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No, this is an attempt to deal with four existential problems that any person has. I've already written about this in detail, but I can't find the answer through the search.
Briefly:
People have 4 existential problems: mortality, meaninglessness, loneliness, and responsibility. They are handled as best they can. And a very large part of people cope with them with the help of religion (or something similar).
1) Mortality. If people didn't die and weren't afraid to die, they wouldn't need religion. But it is very difficult to cope with the awareness of your own inevitable death, so you have to invent the afterlife, the eternal life of the soul. Religion says, ” you will not die, you will live forever, but in a different form.” Tempting, isn't it?
2) Meaninglessness. If people did not think about the meaning of life, no one would invent religious rituals, there would be no such thing as “serving God”. People need to come up with an excuse for their meaningless life, and often this goal becomes a kind of”service to God”. Looks better than sweeping the streets, doesn't it?
3) Loneliness. If people were not afraid and anxious to realize their loneliness, they would not need a God who is “always with you.”
4) Responsibility. We are responsible for our actions. We don't carry them except in early childhood. If we all acted like programmed machines and had no choice what to do, religion would have no meaning. But everyone decides for themselves whether to build or destroy, give or steal, help or kill. And here religion helps, on the one hand, to ease the burden of responsibility (“everything is God's will”), on the other – to regulate the behavior of people so that they do not kill each other (for this purpose, the concepts of “sin”, “heaven”, “hell”are created).
Well, do not forget about the organizational, administrative, and rallying functions of religion. If you have ever been in close contact with religious people, you know that their religious “hangout” performs the same function as social networks, night clubs, gyms, and benches at the entrance. People need somewhere to get together and hang out. You need to get acquainted, exchange recipes, look out for grooms and brides, walk dresses. Different people find different ways to do this. Religion is one of these ways.
The question is not as absurd as it may seem at first glance.
As defined in the latest version of the DSM (Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders), delusions are “beliefs that cannot be changed even in the light of conflicting evidence.” Individual religious beliefs fit this definition well. For this reason, some researchers have directly compared delusions with religious and political beliefs. For example, such an argument can be found in Brandon Mayer's article “Abnormal experience in everyday life: its implications for psychopathology”.�
In addition, there is a certain problem with distinguishing between religious experiences and hallucinations. The same Diagnostic Manual explicitly states that ” in some cultures, hallucinations of religious content, such as when a person hears the voice of God, are a normal part of the religious experience,” and not evidence of a mental disorder. It turns out that there are no clear formal criteria that allow us to distinguish between a person who “hears voices” and a person who hears the voice of God, apart from the fact that in one case his experience is recognized by the community, and in the other it is not.�
Does this mean that religious experiences are delusions and hallucinations? No. But the problem of how to clearly distinguish between religious experience and delirium of religious content (in cases where the delirium is a fairly systematic belief) is really there.�
Various solutions to this problem were proposed. An interesting version is put forward in the study of the Greek psychologist Eugenie Georgaca, who worked with patients who had delusions of religious content. She describes a patient who was being chased by”lesser demons.” When asked why he was convinced of the existence of “lesser demons”, the patient replied that he “definitely knows” and “definitely saw” them. The main difference between such a patient and a mentally healthy person who is convinced of the existence of demons because of the religious picture of the world that they share is not in what exactly they believe, but in how they present their experience to others. A mentally healthy person understands the context in which they are speaking and the audience with which they are speaking. They will describe the miracle as something that truly transcends “normal” reality, and their religious beliefs as religious beliefs. And, of course, in a conversation with a psychiatrist, he is unlikely to claim that the existence of demons is obvious, because he “knows for sure”.
Religare – link.
Religion is a way of worldview in which the world order and its place in the world is interpreted as subordinated to certain laws and relations that are common to all.
That is, for a religious person, everything is interconnected and filled with meanings – regardless of the essence of these connections and meanings, they can be completely different.
The idea of God or gods in this worldview is not necessary-Taoists and Buddhists do without it, and positivist scientists do too.
An alternative to the religious worldview is the understanding of the world as chaos, as a mixture of random unrelated events: “The whole world is a mess, all the women are s … ki, and the sun is a fucking lantern.”�
Although the idea of the absurd can be brought to a coherent system, a kind of religion, as Camus did, for example.
Religion was created by mankind in order to strengthen the belief that there is life on the other side. So, this is far from nonsense. Our distant predecessors, the Hopo Sapiens, were forced to come up with some kind of religious “revelation”, which was the answer of their evolved brain to the questions that appeared in their head.�
Evolution is an unavoidable process, and therefore the critical attitude towards religion that is characteristic of people of the twenty-first century seems to be something quite normal and even necessary to some extent. However, if the word religion is to be interpreted broadly (according to the explanatory dictionary of the Russian language, religion is “one of the forms of public consciousness” ), then why not include the religion of our century-American Dream? For me, this is a well-formed phenomenon, with its own beliefs, heroes and bibles.�
As Jung argued, man is by nature a religious being, and from this, as well as from all of the above, it follows that religion cannot be nonsense, a priori.
Religion taught many people not to be animals at a time when no one else taught them. Religion played a huge role in the development of society in its time. And, although now humanity has become different, for many people who do not have “morality within themselves”, religion plays the role of a moral guide. And in an immoral society, no matter what anyone says, none of us will be happy to live.�
Calling religion nonsense is real nonsense. Even if we assume that this is just a way to manage the masses, then, you will agree, it is stunningly effective. But” believe it or not? ” is a question that you have to answer yourself.
I would like to believe that religion is a collective delusion that has lasted for several millennia among mankind. Religion was born when a person realized his mortality, was horrified, and then he “invented” the immortality of the soul and the gods. I do not know how an atheist will answer the question about the immortality of the soul, but the conclusion is very simple: if I die and fall into a deep sleep without dreams, that is, into Nothing, I become nothing, that is, if I do not believe in “life” after death, then here, in life, I can do whatever I want. “There is no God, everything is allowed.”
So, of course, I would like to believe that religion is nonsense, but I am afraid that an outstanding person will be disappointed in the answer to this question.