I’m often hearing people say things like “I’m not religious” which I think generally means that they don’t go to church because they don’t want to subscribe to one way of viewing life and the universe. It does not mean that they do not believe in God or that they are not spiritual. I caught the tail end of a TV programme the other day when someone said that they were not religious but they did feel the holiness of Holy Isle – to my mind a very strange thing to say.
But what does this not being religious really mean?
In response to the idea of not being religious I want to ask lots of questions about how do you then make sense of the world? What do you think about heaven and what happens after death? What is the sense of the holy or the ‘other’ that you experience? How do you make any sense of it?
The usual response, in my experience, is to say a variety of things that might have come from a variety of different religions coupled with an attempt to make it all sound like science rather than religion. In effect what people do is to make up their own religion with lots of bits that they have thought about put together in a kind of melting pot. The truth is that they are just as religious as I am but they mistakenly believe that being religious is some kind of soft option for those who don’t think.
A religion is really just a framework. It provides a set of beliefs that fit together in a coherent way to enable us to make sense of those big questions we ask. Religions often have various practices that they expect their adherents to use to help them and they often provide training in beliefs to help answer the big questions.
I often find it a bit weird to listen to the ‘non-religious’ talk about what they believe because to me it seldom – if ever – makes sense, there are usually major contradictions involved for instance. I find that particularly so for atheists – itself a framework of belief of course.
Christians, and other religions, sometimes like to make the point that their belief is not religion but a way of life. Meaning it is not about just following a set of rules but is instead about the whole of life and in particular a relationship with the Almighty. This also highlights the problem of trying to understand what a religion is – if being religious is just following a set of rules then I am not religious myself – but it isn’t.
Of course, I am also searching for truth and like many others I have found that truth in Jesus Christ. This means that I am humble enough not to make up my own religion but am instead trying to make use of the framework that Jesus has given us to help me answer the big questions and to understand how life should be lived.
Let’s give up on this nonsense of not being religious and acknowledge that we are in truth all religious people but we disagree over which framework is the right one to make use of. I would then encourage you to try and understand that making up your own religion may not be the best answer – at least not without discovering what the great frameworks of religion actually say (I hope you don’t mind if I suggest Christianity is a good one).