True. The only slight hope being that truth can be rediscovered, but lies need reinventing anew each time.

The thing that contributes nothing (of value) is religious fundamentalism. The alternative to proper, healthy religious systems is extinction. Just as with politics, it is a maintenance task that will never go away.

@skado I am not convinced that all religion, taken to its "logical" extreme, wouldn't be fundamentalist. I do not see religion as a benign influence perverted by fundamentalism, but a poor choice of direction that, fully embraced, becomes fundamentalism. I recognize that this isn't your view or the view of all non-theists, but while I am not so anti-theist that I'd waste my energy on opposing liberal theism (with which I have a lot of practical common cause, if not always for the same reasons and motivations), I do not see even watered-down forms of religion as providing anything that can't come by other means.

@mordant
I see that a lot of people don’t like the word religion. Maybe we need a different word to use there, but religion seems to cover what I’m thinking of best, historically speaking. Whatever word we use for practices that help balance our animal instincts toward cooperative living and mental health, this chore is one that our species needs to continue doing if it is to stay “human”. And I don’t see anything about that task that requires, or even benefits from, maintaining a belief in a literal god personage. To the contrary, the neonatal instinct to concretize the absentee parent (god formulation) is one of the biological instincts that such a practice of the future should be working to counter. I’m not suggesting watering anything down but beefing it up. In our lifetime, and for the last few hundred years, the practices that served this general purpose have been hijacked by corruption and pandering to the instincts that it should have been working to subdue. So the word religion has become associated with that corruption and backward direction. Whether we rehabilitate that word or build a replacement, cultural practices that have helped the human animal resist its natural instincts to misbehave, for the benefit of a stable, complex society, since the advent of agriculture, will need to be improved rather than abandoned if we are to avoid extinction. We are an irreversibly “artificial” animal. That artifice is culture.

@skado "Balancing our animal instincts toward cooperative living and mental health" sounds like the development of a mature personal philosophy of living. Also, since as you say religious practices that attempted or claimed to serve this purpose have manifestly failed, perhaps it is a mistake to frame the discussion of how to attain these worthy ends in terms of "religion".

As hyper-social beings, we need community. This is what my faith of origin called "provoking one another to good works". The foundation on which communities of cooperation like that can be built is civil society -- something that, sadly, has badly eroded during my lifetime.

I lived much of my adult life in some form or other of personal crisis -- largely, serious health crises pertaining to myself or to loved ones. When things finally settled down in that regard to a dull roar a decade or so ago, I thought I'd finally have the opportunity to connect with fellow humans in meaningful ways. What I found is that through a combination of my own introversion, the practical difficulty of finding like-minded friends who don't irritate the shit out of me with fool notions, and my dwindling fund of energy as I age, this is proving much harder than I expected.

A prime example is the post-Christian UU congregation almost without walking distance of my home. If there is a non-theistic (or at least theism-optional) re-imagining of religion, the UUs are surely it. But I find that they have simply substituted an annoying set of political dogmas for religious dogmas. Despite that I have wide areas of agreement with them, I find the same petty judgmentalism and cliquishness that I remember from my religious daze.

I volunteered with the Sanders campaign in '16 and found the same tendency to lay down needless divisive shibboleths was present in politics.

I have gotten the most mileage out of experiences designed to be drop-dead simple, like playing no-stakes Rummy with four other guys every Saturday. The five of us represent just about the whole ideological spectrum, but by agreeing to do something meaningless and trivial for little more purpose than to pass a couple of pleasant hours, we are able to make it work without driving each other batshit.

This does not feel like Changing the World or even like having the kinds of relationships where someone would have your back in a crisis, but these days, I am not sure such things are more than illusion anyway.

@mordant
Sounds like you’ve found what works for you, as have I.
I suspect our main difference here is just what definition we assign to the word religion. Most reasonable people think of religion as what religion is today and maybe what it has been historically, but I tend to think of it as a philosophical category or “ideal form”, and then imagine how it could manifest in the real world. It gets me in a lot of hot water. Ha! Thanks as always for jawing with me.
Always interesting talking with you.