Since William James, psychologists have been much interested in religion: from the concept of some kind of mystical experience, their thinking has evolved to search for the place of religion in the brain with the help of new technologies. What unites religion with neurosis, how do superstitions arise and how are epilepsy, sex and God connected? T&P publishes a transcript of a lecture by pathopsychologist Lyudmila Pyatnitskaya on the psychology of religion.
The lecture was given as part of the Praxis psychological education project.
The psychology of religion deals with the consciousness of religious people: it studies how it is formed and what factors influence it; by the people themselves: their thinking and behavior; as well as religious sects. A very important point is the exclusion of the transcendental principle. This postulate in the psychology of religion says that we do not evaluate whether there is a higher mind or not. We confront ourselves with a fact: there are people who believe, and we study them. To begin to study a believer, you need to understand how he becomes a believer. Theologian James Fowler described seven corresponding stages.
The first is a child under 3 years of age, who develops either trust or distrust in the environment. That is, his faith is limited by trust or distrust.
The next stage is intuitive-projective faith, based on intuition (4–7 years). This is our favorite “I’ll jump over these two steps and something good will happen.” At this stage, the child is intuitive in his faith: he has some ideas about what is good and what is bad, and this is not a formalized doctrine, but his fabulous thoughts about faith.
The next stage is the literal-mythical stage (7-11 years), in which a person begins to study fairy tales or myths and take them damn literally. His faith at this point is based on these literal myths.
Then synthetic-conventional faith happens (11–13 years). This is a conformist faith: at this age we integrate into a group, accept the faith that is in it, and are afraid to leave this faith and group. The most important thing is that some people remain at this stage. Then there will be no age restrictions, and nothing terrible will happen: we will accept the faith that is in our group.
The next stage is individual reflective faith. At this stage, a person thinks: “Is everything so good in the faith that I accepted? Maybe there are some errors in it? He is trying to regain faith in himself: the faith of the group was alien, now he is returning it.
Then a unifying faith happens, in which attempts to resolve the paradoxes of faith and inconsistencies come to naught, and we accept it for what it is. If this happens, then it happens at the age of 30. A person rediscovers myths and legends, but with a double meaning: if a child discovered all this literally, now we see double meanings.
And finally, all-encompassing faith. This is something that no one (or gurus and mentors) achieves. It turns out that it is no longer man who has faith, but faith who has man.
William James
How did famous psychologists talk about faith? I'll tell you about this in chronological order. William James appears first. We owe it to him that he was the first to talk about the connection between religion and man, but he did it more philosophically than scientifically. For James, religiosity was a person's attitude towards the world with a very important component - mystical experience and confidence in the existence of higher powers. What is a mystical experience according to James? If you cannot explain what exactly you experienced, if you felt inner enlightenment, if this feeling was short-term and then disappeared, and at that moment your will turned off - you had a mystical experience according to James. At the same time, inactivity of the will is present only at the moment of experience, but in order to get into it, you need to be very strong-willed and make efforts. James wrote a huge book about all this - The Varieties of Religious Experience. It is about the fact that the visible part is only a part of the existing world; there is also a spiritual part. The true goal of man is harmony with this world, which is achieved through prayer. Religion gives life new value, encourages heroism, gives confidence in salvation and influences the feeling of love. This is a very romantic point of view and more philosophical than scientific.
1.1. Methods for examining patients with psychopathological phenomena of religious content
Psychiatry is a natural science discipline. Therefore, its methodological basis is freethinking - that form of spiritual culture, the starting point of which is the right of reason to critically examine religion and freely explore the world around us. The researcher himself can profess any worldview, but as a representative of a scientific discipline, he considers all phenomena, including religious experience, in the system of those views that are generally accepted in this science. When considering religious content, the researcher brackets the question of their truth, leaving it to theology and philosophy. It should be noted here that atheism, under certain conditions, can be pathological.
The main research method in psychiatry is clinical-psychopathological. It consists of questioning the patient, collecting a subjective (from the patient) and objective (from relatives and people who know the patient) history and clinical observation. Using this method, mental health is assessed - symptoms, syndromes, nosological forms, course features, severity, etiology, pathogenesis are identified. As a result, a clinical diagnosis is established. Religious history includes information about religious upbringing in the family, religious interests, religious behavior, and religious experiences. The main purpose of collecting a religious history is to clarify the question of how a given person’s religious activity affects his mental health.
