Saturday, January 2, 2010
What are the motives for being religious?
Let’s put aside the question of, is there is a true religion? It has been extremely important in my search, to detect my ulterior motives for following a religion. Even though I have a deep desire to know the truth, do I have other motives as well? If I find a motive, does that make it more difficult or impossible to ascertain that I have found the truth? Don’t you think, that an important step in soul searching is, to know the possible motives for religion? After knowing them, you could detect which ones are relevant to you. So; what are the motives?
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2 comments:
My theory of why people are following religion is that religions can provide answers for things/phenomenons which people can't explain themselves. Not having an explanation is very unsatisfying for many so they turn to groups/individuals which provide explanations. The more convincing the explanations are the more people will follow.
Since we are finding more and more scientific explanation, religion looses followers. Although religion still provides a lot of answers for question of spiritual nature, explanations of the physical world are often in contradiction to science.
Michael P.
Being in a group can be more advantageous than going it alone. When you are alone you have to enlist and convince others to the rightness of your position. If you are orthodox then you'll have no shortage of followers to back you up. And if you are a fanatic with a hunger for power you can make it to the top. Who can criticise you then? Especially if you are espousing 'orthodox views'.
This is why theocracy is the true enemy of democracy. In a democracy wrong decisions can be made but in a theocracy a wrong decision can never be made because it is 'God's will' (and if things do stuff up it isn't the theocrat's fault it is the fault of others).
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