Does Religion Have a Place in the Future of Humankind?

We can only hope that the useless baggage of big R religion is thrown out along with little r religion.

A religion that is consistent with humanity will live on.

Interesting stuff...keep it coming

Col, you sure I've been dealing with religion exclusive of rather than inclusive of spirituality as you have defined it? You might want to take a look at the links I gave if you feel that is true. The aleph link is much shorter. Does the mystic experience often exist without a change in morality?

Religion can serve as the medium through which one can come to the mystic experience.

Dauer

Col, you sure I've been dealing with religion exclusive of rather than inclusive of spirituality as you have defined it? You might want to take a look at the links I gave if you feel that is true. The aleph link is much shorter. Does the mystic experience often exist without a change in morality?

Religion can serve as the medium through which one can come to the mystic experience.

Dauer

Col, you sure I've been dealing with religion exclusive of rather than inclusive of spirituality as you have defined it? You might want to take a look at the links I gave if you feel that is true. The aleph link is much shorter. Does the mystic experience often exist without a change in morality?

Religion can serve as the medium through which one can come to the mystic experience.

Dauer

Yes you are right Dauer, but if religion it's not necessary to achieve spirituality, then why not take the shortcut? Why not just strive for spiritual stability without having to jump through all the hoops religion entails?

What hoops do you speak of? Religion allows the opportunity for community in spiritual experience. Are you confusing adherance to dogmatic beliefs with religion?

Dauer

You can't really follow a religion without sharing on it's beliefs can you?

Of course I am speaking of traditional religions, the website that you showed me seems like an improvement, a rather substantial improvement to be honest.

So maybe religion won't become obsolete at all, but evolve at such rate that people will be able to relate.

Well, I believe rather than speaking for traditional religions you are speaking primarily for faith-based religions. Judaism is a tribal religion that has always had fairly flexible beliefs (albeit very clear statements about what not to believe.)

Orthodoxy in Judaism is relatively recent (Orthopraxy the more historically common norm), within the past few centuries or so, in reaction to the two faith-based religions surrounding it, Christianity and Islam.

Beliefs have also shifted as Jews attempted to show that the Truth they found outside of Judaism fit into Judaism itself. Orthodoxy has stopped doing this. The liberal movements, especially reconstructionism and renewal (which itself is actually post-denominational ) are continuing on this tradition of change.

Mordecai Kaplan, the founder of Reconstructionism, took the reconstructing of the concept of God so far that it bares almost no resemblance to the Orthodox view of God.

Further, Judaism forbids superstition so I'm sure that propels some things forward.

But I'm pretty sure the same activity can be found in liberal Christianity. I am not certain.

Dauer

I'll have to do some research.

I say the abolishment of religion is the only hope for a human future.

I think of all religions as being faith-based (at the very core at least). Is this not so?

Eorl,

no it is not. A faith-based religion is one that defines a member by the beliefs they hold, usually places their salvation on those beliefs. Judaism does not place any salvation on beliefs, an atheist or Muslim who were born Jewish or converted to Judaism continue to be a Jew, and places salvation (although there really is no Jewish equivalent to that term since there is nothing to be saved from) almost entirely based on action. (Re-reading this before posting I see how inaccurate the term salvation is. Traditionally a Jew is judged by God, with justice tempered by mercy, and there is no hell. There is only a temporary place of transformation that leads to gan eden called gehenna. So this whole comparison is terribly flawd. Judaism focuses on right-action instead of sin. We are not naturally sinful.) Of the 613 mitzvot, there are only a few that relate to belief (and as with all, sometimes someone may falter in their fulfilling a particular mitzvah and that is okay):

To know God exists
Not to believe there is any God but the Eternal
To know God is One, a complete Unity
To love God
To fear God reverently

So for the rest of the 613 mitzvot action is what matters, and missing these few is not the end of the world, or the end of a Jewish life, and as it is something beyond a person's control, they cannot be expected to fulfill it (just as a Jew is not expected to do things associated with the Temple.) But these things are mostly of concern to a traditional Jew. I am a liberal Jew. So I am really not so concerned with how many of the 613 deal with belief, except to show that belief has always been a side issue in Judaism.

Halachah (Jewish law and the guidelines for Jewish life) never dealt much with belief because belief is not measurable while our actions are. Halachah, which means walking, is what leads the life of a traditionally observant Jew.

Judaism is not a faith-based religion. It does have beliefs that are common but a codification of beliefs came very late in response to Islam and Christianity. As I believe I said earlier in this thread, historically orthopraxy and not orthodoxy has been the rule. The Orthodox today, despite their name, place most emphasis on action.

Returning to liberal Judaism, the late codification (1500s to become part of liturgy iirc) is rejected to greater and lesser degrees. But an Orthodox Jew would never judge a liberal Jew as not Jewish, or as less of a Jew, because they did not hold a specific belief. If they did not hold that belief and lived traditionally, they would consider them an orthopractic Jew living as God would wish.

