Since I've given up religion, I've become a lot more content with my smallness. As noted before, I'm no longer obsessed with expanding my consciousness, enlarging my connection with God, or growing my spiritual understanding.
Small things please me now much more than they did before. I guess you could say I've lost a lot of ego-weight after discarding a religious belief system that had grandiose goals and taught that human beings could attain perfection.
This morning I forgot to put the canned dog food back in the refrigerator. There goes my claim to perfection. To which I say, good riddance. The more imperfectly natural I feel, the more I feel in tune with reality.
The way I see it, I'm much closer to being nothing than everything. The obervable universe extends about 47 billion light years. I'm about six feet tall, and likely still shrinking. So I should feel small.
When I die, likely I'll be really nothing.
Can't know for sure, but those who say I'll become One With Everything don't know either. All we can be sure of is that when people die, there's no longer any sign of the living, breathing beings they once were.
(HInt: if you ever meet the Dalai Lama, don't tell him the "make me one with everything" joke. A TV guy didn't have much success with it.)
Religions, though, play to our craving to have our selves carry on forever. Some faiths say that the body dies, but the soul spends eternity with God. Other faiths promise that if we do such and such, we'll merge with allness, oneness, everythingness.
Supposed result: we get bigger rather than smaller. More wise, more spiritual, more conscious, more loving, more radiant, more blissful, more..., more..., more....
Sounds good, doesn't it? What could be wrong with more? Isn't there an almost universal craving for the goodies that religions offer up on their dogma menu? Yes, there is. But cravings aren't necessarily beneficial for us. Consider fast food.
In his fascinating little (144 pages) book, "Why We Believe in God(s)," psychiatrist and evolutionary psychologist J. Anderson Thomson likens religious belief to fast food. People are attracted to both for reasons that are by-products of evolution's adaptations.
Religion utilizes and piggybacks onto everyday social-thought processes, adaptive psychological mechanisms that evolved to help us negotiate our relationships with other people, to detect agency and intent, and to generate a sense of safety. These mechanisms were forged in the not-too-distant world of our African homeland. They are why we survived.
While not an adaptation in its own right, religious belief is a by-product of those psychological mechanisms that allowed us to imagine other people and other social worlds, abilities crucial to human survival. Because religion only slightly alters those adaptations, it can be equally powerful.
Let's look at the workings of adaptive by-products another way: do you like fast food -- say, a big, juicy burger with cheese, a large side of crisp, salted fries, and an icy cola or shake?... You may avoid them for dietary or health reasons, but odds are that you at least occasionally break down and buy such meals even against your better judgment.
Why does this matter? If you understand the psychology of craving fast food, a savory slice of prime rib, or a decadent chocolate sundae, you can fully comprehend the psychology of religion.
We evolved in harsh, dangerous environments. We evolved cravings for foods that were rare and crucial to our physical well-being. Nobody craves Brussels sprouts. Certain types of greens and tubers were an available source of food in the ancient world. But we all crave fat, and we all crave sweets.
...Craving is an adaptation. It solves the problem of securing crucial but rare life-sustaining foods.
...But today, in most areas of the developed world, food is plentiful and human culture has created new ways of responding to those cravings. Now we have fast food, high in unhealthy fat that plugs our arteries and expands our waistlines, a far cry from the lean game meat our ancestors sought out. Instead of ripe fruits we have sodas and candy bars.
Even knowing the harm eating fat, salt, and sugar can do to us, we still crave them, and unless disciplined, we will choose them over lean meat and ripe fruit. Why?
Because they pack supernormal stimuli. Our brains react to this relatively recent rise of excessive calories on demand as if it's a good thing, as though we still need to behave as our ancestors did. Our brains reward us. When we eat our favorite food, the pleasure centers in our brain explode with delight. What we experience is not just slight satisfaction, but an intense pleasure released by brain chemicals.
...This is why it is not a joke to say that if you understand the psychology of fast food, you understand the psychology of religion.
In the rest of his book, Thomson describes the specifics of how the craving for religion, like a craving for fast food, is a by-product of evolutionary adaptations that helped humans survive.
But now religion and fast food are dysfunctional. We don't really need them, but our brains are hard-wired to desire them.
So true believers will say "My religion feels so right and true to me," just as diners at a fast food restaurant will say, "My burger and fries are so tasty and fulfilling for me. Well, yeah, that's what their brain chemicals are saying, Yum!, and so people keep getting physically and spiritually fatter.
Leaner is better. Smaller is better. Excess weight, whether physical or egotistical, is a burden to carry around. Sure, it may feel good to imagine that you're part of God's chosen band of souls who are destined to feast on divine grace forever.
But consider the benefits of an alternative feeling: that you're nobody special. You're not a big deal. You're not a technicolor being in a black and white world. You're simply a small part of a gigantic universe, a tiny piece of an immeasurably vast jigsaw puzzle of reality -- the whole picture of which can't be known.
Small takes some getting used to. It's a more natural place to be, though. Try it. You might find that you like it.
It is simple.
