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

[Raptor]

Originally Posted by auroraglacialis

No of course free time is a good thing because that is precisely the time that we can be creative and innovative. Which we have a really hard time when we are entering in a work relationship between an employer and an employee in which we usually do not earn the fruits of our creativity or innovation but only a monthly paycheck and maybe a bonus payment.

That is quite the sweeping generalization. Also, do you think most people spend their free time being creative and innovative?

Even I as a scientist with rather increased freedom compard to many other employees do have to restrict my creativity to the topics I can get grants for and I would often rather like to go out and swim in a lake in the sun than sit in the lab - sometimes scientific curiousity is keeping me in the lab, but most often it is duty and a work contract that pays my rent and food. So to be against work is IMO not to be against being occupied with something, being innovative or creative, it is to be against the relationship between a worker and someone who gives the worker money for the work - in capitalism, the employer even controls the tools and space that the work is done in addition to the time and workload of the person who became a worker.
Freedom from that would be if a worker has controls over his own means of working - his own tools, his own workspace, his own schedule and in the extreme case the liberty to not do any work that he does not want to do.

You're arguing as if working and being creative/innovative in a capitalistic society are mutually exclusive.

Continual progress is not in itself bad, but I think it is a bad concept. Progress towards what? What we see is a change in techniques and technologies, new concepts developing, new relationships - but IMO it does not reall yhave a direction, just like evolution does not have a direction. What makes the kind of progress we see now a bad thing is that it claims to have a direction but that this direction is mostly focussed on growth. More production, bigger houses, bigger cars, faster trains, more airmiles travelled, more food, more sales, more people... basically everything faster, higher, stronger, bigger, more complex. And this direction is coupled with an increase in energy and resource consumption, the expansion is driving species and cultures extinct and frankly is not even good for the sanity of those living within the culture that promotes this type of progress.

Uh huh. Let's see, the Boeing 787 cruises at speeds typical for an airliner (Mach 0.85), and it is far from being the largest airliner out there. But I guess that isn't really progress, eh?

I would maybe also call it a progress if people learned more to listen to the natural world, understand the language of the animals, explore their emotions and beneficial cooperative social structures.

Um, you just typed out a bunch of rhetoric. Want to explain what it means to "listen to the natural world?" Nature is as much about competition as it is about cooperation/symbiosis, and the latter is arguably born out of the former.

IMO the NA'Vi are a very strongly developed and "progressed" (yet of course fictional) culture - just their focus is not on growth but rather on balance, it is not on machines but on relationships, not about competition but cooperation and not about doing things faster or bigger, but rather doing it at a scale and speed that is appropriate.

It's also a fictional setting where they have an entity, Eywa, that can, to an extent, control the ecosystem and maintain the balance. You speak of competition as if it's detrimental. It's not. Also, you want to define "a speed and scale that is appropriate?" I really don't think you can speak for everyone in this world.