Welcome to Gaia! ::

I'd like to thank bear for inspiring this weeks topic and certain unnamed individuals on SNF that unwittingly contributed to it's development.

Religion, like sex and alcohol, is the cause of and solution to so many of life's little problems, isn't it? I don't think you'd find a lot of argument over what religion is. But, like every era we of the current one tend to think of the past in terms of the present. We believe the way we do things is the way they were always done. We are continuously surprised with little tidbits from the past, and then alleviate the surprise with the phrase, “Well, I guess things were different back then.” So how does this pertain to religion? For most, not all, but most people religion is something you do on special days and don't let get in the way of getting on with your life the rest of the time. They get some warm fuzzies out of feeling like they gave God his smile and wave and are therefore cool with him, and will see him next week. Then are those that don't even bother with it at all anymore. No judgments, just sating the facts.

But what about back in the murky days of yester-millenium? Close your eyes. No, that's no good, now you can't read. Open them back up, just try to use your imagination.

You're a member of a nomadic tribe. Your people follow game gathering as you go. The sun gives you light and warmth. At night you rely on campfires to keep back the predators and the various threats of the deadly night. Night is the domain of many hunters, of unknown spirits, of things you don't even want to imagine for fear of calling them up. Every morning the sun comes up and, begins a new day. You are safe. Your family is safe. Your tribe is safe. You will spend the life giving day gathering food, making tools, going about the business of living. Every night the fire protects you until anew day.

Now imagine noticing that the days are getting shorter. You know nothing of the elliptical orbit of the Earth around the sun. You only know that everyday is a bit shorter than the last. The time of safety is getting shorter. The time of danger is getting longer. Will you and your loved ones be forced to live in eternal night? Can you even survive that way? Imagine the fear that would inspire in you. What can you do? The fire, it keeps us safe at night perhaps it can heal the sun. So you and your people light ceremonial fires. You dance for the sun. You sing to it. You try to care for it as you would a dying loved one. Imagine the feeling that must have gone into those early rituals. Imagine hoping,, praying, wishing with every essence of your being that the ceremony will work and the great life giving will become whole and healthy again. Imagine the depth of that feeling.

Now imagine the relief when it works. Imagine the joy involved in the celebration. Can you feel it filling you up inside until there's no room? Early primitives did not celebrate the equinoxes and solstices to get a three day weekend, nor to have a big party every three months. They did it because with out them the sun would die and them with it.

Makes waving to God as your life goes by him once a week seem a little pale by comparison, doesn't it?

The second difference I want to bring up is one of denomination. Today religion is in neatly labeled boxes divided into neatly labeled folders called denominations We know exactly what Christianity is, what Judaism is, what Islam is. It wasn't always this cut and dried. As nations expanded into one another's territory cultures blended including religions. A big glaring example of this is the Roman pantheon,, which is just the Greek pantheon with a coat of paint and a couple of new curtains. Religion wasn't stuffed into a folder and filed in the right box the way it is today. There were simply “the gods”.
Even Christianity change wildly from it's origins to it's spread in Europe, and also from that stage to our modern one.

So, does our scientific knowledge today prevent us from needing religion? Can we still feel it that deeply? Have our needs just changed, or have they diminished? How and why did we start keeping the religions separate? Has this separation been a good thing or a bad thing?

How will you change the way you live your life based on these ideas?

Or am I just full of it?

I certainly feel that a large majority of people whom claim to be part of a religion today are mainly performing lip service, and such a thing is rather lamentable IMFO. However, I must admit that I tend to set the bar somewhat higher than most. Look into the creed of any religious or spiritual path and most will be urging towards integration in everyday life rather than setting time aside for such practices, whether it be Xianity's "God doesn't live in houses", or the accessibility of mantras in the Hindu/Buddhist pantheon allowing for one to worship whilst waiting in a queue to use the toilet.

Mankind, however, has "evolved", which seems primarily to mean that we're moving at a faster pace and filling our heads with as much trivia as we can. I believe the sociological phrase is "information overload". As a result of this, we feel we do not have the time to take an hour a day to observe these practices. Interesting, considering most of our grandparents did their washing by hand whilst working the same hours and raising considerably larger families than we tend to, if we choose to let even children interrupt our daily schedule...

