Resumo de World Religions, True Beliefs And New Age Spirituality

Fear is the most basic and fundamental psychological platform for survival. Without fear, we would not run away from dangers and we would self-destruct to extinction in no time. Without fear, no specie can last even a single day. Though we forget our dreams as soon as we wake up; a nightmare is not that easily forgotten.
The flipside of this feeling of Fear and insecurity is the search for security and comforts. It is this search that shapes our lives. Our fear and insecurity are limitless in scope and so is our search for security and comforts. On the other hand, the resources available to us are limited in quantity and quality and so we have to exploit available resources efficiently. This in turn means getting maximum or optimum outputs from minimum inputs. Our institutions whether social, political or religious, as well as our technologies and management techniques are all geared to maximizing or optimizing economic efficiencies.
Charles Darwin's theory of evolution has now been widely accepted even by staunch religious dogmatists. According to Darwin, it is the survival-of-the-fittest characteristic of all life forms, which holds the key to the evolution of all the variations of life on earth. We often assume that the strongest are the fittest. It is seldom so. It is the ability to exploit available resources that counts as a measure of fitness. In other words, evolution is the search for higher and higher economic efficiencies - getting more and more outputs from less inputs or finding uses for hitherto untapped resources. It is in this drive for higher efficiencies that evolutionary niches are formed, niches in which the particular life form efficiently exploits resources that are of little or no use to other competing life forms. Biological evolution may thus be interpreted in economic terms as the instinctive self-transformation, aimed at more efficient use of available resources.
The theory of evolution may also be applied to ethics, morals and values, politics, religions, superstitions, traditions and taboos, politics, sex and family relationships and other facets of life, which may seem alien to biological evolution. As in biological evolution, it is the pursuit of higher economic efficiencies that drives the evolutionary forces in these fields too. Darwin named his work 'The Origin of Species.' In its wake came the book 'The Origin of Family, State and Private Property' in which Friedrich Engels described how socio-political institutions such as families and states evolve in response to the prevailing economic compulsions. According to him, marriage and joint families as well as kingdoms and empires evolved in step with economic realities of the agrarian age. Slavery as well as its other forms, like the serf and caste systems, also evolved in response to agrarian economic pressures. Came the industrial revolution - a quantum leap in economic efficiency over the agrarian economy - and literacy became a powerful and indispensable tool for organizing the large industrial workforces of the times. Literacy in its turn broke the shackles of slavery and the feudal system and led to democracy and its tenets of freedom, equality and fraternity.
Not only we mortals, but also the immortal gods seem to have danced to economic tunes. Thus, the gods including the Lord god of Israel sanctioned slavery and the divine rights of kings in tune with the economic compulsions of the times. The gods approved of polygyny - the practice of one man having many wives - in the Middle East and elsewhere, and polyandry ? the practice of one woman having many husbands - in places like India and Tibet. This was done by the gods for the economic welfare of their devotees. This leads us to conclude that religions, superstitions, and their beliefs and concepts are aimed at maximizing economic efficiencies. If we were to have no fears or economic wants, there would be no religions, beliefs or superstitions. Conditioning is a form of programliving things for real or deemed enhancements in economic efficiencies. The Russian-born Nobel Laureate, Pavlov, was one of the first to study conditioning and reflex behaviors. He fed his dogs daily after ringing a bell. In time, the dogs associated the ring of the bell with their lunch, and it was noticed that their mouths watered at the sound of the bell even when there was no food. The dogs had been conditioned to a tenet that the ring of the bell means food. The ring of the bell is the trigger and the salivation is the reaction.
Thanks to our long gestation periods, humans are the most conditioned of animals, and we tend to think and react in predetermined ways to trigger words, trigger situations and rituals, though the trigger and the reaction may have no apparent or logical relationship whatsoever.
Tthough such triggers and rituals are the means to various ends, in time a few such conditioning dogmas and doctrines become ends in themselves. Such institutionalization of conditioning dogmas and doctrines are much in evidence in politics, morals, values, religions and superstitions.
?World Religions, True Beliefs and New Age Spirituality' is aimed at examining such institutionalized ethnic conditioning factors, which often prove counterproductive in the long run. The same principles of clear think espoused in this book, as applied to religions, beliefs and superstitions, can be applied to politics, economics, relationships and other fields where conditioned thinking is much in evidence.

Resumos Relacionados