Religion is the attempt to optimize human life, by incorporating the Spiritual on the same footing as the Material; it overlooks no aspect of those human entities of whose lives it is a part.
Religion is an optimal path, utilizing insights from the material world-as-fact, which is communicated and informational by nature, and insights from the world of unconsciousness, which by nature appears to be solitary and uncommunicated, and becomes informational only after some effort to transform it.
Both worlds must be made moral: the world of Metropolis, the urban concentrations, and the world of Sanctuary, the desert vision quest.
Consider the bloodier aspects of some ancient religions: the spiritual path was frozen into a bloody, sub-optimal process, in much the same way as the 2oth century saw the material path frozen into repeated bloodshed and genocides.
The preliminary attempts at optimality stopped - for some reason - at a decidedly sub-optimal stage, and enshrined monsters into history.
The battle is joined both in consciousness and in unconsciousness.
Religion proceeds to find an optimal path, or the optimal path if you prefer, among the complexities of human life, conscious and unconscious, and the various religions may be considered as analogous to strong and robust optimality algorithms.
It is the Path.
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But the Path seems to be overlaid with all these extraneous detours, inferior materials, and poorly marked routes to nowhere. What we all need is something that glows in our darkness with the warmth of a encompassing Purpose. Can religion supply that?
Yes, but not the ones we were brought up with.
I made a comment recently about the Lilies of the Field and Trust in God, so a bright young lady said even Jesus had to get some vigorish to keep things going, and He couldn't just shake the money tree, and ministry doesn't come free, etc.etc.
(It was during a discussion of either Rick Warren's Sadleback Church, or Ted Haggard's Brokeback Church.)
So I decided to be the evil Montag, and among other things asked why the more profound teachings in Christianity are turned into nonsense, like God shaking His Mojo Money Tree? And it was time to realize Jesus was not the CEO of an insurance company...even though we like to think so, because it makes it "easy" for us to think about...stuff!
I ended up with the miracle of the loaves and fishes: was it real? or was it more of Jesus shaking his loaves and fishes tree! Yummy.
Dern fools.
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