Studies show that 90% of American society has some type of religious or spiritual affiliation, and a belief in a higher power. Some theologians and transpersonal psychologists theorize that humans can’t survive without God. They believe that because humans have the most advanced consciousness of all the species, they cannot endure exposure to the notion of a Godless life. Were this to happen, a great many humans would remain in fight/fear/freeze mode thinking of their own mortality. They go on to suggest that death anxiety is the reason for what is known as “immortality striving” or creating so that some piece remains.
In my Social Work classes, I am taught to respect people’s faiths, and to use my filters when speaking to people so as not to over-expose them to fact. I am taught to weed out the negative aspects of their beliefs, and help them strengthen the parts that have positive ramifications for their lives.
What do you believe? Is God a basic human need?
© 2026 – SoulSequel
54 responses to “Is the only viable culture one that possesses religion or spirituality?”
Life is in the Spirit.
Without acknowledging this, we are essentially dead before our time. Our physical senses only see the corpse. What makes a deceased person deceased . . . is the departing of everything about them that our physical senses cannot detect: their spirit.
Life is in the Spirit.
We are all “wired” to have a “god” — some “highest ideal” that we aspire to and “worship”. In the absence of a Deity-beyond-us . . . we fabricate and justify and serve (worship?) a miriad of little deities-that-are-just-us.
Whether our feelings, our intelligence [often more perceived than actual!], possessions, money, power, accolade.
But back the truck up: ALL of these things boil down to . . . our feelings. Our feelings as “worshiped deity”. All of these other things, are just serving that deity.
So a Deity-beyond-us . . . if nothing else . . . helps keep us from worshiping just our own feelings and urges.
(And no, our feelings are not bad, not to be imprisoned or despotically controlled. They are just not meant to be our “deity”. Most human woes come about from deifying our feelings).
@griz i would disagree. What is an AI? Does it have a soul? If so, would it be a crime (ethically, morally, legally, socially) to shut such an artificial intelligence down?
@Jear77
Hollywood and scientism not withstanding, we have a VERY VERY long way to go before AI can be considered anything more than a mockery of Life.
@griz it might be sooner than you think! Recently an AI was shut down for not giving the researchers who created it the code for the language that the AI invented.
@Jear77
Considering we let everything from substances to our feelings control and dominate us, the risk of us being dominated by linear-thinking mock-life is both higher and closer then is comfortable to think about.
But we are still a very long way from having to equate pulling a machines plug with murder.
Scientism (the religion-like worship of pop-science) just loves to equate the superior speed of a computer’s linear processing with the intelligence that comes from parallel-processing like the human brain performs.
@griz if an ai can create a language, it’s mere months before it will be unable to be shut off because it’ll figure out how to duplicate itself. Then we’ll have Skynet for real (Terminator franchise) with a war against humanity that will end in complete disaster for the human race is just around the corner.
@Jear77
But is that “intelligence” . . . or just foolish/faulty programming?
(hint, is it “effective parenting” if the child ends up killing the parents?)
And please don’t glaze over the reality that scientism tries to apply religious process to pop-science and push a lot of false ideas (like A.I. is right around the corner to name but one) based very loosely on the science that finds its way into popular entertainment. For instant, most lay-people are more likely to accept what CSI says is possible with forensic science, than what forensic scientists say!
There have been several articles of late debunking the reliability of techniques like “bite-mark analysis”, “microscopic hair analysis”, “fingerprint evidence” and even “DNA evidence”.
They are good tools: but not the “almighty” we’ve been quick to accept they are. There was one case where someone who had never been (iirc) to Spain being convicted on fingerprint evidence . . . but then someone who HAD been to Spain during the murder showed up with the same fingerprint markers!
@griz and what makes you think the scientists didn’t know what they were doing? People who make big mistakes temd not to keep their jobs.
@Jear77
it’s related to what makes you think God doesn’t know what he was doing!
But I can cite proven examples of failures; and you can only cite your feelings and passionate insistent that God has failed!
No reputable court would convict based on such “evidence”
@griz well if he is as inept as the bible portrays it’s no small wonder that people are leaving the church left and right! There are several points where Jesus could have changed the world in such a way that no one could doubt. Let’s say instead of the feeding of the 5,000, he did a miracle such that no one would never need to eat again by speaking it into reality, forever altering what it is to be human. Or maybe when Lazarus died, in additiona ro raising him from the dead, Jesus could have declared that no one would grieve ever again, removing the grieving process from reality. But interestingly enough, he only did miracles that affected those around him.
@Jear77
Be wary of the messages of the various book-worship religions you “escaped” from (but not really?)
What is inept, is the finite’s understanding of the Infinite.