Rating scales. In recent years, the clinical-psychopathological method has been supplemented by standardization methods - rating or rating scales covering a certain range of psychopathological manifestations. In the psychiatry of religion, the PDI scale is used to study the characteristics of delusional ideas in religious patients.
Studying texts. Being an integral part of human existence, religious experiences are reflected in the Bible. In the Old and New Testaments, a division is made into “madness” as God’s punishment (Deut. 28:15,28) and revelations and visions different from it. At the same time, sacred texts are filled with symbols and metaphors; the meanings of the words in them are much wider than in the generally accepted interpretation. Therefore, descriptions of special mental states in biblical characters can serve as material for reflection, but not for psychiatric conclusions and conclusions. The same can be said about texts dedicated to the religious experiences of saints, for example Joan of Arc, who heard “heavenly voices.”
Personal documents are much more representative: diaries, letters. For example, only based on the correspondence of N.V. Gogol and the memoirs of his contemporaries, one can judge his depressive attacks with ideas of sinfulness, self-abasement and stuporous states.
Clinical and psychological methods, especially those aimed at studying personality, are of significant value for the psychopathology of religion. The use of questionnaires, surveys, interviews, despite their high availability for statistical processing, is limited. Their information content depends on the task at hand, for example, studying the influence of religiosity on the tolerance of serious diseases, drug use, etc.
The population method is borrowed from social psychiatry and includes the study of sects, religious movements, as well as observation and clinical analysis of the religious behavior of adherents and leaders. Already at the beginning of the 20th century. Studies on this topic have been published in Russia, among which the most famous are the works of N.V. Krainsky and D.G. Konovalov. The problem is currently being studied by F.V. Kondratyev and Yu.I. Polishchuk.
Sigmund Freud
The most ardent critic of religion is Freud. He believed that religion is dangerous because religion does not allow one to think critically, and if a person does not think critically, he becomes intellectually stuck. The danger is that if religion takes responsibility for morality and morality, then as soon as it itself is shaken, morality will shake behind it, and this cannot be allowed. Freud called religion a mass neurosis. But neurosis does not happen out of nowhere. For it to arise, a conflict and a complex are needed, according to Freud. This will be an Oedipus complex, I will explain why. Imagine yourself as an ancient person. You live in Africa, everything is fine, and then suddenly a tree falls on your friend. You understand that, damn it, you are also defenseless, you can die at any second. Living with such fear is monstrous; it is destructive to the psyche. You need to come to terms with ruthless nature. And since we can only negotiate with those with whom we can talk, we will humanize the forces of nature. The image of the father, and with it the Oedipus complex, is immediately projected onto the humanized, formidable and terrible forces of nature. Now we can arrange rituals to appease this god, because we can agree with him: after all, he is essentially a man. On the basis of this complex, a neurosis is formed, and not an ordinary one, but a colossal one - a massive one. Freud said that such a massive neurosis is useful because it protects against smaller neuroses. Mass neurosis is an illusion of calm, an illusion of salvation. You need to get rid of him. Why? Because religion, as I said earlier, is dangerous.
Faith becomes personal
Religion appeared not only as a tool for studying the world: external and internal, spiritual - but also as an opportunity to be involved in some kind of community. Gathering in groups is an ancient instinct of self-preservation. But now religiosity is becoming more individualistic. Pop singer Rita Ora successfully described the attitude towards faith of the entire generation, although she spoke only about herself: “I’m not religious, but I believe.”
The main subject of the new religiosity is the process of faith itself, and not the artifacts and rituals of a particular religion.
As William James wrote: to believe is to believe in something about which doubt is still theoretically possible. Believing is equal to feeling.
What Millennials Believe
- A believer, but not religious. “I believe within myself.” Such faith is based on a subjective idea of religion. For example, agnostics choose a “believe/disbelieve” point of view depending on how the interlocutor describes God.
- Hyper-individualism. “God is the way I imagine him, and not the way he is imposed on me.” Modern believers do not renounce themselves as the highest authority. Millennials and zoomers grew up during information wars and learned to mistrust. Zoomers are more likely than other generations to talk about the lack of authority - perhaps this is a consequence of being raised in the spirit of “You are unique, you are an individual!” Your opinion is important."
- I choose .
Now religion is not forever. This position is quite in the spirit of new generations, who question even such seemingly unshakable concepts as gender.
