Religion
Religion isn’t simply a story that helps us frame our experience!
Religion is one of the primary disciplines for investigating the boundary questions of life and death, of love and hate that characterize the human condition. Religious studies provide the opportunity to understand, with depth and nuance, the many beliefs and rituals that move us to appreciate the alternative world of the religious reality, to explore how humans understand. And experience the sacred, the self, and the world. It allows us to celebrate the complexity and variety within religious life and thought. To cultivate skills of reading, speaking, and writing. We share in the delight of asking (and even risking answers to) questions about the meaning of life and the sources of human and social transformation, and to experience the knowledge that arises from an appreciation of the place of religion in human experience.
Religion is – until someone asks us to define it. Practices and systems that we identify as “religions” are so diverse (not all religions refer to God or Gods, not all are concerned with morals, not all have beliefs about the afterlife) that it’s no easy task to bring them all under one simple definition. Of course, this difficulty hasn’t stopped people from attempting to define it. The definitions are quite wide-ranging: some emphasize the personal, others the social; some the beliefs, others the uses; some the structures, others the functions; some the private, others the public; some the mundane, others the transcendent; some the truth, others the illusion. In many cases, a person’s definition of religion is actually a definition of his or her own religion. But while no one definition can completely sum up what it is, they all tell us something about it and perhaps bring us closer to an understanding of what we mean when we talk about “religion
Spirituality is good for your health. That’s the finding of this new paper written by Angus Deaton. He says: on average, over all countries, and over countries sorted into income groups, religious people do better on a large number of health related issues.
The history of religion is essentially humanistic. It’s a force for unity. It’s something innate inside every one of us. It’s a personal choice. As humans, we are all in this together. We share the fundamental experiences of birth, human frailty and death.
Religion, that when confronted with a conflict between love, compassion and caring, and conformity to doctrine, will almost invariably choose the latter regardless of the effect it has on its followers or on the society of which it is a part.
Spirituality is one of the most fascinating areas of philosophy. It addresses not only the perennial question, but also the questions. If there is, then what is he like? And, most important of all, what does that mean for us? These are questions that everyone should ask themselves at some point.
We have just enough religion to make us hate, but not enough to make us love one another. Why is that?
