Chapter 4  

                     (The ambiguous “spirit” and its materiality)

                               4.1) Divinity and religion.

    Taking back the considerations above explained and fixing the primary relationship that I recognize be between the RD and the religions in general, with respect to which it is alternative and in opposition, I have to detain me adequately on this theme. I soon wish state that in my opinion it is preliminarily necessary makeoperate upon someone a net separation among the theist religions and that atheistic, separation much often neglected, but that is essential not to keep together faiths, as the three abrahmitic, which hypostatize a creative and ruler divinity with those, of the Buddhism or Taoism type (rather based on a meditative and behavioural ascesis toward the nirvana, the illumination, the spirit, the perfection, etc.) that do not provide for, even if not exclude, any divinity. Not by chance they, very often and from various positions, they are correctly defined  “thought systems”  or decidedly  philosophy , rather than religions.

    Only the first ones are to be considered genuine religions, while the seconds have much more the characters of ascetic philosophy, being found on a process of "purification-formation" or of  “ascesis toward the All”, rather than on the belief in the revelation and in the liturgical devotional practice towards an absolute and transcendent divinity. Under many points of view the seconds show themselves as " immanentist ", since all the processes happen and finish in the world we live in, without imagine some transcendental places where lives the god-person and where the believer aspires to go, like eschatological destination. This differentiation allows to reduce the investigation field and to take in consideration the religions that better represent that dogmatic beliefs, that in offering an exhaustive and global conception of the world binds it to the existence of an only God, creator, ordering, legislator and judge. Such are for excellence the already mentioned three monotheists religions that refer themselves to Abraham as mythical father.

    Goes observed that is enough easy and natural advance some doubt about the fact that the abrahmitic religions had few titles already in past, but less that never today, to sustain their creationistic thesis faithful to the Bible, and that anyway insist to defend them stubbornly, because without of them all their doctrinal plant would collapse. To well see those theses constitutes in fact an inalienable ideological base and in fact the removing of an only footstep on that ground would cause the collapse of all the doctrinal construction. Not by chance the attempts to discredit the Darwinism is so continue and implacable; that happens also with the help of numerous believing scientists, which (in absolute good religious faith and in very bad scientific faith) furnish their precious contribution to limit the theological damages. However I think that their task is decidedly despaired and that the they attempts do not go any more far to persuade again reconvincing their already believing readers, which looks in their affirmations for a prop to themselves faith, rather than the occasion to learn something of more on the intimate secret of the matter or of the universe in general [1].

    The definitive overruling (in truth only theoretical and not practical) of the creationistical theses dates from the moment when it is shown, and in way (I believe) incontrovertible, that the living nature auto-create itself in the time through the adaptation and the natural selection, trying and retrying the expedients and the ways more useful for the conservation and the the progress of every living species of the biosphere. And that an implacable selective process punishes with the extinction the incapability of a single species to adapt itself to the situation and to the environment, gathering for against (each time) the opportunities that, in the changing of external actions and reactions, the genetic mutations offers. To assert, as the Christian official theology want make us believe, that, even if the natural selection is confirmed in the more drastic terms, would come only shown that God uses it to continue his creation work, it shown in my modest opinion to try to play the last card of the most impudent mystification.

    And yet perhaps, paradoxically, it has been actually the uncritical attitude, arrogant and deriding, of a certain metaphysical positivism of the past and of a rough dogmatic materialism of the present, to play in favour of the religious faiths, allowing, in an ideological and implacable war, the winning maintenance of a position that only in terms of false cosmogony and of dogmatic metaphysics can still go out. For this reason the RD get out of an opposition attitude against the religion that found itself on purely scientific elements or on previous faults of it, and put aside totally from that (for me rightful) anthropological consideration that sees the religion as “proper” and almost “physiological” for the human psyche (perhaps straight essential in certain contexts and epoches) and not as historical artful and aberrant phenomenon, or even as tool of power by dominant classes, tending to promote the psychological slavery of the people to better realize that real one. It is indubitable that such fact was happened in various theocracies and tyrannies of the remote and recent past, but we cannot deny that the religions in general, and above all the polytheisms on mythical basic, have carry out a fundamental task in the development of the cultures and of the civilizations.

