We discussed in previous post the toxic effect of admiring and worshiping a hero in any given areas of your life. Like how the exchange between the worshiper and the hero is by definition an uneven and unfair exchange, and is a temptation to self-sabotage.
One of the most admired hero in our culture is God or any other prophet or guru. I am not arguing over the fact that God exist or it doesn't. I don't have any evidence to confirm or deny, but I know that praying and worshiping a God is no different than having any other idols and hero. You are giving your responsibilities to someone else as a form of denial for your vices and flaws.
Institutionalizing spirituality reduced it to meaningless rituals that hardly anybody knows what do they mean and why do we do them, empty rituals are nothing than superstition. As the point of the ritual is to remind and reconnect you with certain values periodically to bring you back on the right path, losing the meaning renders the ritual useless.
Churches today have the lowest attendance ever recorded, and this is not happening because people are sinners and they abandoned God it is because the church has hardly any value and truth to offer you.
The benefit from worshiping a heroic figure is not a direct exchange of value as much is the hope that you can become like him one day. Worshiping God is an attempt to become God, and this is how do we behave. For example when something bad happens to you, as a part of the grief process we pray to God to spare us from the pain and sufferance, we expect miracles that defies the laws of physics. We expect incurable disease to be cured overnight, we expect miraculous resurrections etc. And perhaps the worst thing that comes from praising a God is that we expect to become immortal, by going in to a perfect world without pain and sufferance after we die.
We are born completely ignorant to all this, in a dualistic world in which the main forces that influence as and shapes our behaviour is love and fear, your job in this life is to chose a side. This can be done by learning the true nature of the world. The spiritual quest is not about worshiping a God, it is about finding the truth.
Truth is what dosen't changes regardless of the time, place and circumstances, it is the only thing that it will give you closer in life. Truth is reality fear is an illusion as it is the pain in the anticipation of pain. Creating the illusion that you are hurt in the present while in reality you are perfectly fine.
Practicing spirituality is not by taking symbolic action, like participating in rituals. Practicing spirituality means living your life in the most authentic way you are capable of. It means finding purpose in your life by reducing others sufferance, not by assuming that after you die you will go to a perfect world in another dimension without pain and sufferance.
The spiritual person is like a detective, relentlessly questioning everything and unwilling to settle for anything else other than the truth.