While the inspirations were divinely inspired, they were interpreted through very childish minds. There is value in examining the manifest process of a child. But understanding is suppose to develop over time and not remain with the childish scrawlings that mom loved to post on the fridge.
Understanding improved with the Physical Incarnation of Christ.
Again, you seem pissed that you are not God — continually asserting that YOU alone could intuit a better way for everything to have been made and woven together — driving you on a focus of continually looking for ways God is “at fault”.
@griz If an entire NEED were taken away, that had been historically there up to that point… could anyone deny that something happened? “Yeah, the history books said we were once needing to eat. Isn’t that interesting?”
@Jear77
So how would you resolve the energy economy of physical reality with a better system?
@griz What does Superman run on? Why don’t plants need food per se?
@Jear77
Plants don’t need food??
They synthesize sugar from sunlight but the chloroplasts still need nutrients from the Earth’s to form and grow.
You never studied the energy web in school??
And while Superman is a Canadian creation America fully adopted him: and I was of the impression he ran on Dunkins just like the rest of America!
So you don’t have a better solution? Maybe you should stop griping so much about the one that works?
@griz So sunlight and rocks bits. Great. Why can’t we do so? It’d change us to plants, but that’d be an interesting change.
@Jear77
You do strike me as someone who likes to stay planted in one position!
@griz this is a very good way of putting it. In Social Work 601, I have been learning about theories of consciousness. I am taught that it may be prudent to recognize where people may be in their conciousnesss, i.e. ego consciousness, witness consciousness, transgoic etc. In Ken Wilber’s ideas, there is a thought that there is another place. It is beyond transgoic. It involves disidentification with being the witness. The interior sense of being the witness disappears and the witness becomes the witnessed. What do you make of this? and have you personally experiences such as this?
@Scarlett I find myself stepping away in an effort to try to evaluate my reactions to things in a more objective manner than if I was to do that analysis from within. But I also ask; am I really on the outside looking in, or am I still on the inside of just a bigger version of me, but inside nonetheless? I don’t think I have the ability to be outside of that inside, just by the way my components are integrated to my consciousness mechanism.
@Scarlett
I came across this very deep response just as I was wrapping up at a wifi hotspot and getting ready to hit the road! It’s something I’m going to have to give deeper consideration to.
But I am having a hard time getting a definition of the term “transgoic”.
Is it similar to being a part of the greater process (witness OF it) rather than just standing at a point isolated from the process (being witness TO it).
@griz the transegoic would refer to transegoic model would mean to transcend the ego to a degree. the last and final stage as theorized by wilber is a place where one dis-identifies with the witnessed, and becomes the witnessed. basically the persons awareness has moved beyond diety, nature etc. it is described as non-dual mysticism. it is simultaneously the source, the process, and the realization of consciousness. wilber believes that every human being has the potential to meet this level
@Scarlett
I missed the “e” in transegoic! That gives me something to research into!
I see “moving beyond self as deity” as central to Christ’s paradigm. And there are expansions of awareness (and therefore intimate involvement) along the way.
It’s like a bell-curve that starts out gradually but then grows exponentially over time.
Where does it plateau?
Who knows?
The concept of spiritual non-dualism finds interesting parallel in the growth process of Humans from immature to mature. Children are not non-human. But they are also not yet fully realized.
And limiting this to just the physical doesn’t do full honor to the comparison: recognizing the vast number of people who are physically “fully realized”, but who’s mental, emotional, psychological, spiritual realization has stagnated or is even in regression.
I’m going to wait to read griz’s answer to make sure it doesn’t influence my own but I am looking forward to reading his view on is.
I would think God is a basic human need. God is a catch all in a sense that we can do everything from blame to worship and all elements that reside within that range.
My concern is that leaves a huge field in which to dabble in the management of Man for personal gain. Regardless of your views on Man versus Nature and which is more powerful, humanity only contributes the capacity in and of itself to appreciate that which Is.
Religion and spirituality are two different things. One is a mechanism guided by legalities, while one is more of a philosophical perspective that guides to introspective contemplation that guides your specific actions.
To be inspired, more than motivated, by the existence of a higher power is something that can make you want to be the best you can be for the sake of being the best you can be, versus the fear of an alternative.
@spitfire3dc we think alike! In class, I always write my own answer before I read everyone else so my thoughts aren’t tainted. Would you do me a kindness and read the question I wrote to griz? I would like to have your thoughts on that, too, but don’t want to type it all out again. thanks!
I don’t believe so. Recognition of a specific spiritual existence, force, or reality has been forever associated with violence, corruption, and control.
Furthermore, for such a thing to exist, there should be something such that we can examine it in a lab, not by evidence of a mass number of people, which could say “i experienced such and so” but at day’s end, the only thing that they experienced is confirmation bias.
