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http://www.mormonnewsroom.org/article/why-religion-matters-longing-within Not uniquely Mormon, but it’s a good essay related to why religion is relevant to people. A few key quotes:
Quote:“religion is the gathering of unique persons into a fellowship of believers. But if it cannot win the heart of the one, it cannot sustain its community. The spiritual experiences of each individual can be as different as the individuals themselves. Because we “see through a glass darkly,”[3] most things in life come down to faith. Ultimately, in those searching moments with the divine, it is the individual who filters the details, weighs the evidence, and makes decisions on matters of highest significance. This wrangling is the process of faith. Ludwig Wittgenstein wrote: “To believe in God means to see that the facts of the world are not the end of the matter.”
Quote:But as long as man suffers, these steeples will remain.
Quote:churches represent something deep in the human soul, something we long to uncover. More than anything man-made, religion gives direction and shape to the individual search for meaning.
Really good quotes. I might add that as long as we search for greater meaning and feel a sense of longing for immortality, religion will continue to be important to people.
Curtis wrote:Really good quotes.
I might add that as long as we search for greater meaning and feel a sense of longing for immortality, religion will continue to be important to people.
I do think that religion is more about death, or the refusal to accept death as the end, than about suffering.Is it attributed? Sounds like the Givenses. Quote:
To this point, Rabbi David Wolpe taught that religion “can go into a world in which there is a great deal of pain and suffering and loss and bring meaning and purpose and peace.”
I like the idea of religion being most useful when it eases pain through either hands or hope.
Healing through hands is not, of course, exclusive to religion. The irreligious also care for those in need.
A religion should be evaluated on how much it motivates people to heal with hands.
Hope, eternal hope, is perhaps more exclusive to religion. Hope that the pain is not meaningless. Hope that pain is part of going through the refiner’s fire.
mackay11 wrote:Hope, eternal hope, is perhaps more exclusive to religion. Hope that the pain is not meaningless.
I was thinking along these lines when I compiled the quotes in my signature line:
Quote:“It is not so much the pain and suffering of life which crushes the individual as it is its meaninglessness and hopelessness.” C. A. Elwood
“It is not the function of religion to answer all the questions about God’s moral government of the universe, but to give one courage, through faith, to go on in the face of questions he never finds the answer to in his present status.” TPC: Harold B. Lee 223
I’ve always thought that the main function of religion was to help make sense of what happens in life. The risk is that when the religion, whichever it is, fails in that regard you run the risk of coming to believe that there’s no sense to life at all.
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