I slept well last night for the first time in DAYS. So I guess this ranting is helping... thanks again to all my supportive friends for reading this.

Now that I've had a chance to mull over what I said in previous posts, I'd like to make a couple addenda (I think that's the plural for addendum) and a few remarks.

1) None of what I'm saying is fantastically new. Please don't think that I'm somehow making terribly insightful observations about the world. I'm just selecting points that I've read and forgotten the source to.

2) I don't believe that the only purpose that religion serves is to offer a support or somewhere you can put your faith... It serves a multitude of others, many of which are not as relevant in this day and age, and many which are more so (and the degree to which these purposes are currently relevant determines the success of the religion). For example, religion is sometimes a way of explaining the world (How we got here, why is there a sun... stuff like that), it is (was) a way of controlling behaviour and introducing ethics (If you're bad you have bad things happen to you.), it serves, through ritual, as a means to unite the community and to bring order and discipline to one's life (Islam is a prime example), it also served as a vehicle for the transmission of history (especially so for the Jewish), it was a way (sorry to be cynical) of creating society by enforcing absolute leaders (priests, brahman, ... back in the day, the pharoh), it offered congregation points for the community and lastly it inspires self-reflection (to a certain degree). I'm not saying this list is complete either but you get the point. Contrast this with modern day, where a lot of these functions are split up... the government provides the leaders, science provides the explanation of the world, more and more learned people transmit stories, education provides a good part of the other duties of religion, law provides an enforced ethics. I'm not saying that religion is entirely not relevant these days, only that a number of its original roles have been taken over (especailly by education and science). Religion is still here to serve as a support for those who need that kind of support, a source of community and a basis for ethics (which is sorely lacking sometimes.) But these roles are no longer crucial to the functioning of society and so thus the decline of religion.

-- rest killed by blogger... next post! --