Religion - Its proper purpose

Oh no. 

I will try to write about the term religion again. This pesky word, that is so heavily abused in all kinds of ways that it many times during my life's journeys has been impossible to use, even though I in some certain ways always have been religious. Yet terms like "spiritual" or "idealist" or what have you often has been better to use just to get people to understand what line of life I'm actually pursuing and for them not to hear their prejudices or simply their own version of the term which may be the opposite of what I actually mean myself by the term. 

Now I am at the point however where I'm not afraid of these misconceptions, at least not in the same way I was before. Religion and to be religious is in my mind the solution to so many issues in our current age. We have tried to let this modality of human life to be an artefact of the past and in a pursuit in accordance with the spirit of enlightenment instead forming human life in a different, more rational (ha!) way. This effort hasn't really work. Humanity and religiosity is intimately connected and if one denies this, one doesn't become free of religion, rather one become an unconscious and simply a bad religious practitioner. 

Well, this might need some explaining to make sense. First of all, I need to stress that how I see religion is not connected to theism in any sense whatsoever. Instead religion involves a three-folded structure that goes up from an individuals inner imagining of the divine and cosmos as a whole up to the dimensions where organizations and structural administrations is starting to form around collective practices and communities.The metaphysical ideas and ideologies being the foundation for a specific religion in this sense can in principal be anything - but of course certain ideas is stronger and are more viable than others in this regard. In any case, religion as a modality is something different than our common way of meshing the term together with different beliefs about the divine. God plays a part in religion, naturally, but if my discovery would be that "oh, the world would be so much better if we got rid of atheism" or something similar, this post wouldn't be worth writing. 

No, proper religiosity doesn't really care about your specific ideas, be them about the divine or something else. In fact, we in the west have got the strange notion in our head that there exists different religions, an idea likely stemming from the church struggles to preserve orthodoxy among its ranks regarding its views what Christ was all about. The church got divided and formed identities from that division that gave the illusion that their differences made their religiosity different from each other as well. Then, when christians ventured around the world and noticed different religious practices they saw them as different religions all together. And this is just false, in my opinion. Religion is about reality, and there is only one reality and can ever only be one such. 

You see, to explain how I more concretely view the word religion - this modality of human life is about binding together (the terms strict literal meaning) or perhaps rather to make sense. Why I say that there is only one religion is because we humans do this on several levels, our analytical faculty is only one of these layers and it can jap all it wants about the importance it has, it still doesn't change that in all the other layers of our being our religious activity is one and the same. It has only one purpose: to give meaning to existence. 

Yes, during this year I have been intimately connected with the church year my tradition practices and this has made me see something. Religion makes you aware. Through the phases of the liturgical year I have both seen and participated in a rhythm and a cycle that goes above and further than what simple seasonal changes can convey alone. Reality consists of a fractalized system of intricate cycles nested into one another and without a religious structure this is incredibly hard to see. My own tradition has a liturgical year, it highlights every week through their different masses and a has a way to frame each day through our daily prayers. We don't do this from a need to appease God regularly in a manner He has decided in an arbitrary way, we do this entirely for our sake. To stay aware in and of as many of the cycles of reality as possible. Every religion does this, in a way that is proper for their context and culture - naturally there exists many differing religious practices, but only one purpose for why they are there. To observe, notify, celebrate and connect the various parts that reality consists of. 

All other religious customs follows in line with this purpose. We baptise, wed and bury not because God need arbitrary actions and symbolic events to understand our inner intentions, but to give ourselves the proper placement for the aspects of life that we value. The religious symbolism varies but the intention is the same - we need to connect the events and relationships in our lives to an hierarchy of being. To know what is what and why it is there we need religion. It's as simple as that, really. 

Before the modern era religion conveyed a lot more. Almost everything in the ordinary life had a religious ceremony, rooted in the customs of old, but as the modern marsch to eternal progress grew stronger we lost the old way of living and we didn't bother to bring in religious imagery to the new life we started to led in its place. This is to my mind the reason to why there is a constant feeling of rootlessness in our generations, you see, the hierarchy of being religion is aimed towards isn't only concerned with what his happening in the presence but also reaches backwards and forwards in time and the religious ceremony brings these spheres into what is going on now. Religion allows us to step outside of time and converse with old ages as well as it makes us visible to those who comes after us and remembers to keep the customs alive. 

You see how metaphysical ideas doesn't come into the picture at all? You don't need a cognitive understanding to perform the practices, the rituals and the ceremonies of a tradition, you just need a minimum of know-how and then you're off to go. I would argue that in the pagan times there were no need of metaphysics simply because every culture were so connected and so fully participatory with how reality presented itself that cognitive ideas about it all just weren't necessary. The gods had different names because different contexts highlighted different aspects of their being, but different religions in our sense? No, before Christianity, or rather the jews mayheps, this simply wasn't a thing. A break occurred, that made Christianity possible with its strange view of the world enfolded within it and this is not the place to explore this break and why Christianity is a solution to a problem, rather than a cause to this alluded break. 

Instead I wish to admit that our cognitive ability, our way of framing our customs and myths with reason and analytical ability has a part to play in the essence of religion. You see, if religion stay concerned with earthly and humanly affairs alone it will soon seem dull and powerless. Religion also need a structure reaching up to the heavens and this is done from our linguistic languages and our distinct ideas. By these tools religion can become something that reaches upwards and connects us to the highest possible values in existence, not excluding the absolute itself, God holy. When religion is dressed in these ways it would be borderline false to say they are one and the same. When metaphysics, ideologies and other marks of identity has entered into it the differences between the practices becomes impossible to ignore and I see no reason to not admitting this. Our ideas matter, absolutely. 

At this stage the different religions has become entities and these entities are embodied by the organisational structures we recognize today as existing religions. These organisations are subject to heaps amount of suspicion and sometimes outright hatred and fear. I have sympathy for this, but I just want to highlight that these bodies are not equal to what religion is, organisation are entities and entities will act out mistakes and evil deeds but the religious bodies are in place to preserve certain customs through the passage of time, without them we would stand no chance of keeping our traditions intact. To stay away and distance oneself from "organised religion" in favor of being "spiritual" is in my opinion a grave mistake, because you're missing out of participating in the hierarchy of being that the organized religion is aimed towards. 

Furthermore, if you're truly a spiritual person that has laid eyes on the reality of the heavens and chooses to stay absent from the organisations of religion, then you are denying them the fruits of your transformation and they will likely fall even further into corruption and decay. You loose out on the treasures they are assigned to keep in custody, and they loose the perspective of someone that is about to travel upwards on the ladder of Jacob. Who will get it instead, if you stay isolated from anyone involved in the purpose religion is all about, to bring existence together? 

Don't do this. If this text has a message at all, it must be this: Make yourself more religious, connect yourself to the contexts residing in the past. I'm not saying you must believe in God, any religious doctrine or anything like that, but then let other layers of your being communicate with the hierarchy of being we're all a part of due to the fact that we find ourselves existing at all. To many of us this is a tall task as it is, but in a time of death and confusion we all has a duty to try to turn the tide. Religion, the religion, the one without difference and fragmentation, is our best hope to achieve a difference.