RELIGION, GOD, SEXUALITY, TRUTH
Religion is what most people think is their personal relationship with God. In most cases this is not true. The most important thing about religion is it is important politically and is used to control the behavior of others.
Most conflate their personal relationship with that of the Catholic Church, their Baptist Church, their synagogues, Temples, or Associations all of which come complete with all the dogmas you need to make it into those Pearly Gates or to be “saved”. For many Religion supplies relief from the fear of the unknown. Religion started in early man probably way before what we consider to be civilization. Man had a new big brain but hadn’t developed a sophisticated body of knowledge and we anthropomorphized everything. We didn’t know what new horror was waiting around the bend and our big brains early on realized that we would all die. Many perhaps most could not bear the burden of the fact of death and man came up with a multitude of ideas to escape its inevitability. Many due to their internal stress still need the reassurance that they are doing the right thing but don’t have the kind of character to make the necessary choices on their own. I think that those who find it comfortable not to believe where there is little evidence, to be less risk averse than those that believe. Nonbelievers must, at least within themselves, be relatively comfortable with admitting that ultimate questions are ultimately unknowable. If you are not one of those you go into a belief system that relieves you of the burden of continued learning and adjustment in your body of knowledge. These systems do however charge rather high fees for the services they provide. These systems come complete with fellow travelers who reinforce ones belief system, sometimes with strict and violent methods. They need others to affirm their belief system as they find reality unbearably harsh and their beliefs are so tenuous that they insist we all support what is essentially unsupportable. These churches/organizations provide a many headed mechanism for their members to receive teachings and reinforcement of their teachings and to varying degrees the substitution of perceived power in place of each persons individual fears and inadequacies to effectively integrate those fears into their psychological construct of who they see themselves to be. The psychological need for belief in a stress reducing system of dogma injects power into the religious enterprise which is often used to support negative thoughts and actions which feed the feelings of aggression common to our species.
God if it exists is ultimately unknowable and we should place it in the mystical and no effort should be made to force others into agreement. I had an old friend, Bhante Dharmawarra from Cambodia who taught that perfect awareness would solve all of humanity's problems. If we knew the result of all our actions we will always make the right choices. The only thing I’ve ever agreed on in religion is God is love.
The biggest thing about religions are their political power. It is wielded through a cradle to grave teaching and reinforcement regime which makes a good person who is ready to postpone their principal rewards till after their deaths. This is pleasing to the wealthy. Wealth is not equal to money. The people in the Soviet Union had wealth in the form of political power which allowed them to make demands on their system with little need for the substitution of money for direct political power. The Soviets and China had/have a planned economies. We on the other hand like to use the “magic” of markets to allocate resources and think wrongly that it relieves us of the burden of choosing (planning). This just happens to coincide nicely with the ruling class’s plans to enjoy their rewards in the here and now without the pesky interference of the hoi polloi. Of course these characteristics show themselves best through formulaic sigma curves modeling group choices and behaviors. Russia and China continue to be buffeted by boom and bust cycles to the extent they play the game. The "game" being capitalism.
America was the first official political organization to attempt to unlink or weaken the link between our politics and our religions. Today there is renewed interest in people seeking to make their religions more politically powerful again. I think that this is pernicious and can only result in greater human conflict.
I think that religion and the belief in markets are ways in which people allow others to make choices they feel ill prepared to make. It is also a lazy person’s excuse for not doing the hard work necessary for choices and decision making.
I’ve had two sisters. One chose religion as a way of being and is relatively more successful than the other who sought to escape her stress and turmoil through the taking of any and all drugs. That sister is now dead and her early death is a result of only making one choice. Drugs. The other sister is still alive and has brought much more happiness to the world and herself. She has however failed to live up to the potential all of us have if we put our liberal characteristics to work, in order to solve the problems which confront our species. I think that humans will soon evolve for the first time as an act of conscious will into a new creature I call homo technius. This will be the result of intentional gene modification and perhaps the inclusion of digital apparatus into our genome. Maybe the genius of man will be the linking of individual thought into webs of cooperation and group work with individual innovation. (see Pierre Teilhard de Chardin).
