What Is The True Purpose Of Religion?

[Angrboda]

The 'true' meaning of religon?

There's no such thing. What is true varies not only between each believer in the common herd,but depends on one's status and place within an organisation.....<snip>
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Ten thousand monks ten thousand religions (Buddhist saying)

No theres an applicable purpose to it, I've actually been looking into it for some time now. Just getting all the facts together which is why I needed some fresh ideas here but nobody seems to think outside the box.

Religion isn't just used to keep people in line and ect, one of it's main usages is to stifle the human desire to become more knowlegable. People who are severly taken by faith "stupidity" become more complacent and a little snooty if you ask me. The reason why is well, they believe they know all there is to know about anything and everything because apparently everything is done by god. With this system the dumbest person can be as wise and the most intelligent scientist if they both believe in their religion meaning there is not much use in learning very much else is there?

I'm not sure this jibes with historical fact. The Reformation was largely driven by the Catholic clergy's desire to keep the keys to the kingdom in their hands. The church fought viciously to prevent the bible being translated into vulgar tongues that the commoner could understand. One might argue that this was an authoritarian way of stifling the desire for knowledge, and the so-called Dark Ages are a result, except that from my meager explorations in the area, historians are revising the picture of the middle ages as a time of enforced stupidity at the hands of the Church. If anything, the Protestant Reformation has been a flowering of empowerment in which the decisions and sources of knowledge were explicitly delivered into the hands of the Everyman.

But there's an even bigger problem in that this view is rather ethnocentric, and seems most successful only when applied to Semitic Religions. Hellenistic pantheism and Roman pantheism were very egalitarian; to portray them as anti-gnosis (save that nasty little business with Socrates) doesn't jibe with what I know of them, though I confess no more than passing familiarity with them. The religions of the Indian sub-continent, whether Dravidian or Aryan in origin, are hard to reconcile with your model (Buddhism and Jainism alike are also empowering religions in terms of gnosis, and I can't speak intelligently about Hinduism [even in an unfairly simplistic sense], but I do not get the impression that the Upanishads and the Bhagavad-Gita are works aimed at providing easy, smug answers [certainly not the Bhagavad]). I think Taoism is a judgement call, but it doesn't fit in my view as Taoism is about abandoning intellectual understanding in order to discover a more fundamental underlying truth; not exactly the type of anti-knowledge stance you suggest, but like Ch'an and Zen Buddhism, and Christian and Sufi mysticism, the Taoist is arguing that there is a better path to the summit -- not that one should abandon the climb. (And it's worth noting that Theravada Buddhism places explicit emphasis on intellectual understanding; the fact that Hinayana Buddhism was the exclusive province of the elite -- the monks and the nuns-- doesn't fit your model because the commoner wasn't discouraged from pursuing knowledge, he wasn't even allowed to play the game.) I'm not even going to go into the complex and variegated attitudes of the manyfold forms of Buddhism, but just a sampling of the body of literature regarding Tibetan Buddhist Psychology reveals yet another square peg for your round hole. The complex relationship between knowledge, authority, praxis and revelation in the main branches of Chinese philosophy (primitive, Taoist [two kinds], Confucianist, Buddhist [north and south schools], neo-Confucianism and modern folk religion) would take a dissertation length essay to do justice to, but failing some demonstration otherwise, my conclusion is that fitting your model to these religions would take some serious stretching of the fabric of your argument. And that's not even to begin to account for Shinto and the millions of religions which I profess insufficient familiarity with to comment on.

To be blunt, Your model smells of post-facto reasoning; you picked a religion you didn't like, identified what you didn't like about it, and generalized that to all religions. I don't think your ideas stand up well when examined in the context of the broad spectrum of forms that religion has taken. And that's not even counting religions we don't know about and judgment calls that are hard to make: the Eleusinian mystery cults lasted for two millennia -- were they anti-knowledge? Even if we knew the full details of the cults, it would be hard to say that your model is even meaningfully applicable.

Sorry. You need to add some more decals, pinstripes and stickers to your model. As it sits, I don't think it will fly.