    We’ll say that in a prescientific and pretecnological world, yesterday's as of today, it is unthinkable that someone does not assume the task to supply elements about the history of the world and its structure, favouring the constitution in a community of a minimal patrimony of conceptual coordinates, such to define the relationship between the man and the universe, the order and the chaos, the good and the evil, the life and the death. In this sense is to recognize to the primitive religions also the gnoseological attempt to explain the world and itself show, the life and the death that reign in it, the sense and the not-sense of the parts and of the all.

    For this reasons the religion, generally, is attentively to study in its hidden meanings and not abhor neither criminalized. In other words: the religions, as principal grounds of all cultures, doesn't go expunged but assumed and above all "historicized". We must consider the religions as cultural survivals and, in spite of their hoaxing, positive, which, in absence of acceptable alternatives for the reason and for the psyche, continue to remain, perfectly working, even in the contemporary hyper-technological world, in wide population bands. And we can also add that till will not open new and believable extra-physical horizons, from a tightly anthropological point of view, perhaps would be almost preferable the persistence of religious references rather than find oneself in the arid regions of some rough radical and nihilistic materialism, denier of some ethic worth and destitute of ever humanistic and humanizing perspective.

    On the other hand, all that the men have produced in the millenniums has always answered to some fundamental need. The science and the philosophy, the religion and the poetry have risen and developed themselves under the action of analogous pushes to what have determined the developments of the agriculture, of the medicine or of the mechanics. Different is the applying side: the mind in the his different functions (intellect, reason, psyche, idema) or the body, in its efficiency need, feed, sexuality, well-being, prolongation of the life, etc.. Of this second one, so to exemplify synthetically, the agriculture solves the problem of the food, the medicine that of the health, the mechanics that of the effort. While the science and the philosophy satisfy and allay the uneasinesses of the intellect, the mathematics and the logic answer to the demands of the reason, the religion pacifies and reassures the psyche in its homeostasis need, the poetry activate the idema, feeds it and it forms in sensibility terms and intuitive wealth.

    But let us see then in the detail as the things are. The body has found in the mentioned activities adequate ad sufficient solutions, even if far to avoid the suffering, the physical and psychic deterioration, the death. The mind has instead found much partial solutions to the demands of his four components, since it doesn't have been able in any way to put end to the assaults of the unknown, to the uncertainty of the future, to the relativity of the knowledge and to the binding limits placed by the necessity of the matter that us constitute and in which we are immerged. One of the reasons is certainly in the fact that the bodily organs can yes have different needs, but they are in any case univocal, while the functional organizations [2] of the mind have different and sometimes antithetical demands not always easily compatible. We then can hypothesize frequent and imperceptible conflicts to unconscious level of the psyche with the reason and the intellect or of the idema with the psyche and the reason, such to determine some underground dissociative states, only perceptible as a momentary or persistent uneasiness, not due imputable to situations or facts clearly objectivable.

    Beyond these generalities on the problem of the fundamental human demands just now outlined I wish go into the specific theme of the present chapter to underline that it is the psyche the dominant organization in our mental system [3], even for the fact that it is, in evolutionary line, the part more ancient of the encephalon; for this reason the psyche can be also defined the “basic-organization” of all our mental structure. It, in fact, phylogenetically the more ancient of the neuronal functions and at the same time the more present and binding is in the daily and common becoming of our life. Interpreter of primary demands of the body as well as conservative element in front of other three organizations, the psyche pursues (as protectress of general and her own homeostasis) the more harmonic integration among the functions of the body (vital and nervous-motor) and that of the mind. But if the primary function is that of the maintenance of own homeostasis (promoting the exorcization of the unknown, of the chaos and of the death ) it just even pursues that global one, in the sense that also to tightly physiological level all our organism (in its tendency to avoid inside or external variations that requires a adaptation “work” or, in the worse cases, to face the trauma and the illness) may work and defend itself in the best way only if the psyche keeps well.