A similar picture was predicted back in 2015 by Alexey Firsov (former director of communications at VTsIOM):
“25 years ago, the population was experiencing a boom in neophyteism: religiosity was not only a personal belief, but also a broad social fashion associated with the lifting of political restrictions. However, over a quarter of a century, several significant changes have occurred that have weakened this trend.
Firstly, there was a significant separation of the concept of “church” from the concept of “faith,” which practically did not exist in the early 1990s. The church as an institution has encountered public criticism on a number of aspects of intra-church life.
Secondly, the psychological structure of society has also changed: the rise of consumerism did not imply the development of religious feelings.
Finally, after the infatuation took off, there was a natural period of emotional alignment. At the same time, a positive point in the survey should be noted: the share of those who admit that religion constantly helps them in their personal lives has increased 5 times. This means that religion, losing its institutional positions, is increasingly becoming a matter of private life and everyday attention.”
It is unclear whether the idea of individualized religions (“as I feel is how I believe”) will become widespread. On the one hand, this would be in the spirit of the times, on the other hand, this approach cancels the effect of belonging to a society of like-minded people.
Gustav Jung
Straight from Freud to his student Jung. Jung's most famous theory, the theory of the collective unconscious, fits perfectly into the explanation of religiosity. If the personal unconscious is an oasis of our desires, fears, instincts, then the collective unconscious is an island of archetypes that are built into us from birth. If John Locke believed that we are born like a board, like a tabula rasa, then Jung said that we are born with a set of archetypes in our heads and it is on them that our physical life, mythology, fairy tales, legends and everything else will be built. Jung simply observed that in different fairy tales, beliefs and legends, the same characters suddenly appear, who act in the same way, and the plots are more or less similar. And then there was this concept of archetype that we are born with, which has the same content no matter where you are. Therefore, Jung called religion the unconscious, but not the ordinary unconscious, but the collective. For a religion to work, several archetypes must combine. The archetype of God is a projection of everything sublime, good that is in man, the opposite is the archetype of the devil. As soon as God and the devil begin to fight, religion emerges.
Religious organizations and their psychological characteristics
Religious organizations, without which religion cannot exist, perform certain functions.
There are several types of such organizations:
- The Church is an open, constructive group of believers. The Church promotes the integration of society and acts within it, satisfying the majority of personal needs of all social strata of the population. The church attaches great importance to prayers and belief system. For example, the Catholic Church relatively successfully found a place to express individualist tendencies through the representation of its monasteries. Her beliefs and rituals satisfied the needs of a huge number of people at all social levels;
- Sects are small, unstable, closed religious groups. Their position towards the world as a whole, towards the state and church, society is either indifferent or aggressive. A sect always opposes itself to the Divine Truth. The founders of such sects always considered themselves smarter, more spiritual, and more virtuous than others. Members of the sect are guided by asceticism, a complete rejection of worldly values. Their principled position is expressed in the refusal to recognize the right, property, oath, power, etc. With the death of the leader, the sect disintegrates or becomes part of a more formal religious structure that can accept new members and ensure the satisfaction of their interests.
- A denomination is a semi-closed formal community of believers, which is an intermediate link between a church and a sect. This type of religious organization does not have universality, because class, national, racial, and regional interests may manifest themselves in their activities. It is only a stretch to call a denomination a church, because it is in relative, not entirely perfect harmony with the secular power structure. Denominations can be different, for example in the USA they range from Congregationalism to Lutheranism, adapted to civil power structures;
Frederick Skinner
Let's go further and come to the behaviorists. Skinner believed that religious behavior grew out of superstition, and superstition grew out of the classic behaviorist concept of stimulus-response: every stimulus is followed by a response. To demonstrate this, he conducted a simple experiment with pigeons. A pigeon sits in a pen and gets food every 15 seconds. The pigeon is happy, but for some reason it suddenly begins to suffer from some kind of nonsense: it starts dancing, spinning, shaking its head. For what? It's simple. When one day the food fell out, the dove turned around. And he decided: “Maybe this is somehow connected? I’ll turn around again.” And it fell out again. And he was like, “Wonderful. Maybe I’ll turn around again?” It fell out again because it drops out every 15 seconds. But the dove doesn't know this. A superstition has formed! Pigeons, indeed, had different superstitions: some spun around their axis, others hit something with their beaks. Initially there was superstition, which grew into religious behavior, and religious behavior developed into religious thinking and everything else. Beautiful.
