you are what you do*

not what you believe
or think..*you 'might'.."do"....
................................one day..

lol

""does religeon..have a place in our lives,""?

we NEED others...[man is not meant to belief anything
but man is meant..to try and live with others
live in this realm...and the next
AS WELL living..being happy
with/in ourselves..]

others are important
but not important enough
to do ANYTHING..against y*our beliefs


is religeon..""providing..meaning to modern Australia or not?""

of course..the govt minesters/judges..etc all swear oath
on their own instituted..local holy texts..

in this alone
religeon if only in part
provides reason/meaning..to..the institutional/district..called..*'australia'
[great south lands
Van Die Mens land
land downunder
OZzzzzzz
etc]

""Can religion be re-invigorated
as a vital backdrop
to contemporary Australian life?""

no we must respect our elders
keep the good...and respectfully
let the lies go gently to sleep..giving good for ill

belief cant be a back-drop
its a core..YOU ARE living your beliefs*

your works..speak for the 'real you'
not what you said..but what you did/do

religeon as we presently know it..is dead and gone

JESUS SAID..we can KNOW god...one to one..
[a personal living loving good]..god
emmanuel..[god within]

[good IS*..with*in us all]

we need to grow respect..for all*
[giving good..back to god..the only good]

teach kids..the vairious..'truths'
then let them chose..

nothing to 'win'
nothing to loose

if you got belief use it
prove your belief is right

be-LIEF*
be love love
love is more than a word
or a belief..if you relly love love
you would be loving the li-ving..[lo-ving]..you do*

have i told you i love you
how else...can i better prove it by works
yet all i got is words...[and i know talk is cheap]

That's a bit of a shame, Lexi.

>>I'm referring to relgion as a universal social institution - in my case the Catholic Church into which I was Baptized and which has been a part and parcel of my life.<<

It narrows the discussion to the impact on us of social institutions, rather than the need/willingess/predilection to believe in a supreme being.

For what it's worth, I'd say religion is as much "embedded" as your nationality. If you are born Australian, you are likely to consider that an "embedded" feature. Whether it means anything more to you than the name of the country on the cover of your passport, is a separate issue.

Some people - not very many, I suspect - actually take the trouble to shrug off the one (nationality/religion) and acquire another. That requires a level of dedication to an abstract concept that few people, I suspect, either have, or aspire to.

I have alway given this subject a lot of thought.
I take it as read any follower of any religion would have the same answer.
I was bought up in an active Christian house, and was Christian , then very active Christian until mid life.
It the boundary's to live by remains in my DNA but I no longer believe.
I do however very strongly,think those rules and boundary's are a positive for us all.
And that maybe a reason for current problems in our community include the lack of belief and hence the boundary's.
Firmly and forever a nonbeliever but it would not disappoint me if one united religion world wide for those who need want it formed the rules to live by would be of benefit.
I offer the late Rev Ted Noffs head of Sydney's home Church for the down and outs Wayside Chapel as a measure.
He said he was a Christian a Muslim and went on to name just about every religion, one thing he was is a force for good.

Pericles,

thanks for your amusing riff on gluten. I've just finished making a baker's cupboard and we're all into bread making (which has a certain spiritual dimension to it), so the metaphor sprang readily to mind.
The question is, do we want our society gluten free, or chewy? I'd say chewy, but I prefer Reformational ideology to Catholicism; it's a less dogmatic or mystical institution, and at it's best it offers a modest individualism that runs counter to the excesses and alienation of our gluten-free late-capitalist societies.
But institutions in general are conservative and might tend to bog us down at a time when agility in the face of a rapidly changing world would seem to be preferable. In any case I see all institutions as corrupt, more or less, the older they are the more so.
On the other hand the fabric (cathedrals and choirs) and traditions of institutions certainly add a corporeal richness to life.

George,
It's been too long.
My views on religion aren't quite so well-known as you might think, even to myself, as they continue to be reconsidered, and I remain open to debate on the subject. I am pretty much persuaded too that the human need for a spiritual or idealistic dimension to life is based on something real about us, that it's more than any of the competing materialist theories that would dismiss it as illusion.

@Squeers: Religion as a spiritual dimension to life, however, remains as a hangover for many the hapless individual.

Hangover, as in a something in our genes that we have no control of and can't get rid of type hangover. Rather life homosexuality. For some spirituality is not a choice.

From http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Religiosity :

"contribution of genes to variation in religiosity (called heritability) increases from 12% to 44% and the contribution of shared (family) effects decreases from 56% to 18% between adolescence and adulthood."

I am not sure why am individual who is spirituality would be considered hapless. I am not spiritual, but there are things I envy in those who are. And things I don't, of course. The ledger seems at best even to me.

Religion is embedded in my identity to the point that I was born into and raised as a Catholic. Which means that whatever our religious beliefs may be, we usually learn them from other people through socialisation into a particular faith. My religious convictions were influenced by the social context in which I lived.

However, things began to change with university, travel, and living overseas. I began to question what organized religion had done to the world and I finally began to realise that true religion is internal, not external. Today, I'm probably not a very good Catholic. I don't go to church very often. But I still find the need to go sometimes. I find that life without a conscious awareness of God is difficult, and I go to church because that's theoretically where I will find Him. But I don't go back as the spiritually half-interested, complacent congregants that many of my relatives were when I was growing up. I go back with an interest in actually having a religious experience.
That probably doesn't make sense - but there it is. I may not have all the answers to the big questions in life - I'm still on my own journey of discovery. I question my own beliefs up to a certain point. I may no longer believe deeply in traditional religion, but so far I haven't found a satisfying substitute.