Perhaps I am starting to veer off-topic, et ergo I shalt attempt to cut to the meat of the matter.



Personally, I would say it depends upon the religion one follows. Creationism has been on its last legs since it was created due to its inflexibility, yet Hinduism can claim to have had knowledge of zero-point energy and the holographic universe if one reads the texts in said light. As much as people may talk about "the God of the gaps", I honestly think that these things are dependant upon how one approaches one's path.



This is reminding me of a quote from Dogma, namely "Faith is like a glass of water. When you're young, the glass is small, and it's easy to fill up. But the older you get, the bigger the glass gets, and the same amount of liquid doesn't fill it any more. Periodically, the glass has to be refilled". This is not to say that we should refill our faith in Father Xmas,, but rather that we can easily forget the things that we take as self-evident. Think of how often you hear about people less fortunate. I bet most of us really cared about "The Third World" when we were six, but that we tend to skip channels when an Oxfam advert comes on more out of boredom at hearing the message than horror at seeing starving children. Perhaps "Religious desensitisation" would be the best term.



You must be careful when making this statement, as it seems like you may have fallen into the "One World" fallacy, as I like to call it. In today's day and age, which is edging closer and closer to a "One World government", there appear to be many people looking to connect all the dots in order to help everyone get along, with disastrous results. I'm sure we can all think of a few of these ideas that get on our wick(a), and it is folly to think that Buddhism and Judaism sprung from the same root, even if certain veins of etymology may point to the Æsir being conquering Asiatics. In this light, to ask whether it is a good or bad thing is something of a non-sequitur



I hate to say it, but I am unsure as to the "ideas" that you are meaning when making this statement unless you are referring to the entirety of your post. If this is the case, I would say that I will not change, as my change in this regard happened a while ago, and I am currently on my way to reciting half a million mantras which I fit in to most of the "brain idle" time I have whilst still performing rituals et cetera every Tyr's Day and Saturn's Day.



I wouldn't worry, we're all full of something! I know I am

'til next time,

Mernans bós genough.

Welcome to the guild biggrin

Thank you for the excellent expansion on the topic and the informative links. I would especially like to thank you for going into the intergration of faith into ones day to day life. I had intended to touch on that better than I did, but neglected to. The writing of this week's topic was a bit rushed, owing to changing subject matter at the 11th hour.

Just for clarification, I did not mean to imply that all the worlds religion's had one common root, but simply that there was a time that blending seemed to happen more smoothly and easily than it does today. Since it came up however, I will say that I find it very interesting that you do see similar themes arise in cultures that never had any contact with one another. An example that came up in converstion recently being the circle of equals of the Norse and the council of chiefs of the Native Americans. It is on examples such as these that I largely base my belief that there IS an answer or formula of some sort to the universe, and that from time to time we grasp on a little piece of it.

PS I reference to your post on the welcome thread, don't worry too much about putting anyone of with extraneous verbilation or fifty cent collage words. They're all used to dealing with me. lol And you even manage to do it without my oh so frequent typos and spelling errors.

i for one dont think you are full of it, ironicly me and my family were havign a discussion along these lines as well. our needs as people hasnt changed form the begingi of time, what has tho is the means of getting it, and the ways things are explained. in this explanation of why things the way they are has changed from the work of the gods to the work of god and all the denominations that fall in between. but what has changed is our own faith in religion or what i should say faith in a supernatural higher archy. Science is all well and great, it has gotten us in and out of many predicitments and makes our lives easier than our ancestors.
however it is no replacement for your spiritual needs, because science cannot explain everytihng or comfort every one

I'm sorry I got to this post so late.

This post I just made ( http://www.gaiaonline.com/guilds/viewtopic.php?t=22205771 ) actually talks about a few of the....stranger beliefs of ancient religions.

I've often thought that modern paganism is some kind of way for people to get in touch with a more primal part of themselves. The bigger the universe is, the more reassurance we need that we have a place in it. Back when one's whole life was a single tribe or village, it was easy to feel important.

In today's world...not so much. I think people want to get back to that kind of village mentality, and the importance of rituals in daily life. I've recently started cooking mor, and thus have started giving increased prayer to to my chosen hearth, home, and fire-gods. It's not a part of my own spirituality I've really ever expressed before, but my ancestors would never think of lighting a hearth-fire, preparing a meal, or having a party without praying first.