My favorite etiology of the word “religion” means to “reconnect.”
When I use the word “religion” I am not interested in the sects or institutions that most people are referring to when they use that word. I am curious about how you personally put the pieces of your life together.
In philosophy the subject of “first things” is sometimes called “metaphysics.” It deals with the assumptions we have to make to begin thinking about topics like meaning and purpose. We simply do not have the information to put a worldview together and yet our minds will move to some sense of the whole of things. Science can do some of that work, ethics can do part of that work, art can do part of that work, but how do you enough pieces of your life together to feel integral within and harmonious without?
The task of metaphysics is both necessary and impossible. How do we experience life completely when so much of it is a mystery to us? How do we blend the rational parts of our awareness with the irrational glandular fluids that give our life meaning? How do we work around our tendency to believe what we want to believe?
Make no mistake, how we do this task of reconnection affects everyone. If my religion cannot stand the light of day my mind will live in the shadows like a toadstool. More than that, if my religion is dishonest it will call light itself a heresy.
What I personally believe about such topics as homosexuality, or a pandemic, or America does not belong to me alone. If my morality is based on my own cultural comfort zones, it will come to consider difference itself to be an abomination. Somehow my ethics must submit itself to a common scale or what I call ethics will be an exercise in justification of myself and my group.
If I believe the mystery of things can be outlined into human language like one of Euclid’s theorem I will be unable to tell the difference between what I can think and what can exist. To think I can privatize reason is an act of piracy against my human family and the web of life. I must rigorously test my beliefs and recognize that whatever belongs to me alone is but the shadow of truth. Life is what we share.
So when I use the word “religion” I am not interested in your sect and tradition. I am curious about how you are integrating your life within and how you are harmonizing your inner life with the web of life and with the cosmic process to which we ultimately belong.
Religion consigns me to caves of illusion if it has not learned to breath the common air and live in the light of day common to us all.