Knowledge is based on studying and learning what someone else has discovered. The problem with this kind of knowledge is that it is always of the old and established. Then from that knowledge we build to create something new. Yet the knowledge is always old. That is the problem when it comes to being fully creative and innovative, when we depend on what is already known, especially in the realm of science.

Imagination breaks away from what is etched in stone. But if we are stuck in a position that what we already know is right, we can’t access our imagination. Dogmatic religions are based on, “We know this. This is right. You are wrong. Anything outside of our system is wrong.” This kind of thinking does not allow for the free play of imagination, of possibilities, of what could be. Instead we are stuck with what we have always done.

Societies that are tied to old knowledge are also stunted in their inventiveness and scientific contributions to the planet. This is because scientific progress actually depends on imagination. This is what Einstein said about the precedence of imagination over knowledge:
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“Imagination is more important than knowledge. For knowledge is limited to all we now know and understand, while imagination embraces the entire world, and all there ever will be to know and understand.”

Our ego-minds are always screaming out for attention. They are nervous, uncomfortable, and constantly concerned with the past and future. This quality has enabled us to rise to the top of the food chain. Combined with our ability to fashion tools and technologies we have been able to dominate larger, more powerful animals.

Humans are very weak compared to the larger animals and cannot run as fast. We are not covered with scales, fur, or other protective coatings. So what was left for us, if we were to survive in a hostile environment? The nervous, easily frightened mind, that could predict disaster and learn from past mishaps, was what brought us to our position on the planet and has ensured our survival. If we were happily basking in the sun and ignored the sound in the bushes, we would be somebody’s lunch.

But now we don’t need this over-reactive mind anymore. Yet it is hard-wired into us because of its benefits to us in the past. It drags us along on its stream of thoughts. It thrives on fear, believing that fear is what has protected us. It doesn’t understand that knowledge is what has protected us and not fear.
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This is why our nonstop trains of thoughts are so believable. They take us along with them on their fearful journey and we, like an audience in a horror film, sweat it out in terror. We know we are in a movie, yet our heart pounds and we wince in pain. Luckily, the human soul transcends this bundle of nerves, alias the brain. Systems of meditation, such as Buddhism and Yoga, have shown us ways to go beyond believing in every thought that crosses our minds. And we can find our path to peace.

Luciferianism reveres Lucifer not as the fearsome devil, but as a liberator, a guardian angel or spirit guide, or even the true God. This thought system came from the Gnostics, an underground Judeo-Christian spiritual movement.

People of the modern age probably don’t know enough about Lucifer, the fallen angel, sometimes considered the devil, to worship him. You might argue that modern materialism and its ceaseless emphasis on acquisition and retention, is a form of devil worship, however. Or you might say that we no longer seek the punitive image of Jehovah to be our guiding principle. That we are on a path of destruction based on false values and poor choices.

But that has nothing to do with worshiping Lucifer. Anyway, Lucifer, according to the New and Old Testaments, was created by God. He was the highest ranking angel of all. But he wasn’t content to worship and serve his Creator. He was prideful, he rebelled, leading a third of the angels to come with him. But he was unable to match the Almighty God. God threw Lucifer out of heave to the earth where he has operated as the devil ever since.

God did not create Lucifer as evil but allowed the potential for sin. While God cannot commit sin, He doesn’t take the choice away from those who want to sin. When Lucifer chose to rebel, he instantly became the author of sin. Evil is the result of a free-will choice by Lucifer in not obeying and worshipping the God who made him.
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So from the point of view of free choice, it is an explanation of why there is sin and evil in this world. Where this fits into modern day spiritualism, is that we no longer worship an Almighty God to dictate our behavior. We depend more on our own desires, sense of right and wrong, and what is on trend right now to motivate our behaviors. This is not worshipping the devil, but some may say it comes close.

It is true that as babies we absorb whatever cultural cues we are taught and pick up on. This ensures that we will be loved and nurtured and be thought of as good and not be rejected and punished by our tribe. But the operative words in your question are “as individuals.”

