Q: CURT: “DO RELIGIONS NEED LIES? AND WHY DO WE NEED RELIGIONS?”
The reason you need lies is the instinctual demand for mindfulness provided by hunter-gatherer family clan tribe, socialization, regularity, and simplicity. Yet we the cost of anonymity and irrelevancy and loss of that dependency produces mindlessness we call alienation and anxiety and inability to cope with the reality of a universe, which is a vast irradiated wasteland, solar system, a sun, a geology, a climate, a fauna and the other humans that are all but hostile to our very existence, and try to eradicate us with disturbing regularity.
The question man must solve, is how to provide that mindfulness by means that are not false, and not harmful to our continuous adaptation to these environments, and the environments we innovate with our science, technology, and knowledge – despite status (after food and shelter) being our primary instinct that influences all our behaviors.
Stoicism, Confucianism, Shintoism, and Buddhism were the least false religions. Hinduism is an eccentric outlier that while brilliant and innovative eventually proved an impediment to the people. And The Abrahamic spectrum are the most false and most harmful religions that were a detriment to the people and all those they interacted with. At least until the marxist spectrum which are the most harmful cults since the mesoamerican cults of institutional murder.
But there is something to be learned from these means of producing mindfulness. Perhaps the Chinese tea and Japanese craftsman rituals. Perhaps the stoic rituals – which are but what today we call cognitive behavioral therapy. The explicit pursuit of mindfulness through non-aggression in Buddhism – despite it’s abandonment of reality.
We can, at least I can, at present describe requirements for a scientific non false religion for the political, social, and personal problems of alienation and neuroticism. At that point, like Hinduism, stoicism, or Confucianism, is such a thing a religion? Or is it an intergenerational set of narratives and values that provide mindfulness by teaching us a way of life that benefits all of us? I think the latter.
So, to say we need religion is a half-truth. Humans need mindfulness. There are a spectrum of solutions to providing humans with mindfulness. We need only discover those that are not false, and do not produce direct harms, or indirect harms through negative externalities.
Train the body (fitness), the mind (mindfulness), the habits (hygiene, dress, manners, ethics, morals, norms, natural law), the brain (the basics of the disciplines (means of ‘calculating’) from reason to physical, behavioral, evolutionary sciences), the individual (skills that are useful for contributing to self sufficiency). We need to train the whole person. Not take it for granted that idiosyncratic experience will provide the fitness in body, mind, habits, brain, and sills needed for self determination by self determined means in a condition of mindfulness and appreciation for not only this life, but our investment in one another’s fulfillment.