    If our hypotheses are correct it results then evident that the psyche, for be able to  work for the best therefore needs of a “general panorama” that assures, or at least that lets glimpse, “clarity”, “order” and  “peacefulness” in the becoming of the daily life and possibly the hope in a future over the death that allows the maintenance of own individuality, if not straight that of the own bodily image [4]. The psyche of the man then is just a perfect machine in its stabilizing function, which chooses continually between the useful and the useless, between the favorable and the harmful, for the best psychosomatic condition and for the survival of the individual in a context sometimes very hostile. 

    We can imagine that it would be able to have an immune system against the “extraneousness” not less efficient than that of our body with reagard to of foreign bodies, which rejects all conceptual stimuli that would be able to risk our psyco-physical equilibrium. It was the first encephalic nucleus with “super-nervous” performances and has modeled itself in the arc of about five hundred thousand years of evolution. For this it is the functional structure most powerful and most solid of our mind, which protects our existentive integrity not only from the endogenous or exogenous damages, but even from the potentially breaking up attacks that the other mental functions can inflict. The intellect in fact would be able make an attempt to its homeostasis with upsetting intuitions, the reason with its logical and computational stunts, the idema with the his escapes toward the extraneous horizon of the aither. Then is evident that psyche and religion are both homogeneus and that the mental presence of a religious faith surrounds the psyche of a efficient wall that makes strong and sure its citadel.

    A brief notation to what above explained. Already at the beginning (paragraph 1.2 ) we mentioned the way used for this kind of virtual “partition” of the mind in coordinated functions but singularly able to be isolated, to the purpose of the heuristic attempt to analyse the single functional contribution in the mental processes, apparently always unitary. That leads me even (and for primarily discursive reasons) to a not-scientific subjectivation of them, which may create in some reader notable and justify perplexity of which I feel the weigh. I hope that later I can better justify such option, facing it in the detail and loosening the knots that it can produce.

    Lets now return to the theme of the religions to take back a discourse already fact and remember that the commonly understood philosophy (those learned or academic ), in its frequent conceptual formalism, has an altogether irrelevant influence on the “practical life”, while instead the religious faith (when it there is an is solid) concerns from near all the existentive and existential components, and to it therefore psychically is inherent as the key with its lock. This connection, consolidate over the millennia of generation in generation, has made the religion ideal instrument for the birth and the radicalization in the mind of the man of an exhaustive and reassuring weltanschauung. While the modern philosophy, precisely, usually not deals at all of the existentive and existential needs, or if it does but in too intellectualistic way and in an incomprehensible language for the majority, the religion continues to be perfectly functional to the psyche. So, beyond high cultural value of its analyses and its theses the learned philosophy (even when it possesses interesting existential values) may act psychically on a enough limited number of person of middle-high culture, remaining however extraneous, if not straight abstruse and unfriendly, for the majority of the mens in the street. In fact, the logical and dialectical course that generally characterizes it, with few exceptions, requires a specific training, to which may or will approach however a limited portion of humanity, while that one excluded assumes in front of it a mistrustful attitude and sometimes rancorous, just because it perceives its elitist character.

    The religion’s on the existential ground has determined a monopolistic situation for which, in at least two continents (Europe and America), the Christianity has been able to manage the metaphysical demands of the people, without an existential alternative way. While likewise, in the rest of the world, have continued to dominate the traditional religions, in accord with the anthropological demands of his inhabitants or in the interest of the constituted powers. It so happens that in all the wide world the science is an only, but the scientists, which have too an univocal vision for all what pertain to the matter, are divided then in the metaphysical attitude toward all that it transcend. Therefore the physicists, as the chemists or the biologists are nearly agree on all that keeps their science but then (excluded the atheists and perhaps the agnostics ) are divided in Christians, Jewishs, Moslems, Hinduists, Taoists, Buddhists an so on. This plurality of weltanschauungen is the fruit of different civilizations, which, relatively to a belief field and bonded to specific revelations, prophecies, sacred writings and miracles on, don't be probably never able to find a common ground of metaphysical dialogue.

