Rational Religion


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The Purpose of Belief…

 

…Assuming that anything has purpose, is to provide the individual believer with hope of a future which will be, at very least, no worse than the present.

 

For most believers, in most religions, the most important thing is not the Faith but the Orthodoxy. 

 

These people, as a matter of fact, have no concept of the true value of faith...which is to help the individual maintain a healthy personal relationship with the rest of the Universe.

 

The forms and the shibboleths become superordinate to them; because their minds have not been trained to live in a world which has no absolutes.  Some few of them may be genetically incapable of conceiving of such a world, but for most people I think it's the training.

 

To begin with, a religion must explain the Universe; in terms that the least scholarly of the Faithful can understand.

 

No system can explain everything, which leaves room for troubling doubts and eventual apostasy in the minds of at least a few. 

 

We depend on Faith to bridge these gaps.    But too much emphasis on faith calls upon the Faithful to ignore reality; most often to build a patently false reality and live inside it. 

 

This is a distortion of the purpose of Faith, which is only to get us intellectually and emotionally over those bumps and chasms which our intellectual and emotional resources cannot span. 

 

If you live for Faith, you are a loose cannon; as soon as your particular faith is called into question, you become capable of anything to defend it.  You will even violate the principles of your faith in its defense.  This is not rational.