What do you want from a religion/ ideology?

It strikes me that different people want very different things from their religion - or (more often nowadays) their ideology*. 

Many people now - and always, perhaps - understand their religion in terms of this-worldly benefit. 

In other words, they believe (or, at least, hope) that the practice of the religion makes this-mortal-life better: either positively good or less bad. 

What "better" means is various by times and places. Nowadays "better" usually means "feels better" - so that religion is seen as a kind of pastime or therapy. 

In the past - such as in the Old Testament - it meant having more power/ status/ wealth, avoiding catastrophe, winning a battle, escaping slavery and the like. 

Typically, such a religion of this-worldly benefit is at bottom fear-motivated, and propitiatory in nature. 

Such a religion broadly becomes a matter of contracts or deals made between the deity (and the mediator of deity) and the individual... 

"If I do this for you, you must do this for me" - or vice versa. 

"If you want this outcome, you need to follow these rules" 

"If you want to avoid this happening, you must refrain from that'. 

Again; you can see this in the Old Testament - and, of course, in many other religions; and, of course, this has been the nature of most of "Christianity" for most of history... 

Because, many people who regard themselves as Christians (from the highest levels of churches to the most ignorant of the laity) continue to want and practice exactly this kind of this-worldly religion while calling it Christian.

And they have-made, and continue to-make, Christianity into this kind of this-worldly religion - probably because that is what they most want from their religion.       

Then there are questions of purpose and meaning: A lot of people want a sense of meaning in life. 

They want to know that what they desire, think and do has a meaning beyond itself - that the bit and pieces of a life are connected into some kind of pattern or system.

And when people begin to suspect or believe that their lives are arbitrary, to suspect that it does not really matter what they do because each thing is disconnected from each other thing... Then this leads to despair. 

But despair is intolerable. 

If immediate suicide is not chosen; then such people (most people, apparently in Western Civiliaztion) seek escape from the despair of meaninglessness into hedonism; or at least into not-thinking distraction**. 

It turns-out that meaning requires purpose. 

So our lives need to have purpose. However, not all purposes suffice...

When the supposed purpose of life is confined within the boundaries of mortal life itself (i.e. that life between conception/ birth and biological death); then such purpose makes no ultimate difference to the question of meaning.

Meaning in life, restricted to mortal life only, is just a delayed form of despair. 

If purpose is just a matter of what happens to us during the period of mortal life; and then this is followed by annihilation - then the end result is just a modified version of trying to live a life of meaning without purpose. 

The difference of having a mortal purpose for life rather than no purpose at all; is merely that with mortal meaning our escape from despair into hedonism/ distraction just becomes longer-term... A matter of blocking awareness of despair over the time span of our expected mortal life (rather than here-and-now hedonism/ escape).

Meaning in mortal life merely leads to what might be termed "enlightened" hedonism: which is the main mortality in the world today.

(Sometimes called "Utilitarianism".) 

I conclude that we must have a purpose in our lives that extends beyond the boundaries of our mortal life. I further believe that for such a purpose to have meaning, entails that we each have a personal role to play in this purpose. 

Religions that explain everything in terms of the purposes of deity exclude any role for the individual, hence they offer purpose - but a purpose without individual meaning. 

Such "purpose without meaning" religions, include almost all the religions of the world in their official capacity - including almost all of the Christian denominations and churches***. 

Their most fundamental explanations of reality exclude any participation of individual persons in the divine purposes: therefore they offer purpose without meaning. 

This is why "off-the-peg" religions of the churches; and their mandatory metaphysical assumptions, their ready-made theologies, their compulsory philosophies - are of their nature insufficient. 

They do not - and more importantly they cannot - provide both purpose and meaning for our individual lives - when those lives are understood to encompass both this mortal life on earth, and personal life outwith those bounds. 

Since we cannot simply choose what we need from the mass produced corporate religions; if we want our life to have meaning as well as purpose; then we each must make our own "religion", from that which we personally regard as the fundamental realities of existence. 

And this is not an exercise in subjective wishful thinking - because its basis is that "the stakes" are of the highest we can experience: purpose and meaning in our own extra-mortal and well as mortal lives.

We need to deal with realities, therefore we need to identify these realities; and in the activity we cannot rely upon second-hand assertions. 

Unless we are content that our life be futile; the basis of such work needs to be that which we personally regard as the fundamentals, the truth of how-things-are. 

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* "Ideology" is the system of bottom line evaluation, explanations and purposes of someone who is a materialist-atheist. Ideology therefore does not replace religion - because its ultimate metaphysical assumptions concerning the nature of reality are already in-place - whereas these are part-of a religion.

** That despair is indeed intolerable can be regarded as a fact of "the way we are made", leaving aside why or how we are made that way. The effects of despair - can be seen in the self-hatred and strategic self-destruction of all the societies of the world that are conducted on the assumptions of atheistic materialism - which category includes (at least) all nations of the developed world, and all international groupings. Official churches and religions make only a quantitative, not qualitative, perceptible difference.  

*** It might be asked why this was not a problem in the past. My answer was that - before the modern era - human beings had a sense of meaning and purpose innately, spontaneously, and naturally. Much as young children do even nowadays. This was mostly unconscious and taken for granted - and people brought it with them to whatever religion they conscious adopted. The deficits of religion were therefore filled by this inbuilt sense of meaning-purpose - even when the explicit doctrines contradicted it. Presumably; a dwindling residue of this unconscious innate meaning-purpose has (diminishingly) sustained humanity through the explicitly atheist-materialist assumptions and teachings of modernity - and explains why few people wholly live-down to their expressed beliefs. Still residual, yet increasingly feeble: this is why modern motivation is radically insufficient.