[excerpted]...
1) Religion appears to meet some kind of basic human need (either directly or as a byproduct of our evolution)
2) Religions are made up
3) How can one replicate the benefits knowing this? Having faith for the sake of it's benefits doesn't work (at least for me). Once you reach point (2), I don't think there's a way to be religious without some kind of catch 22.
This is one I've been dealing with most my life as well. Atheist here. The only religions or traditions or faiths that ever held any real calling for me beyond anthropological curiosity were pretty close to animistic. There's also a materialist bent to them, since most were formed out of, & reflect, observation of the natural world.
I think organized religion serves the human need for connection with people through organizational structure that is mostly coincidental to religious purpose; you can get it elsewhere. The thing which distinguishes religion is a sense of connection or relationship to the world outside ourselves, in the broadest possible sense, & where that connection or relationship is perceived is what we deem holy. Whether you personally get that from Sagan's "We are a way for the universe to know itself," or from the notion that we are all dreaming our separateness from the whole, or that some god birthed us or made us of wood or clay, it seems to be the same emotional experience of the sacred.
Combining that emotional experience with social & personal purpose, tribal markers, a couple of beloved narratives, maybe a few symbols for shorthand, & ritual behavior has plenty of neurological basis for something intensely satisfying to the primate brain; the question if you're trying to build that whole capital-R Religion experience from scrap is, are any of those constituent elements mere mental junk food or do they each convey separate benefits? Because if any of them are crap, in absence of some faith (an emotional experience you can't control) in their rightness it degrades the rest of the experience, it won't cohere. (Malcat will perhaps laugh in context of a recent thread when I say that the one part I still find lacking is the
community....)
I'd also say that like most emotions, you can practice the experience of perceiving the holy to learn to access it more easily (& thus frequently.) It's a neurological habit you can build. Which things trigger it for you can change or multiply over time, but the more easily you access that state the more opportunities you have to share it with others as they experience it, imho.
(The fact that I'm reasonably inclined to believe this is reducible to molecules zinging around under the influence of a predictable physics is, to me, part of what makes it beautiful, holy, good. The certainty of faith, for me, is in the resonant emotional experience, not the particulars of whether our science is good enough yet or if we're all actually borne on the back of a turtle.)
Elsewhere in the thread, I quite agree with this & think it's related!!
All categories are arbitrary. Observable reality is based on continuous phenomena. Categories vary in their utility and defensibility, but not in their trueness.
But it doesn't have to be true to be real, in human experience. It'd be fairly easy to say that most people's experiences of the holy fall into the experience of
accepting, affirming a relationship between self & else: a state of perceived comprehension (even just comprehension of the existence of mystery. ...This is also why drugs do it for some people.) In brief, humans really get a kick out of categorizing, deciding/ discerning things; it's installing handles on otherwise unwieldy experiences.