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At it's core, participation in religion is a reaction to freedom. Religions typically impose a code of behavior for it's members and often others. It's also true that many participants in religion pick and choose tenets like they're at a religious smorgasbord. I say it's reactionary because many of these tenets tell participants what things need to be controlled. We can make quite a list of all these things but I don't think we need to. Sometimes, reaction to freedom found in religious participation is harnessed by a government, again to limit freedom. To bring it under control. Whether participants in a religion are a defacto branch of a government or even oppose it, I'd like to paraphrase a favorite line of mine by Ford in Westworld. "The people are free here, under our control".

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Religious issues, beliefs and actions are so layered, and I encounter them in so many unrelated ways, that I have difficulty reaching any general observation. There does seem to be a powerful urge (is it genetic) for the human to find purpose and meaning in life. That is beyond the mere instinct to survive or to satisfy altogether selfish pleasure-seeking urges. As I would not altogether be a hedonist, so I would not desire to live in illusions. But what, beyond some speculation about "morals" and "instincts," the two "let's talk about this later" answers?

Tentatively I am drawn toward what I hinted at in the blog. Our cognitive frameworks, the conceptual building blocks that are at our disposal, are historical relics and not adequately, if at all replaced, in the present. On the frontiers of art and science there are hints and guesses, as T.S. Eliot observed, "hints follow by guesses." Or fearfully quote Yeats, Surely some revelation is at hand;

Surely the Second Coming is at hand.

The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out

When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi

Troubles my sight: somewhere in sands of the desert

A shape with lion body and the head of a man,

A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,

Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it

Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.

The darkness drops again; but now I know

That twenty centuries of stony sleep

Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,

And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,

Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

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Life is a journey. Problem solving takes more than an opinion. I'm afraid to say, it usually takes a great loss before many can realize fact. Religion is a way of life, too many say they are religious, but aren't.

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We really do have to wrestle with the distinction between fact and opinion. One problem is that we have "opinons" about facts, i.e. relevance or certainty. But the struggle really matters as you say when we have encountered "fact" in our own experience, and it matters to what we value.

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