# The problem I have with the majority of western religions



## Pablo (Sep 1, 2005)

The way I see it is that the reason religions exist at all is to try to make peoples lives more rich and fulfilled. religion is supposed to make you happy and content, but the main religions which are popular in the west (ie Christianity, Judaism and Traditional Islam) only give you a few resources with which to find happiness which consist of: rules to live your life by, prayer and faith in a higher power.

My main problem with this approach to finding happiness is that these religions dont actually give you a method to work on yourself, unless you count prayer as a powerful transformational tool there is no knowledge or method which these religions give you which you can use to look within to reduce neurosis, uncover and deal with repressed emotions, promote physical and emotional health and even reduce stress.

In contrast many of the religions of the east such as Taoism, Buddhism, Sufism, Tantra and Hinduism, all contain very powerful methods to work on yourself such as meditation, yoga, tai chi, qigong and many others. The basic premise is that if you are ill, of bad health or neurotic how are you supposed to find any sort of truth or find god in any way? You have to do an inner cleansing before you can get anywhere. Also these methods give you a way to really get to know and understand yourself on a very deep level, which makes sense to me because how can you expect to know god if you dont even know or understand yourself?

The other problem I have with the main western religions is that they give you rules to live your life by. What happens if these rules conflict with what comes most natural to your being? such as wanting sex before marriage or thinking bad thoughts about people or getting angry, all that results is anxiety and guilt. If religion tells you certain states of mind are wrong, when they arise in you you will repress them, and every psychologist in the world will tell you what the end result of repression is: neurosis. All the rules of religion achieve is to create a shadow part of your ego, which is where all the repressed disowned parts of your self are stored, but history has shown that the shadow parts of people has a tendency of coming out because repression is not a permanent solution, it simply makes you unconscious of what exists.

These are the reasons why I think there is a growing interest in a lot of the eastern methods of self realisation and methods like meditation and yoga here in the west because our traditional religions have failed to make our lives much better or even make us more conscious of ourselves. Anybody agree with me on this one?


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## californian (Jul 24, 2006)

as an an adherent of Christianity, I have to say I really hear what you are saying and have felt that way in the past. i felt like people told me to pray, have faith, etc., but didn't really give me much to go on as far as HOW to achieve anything deeper. i thought to myself, this religion is supposed to be the truth, has a more well developed and better (in my opinion) cosmology than eastern religions do and has a positive anthropology (as opposed to the negative one found in many eastern religions). so why does it seem so spiritually shallow in comparison to these?

the main thing i came to realize is that i hadn't really been exposed to the mystical traditions of my religion, or of those of the other Western religions. Eastern Christian mysticism became expecially attractive to me because it had many, many forms of method and practice to actually make progess in life. the practice of Hesychasm (or stillness) in Eastern Christianity is one such area that i continue to research and practice. to be fair to Judaism and Islam, Kabbalah and Sufism are also mystical and have methods and practices along the lines of what you are talking about.

but i think you are right that this is what is making eastern religion attractive. it is also what is making things like Eastern Christianity, Kabbalah, and Sufism the most popular segments of Western religion right now.

as for the rules thing, well, i hear what you are saying, but again this is somewhat unfair. indeed, it is unfortunate that Christianity has been distilled down to "rules." but St. Paul, for one, was always writing AGAINST this mentality. in Gal. 5:22 he states, "the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, self-control; AGAINST SUCH THERE IS NO LAW." Eastern religions all typically promote the same values as those stated above. Paul is repeatedly adamant that rule-keeping produces neurosis (like you said--see Romans chapter 7, for example).

likewise, all eastern religions teach that self-denial is a passage to all of these values and to union with the divine/compassion/the infinite. self-denial is a key component of all religions and is not the same thing (necessarily) as "repression." it should mean rechanneling desires (not repressing them) into more constructive pathways. psychologists have found that working towards forgiveness and accomplishing it is much more psychologically beneficial than indulging yourself in thinking bad thoughts about people, for example.

faith, hope, love,
the greatest of these is love


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## CECIL (Oct 3, 2004)

Pablo said:


> All the rules of religion achieve is to create a shadow part of your ego, which is where all the repressed disowned parts of your self are stored, but history has shown that the shadow parts of people has a tendency of coming out because repression is not a permanent solution, it simply makes you unconscious of what exists.


Very well put. To go even further: When you have repressed energies, they MUST be expressed, just by the simple nature of human energy. The more you repress it, the more it grows. You eventually get to the point where you do something major (like kill someone) to be able to release it.

On the other hand, if you allow someone to express their "negative" emotions normally and naturally (which IS normal and natural) and you teach them that its ok to be angry, afraid or whatever, then you make for healthier human beings.

Also, I agree with everything you said, Pablo. My major gripe with Western Religions (And Eastern ones are guilty of this in some cases) is that it takes the power out of the hands of the people and puts it in an external source.

Example: Worhsipping Jesus. The principle is that you are a sinner and you must STRIVE to be like Jesus (But of course, Jesus has been deified - he is holy and you can never hope to be). You must spend your life striving to reach the unattainable. Moreover you are unable to forgive yourself - your sins will be judged by God and God alone. You put your spiritual responsibility into the hands of someone else while at the same time worhsipping an external source (i.e. Placing something else above you as though you are not worthy, when in fact you should be worhshipping your own inner connection to the divine).

In other words, you are creating a middle-man (Priests, Jesus etc) who handle your spirituality for you. These middle-men tell you that you can only experience the divine through them as a proxy.