Add to this idea that people believing in an outside force have the exact same problems as everyone else. Their lives are statistically the same as non believers.
So what’s does a person get from this belief? A feel good feeling about a destination after death, misery in this life over one’s actions – so called sins, and a forced paradigm.
I’m sorry, i can’t get behind that.
@Jear77 how did you go from being an religious person to a cynic? Did religion have a negative effect on your life?
@Scarlett that among other things. Loss. World wide tragedies of poverty, war, famine, natural disasters. The fact that there is no evidence. The sickness of scripture.
@Jear77
There have been many peaceful, purity-seeking and accommodating individuals who have recognized a specific spiritual existence, force or reality.
Once again you are trying to confabulate the characteristics of religion (tainted by the human desire for control), with spirituality (the quest for the pure, Beyond human foibles).
Ditto with the followers of religion still being a human.
Double ditto on the worship of dead words on paper producing harmful results.
@griz maybe the idea is to completely leave such things alone until death, dealing with such things If they exist at that point and that point alone. If everyone did, the followers would no longer be confined to human foibles, teachers / teachings, words, as at that point faith would be sight.
If everyone did that and no one accepted words on a page as divinely inspired, and everyone did as they saw fit, guess what? The most powerful being in existence would have completely failed in its mission of being able to have a relationship with mankind.
@Jear77
That’s a bit like the fetus deciding it will have nothing to do with this dastardly “physical development” and leave such things alone until the point of birth to deal with them.
And then, despite receiving all the necessary time and nutrients and support, it would pronounce that the mother failed in her mission.
(BTW, there’s that “not taking responsibility for yourself then looking to blame others” again)
@griz tell that to the spontaneously aborted fetuses that happen every day of every year
@Jear77
Remember what I said about riding into battle on the backs of those you see as less fortunate?
You conveniently miss the key point of someone who chooses to fail even when opportunity for success is provided, and then blames others.
Even Judas sought to own his own folly without blaming others. Was his process more blessed than yours currently is??
Its good wisdom; but does not cater to the delusions you choose to live under so your “god” requires you dismiss it by any and all means.
@griz who, except an idiot, asshole, or enemy would fail deliberately.
@Jear77
. . . someone who has been tricked into believing a lie.
A powerful lie with the ability to in trap own and ruin a life.
But only if we choose not to accept a provided way out of it.
@griz there are no lies here, at least none that are provable by the 4 dimensions we live in (time is the 4th). You can’t put god into a situation where he will ALWAYS do the same thing, i.e. subject divinity to the laws of science
@Jear77
You keep defaulting to a defense of scientism: that a lack of evidence for, means that does not exist.
There are a growing number of scientists who rebuke this as anti science; and hold that only concrete evidence against somethings existence, is cause to write it off.
(At least until the next surge in scientific growth!)
The moral being, the religious worship of science is no different than any other religion in its ability to taint pure pursuit for Truth.
The arena for Natural Science, is nature.
The supernatural, by definition, is “beyond the natural”.
I am sorry but your god does not function there!
Whereas mine functions here quite well.
@griz but this supernatural entity doesn’t give a shit about what we want, only that it’s will is obeyed, which makes is followers no better than dogs.
@Jear77
Oh my gosh, shit, Bingo and thunderation!
YOU’VE GOT IT!!!
It’s not your wants that God is there to service. That’s the territory of either a genie a nanny or a spoiling parent who doesn’t really love you.
God is about our genuine basic spiritual needs. And we for the most part, don’t know what these are. Any more than a child does not know what their physical needs are or how to meet them. That’s why they have parents.
This is so drop-dead simple Jear that you’d better start connecting the dots if you don’t want to nurture the impression you are stunned.
And only once you’ve made this giant itty bitty step, will you start to see that God cares for our spiritual needs but also listens to our wants; and loves to fulfill them in ways we hadn’t contemplated.
@griz You know what’s fucked up about that idea of the god that you serve wanting dogs? This god you serve has a “jingle ball” (you know one of those balls with a bell in it that rings when you shake it? If you haven’t, visit a pet store and check out their toy section, they’re a blast for to play with if you have a small dog). In this scenario, we’re (mankind, those that choose to serve him) are an incredibly stupid Chihuahua. I am using this type of a dog because 1) they’re annoying (people constantly pestering their masters for treats, they shrilly bark, and are scared of everything) 2) they’re no threat to anyone or pretty much anything due to their size. The dog’s master’s like “go get the ball, get the ball!” and stupidly they chase after it for the rest of their lives! You know what the problem is? The ball wasn’t thrown. The master retains the ball. And when the dog comes back the same scenario is repeated over and over again. Maybe the dog will be thrown a bone to distract it from the jingle ball. But by and far the dog is kicked around, stepped on when it gets underfoot, and ultimately euthanized. The abuse that this hypothetical dog gets is the problems – the war, the natural disasters, the famine, the diseases of life. The ball in this scenario is the promise of heaven (or a new earth, whichever interpretation you prefer). You say that the master loves the dog? WRONG!