When we start to distinguish ourselves as individuals, we no longer just go along with whatever we were taught. We start to think for ourselves. We see that many of our sacred values are merely the result of conditioning and training. Mommy and Daddy think that all people of a certain race are bad. You think for yourself, find out for yourself, and arrive at your own conclusions.

So, as individuals, we are never the puppets of our environment. We clearly navigate our way through it based on our own experiences and reflections on them. This is what individuality means. It doesn’t mean being a sheep, a marionette, or a ventriloquist’s dummy. Many people do not exercise their individuality and prefer to drift along without ever examining what is declared as true.
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But if you are truly an individual, you stand on your own feet and are not swept away by the tide that pulls most people into its whirlpool. You can swim away.

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I would not want to live forever in any world, whether ruled by animal survival instincts or by a more evolved collective consciousness. We are destined to go through all the phases of earthly life. Each chronological age has its lessons on the enlightened path. It is arrogant to extend any of the natural stages through manipulation of genes and nanotechnology because we think some of the stages are distasteful.

Enabling humans as they are today to continue indefinitely will bring on a global disaster. Only the wealthy will be able to afford the longevity treatments. That does not look like a future I’d like to inhabit. But then, I am not afraid of death and see it as part of a beautiful, natural process.

Just as in a forest, we have trees in different stages of growth and decomposition, so humans go through their stages. When we get to the point where the Prana or Breath of Life no longer flows through us, our eternal soul is no longer tied to the physical experience and rejoins cosmic consciousness. Our bodies are no longer alive. This is not a bad or fearful thing. Our bodies have been changing constantly since we were little babies, so why all this fear around death? It is one more change in an endless cycle of something that was and is always changing.

Human nature is a complex thing. As it exists now, as we see it operating on the world stage in history as well, it consists of a lot of murder and tyranny over others. In short, the bullies ruled the playground and still do. I thought that we would have moved beyond the politics of hatred and fear by now, but a look at some of the countries of this world today makes me realize we are not there yet.
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What would be the point of living forever under the conditions of an un-evolved human consciousness? Is it worth it to keep your body alive when faced with no change in the madness of ego-driven human nature? The decision to live forever under conditions of insanity is based on fear. Fear of the unknown, where suffering is better than nothing at all. We fear going into nothing and this carefully constructed story will vanish. Yet, at bottom, we are eternal souls who freely express eternal life.

One of the characteristics of the human mind is its continuous search for “what’s wrong with this picture?” It is this ability to sense and see what is wrong that enabled us to survive and emerge at the top of the food chain. We survived through our enormous capacity to fear.

As we evolved and other parts of our rational minds developed, this fearful part of our brains remained. It is like the appendix that we no longer need.

We feared what was different. We didn’t trust the tribe of cannibals that did not look like us. They wore red feathers, we wore blue. We hated and feared them. They hated and feared us. They attacked us. We feared them more. We attacked them. They feared and hated us.
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So anyone who doesn’t look like our tribe, frightens us. They are a threat to what we think is the right way of life. We fear how they make us feel. A lot of this, too, is taught to us. Little babies aren’t alarmed by any perceived “differences” among people. They will smile at a an unkempt beggar and equally smile at a well-groomed socialite.

A huge, eternal laugh is built into the Universe. We can see it in the funny and strange animals, such as the giraffe, hippo, and sloth. The giraffe has such an amazingly long neck. It defies gravity and makes us wonder how it survives with such a heavy upper body. Can you imagine having a stiff neck if you are a giraffe? Yet it is precisely, and ironically, this long neck that has allowed this animal to thrive because it can eat vegetation other animals can’t reach. Its smile-inspiring neck looks like a liability and ends up being its main asset.

