Religion
What is religion? How do you define it? There's been a lot of talk about this issue, but it is one that many tip-toe around, afraid of offending Mahayana Buddhists and other indistinct groups of people. I think that these people cannot distinguish the real problem, much as they cannot distinguish who they are afraid of insulting.
A Definition
I define religion as "culturally patterned behavior centered around culturally postualted super-human beings." I did not come up with this on my own, I stole it from a guy named Spiro. The culturally patterned/postulated bit is to show that religion is a social institution. It is a phenomenon of groups of beings, not of individuals. The patterned behavior is the rituals of the religion, and super-human is to point out that some of the beings are not always considered divine. The Buddha is not divine, but he achieved a super-human state of elightenment. Note that the word postulated is not meant to imply any judgements about the actual existence of the super-human beings. It merely points out that the final characteristics (as percieved by the members of the religion) of the super-human being are determined through a cultural process.
Note that I mentioned the Buddha. I would like to point out that there is documented evidence of ritual behavior centered around the Buddha. I am not saying that all Buddhists do this, but it is a fact that some of them do.
The Offended
When I first explained and defended this definition in college, an eventual friend of mine (hi David) was highly offended. He was a Buddhist, and did not practice ritual behavior centered around the Buddha, culturally postulated or otherwise. He found it incredibly insulting for me to say that he did not have religion.
What did it mean when I said he didn't have religion? I meant that he was not a part of culturally patterned behavior centered around culturally postualted super-human beings. What he heard was that I thought his belief in the Buddha and the Dharma was somehow less than the belief of the person next to him in Jesus Christ, because the Christian went to mass, celebrated Christmas, and took the Eucharist.
The Real Problem
David illustrates perfectly the real problem with the issue of defining religion. He was unable to seperate the social implications of the numinous from the individual implications. There is the social aspect of the numinous, or religion; and there is the indivdual aspect of the numinous, or faith. To try subsuming one under the other can only lead to confusion.
The point is, nothing I said to David made any judgements about the quality or character of his faith. I merely said that he was not part of a social institution concerning that faith. I have deep respect for David's faith, and I had even more back then, because it lacked what I then thought of as the taint of religion.
My observations of faith and religion can lead me to no other conclusion than that they are seperate, even though they often intertwine. The Buddha, whose teachings were very much a reaction to religion in his homeland, made several restrictions on his students, to keep them from making his teachings a religion. However, almost as soon as he died many of his students broke those very restrictions. It seems that there is as deep a need for religion in the human spirit as there is for faith.
That is not to say that both needs are universal. There is a growing movement in America, and I assume elsewhere, of people who say they have faith, but practice no religion. I also remember reading about a case in California, where parishoners were suing to get back into church. They did not feel that the fact that they did not believe in Jesus Christ should be used to keep them from the rituals of Christianity. So we have faith without religion, and religion without faith.
What is Faith?
So if we are to seperate the two, how do we define faith? I'm not sure. I am tempted to fall back on what I learned about the Philosophy of Knowledge. In philosophy, knowlege is sometimes defined as true justified belief. The trick is applying this to faith. Certainly faith is belief. Is it true? That is unclear. I would say it has no verifiable truth content. It is not possible to verify that God exists in the same way that we can verify that water freezes at 32° F. Of course, what really matters is that it is true for the believer, not that it is true for anyone else. Justification is also a problem, even more so than it is for ordinary knowledge. I would think that certain faiths can be considered self-justified, like sensory inputs. So you can see I have my ideas about a definition, but nothing has struck me that satisfies me at the same time.
Last Modified 6/9/99
Created 9/13/98