I look at religion as a scientist might, as something to be dissected and studied, rather than experienced. I grew up in an agnostic household, the kind with a Christmas tree every December. My father, culturally Jewish and rather agnostic himself, used to quote the New Testament the same way that he quoted Shakespeare. I’ve spent more time reading St. Augustine than I have in church. As a child, I thought of of the Bible as literature, and even now I tend to look at sacred texts as stories, heavily influenced by the contexts they were composed in, rather than religious pillars in their own right. Particularly in cases dealing with womens’ rights and the like, I may be too quick to dismiss religious beliefs that clash with my ideals as ’simply’ products of a particular culture.
In literature, in art, in architecture, I find religious works beautiful and compelling, but I find that I tend to distrust the actual practice of organized religion. I never did it, after all. My mother was a member of a Christian cult for several years, and left disillusioned after seeing the way they spent their money. I don’t recall her ever speaking poorly of religion as a whole, but I can’t imagine that haven’t I completely avoided absorbing that distrust. The value of religion for me, then, tends to be less in the actual practice in more in the cultural artifacts and traditions that spring up around it.
Religion is a slippery concept, easier to identify than circumscribe; as Justice Potter Stewart said of pornography, possibly indefinable, “but I know it when I see it.” It has certain characteristics, chief among them a belief in some sort of god, higher power, transcendent human spirit, or mythical experience that cannot be touched without religious aid. It has a narrative, a mythos, and it places the person who participates in it within the scope of that greater story. It makes people a part of something larger than their ordinary groups.
It is a cultural phenomenon, a belief system than can both embed itself within a culture and transcend cultures. A religion requires groups of people, even in the sad cases where all but one of them are past, dead, existing only in memory. Even given all other factors, a religion cannot exist for only one person. To transcend ’spirituality’, it requires some form of community. Perhaps because of this, religion often functions as a vessel, carrying cultural information, tradition, or prohibitions through generations and across space. It has a tendency to pick up the native ritual and belief systems of those who adopt it, and so is dynamic, liable to change and absorb new culture as well as maintain the old.
Religion is a symbol system, but it’s a symbol system that serves a purpose. It’s a set of stories, but those stories mean nothing without the storyteller and the listener. Effectively, religion is a tool that people use to perceive the world, a lens through which they regard the things around them. This doesn’t imply that God, or gods, or the spiritual experience is nothing but a way of looking at the world. Gods may or may not exist, but their existence is a question of fact. Religion exists beyond the factual. The divine may live in heaven, or shoulder to shoulder with humans, or within the human heart, but although that divinity is often the basis for religion, it is a part of religion only by extension. Religion is the stories that spring up around it, the way that belief takes hold in everyday practice and changes the way people look at life.
