masukuma wrote:Othelo wrote:So in this contest, which religion is supreme?
yep! seems like it!
I think it's possible to measure the superiority of a religion per context. But the measure would have nothing to do with assertions per se. The other day I was looking at the history of psychiatry from ancient times to the present, and as usual I was looking for patterns and constants, and alas, through the ages there seemed to be one constant; that there's an optimal human state of being that is about being in dynamic equilibrium with a dynamic ecosystem, and whose characteristics are happiness, productivity, intelligence, and peaceful coexistence.
Interestingly, the center of human existence has been the temple, save for now when psychiatry has moved more into an atheistic view point. The cave was the first temple it seems. The cave is the church, the mosque, the lodge . . .
So to know the superior religion, we need to ask which religion now, offers a metaphor that can take any individual closest to the optimal state of being. In my estimation, so far, there's no single metaphor that fits into the global world we're living in. The psychological role of a human being is finding such a metaphor whether consciously or unconsciously, and right now the hue and clamor we're experiencing around us is proof that this task is indeed pushing us to the edge. Old metaphors can no longer fit, hence we'll see more atheists, fundamentalists doing their best to convert others, agnostics throwing up their hands in despair and the like. It's amazing how similar psychological conditions precipitate different behavior in different people.
But psychologically speaking most of these responses are the same in value in that they are all regressions. Regression isn't necessarily bad, the question is how is it being used to offer healing and progression? Once again we lack leadership in such a conversation. Not even atheists can handle this. Till someone somewhere finds the metaphor and shares it, and makes it to work on the political economy, we're stuck.