The hippo is funny too, unless you get next to one on a bad day. Then the cute and cuddly-looking giant water pig can get nasty and murderous very quickly. It is large and lumbering but can swiftly overcome a man or other large animal and run up to 19 miles an hour on its stubby legs. So the peaceful hippo, grazing on water veggies, ironically turns into the animal that kills more people than any other animal in Africa, including lions and tigers.

The sloth, too, is a humorous looking creature. I wouldn’t want to get in the way of its long, curved claws, but it can’t move fast enough to do much damage with them. It moves in such exaggeratedly slow motion, most people have to smile when they see this. Yet, ironically, sloths have been around for a long time, since pre-history, when the giant ground sloths slowly crept through the Pliocene and Pleistocene jungles of South America. Their low-stress lifestyle may make people laugh at them, but it is working out for them because they are not extinct yet.

The fact that they are so slow has helped the six existing sloth species on the planet to survive today. They do very well exactly because their movements aren’t fast. Sloths have a very low-energy lifestyle because they eat leaves that are very low in nutrition. They stay out of the “rat race” of swift and desperate food procurement on the prowl. They also move slowly so they won’t be identified as prey. So while we are laughing at the sloth and its almost insanely hesitant movements, it has a proven survival strategy that makes us look like the butt of the joke.
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These are just three of the many examples of the sense of humor of the Universe, which is on display all around us. From plants that get people to do things for them to the crazy dances of the New Guinea Bird of Paradise to playful kittens, puppies and otters, the world is full of joy, play, irony, humor, and laughter.

We can make very sure that the world we experience is not just a figment of our imagination when we bang our toe on the table leg, burn our hand in the fire, or bruise ourselves after falling down the stairs. We will feel pain and it is not all in our imagination. It hurts, and rightly so, because our nerves are sending signals to our brains. We can see the black and blue bruising. It is tender to the touch, especially when we forget about it and bang ourselves again.

On the other hand, imagination is the process of making something up that never happened. The fall did happen. We did get hurt. We might even have broken a bone. We are not making this up. No one is sharing this imagining with us either. We are the only ones feeling our specific pain. We are the ones who need to get that broken bone reset.

But what I would say is that the world we experience, may be and can be, a shared misperception. For example, the earth looked flat to people before global navigation began and proved this flatness not to be true. Yes, it looked flat but that was due to our ignorance and to our limited visual perception.

Another shared perception that is not true is that we are seeing the stars just as they are now. In reality, it has taken so many millions of light years for some stars to be visible to us, they have already died and all that is left is their glow in the night sky. One more example of shared false perceptions is that the sun “sinks” in the west and “rises” in the east. Of course, we know now that the earth’s rotation causes this visual phenomenon and no active sinking and rising is going on.
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Imagination is making things up that don’t exist and never have. The universe and you exist. You are not making it up. But how you perceive the universe and all of physical reality can be highly flawed, faulty, and based on ignorance. A whole culture and planet can share these misperceptions and take them to be the truth, when they are false.

You have hit upon an important point by linking organized religions with role playing. When we are children our parents and our culture teach us the roles we must play and the rules of those roles. If we stray from these rules we risk being outcasts, unloved, scorned, and not supported.

Rules and roles go together. When we play the role of a devout religious person, regardless of which religion it is, we will be admired, accepted, and ensure our survival. If we flagrantly oppose, ignore, or evade those roles, we might be put to death, publicly stoned, or even be considered insane.

If I had to choose which religions to role play, I would pick the ones that embrace the fun of life. The ones that include dancing and singing in their rituals. I would play the ones that view sexuality as something clean and wholesome. I want to play the ones that include forgiveness and inclusion instead of the punishment of an angry male god who is watching every move everyone makes on the planet, so he can torture them accordingly before after they die.

I would role play a religion that places women on equal footing with the male decision-makers in their organization. If we look at the major world religions, right away we see the gender imbalance when it comes to their hierarchical structures. I would not like to play any role where the wisdom of women is discounted or nullified.
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And I would not like to play a role in a religion that self-righteously kills others because they hate and fear a different belief system, roles, and rules.

