Jagat

I recently posted a review of Universalist Radha-Krishnaism , which led to personal discussions with the author and others. Without divulging the content of those discussions, I would like to share some thoughts. It seems to me that one of the purposes of religion is community creation. For many sociologists and anthropologists, of course, that is the primary purpose of religion. It has now become the habit of those who are individualists to say they seek “spirituality” and make a strong distinction between the social forms of religiosity and the personal. I believe this is a false dichotomy, as society is made up of individuals, and a society of strong individuals is a strong society. But all societies need commonalities, otherwise there is no community. We should perhaps distinguish between society, with which an individual may have only tenuous identification, and community, where such identifications are much stronger. Society is larger, community more intimate. One finds on...

I got a letter from a devotee who called himself an “accidental hermit.” He said he was gloomy because he has outgrown the Hare Krishnas and religious people in general reject new ideas. He finds that many of them are locked into “scripture-repeat” and “look-for-heretic” mode. Nevertheless, he is attached to his friends, who are all devotees. But if says something that doesn’t conform to their ideas, he loses his friends, so he remains mum. The long and short is that he feels lonely, but can find no solace in New Age, or anything else. At the same time, he cannot blindly follow scripture. ==================== This is my quite short answer: Yes, you have put your finger on a problem--that of the loneliness of the individual. Since individuals evolve, human groupings, like religions, must evolve. IGM have the big problem of a very dominant charismatic founder. That magnifies small heresies. A truly big tent has to account for and permit a certain amount of heresy, i.e., allow fo...

[This is a late posting from 11-01-2008, so there may be erroneous references.] Once again, a commentary on religion at the Guardian Comment is Free page ( Let us Pray ) has sparked hundreds of commentaries. Theo Hobson has a liberal approach to Christianity, so his comments on prayer are an attempt to understand it spiritually and in a psychologically progressive manner: The atheist account of prayer has very little connection to the reality. The believer does not pray in order to try to influence God's will. Instead, he's trying to influence his own will , to make it conform to his worldview. Prayer is essentially a matter of saying "Help me, God, to be what I should be." The believer acknowledges a conflict between what he is naturally inclined to be, and what he feels he should strive to be. I suppose such a conflict is totally unknown to the atheists, who feel that they effortlessly realise moral perfection in their daily lives. Also, the believer reminds h...