From Faith to Religious Orientations: Dilemmas of the Social and the Individual, the Positive and the Negative

Abstract

For thousands of years, religion had held a monopoly on defning reality as well as determined the life of individuals, peoples and civilizations. Religious fgures have at all times been wary of science, while scientists are just as cautious and critical of religion. It is obvious that faith and science are based on different ontological and epistemological foundations. Not everyone is able to balance two positions. In the modern cross-cultural world, in the chaos of existential problems, Saecularis accelerates and gets into a spin, while Religio Renascentiae takes on the form of a grotesque. In postmodern consciousness, a semantic barrier has formed between “ratio” and “νοῦς”. But gods and angels did not die: in the chaos of worldview eclecticism, they transformed into depressions, psychoses, neuroses, bipolar disorders, etc. The ordinary man tries in vain to erase the ancient voices of the mass unconscious and turn them into dust on the asphalt of the trodden roads of the metropolis. This article analyses the problems of religious faith through the prism of its modernist reflection. Faith is positioned here as religious orientations in the dilemma of the social and the individual, the positive and the negative. The paper traces the attempts of the sacred and the religious to blend into the modern secular consciousness, in which religion is analysed from a rationally reflective position as a criterion for social destruction and
disengagement, as a consolidator of individual identity. The authors put such emphasis on psychology because they believe its vocabulary to be most vivid, utilitarian and at the same time understandable to the contemporary person.