MORE PEOPLE ARE TAILORING THEIR RELIGION TO FIT THEIR NEEDS
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According to a report I read today on-line, the facts are that more people are tailoring their religion to fit their needs. “That's one of the key findings in newly released research that reveals America's drift from clearly defined religious denominations to faiths cut to fit personal preferences. The folks who make up God as they go are side-by-side with self-proclaimed believers who claim the Christian label but shed their ties to traditional beliefs and practices. Religion statistics expert George Barna says, with a wry hint of exaggeration, America is headed for "310 million people with 310 million religions…
We are a designer society. We want everything customized to our personal needs — our clothing, our food, our education," he says. Now it's our religion…. We live in an era where you pick and choose the part of the religion that makes sense to you. And you can connect through culture and history in a meaningful way without necessarily religiously practicing,..
The bad news is you lose the capacity to make connections. Everyone is pretty much on their own…And all this rampant individualism also fosters "hostility toward organized groups — government, industry, even organized religion…
One individual grew up "old-style Italian Catholic," but says he never felt like his spiritual questions were answered. "I just wiped the slate clean. I studied every major religion on the face of the planet. Every one had parts that made sense, but there was no one specific dogma or tenet I could really follow, So now, I call myself an agnostic — one who just doesn't know. What I believe is that if you can just do the right thing, it works everywhere."
Whether you are into Scientology, Christianity, Atheism, Jeudiasm, etc, what is your viewpoint. Do you agree that in this day and age most people tailor their religion to fit their needs? Is this acceptable to you or problematic? Is this the way you have found your path?
"I distrust those people who know so well what God wants them to do because I notice it always coincides with their own desires."
Susan B. Anthony
If anything, religion often appears to limit one's relationship to God - it is conferred more than developed.
I think it's an exciting trend myself, because unlike Barna I don't see how this limits our relationship with people - like that with God, I think it removes predetermined notions of how to interact with and what we can and who we should learn from.
The "designer society" argument seems a bit off to me for that reason. The individual quoted describes a desire for more complete answers that he's driven to seek out. It pushed him out into the world. He wasn't trying to "style" a religion - as he settled on "I still don't know" he's essentially shrugged religion altogether.
The trend seems more a product of being exposed to more and more difference more and more of the time.
It also has to work under the illusion that any of the faiths have a membership of people that have any uniform beliefs, as opposed to a membership that isn't already made up of individualized concepts or understandings of God. The fact that they're all inevitably sectarian seems to escape them.
This trend for me actually approaches what any person should see as a reasonable exploration of God and faith (faith and reason are by no ways exclusive - as all knowledge is derived from reason until we accept that we must assume certain things either for now or because we believe them to be true). Otherwise we're forced to delude ourselves into thinking that we have it right, and everyone else has it wrong.
And you're 100% right about the internet. I'll point out that what's fascinating is that we often see these transformations in religion in conjunction with profound communications developments. Christianity originally spread due to the Roman Empire and their infrastructure of roads - faiths had a way to reach each other easily. Christianity, of course, was a democratization of Judaism - it was a statement that ...
It also has to work under the illusion that any of the faiths have a membership of people that have any uniform beliefs, as opposed to a membership that isn't already made up of individualized concepts or understandings of God. The fact that they're all inevitably sectarian seems to escape them.
This trend for me actually approaches what any person should see as a reasonable exploration of God and faith (faith and reason are by no ways exclusive - as all knowledge is derived from reason until we accept that we must assume certain things either for now or because we believe them to be true). Otherwise we're forced to delude ourselves into thinking that we have it right, and everyone else has it wrong.
And you're 100% right about the internet. I'll point out that what's fascinating is that we often see these transformations in religion in conjunction with profound communications developments. Christianity originally spread due to the Roman Empire and their infrastructure of roads - faiths had a way to reach each other easily. Christianity, of course, was a democratization of Judaism - it was a statement that there was no chosen people and that all could reach God through an understanding of, in essence, good teachings (much like THIS change). The Reformation was possible as a result of the printing press - it was a reaction against the change from the "Roman Empire" to the "Holy Roman Empire" and the new authority of the church taking away what seems the central premise of Christianity that one reached a relationship with God through personal interaction with scripture. So when it became possible to easily mass-produce the Bible, the church lost its ability to hoard the limited copies of the Bible, and lost its position as one of the few with the resources to produce and distribute it. So now we have a revolution where the Bible is brought to the people, and translated, and that more commentary and discussion of it can be had, and it can be compared to other faiths (much like THIS change).
Of course, we always see those threatened by change that comes with these expansions of our understanding. Just because we have the capability to suddenly be aware of so much more doesn't mean that it's more human to forget that we often do doom ourselves to repeat these dramas by choosing not to be aware.
In terms of my qualifications or background for this - well, again quite honestly, I think that the sad part of this is that the historical trends are there for all to see. I think the reason why the above might come off as astute, discerning - even intelligent - is that people generally aren't expected to assume that their opinions and beliefs are wrong, or that they shouldn't challenge their own assumptions.
When we reach an opinion, or have a belief, we should really be expected to assume that we DON'T have all the answers. If we realize that, we'd recognize that the periods where information becomes readily available, and diversity of ideas come into contact, are periods where ALL forms of belief - scientific, social, religious - end up expanding, because we ARE directly challenged.
My background is more literary, psychological and legal - which demand understanding of history as context. But I'll suggest that my current opinion has been most influenced by "The Empathic Civilization" which seems to be one of the more astute and practical analysis of the development of human knowledge I've recently seen. It does what I've stated above many fail to - trying to take a meta-perspective of one's own beliefs in terms of how and why they're formed.
Today in "western" society there are very few people who actually read their holy books, and know what they say. Theism is rapidly disappearing. In my country, from talking to people, I think that most of the people who say they are "Christian" turn out to be Christian-flavoured deists.
Therapeutic deism is belief in a warm, comfortable afterlife myth (heaven), without all the bother of the rest of a religion (tithes, going to church, actually reading the Bible, etc). Since people still fear death even after they figure out that religions aren't literally true, belief in heaven persists in people who otherwise reject their parents' religions. Cheers.