Sexuality is very natural and powerful but is corrupted by the desire to control others behavior, this is due to many competing interests. In our own patriarchal culture fathers wanted to know who exactly they had donated their genes to and controlling women’s sexuality was essential. We have developed many customs, laws and religious edicts to provide insecure males with some reassurance in this regard. We are having difficulties with the expansion of our tools, which have made unnecessary many of our cultural and societal rules. These rules included controlling sexuality in order to protect individuals from the burdens and rigors of having unwanted and unplanned children. Conservative thought rejects the notion of change so we are often struggling for changes necessitated by new conditions. Control extended into the realm of homosexual practices because controlling births also included the power involved in growing one’s army. I think that without cultural and legal suasion most humans are bisexual and suspect that our preferences would map out like a sigma curve on spectrum line. That is a minority are almost strictly homosexual or heterosexual with the majority falling within two standard deviations from the bisexual mean.
I think sex itself is repugnant to many because it threatens the foundational belief essential to placing us above all other life forms on the planet and is an obvious reminder of our origins and connection to other biological life.. Why do almost all people use sex words as negative words to abuse those they dislike? George Carlin said sex was good and if he wanted to say something negative to someone he would say; “Un-fuck you!”. Again religion has more characteristics of power and control over others and sexual regulation provides an area ripe with possibilities for control over others. The psychic energy diverted from sexuality can also be harnessed for efforts in building and creating other things. Freud was very fond of this idea and it became a center-piece of his psychological theories.
The more education people undergo the less they are apt to be believers in the archaic religions of yore. We are such a new thing in the history of the world that we do not have much confidence in our staying power. Whether we will be here tomorrow is highly problematic.
I think that we have long-term chances of survival based on our using our brains in concert with one another in ways similar to ants and honey bees. It is also likely that our changing environment will require evolutionary changes much more quickly that those we can determine in our biological past. I think of the new human, homo technius, will require an open attitude to change. I see this liberality as necessary to the continuation of our species. I make no effort to argue specific religious points here. One cannot do an adequate job arguing religion when it is created by man out of whole cloth unsupported by logical constructs. I am comfortable knowing that there is much more I do not know than that which I do know and I see no need to employ fictional stories in this regard. Please don’t misunderstand me here. I think fiction is an interesting thing for exploring the unknown but is a completely different means from evidence-based knowledge and we grant a suspension of rationality when participating in it but we do this with knowledge and don’t seek slavish adherence to those ideas. If anything has been proven by our science it is that change is the overwhelming fact of the universe and our place in it. We began such a short time ago and developed ways to record our knowledge and discoveries for future generations. At first we understood little and imagined gods who ran what we didn’t understand. We suffered so much that we thought our suffering was pleasing to those gods so to invoke their aid in our struggles we offered more suffering in the form of sacrificing humans for the gods’ enjoyment. We still do something like that when the host transforms into the body of Christ. If more suffering was needed to get the gods on our side we upped human suffering by sacrificing our own children. The Aztecs did this just as Abraham was about to do in following an ancient practice with his son Issac.
When it comes to our relationships with others I am open to considering everything. I think our primary directive should be first “do no harm”. I think the partnering of people should be left to their own powers of reason and that their primary moral obligation should be honesty and fidelity (contract) to their word and obligations to their partners and children . I think it wise that their contract be revisited from time to time for revision. Then come obligations to their communities and on to all creatures living and not so living. Most American Indians granted the concept of soul to all creatures and even to the rocks. They were not wrong. We make our most serious errors as people individual or as societies when we fail to grant belonging to our group due to the failure of empathy.
One of my favorite thoughts was written by Ernest Hemingway. He wrote: There is no one thing that is true. It is all true!
This brings me to “truth”. This is a word full of different meanings and uses. I think “truth” is innately inaccurate as it only requires the intention of the speaker to validity. It is usually used in the context of universal truth or accuracy. Beware for the false confidence in our beliefs when we see ourselves as speaking truth. I see the principal difference between those who self-describe as liberal or conservative being a relative lack of self-doubt and over suspicion of the other if one is conservative.