaging with the world around us.

I am a simple creature and I see the universe as 'GOD', or multi-verses if there be more than our simple biology can detect.

At the local level, I expect that an increasing number of persons are going to shift their religious devotion to the camps of nature and technology and ways to integrate the two, for we have become influential in the natural processes of the planet by means of our sheer population growth.

The benefits of religion are that they enable us to work cooperatively to solve problems that threaten our survival and I hypothesize that in resolving future challenges that we shall need to evolve toward a new understanding of religion and new religious expression.

I belong to no organized religion, for the record, though I was indoctrinated in my youth with the basic tenets of Christianity. Interesting to note that when I went to spell christianity with a small 'c', the spell check prompts me to capitalize the word.

Such is the power and influence of a religious nature that it is woven into the structural fabric of language use.

 

I can truly relate to your experience and perspective

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As the saying goes - While your molars rot!

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There is a benefit of been part of a bigger family , You associate more often in fellowship, you are supportive of the fellow members, and beside you might trust a fellow of the congregation more as an individual on the street.

 

In view of one defination of religion provided by me, it appears that benefit from religion should be like benefits from going to the nature.