A serious (read LONG) question on belief structures.?

Question

It seems to me, that at the heart of most religeons are 3 things. The first is , make yourself a better person and lead others to better themselves. The second, live your life as you will but respect the laws of nature. the final, this path leads to perfection.

From those 3 things any religeon can be built. Then culture comes in, and with culture - ignorance. Culture adds rules, and twists the words and meaning of those three things to ensure strife, pain, and more ignorance.

My simple question, How could I, or anyone, go about creating a religeon that would not become corrupted by culture or other people's "interpretation"?

any ideas?

Note - I am an atheist. However, I have found that each religeon for all its faults does have some golden bits of wisdom. I'd like to use part of each to give mankind the gift of a peaceful future.

Answer 1

Logic at its core never changes. However, if you based your religion on logic, would it really be a religion and not a philosophy?

Answer 2

you can not create a religion, or anything, that will not become corrupted. Human nature, there are some people who will inevitably corrupt anything that originates with something good. As humans, we are all fallible and therefore we corrupt things. We are all different and this creates tension between different views. I agree that there is golden bits of wisdom in most doctrines (see my blog at teejay39.blogspot). You nor no one can give peace to the world because we are all different and believe different, the only way we could have peace is if every single one of the millions of people on earth were tolerant to every other view and this is impossible plus even if it were possible it would leave a wide open door for a**holes to exploit it and use it for evil.

Answer 3

The first is , make yourself a little person and lead others to shrink themselves.
The second, live your life as the Large Entity would, but respect the laws of Entitial Reality.
The final, this path leads to Entitial.

How's that? Can an atheist accept the need for smallness? Ask a sparrow or mustard seed.

Answer 4

All religions are doom to fail because of no. 3. There is no such thing as perfection. It is a vain glorious pursuit. Religions are a contract between the faithful and the deity. Like all contracts, every time there is a dispute over some point, the whole contract is, in effect, re-negotiated. The response of the officials is to deify the founder to provide an "ultimate" authority.

Answer 5

Each religion seems to have, at its heart, another item you didn't mention -- a sustained belief in its sole understanding of whatever it believes to be truth. Thus, religions, by their very nature, become exclusionary.

So. 1. Create a religion which prescribes personal improvement without attempting to impose one's personal standards for improvement on anyone else. 2. Create a religion which doesn't attempt to define nature (either human or "natural") through any kind of dogma related to rule 1. 3. Create a religion which commits and celebrates kindnesses whenever and wherever they may be -- without considering kind action a movement toward perfection (which requires comparison and thus violates rule 1).

Answer 6

So in other words, how could you create a religion that is devoid of any cultural content?

I'm afraid you can't. You can't even make a sentence that is devoid of cultural content, let alone a religion.
The problem is culture is natural to man. I don't remember who said this, but culture is to man what water is to a fish; a fish wouldn't even notice its wet, yet water is a condition sine qua non of its existence.

No matter how hard you try, your attempt would be marred by your own upbringing, your own understanding, your own way of seeing things and the world, in short, your own culture.

Answer 7

The religions that are made to be religions are already popularized by hundreds or thousands years of tradition and practice. It seems all new forms of religious following are cults, but if you were to create a new philosophy or ideology, that may be a plausible pretense for a following, but not exactly a religion.

Answer 8

Anyything human eventually corrupt. That doesn't mean that there isn't a higher power that we can be connected to.

It seems that all cultures have a creation story, a world flood story, and an afterlife story.

I just can't imagine that this world is a fluke.

Answer 9

perfection isnt in trying to convince people it is being able to find peace in oneself