Where the River Flows: Atheism and Islamization
Over the past four years, the number of atheists in Russia has doubled. More often than others, young people from 18 to 24 years old, that is, zoomers, do not believe in the existence of divine powers. The trend towards the absence of a specific religious faith is noticeable not only among young people, it is rapidly spreading through all generations. If in 2022 70% of people 35–59 years old (millennials and generation X) adhered to Orthodoxy, then four years later this figure decreased by 9 points in the same age group.
British historian Tim Whitmarsh believes that being an atheist is as natural for a person as believing in gods. The scientist sifted through many ancient Greek, Babylonian and Egyptian texts in search of atheists - and found them. According to Whitmarsh, atheism as a philosophical system was formed around the same time as the first religions that have survived to this day.
Religion should tell the seeker something new about the world and help him adapt to it. What faith is ready to formulate an answer to the request of modern 30-year-olds?
Judging by the way millennials believe, their request for faith may sound like this: “Where can I find forces that will not demand anything from me, but will adapt to my needs and give good in the present?” There seems to be no religion on the horizon that can satisfy this desire.
According to VTsIOM, there is another emerging trend - Islamization. In the total share of respondents, Muslims have made up a stable 6% for the last five years. Let's look at the distribution of answers by age group: young people are 3 times more likely to choose Islam than the 60+ generation. This is surprising, because Islam is one of the strictest concepts, requiring great discipline from its adherents. The liberalism inherent in millennials and zoomers in the matter of religious beliefs goes against the trend towards Islamization.
Maybe this is smart marketing? Popular personalities often publicly admit to changing Christianity to Islam, which makes the latter even more popular: Shaquille O'Neal, Mike Tyson, Zinedine Zidane and his sons, Janet Jackson, Franck Ribery, Rita Ora.
Buddhism, which neither affirms nor prohibits the presence of gods, unlike the Abrahamic religions (Christianity, Islam, Judaism), has a great chance of popularization. But whether Buddhism can be classified as a religion or is it still a philosophy is an open question.
Erich Fromm
Moving further along the chronological spiral and the course of general psychology, we move on to Erich Fromm. He was the first to give a damn about how religion turned out: he was interested in what came of it. He was also the first after James to say that, in fact, someone needs this, because, dear psychologists, your function has been performed by priests for many years. Fromm called religion psychotherapy, but not all confessions, but some. But Fromm also has a certain provocative idea: neurosis = religion. We've already seen this somewhere. For Freud, religion = neurosis, and for Fromm, neurosis = religion. The fact is that Fromm expanded the concept of religion to any thing that we live by, that moves our lives. iPhones are quite a religion, according to Fromm. Or the cult of personality - Kim Jong-un: there is no God, but there is religion. Fromm did not consider all religions to be psychotherapy, but only some of them, because he divided them into authoritarian and humanistic. Authoritarian religions are characterized by obedience, submission to doctrine, loss of independence and, as Fromm said, the greatest powerlessness. Man is powerless before religion, he is completely subservient to it and acts only to feed this religion. There are also humanistic religions. They are characterized by independence, the cult of self-actualization and realization of potential, the right to happiness and freedom, which is not regulated by anything, and, in contrast to the greatest powerlessness, the greatest strength. As you probably guessed, Fromm was a fan of Zen Buddhism. He has a book “Zen Buddhism and Psychoanalysis”.
Areas of religious psychology
Today, at the modern stage of development of science, there are several problem areas in religious psychology:
- the doctrine of the psychological foundations of any religion, analysis of religious psychological phenomena, that is, properties, processes and states, as well as their impact on other psychological phenomena, study of the psychological aspects of religious activity and relationships - cult, religious sermons, training, education, guidance, communication of believers etc.;
- revealing the dynamics of psychological states during the transition from religiosity to irreligion and atheism;
- methodology for specific psychological studies of religiosity and atheism.
An important component of psychological theory is the doctrine of the roots of religious psychology. They go back to social foundations and are determined by epistemological roots. The main, determining ones are social roots, which inevitably cause the formation of religion. In relation to them, psychological and epistemological mechanisms act as conditions that create the possibility of its appearance and existence.
The roots of religious psychology lie in those states, processes and mechanisms of social, group or individual psychology that form favorable psychological soil favorable for the production and assimilation of religion. These roots feed the spontaneous social and natural forces that dominate people. It is customary to distinguish between socio-psychological and individual psychological roots.
