Religions exist for a number of reasons. Such as:
1. To help counter-act man's propensity for unbridled narcissism -- meaning, selfishness, greed, egotism, self-infatuation, etc.
2. To help explain the unexplainable -- such as Creation.
3. To compensate for a fear of death and dying -- and anxiously contemplating the great 'abyss of non-existence'.
4. To help compensate for, and alleviate, man's alienation -- from himself, from his family, from his friends, from his community, from his government, from his fellow man, from his work, from nature and his environment...
Unfortunately, religions often come with 'significant side-effects' -- like bad drugs -- and as such, they should also come with a great big 'Caveat Emptor' sign -- 'Buyer Beware!.
Here are some of the potential negative side-effects of religion, particularly 'pathological religions' -- religions that are bad for individuals and bad for the evolution, wholism, and harmony of mankind.
1. More and more religious, ethical, and moral righteousness at the expense of less and less tolerance and respect for the rights of others to hold different opinions, beliefs, faiths...
2. Loss of reason and rationality, observation and empiricism, common sense...
3. A propensity for not only extreme righteousness and intolerance but also even worse -- divisionism, hatred, and violence -- the very things that most religions say that they are trying to preach against...
4. A tendency towards 'religious dependence', giving up one's own uniqueness and indepedence, one's own critical, reasonable and rational faculties relative to what is right and wrong, good and bad, a tendency towards 'submission to religious authority, and to authority in general, a tendency towards 'dominance and submission' attitudes, and even 'sado-masochistic' attitudes...
5. A tendency towards 'self-denial', and towards an unhealthy attitude regarding 'Gods' and 'Idols'. This unhealthy -- non-humanistic-existential, non -democratic-dialectic -- attitude can be expressed something like this: I am nothing and you are everything. (See my various essays on 'Gods, Myths, Archetypes, and Idols'). The relevant passages in The Bible (The Ten Commandments) are these:
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Do not have any other gods before me.
You shall not make for yourself an idol, whether in the form of anything that is in heaven above, or that is on the earth beneath, or that is in the water under the earth.
You shall not bow down to them or worship them; for I the Lord your God am a jealous God, punishing children for the iniquity of parents, to the third and the fourth generation of those who reject me,
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These three passages are full of hypocrisy and pathology -- they exasperate religious and human intolerance, they demonize competing religions and Gods, and more than that, they in effect 'existentially castrate' and dehumanize man. They seek to turn grown men and women into helpless children, grown men and women facing the wrath of a Domineering, Sado-Masochist God -- throught the mediating over-righteous force of a priest or minister gone too far -- like a child confronting an authoritarian, anal-retentive, overbearing, righteous-angry, jealous, possessive parent.
This is no way to raise a child.
And it is no way to preach to a Congregation.
If we want to believe in God and religion, then we have the choice as individual and collective humans -- providing we don't believe in a God who wants to take away this freedom of choice -- to believe in the type of God and religion we want to.
I have a Protestant background.
My parents are good, religious people.
There are no better role models for the 'potential good in humanely practised orthodox religion' than my parents.
However, 'Hegel's Hotel: DGB Philosophy' -- the name of my evolving, life-long philosophical treatise -- is aiming to do something different here.
My main 'spiritual-religious' role models are: Spinoza, Hegel, and Nietzsche.
From Spinoza, I take his very unorthodox Jewish brand of 'Spiritual-Romantic Pantheism and/or Deism'.
From Hegel, I take his theory of 'dialectic-evolution': thesis, anti-thesis, synthesis -- and start all over again, hopefully at a 'higher level of human evolution'.
From Nietzsche, I take his love of man and life, of helping to make men (and women) into 'Supermen' and 'Superwomen'. of looking inside us to 'find the God within each and everyone of us'.
Is the God within us a God of assertiveness, reason and rationality, passion and compassion, love of life, love for man and nature, for embracing love, life, and nature?
Or is the God within us full of rage and hate, divisionism and violence, jealousy and possessiveness, destroying people, destroying mankind?
Most religions and preachers have it completely wrong.
Man is not helpless and dependent in the face of God.
Unless we wish to equate God with Nature, and Nature with God.
Which is not a bad idea at all. Indeed, it is an unorthodox Spinozian Pantheist spiritual-religious position.
God is in Nature and Nature is in God. God is in man, and man is in God. God is everywhere and everything. Spinoza said that. (And he was 'ex-communicated' -- it could have been worse -- by the Holland Jewish religious orthodoxy for saying that. Even though the Holland Jews were fleeing the onslaught of the Spanish Inquisition where I believe it was the Spanish Roman Catholics who were torturing and killing Jews who only wanted the 'freedom to think and practise their own brand of religion'. Hypocrisy -- thy name is 'Narcissistic-Righteous Man'.
Certainly, to some extent, man can be helpless in the face of Nature.
But not entirely. If we kill Nature, then Nature will kill us. Because there will be no 'God-Nature' left to support us.
God is man. And man is God.
The two are inter-connected.
Dialectically and democratically connected.
Nietzsche said that 'God is dead'.
I say that 'God is very much alive -- and living inside of man.'
It is only a question of 'What kind of God we choose to be'.
And 'what kind of God we choose to worship'.
A God of love.
Or a God of war.
A God of 'Narcissisitic, Unethical Capitalism'.
Or a God of 'Ethical, Dialectic-Democratic, Humanistic-Existential Capitalism'.
A God of Authoritarianism, Jealousy, Possessiveness, Hypocrisy, Rage, and Righteousness...
Or a God of Reason and Rationality, Passion and Compassion, Self-Assertiveness and Social Sensitivity, Embracing Enlightenment Principles, Embracing Romantic Principles, Embracing Humanistic-Existential Principles, Embracing Ethical and Moral Principles that are good for us as well as being good for others...
It is your God.
And your Religion. Or non-religion.
It is your life.
You choose.
-- DGBN, Nov. 23rd, 2008.
-- David Gordon Bain
-- Democracy Goes Beyond Narcissism
-- Dialectic-Gap-Bridging-Negotiations...
Are still in process...
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