The most important thing is life is supposed to be 'religion'. That is how Men are made - spiritually, and even biologically. Because biologically Men evolved in a religious world - and Men's responses, motivations, attitudes and behaviours were always calibrated by a religious environment.
(I use the scare quotes around religion, because the term is so ill-defined, controversial and indeed tendentious - against Christianity; but you-know-what-I-mean.)
Men are made by God so that our lives are built-around and permeated by considerations such as God or the gods, the spiritual world around us -including matters of contact and communication with that world, life beyond death, the purpose and meaning of life so-considered... and so forth.
If we look back at any pre-modern society; it is obvious that religion was (almost always, for almost everybody) the most important thing: it provided a multi-level and integrated perspective through-which all else was evaluated.
After religion was incrementally deleted from both public life, and - in effect - from personal thinking (even among the self-described religious - due to the change towards materialism-positivism-and this-worldly ideologies) Mankind entered an unprecedented world in which there was no integration overall, and where meaning and purpose were confined to micro and specialized domains, short-termist, selfish and pulling apart.
What took-over as the most important thing in life? Variously (in different times and places) national identity, leftist politics, sex and sexuality, money, status - and sometimes (briefly) idealistic devotion to work: arts, literature, science, scholarship...
At first after religion there was an age - a generation or two - or idealism and ideology. Even sex was an ideology, for a short while - for normal sex in the 60s, for abnormal sex from the 80s...
But always, soon, these ideologies became negative, oppositional, incoherent - and much weaker as motivators. None of these replacements for religion were sufficiently powerful, effective, coherent, deep-rooted or motivating.
Until in 2020 - all ideologies, all utopian hopes (whether for sex-utopia, arts or sciences, for the residual rump of church Christianity - or for any positive ideas), were suddenly discarded; and the whole world of human aspiration replaced by a mass mindless, irrational, panicky, dependent, pathetic craving for short-term personal survival at any cost.
There was no longer any compelling positive reason to live - but only negative reasons not to die, not to suffer...
Against this global, pseudo-unifying mass effect of fear (also fuelled by manufactured and false fear of climate change due to excessive CO2) - worked many individual and group negative resentments based on sex, sexuality, race, nation, church-religion etc.
And this is where we are - now. One world system organized around negative motivators concerning the birdemic and climate change; which are Big Lies. And multiple fissile and hostile negative sub-motivators based mainly on race, ethnicity, religion and the other resentments of leftism.
Absent religion; there is only one terminus, which is despair and the desire for death - which means, to the non-religious - wished-for annihilation of the self, of the soul.
All because the most important thing in life must be religion. First that must be recognized and acknowledged as a fact. Then people must 'choose their religion'...
But this time choosing religion personally, from internal evaluations, without equating religion with any external assumed-authoritative 'church' (all major denominational churches having by now demonstrated unambiguously that they are a part of the religion-deleting, negative-system of evil).
How may someone choose their religion? On the basis of what is true - of course; but the process should probably start with asking "What would I most want to be true? Now - and, most importantly, forever."
Once that is known - we can begin work to establish whether our first idea of what we most want is really what we most want; and then whether it really is true by the profoundest intuitive evaluation we can discern.
3 comments:
"What would I most want to be true? Now - and, most importantly, forever."
This is important. The thing is, any God worth the title will see through pragmatic, grudging belief. There is really no point to 'believing' in a God you don't deeply respect as well as wanting what He's offering.
We are in an age where the most important thing is being relevant. There are many metrics, measures and judgements in place to tell us how relevant we are, but they all orbit technology. So technology has become the mount Olympus, hosting all of the demigods.
"But this time choosing religion personally, from internal evaluations, without equating religion with any external assumed-authoritative 'church' ..."
Yes, precisely!
Two years ago, those who insist on equating religion with external, authoritative church would have flippantly dismissed such an insight as apostasy or dreamy mysticism. I sincerely wonder if attitudes have changed since then. They don't seem to have changed all that much, but I could be wrong about that.
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