The socio-psychological stage is a phenomenon of the psychology of society and groups:
- crisis conditions of the socio-psychological atmosphere;
- perverse nature of communication;
- group and mass fears and suffering;
- public opinion;
- mechanisms of negativism and contagiousness, suggestion, imitation, inheritance of customs and traditions.
Individual psychological factors are those that work in human psychology:
- worry about various kinds of dependence on people around you;
- predetermination of internalized mental mechanisms;
- personal suffering and grief from an incurable disease, unrequited love, death of a loved one, etc.;
- fear of death or loneliness, etc.
Vileyanur Ramachandran
At this stage, psychologists have finished reasoning. They realized that they could look because methods of recording brain activity had become available, and they began to look for where religion fits into the brain. Of course, there is no “god spot” there. Religion is a very complex construct. But there is temporal lobe epilepsy, which more or less concentrated hyper-religiosity. Vileyanur Ramachandran is a very famous scientist, he is now working on mirror neurons and generally believes that they gave birth to our civilization. But he studied temporal lobe epilepsy too. I studied it in simple ways, namely GSR - this is the galvanic skin response of the sweat glands to irritation by a stimulus (a clothespin is placed on the finger). He had a group of patients with temporal lobe epilepsy and healthy people, to whom he showed words that were neutrally charged (for example, poker), sexually charged (for example, orgasm) and religiously charged (for example, god). For the norm, everything is quite primitive: we do not react to normal words, we react more or less to religious words, and we respond well to sex. Patients with epilepsy unexpectedly have the strongest reaction to religious words. This experiment was the first to prove that temporal lobe epileptics are characterized by hyperreligiosity.
The concept and essence of religion
Definition 1
Psychology of religion is the application of psychological research methods and interpretive models to different religious traditions, forms of spirituality, religious and non-religious individuals.
Religion is one of the forms of social consciousness, with the help of which a person tries to communicate with reality in illusory and fantastic images. This social phenomenon is associated with a special sphere of manifestation of the psyche and functions in the form of beliefs and practical actions.
Regarding the concept of “religion,” there are several equally valid theories. For example, Cicero considered religion to be a constant, vigilant and careful attitude towards everything “that concerns the cult of the gods.” True religion, he argued, is distinguished by sincere and selfless observance of the divine cult.
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Note 1
Religion is the basis of human morality and social relations.
The second theory belongs to the Christian apologist Lactantius, and its etymology has become traditional for most Christian thinkers and religious philosophers. Lactantius also distinguishes between the concepts of religion and simple piety, only he connects this distinction with the emphasis on faith in the “one and true God.”
According to S. Bulgakov, in religion, a person’s connection with that which is higher than him is established and experienced. Religion is the real life activity of a person; it is the forms and principles of organizing social life, based to some extent on a religious basis.
Religion is a worldview based on belief in the Divine. Religion is a cultural phenomenon, therefore some authors derive culture from cult, but the opinion that religion is one of the areas of spiritual culture is more justified.
Finished works on a similar topic
Coursework Psychology of religion 470 ₽ Essay Psychology of religion 260 ₽ Test paper Psychology of religion 200 ₽
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The relationship between culture and religion is an essential factor in personal, social, and state life that takes part in the formation of national identity, in resolving ethno-national conflicts, in establishing dialogues and intercultural ties.
The essence of religion is represented by sacraments, ways of personal relationships between man and God, and the affirmation of man in eternity. For religion, the ideas of fate, miracle, and higher meaning are important. For a believer, God is everywhere and in everything, in all being, in the entire human totality.
Michael Persinger
Then came Michael Persinger, who came up with the “helmet of God,” with magnets built into the temple areas. By turning on this amazing device, Persinger affected people's temporal lobes. Now we'll see what happens to a person when he puts this thing on - this is the editor of Skeptic Magazine and one of the world's leading atheists. Shermer felt a presence; he left his body. Thus, we can say with great confidence that the temporal lobes are to some extent responsible for hyper-religious feelings.
How religions are trying to reach young people
To say that most religions are outdated in their intellectual content is incorrect. Moreover, many are looking for approaches to changed people. In 2022, Germany released a Bible for Zoomers - a simplified text of the Holy Scriptures to attract teenagers to religion. The text has been shortened by 15%, and complex sentences have been broken down into shorter ones.
Perhaps in the next edition for the alpha generation, the authors will move from text to pictures or videos. Oh no, this was already done in America 8 years ago! The illustrations for this publication were drawn by Marvel.
