Connectedness

Will society be better without religion? The answer would depend on the state of mind of the society. If people can be spiritual without the help of religion, then society would be much better without religion. Religion is an expensive and wasteful enterprise. People waste a lot of time, money and resources to keep the religious activity going. At the core, every religion promotes a tribal mentality of us vs. them.

If we take out religion from society, will everything be alright? Almost all the massive massacres that the 20^th century witnessed are all committed for non-religious reasons, mostly lead by people who do not care much about religion. Joseph Stalin, Adolf Hitler, Pol Pot.. just to name a few. More people are dying from starvation and poor living conditions that resulted from political complacency and divisiveness. Based on these, I would argue that religion is not the problem. Fundamentally, we are responsible for our own actions. We might try to justify the actions by blaming various philosophies and belief systems. But in the end, these are all excuses to save us from our own guilty consciousness. Our actions are reflections of our true internal self. It might be slightly influenced by the society, religion, and environment that we brought up in. But as far as I know, no religions in this world support violence and hatred. It is just a matter of how we interpret the teachings.

If theism and atheism are equally bad, then what is good for society? I would argue for spirituality. You can call it by any names you want, but it essentially means a feeling of connectedness with all the living beings. It is a biological reality. Current evidence support that almost all-living being came from the primordial common ancestor. All life forms are written by the same language of life. We follow the same logic and laws for survival. At the basal level,

Evolutionary Tree of Life.
Image Courtesy: https://www.istockphoto.com/

we are all driven by the same forces; the drives to propagate and avoid death. As we move along the evolutionary tree we develop emotions and feelings beyond mere survival instincts. We love, care, idealize, calculate and think. We develop qualities that are hybrids of multiple biological entities: altruist attitudes, logical thinking, humor, thoughts and importantly the consciousness to be aware of thoughts. We see and appreciate the oneness in life. Intellectually, we know the tree of life that connects us all together, but that would not substitute the experiential feeling. We love our children, siblings, parents, cousins, then neighbors, then people who speak the same language, then who lives in the same country, then who have our same skin color and without our knowledge, the separatism creeps into our thoughts.
As we draw bigger and bigger circles around us, we will start seeing more differences than the underlying truth that connects us all. The more we open our eyes and look outward, the more distant we feel from other living beings. In essence, spirituality is looking inward to find the common thread that connects us all together. Experientially, if we can feel the same connectedness that we feel to our own child or parents to other living beings, who will hurt whom? Will you kill your own child, mother, father, sister, and brother? Will you kill yourself? Spirituality is nothing but an attempt to experience this physical connectedness with oneself and the rest of the universe. An attempt to truly realize that we are all nothing but stardust!