Whether A Meaning System Is A Religion Or Not

Doesn't change what I believe is the fact that we, as a species, need transcendent explanation; just as we need meaning systems in the first place with which to connect to.

Meaning systems. Call them ideologies. Call them philosophies. Call them various collectiontions of folk wisdom. Whatever you call them, just understand that we not only need them, we need to have deep, and involving connections to them, in order to have identities at all, in my opinion.

Culture, as a whole, used to supply a lot of this as it would be a particular mix of all of these things. Now, of course, we have only market culture, and brands to believe in. "Wear thy brand as thy label," McLuhan used to say (or at least as I recall he did). Which is why connection now is so superficial and transient. Which is why meaning is not only more manipulable (because people are a great deal more suggestible now in my opinion) now, but having personal meaning so elusive as well.

Better believe that this will not get better unless something is done to change it.

A QUESTION OF BELIEF

Is Religion A Universal In Human Culture Or An Academic Invention?

8 diggs aeon Beliefs

What could compel the late Jonathan Zittell Smith, arguably the most influential scholar of religion of the past half-century, to declare that "religion is solely the creation of the scholar's study," and that it has "no independent existence apart from the academy"?