0.3.4 Key Learnings from Religion

Version 1.1 November 2016                                        Previous Version

Religion is humanity’s attempt to find meaning and purpose.  It’s about our “ultimate concern�, what we care about most, our most basic beliefs about the world, guiding how we face up to life.  We must acknowledge and take from each religion whatever wisdom it offers.

Most people today still follow some sort of religion, and we need to sympathetically understand its attraction.  We also need to understand why a rising number no longer follow a religion.

Religions have a common structure we can use to compare them.  Despite what some would like to believe, there are significant, unresolvable, differences between and within religions.  Here we look at what we can learn from indigenous religions, the major global religions of the East and the West, and modern approaches to religion, including political ideologies and Atheism.

●    All religions change over time.  The message of the early prophets or gurus is refined by later revelations or insights.  Some incorporate modern knowledge into their faith.

●    Each religion has many views of how to interpret its essential message.  Some take sacred texts literally, others treat some sections as allegories, others interpret the texts very liberally.

●    Even fundamentalists who take every word of the Bible or the Koran as the unchanging, literal word of God can differ as to what their texts really mean.

Some people see a clash between science and religion.  Some believers reject the science, others reject the religion, and others reinterpret their religion to be consistent with science.  For many faiths, the supposed clash between science and religion is not a major issue. 

Most of us need to move on to a more sophisticated understanding of religion and science.  Wisdom can be found in some religious stories regardless of whether they are historically true or scientifically valid.

Many claim religion is our source of values.  Religious people are prone to claim every good action is based on religion.  The non-religious reply that the good done religion’s name is actually due to the legal system or our innate, natural goodness, rather than religious beliefs.

The best of religion adds richness and depth to our universal narrative and our part in it, and improving our understanding of religion will only enable us to be even better people.

We end up coming to this summary of our conclusions.  You may be able to phrase this better.  In subsequent pages we expand out and justify each one of these points.