Tuesday, August 05, 2014

What propels spiritual action in our everyday life?

Is religion the opiate of the people, as Marxists believe, or is it a spark of rebellion?
How about the aspects of religion which promote sacrifice and obedience? Christianity promotes self sacrifice, as do Buddhists, while Islamists promote the idea of suicide bombers and 9-11 atrocities.

Stephen T. Asma writes:
People who are looking for God are not looking for proof, for evidence. They are looking for a subject-to-subject encounter — one that is like human friendship or love, something intimate.

The majority of religious people are working-class stiffs who need a dose of comfort to get through the week.

Asma has some advice for those who write about religion:
Get your heads out of the clouds and examine the ground, too. One wishes the authors of these books had heeded this advice and spent more time with people and less time with theories and texts.

The authors continue to think of religion primarily as a system of beliefs (as did the New Atheists before them), but I suspect that religion is a set of feelings (affects) first, group identity second, and beliefs only last. If we’re trying to appreciate the inevitability of religion, or its substitutes, we must go deeper than political economy and modern history and culture. We must better explore the positive social-emotional complex that not only allows but propels spiritual action in everyday life.
Read more here.

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