Can ou make your own religion ?

Post Reply New Topic

In the Americas, Catholicism has also incorporated African (and I guess also indigenous) elements to varying degrees, and even modern-era European occultist elements (like spiritism), all blending together, not necessarily attached to race. Some people who follow those practices consider themselves members of a separate religion, but most just call themselves Catholic and don't see any reason not to. The church also seems fine with it. I guess it shouldn't be surprising, because it seems to be the way it has been throughout most of its history.

It saddens me to see people spending their entire lives studying theology who seemed to deliberately put blinkers on their eyes so they don't see the obvious....that mainstream religions are merely syncretic cults.

The freemasons and other elite secret societies practice secret rituals/rites that are borrowed from pre-christian rites which they are initiated into despite outwardly claiming to be god-fearing christians.

Most elite institutions (whether private boarding schools or military academies) that only allow the children of the wealthy have traditions involving blood sacrifice, skulls and other weird things.

Faith and religion are not the same things.  Religion is the outward expression of faith, and faith is the belief in improvable things.  My religiosity is minimal.  I sing the hymns, pray the prayers, and I stand, kneel, and sit at the appropriate times, too.  I have read the Bible, and can answer most questions in a doctrinally correct way.  I go to church because that is where most of my friends are, and because bars are too noisy, too crowded, and they stink.

Sincere belief in a religion (whatever you choose to follow) is an inward journey. Chanting hymns/prayers by oneself or in groups is no different to chanting mantras in a monastery. The goal is the same, to understand oneself.

Outward trappings of a religion are irrelevant.

---

"Faith of the Mustard Seed"

Obviously Not Worrying About
Being Small Just Growing That's All...

And Indeed As Far As Humans Come and
Go And Continue to Be Conceived Humans

Have The Ability of Tools, Ranging From Abstract
Constructed Symbols to Cranes Hehe to Lift Others Up...

True Some

Jobs

Require

Different Tools...

Do Note This Tree Started
With Faith And Like 'Magic'
The Seed Just Grew into A Tree
Or A Lamp All Lit Up (Thanks Mikah)
For A Tool To Center Balance Both With Roots..

---

I really don't think it is. Religion is all about social cohesion (for better or worse). Faith is just any instance of believing in something with no proof available. And chanting by yourself, depending on why you do it, could very well be nothing more than a ritual no different from organizing a bookshelf or something like that.

Belief in a religion is belief in its institution. Or at least it is when it comes to organized religion more specifically.

doesn't sound too different to original Buddhism, the old suck it and see doctrine. Don't believe me try it for yourself, if it turns out you think its bs, then fair enough.

I think a fair amount of the knowledge has been lost through time or mixed with bs from many centuries.
I guess that is why religions need to keep on being updated.

personally i am extremely careful about paying or buying into any man's scheme
whether they have cathedrals or just selling t-shirts and books.... to the alter of David Icke.... i mean.. come on!

Shouldn't be too hard to start a pseudo viking religion at the mo, plenty of far right holes wanting to hide in plane sight
using the guise of ancient mythology, the same ancient mythology that Hitler and the ww2 nazis used to get people into the idea that waging war on the world for conquest was a great idea, because it was in their viking / roman / greek blood....

sending out the masses to their deaths while those who decided on their fate, stayed at home, doing the important jobs...

or if you want to appeal to the rock and rollers, why not do a similar thing to that which Hitler, Crowley and LeVey all did. Start pseudo ancient magick religions, that can be used to victimise, abuse and then steal from individuals who did nothing to the members of the religion but exist.

Great place for gang bullies to hang out and hide in plane sight.
Nothing more cowardly than gang bullies.
If you aren't tough enough to win a fight one on one, always stir up trouble among a pack of equally weakly minded cowards and get them to form a "wolf pack" to victimise their victim. How Strong and tough thee Vikings really are?...
at least the vikings of todays metal pop culture.... ho hum....

Ok so sincerity in this context is not to get caught up in outward expressions of your chosen religion. Most people are born into a religion so they conform as per societal expectations. However, joining a religion as an adult is a different matter. Many people are attracted for different reasons. The least relevant reason is because you like the costumes, the buildings are impressive or that you want a friend/girlfriend. If you are (for example) a member of a church because you like the social interaction then your reasons for joining are probably not religious. However it's like choosing a car. Whether you choose a BMW or decide to ride a bicycle or skateboard ultimately the mode of transport is irrelevant and the destination is what matters.

