Tuesday, September 22, 2015

RELIGIOUS MATURITY

What do all religious people think; what do they have in common, and not how they are different? What do all Abrahamic religions, Christians, Jews and Muslims, have in common? Then think about what Baptists, Catholics, etc. and all have in common. It isn’t until you get to the differences that it becomes ugly. “Only if you belong to my religion can you get to heaven.” Proof; ask yourself, can a Muslim go to heaven? The Muslims say yes, but they are the only ones. Christians say, no, Muslims are heathens. as the world society reached a point where religious people can start to mature? Can the rest of us look on and question what is happening. I see Christianity, Judaism, and Islam as all being in the process of maturing. All we what to do is look at the beginning of monotheism, which happened around 2000 years ago. Actually, we started to move out of bestiality perhaps 100,000 years earlier; however, the subject here is Abrahamic religion, so 2,000 years is fine. Morality is centered on self-preservation. The only time it is morally right to kill is in self-preservation, greed is necessary to feed me and my family, altruism is fine if it helps my tribe and me but foolish if it hurts my chances of survival. Religious leaders build their perception of morality around these ideas. Of course, self-preservation of their church, which is now their tribe, takes center stage. This is evident in all religious texts. The only way to get to heave is to believe in God but also to belong to that church. I chose to look at this through the lens of evolutionary psychology that is my self-constructed lens. Morality is bestial and in our being and we are refining it by what we refer to as humanization. We interpret our growing humanization as morality. Different religions and societies base their laws on our interpretation of that fundamental morality. Some cultures have divided the church and the state others have not. Unfortunately, different religions have interpreted the biological self-preservation in different ways in respect to government of society, marriage laws, place of women in society, family structured, what are crimes and the severity of different crimes, severity of punishment, etc. As we move more and more away from the bestial level, we consider ourselves as being more mature. We can look at this as individuals, as churches, as society, or as humankind as a whole. Michael Shermer, in his book, The Moral Arc, reviews the expanded concept in terms of our treatment of animals. He raised the issue of our growing concern about eating meat, etc. In this overall context, I see Islam as immature but growing in comparison to Judaism and Christianity; nevertheless, I see Christianity, Judaism and Islam all in need of a lot more maturation.

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