Comparative forum - Major world religions are fundamentally the same...page 2. (can't do the link on this device :-/
Ah well...)
s.
Have finally checked that up. Thanks! (Have been snowed under with deadlines!) That isn't really the posting I've been looking for -- although it is a section of the overly humongous post I submitted to this thread. The chief question here is "
how did you come to believe or follow a religion?". So what I'm submitting now is a heavily abridged statement concentrating solely on that question --
For me, a key to my understanding was the way in which rigorous specialists in evolution view the phenomenon of adaptation. I practically devoured most of Stephen Jay Gould's books and -- at one time, when I still had a young brain
(ah, youth!) -- could spout yards of stuff about Gould's theory of "punctuated equilibrium" -- a theory that I still believe makes far more sense, given our current evidence, than the gradualism model of yore. Three cheers for SJG!
Frankly, from studying SJG and "punctuated equilibrium", I found that my own lifelong atheism -- and BTW, my entire family, including my parents, are/were lifelong atheists as well and nothing of that has changed -- was keenly challenged. You see, "punctuated equilibrium" entails a discrete adaptation of some kind brought on by a discrete crisis in a species' development. The crisis will precipitate an adaptation that helps make the species better able to handle their environment with better knowledge of their surroundings and with more reliable predictability and with better long-term results for the species going forward. Well, intrinsic to any species heavily dependent on socialization -- as homo sapiens is -- are those beneficial adaptations that help strengthen those habits/traits, etc., that tie communities/herds/flocks/prides -- etc. -- together. Crudely put, an adapted ethic of "You scratch my back; I scratch yours" helps the "community" of a socialized species flourish better in the long term than an ethic of Each One For Oneself.
Such types of ethical adaptations in the history of homo sapiens help underscore the various contexts in which renewed social ethics targeted at more "mutual back-scratching" have helped snatch certain human communities from the brink of virtual extinction. Of course, extinction has still overtaken certain human communities in the recent and distant past anyway, as it has certain "communities" of other species, for various reasons, including abrupt environmental change, depletion of resources, and so on -- the lack of a "mutual back-scratching" ethic being but one of a number of frequent causes for extinction and/or near extinction. But as scientists like SJG and others sometimes point out, near extinction is sometimes threatened through a-social habits primarily -- the Each One For Oneself variety. That still doesn't discount other causes for near extinction, of course, but it does make the lack of a "mutual back-scratching" ethic an important factor here.
Startling patterns emerge in human cultural history when scrutinizing the contexts in which "mutual back-scratching" ethics on the one hand, versus "self-ist" Each One For Oneself ethics on the other, pop up. And it was these patterns that made me revisit my atheism. Those patterns, as further described below, may point to some kind of divine influence over social ethics.
Viewing such patterns still leaves me profoundly skeptical of all religions, but I would call myself today a deist (small d) rather than an atheist. I am still a skeptic on most of the doctrinal tenets of all religions. I don't think any religion holds the key as to the "nature" of "the divine" at all, but the startling historic patterns that emerge respecting "mutual back-scratching" ethics versus "self-ist" Each One For Oneself ethics -- _at_ _their_ _cultural_ _inception_ -- suggest an invariable symbiotic connection between counter-cultural innovations in new-minted counter-cultural types of theism and new-minted counter-cultural types of counter-cultural "mutual back-scratching" ethics. This symbiosis, plus the clear benefit that such "mutual back-scratching" ethics plainly confer on human communities, mutually suggest that the frequent -- invariable? -- combo of counter-cultural back-scratching ethics with some counter-cultural type of new-minted counter-cultural theism in one and the same innovator may be of evolutionary value in sustaining many a species in the long term. (Of course, the counter-cultural has to first change into the cultural for the innovation(s) to achieve any positive impact, and indeed the counter-culturalists introducing these symbiotic counter-cultural ideas frequently suffer horribly, while the ideas themselves can sometimes take a few centuries to become cultural rather than counter-cultural.)
If this described symbiosis is of the kind of evolutionary value that facilitates a species' being better able to handle their environment with better knowledge of their surroundings and with more reliable predictability and with better long-term results for the species going forward (as I framed it in my third paragraph [above]), might that suggest that the occasional _perception_ of "the divine" -- however muddle-headed the various religions that subsequently turn that perception into a blatant political tyranny and turn it into yards and yards of noxious and impenetrable mumbo-jumbo -- is based on something other than pure delusion, however ludicrous the constructs that institutionalized religions subsequently foist on top of this initial perception?
That initial perception does not validate the notion of a "God" as a creator, so I'd put the creator notion to one side.
That initial perception does not validate the notion of an afterlife, so I'd also put the afterlife claim to one side.
And so on and so forth.
But it might validate the notion of something divine that acts as a prod for social consciousness-raising -- or conscience-raising, if you will -- the "divine", whether singular or plural, acting purely as a catalyst for our social conscience. That makes the divine neither male nor female; it makes the divine neither spirit nor body. It does, though, make the divine an active and very real presence in the "punctuated equilibrium" of our cultural adaptation(s).
Operacast