    And yet I want repeat it: under the historical profile the religions are the more solid product, and in some case even the more high, of every culture; rather, usually they represent the essence same of them. This cultural connotation makes them as an environmental food that every man assumes from the infancy and that is so strong rooted, nearly a genetic patrimony, that opposes to any disruptive and ravaging result caused by the conscience taking, on scientific base, of a verified reality and verifiable that denies it. On this basis for the men crowds the religions absolve marvelously their psychic function, from the age of the awareness till the death, preserving every psychic trauma in an orderly and reassuring vision of the universe and of the life. They in fact furnish an answer to the question that leaves mute every science: what sense has lo live and that it has to do to get the reimbursement of this existence, usually characterized by the suffering, in an other world beyond the death that set us in communion with God? But it appears besides evident that to furnish answers to this asks implicates a series of other credits relating to the cohabitation norm, to the ethic and above all to the definition of the concepts of good and evil. And if we consider that of good and evil concepts are fundamental to motivate and hold up an any community, become clear because the religions have historically constituted the institutional base of every people and the cultural motor of every civilization.

    Taking a step backward, and limitedly to the West, we intend now to consider the fact that even among the religions are worth, paradoxically, the laws of that biological reason that we have set and that they surely would deny: in fact there are the losers ones and the winners ones! In outline it can be traced a dividing border among two classify: that of the naive or natural religions (losers) and that one of the revealed or ideological religions (winners). The apparatuses that characterize the two classes are completely different in dimensions and qualities.

    The first ones have accompanied and still accompany the cultures when remain in a narrow relationship of the individuals that composes the group with the nature that surrounds them, which is left substantially as it was and with it exists a form of unchangeable symbiosis. In this religion form the divinity show itself in plural way and it is substantially present in the elements that constitute the vital environment: aspects and phenomena of the nature, animal, vegetable, and so on. Here the divinity is immanent in the territory and to the vital context; that authorize us to define this religions even as "immanentistic". The conceptual apparatus is very vague and tightly tied to the myth of the origins (of world and of the man). This is a made as a great fable that grows from its inside, since anyone that transmits it is at the same time carrier and interpreter, therefore in more or less voluntary way reduces or widens it and develops or changes it. Consequently, this particular and archaic kind of  “holy scripture”, nearly always only oral, is done (over the centuries) from many persons, or at least from anyone who has some little imagination and some ability and literary charisma to impose it in the attention of the others ones. The myth so becomes like a river, to which are flowed a lot of waters, that then is divided in many diversified effluents, but all referable to a common origin. As time goes by and the myth transmission goes the myth strengthens, consolidates and crystallizes itself. Examples of this naive religions, or immanentist, we have even today in those peoples that, with a certain approximation, we define primitive or archaic. But even the polytheist or  “pagan” religions of the European and middle Eastern pre-abrahmitic world, first among all that Greek one, are belonged to this class. And obviously they had been swept away in a few centuries for the appearance of the ideologies of the "only god”, which are the second class.

    This class is pertinent to the three great monotheists religions, that I have abrahmitic even called: the Jewish, the Christian and the Islamic: triad that in fact has the first as progenitor and of reference model. Here the nature loses every deification and the only god is put outside the vital context, in a more or less definite "furtherity", that transcends the human world: this fact legitimates the "transcendentalistic" adjective that we use. In them is not a precarious and plastically modifiable myth, but "holy scripture" stiffly definite; the God’s dictation is fixed in the unmodifiable texts from him inspired and of them is at most allowed some interpretation. This texts are guaranteed from the divine "revelation” that mould their character, made from God himself, of that they are immortal carriers and then "fixed" once and for all. It is evident that in this case the ideological structures ideological is very strong and make an univocal faith, which not admits any kind of deviations that could put in discussion the bases and the form up. In them, in fact, the text contains an "absolute" revealed totality  and then not subjecting to any form of relativism in any way. Then it stands to reason that becomes easy and natural, on the basis of the holy scripture, to draw a clear and simple system of beliefs and prescriptions, that promotes shareable and binding values sharing an binding for all the individuals that are integrated in its context.

