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[–]LarrySwinger2 2 insightful - 1 fun2 insightful - 0 fun3 insightful - 1 fun -  (1 child)

It's an important issue you're raising, but I think you're quick to dismiss religions, especially Islam and Hinduism. Are you assessing Islam based on Muslim migrants coming to the West? I think that wouldn't be a fair assessment. They seem to be doing a good job resisting modernism in the Middle East.

How is Hinduism not universalist? It has, historically, not been as unified as Abrahimic religions, but it's in the process of being unified under Hindu Nationalism, and movements like ISCKCON have adherents worldwide, in the millions. There's also Sikhi.

To me, the issue is that religions are filled with superstitions. But if you take those out, it becomes dry and will lose the beneficial effects such as maintaining contentment and integrity in individuals, installing social cohesion, scalability. I wonder if some kind of middle ground can be found between enlightenment ideals and traditional monotheism. Belief in God isn't a superstition unto itself. The question is how much the existence of God, without any superstitious overlays, really implies. I plan to flesh out this question and develop an alternative that's in accordance with reason. Although lately I've been wondering if "religion" is even the right word for something like that.

[–][deleted] 2 insightful - 1 fun2 insightful - 0 fun3 insightful - 1 fun -  (0 children)

I think I'm agnostic about the questions about God and the Heavens or which doctrines are true vs. not true in the objective sense. I do believe that Jesus Christ was a real figure who performed works and died, rose up to Heaven, but pretty much outside of that I don't care much about what the conclusion is. I am more familiar with me and people's subjective judgement of God's actions.