What is Religion and which religions end up popular Short

Faith is taking the first step even when you don’t see the whole staircase – Martin Luther King Jr.

 

I would rather have questions that can’t be answered than answers that can’t be questioned – Richard P. Feynman

Spirituality is a Game of Self stuff: If it helps us to be happy, it helps us to be happy.

Faith is Spirituality with a direction: If it also helps us to achieve our goals, it also helps us to achieve our goals.

And when our Faith goals involve other people and the world, then it’s a Religion. It is an explosive mix between The Game of Self and The Game of Life and a major source of tension and conflict.

What is Religion?

Religion is Faith turned into a story trying to spread and outcompete other stories. It evolves like a living organism and has one long term goal: survival.¹

It doesn’t matter what the story is or how spiritual the initial idea is. Religions have to be catchy and make us feel good. Best of all, universally loved. Also treated fairly.

Since Religion often seems to meddle with Evolution let’s analyze religions in evolutionary terms. Evolution is how reality unfolds over time following the laws of nature.

As the story has to be about something, this definition gives religions the following options:

• Religions with no (all-important) gods

Belief systems can range from the best to the worst.

• Religions with a single all-important God

This means rejecting all other gods. This foundation is shaky and has led to attempts to prove things that cannot be proven by using misinformation or violence.

• Religions with multiple important gods

• Belief systems centered on Morality

They emerged as a belief system about how you should live your life and what values are most important. The historical benefits are unquestionable, but the overuse of morality, rules and tradition leads to major sheep mode risks and high amounts of shame in society, a terrible emotion for our mental health as it destroys self-love. I have described my problem with morality and rules.

• Belief systems centered on Supremacy

• Belief systems centered on Equality

Equality is a goal worth pursuing in an unequal world, but the world is inherently unequal (and also objectively unfair) due to historical and random factors.

• Belief systems centered on a Cult of personality

Human ideas are precious, but not human that puts themselves in the center and not their ideas.

The dark sides of religions vary from threatening your self-love to threatening your life. There is no difference between a religion and an ideology.

This post is about what makes religions the same – how easily they can invade the human mind and how hard it is to change once they have stayed there for a while.

I am in for Spirituality… as long as we don’t impose our thoughts on other people who may not need what we need.

Spirituality has close ties with Morality, a human-made concept that is largely a force for good in society, though it’s easy and actually very detrimental to overdo it at an individual level. Atheists can be spiritual (drawing inspiration from nature, science, etc.) and we see no significant difference in morality between atheists and faithful people.

Faith is a multiplier of a person’s abilities. Give it to a peaceful human with good principles and you get the behavior of Jesus. Give it to a king, dictator or religious leader with lust for power and you get the Nazis or Crusades. People are generally more good than bad today. In times of scarcity and disinformation this was not the case. Faith is historically controversial in its results.

But today Faith can play a role in helping those we collectively left behind in developing countries. It can help realize and combat inequality with some much needed charity.

Faith is not Wisdom. Spirituality alone can give you Wisdom. Faith is something you can use to power up your Game of Self and subsequently, your Game of Life. This is the part atheists don’t grasp. Just because you can handle your own Game of Self based on scientific truth, it doesn’t mean you’re living up to your full potential, as you’re missing the powerful multiplier of Faith which is already biologically embedded in your brain.²

Faith is a good tool to overcome inertia and make a change. But Faith is  for personal use. It should not be exported to crowds or you don’t know if you’re multiplying the good or the bad anymore!

What is Religion in terms of society?

Religion is a story-based structure with the goal of streamlining Faith. It’s a complex system for ensuring the survival of the underlying story.  It needs cultural, political and financial resources. It collects money to ensure its survival and it gives some back for good causes, resulting in mixed economic results. It can be a valuable support structure. It can also make people narrow-minded. All this brings mixed social results.

Religion is outsourcing

We all have very important questions about life. Many of them science is incapable of answering. Humans are not built to handle uncertainty for anything important well. We want to know as not knowing was a bad trait for evolutionary survival.

Society is going through a mental health crisis and a major reason is that people lack self-love and don’t find meaning in their lives. Many people don’t feel happy. They cannot confront the question of death. A major way humans battled their mental health challenges was through religious belief.

Religion, for all its downsides, has thousands of years of proven experience of making humans feel better when they are miserable. It’s a stabilizing structure we can always outsource to. The demand for such structures is higher than the supply. Family and the few therapists are not enough.

Religion directly brings meaning, human connection and spiritual experiences that release oxytocin. Religious groups are usually empathetic and supportive. It may seem like you’re loved like never before. If you’re down, but have hope, faith can help you multiply the hope and get back on your feet. But if you have no hope, then religion may be the last tool to create some. Happy people don’t need religion and rarely turn to it.

If you have recovered your mental health, you no longer need the support structure of religion.

Otherwise you lose a lot of your freedom. And if we care about one thing in I Grow Younger, it’s your long term freedom.

Unfortunately religion needs you… and the need is a desperate one.

Some of the ways to incentivize you to stay may be really nice, like supporting you in The Game of Life or creating fuzzy feelings by helping the poor together. Some may be very unethical like planting seeds of guilt. Religious groups are made out of people and faith brings out both the best and the worst from them. From one moment on your group will bring you decreasing benefits and/or increasing frustrations.

You need to be as open to Game of Life possibilities as possible. Even possibilities that might seem immoral. Because this is the way to overcome fears and shatter Game of Self barriers.

But as you evolve and change, your religious group will still be stuck and will become your mental prison:

“None are more hopelessly enslaved than those who falsely believe they are free.”

Goethe

There is a central problem with outsourcing. You delegate a task to a third party company. They have every incentive to make you dependent. They never want you to be able to solve the task yourself. Ever. Religion is the same. 

As with many other things, time is very important. The more time you spend in a religious group, the more indoctrinated you become. But it’s never too late to leave when you feel you need your freedom back.

In developed countries we’ll be just fine long term without religion. But we need to make sure people have access to diverse sources of Spirituality, Faith and Hope.

Regarding your values there can be no outsourcing.