Spirituality is a Game of Self stuff – it helps us to be happy. Faith is Spirituality with a direction – it helps us to be happy and to achieve our goals. Religion is when our Faith goals involve other people and the world. It is an explosive mix between The Game of Self and The Game of Life and a major source of tension and conflict.
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. Religions have to be catchy and make us feel good, universally loved and treated fairly.
Religions can be: with no (all-important) gods, with a single all-important God, with multiple important gods, centered on Morality, centered on Supremacy, centered on Equality, centered on a Cult of personality. 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.
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. Atheists can be spiritual.
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. 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. Today Faith can play a role in helping those we left behind in developing countries. It can help realize and combat inequality with some much needed charity.
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.
Religion is a story-based structure with the goal of streamlining Faith. 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. Religion 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.
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. From one moment on your religious group will bring you decreasing benefits and/or increasing frustrations. As you evolve and change, it will still be stuck and will become your mental prison.
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. 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.
