Definitions I

Religion:  NOUN 

1. beliefs and worship: people's beliefs and opinions concerning the existence, nature, and worship of a deity or deities, and divine involvement in the universe and human life

2. system: an institutionalized or personal system of beliefs and practices relating to the divine

3. personal beliefs or values: a set of strongly-held beliefs, values, and attitudes that somebody lives by

4. obsession: an object, practice, cause, or activity that somebody is completely devoted to or obsessed by

"The danger is that you start to make fitness a religion."

I have always considered religion to be the governing body of spirit: a code of rules and regulations to lead the uninitiated to a sense of greater peace and understanding in a community we have created for ourselves where there is a shared understanding of the deeper aspects of life. This would be the man-made aspect of the spirit- trying to tame and control the mystical otherness into a process that can be repeated and fostered to teach the uninitiated.  To me, however, Religion with a capital “R” has become a more and more rigid method of following rules and regulations, going through the motions of what used to inspire people, simply because it is a tradition. Religions vary understandably from community to community, growing larger and more militant as our communities do.

Religion also implies the large organizations which purport to act with the will of God, and yet oppress, kill, torture, and destroy. I am not alone in my belief that this type of religion is a painful part of human history, and is a necessary end to having the bureaucratic hierarchy attached to what amounts to be a personal spiritual exercise. The more regulations there are to a dogma, the less I want anything to do with it. That may be some part of my rebellious skepticism; my resistance to being told what to do, but it is also a healthy distrust of power.

"All power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely. All great men are bad."

-Lord Acton, 1895

Even the power that is given in the church, and sometimes especially the power that is given in the church, corrupts. As Timothy Keller notes in The Reason for God, the church is the place for those who understand and have fallen victim to sin, who know what it is to be lost and saved, not a place for perfection. In fact, it is much like a rehab center for sinners. Taken in this vein, powerful members of the church can be just as trustworthy as the politicians whose power is entirely man-made.

With or without my own personal bias against organized religion, there seems to be some element of agreement involved- in order to make it something built out of community, we are almost required to have something in common to build upon. There is a need for an initial pact between people in order to build the eventual bureaucratic madness.

“Religion, therefore, as I now ask you arbitrarily to take it, shall mean for us the feelings, acts, and experiences of individual men in their solitude, so far as they apprehend themselves to stand in relation to whatever they may consider the divine. Since the relation may be either moral, physical, or ritual, it is evident that out of religion in the sense in which we take it, theologies, philosophies, and ecclesiastical organizations may secondarily grow.”

-William James, Lecture II, "Circumscription of the Topic"

If we were to follow the ideas of William James, religion is the over-arching form of the spirit- rather than something experienced in a community, religion is a personal connection and understanding of what lies beneath the realities of the world. Whether you were to understand those realities as painful or ecstatic, the realities are still a cover for something else- something that each person can only define for himself.  To mesh the two ideals, religion is the feelings, acts, and experiences agreed upon in community to have value regarding what is understood to be divine.

How did religion morph from a personal experience (since I think Jesus, Moses, and the Buddha would all agree with William James on this one) to the large construct of Religion?