Opinion | Where Does Religion Come From?
nytimes.com
Opinion | Where Does Religion Come From?
While science has nothing of value to say on the great and aching questions of life, death, love, and meaning, what the religious traditions of mankind have said forms a coherent body of thought. The yearnings of the human soul are not in vain. There is a system of belief adequate to the complexity of experience. There is recompense for suffering.
... See moreDavid Berlinski • The Devil's Delusion
God, then, is the ungovernable reality commemorated by ritual. Ritual reflects the highly contingent anthropological, geographical, agricultural, and historical facts that conditioned our neural pathways and tribal behaviors and the forms and customs that became religion, and that even now determine through force of repetition the way things ought
... See moreJudith Shulevitz • The Sabbath World: Glimpses of a Different Order of Time
How did we arrive at this strange situation, with traditional religion declining while our politics and ideologies are looking increasingly religious? We believe there are a number of historical, philosophical and psychological forces at play, and that these might tie together phenomena as different as the argument over teaching Critical Race Theor... See more
Alexander Beiner • Is Religion Coming Back?
And maybe there never was. But at least we maintained the illusion better before. We used to be told how to live, provided lore that outlined where the lines were drawn between right and wrong, and granted something resembling safety and stability in exchange.** Yes, I’m talking about the glue of society: religion. **“Literally false but metaphoric... See more
Molly Mielke • callings
religion reflected humanity’s need to codify natural impulses of curiosity about nature and a desire for order, plus perhaps gratitude for life itself.