    The historic irruption of the hypostatization of an only god is surely the fundamental happening for which the polytheist religions has lost rapidly consent just are appeared that monotheists ones. The passage from the multiplicity to the unity is already for itself satisfying and reassuring. Above all because, abolishing the plurality of the divine subjects, it attributes to an only will the reality of the world, eliminating all the contradictions and every possible oppositions. And as the God will is able to be only “for the good”, this is a value " intern " to holy scripture, that brings testimony of it and that is therefore inferable from the text that it constitutes and reveals. The evil stops to be real in its material terribleness, but it assumes whether the characteristics of a "formative" evil, that tests the believer for the divine good, or that of the “punitive” evil sent by the divinity for the expiation of the "true" evil, that "metaphysical" one: the sin. The evil in fact, from the point of view of the faith, it doesn't measured on the basis of the consequences that produces, but on the greater or smaller transgression of the divine laws. Such to the point that the morality becomes an ethics of the intention more that of the action, and the believer is feel permanently "looked and eavesdropped" from God as intimate judge. That involves naturally a fundamental aspect of the relationship, since if God sees you, hears you and reads you inside, you are able establish a direct dialogue with him. Then the prayer is not more only an act of faith, demand, invocation and praise, but a conversation with the "absolute truth" of God, to which the man is able to enter across the faith that consents and promotes the relationship.

    We will never be able to forget how much struggles and sacrifices have done by the men in the name of God. We would be able ask us as, in some dramatic situations, the men could be ever able to withstand and survive to the discomforts and sufferings, if the faith, with its eschatologic promise, not had furnished motivations, comfort and hopes. These religions had drive back the unknown and indemnified the nightmare of the mystery with the gift of the “grace” (or similar), that relieves the sense of the precariousness and of the fear of death. They are the mothers of the hope and with them was possible that become institutions the pity and the charity. Any human society, evolved and a little organized, had constituted without to be founded on the approval of the divine benevolence, which, across its ministers, had dictated, or at least suggest, the laws. If, as we have sustained, the things of which the human psyche has absolute necessity are the clarity, the order and the hope, having “homeostatic” terror  of the unknown, of the chaos and of the nothing, we understand because from what comes the triumph of the monotheists faithes: complete and not complex, exhaustive and optimistic.

    The fact that often the religions mortify the human mind, privileging the blind faith in the revealed truth and the devoted and humble obedience to the precepts, means only that the man has to recognize himself in the divine intellect, of which his is a copy. In fact, the demands of the human mind are already attributed, in their maxim ideal degree, to that divine, and then in it confers and recognized [5]; for which, from a certain point of view, it may be only formal and apparent the devaluation of the man in comparison with God, since God is the “god of the men”  and their protector father. It is as if the people of the men had chosen God as his metaphysical king: in fact, God exists because there are men which do it exist, to one's own benefits, at one’s own disposal.

    At to bear the cost is instead the Nature (our truly “real” mother), from which the man (as made in the likeness of God) comes ontologically detached, which comes to present itself as a foreign entity and stepmother, to subdue and to sack on divine authorization. In parental language an “invented” father incites the men to refuse to recognize the “real” mother until to turn against it. This is the enormous difference between the immanentist religions, in which the man recognized himself in the nature, and those transcendentalistic ones, in which the man objectifies it. Then if God is the “our god” the Nature will be able just answer to the cruel biological reason (fruit of the sin or of the Devil), but the man with his actions and his works it will enslave and modify in a way that likes to the celestial father, which in fact is put outside of the nature. The biological reason becomes then subsumed in the God’s will, which admits its evil for the best good. It can just regulate the biosphere with a fierce struggle for the survival, that trespasses always in the struggle for the supremacy and the power, but that is the fruit of the "original sin" and not of the biological laws, that as divine don't be able to hide any negativeness.

