What is the role of religion in human survival?
Why was religion created in the first place? Is religion still relevant today, or has science made it obsolete?
My audience includes people with all sorts of views on religion and spirituality. I have readers who are agnostics and hardcore atheists and communists, others who follow an Eastern guru or New Age program, and still others who adhere, like I do, to one of the traditional revealed religions. But even fellow traditionalists probably won’t fully agree with my take outlined below.
When Quora asked “What is the role of religion in human survival?” I assumed they were referring to the future of humanity, and whether religion would play a positive or negative role in the long-term survival of the species. Instead, it turned out, the most popular answers involved materialist-evolutionary just-so stories purporting to explain why religion even exists.
The series of three questions could have been designed by demonic controllers to propagandize for their pro-scientism anti-religion narrative, whose purpose is to keep Earth’s population suffering and ignorant (two sides of the same coin). The first question What is the role of religion in human survival? steers the reader towards the materialist-Darwinian assumption that religion must exist because it provided an evolutionary advantage. The second question Why was religion created in the first place? implies that religion is a human or natural creation. The third, Is religion still relevant today or has science made it obsolete? holds up scientism as a possible “final solution to the religion problem.”
The false religion of scientism—the belief that quantitative-empirical science is the ultimate source of authority and can answer all meaningful or important questions—has been held up as a replacement for all other ways of knowing. (Scientism, the ideology, must be distinguished from the scientific method per se, which makes no claims about itself.)
But scientism, the discourse of scientific authority purportedly based on whatever honest people using the scientific method have discovered, is profoundly corrupt. Scientism, or “the science” that we were supposed to “trust” to tell us the truth about COVID issues, is lying about all sorts of things. Most importantly, scientism is lying about scientific investigations of paranormal phenomena. A very large and repeatedly confirmed body of investigation shows that such phenomena as telepathy, precognition, psychokinesis, psychic healing, and apparent reincarnation are very real. (Most of us have experienced one or more of these things in our own lives, and have to be in massive denial not to notice and acknowledge them.)
Scientism lies about the actual science of psi in order to promote materialism. Those fabricating the lies know full well what they are doing. They are using psi technologies, as well as material ones, to dumb us down and maintain Earth as a prison planet, for reasons explained in my Quora answer reproduced below.
KB
This question, and its most popular answers, assume that “survival” means physical survival in spacetime. It implicitly assumes a materialist perspective. But that’s not really what religion is about, if by religion we mean doctrines and practices (especially rituals) that connect us to greater non-material realms, and in so doing provide (or fail to provide) a good/true answer to the question of the meaning of our existence.
To grossly oversimplify, there are two kinds of religions. The first and most common is the religion of scapegoating and human sacrifice described in the work of René Girard. Those who practice this religion feed the suffering of sacrificial victims (and ultimate their own suffering) to demonic extradimensional entities. That is what the Aztec and Maya priests did when they ripped living hearts out of victims atop pyramids, and what the Israelis are doing to Gazans now.
The extradimensional entities that feed on human suffering, and interface with selected humans to maximize the suffering they feed on, dominate Earth through demonic elites and maintain it as a prison planet. So what can we do about this grim situation? That’s where the other kind of religion comes in. Divinely revealed religions offer guidance to help us minimize the depredations of the demonic control systems, and ultimately dispense with them, by ascending toward what the Western traditions (including the final one, Islam) call God.
Materialist science not only ignores these realities, but was heavily influenced, indeed in large part designed, by the demonic controllers as a means of blinding us to more important realities, and binding us to suffering.
Kevin, may I recommend an essay that is more than tangentially relevant to the questions presented herein?
Christianity and the Survival of Creation
~Wendell Berry
https://www.ecofaithrecovery.org/wp-content/uploads/2012/09/BerryWendell_ChristianitySurvivalCreation.pdf
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"The Bible leaves no doubt at all about the sanctity of the act of world-making, or of the
world that was made, or of creaturely or bodily life in this world. We are holy creatures
living among other holy creatures in a world that is holy. Some people know this, and
some do not. Nobody, of course, knows it all the time. But what keeps it from being far
better known than it is? Why is it apparently unknown to millions of professed students
of the Bible? How can modem Christianity have so solemnly folded its hands while so
much of the work of God was and is being destroyed?
"The sense of the holiness of life" is not compatible with an exploitive economy. You
cannot know that life is holy if you are content to live from economic practices that daily destroy life and diminish its possibility. And many if not most Christian organizations
now appear to be perfectly at peace with the military-industrial economy and its
"scientific" destruction of life. Surely, if we are to remain free, and if we are to remain
true to our religious inheritances, we must maintain a separation between church and
state. But if we are to maintain any sense or coherence or meaning in our lives, we
cannot tolerate the present utter disconnection between religion and economy. By
"economy" I do not mean "economics," which is the study of money-making, but rather
the ways of human housekeeping, the ways by which the human household is situated
and maintained within the household of Nature. To be uninterested in economy is to be
uninterested in the practice of religion; it is to be uninterested in culture and in character.
Probably the most urgent question now faced by people who would adhere to the Bible is
this: What sort of economy would be responsible to the holiness of life? What, for
Christians, would be the economy, the practices and the restraints, of "right livelihood"? I
do not believe that organized Christianity now has any idea. I think its idea of a Christian
economy is no more or less than the industrial economy--which is an economy firmly
founded upon the seven deadly sins and the breaking of all ten of the Ten
Commandments. Obviously, if Christianity is going to survive as more than a respecter
and comforter of profitable iniquities, then Christians, regardless of their organizations,
are going to have to interest themselves in economy--which is to say, in nature and in
work. They are going to have to give workable answers to those who say we cannot live
without this economy that is destroying us and our world, who see the murder of
Creation as the only way of life."
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*Excuse the shitty formatting
In Madison, Wisconsin, there’s this organization, called the Freedom From Religion Foundation.
OUR adherents don’t physically and/or emotionally abuse people for questioning tenants.
Don’t demand subservient subjects, who must bend the knee to dogmatic demands.
If others want to comport their lives in conformity to what I consider to be fairytale books, that’s alright with me.
I just want those others to keep their faiths to themselves, and not impose it on me, or anybody else, for that matter.
The FFRF doesn’t enforce, or endorse, slavery, or sin, or murder of kin, or anyone else for that matter.
We don’t see women and children as property, or as exalted.
Don’t tell others what to do with their bodies, or their money.
Don’t declare war against infidels.
Don’t declare the existence of heavens or hells.
I guess that the key is in the foundation’s title.
The root word is free.
If there is any deity, it’s the empathy inside of me.
One ancient figure that makes sense to me, is old Socrates.
When I think about the foundations of Abrahamic religions, I think about trump.
Get the suckers to do all the work, and give the godhead the fruits of their labors, while he sits on his rump.
Not that there aren’t “fine people on both sides”.
I’ve seen great acts of kindness, that have brought tears to my eyes.
Also religious war making, which I really despise.
I don’t have any, or all of the, answers.
But, I’ve seen religions turn people into monsters.
Religion should be between others and their gawds.
It’s got nothing to do with others, who don’t share their beliefs.
I can’t speak about eternity.
I’ll find out when I’m dead.