Friday, November 3, 2017

The Very American philosophy of Transcendentalism in synopsis

Transcendentalism is a philosophical movement that developed in the late 1820s and 1830s in the eastern United States.[1][2][3] It arose as a reaction to or protest against the general state of intellectualism and spirituality at the time.[4] The doctrine of the Unitarian church as taught at Harvard Divinity School was of particular interest.
Transcendentalism emerged from English and German Romanticism, the Biblical criticism of Johann Gottfried Herder and Friedrich Schleiermacher, the skepticism of David Hume,[1] and the transcendental philosophy of Immanuel Kant and German Idealism. Miller and Versluis regard Emanuel Swedenborg as a pervasive influence on transcendentalism.[5][6] It was also influenced by Hindu texts on philosophy of the mind and spirituality, especially the Upanishads.
A core belief of transcendentalism is in the inherent goodness of people and nature. Adherents believe that society and its institutions have corrupted the purity of the individual, and they have faith that people are at their best when truly "self-reliant" and independent.
Transcendentalism emphasizes subjective intuition over objective empiricism. Adherents believe that individuals are capable of generating completely original insights with as little attention and deference to past masters as possible.

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Transcendentalism - Wikipedia

As someone trained to think this way from birth I knew that I could easily start my own progressive revelation religion myself. 

 However, as I contemplated this my conclusion was: "The world has enough religions driving people crazy already!"

So, my thought was to help people create their own personal religions because large religions will tend to go obsolete in the next centuries for a variety of reasons.

They still will be culturally useful in many ways but generally speaking people won't believe in them any more because of Scientific educations.

So, my thought always was: "The native Americans that value everyone in the tribes dreams and realizations are likely the model people need to follow. This isn't just native American this is actually worldwide before farming created nation states and state religions.

So, I observed that individual religions designed by each individual would actually be the most useful in the long run. Larger Religions would be useful in pacifying groups of people within their own nations and continents but would be problematic like we see between Christians and Muslims now and we also see between Hindus and Muslims now and in the past and we also see between Buddhists and Muslims now with the rohingya Muslims in Burma.

The one religion all the others seem to be having the most problems with is Islam likely because people think it's okay to kill people in order to convert others to Islam (the Muslim religion).

It's hard to know how all this turns out in the next few hundred years or so here on earth.

However, in developed nations people will either tend to have no religion or have developed their own personal religions more who are educated and world travelers.

 

 

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