What is Religion? Our common situation in this existence tells us what Religion is. Our common situation is that we are semiconscious, cultural, social lifeforms who produce immature offspring.

We are born, we live, we die. And when we make choices among beliefs and behaviors, we are not conscious of all aspects of our situation. We are not even conscious of all our own motivations. Therefore, we are semiconscious lifeforms.

But we are conscious of the facts that we are cultural, social lifeforms who need to cooperate to survive and thrive, and that requires shared standards of good and bad social behavior. Shared standards of social behavior for cultural, social lifeforms, like us, are based on shared cultural purposes, which are based on a shared world-view.

And we produce immature offspring. We cannot do without teaching children our shared standards of social behavior, cultural purpose, and world-view, that we require to survive and thrive as semiconscious, cultural, social lifeforms.

Children learn most effectively by hearing stories and performing rituals. Bald lists of dos and don’ts, don’t cut it with children. They don’t effectively engage a child’s attention, or gain their commitment to a culture, its standards and world-view, as stories and rituals do. We are also semiconscious lifeforms of self-fulfilling prophecy, we are the stories we tell ourselves, we become the stories we tell ourselves.

Religion is the set of common stories and reinforcing rituals that teach children and remind adults of their shared world-view, their shared cultural purposes based on that world-view, and their shared standards of good and bad social behavior based on those purposes. Religion, through common story and ritual, teaches children the cultural, social rules providing a group strategy for negotiating this existence.

Therefore, Religion is a necessary cultural feature for lifeforms, like us, who produce immature offspring, who must be taught shared standards of good and bad social behavior to survive and thrive, and who learn most effectively by hearing stories and performing rituals. Religion is a cultural feature that serves the needs of children. Religion is for children.

Religion is necessary, but gods are optional. The necessary features of Religion are: one, a world-view; two, a cultural purpose; three, standards of social behavior; four communication through story and ritual. But gods are only independent players in one particular world-view, the theistic world-view, the basis of theistic religions. In the atheistic world-view, the basis of atheistic religions, gods are like fairies, trolls, and demons, imaginary beings that are projections of aspects of ourselves.

We don’t need one religion on this planet; we would be culturally, intellectually, and morally poorer, if we had only one. We need religions that teach an intellectually mature and morally responsible world-view.

But we tell children stories that teach the intellectually childish and morally corrupt theistic world-view of Western Culture. The theistic world-view is that this existence is overseen by an independent god, or gods, by imagined, must-be-obeyed, super beings.

Gods are imagined beings, born from imaginary experience, just as fairies, trolls and demons are. Gods are mighty, independent, super beings, because that is what theists imagine them to be.

Theists must obey imagined gods because the theistic world-view is based on the savage’s criminal belief that Might Makes Right, that might confers the right to harm the less-powerful. For Might Makes Right theists, who live in fear of harm from an imagined mightier god, the might of that god makes it right that they fear and obey imagined commands. The theistic world-view is based on the same low, criminal belief that slave masters use to justify slavery, that Might Makes Right, that Fear of Harm Makes Right.

The criminal Might Makes Right theistic world-view leads to Ancestor Worship. Ancients, who knew little, understood less, and believed anything, out of a comforting and compensating arrogance, imagined their ancestors were mighty too. So, for Might Makes Right theists, ancestors had to be obeyed too.

Ancestor Worshippers never learn to do right and take responsibility for their beliefs and behaviors. Ancestor Worshippers learn to do wrong, to be morally blind cultural slaves, who just obey orders, and blame their beliefs and behaviors on imagined mightier ancestors, no matter harms caused or benefits denied.

Because gods are imagined beings, the theistic world-view is also based on the fool’s criminal belief in the truth of imaginary experience.

Theistic religions are founded by shamans who claim to tune into messages though hallucination, meditation, contemplation, and dream. They believe their imaginary experiences are a source of reliable information about this existence. Shamans even believe, as the mentally disordered do, that imaginary experiences are a source of truth to be obeyed. Ancestor Worship makes the imaginary experiences of ancestor shamans culturally indisputable.

The theistic belief in the truth of imaginary experience leads us into crime because our imaginations have no limits. Making imaginary experience a guide without limits. Making limitless crimes right for the criminal fool theists who believe in the truth of imaginary experience.

We can do without theistic religions teaching the theistic world-view of Western Culture that the Might of imaginary experience Makes crime Right.

We need religions, common stories and reinforcing rituals of birth, adulthood, commitment, and death, that teach children the intellectually mature, morally responsible, atheistic, ecological world-view of Global Culture that teaches Fairness Makes Right. It teaches we are here to cooperate to enjoy our lives as partners with all now, culturally free to be wholly ourselves in our one and only life, guided by commonly observable experience, and appreciating imagined beings as aspects of ourselves, and imaginary experience, the Always Could-be Criminal Insanity Channel, as a source of cautiously testable new ideas.

Culturally free ecosystem partners in Global Culture put their virtual heads together, recycle culture, make up ecological religions for children, telling stories and performing rituals of good partnership that condemn all slavery. Ready, Set, Go, Partners.

MJ Stephens, stephensmj.com
Good Partner Rules: cafepress.com/stephensmj

26 April 2015