What Comes After Religion? - Transcript and Annotations

 

School of Life: What Comes After Religion? (Please watch the video first!)

Published: Feb 4, 2015

Link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CL--1Z_g4DE&list=PLV7Diz4DTv4mnAutv5CEqN7Y9HRKmejor&index=18

Accessed: 2021-02-01

(The main text is a transcript of the ‘School of Life’ video. Sub-headings and parts in blue are my own annotations. The concluding reflections are also my own)

Secularization

Fewer and fewer people believe nowadays. It's possible that in a generation, there simply won't be religion across Europe and large sections of North America, Australia and Asia. That 's not necessarily a problem.

Above, we find a brief description of the rapid process of secularization taking place in the so-called “developed world.” Of course, institutional religions think that this loss of faith and belief is a problem. How do you see the matter? Is the demise of religious belief and institutional religions a problem?

Why Religions were/are Important

But it's worth thinking about why people made up religion in the first place and what we're doing with the needs and longings that led them to do so. 

Examining the origins of religion and what were/are the human needs that religions have met in human history --- is a very important task!

At one level, religions are about asking us to believe in something. And when people say they can't believe, they tend to stop right there with the whole religion business. And often point out all the horrid things that religions have undoubtedly done and continue to do. But in this sense, belief is almost the least important and definitely the least interesting side of religion.

“Religious belief” often involves trying to give our intellectual assent to mythological ideas that cannot be proved by science (or has been disproved) by science.

The Valuable Things Religions Teach even in a Secularized World

What's fascinating is all the other stuff religions get up to. For example, the way they regularly gather people around and, strikingly, tell them to be nice to one another. Or the way they create a sense of community, acting as hosts, making sure that granny and the child, the big chief and the little guy learn to see each other as human beings rather than abstract entities.

Religions use rituals to point stuff out to us and lodge it in our fickle minds. For example, that the seasons are changing or that it's the time to remember your ancestors. That the moon looks pretty or you can atone and make a fresh start or that it's rather amazing that there's food on the table. Religions know we're not just intellectual creatures so they carefully appeal to us via art and beauty. We think of beauty in one category a frivolous and superficial thing, and truth and depth in an another. Religions join them together. They build temples, cathedrals, and mosques that use beauty to lend depth to important ideas. They use the resources of art to remind us of what matters. Their art is didactic. It's directed at making us feel things: calm, pity, awe ---

Those are the things (above) that—the School of Life’ thinks—are the valuable lessons we can learn from religions which we ought to continue practicing today, even in a secular age. The following statements below are why we still need the things that religions used to and still deliver to its adherents.

We may no longer believe, but the needs and longings that made us make up these stories go on. We're lonely and violent. We long for beauty, wisdom, and purpose. We want to live for something more than just ourselves.

Below we find critiques of the superficiality and inadequateness of contemporary society from ‘the School of Life’

What Modern Society Focuses On

Society tells us to direct our hopes in two areas: Romantic love and professional success. And it distracts us with news, movies, and consumption. It's not enough, as we know. Especially at three in the morning.

The Lessons We Need to Learn

We need reminders to be good, places to reawaken awe, something to awaken our kinder, less selfish impulses. Universal things which need tending like delicate flowers and rituals that bring us together. The choice isn't between religion and a secular world as it is now.

 The challenge is to learn from religions so we can fill the secular world with replacements for the things we long ago made up religion to provide. The challenge begins here.

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Some Concluding Comments (by jkk)

On the one hand, the ‘School of Life’ adheres to an atheistic, materialistic worldview. It does not believe that there is any “Greater Power” (such as God, the Spirit, the Holy) out there. On the other hand, it thinks that there are many valuable things we can continue to learn from religions aside from the supernatural claims (which it does not believe).

My own (as well as many other “scholar-believers”) position is a bit different. I continue to hold that a standpoint of faith (in a Greater Something or “God,” if you will) is still possible and even important today, even for someone who believes in the value of science and progress but is also aware of its limitation. My definition of faith is that it is primarily a trust in the goodness of reality and life – that trust is often linked with a greater power, but it need not be. It is enough to hope that there is some greater power with which all of us are connected (For a more detailed description, see: https://spiritual-notandyet-religious-jkk.blogspot.com/2020/04/part-3-epidemics-and-god-covid-19.html )

I absolutely agree with scholar-spiritual practitioner Roger Walsh MD, PhD that if we think of life and reality as—in his words—“disenchanted” (just material) as ‘the School of Life’ does, we run the risk of living in a world devoid of meaning and significance. That would lead to us feeling adrift, without any sense of a higher purpose. That, in turn, would lead to more meaninglessness and depression. (See Walsh, Essential Spirituality, 1999, pp. 195-196)

I do agree with ‘the School of Life’ though that religions over-emphasize mythological beliefs. This is a problem for contemporary people who live in a world with an advanced level of science and critical thought. I am, therefore, also for shifting the emphasis on—what the same Roger Walsh—calls “transconventional religion” (I’ll write more extensively about this in a future post) with a greater emphasis on ethical and spiritual practice that would enable one to have genuine “awakening” experiences. These in turn will lead to a deeper experiential sense of the “spiritual” unity of everyone and everything. And that is the core truth that all spiritual-wisdom traditions (aka, the religions) teach.

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