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Why are there religions?

_JJM

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Knowledge? There is none whatsoever, IMJ. (I assume you are using that upper-case "S" on purpose.)

I think you mean "belief", or perhaps "experiences that have been interpreted as Spiritual".

I do not doubt that there are unusual experiences one might have that lend themselves well to grand interpretations. One might hear a voice in one's head that is not one's own and think that this is God speaking, or an angel, or a demon. But the brain is not so uncomplicated to jump to those kinds of conclusions. There is much going on in the brain that is not directly tied into one's conscious experience of "self".

I've never heard voices, but I once had an experience where I was working on a math problem, and I had decided to shut my eyes and rest for a few moments, thinking of nothing in particular. Suddenly, before my mind's eye I saw a green phospor vector diagram with the correct answer to the problem. It was a complete surprise to my conscious "self".

Now, I could interpret that as the God of Mathematics, or maybe one of his Holy Grad Students, giving me a divine revelation! But it is more in the spirit of Occam's Razor to conclude that it was some subconscious process in my psyche that had worked on the problem and given me a hand.

Intepretation is a very important factor in all of these claims that humanity had somehow had knowledge of something "Spiritual". They certainly had experience with something, but maybe that should be a lower-case "spiritual" instead.

Personally, I consider myself a spiritual atheist, but I don't intend that to mean that I believe in supernatural or disembodied entities. I mean simply that there are desirable vantagepoints to have on reality that involve a way of being that is not like the sort of experience of day-to-day life that most people have.
I guess I wasn't speaking of specific experiences, but a general awareness of the spiritual. I find it interesting that in seemingly most all Homo-Sapien cultures, regardless of time or place in history, there is an acknowledgement that there exists something more than just the physical.
 
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Wicked Willow

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I don't think any socio-cultural phenomenon could ever be dumbed down sufficiently to be reduced to a single, linear cause-and-effect-scheme, even if such simplistic explanations may be tempting to some.

However, I'd say that religions are a very specific manifestation of traits that are very specifically human: we are natural pattern-detectors AND generators, and possess both the curiosity and the abstract creativity that are needed to create vast cosmological sketches.
Imagine our ancestors, looking at the night sky: they saw shapes and patterns there; animals, mythological heroes, gods; they even tried to figure out how the celestial movements influenced their lives, and believed that they had really devised systems that would allow them to predict events simply by pointing to constellations.
 
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durangodawood

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Religion exists because God exists.

Religion is man's attempt to find God again after Adam sinned. Man has the innate desire to find God because deep down inside man knows that God exists.
I agree with this. But I doubt we would agree on what God IS.
.
 
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