I have left my speaking on liberal Judaism again. Within liberal Judaism there will really be no concern for beliefs. People will affiliate with a synagogue where they feel comfortable even if it is of a different denomination. And here belief is of minimal importance when it comes to Judaism.

The one place Judaism is concerned with belief is with what not to believe. This is true in all denominations. It forbids believing a physical manifestation is God or believing God is divisible. I think I excluded the mitzvah not to worship idols in the list I presented. It was elsewhere on the list I was refering to. Panentheism is considered a valid form of Judaism, and I have read the works of a respected liberal mystic who seemed like a rational pantheist(as in monism and not many gods).

Dauer

Thankyou Dauer, I am indeed greatly enlightened by your thoughtful and detailed response. I am always delighted to be shown the depth of my ignorance, as I delight in learning (which after all is why I am here!)
To enquire further then...is it therefore possible to be both an athiest and a Jew?
If so, what would be the authority behind the Jewish laws in one's mind....ie. what would be the point?
(re-reading this I fear I may sound sarcastic, but I assure you I am sincere!)
Thanks again!
Eorl

Dauer has brought up quite a few interesting ideas, Eorl. What he's told me about Judaism, I had never heard before.

I still stand by my agnostic beliefs, but he has enlightened me with quite a few intelligent thoughts.

Eorl,

that's a very contemporary issue. In the earliest Jewish literature, the existence of God is taken for granted. There are no proofs offered, no defense of belief.

Orthodox Jews tend to reject the idea of atheist Judaism for pretty much the same reason you give: "what's the point? Why bother? How can someone belong to a religion that speaks of a convenantal relationship between God and the Jewish people and not believe in God?"

But outside of Orthodox Judaism views on this issue differ. One important difference is that a liberal Jew might not see any authority in the mitzvot or they might view the commandedness in a different way. I'm with Franz Rosenzweig on this who said it's about feeling commanded, in the way we feel commanded in any relationship, by relationship with God, awareness of God's presence, to act differently and instill our lives and actions with that awareness. The mitzvot are the way Jewish people do this. I'm with Franz on that for me but there are many other approaches. I actually don't limit myself to this single approach alone.

So there's humanist Judaism which, as the name seems to suggest, is atheist. Taken from their site:



http://www.shj.org/believe.htm

There's also reconstructionism which, as I believe I mentioned, was founded by a man with a view of God entirely removed from the traditional one. A quote from him:

"God is the sum of all the animating organizing forces and relationships which are forever making a cosmos out of chaos." He rejected the supernatural. He also called the mitzvot folkways.

Reform Judaism rejects that anything but the moral law is binding and leaves it upon the individual to choose what ritual law to observe.

Myself as a liberal Jew, I don't feel commanded by God to follow the mitzvot. I don't believe God gave the Torah at sinai. I don't believe Torah is divinely inspired. I hold that Torah is only sacred because I consider it so. I find that the rituals allow me to increase my sense of awe, raise the mundane beyond the mundane. And some of the mitzvot do have an other specific goal attached to them, like Shabbat. I do go with Mordecai Kaplan on viewing the mitzvot as folkways.

Even for the Orthodox, it's not simply about being commanded by an authority but also the effect of following the mitzvot in such a way on one's experience of the world. When the authors of the new testament called the mitzvot a carnal law, they did a great disservice to the Jewish people.

Dauer

Religion and spirituality are, saddly to say, going to eventually be obsolete, it is just a standard set of morals, which more and more people are choossing to ignor and are choossing to bend to their own sick and twisted way. Science has become the new god and now the human morals are bassed on "can this be done in science, can a labratory really solve all these problems that god has not, will not, or choosses not to rcocnize as existant problems." As time moves on, you can see that religion has steadily gone down hill, the catholic church has lost numbers, thousands of people no longer go to church.

But the important thing to think about is that faith is something that everyone uses to fill those unanswered gaps in the mind. Gaps like, how WAS the universe formed? So no, religion will not survive thruogh the next evolution of man unless the cristian revelation comes true. but even then, it will be to late.

Sleeper you are wrong.

Not everyone uses faith to fill those unanswered gaps. Some of us are strong enough to say "we do not know the answers" still others of us say "let us try to determine the answers for ourselves" and they do this by a careful, logical critical process called science.
Science is not a god or a religion. Science is what you do as a three-year-old to understand that when you put two apples in a bucket, only two apples will come back out of the basket. Science is the only process by which one may obtain the truth and be reasonably certain of the results. (other methods may determine the truth by accident... yet the results remain unproved)

You also say spirituality and religion will soon be obsolete. "Saddly to say" I think you are wrong about that too.

May I also point out that being an atheist does not make me any less moral than you, if fact it may even make me more so...but that's another story!