    All the transcendentalist religions pursues for their nature, and from always, even this aim: to authorize the man to dispose of the environment and of the other beasts at its will. Even if they had abandoned the violence in the struggle against other faith or in the repressing the internal heresies, their end remains always the power; on the souls surely, but even on the bodies, authorizing a violence on the matter, in any form it shows itself, that is never been really censored. For other aspects (but here in positive sense and in favor of the religion) the mouldable and workable matter (in painting and in sculpture ) offers itself to the man for a manipulation to greatest God’ glory. Only a dominated matter and transformed by the man (God’s son) is able to holy becomes, and in such sense the Christian religion in particular (but even the Jewish and the Islamic ones) had promote and favour the music, the literature and the figurative arts as demonstrations of the “divine” in the man’s work, by it inspired and to reoffering to the divinity as substitutive and sublimate forms of the primitive sacrificial offers. What any never have suspected, as we will say later, it is that to the base of the art not at all there is the “divine” with its creator puff, but the aither, that furnishes raw material, and of to being modalities and of to show itself forms.

    Across the preaching, the proselytism and the salvation promise the transcendentalistic religions pursues and obtain the control and the dominion of every metaphysical and eschatologic desire. They work accomplishing "the God’s will" (that we know to be the human will mirrored in God ) that is consubstantial of that “spiritual” (ideal) endless power that to the man is obviously denied in the reality, even as result of the inflexible laws of that necessity that to the matter inherent is. God shows then himself unquestionably as of intellection and of typically human activity concentration, with that virtual extrapolation that projects it in a fantastic and unattainable ideal, but that remains “nearly possible”  in the eschatologic perspective of an union with him, when will taken off the deadly body.

    The charm of the religion consist then even of the rewarding human filiation relative to an almighty father that is chosen and recognized, but that, in a phantasmal inversion of the reality, becomes  origin  and  end, closing the circle on itself as humanized God. In such case acquires a certain reassuring psychological appeasement just such human dependence in comparison with that "power will", of which God is depositary, united to the desire to have a father-tyrant to which refer, in a clear and rewarding outline of a presumed and artificially created “theistic” reality of the world. Ironically we can mark that this God would be well able to reward his sons after have them tyrannized and explained to thousand tribulations on the Earth in the name of an ancestral sin that would have determined the evil, eternally divided from the good and from this defeated definitely only when the Celestial Father will have decide to put an end the existence of the world, recalling to himself the highest fruits of the creation.

    The doctrines of the great monotheists circum–Mediterranean religions, in an intellectual dress and sometimes straight rationalistic (but answering always to demands of the psyche), achieve so those three fundamental objectives already mentioned, in bright manner, effective and convincing. They are, I want repeat it: 1) exorcize the unknown, 2 ) establish an order of absolute values, 3 ) guarantee a future beyond the death. But it is important to mark that in such perspective they develops their action in the merely existentive (material) field, because the existential [6](metaphysical-extraphysical) problem, already granted as solved in the faith, is how it would be among parenthesis or straight of the all ignored. From that comes an extremely ambiguous situation, since the so-called "spiritual" values to it afferent, of the all contradictory and purely dogmatic, become "confirmed" (or better “actual” made) from the extraordinary worldly powers on which the religion can rely on. Global power especially done in cultural field, but even in political one and sometimes in a not negligible financial power.

    Powers, those above mentioned, that are all perfectly coherent with the image of a creator God, omniscient, judge, almighty and providential: then extraordinarily  “material”, whereas all these functions are those from always ideally recognized or auspicate in the perfect “father-head-tyrant”. But just to escape to this dangerous evidence, the endless power and the boundless God’s intellect have to be declareded a priori entirely transcendent the matter, so they have to pertain to a "pure spirit" that to they would preside: such concept is in the base of all the transcendentalistic religions that have assumed strong social importance. And the created matter (of which the man is dominator in God’s name) is a divine gift, fruit of an act of love that gives evidence of an immense goodness, so great to even overcomes the perfect justice. Then, the man, in the God comparison, must to have also a sacred fear of his justice and of his anger, being able yet at the same time count on his boundless goodness and benevolence. God becomes in such way a sublime assemblage of power and fatherly benignity: how long does it take to define the perfect “humane” tyrant , just paternalistic and benign. In such situation the only possible freedom is to do the God’s will, because (as Adam and Eve are teaching) to infringe is not convenient.

