Among other psychoanalytic interpreters of religion, the American scholar Erich Fromm (1900-80) modified Freudian theory and produced a more complex account of the functions of religion. As things stand now, we face a terrifying future with little capacity to see a pathway through the mess of living complex messes we have unconsciously created. Religious intellectual inquiry is the endeavor to understand faith as a characteristic quality or potentiality of human life, that propensity of hu-mans (hubris humans) that across the centuries and across the world (within complex societies) that has given rise to a prodigious variety of religious forms, and yet has remained elusive and personal, prior to and beyond the believing forms that fideism has mutated into. We believe in our narrative of the world only because of our ignorance. Econ’s Income Shifting Strategies gave me a financial education and myEcon’s World Class Compensation Plan empowered me to build a six-figure annual income.

Using all of their energy and creativity they seek to bring the Gospel of Jesus Christ by educating and evangelizing them. We accept Jesus by faith. There can be no defending religious and faith based claims about the unknowable, of things outside the cosmos. Since “religion” has not always been thought of as equal to “beliefs”, then there may be something else going on with folks who are religious, something which reductionist dismissives, who view religion as the set of “their beliefs,” miss. Modern views of “religion” and “faith” as atavisms was uncritically accepted by the more “progressive” thinking products of Modern culture and routinely taught as the truth of the matter in our universities in the mid-to late 20th Century by those lacking epistemic humility. To equate “religion” with a set of “beliefs” is a recent Modern invention, commonly accepted as an adequate and proper characterization of religion. No defense of “religion” is implied, but a need for conceptual clarity and adequate scholarship is. For example, “I have a need to believe that eventually we’ll have a human on the planet that really does understand it and can live with it properly” is a fideist expression (of James Lovelock et al., other fideists being Occam, Pascal, Kant, James, Kierkegaard, Wittgenstein, Peirce, Unamuno, Zhen, and Martin Gardner) that implies a recognition of potential, not belief-based certitude.

The challenge is to understand the impulse that lies behind the belief-based forms, and the meaning/addictions that they have conferred/inflicted upon their billions of adherents. That most religious scholars of the 21st Century have rejected dismissive views of religion could be another iteration in error, ignorance, and illusion as usual. The scholars Jenifer Snook, Thad Horrell, and Kirsten Horton argued that in doing so, these Heathens ignore the fact that most of them are considered “white”, and have thus perpetrated and benefited from colonial and imperial policies against indigenous communities in the Americas and elsewhere. Faith is based on idiosyncratic need, as William James argued. Within the sects of the Latter Day Saint movement, the Articles of Faith are contained in a list which was composed by Joseph Smith as part of an 1842 letter which he sent to “Long” John Wentworth, editor of the Chicago Democrat. Organized religions are religious control systems based on beliefs that can be virally spread within memetic systems. You can also follow us on Twitter @hiddenbrain.

Indeed, in his paper on Pakistan, Matthew Nelson suggests that sectarian conflict-rather than ideological convergence-is one potential area where The Islamic State can make inroads and gain influence among South Asia’s militant groups. Minority groups and independent observers have complained that this system comprises religious discrimination, especially as the media regularly names nontraditional groups as ‘sects’. This familiar yellow star accounts for a staggering 99.8 percent of all the mass in the solar system – Jupiter included. Scar is a symbol of Satan, he is jealous and full of rage he was banished from the herd for his evilness just as lucifer became the fallen star. A ‘sense of self and other’ is the original story told by the storytelling animal as socially shared explanatory fiction, as foundational conceptual dualism. The ‘I close and open my eyes’ is narrative, based on memory and selection, the telling of a story of a conscious entity. Eyes close; eyes open. Sagittarians’ entrepreneurial spirit and their ability to think outside the box can be valuable assets in the financial realm. I think I may write a bible lesson to tech my kids! A review may be a start, and the book is available on bittorent and elsewhere.