| I am personally atheist/apathetic. The closest thing you could get me to profess a religious fervour to is exercise (or martial arts) and mother nature. That said, I am a huge proponent of religion and can see how it is so important to people like my mother. She doesn't preach or judge but I can see how faith anchors her. It gives her answers and an unyielding optimism in the face of difficulty, and I can tell you as someone who has clawed her way through a poverty most people in this world will only ever read about, she has known what difficulty can be. Faith keeps her positive and kind and generous. She finds it in herself to let go of anger and to forgive thanks to her belief in God. So you're bang on the mark - my personal observations agree that religion helps us process emotions. Seen through the lens of a social technology, we've replaced religion with consumerism and individualism, and social media has encouraged unchecked mammon. And so we're having to relearn everything old as new again. Confession and grace are parts of the toolkit in therapy. Breathing techniques from yoga, wim hof and meditation are doing the rounds. The presence of song and chanting in many religions seems like a decent overlap... Then at times of the highest reported rates of loneliness, especially amongst the young, what did religion give us - a local community. Don't get me wrong, there was a lot of bad with religion but modern faith in places like the UK or the Nordics seems to be a net benefit IMO... |
Even in light of what the Christian Nationalist movement is striving towards in the US, and in light of the ugly persistence of fundamentalism in places like Iran, Saudi Arabia, and Afghanistan?