The Mudcat Café TM
Thread #75036   Message #1316487
Posted By: Stilly River Sage
04-Nov-04 - 11:07 AM
Thread Name: BS: Is Religion a form of Mental Illness ???
Subject: RE: BS: Is Religion a form of Mental Illness ???
I always liked that Dave Allen ending also, and have used it on occasion as a response to religious friends who try to bring me under their umbrellas.

Points to clarify: "religious" and "spirituality" are related but are not the same thing.

Religion: institution to express belief in a divine power [emphasis on "Institution"]

religious belief: a strong belief in a supernatural power or powers that control human destiny

A Jungian reading from http://www.tearsofllorona.com/jungdefs.html">this site (one block west of LaLa land, so wade through here at your own peril, but its kind of interesting in a California sort of way).

Religion: a subjective relationship to certain metaphysical, extramundane factors. A kind of experience accorded the highest value, regardless of its contents. The essence is the person's relationship to God or salvation. Jung called them psychotherapeutic systems and believed they contained, offered a gradiant for, and transformed instinctual (hence asceticism), nonpersonal energies, giving people a cultural counterpole to blind instinct, help through difficult transitional stages, and a sense of meaning. They also help separate the growing person from his parents. For Jung, the unconscious had a religious function, and religion rests on an instinctive basis. Different from creeds, which are codified and dogmatized versions of a religious experience. Creeds usually say they have THE truth and are a collective belief. For Jung, no contradiction existed between faith and knowledge because science has nothing to say about metaphysical events, and beliefs are psychological facts that need no proof.

Increasing exogamous libidinal tendencies over the centuries have caused endogamous libido to react by forming religions, sects, and nations (see cross-cousin marriage, aion).

Religions collect projections of parent imagos (Pope, church as mother, etc.) in a positive way--let the imagos live on in a changed and exalted form within traditions that preserve living connections and roots for centuries. Instinct expresses itself in traditional form, and when the traditions break down or the images are lost, the energy activates the unconscious dangerously. Isms and the State then replace tradition and hierarchical order.


From a more generalist site: (generic definition of "religion"): A means of getting in touch with and of attaining at-onement with "ultimate reality." In slightly different words, a religion is a system of symbols (e.g., words and gestures, stories and practices, objects and places) that functions religiously, namely, an ongoing system of symbols that participants use to draw near to, and come into right or appropriate relationship with, what they deem to be ultimate reality.

Many more definitions here

"Spirituality" (the most generic definition I could find, not co-opted by a religious organization):
(a) relating to spirit or sacred matters; (b) being connected to the essence of self, others and life; (c) an experience of coming home to self and connecting to others