The purpose of this, over time, has been to keep humanity under control. Free thinkers are dangerous - governments and churches don't want free thinking people walking around making desicions for themselves, they want people who are easy to control. A defined set of rules coupled with the belief that you can't be in control of your own spirituality (And that you must worhsip an external source rather than your own inner divinity) was a brilliant way of doing this.

The truth is that these middle-men are no longer needed (They have served a vald purpose in human evolution to this date, but now humanity's needs are changing). Humans are now quite capable of taking their own spirituality into their own hands. You DO NOT need a priest to talk to god for you! You can communicate directly with God/the universe at will - you just need to learn how to speak the language


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## californian (Jul 24, 2006)

i'm just going to throw in my two cents again in favor of a more mystical understanding of Christianity, which is, in my opinion, simply Christianity as it was meant to be.

in such Christianity, Christ is always understood as both external and internal to the individual person--as both immanent and transcendent. and priests are not necessary to talk to God for us or handle our spirituality. this may have been the understanding in some periods and strains of Roman Catholicism, but this is certainly changing and, in fairness, has never entirely been the case.

Eastern Orthodox Christianity is typically identified as the largest recognizable Christian group that generally holds a more mystical view, but many Roman Catholic orders have stressed these ideas as well as many Protestant groups. unfortunately, the more vocal Christian groups today tend to be those for whom religion is a largely external phenomenon. these people explain and practice Christianity in an external way. fortunately and unfortunately those with a more "mystical" spirit, for lack of a better word are a lot less vocal and therefore are not in people's faces (but also aren't as well known).

so i agree to an extent with both of your criticisms, Pablo and CECIL, but I also think a fair judgment of the spirit of Christianity should involve at least some inquiry into its mystical varieties...


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## Pablo (Sep 1, 2005)

I have not looked deeply at the mystical aspects of Christianity but I am interested and I have looked a little at Meister Eckhart, Sufism also looks very interesting as it seems to celebrate what is good in life like laughter, dancing, colour and celebration rather than declare it as anti-religion like more mainsream Islam does in places like Saudi Arabia and it also looks upon the religious teachings as a metaphor for an inner struggle rather than taking it as a literal instruction of how to conduct yourself in the world, which seems more logical to me.

I admit that many of the eastern religions have their own problems and I agree that any religion which takes your power out of your own hands is on the whole a negative thing for an individual, but there is always in all cultures a need for some sort of spiritual or religious practice but I dont think there is any need for god (in the traditional sense of all powerful creator) to be involved in this any more in the modern world. Here in England for a large part of the population god has already been abandoned but he has not been replaced except by consumerism, getting drunk and football, so all of the religious people like the foreign Imams and local priests say that our problem is that we lack worship in our lives and there is a god shaped hole, but god has already failed as a concept in this country and a new form of religiousness or spirituality is needed.

This is why I think that religions like Zen and Tantra (if they really are religions) which have meditation rather than god as the core of their practice are more likely to be of postive use in western countries because in essence they are scientific in nature, they may be subjectively scientific but they are still scientifc in that there are clearly defined methods and stages you go through in order to have spiritual experiences and become more harmonious within yourself and with the world.


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## californian (Jul 24, 2006)

good points, Pablo. i sympathize entirely with your point of view here.

i think the problem you've identified with the "God shaped hole" idea is quite valid. the problem is that for most people this God shaped hole means the "concept" of God as you put it. the so-called "God shaped hole" cannot be filled with concepts, but only with God. the biggest problem is that a large segment of Western religions gives people no guidance in how to practice the presence of God.

ekhart, St John of the Cross, St Teresa of Avila are all interesting ones in the Roman Catholic tradition. there are some in Protestantism as well. some personal favorites of mine from the eastern Christian tradition are St Isaac the Syrian, and St Simeon the New Theologian. see http://www.isaacthesyrian.com/translations.html

may God bless you and your path...

faith, hope, love,
the greatest of these is love


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## CECIL (Oct 3, 2004)

californian said:


> so i agree to an extent with both of your criticisms, Pablo and CECIL, but I also think a fair judgment of the spirit of Christianity should involve at least some inquiry into its mystical varieties...


Yep the original intents and practices of Christianity (Mysticism) I could probably get into, and they are more than likely highly similar to what I study now, just in different words.

But what we see of Christianity in the mainstream is nothing like those original teachings etc. Its been edited, diluted, re-written and blatantly changed to fulfill a function. That function is keeping people under control while assuring the power remains at the "high" levels of our society (Churches and Governments for example) as opposed to in the hands of the people (Where even Jesus thought it was supposed to be  ).


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## californian (Jul 24, 2006)

CECIL said:


> But what we see of Christianity in the mainstream is nothing like those original teachings etc. Its been edited, diluted, re-written and blatantly changed to fulfill a function. That function is keeping people under control while assuring the power remains at the "high" levels of our society (Churches and Governments for example) as opposed to in the hands of the people (Where even Jesus thought it was supposed to be  ).


As far as the governments go, I agree wholeheartedly, and I also agree to a great extent with the comment on the mainstream of Christianity. In America, for example, I am quite frustrated by what passes for Christianity in both the political and ecclesial realms. When governmental power and ecclesial power become entertwined, there is a great recipe for potential disaster (which has played itself out again and again).

However, as far as Church leadership goes, there really doesn't have to be a total dichotomy between having leaders and giving power to the people. A true spiritual leader should be someone who empowers people to find God. There are numerous examples of people who have used church power for evil/power/control. But it also should be noted that many of the greatest figures in Christian history, including many of those canonized as saints in both Catholicism and Orthodoxy have been figures that have harshly criticized those same elements that you have been criticizing. :shock:


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