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I always valued religion as a means of comfort and safety to people.
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This fits exactly with deMello's belief as a warm blanket metaphor.
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I can't help but always ask, what is the point?
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This is one of the reasons that religion exists. Ironically, as I mentioned, the only real purpose seems to be survival (and it doesn't have to be your purpose, you simply won't survive if it isn't). Without the strength of the ideas expressed in religion it's hard to find purpose. So religion survives because it enables survival. It gives purpose and direction.
Personally, I call my own spirituality the WTF religion. Joseph Campbell often relates that the main value of religion is to connect the individual to the wonder that things exist.
Whether you're christian or agnostic or whatever, the reality that things exist is always there. The wonder that this glass of water or this rock or all of the night sky exists (instead of not existing) just makes me say "WTF!"
I'll quote joseph campbell on buddhism:
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Now the key story for me about Buddhism concerns the sermon where the Buddha was seated, and there was a great group around him and he just held up a flower. Just a flower. One in the group got what the Buddha was on about. For him, the flower itself was enough to spark enlightenment. The rest of the crowd were still in the dark, so to speak, so the Buddha delivered a sermon--the great Flower Wreath Sutra (Avatamsaka Sutra)--to explain what he meant, which was this:
There is nothing to say about life. It has no meaning. You make meaning. If you want a meaning in your life, find a meaning and bring it into your life, but life won't give you a meaning. Meaning is a concept. It is a notion of an end toward which you are going. The point of Buddhism is this is it.
The Buddha is called tathagata, "the one who has come, thus"; the flower is the tathagata that has come thus. The Buddha is often shown just looking at the flower. That flower is the world. That flower is a flower. That flower is what I am looking at now. This has been made to serve an end but that is not the essence of the mystery of this thing. The essence of the mystery is its very being, which has a ring around it of cosmic ocean, you might say, beyond which you cannot look.
Buddhism is the illumination to the fact, the realization of the fact that this is it. You are it and it is nothing. It is a very difficult thing to tell anyone about because the words themselves suggest that there is a meaning here, but the thing is just to get it, and that is why you can't communicate or teach Buddhism: you can only bring a person up to it.
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That's my story about purpose. My flower is the woman I'm going to marry here within a year or so. The children we're going to have. The scientific/mathematic path I take and that I defend my PhD dissertation on monday. Why? Because these things connect me to the mystery of existence. That a rock or a glass or her smile exists at all instead of not existing.
For christians, their flower is jesus or the cross. etc.
To me, eternal life is what it says in that buddhist quote: "This is it." It's not something that goes on forever. It's something beyond categories of time and future and past. This is how the metaphor of jesus' and buddha's teachings speak to me.