Leave the religious conflicts and war alone. People will always look for conflicts is in the human nature, look at the LGBTQ conflicts. Diversity in religion as well, seem to have a lot of gods but they converge and point out to the same creator (God, Allah, Shiva are all the same God with different interpretation). The religion is just a pretext to start these, aside from that conflicts I don't believe that religion did any harm, and as the others have commented it comes down to the POV of each person. Most conflicts were started by abrahamic religions. Take Cambodia for example, an undeveloped country with 97% Budhhists they seem to live peacefully with faith, same with Philippines but they are mostly Roman-Catholic. Now take France, developed country most without faith. Take In general seems to be outdated and fade away, I wonder what will happen in the future. I see religion keeps people united in communities unless they don't start conflicts and also helps with optimism, faith and passing of the dead
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Originally Posted by Greenslade
It's been said that every religion was right for that culture at that time, if that's true then what does that tell us about today's culture? That it doesn't need religion? Very often religion has had a specific role to play within a culture and today that role is eroding fast.
By the way, often people are just people and nobody is above anything, people who believe in Spirituality can be just as arrogant as those that don't. "God made man, man made religion." God didn't make religion nor Spirituality and the mindsets that created religion and Spirituality really haven't changed much.
France spent many years in the grip of the Roman Catholic church and heretics were burned at the stake, often with little or no trial. It's hardly any wonder that Macron encouraged his people to be atheists after so many bloody years. It would be nice to have a debate about the benefits - and there are quite a few - to being atheist but it's a taboo subject on these boards, even in today's tolerant times.
The majority of the wars in history and currently have been caused by religion, so to the general populace religion can be seen as another reason to create conflict.
Science doesn't contradict religion - it's the other way around. Throughout history many of the world's leading scientists have been religious or Spiritual, but how many religious/Spiritual leaders have been scientific? Often Spirituality adopts words or phrases from other fields with no real understanding of what it means, then changes the definitions to suit personal agendas.
If Jung's definitions of the word 'ego' or 'Shadow Self' or Freud's definitions of the 'id', the 'ego' and the 'superego' were better understood better then not only would this particular topic be better understood, so would the frameworks on which Spirituality is built. Come to think of it, if people used 'kamma-vipaka' instead of 'karma' there would be more understanding and self-awareness.
According to the Hindu Samadhi, religion, Spirituality and beliefs are a 'product' of Maya or the false or conditioned self. Tolle also says that beliefs and Spiritual knowledge are space consciousness, a lower-level form-based consciousness. What's to be done with that information?
Your perceptions are defined by your definitions in short, and when you define what is Spiritual you also define what is not Spiritual. Your personal perceptions that Spirituality is outdated are your comparisons against your definitions. But Spirituality will tell you that everything is an expression of Source.
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