[Serious] What does religion have to offer?

[BrianSoddingBoru4]

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Boru

[The Grand Nudger]

It asserts a basic framework around which the borders of acceptable behavior and human interaction can be defined, for better or worse.

It doesn’t necessarily provide any specific benefit. It fills itself with things seen to be beneficial, again, for better or for worse.

[no one]

All your hopes and dreams come true. All that you could ever ask for and more.

[mordant]

I think that a lot of it is community.  It's a feeling of belonging even if it's only surface deep.  Those things and the ritual.  I think people find the routine/ritual comforting.  

We can pick it apart all we want but there is also the need to be able to make the claim of having a certain faith even if they really don't.  

When someone asks "What church do you attend?" it's uncomfortable in a lot of places not to have an answer.

I think community and belonging are the main attraction when you unpack it all. For that to work, you need shared beliefs and/or a strong shared experience. Shared experiences can include shared social life, ritual and custom, or, as is the case with evangelicals, a shared spiritual or mystical experience ("salvation", plus, in the case of Pentecostals, "the baptism in the holy spirit").

The importance of overt ritual varies with different personalities. I think those who truly find ritual and tradition comforting tend to gravitate toward the "high church" traditions (Catholicism, Church of England, Episcopalian, Eastern Orthodox, etc) and those who find that stifling, toward the rest of Protestantism ... and if they're averse enough to it, to fundamentalism. Fundamentalism in fact often portrays it self as an interactive, vital, relational, "living" faith, whereas the traditional denominations, particularly Catholicism, are seen as sterile, even "dead". So ritual is isn't of equal value to all believers; it is of negative value to some.

[comet]

I think you guys pretty much nailed it.

[vulcanlogician]

We shall see how infinitely passionate a thing religion at its highest flights can be. Like love, like wrath, like hope, ambition, jealousy, like every other instinctive eagerness and impulse, it adds to life an enchantment which is not rationally or logically deducible from anything else. This enchantment, coming as a gift when it does come—a gift of our organism, the physiologists will tell us, a gift of God’s grace, the theologians say —is either there or not there for us, and there are persons who can no more become possessed by it than they can fall in love with a given woman by mere word of command. Religious feeling is thus an absolute addition to the Subject’s range of life. It gives him a new sphere of power. When the outward battle is lost, and the outer world disowns him, it redeems and vivifies an interior world which otherwise would be an empty waste.

https://csrs.nd.edu/assets/59930/williams_1902.pdf

[WinterHold]

Time and time again we have had conversations with religious whack-jobs who come on this forum with some tired, washed up platitudes and tell us, "Checkmate, Atheists! Bet you can't explain this one!" I would say about 99% of the time we easily dismantle their silly arguments; whether or not they choose to admit, or whether they realize, their logic is faulty is another story entirely. But, for the most part, I can safely say that no theist here on this forum has ever thrown a curve ball at me that I either didn't see coming or haven't seen before. The most of you could probably say the same for themselves.

One logical and also scientific point that I don't see you dodging -because outside the big bang we can't even call information: information-; and also makes me never taking atheism into consideration is that we discovered 4% of the universe only.
One huge assumption is assuming that the 96% undiscovered part is empty of other beings.
If an atheist told me "God doesn't exist" it will be the same as saying "alien life doesn't exist". The 96% is a huge undiscovered area; I believe my God -as Islam teaches- resides there, he created 7 heavens one atop of the other, we reside in the lowest one, according to Islam.
Science discovered now the possibility of the multiverse. It is also discovering more and more dimensions that can very simply allow for the "7 heavens" mentioned in Islam. Finally; it had been discovered that the idea of the multiple universes is very possible.

[The Grand Nudger]

From the standpoint of humanity, a god that’s in some other percentage of the universe rather than this percentage is equivalent to a god that doesn’t exist. Though, that does make me wonder what sort of religion might manifest itself out of a group of people who believed that god simply wasn’t here.

[comet]

Time and time again we have had conversations with religious whack-jobs who come on this forum with some tired, washed up platitudes and tell us, "Checkmate, Atheists! Bet you can't explain this one!" I would say about 99% of the time we easily dismantle their silly arguments; whether or not they choose to admit, or whether they realize, their logic is faulty is another story entirely. But, for the most part, I can safely say that no theist here on this forum has ever thrown a curve ball at me that I either didn't see coming or haven't seen before. The most of you could probably say the same for themselves.

One logical and also scientific point that I don't see you dodging -because outside the big bang we can't even call information: information-; and also makes me never taking atheism into consideration is that we discovered 4% of the universe only.
One huge assumption is assuming that the 96% undiscovered part is empty of other beings.
If an atheist told me "God doesn't exist" it will be the same as saying "alien life doesn't exist". The 96% is a huge undiscovered area; I believe my God -as Islam teaches- resides there, he created 7 heavens one atop of the other, we reside in the lowest one, according to Islam.
Science discovered now the possibility of the multiverse. It is also discovering more and more dimensions that can very simply allow for the "7 heavens" mentioned in Islam. Finally; it had been discovered that the idea of the multiple universes is very possible.

this gets into the properties of the god you believe in.

If the properties of your god line up with the properties of the universe we do know then I am ok with your god.  Its the gods that do not line up with the traits of the universe that are troublesome.  And to make laws based on that type is dangerous.

[WinterHold]

From the standpoint of humanity, a god that’s in some other percentage of the universe rather than this percentage is equivalent to a god that doesn’t exist.  Though, that does make me wonder what sort of religion might manifest itself out of a group of people who believed that god simply wasn’t here.

Not if he's the creator of the whole universe. Islam dictates that God created the whole universe then resided in what is called "the throne":

Surah 10, The Quran:


( 3 )   Indeed, your Lord is Allah, who created the heavens and the earth in six days and then established Himself above the Throne, arranging the matter [of His creation]. There is no intercessor except after His permission. That is Allah, your Lord, so worship Him. Then will you not remember?

You can't consider him to be "local" to the 96%; both that undiscovered region and the remaining 4% are under his grasp; he is residing outside them. In other words; we are below the throne.

I can't even imagine the size of such existence. But another verse verse from the Quran assures that he is also everywhere:

Sura 2, The Quran:

( 115 )   And to Allah belongs the east and the west. So wherever you [might] turn, there is the Face of Allah. Indeed, Allah is all-Encompassing and Knowing.