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Goodbye Jesus

What Is A Good Substitute For Religion?


RipVanWinkle

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AM, I told someone yesterday that the most spiritual person I'd ever met online or RL was an atheist, meaning you, and I meant it as a major compliment. I like all of the mods' posts, but those short pithy one-liners you reel off especially knock me in the forehead.

 

I like being part of my community and get more out of it than I ever did about religion. May I illustrate? A few years ago, my husband and I went to our city's arboretum for Christmas Eve. Volunteers spend weeks out there in the cold Idaho winter dressing every available damn surface with lights. Other volunteers show up and donate their time helping people park, manning hot-cocoa and apple cider stands, making sure barrels are filled with logs so people can warm themselves by fires placed all around, and making sure the visiting reindeer (YES!) for kids to pet are docile and fed. A guy famous for his Santa impersonation shows up and lets kids sit on his lap and take pics. Hundreds of people come together for these weeks. It's like a big community play every year, and we love it.

 

I was stupid and wore a miniskirt and boots that first time because I am categorically incapable, being Southern in breeding, of dressing for the weather, but we still had a great time and spent money to support the venture. We left and went walking downtown looking at displays, and then to an independent family Italian restaurant way off the beaten trail, where the servers were having, it seemed, as much fun as the large but somehow still intimate crowd. We'd never been there before, but we're both major Italianophiles (?) so we ended up getting a free "test" appetizer the restaurant was considering serving because the waitress said she thought we'd appreciate what they were trying to do (it was a sort of pickled eggplant-and-pepper thing, DELISH). We dropped a C-note there at a place comparable in cost to Applebees, most of it tip, because we felt it was important to show the waitress how much we appreciated that she'd sacrificed her Christmas Eve to help us cap off our own perfect one. We left feeling nurtured in body and spirit, from the time we'd left home to the time we walked back into our house. We felt like we'd truly become part of our community that night, that we'd all kind of worked together in a way. They'd done all this work, and we'd been part of it and supported it as lavishly as we'd been able.

 

THAT is what belonging feels like to me. I felt more whole after that night than I'd ever felt after any church service I'd ever attended. I love that my city works so hard to foster that feeling of belonging. I feel more loyal to it than I've ever felt about any dumb church.

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  • 3 weeks later...

Like you already said most people are below average intelligence. (not forgetting that average intelligence is really low as well)

 

It will simply be replace with some other form of control.

How many people worship the TV?

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Guest r3alchild

Think about this for a second. What if humans never invented religion. Everything we have now thats not religion is all we have to replace it.

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  • 1 month later...

 

James 1:27

English Standard Version (ESV)

27 Religion that is pure and undefiled before God, the Father, is this: to visit orphans and widows in their affliction, and to keep oneself unstained from the world.

If this is the definition of religion, then it would appear that Christianity is the substitute, and a poor one at that!

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Guest r3alchild

Life, just live life, nothing more nothing less, because all you really know is that you have one for now and nothing more.

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  • 2 weeks later...

Think about this for a second. What if humans never invented religion. Everything we have now thats not religion is all we have to replace it.

Well, actually we'd have been further along by now--generally speaking, religion has long been opposed to social progress--but whatever.

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No need for a substitute.  If someone gets rid of cancer they don't go looking for a substitute illness.

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Personally, my road is leading me towards an ayahuasca retreat in Peru. At least the shamans can see, taste and feel something tangible in the form of powerful hallucinogens.

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After spending some time fixing up my own issues, I've started to get lonely. I'm unlikey to ever have a family of my own (and even if I did find a spouse and we had kids, I'd loose much of my blood family in the process). So I think it's time to put more priority into social things. I actually have more of a social support network than I'd realized. It's not just my friends, it's the people in special-interest groups that I spend time with weekly. We don't have to be best buddies outside of that for us all to be part of a community and value each others' contributions to said community.

 

Social time may also mean doing community service events with other people around - the activity may not be fun in and of itself, but the attachments you form with other people are nice. And then you're not committed to being their best friend after that, either! I've been avoiding a lot of social stuff because I've often gotten in over my head and that's unhealthy. Churches encourage that, to make you feel trapped by all these people who "really care" about you. I've found it's nice to have strong emotional group experiences that don't come with any future obligations.

 

Friends, and sometimes shared interest groups, are for feeling like belonging. Charity work is for feeling like you have value, meaning, and purpose in the greater world. If that's the role religion played for you, then there's plenty of secular replacements available already. And as a bonus, you get the warm fuzzies by actually doing something good for other people, not just from religion telling you that praying is good enough on its own.

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  • 3 weeks later...

Common sense

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  • 5 months later...
Guest OldSeer

I have no doubt central government would be the religion. As I understand things, all belief is religion and religion is all or anything one believes. Religion and belief are the same. For example-- in the mind there are many stones.Beliefs are the larger and heavier ones and harder to move. From belief mental habits are formed. The smaller stones come and go most easily and are more readily eliminated. It is automatic for an inteligent one to form beliefs. Beliefs merely happen according to the importance that one places on a thought or information. Intellect and belief are inseparable. Belief prods one into a certain line of behavior and thinking, and from that- one determines what one's own life is about. Belief can also be forced upon one by other people and "externslof the self' forces --such as government (by others) demand or dictate. Logically then, what one construes as religion, and what one construes as government and are both together one's religion.   Beliefs are what one is governed by. It is belief in itself that is religion. One belief cannot be religion and another belief not be religion. This is why one goes to school (forced) at a young age---to be formed into beliefs by those that lead or are prominent within a social system.   :)

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A substitute for a religion?

 

A nice round of golf on a Sunday afternoon.

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