American artist Stephen Sawyer, deciding to attract young people to religion, created the Art4God project - a series of paintings where Jesus is depicted as a handsome man who is not alien to either tattoos or sports. The iconography depicts the saint as the artist imagines Jesus would be if he were born in our time.
Cognitive psychology of religion
We have reached the cognitive psychology of religion - the most modern direction in its research. Cognitive psychologists decided that at some evolutionary stage, religious thinking for some reason turned out to be the most beneficial for cognition. Here the eternal debate about science and religion comes to a strange point, because at some stage religion was needed for knowledge, they made this postulate the main one: “Religious thinking is perhaps the path of least resistance for our cognitive systems” (Stuart Garty) . A lot of modern research is aimed at understanding how the image of a deity is fixed in the mind, how it works. A principle was derived that is called the principle of fixing a minimum of counterintuitive ideas. The meaning is very simple: we remember what, on the one hand, is intuitive and understandable to us at the everyday level, but, on the other hand, goes beyond the scope of our everyday life. That is, a memorable character must be, on the one hand, ordinary, and on the other hand, very unusual. This raises a question called the Mickey Mouse problem: why is Mickey Mouse not a god? Because this is quite an everyday thing - a mouse in pants, but one that talks. Everyone puzzled over this until the properties of the supernatural agent were experimentally deduced. The supernatural agent is not James Bond, but precisely our deity. It must be incomprehensible at the everyday level, it must have strategic information, that is, know everything about everyone, it must be able to act and motivate the people themselves to act (these are rites, rituals, etc.). Then another question arises: where did the old gods go? They were suitable for this agent position, but disappeared somewhere. Where did Zeus go? The fact is that there is one very important point - the moment of context. Some gods fall out of it. Zeus is no longer in our context and we now look at him as history. Maybe someday our confessions will also fall out of context, but something will replace them.
Continuing to study how a higher deity is perceived, cognitive psychologists decided to look at at what age this happens and how it happens: when a child begins to be dependent on something incorporeal. An experiment was constructed in which the researcher asked children to throw a ball with Velcro, but over their back. Naturally, the children did not succeed. They were left alone in the room, they had to throw this ball, but they didn’t do it well, and they started cheating. But one day the situation changed: they put a chair in this room and put the invisible princess Alice on it. The empty chair turned out to be very important. The funniest thing is that the children were asked: “Do you believe that Princess Alice is sitting here?” They're like, "No!" - and then they stopped cheating. This study shows at what age some dependence on a disembodied observing entity is formed.
Bibliography
"The Future of an Illusion", Sigmund Freud
"Psychoanalysis and Religion" by Erich Fromm
"Zen Buddhism and Psychoanalysis", Erich Fromm
Handbook of the Psychology of Religion and Spirituality, Raymond F. Paloutzian, Crystal L. Park
"Brain Phantoms" by Vileyanur Ramachandran
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Religion requires constant and long-term concentration. The speed of switching attention from object to object for zoomers is 8 seconds. Clip thinking, which is talked about so much, does not contribute to long-term contact with oneself, which many basic practices of the most widespread religions assume.
There are also those who do not find time for religion in their lives. The Great Guide to the Stages of the Path of Awakening by the Tibetan figure Zhe Tsongkhapa (1357–1419) states:
“Many years of life have passed in vain; half of the remaining will be spent in sleep, and also in other everyday activities a lot will be wasted. When youth passes and the time of old age comes, bodily and mental strength decreases, as a result of which, although you want to practice the Dharma, you do not have the strength to practice. Therefore, the time of Dharma practice [throughout life] is insignificant.”
This is how Buddhism answers the question why modern thirty-year-olds do not follow religions. While we are young and healthy, we have many routine activities, and we leave spiritual matters for later, for old age. But when we enter our silver age, our strength leaves us. Je Tsongkhapa quotes the Entering the Womb Sutra:
“Sleep steals half [of your entire life]. Ten years are taken away by childhood, and old age also takes away twenty years from life, and also grief, tears, suffering, sorrow, confusion and hundreds of illnesses.”
The experience of previous generations shows that as people get older they tend to join or turn to religion more often than before. Death in some religions is the path to rebirth, the starting point. And it is quite natural for a person to delve deeper into religion as he approaches this moment.
Perhaps millennials and zoomers will come to some kind of religion in 30–40 years. The question is - which one?
