A World Without Religion?

Would the world be better off without any sort of religious or mystical practice? Many early enlightenment thinkers saw a world without religion as a rationalists utopia. At a point in my early times of agnosticism I shared this Utopian view of the ideal society. I have fraught the existential battle between rationality and mysticism for quite some time now and have come to my current thinking that religion and mysticism do have a valuable social purpose. Although religion has an extremely bloody past that has arguably caused more harm than good, the past does not need to be considered when considering its present social value. This idea of history bearing no weight on the present value of a system comes largely from the interdisciplinary thinker William James.

William James in The varieties of religious experience looked at people who described themselves as having transcendent experiences. The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy states the following about James's conclusions on the usefulness of religion:

James sets out a central distinction of the book in early chapters on “The Religion of Healthy-Mindedness” and “The Sick Soul.” The healthy-minded religious person — Walt Whitman is one of James's main examples — has a deep sense of “the goodness of life,” (V, 79) and a soul of “sky-blue tint” (V, 80). Healthy-mindedness can be involuntary, just natural to someone, but often comes in more willful forms. Liberal Christianity, for example, represents the triumph of a resolute devotion to healthy-mindedness over a morbid “old hell-fire theology” (V, 91).

James makes the distinction between a religion of harm and a religion of 'healthy-mindedness'. Looking at the 'healthy minded' views of Walt Whitman, one will find him to have accepted and adopted all religious texts, myths, and theories, while believing in none. He was a deist who believed the sole is imminent, transcendent (interestingly paradoxical), and immortal. His skeptical open-mindedness tended to the human spirit without belief in a specific theistic religious figure. William James asserted that all religious experience was the same at its core level. This illuminates the fact that it is not religion we should concern ourselves with, but with the core spiritual aspects that are universally shared amongst them.

I see great value in the way certain individuals view spirituality. It is too easy to cast out the idea of spirituality as a whole and dismiss it as irrational fluffy thinking; although, I agree that most religious practice (especially in highly conservative areas) it is just that. Instead, We must look closer at the positive aspects of spirituality found amongst the worlds religions. The great enlightenment value of pure rationality must be taken off the high and mighty throne to make room for other important aspects of human experience. We are thinking-beings just as much as we are feeling-beings. Cultivating rational thinkers is very important, although, this can and should be done alongside the cultivation of passion.