Are we missing the point in this whole religious debate?

Many people are born and raised to see there “religion” as a reality instead of what it actually is, a belief. As a young kid your mind is shaped by what your parents teach you, as goes the natural course of nature.. By the time your older the beliefs and values you hold are a part of you. So I don’t blame people or dislike them for fighting for and or standing up for what’s in a sense a part of you.

If tomorrow I woke up with a farm of a baby’s, I would raise them to believe that we we’re created by a giant taco just to prove to humanity that beliefs are just beliefs, an ideal absent of fact or evidence, supported by mere speculation. I can believe in anything but does it actually make it real? Proving if anything is “real” to humanity requires physical evidence, But proving if anything is “real” to yourself requires personal experience.


When we define “real” as something perceived and are aware of things get complex. What exactly is real? When we dream we perceive it as real but when we wake up we go “Oh it was just a dream”. So if everything we don’t experience isn't real, and whatever we do experience isn't real.. Then what are we left with? My main point being is that these religious debates don’t matter. You can’t prove god exists, but you also cant disprove if he exists. Same goes for anything unless you actually have physical evidence that you can only perceive it’s existence on this current level of consciousness.

Who knows maybe when we die we will wake up.

“oh it was just a dream”.

Well that is the point that is not spoken about - the fact that religion is taught by the family. How come? How do common beliefs form common ground, and is this necessary for a society to function? Can a society function entirely made out of individuals, and how would those individuals form relationships?

God doesn't matter, but the process of religion does. Is it possible to run a society based on rules that are constantly changing every week, state by state, fragmenting? How would someone even live in that society, ultimately?

Because the religion element is not going to go away, people will become "religious" about recycling, affirmative action, feminism, whatever - on the other side, if religion is taken away, conservatives could get religious about money, racism, or anything.

It is entirely dangerous to miscalculate when dealing with this issue.

I admire your line of thinking that is a natural succession of realizations that every truly great mind has been through at least once. I would suggest you find some Plato, Socrates, or any old philosophy that you can grasp and work your way through existentialism with Kirkergaard however it is spelled. There are tons of great existentialist writers; Franz Kafka's way of explaining the world is my personal favorite and J.P. Sarte was always to hard for me to grasp. But you get through those and head east to Zen Buddhism an Taoism then if you are like me you will notice how close Hinduism is to the only correct major religion on any level. By then you may have cultivated that subtle feel for the real truths of the world and how to identify some truths that you have never been taught how to find or to even look for. At that point, you will be idealogically independent from society and culture. Finally, if your natural sense of honest yearning to find who you ultimately are is the internal compass you use along with an ever-sharpening intuition for ultimate truth there is no way you can escape enlightenment.

reply to post by darkbake


That is the beauty of these dumber religious people a rapture will in fact happen for them. The universe will create a Heaven for them as a static simulation where they're entirely composed of pleasure sensors that are being stimulated constantly for an eternity, to them anyways. This is just to remove them from our simulation which could possibly be the first mechanism so far to allow the entire universe to be self-aware and start its life path. I know these things to be true.