Having said that, skill-oriented communities would be great too - they primarily exist online right now because participants are often spread out, or otherwise take the form of friend groups based on shared interest.
Gather all the theologies into a room and get them to agree on the evidence for their points of dogma if you can. There's a first test of knowledge. Beyond pragmatic social strategy, these ancient tribal writings are a vestige of ignorant mummery.
"My Sky Avenger versus your Sky Avenger," as George Carlin might have said.
> Religion is the original form of moral philosophy and sociology, and contains thousands of years of experiential learning [...]
Sure, humans (and likely other extinct hominins) have speculated about their life and the world. It is not given that all their conclusions favoured a Sky Avenger. Some notable ancient Greeks were atheists. So, no, "religion" does not contain thousands of years of experiential learning. Speculation only becomes learning when it can be tested. Arrant nonsense is not learning, even if bound in leather and printed in gold on vellum.
Theology is knowledge only in the same sense that astrology, Scientology, or QAnon claims are knowledge. It is knowledge about a system of false and/or untestable assertions, constituting in all a set of conventions to which a power structure may ally itself. Old religions become mythology when there is no longer a power structure to promote them.
People make pragmatic choices every day to live in the real world. Purveyors of religion just build fantasies atop these pragmatic choices.
I used to believe this stuff when I was a know-it-all 15 year old too and used to joke about the flying spaghetti monster, but I've since attempted to actually understand some of these ideas rather than dismissing religion as crazy imaginings by those stupid people from over 70 years ago and all of history before that, compared to us modern enlightened atheists. I was raised atheist and have only come to understand some Christian ideas via learning some philosophy and 20th and 21st century scientific theory.
Although literary criticism far from a rigorous field of thought, I am happy to celebrate your interest, especially if you have devoted most of your adult life to it.
What ignorance, cruelty, strife, and murder have been committed in the cause of other interpretations of 4000 [1] years of mythology is to my mind the greater concern. But we can of course agree to disagree on the InterWobbles.
Cheers!
[1] An arbitrary number to include various artefacts.
I suspect that wars between sects is not a simple matter of killing the non-believer, but an excuse for the real reason wars have always been fought: expansionism and colonialism in order to control scarce resources.
And, of course, the winners of a conflict write the historical account and the myths. The losers lose their voice and often their lives.
There are some relatively lucid works in literature. But literature serves artistic purposes. There are honest and more rigorous works in economics, history, and anthropology that lead to a stark conclusion. [0]
Civilisation is a hard system to build. ^_^
I don't agree that there is any rigorous system to be found in the topic we are discussing. But we certainly can agree that anyone trying to be good is a welcome candle in the darkness. ^_^
You don't "need" to attend places of worship 80% of your life. A place of worship is usually a place where you are told to consider respectable several of the tools for indoctrination:
- Trust in a authority
- Faith over knowledge
- Revelation as a valid source of information