Where did spirituality/religion come from, and where is it going?

[Aquaplant]

Originally Posted by auroraglacialis

But life or human culture is NOT a machine with cogs and wheels and functional parts! This is my whole point, that this idea of claiming that there IS such a machine and that we ARE cogs in it and that this is just the way it is is wrong! We are no f-ing machines and if anything in that aspect is true then that this is how we made society look like with industrialization when these concepts of looking at society as if it was a machine first came up. But that image is either wrong as an image or if the analogy holds true in a number of cases it is not how it is supposed to be and most people know this.

Of course it's wrong, but what can you do about it? Try talking to people, and they all say that tough luck, the world just works that way, deal with it and so on.

Incidentially what I argue here is quite similar to what the Adam Curtis movie "All watched over by machines of loving grace" says, even though I really was sceptical about some of the parts about ecology in it, it has many points that are very similar to what I came to argue here now, albeit from a totally different direction.

If anything, humans and society is more like a large living being and in that, every cell is slightly different and has a purpose. Life is organic and not assembled from some parts with some leftovers that do not fit. Do not fit whose blueprint?

Nature works the way that those who do not survive do not fit the blueprint of natural selection, that is the driving force of life in nature. We humans have our own selective methods and hierarchies, but life is inherently cruel no matter how you look at it.

I cannot give a recipe. This is not a task for some lonely saviour who cooks up the plan how to make the world a better place in a small basement. But what I say is that there is a very different way to look at what should be the focus of the attention when it comes to solving the problems.
And my argument is that what has to change is society and culture, not the humans or their tools. Society has to adapt to human needs, instead of humans adapting to a society that is shaped by others (monarchs, oligarchs, free market economy, the results of the darker human urges running rampant, the "wetiko disease"). Humans feel powerless at this "machine" and thus redirect the need for control to others. To children, to animals to nonhumans, to the natural world. Those who are weak enough to control. But what has to be is that humans take control over their own society and culture instead of trying to take control over other cultures and of the nonhuman world.

"It is the way of men to make monsters, and it is the way of monsters, to destroy their makers."

Let me ask you, why it is that despite the amazing developments of the past 2 centuries that replaced supposedly "menial repetitive tasks of maintenance" like producing food and chopping wood with machines, oil or other inventions and discoveries - how we still have to work 8 hours a day to make a living. How it comes that in the past 3 decades, the workload of the average person went up and up. My father used to work and earn enough for a family of 4, nowadays, both parents work jobs, sometimes even two. Why not let the machines do the work and bum out. Certainly all the wonderous inventions would at least make it possible to work less than a person living in the 15th century. But it doesnt work that way - because there is something fundamentally wrong with the assumptions that we need more progress to fulfil our needs alone, that we need perpetual growth just to maintain the level we have now.

This is more about the economy going down the drain than anything else, seeing as the pyramid scheme of monetary power is on it's way to a collapse. Now I don't really know how long, and how much worse things will get, but when it is over, then perhaps there will be a better system implemented in its place.

I am not saying that these machines do not really save labor - they certainly do, but obviously that has not really the effect on society and on individual freedom from work as one would have expected. And thus I think more of the same will not be the decisive factor that helps along such an improvement.

When everything is measured in monetary profit, then automation just means more profit to the person who previously had to employ and pay people to do stuff, and now people get laid off and have to take menial low status jobs because they have been replaced by machines.

Well in a way yes, in another way no. Chopping wood may be repetitive, a choice of gardening, hunting, fishing, collecting honey, collecting herbs, picking seafood, picking fruits, searching mushrooms and berries or growing mushrooms, planting vegetables sowing and harvesting grains - it is not all that repetitive in the short run. It repeats itself over a year maybe. Most importantly though, these tasks are much less perceived as a repetitive burden at least compared to lets say preparing burgers, working an assembly line or selling insurances or financial products.

Some people like that sort of thing I guess, but I hate, I abhor, loathe picking berries for example, because I had to do it as a child and it was so annoying that I've come to hate it even more than ever before. But I know that I'm mentally unstable and somewhat crazy, so there are plenty of people who don't mind such things, but to me these things cause serious rage.

Not by themselves but if there are incentives missing to do something else, it kind of gets boring.
And I am not even sure if maybe people actually do tend to a higher level of insanity if they are having too many material comforts - especially if that means that they miss other things - social comforts, adventure and therelike.

I do not want to do things because I have to, I want to do thing because I want to do them. If anything, material comforts and wealth enable people to do what they want to do. For example, I don't have the money to go socialize with my friends in another city because travelling via train is insanely expensive here. I mean I can afford to do it, but not on a regular basis.

Of course we want comforts but we also want adventure. Thus we want to sit in a sauna or spa but also want to take a tour in the jungle or go paragliding. What is happening though is that in the society as it is now with the way we work now, we are actually working more and harder than it would be needed. Also we need to make more mental detaours all the time - to avoid being stressed out by some of the things mass society brings. All this makes us incredibly tired in case we are in fact not "good hamsters" or "fitting cogs in the machine". Then we just want to get some f-ing rest and sleep and not have to worry about maintenance and all that stuff. I feel like that in the evenings. But I also know from experience that this usually lasts only some time, if I get the chance to actually do it. If I get a three week vacation, I may bum out the first of it, slack on the beach or in the grass and do nothing but reading some book and drinking juice. But by the end of the second week or earlier, I will start to see if I can find some nice spot to go hiking or snorkeling and I may rent a bike or scooter to get around and have some adventures. Others may go out and have parties at night instead.

Intellectual adventures like reading a good book sounds nice, but physical travelling is quite tiresome. The only effort I'm interested in is intellectual.

This somehow tells me that this tiredness and desire to just slack out in a comfort zone is something that is not sustainable to the human mind.

I wouldn't mind if I had some company, as it stands it's rather lonely.