[flagged]
Personally I'm not convinced that the vacuum left behind by going to church (and having a community) has been well replaced yet and instead our collective religious tendencies have been steered towards identity politics and idol worship by social media instead.
I'm not religious in the slightest but my mother is a harmless Christian and when I see how a little bit of faith anchors her and make sense of a world that is completely unrecognisable to the one she was born into (she didn't even have a fridge let alone an iPhone lol) I am always reminded to stay humble and open minded
This isn't quite right.
The true version of what you're getting at is, "at some point every practice was useful to someone", but just because someone or someones found it useful doesn't necessarily mean it solved a real problem for society overall.
E.g. men have dominated over women in almost all pre-modern societies (and even in modern ones there's often a good ways to go), because that was useful and advantageous to men, who also had the physical strength to enforce such a social division. It was never truly about "solving a problem".
Sure, in some cases religious practices may have helped with a problem, but in other cases (e.g. indulgences) they were just about gathering or retaining power for the religion, which was certainly useful for the leaders within said religion.
European powers were dominant over other countries and colonized them due to superior weaponry and organized armies that used said weaponry, but that doesn't mean every European leader was a soldier toting around a gun themselves.
In any case power capture is just another one of those axiomatic things of the human condition for me. After all, democracy and capitalism is being contorted into neo-feudalism in our own lifetimes.
My point was that even though they seem silly to nonbelievers, I suspect a lot of people would probably be happier spending an hour a day singing hymns and reciting prayers. It turns out singing can be a pretty good mind-body hack for making you feel happier. And prayers are a pretty good presence of mind hack for regaining focus
For sure organisations find themselves in ruts or local maxima. And things like virtue signalling exist but when practices like prayer, meditation, chanting and singing exist across religions maybe it is worth trying to understand what ordinary people derive from the practices. Whether that be a sense of belonging, presence of mind or the ability to make peace with the cruelty and randomness of life.
It rubs you up the wrong way that I axiomatically assume that all religious practices were useful in general but my point is just like being healthily skeptical about things and challenging the status quo is good. So too, is looking at things you don't understand and starting from the supposition that it is beneficial UNTIL you can prove in your own mind with all certainty that it isn't and then feel free for you to do your own thing.
Are those two approaches in contradiction? Yes that's a good thing, it's healthy to hold opposing views in tension.
If we continually ignore the lessons of the past we are doomed to repeat the same mistakes and relearn the same lessons.
Religion ultimately propagated because people preferred it to what they had before. Sure bad people have manipulated and exploited those tendencies in people but that still happens even without "religion" - see crypto. At least most faiths ostensibly revolve around a set of morals and virtue. The establishment has also been tempered by their own success and and are being forcefully dragged into the 21st century by their need to stay relevant. When I attend my usual annual Midnight Mass CoE service in the UK, the biblical elements are so watered down it's mostly just about being a good person.
Tldr people who are skeptical might benefit from being more charitable just like people who are gullible could benefit from being more skeptical.
It was a literal cult I’ve read like hundreds of articles and regrets of members and experienced first hand discussions that are manipulative and withholding information and rationalising political stuff with scripture that anyone would just have to experience to get why it’s manipulative and exploitative, it won’t come across online as easily
So it’s a lot of research into the brainwashing funnel of a type of cult that I was talking about and not religion at large
Sometimes animals just do be like that, since it doesn't harm their fitness, and it seems likely to me that the same is true for most features of religions.
For example it is suddenly all the rage to study the health benefits of breathing or meditation. But this has been common knowledge amongst yoga and qigong practitioners for 1000+ years. If you are scientifically minded, a lot of the explanations of how qigong works are hard to reconcile but if you actually try it earnestly you'd realise there's something there. Sure, a 1000 year old model has the wrong explanations, but all models are wrong some are useful.
Empiricism gives us so much false confidence when we often still can't measure many things and often don't know what to measure. Especially so when real true reproducible science is hard, slow, and expensive.
So for me, starting from a prior "maybe people do do this thing for a reason even if they themselves have forgotten why" can be useful
Okay, but there's also "common knowledge" amongst practitioners of yoga or qigong or other traditional practices that's complete bullshit. There's good reason to not just accept that traditional practices must be smart automatically.
> If you are scientifically minded, a lot of the explanations of how qigong works are hard to reconcile but if you actually try it earnestly you'd realise there's something there.
I'm guessing they're less "hard to reconcile" and more "completely made up".
We were perfectly able to use fire (and the Romans even had a prototype of the steam engine) long before Lavoisier had a working model of gases and stoichiometry.
The model for what qigong is and what qi is can be wrong while still being helpful. Having worked on it I'd argue that it is a mental model / visualisation technique for honing your body awareness and mind-body connection. Visualisation techniques proliferate everywhere. I've been taught visualisations in swimming, martial arts, yoga and singing - so who cares if qigong is "completely made up" if the visualisation training achieved the goal.
Only just recently in some self practice on the piano I was trying to achieve a specific multi-voicing effect on a tiny passage and have practiced this single bar at least 5+ hours. I finally had a breakthrough when I stopped trying to control the individual velocity and depth of my presses and just imagined I was whispering the secondary voice.
I'm not whispering anything on that piano and my fingers are still just pressing keys. Its as made up as when I imagine I'm playing woodwind instruments during a Mozart adagio but it still accomplishes the effect.
This is all airy fairy but my point is that actually my experience has taught me that for certain things, especially where the body is involved trying to think in mechanics or vertebrae and muscles is a lot less useful than imagining you're Mount Everest peaking above the clouds reaching for the sun.
― Friedrich Nietzsche
A fun game to play is trying to guess which organization you are talking about, since there are so many of them all running this exact same business model!