At 10:46 AM 7/10/2008, William H. Russell wrote:
I think any worthwhile form of religion should involve caves, but I am not clear on B Morgan's distinction between "illusory" forms of religion and the non-illusory forms. If the "forms" are written down in a book and a large church built, does this make the forms less illusory? Please explain.
My own illusion of it is that religion, by its very nature, is illusory--it is an illusion the organic and structural forms of which exist entirely within one's brain--within one's thought processes and imagination. There exists no hard evidence to the contrary--period! The concept (quite literally a concept) of "to believe" is that it exists in one's head--one believes something to be true usually without one whit of evidence but often with a great desire that it be. By its own conceptual nature to "believe" is to "make believe", to "pretend" that something is true. Whether it is true or not may be totally irrelevant--it's the pretending itself that makes it religion and makes it illusory. It's all up there in the neurons, no place else.
A sacred cave or a book or chants or a stone circle or church building or a concrete casting of a virgin or saint and other graphic symbols are not religion within their own right and not illusory. They are solid state, truly existing artifacts adopted by or for the believers in order to give their ethereal illusions some otherwise physical credibility--credibility which cannot be found anywhere else within what is popularly defined as religion. Little matter that they are mere constructs with no inherent spirit or powers of their own.
That is not to say that religion is not a fine and viable hobby to those who choose to engage in it. Like golf or macrame or email philosophy or even caving religion offers an amount of socialization within one's peer group and can gain an ardent practitioner some degree of acceptance and approval that one may not be able to get elsewhere--or think they can't. Getting strokes and having feel-good friends are what many hobbyists are after and what hobbies are about and that can be a good thing so long as the hobby adversely impact some otherwise innocent non-practitioner. Many hobbies such as reading novels, watching outer-space movies, and practicing religion rely on people pretending that their illusions are real. Yet it is important to remember that somebody is always making serious money off of those simple pretensions; it's good for business.
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