The problems of religion in society in a globalized world

Note: this isn’t an anti-religious document, nor it was made to offend anyone.

This document wasn’t done to support any religious or anti-religious point of view.

This was written by somebody whose main language isn’t English, and this document is much more prone to have grammatical mistakes.

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One of the very basic characteristics of religions is that they, as a common cultural element shared by many people, strengthen the bonds between people, however, time has also proven that religion also splits us.

In the past, societies were more primitive and harder to coordinate, and religions played a role in the evolution of society by giving their people many things in common (like beliefs, values and a moral code), this gave religion a cohesive power between the individuals that form society, something which furtherly increased with its institutionalization and it's integration to education, however religion didn't come without price. It didn't only strengthened the bonds of people in societies, but also gave them rigid perspectives of how should the world be, the discrepancies of believes, values and ideals were so strong that they lead to violent confrontations, the rigidness of those believes and ideals also made it harder for this primitive ideologies to disappear, which also increased the time spam for religion based confrontations.

If we take a look at history, it seems quite obvious that with time there is an increasing tendency into interconnectivity and cooperation, and with interconnectivity, comes spread of knowledge, the spread of knowledge make it so that ideas meet with each other’s and when this ideas are applied to the world we live, if the ideas seem reasonable to many, it has the potential to become a movement, and like that, movement and ideologies based on universal values (like equality and freedom) to fight against social injustices that are still present today arose. The fast spread of these ideas and movements (like Feminism and LGBT rights) clashes against a rigid wall of much older perspective about world, perspective which are usually based and boosted by religious ideologies. And then, again confrontations are given, this time maybe not entirely religious, but still ideological, and religion based, at least for one of the parts.

Humanity has been evolving all this time, since it came into existence and it will continue evolving into the future, the evolution of humanity is happening right now, at the present, maybe not much from a biological perspective, but as society, humanity evolves through its technology, culture and knowledge.

But then, what is the real problem of religion? There are many problems with religion, because of the very nature of religion, of what it is and how it is, religious believers are much more prompted to fanatism, and as their minds are often biased into seen and judging other people, cultures, events and ideas from their own theological perspective, they are also more likely to apply and impose their religious ideologies and perspective into others, and that combined with the believer's recklessness to accept ideological changes or the rigidness of religions in general, becomes anchor for the evolution of society.

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Given the increasing tendency of interconnectivity and cooperation in the world, that globalization is giving humanity much more things in common to people than religion and that the problems of religion seems much more obvious to more people in everyday, it seems that the cohesive function of religion is becoming less relevant for our societies.

Author: Golden Dark Angel

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