    The "spirit" of the divinity, so expressed, makes that of God a very solid and  charming concept, since it is not only the "heart" (the psyche) to do it one's own, even the intellect and the reason (mainly by means of the cause and of necessity concepts) are able to accept it. The God of the abrahmitic religions is then perfectly coherent and homogeneous with the human materiality; in every his faculty an emphasized and redundant image rich of charm and gratification is given of him. To consider carefully God’s attributes, all in the sense of the "power" and the "dominion", it doesn't be hard to come at the conclusion that they for nothing have the of the “spirituality” characters [7]  how the common sense may mean. That is: indifference to power and dominion, detachment from the search of honour, admiration and devotion, having instead those of the "super-materiality", that is absolutely antithetical. That explains the abyss that divides the buddhist or taoist spirituality  from that of the abrahmitic monotheisms one for anyone that neutrally (or agnostically) judge them with objective attitude.

    Yet, I reaffirm, would be a heavy mistake forget that, historically, to spite of the deception by them perpetrated, the religions have been even vectors (but not makers) of great ethical values still now valid, which have surely help the humanity in the justice ideal formulation and of civil promotion, even if sometimes accompany from violent and homicide fanaticism. This positive contribution to the life and to the coexistence among the men has to balance in the historical judgment the ferocities that the religious ideologies had produced and stir up in the millenniums.

    But perhaps the greatest worth of the religions is simply to see in the fact that they helped billions of people to survive to diseases and sufferings, cultivating cohabitation ideals in the God name, together with the hope in an ultramundane reimbursement, where the injustices would paid back, compensated the sacrifices, sublimate the feelings. That had seen from the atheistic ideologies as one of the opium aspects of the religion, but from an anthropological point of view and not ideological is has to recognize that the “faith”, at least to individual level, had  “worked” rather well as hope producer, and that perhaps our ancestors, without it, could to live still worse of how had been.

    But then the religion, when we recognized what of positive the humanity historically has by it received (and minimizing on what of negative it had done and does), may it continue to dominate arbitrarily the consciences of the men in scorn to the intellect and to the reason? The answer obviously is: no! Even because, with the raising of the cultural level (where and when this happens), they are becoming of common knowlwdge notions of the reality that clearly are conflicting with the religious ideology, the what would not can subsist without have devastating effects in the relationship among the psyche and other mental organizations. This conflict, nonexistent for millenniums, would end to annul the extraordinary homeostatic effects that the religion has had in past on the psyche, acting in the future in the opposite direction. Then it, from stabilizing element of the psyche, could become destabilization cause, as would result a serious obstacle for its eugenic “adaptation” to of the reason and intellect unstoppable evolution, with which it has to reconcile. That would put then in crisis that homeostasis itself that the psyche has been able to produce for millenniums feeding with religious illusion.

    The RD then, contrarily to rather diffused attitudes among the atheists, doesn't intend neither criminalize neither much less mock the religion, but adequately “historicize” it . Putting it therefore in the panorama of a by now “historical” past, in which it appeared enough “functional”  to the cultural and civil evolution level in various epochs and contexts of, and not more unsuitable than a lot of secular institutions to it allies or adversary, which have been not less liberticide and oppressive than it. I reaffirm that, in my opinion, the religion had produce even positive influences on the individuals and on the peoples, promoting culture (excepted the scientific one) in general and above all patronizing the arts and committing works and monuments that are a not renounceable patrimony of beauty even for the most antireligious spirits. The culture and the art had represented for the religion some extraordinary  tools  of indoctrination and of prestige and magnificence acquisition, but their aitherial nature had done that the religious power (unintentionally) had favour the foundation of some “anthropic” (ethical and aesthetical) purposes, even if relative, of enormous importance for the whole humanity.