Religion is often taken to mean "blindly following a belief system". Religion is regarded as what motivates people to kill others, or be dogmatic and closed minded. I acknowledge that this is what people often do in the name of religions, but does that define what religions are? Can't religions also help people to live together peacefully and work towards building a better world. Doesn't Islam have a strong emphasis on social justice and welfare? Doesn't Buddhism make us aware of human suffering and how we can change our own psychology that reinforces it? Doesn't Christianity enjoin that we should love even our enemies?
Why don't we consider the possibility that religions are the systems of belief that help people to make sense of the spiritual aspects of one's experience, just as science helps us to make sense of the natural world. And the two worlds may not be as separate as they seem to be. For most of man's existence on earth, they have not in fact been seen as separate, and the latest findings in neuroscience may yield the links between the world of the spirit and that of nature that the ancients took for granted. But this is still controversial.
Notice that when traditional religions are abandoned, then substitute religions appear to take their place, complete with rituals and ideologies and institutions. And dogmatism is by no means the monopoly of the religious.
I agree that religion is open to abuse. But then which system of ideas is not? Some would say that even science is: notice the billions of dollars spent on developing weapons and other means of doing deliberate harm to human beings. Notice how much we have allowed the products of scientific research to destroy the planet. But that is not science at its best.
I think religion at its best is a system of beliefs that expresses - i.e, imagines, tells stories about - the best that human beings are capable of, and is based on systems of inner examination that have been around for a long time. The question is: should religion (understood in this sense) be something that should be confined to the individual/private sphere and not be allowed to enter the public sphere? I am not at all sure that this is possible, or even a good idea. No one claims that science ought to be restricted to discussion among scientists in laboratories. A similar demand should not be made of religion.
Religion, like science, needs to influence our values. It needs to inform public policies such as in economics and education (NOT as in countries where religious or other ideological dogmatism has been allowed to dominate political discussion). And religion ought to be subjected always to public and critical scrutiny by vigilant citizens, just as scientific research should always be discussed by an educated public as well as by scientists themselves. We need religious ideas to understand our inner selves just as much as we need scientific ones to discover and understand the outer world.
Religion originally began as a quest to understand the world - both inner and outer. With the development of scientific understanding, science has provided the tools and concepts for understanding of the outer world. Religious ideas began to be replaced by scientific ideas in our understanding of the world outside our selves. But in the inner world - the world of mind, soul and spirit - science has been able to make very little progress so far. Psychology - in some forms, at least - represents attempts to apply scientific concepts and tools of understanding to areas where they are inappropriate or of limited use. They are about as effective in understanding the inner world as religious ideas have been in understanding nature. But I think the scientific exploration has just begun of a journey which many religions have mapped a long time ago through rigorously empirical methods. Through research in neuroscience, scientists may at last begin to say something significant about matters that have been understood in religious systems of beliefs for a long time through methods of inner exploration.
Ultimately, I don't believe in a conflict between science and religion. One goes outward and tries to understand nature. The other goes inward, and tries to understand the human soul and spirit. I think they are both equally important, but represent two opposite journeys that originate in the human mind, but also meet back in the mind, like a Moebius strip. But unless we understand both clearly, they both cause enormous trouble!
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