Posted by:
getbusylivin
(
)
Date: April 11, 2016 10:57AM
Everyone is religious, although not everyone knows it.
For example, in addition to being a (crappy) Mormon, I practice several other religions. I follow baseball. I use money (and, more broadly, believe in the basic tenets of capitalism). I read a lot of Buddhism (another non-deistic religion, like capitalism, communism, etc.)
If you provide a good or service and, in exchange for your product, you accept either small rectangles of paper with pictures of Presidents on them or numbers added electronically to your bank account, it's because you HAVE FAITH. You can't eat a dollar bill or a string of numbers at Bank of America, but you HAVE FAITH that you can convert these symbols into something that meets a tangible need in the future--e.g., you get the munchies and want a pizza.
Some religions include as part of their imagined realities invisible supernatural beings (Mormonism, Islam, Catholicism, Judaism); other religions don't (capitalism, Buddhism, socialism, evolutionary humanism [Nazism], etc.). But they all do basically the same thing: they provide for our emotional needs while allowing us to unite with thousands or millions of other human beings who we otherwise have nothing in common with.
Me, I'm a cafeteria type--I like to go down the lines of all the religions and pick and chose the tasty parts of each: I'll take the goal of working selflessly from "Christianity," the imminent arrival of my Social Security check from the religion known as the "United States of America," the inherent superiority of the San Francisco Giants over the Los Angeles Dodgers from "baseball," etc.