I'd call that mindfulness not religion.
We may not need more religion, but it sure seems like we need something. Building our society so heavily on economic expediency can’t be healthy long term.
My comments - I guess - are more generally focused. I feel similarly about male identify. We’ve walked back many aspects of traditional masculinity (often for good reason and for positive social benefits) but haven’t - as a society - replaces them with alternatives. I think it leaves many young men without a positive vision for “what it means to be a man”. These are opportunities, but I don’t know how we can work through them without a distinct shared cultural vision for what we all want to be. Individualism has its downsides too.
Didn't mean any offence to anyone - I have an issue with the idea of palliative doublethink, not religion, theistic or otherwise.
Stoic philosophy can also float in a nice pantheist grey area. I always keep in mind that the most insightful and present religious people I’ve ever met are by no men’s dogmatic and their spiritual exploration is part of their spirituality. The journey, the acceptance of your own fallibility, mindfulness, these are all parts of faith. The word faith works better for me than religion.
our society has completely thrown the baby out with the bathwater when we arbitrarily decided that all organized religions are bad and that God doesn't exist.
The word religion itself originally was all about worshiping a god.
Now everyone can define "God" how they want and follow whatever the scriptures advise, but let's not fool ourselves here, it's always been about power / control.
Not really, it was specifically about life under monastic vows (which, where it was coined, involved worship of the Christian God, but that wasn't the feature “religion” referred to, but instead the life bound by vows.)
In fact, the Catholic Church still used the adjective and noin “religious” in that sense, while it uses “religion” in the newer modern sense; a monk or nun is a “religious", a cleric in an order is a member of the “religious clergy” while those outside of an order are members of the “secular clergy”.
2. Therefore man should serve that source in spirit.
3. The life of all men has a divine origin. It alone is holy.
4. Therefore man should serve that source in the life of all men. Such is the will of the Father.
5. The service of the will of that Father of life gives life.
6. Therefore the gratification of one's own will is not necessary for life.
7. Temporal life is food for the true life.
8. Therefore the true life is independent of time: it is in the present.
9. Time is an illusion of life; life in the past and in the future conceals from men the true life of the present.
10.Therefore man should strive to destroy the illusion of the temporal life of the past and future.
11.True life is life in the present, common to all men and manifesting itself in love.
12. Therefore, he who lives by love in the present, through the common life of all men, unites with the Father, the source and foundation of life.
That's Tolstoy's distillation of Jesus' teachings from "The Gospel in Brief". I have felt the same as you in the past, but when you look closely at some of these premises, they are more philosophical in nature rather than dogmatic. As a scientifically minded person, I have seen the unity of things, like in physics, where it does seem like there are some natural principles laid down. Or like in mathematics, where it seems like eternal truths are discovered, not manufactured. You can have a spiritual interpretation of this, or you can interpret it in whatever way you'd like. What I like about Tolstoy's rendering of Christ is that he basically rejects the stupid personification of God, and claims that Jesus didn't mean it that way to begin with, that the Church actually warped the teachings into a system of control.
I don't even believe Jesus was a real person, but these principles do make sense to me (at least some of it does), maybe they will make sense to you. Or maybe it's just dogma to you.
I can't just accept dogma because I'm miserable. I can't just say 2+2=5 even if it would make me feel better. Religion isn't something you can just pick up like pilates. If life is inherently without meaning or direction, I'd rather go with that and be true to myself than refract the universe through some doctrine I understand to be false.
Self-knowledge, mindfulness, wisdom, spirituality, reflectiveness - I can make my peace with these. But I think it is bordering on unfair to proffer a deity as a solution to depression and anxiety.