What is religion? There are many different answers to that question, and which ones you accept will depend on your background.
As diverse as each of our backgrounds may be, there is one thing we can all agree on: Religion is a human institution. Ignoring the specific claims of different world religions, if you will not concede that we create religions, surely you can agree that we maintain them.
This is easy to take for granted, and, as with everything we take for granted, it becomes hard for us to value religon's stengths, and terribly easy to gloss over its weaknesses.
Weakness is important, because it signals to us a potential for improvement, but improvement can be painful, which often makes these weaknesses easier to just ignore.
We know religion has weaknesses. Try pointing to them, however, and you meet an obstacle. If the weaknesses of religion were obvious to us, and we were willing to admit them, this would leave us no excuse for history books scattered with repeated religious conflicts, or headlines exposing religious figures in crimes that have become sorely familiar.
So we must ask, do these issues keep arising because the weakness is obscure, or because we decide to ignore it? Two other human institutions could provide some insight: medicine, and politics.
We have filled in our charts of the human body considerably, yet its detailed contours remain unexplored, and our treatments still reflect this ignorance; the history of medicine has mostly been a history of picking battles with the obvious symptoms, rather than systematic campaigns against causes.
The battleground of medicine is the human body, while that of politics is human society. But whereas doctors are humble about their ignorance of the terrain, the hubris of politicians is epidemic. They lie to us – repeatedly – to maintain an illusion of their effectiveness, and censor dissent so they can remain in power.
Humans have a biological imperative to survive so they may pass on their genes to the next generation. As long as individuals have an interest – a dependence – in particular human institutions, those institutions will follow a similar imperative.
The medical field is interesting because it is sustained by our own drive to survive – we have an incentive to maintain and improve our medical institutions because doing so directly improves our chances of surviving the ailments that befall us.
Similarly, various academic fields are supported by the businesses that exploit their findings and developments.
In contrast, other institutions – many businesses to a certain extent, but most obviously political parties and religions – have traditionally needed to fend for themselves, to be responsible for their own survival.
Perhaps this immense responsibility they take on – this independence from other institutions – is the source of their weakness. Perhaps these institutions begin to take actions in the interests of their own survival, more than the survival of those very values they were founded to represent, and more than the interests of the people who hold those values.
Political parties will pursue short-term polices to gain more votes at the next ballot, to the detriment of long-term plans for the health of society.
Looking past the power struggles between different parties, politics provides a lens on the worldly concerns of society. While we may make these concerns revolve around the length of election cycles, the idea of politics, and many religions themselves are centuries – even millenia – old. Ideas from religions that fell with the cultures that practiced them literally affect our day-to-day lives: most of our week-days are named for Nordic gods.
Religions have tried to provide another view of these worldly issues we confront by the perspective of the other-worldly. A small but important tenet is the idea of transcendence. This word itself only refers to 'something beyond.' It is that which we as humans can not know. To value transcendence is to admit uncertainty. At the same time it is an act of wonder, for we need to appreciate what we can know to value what we do not.
Valuing transcendence is disarming, it appears to weaken us, but failing to admit we do not and perhaps can not know, makes it impossible for us to ever learn. Valuing transcendence is a recipe for our growth as individuals, a recipe I like to call 'spirituality.'
If all religions have this exact same spirituality at their core, something else must be responsible for their rise or fall. History narrates many conflicts that have encouraged the faith of the victors at the expense of that of the losers.
Surely, many of these battles have been fought because of a group's conviction that they are superior to the other. What is it about their religions that fosters these feelings?
Spirituality can not be the culprit, because to value that we can not know is a value that we can only share. It is a value that can only connect us, not divide us.
Values that do divide us are those with a natural hierarchy at their core, and religions draw their line in the sand when they profess 'truth,' by which they – even if they do not intend it – imply that others deceive.
They sow these seeds of division when they present spirituality as an explanation, usually in the form of a god or gods. This has traditionally been a unique selling point of religions: that they explain how the world works. Their 'gods' were 'placeholders;' they were the brand of our uncertainties, the things we did not understand about the world. But by valuing uncertainties, and at the very same time advertising these as truths, they were only sowing seeds of hypocrisy. Only recently have their flowers begun to bloom: for a long time we were clueless about how the world operates, so these placeholders seemed natural. With advances in science, the gaps that religion can still plug are continually becoming fewer.
Here we have the hallmark of what the environmental movement would call an 'unsustainable' strategy. Perhaps to survive, religions will begin to market themselves differently.
Spirituality knows no difference between Christianity, Islam, Hinduism, or Buddhism, and so being spiritual – valuing uncertainty – is no reason to support one or any other. Their gods – their 'truths' – are what we can invest in. When a church leader asks whether you believe, they are not questioning your values, but your loyalty.
Beliefs do not ask you to conform, they are an individual expression. They grow with you, and you with them. Religions are about fellowship, the collective striving for higher ideals than any individual could reach, because everyone contibutes a unique outlook. Perhaps religions should value these expressions of their members more than their loyalty, their member's interests more than their own.
An interest they clearly meet is the natural human hunger for stories. Belief is not a virtue, having it or not is neither good nor bad, but beliefs are something we can share, and what more is storytelling? What more, indeed, is religion?
