Why do people want to stick to organisations
It isn't really the foamers at the mouth I find hard to understand. It's the ordinary, apparently decent, largely rational people who live ordinary, apparently decent, largely rational lives. Anglicans with gay friends, Catholics who choose the size of their families.
Why do they finance bigotry, the suffering and subjugation of women denied contraception, the mass murder via disinformation about HIV? Why do they pay to have the vulnerable savaged by zealots whose values they cheerfully ignore when it comes to their own lives? Why didn't they turn away in disgust at the cover up of child abuse?
That's what I don't understand.
it's a 'flight to safety', in economic terms.
governments that can't deliver quality to their citizens, can't offer an easier afterlife.
their promises, equally improbable, involve material things like chickens in pots.
strange as it may seem to this crowd at ET, many apparently rational people are concerned about their souls, and cannot blithely deny them with the facility given to those who have delineated their belief syatems in other, more worldly ways.
people have been that way for ever, it will be interesting to see if secularism, an easier choice in times of plenty, continues to provide the 'womb-to-tomb' social contract in times of woe.
if it doesn't, and as predicated it seems unlikely, expect a plethora of faiths to continue to mushroom, to try and cope with reality.
it's a pressure valve, we can only hope we don't revert to theocracy, the cruelest form of government.
seen in that light, the disestablishment of the c of e is surely a good thing, its obsolescence is almost a given, the real point is what, if anything, will take its place?
humanism?
disclaimer, i am a believer, but will happily co-exist in an atheist world, as long as i am allowed the freedom to believe as i see fit, the same right i see as fair for any belief system one does not resonate with, from atheism all the way to the FSM.
humanism would work fine as a social framework, and i am extremely leery of meshing religious institutionalism with government, the power of the state, history is quite clear on where that takes us. ~"When an inner situation is not made conscious, it appears outside as fate." Karl Jung~
