Religions Are Of Two Kinds

One of the silliest cliques going is that “all religions are basically the same”. They are really not, and I am not just speaking of the thousands of hair-splitting doctrinal, theological and philosophical differences. I am talking about differences of essential purpose. Certainly religions are not the same when they don’t even want the same thing.

Anyway, when it comes to wanting two different things, then we can identify two different kinds of Religion.

The first kind of Religion is what we would understand today to be like a Self Help Program – sad or unsuccessful people are looking for some kind of a key for improving themselves or for feeling better about themselves or at least to help them manage their depression.

The second kind of Religion is the expression of a Social Propaganda – a unifying Ethos for a Community.

Often a Social Ethos Religion can co-opt the Self Help model of Religion by insisting that Happiness can only be attained by being Community Minded – that Love for Others is the Supreme Happiness. “It is better to give than receive”. However, such Religions can point to relatively few Saints who had actually demonstrated much overt happiness at helping others, and so instead a great deal of attention is focused upon tolerating hardships and enduring suffering for the Good of the Many. People might be told that the Happiness they should expect will come only in an Afterlife.

The purely Self Help Religions can afford to be less contradictory, as their goal really is less ambitious and so much easier to envision if not to achieve. To be more successful and to feel better about one’s self, simply become consciously and deliberately ego-centric. Live for one’s self. To worry about other people only robs one of the energies that could be devoted toward furthering one’s own ends. Wolves are happier than sheep, especially at dinner time.

But, in the end, the Social Ethos Religions actually stand the better chance of making people Happy. Just think about it, that if a Social Ethos Religion finally brings peace to a once Barbaric Community, then a general happiness is likely to follow as destructive energies take more positive directions simply through default.

The selfishness engendered by the Self Help Egotistical Religions suffers from being tied too tightly to the Win-Lose construct, where there is naturally going to be more losers than winners. Every man at war with every other – making life solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short, that is, between the small celebrations of single Conquerors over multitudes of the conquered. The truth is that groups of selfish people make each other miserable.

So it is that the one most reliable indicator of a Self Help Egotistical Religion is the advise or injunction to go off and be solitary. Happiness in selfishness is so much easier when one is alone. Happiness is the best hiding place. Nowadays I believe they call it Meditation.