The Religious Feeling – What Religion Has Always Been About

January 1, 2020 Open Religion No Comments

The religious feeling lives deeply inside and everywhere. It is ubiquitous and invisible. It can be supported and downplayed without anyone’s knowing. It is very much Open.

What I dare say

One can have full-blown religious feeling without believing anything conceptual. There is no need to lose anything of this feeling by ‘not believing.’

The question is about conceptuality.

One can keep one’s religion of birth. There is no need to relinquish it. There is no need to stay with it for the religious feeling to flourish.

Anxiety has no place.

What I dare even say

Conceptual belief can stand in the way of full-blown religious feeling. What one can deem of the highest importance in religion can sometimes better be served by not believing anything conceptual.

Of course, this is mysticism.

The thing is:

One can lose one’s conceptual belief and not lose anything worthwhile. Many people can do so. Humanity can do so.

One can read some Holy Book, get deeply immersed in it, see it as purely symbolic, and not lose anything worthwhile.

The reason why people don’t

The reason why people don’t is the general basic illusion of living an X-dimensional life whereas reality is (X+1)-dimensional at least. In the +1 additional dimension, one can make contact towards inside. This is the way towards God in any case, no matter how one experiences religion. I mean: anything that is anyhow a path toward anything.

Not being merely 2-dimensional characters on paper.

COVID

The same illusion makes people blind to a profoundly physical influence from inside, even if it throws them in a societal whirlpool of unnecessary disease and death.

Including huge economic havoc.

Also, the same anxiety has no place, even though it’s everywhere.

It may not be the most popular thing to say, but the whole world is suffering right now through a lack of religious feeling. This, while the world is still inundated with a flood of contradictory religions of many makings, ages, places, concepts, and whatever. This alone should ring a bell

of a uniquely different church.

We can do better

Religion could help in the sense of ‘true religious feeling.’ This could guide people like a path being traveled upon, as well as constructed while traveling. Responsibly religious people could take the lead. It would be nice for them to cultivate, themselves, the religious feeling.

Yes, even the Pope.

Or is it asked too much that someone who dedicates his life to religion grows in the same?

Is such growing ever finished, even while taking the risk of finding oneself – sometimes suddenly – in a distinct space of religious feeling?

Leave a Reply

Related Posts

From Feuerbach to Open Religion

Ludwig Feuerbach changed the course of Western thought by exposing God as a human projection. Yet in doing so, he also uncovered a question that still shapes our culture today: what happens to depth once God is gone? This blog follows that question through philosophy, psychology, and humanism, toward a place where depth is neither Read the full article…

We Are Not Alone

This may be the first reason why people are drawn to spirituality. The idea of being-not-alone can bring relief, whether in the form of a personal god or something more abstract. We may be creatures who wish to ‘be meaningful’ forever, yet we know we won’t. That’s hard to take. But if there’s someone – Read the full article…

Science = Re-ligion

Science is frequently seen as partly or even completely opposite to religion. In the sense of re-ligion however, things get reversed. Science is the quest to know the universe as it is and not as someone of a few centuries or even millennia ago has imagined it. Back then, almost nothing was known on many Read the full article…

Translate »