The biggest problem imo with organized religion

[bellatrys]

is that it validates the very human impulse to think that we can "make up" for things - rewrite the past, undo what we have done, magic away the reality with something else - that we can fix our misdeeds and harms done by harming ourselves in some way.

And we can't. We really can't.

It's not that religions create this idea: as I stated above, it'

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Re: Yes, there's a terrifying science saying,

[yeloson]

I tend to think of the mystical practices as preceding the organized religions - for example the various taoist practices predate nearly anything else in China, and then later, we saw organized orders and cults arise.

I think it has mostly to do with the fact that the usual mystical premise, "Change yourself" involves all work and no guarantee or obvious reward, while social groupings where people are looking up to you as holy, giving you money, sex, whatever has clear benefits.

It's the natural human tendency for greed plus magical thinking that creates organized religion out of anything. (For example, given the basic tenets of Buddhism, the idea that there should be orders of monks supported by the lay population? Makes no sense at all.)

It's also easy to make a living telling people what they want to hear:

"Good things happen to you because you earned it and you're blessed by God. Good things happen to THOSE people because the world is corrupt and rewards evil. Bad things happen to you because the world opposes good people. Bad things happen to THOSE people because they deserve it!"

Of course, the basic offer made by organized religion is kind of broken at heart:

"Pay/give status to someone else to show you how to be a better you." - it's like paying someone else to do pushups hoping you'll become healthier in the process...

!

[bellatrys]

"Pay/give status to someone else to show you how to be a better you." - it's like paying someone else to do pushups hoping you'll become healthier in the process...

Well, the argument is that it's like hiring a personal trainer or a coach...but yeah, it often turns out like "You do the exercising, we'll reap the benefits!" Clericalism as a division of labor to appease predatory gods makes a certain amount of common sense; Clericalism in an ananda-based religious system becomes ever less theologically justifiable. But then, for all the talk of "joy" and "love" and "inner peace" it usually is a fearful one of old predatory gods, underneath. So you end up with the worst sort of feudalism, an elite supported by the labors and wealth of the "lower" classes and immune from the rules, in the name of "protecting" and "serving" as Spiritual Warriors and Lords Bountiful.

Or you can have the worst of both worlds: not just an an elite who gets away - as in the recently-revisted in light of the Murphy Report case of Bernadette Connolly with even murder, but who at least take on the "burden" of doing all that propitiation stuff, but also a populace who is haunted by the same fears of ritual impurity and impiety that the sacrifices of the priestly classes are supposed to be taking care of, though with no confidence in their own ability to take spiritual care of themselves. It may be an inevitable result of social pressures to justify supporting a Standing Clerical Army, in spite of the questionable theology, the need to convince the majority that yes, Virginia, there ARE armies of demons and that's why you need to subsidize the Watchers' Council and their Slayers resulting in a haunted & miserable populace who find no comfort in the Invisible Rat Catchers' assurances of their ability to whistle away the Invisible Rats - I don't know. It could just be simple human heirarchicalism born of innate authoritarian impulses, fixing on whatever target is at hand regardless of logic, too, combined with that need to feel *some* sort of control over life and the universe and everything.

IMO it comes down to what does more harm - "an it harm none" being a good counteractant against fanaticism of the sort that leads to Jansenism or mandatory atheism (I don't see much difference really) and attempts to purge out folkways in the name of purity and avoidance of superstition.

But the flip side of that is that you *do* have to ask if it's doing harm, and sometimes it is. Sometimes the comfort it gives is that of the barbituate bottle or the heroin syringe, and *damaging* to the one who holds on to it and to others.

Oh, indeed

[bellatrys]

I only had a few years of Theo, but I have a glancing familiarity with Rudolph Otto - and then it only makes sense, from a purely practical historical perspective, that behaviors wouldn't be codified and systematized *before* the impulses that led to them.

I tend to think of the mystical practices as preceding the organized religions

Yes, I meant merely in the sense of a Personal Journey - those who have been raised in a legalistic faith and after study end up on a more mystical and less exclusionary path often do see it as a Return to a primeval spirituality, free of "accretions" as well as superstition and parochialism. Western efforts by the Establishment to resist this cutting into market share are notorious; but the realization for me that it *was* a Fight About The Stuff like most political battles (ie a political battle!) for all the conflicting dogmas on all sides, was helped along by reading about bloody (if less centrally organized) fights between Asian monasteries which sounded awfully familiar after reading about the purges and splintering and counter-accusations of heresy between orders in the European Middle Ages.

(Unfortunately my knowledge of Asian religious/political history is a lot sketchier and more scattered, and so I don't have a good feel for the extent to which thinkers over the centuries *engaged* with the problem of Clericalism in Buddhism and how that affected ordinary people who just wanted the Comforts of Tradition and the household shrine to help them get on with their lives and let the professionals take care of the high-level mediation and cosmic stuff; the bits I've read in Mencius and other Confucian school theorists remind me of the ancient internal debates over Piety vs Superstition in Magna Graeca which also inevitably start and roll back round to the whole Social Utility of Organized Religion. The pop cultural takes, full of snark and skewering of hypocrisies, in plays and folktales of lecherous monks, false ascetics and other holy hypocrites, those sound *way* familiar after reading medieval European poetry and song lyrics - or Tartuffe.

OTOH, while it's definitely a relief to realize that It's Not Just Us in that it allows for better diagnosis and hopefully, treatment of problems (if you think it's Just Us then, in my experience, a common result is fleeing from failed institution to as-yet-untried-&-thus-not-failed institution in search of the Real Authentic Pure Religion, which never works) as well as a we're-all-in-it-together commonality of humanity - still it's also very disheartening in that it shows that nobody's got a handle on how to deal with it, after all these millennia of trying... "Damn, we ALL have versions of the Prosperity Gospel!? We're all following Empress Fortuna, whether we call her Mother Church or Kwannon or Reason or Nature, the real target of human veneration is & has always been the 'bitch-goddess Success' it seems--"

(Oh, and thanks for reminding me that I forgot the intended epigraph to this post.)