This is an expansion upon the notion of religion as fulfilling a function within society, including the function of consolation.

Myths do not come from a concept system; they come from a life system; they come out of a deeper centre. We must not confuse mythology with ideology. Myths come from where the heart is, and where the experience is, even as the mind may wonder why people believe in these things. The myth does not point to a fact; the myth points beyond facts to something that informs the fact. – Joseph Campbell

Religious experience, spiritual experience, existential yearning, the full gamut of the transpersonal paradigm stand as one in polar opposition to materialistic naturalism, primarily in its search or faith in the existence of meaning.

To paraphrase Lou Marinoff: Materialists believe that material existence came out of non-existence by an accidental quantum fluctuation. The big bang explains a lot of things, but what explains the big bang and how so much comes from so much nothingness? Darwins theory explains how primordial life forms proliferated and how life is an arrangement of self reproducing molecules that accidentaly evolved from nonliving matter, but it does not explain how primordial lifeforms came out of nonliving matter. Materialists believe consciousness, thought, memory and understanding are just electrochemical states of the brain. Thought therefore is just elaborate biology. But materialism does not explain the biological basis of being conscious or of thinking thoughts. Materialists believe that spirit is a figment of the imagination, and that spiritualism arises from a forlorn hope that there is more to the world, life and consciousness than mere matter in motion. Yet these materialistic views are nothing other than beliefs, not explanations. How does something come from nothing? How do living organisms arise from dead matter? How is consciousness produced from brains? How are experiences of pure light, divine music, perfect love, boundless grace, and cosmic consciousness dismissed as wishful thinking, hallucinations, or figments of the imagination? It is equally possible that materialistic denials of the special significance of existence, life, mind and spirit are themselves wishful thinking, hallucinations, or figments of the imagination.

To quote Shakespeare: And therefore as a stranger give it welcome. There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy. Hamlet

To accept materialistic naturalism and to reject the transpersonal paradigm is to miss out on the oppurtunity for the great existential spiritual quest.

If a human being did not have eternal consciousness, if underlying everything there were only a wild fermenting power that writhing in dark passions produced everything, be it significant or insignificant, if a vast never-appeased emptiness hid beneath everything, what would life be then but despair? If such were the situation, if there were no sacred bond that knit humankind together, if one generation succeeded another like the singing of birds in the forest,… how empty and devoid of consolation life would be! Soren Kierkegaard.

If naturalism is true he states, and there is nothing beyond nature, then there is a great gap in our lives and life is meaningless, human relations shallow and pointless, and there is no real difference between right and wrong.

Kierkegaard is looking to find responses to feelings such as anguish, guilt and dread, which he believes to be charactersitics of the concrete human situation. Central to Kierkegaards thought is the act of choice, we can choose to believe.

Response to this.