Topic Discussion: Religion

The thing I most "like" about religion is that it is about What is Divine.

Though "religion" is technically the structure through which humans access The Divine, not The Divine itself. But I like "religion" for just that reason. I mean, I "like" The Divine ("like" is such a strange word to use here and not at all precise), but one of the biggest ways to perceive and understand The Divine is through how humanity interacts with it.

I love the Bible, for example. I love everything about it (though not everything that's in it). I love it bc it is a documented record of all the different ways humans thought about, interacted with, talked about and explained The Divine over a period of thousands of years. Maybe not a complete record of all humanity and all ways of thinking, but a huge record of a certain segment of humanity. Additionally, words are symbolic structures. Words, which are symbols, are used to define and express other symbols. What a giant puzzle, with endless layers upon layers of meaning!

By studying the Bible one can also see how other segments of the human population not directly responsible for the Bible's texts interacted with and influenced those ideas and understandings. So there is direct and indirect knowledge there. It is endlessly fascinating to me bc it is a window into the minds of so many people.

When thinking about "The Divine", whatever it is, I am reminded of that old tale of the blind men all touching the elephant and describing it all in different ways. They all had different pieces of the puzzle. I think all religions have glimmers of truth in them. All religions exist bc some group had a piece of the puzzle and they created an entire social structure around that one piece.

Consider a wall with a window in it. The Divine Realm is on one side of the wall and humans and our ordinary perceptions are on the other. Each religion has a central symbol (Jesus, Buddha, Goddess, etc). That central symbol is the window in the middle of that wall. The window lets in the light from the other side and you can see thru it. Sometimes one can actually stick their head thru the window to the other side. Maybe some people have actually climbed thru said window.

Religions are formal structures that grow up around those symbols. Religions express and delineate how humans think about those central symbols, how they interact with them. For various reasons, most humans seem unable to interact with The Divine in any way other than symbolically, religions formalize the human relationship to The Divine thru the central symbols.

This isn't precisely related to religion only, but one of the other reasons I am so fascinated by this topic is that EVERYONE can and does have an opinion, based on personal, direct experience (negative or positive). Unlike anthropology, my other big love, which many people do not know and some cannot even SPELL, religion and spirituality are topics that everyone can talk about. Everyone can contribute. Everyone has ideas. And anyone, even the least educated, can offer some knowledge that maybe no one has thought of before.

The thing I like the least is that some people learn a few things and then they stop. Stop learning but also stop thinking. And they don't wanna think about it. In any other topic or area, a person with just a little bit of knowledge would KNOW they were knowledge deficient, and they would say it -- "yeah I don't know a lot about that." And that would be it. Instead, bc of religion, whole swaths of people learn just surface information and they think they know just as much as anyone else, and that what they know is just as valid. It isn't.

I do practice Christianity in a Catholic setting regularly, which is what I was brought up in. However that is specifically structured itself within the Benedictine tradition. I don;t care to practice generic Catholicism. I do not practice Protestantism in any form at all, which is the form of Christianity I practiced deeply and devoutly for 10 years. In fact when I drive past certain churches, I shudder as I pass. I also practice certain forms of Pagan religion, especially as relates to nature spirituality. Certain pieces of Judaism also make their way into my own spirituality, though not formally as a religion.

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