Scrap the meat off the bones and you find death. Religion is about death, gives hope of renewal or immortality, and addresses the terror of the abyss, of non-existence, or worse existence in some eternal hell-fire or aware in absolute darkness without reprieve. So humans need religion, and always will. Religion has absolutely no other purpose than to be the Supreme Don Quixote fighting off the fear of death. Jesus saves us? Guru saves us? Saves us from what? DEATH.
Animals don't know they are going to pop-off, lucky them. They like fast-food too though.
Posted by: Don Quixote | July 03, 2011 at 12:01 PM
Religion could indeed be like fast food but in our culture here it is not so much 'fast food' (which is fast changing) but more like medicine which is becoming like religion.
Imagine going into a pharmacy.
On display are innumerable amounts of pills, lotions, potions, tonics, creams...all which promise to in one way or another to ‘make’ one better, live longer,more healthy, more slimmer, more attractive, less wrinkles, less depressed, a cure for every known calamity and er, life; most with the promise to improve one self and some coming with guarantees, to fix something that is wrong, to prolong life, to give you a good feeling, and all saying that their ‘brand’ is the best, superior to the lesser ‘competition’ all battling to a greater or lesser degree with the competition.
They come in different forms, all packaged in different ways to entice or help the ‘consumer’ into buying the ‘product’. You have bottles, tubes and containers; big and small, filled with liquid in varying densities as well as containing varies flavours. Some in the form of tablets ranging from pea sized, to major big whoppers which can be hard to swallow, bitter, sweet, fruity, chalky .... and then you have creams which one can put directly on to the skin which supposedly will soak in and have the desired effect. These too, have their different textures of density and smells. Not leaving out the ‘natural’ brands that claim to use nothing but natural wholesome ingredients and in some cases use proportions of these ingredients that are so minimal that it has been questioned ‘if it is not the placebo effect’ that makes them ‘work’.
A lot of these medicinal remedies have been around for centuries and have been built into individual cultures in different ways. There has even been wars over these differences, all been about trying to control a certain product as the only one and to eliminate those who go against this with their own versions.
Some households have been traditionally handed down these ‘medicines’ from generation to generation, brainwashing the members into believing only in one 'real and particular' cure, leaving all other brands, varieties as shunned and judged. Others hold lightly to their medicine and have a different variety in their cupboards all of which can be sampled and taken if desired or not – just in case!
Others don’t believe in medicines at all for different reasons and may think they are all money spinners after spending a lot of time and money in purchasing and taking these remedies, with none of the desired affects promised, gained. Thereby coming to the conclusion that all medicines should not exist.
All tablets, potions and lotions and those against all these, have their own set of ‘customers’ who verify staunchly or not, are against the workability of these pills. Arguments break out all the time and each group believes they are correct.
While there are those customers who may see that medicine can have its uses in the proper proportion, under certain conditions with the aim to use them for a certain period as an aid to give themselves a better healthy place to be able to be at their optimum health or a tonic for some of the bugs they may have picked up, on the ‘journey of life’ having been in contact with others who may have some ‘contagious disease’ and by which their immune system may be temporarily not firing on all pistons.
Not to leave out the ones who say "there are no tablets, and who is here to take the tablets?". Nothing more can to be said about that then!
All have different gradients of workability according to the individual consumer/customer.
One also can become overly attached, overly dependent, hooked, addicted to these pills and lotions and end up ‘mis’using them, thereby giving the ‘product’ a ‘bad’ name.
For others they can be useful to have in the home and small doses taken if or when the necessary conditions arise, taking them as prescribed or until such times when they see they have helped but now no longer do they feel the need for them.
What is the solution?
We have scared the living daylights out of ourselves and others (vice versa) and now we need pills to not look at the scary bogeyman we have created, taking the bogeyman to be real, we medicate ourselves to cope....when if we question/inquire, we may see it as no more than a figment of our much too active imagination.....not real.
Are all tablets, pills, lotions and potions placebo in their nature?
Is there really anything we can really do with these ‘ailments’ that seemingly are rampant in our world? Is there really any ailment or have we brainwashed ourselves into thinking so?
That is not to put down medicine. It has its place and we all know what good medicine can do in some cases for short periods of time plus longer, depending on the given situation. There can be life saving/life changing. But the ‘problems’ seem to arise when our ailments have been relieved, whether it is ‘placebo’ effect or not is irrelevant, when we ‘hang on’ or grasp to the very medicine, believing every word and leave ourselves ‘living’ by someone else’s prescriptions/rules. Medicine has its place just like religion. Each and all one can do is search within ourselves and decide with a bit of objectivity and openness as to what suits us as an individual and afford other’s the same choice.
One man’s meat can be another man’s poison. No one can say for someone else in the long run.
Is the fear too great (death/life?), to handle on our own that we think we need ‘mothers little helpers’? We own nothing! What a drag it is getting old!
See Rolling Stones song and lyrics (wonderful lyrics and music imo)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tfGYSHy1jQs
Marina
Posted by: Marina | July 05, 2011 at 05:42 AM
I couldn't find the post I recently read about "give me an example of a 'go to hell' action, according to the gurus or something like that" but this seems to be in line with that train of thought:
Harry Truman once said, "I never give them hell. I just tell the truth and they think its hell."
Posted by: Peter Holleran | July 07, 2011 at 12:16 PM