I still think most people don't actually care about that "destination". They only really care about being accepted. Their assertions of faith emerge from that desire.

I'm not saying people are simply lying when they say they believe what they say they believe. People will effectively (if not fully) believe all sorts of weird things if that's what it takes for them to feel a sense of belonging. I mean... it's 2021. We see it happening all the time all around. But that's still conditional. Take away that sense of belonging, and a "crisis of faith" will happen in no time (be it with religion or politics or whatever else it may be).

A lot of human behavior in relation to faith/religion is developmental as well. Younger people are more preoccupied with acceptance and finding their place in society. Older people are less preoccupied with such things and start to reflect on spiritual things. Maslow's heirarchy of needs tends to refllect this as well, older folks tend to have achieved the basic needs of home, family, career, children etc...so what next...self-actualisation.

What about the visibly increased preoccupation with deference and tradition? I'd say that's hardly spiritual.


I don't buy that narrative. But as with much in psychology, I guess it comes down to faith.

Last edited by toadsnail on 16 Feb 2021, 2:12 am, edited 1 time in total.

Psychology is evidence based so it's not quite faith.As with any rule there's always exceptions. I'm speaking more about trends/patterns rather than defined absolutes.

But is it really?...


One might argue that this is just a rather embarrassing outlier in psychology, but from what I can tell, it isn't.

There's a lot of value in gathering and analyzing statistical data involving psychological phenomena, and there's a lot of quality research based on that out there (there's a lot of bogus research too, but not necessarily more than in other areas of statistical study). There's also some value in controlled psychological experiments, but those are a lot more subtle, and you have to be very careful with the conclusions you do you don't draw from them. It takes restraint to limit your generalizations appropriately, restraint that the most widely recognized names in psychology most likely won't have. By virtue of its extreme subjectivity, psychology is much more prone to a perverse kind of academic Darwinism than other fields of study.

And we come full circle at this point. Because I think certain areas of psychology are not and could not be a science, and the "scientification" of those studies tends to turn fundamentally subjective conclusions into a sort of dogma under the guise of objective science. Those areas are just better served by philosophical inquiry instead (or, in the absence of it, spiritual belief), without the pretense of objectivity, because they matter but they're just not provable one way or another.

Are you taking notes, Tomatoes? There's a market gap here.

Agree with many of your points, Psychology does have its roots (ironically) in philosophy. However some of your criticism on psychology carrying with it (as a discipline) pseudoscience is somewhat outdated. Nueroscience is a hard science and psychotherapy is fairly comfortbly evidence based.

But is it really?...

(Sorry, I know I'm probably being a little annoying, I just couldn't resist )

You've probably heard about the ongoing "replication crisis". Maslow's pyramid itself may be outdated in the field (though I don't know if it really is in practice), but we don't need to look far to find a more pertinent/contemporary example:

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6959478/

I think this quote from the paper sums it up pretty well:


The paper is talking about prevailing core ideas in the field today, proposed and championed by serious, well-known and well-respected experts. It's not that their ideas have no merit, but they're approached completely backwards. Phrasing "empathy" as "theory of mind" makes it sound sciencier, and arguably does improve clarity and specificity a little bit, but not much really. It doesn't change the fact that we're still contemplating the innards of a completely opaque black box. And more importantly than not being able to see inside a subject's black box, experts themselves can't look into their peers' own black boxes to even know that they're really talking about the same thing.

Outer manifestations of human psychology can very well be categorized and quantified, of course, and that's very useful in many ways. But, at its core, psychology is fundamentally, by definition, subjective. There's no possible microscope to look inside anyone's mind. It does a disservice to the public when experts in the field fail to acknowledge that limitation, and they often do. Other less eminent peers, in turn, follow suit and fail to acknowledge the failings of their more established counterparts, especially under the types of pressure that they face in their job. It's a pervasive phenomenon, not exclusive to psychology, but psychology is unavoidably more susceptible to it due to its nature.

And, well, as a lower-hanging fruit to further illustrate my point, there's always Jordan Peterson.


Yes, I think those are the probably the main areas of psychology where the word "science" actually applies more properly.

By the way, I think I expressed myself poorly when I said "controlled experiments" earlier. What I meant was "controlled-environment experiments".