@Jear77
Even we can ( or should be able to) grasp the difference between children and pets.
Children grow up and become one with adult Society. Pets never do.
That’s why people like them. They are like perpetual children, always dependent. And we are fortunate that their instincts drive them to the easiest path of subsistence.
But we are capable of far more than just subsistence.
@griz but the god represented in the bible treats us like pets in that we never know/ see the whole picture, we can’t get to the point of being able to go without god – completely dependent on him (at least according to the bible), thus we *never* grow up to the point of being as (anything) as god is, so we’re forever relegated to be the role of being the dog… Which brings me to the point: if you want to be treated like a dog by god, don’t be surprised if you get treated like a female dog (think of the British/ English term) in the rest of your life!
@Jear77
That’s what you found trying to religiously employ dead words on paper as a way of claiming reward.
Don’t mistake refusing to grow up for never being able to grow up!
@griz no. Unable. Can you (or anyone really) say “let there be (fill in the blank)” And it happens just through them speaking it into existence? What about a person saying “i will (or am able) to do x,” and things always work out, never any snags, working out perfectly, no problems ever? No? We are dogs, not children to the god you serve.
@Jear77
An interesting contrast to Disney’s Aladdin: the bitterness that we cannot poof things into existence maybe what cramps us into smaller and smaller itty bitty living spaces.
A lot of very good things started appearinf in my life and continue to this day — things that refuse to happen despite my best efforts.
And I have the ability to bring even more of these good things into my life by simply observing the wisdom of Matthew 6:33.
With two important caveats:
1. I never fancy myself the genie doing all of this of my own magnificence.
2. I recognized that the baby-mush is for babies. I am not afraid of challenges, snags or even the dreaded effort! I don’t mind having to do some of my own chewing, They are all part of the process that makes me strong, and teachers me about Fellowship — Oneness with a greater whole.
Neither the genie nor Aladdin had this. They were always apart from one another, on the verge of losing one another if the lamp was stolen or misplaced.
@griz so even HEAVEN will be full of problems and drama!,
@Jear77
Is this provable assertion or just feelings!
Problems are simply challenges we don’t feel ourselves up to. I have a taste of Heaven now ( I am a citizen of the Kingdom) and that includes the ability to overcome challenges, and use them to the benefit of many.
If this continues I will praise God. If this does not I will praise God! Because it’s an awesome ride!
But methinks you fantasize a lot of problems that don’t exist; and try to speak with authority on experiences you’ve never known.
@griz no. Provable by the very fact that heaven and new earth is a war zone. At least for a time. What makes you think you’ll be immune from being involved?
@Jear77
Even IF the battle was not God’s, and was NOT already won . . . I would be a fool to turn down all of the Wonders and assets available to me in the now; against some perceived nitpick of a spiritual future we have no physical frame of reference for.
Need I remind you that the nature of Prophecy is to not be clear in foresight? Certainly not clear enough to be using as an excuse!
@griz the wonders of a dog being thrown a bone but ignoring all the other dogs that are being kicked around. Sorry, I can’t get into that mindset.
@Jear77
I cannot even fathom where you’re getting such a mindset from!
Have you truly never had a relationship . . . where you weren’t the dog?
@griz you ARE the dog, maybe a well treated one. But look at EVERY person who is starving, EVERY person who is dealing with famine, EVERY person who is dealing with the horrors of war, EVERY person who has horrible diseases that waste away the body. If god exists, this is all his fault, as there were other ways to set things up. THAT is the god you serve, and see as such life giving. Sorry. NO. No more of this. Drop the subject or be blocked. Last warning.
@Jear77
I do not, and will not “ride into battle” against Life (or God) on the backs of others I judge to be “less fortunate” than I.
Do what you must.
It’s YOUR choice, YOUR process.
Just remember you are the one going to these places over and over again. Meaning they are unresolved in you. You can block and “groom” your input so it’s just what you want to hear.
But this is more of stagnation than growth.
Not at all. The idea helps some people, it harms others. Just depends on the people. I have no reason to think that a society can’t thrive without them. I think it’d be more of a culture based around science, which I can’t be too against. There are times that science and those that get into it may ignore empathy and whatnot, but that is going to be in just about every society and culture.
Follow ME!!!!!!!!