One of the challenging questions, which has been a puzzling people even before modern times is: If God is all good, all wise, all loving, and all knowing, then why is there so much hardship, suffering, and cruelty in the world? Why couldn’t God just make a happy world where everyone gets along?

Various religions have attempted to answer this question, some have answers that will stand the test of time. Others may go by the wayside as did the Greek and Roman system of gods and goddesses:

Judaism:
Suffering is caused by a weakness in one's devotion to God. God gave humans free will to feel pleasure and pain, and His purpose in allowing deep suffering of the innocent must be good even if mysterious. God suffers along with the sufferer. God's sense of justice, and therefore the reasons for human suffering, are beyond human reason.

Will it last? Because Judaism permits people to call themselves Jews without believing in any of the dogma, there is a chance that it will endure as a culture for many centuries to come. The challenge of a paternalistic God who punishes like an angry father may be difficult for modern, scientific minds to embrace. Women of the world may object to God being portrayed as a male as they attain increasing autonomy in the world.

Buddhism: 
All of life is suffering and suffering is caused by attachments to worldly things. This attachment, which can take the form of greed, hatred, and ignorance in this life and past lives, can, unless mitigated, return as more suffering (karma)—as in Hinduism. Suffering is not necessarily punishment from a divine being, but rather something that must be transcended by not clinging to material objects or relationships.

Will it last? Because it is a system of thought and meditation, Buddhism does not depend on a paternalistic God who moves people around like chess pieces according to His divine whims. They leave God out of it completely. Buddhism depends on personal and practical life choices to alleviate individual mental and physical pain. Therefore, it is compatible with the most scientific research to date.

Christianity:
Many Christians see suffering as:

• God's punishment of sinful people.
• God’s punishment of the world as a whole.
• The a way a loving God tests the faith and fortitude of believers.
• Evidence of the unknowable will of a God who "works in mysterious ways" toward an ultimate good.

Will it last? The large, corrupt organizations and hypocrisy in high places may bring Christianity to a halt in centuries to come. It may not be rational enough for the modern, sophisticated thinker to trust that a punishing old man in the sky is manipulating everything for some end result that only He knows. For it to last, Christianity must undergo some radical changes and be more relatable to the educated people of the planet.

Islam: The word "Islam" means "submission." Many Muslims believe that:

• Enduring pain or loss is a way of submitting to the will of Allah.
• Some suffering is Satan's doing or is the work of his cohorts in the spirit world (the "jinn") and is allowed by Allah as a test of humility and faith.
• Suffering and adversity strengthen one's faith, as pain often leads to repentance and prayer and good deeds.

​Will it last? As in Christianity and Judaism, Allah also is paternalistic and male. This approach may not be compatible with female empowerment that is sweeping the globe today. Modern, sophisticated thinkers may see the wisdom in submitting to what comes their way as a means to achieve inner and outer peace. But they may decide to leave Allah out of the equation, seeing the process in terms of Universal Principle instead. Culturally too, Islam like Judaism, has given structure to people’s lives and may endure just because of the comfort factor in retaining the “old ways” and devotional practices.

Hinduism:
Suffering is punishment for cruelties committed in this lifetime or past lives. Even an innocent person who has not eradicated bad karma from past lives through charitable deeds may feel the pain of the karma of past misdeeds. Suffering is placed in the broader context of a cosmic cycle of birth, life, destruction and rebirth. Victims will be reincarnated and have the chance to be happier in their next life.

Will it last? Because the responsibility rests on the individual and his or her choice of action, we don’t have a God who is sending capricious punishment for reasons beyond our understanding. We also don’t have just one God. There are lots of them, some of them embodying destruction and even evil. But still, we have the reason for our suffering right now and it has to do with what we did and how we behaved. The form that Hinduism takes today, with its myriad colorful gods and goddesses may not endure but the idea of our basic responsibility for our own suffering is compatible with modern rational approaches to the reasons behind why things are the way they are.