(I'll admit up front i didn't read all the comments.) :)
Some of this is definitely familiar to me. I always used to joke with folks that there is a second set of basic human needs. The first set is the ones we always talk about -- food, warmth, water, etc. The second, tho, are things like The Need To Belong, The Need To Be Right, and The Need To Be Better-Than-Others... very similar to some of hers.
Organized religion serves to address these pretty well, but so can any number of movements, like political movements or intellectual schools of thought. Embracing atheism may or may not mean a person has transcended these needs, of course... it's far easier to replace one need-meeting structure with another than it is to personally grow to be free of them. (I don't mean to include her in this necessarily -- she has identified her own version of some of these needs, so hopefully that means she's aware of them in all of their forms.)
![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
no subject
Date: 2008-03-08 01:39 am (UTC):)Some of this is definitely familiar to me. I always used to joke with folks that there is a second set of basic human needs. The first set is the ones we always talk about -- food, warmth, water, etc. The second, tho, are things like The Need To Belong, The Need To Be Right, and The Need To Be Better-Than-Others... very similar to some of hers.
Organized religion serves to address these pretty well, but so can any number of movements, like political movements or intellectual schools of thought. Embracing atheism may or may not mean a person has transcended these needs, of course... it's far easier to replace one need-meeting structure with another than it is to personally grow to be free of them. (I don't mean to include her in this necessarily -- she has identified her own version of some of these needs, so hopefully that means she's aware of them in all of their forms.)