| sapphi_snake said: @richardhutnik Well the trend seems to be that the more humanity progresses and becomes more prosperous, and the more education becomes wildly available, the less religious people become. You can't deny that the civilized western world is a lot less religiousthen it used to be in the past , while the most religious places on the planet are third world countries struck by povert, disease, political instability, and illiteracy. Since the world of Star Trek was an utopia, a perfect society where current day hardships weren't present, one might asume that religion would disappear altogether.Of course an utopia isn't possible, because societies aren't static and new problems andchallenges constantly occur. Persoanlly I don't see why people need to worship deities. I understand that there's some form of psychological benefit in having faith in the supernatural (this applies to people of all religions that have strong religious convictions), but it seems to me like nothing more that auto-manipulation and self-deciet. Kind of like taking those pills that have no effect, but since you think they work you actually start feeling better (can't remember theri name). |
In a modern society, religion becomes less of an authoritarian structure that hangs over it in a formal way, as a form of government. What it does become is something less formal and more freeflowing.
As for the need for religion, it is the way the human brain is wired. People's brains desire to have something larger than themselves to have them have wonder, be able to lean on, and also help them find meaning. What you have in religion is collective experience that is much larger than the base of experience people have individually. There is also the case of a group of people collectively needing something for their collective benefit, which may seem to be not of much use on a personal level. Bylaws in organizations are things that make no sense to people on a personal level, but essential to the collective function of the group, and the existence of the organization is what the individual benefits form. Tradition is similar here.
Also, the values society has had end up coming from religion of the past. It has been impossible to remove such things from existence, in the same way it has been impossible to replace natural language with Esperanto. You may want to look in to Hayek's "Fatal Conceit" for more on this:
http://explorersfoundation.org/glyphery/379.html
