At a biological level, Man evolved to be religious.
All historical societies and most of the modern world are religious. Our ancestors responded to religion as a pervasive and powerful selection factor, acting over hundreds of generations. Our minds assume the presence of religion - they are setup to operate with a religion.
As a pwoerful generalisation; humans beings and human societies do not function adaptively without a religion - individual minds and social groups become dysfunctional at a basic level - they become indeed literally psychotic.
Most of the people in the modern West are literally psychotic, all organisations are psychotic - and only that fact that insane people make up a majority of these societies (and a near-monopoly of those with power, status and wealth) itself covers the fact of mass madness.
Lack of insight is a hallmark of psychosis. Lack of insoght means not just having mad ideas, but being unable to recognise that the ideas are mad. False threats are focused-upon; while real and present threats are unnoticed or denied.
Western Man is overall and in all significant public interactions Not religious. However people may self-identify; the mass of populations do not believe in God, gods nor the world of spirit to a sufficient extent that they will make religion the primary factor in their lives, nor to the extent that they will defy (in their hearts or in practice) the inverted morality of mainstream public discourse.
Modern Man Has Not found a 'substitute for religion' - he has excised religion from his soul.
What we see in the faces and behaviours of our leaders and most of those around us, are the countenances and activities of psychologically-maimed mad people.
(Look around. I'm right, aren't I? Or, are you yourself so griped by insanity that you deny the obvious?)
The objective evidence is not hard to find, but - because nearly everybody is insane - the obvious and true and immediately-experienced is simply ignored, regarded as Not A Problem.
How and why? Because we are surrounded my maimed-minds; minds that have been made nuts by the removal of what was - through evolutionary history -the Most Important Thing.
Religion has been removed and has Not been replaced; because there is no replacement.
Politics is not remotely a replacement for religion - and never will be. Sex/ sexual identity/ sexuality is not a replacement - and never will be; neither is antiracism/ multiculturalism. Environmentalism is not a replacment.
The only replacement for a religion is another religion. The alternative is insanity, nihilism, despair; and active self-destruction.
You sum up the core problem well here, Bruce. Religion is indeed the Most Important Thing (and for the West, that is Christianity).
ReplyDeleteOn a personal note, I find I am becoming increasingly impatient with everything that does not acknowledge the necessity of religion. I used to entertain secular theories and theorists, mainstream politics and art, political developments, and the like, all with a rather open mind, but over the past half year or so I have noticed that I am less indulgent toward the vast majority of it for the simple reason that so little of it addresses, let alone acknowledges, that which is most needed.
@Frank - Indeed. I can't be bothered to read plans and schemes for how 'things' might easily be 'improved' - knowing that the problem is that there is no motivation to improve things; or even worse, that people cannot even perceive the problems.
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