Now for the question that is of the chief importance: what is religion? Don't you agree that if we cannot give a quick and good answer to this question, we don't belong in the pulpit preaching, but in the sits paying atention.
Other books will tell you that religion comes from the Latim word "religere" which means "to reconect". So in their opinion, religion works by reconnecting you to a higher being or concept or whatever. They are wrong. That is not how religion works, it's what it achieves, and in fact just one of its goals.
Take one of those university students, that instead of going kiss his girlfirend (many times because he has no girlfiend to kiss), goes about reading Thus Spoke Zarathustra, of the philosopher Nietzsche (nice reading, by the way, quite easy), and right there in that moment he feels special because he understands those words and normal people don't. You know he is high on religion. I know: I was that student.
Take one of those gospel girls, that every saturday goes to the worship, and feels special, and as they say set apart to God, when she sings to her church sisters. She is not like those girls that walk on the streets with tight jeans pants. She feels that she is different. She feels connected to a greater purpose. And she was, as much as she was also just a normal girl with the same normal dreams of many others. She was high on religion. I know, I date her for a while, when I was reading Nietzsche for the second time.
Reconnecting a person to a high concept or to a higher being is one of the effects of "blowing on" religion. But how does it do that? Making a person feel apart and special compared to others, another effect. But how does it do that? Keeping people on a cohierent gruop, another effect. But how does it do that?
Well, these are the elements a religion must have:
1) The jumps;
2) The misses;
3) The negatives;
4) The inclusives;
5) The connections;
These elements each one of them when present works producing an effect. The tipestry of these workings, all together, is what makes a religion complex, like islam, or makes it simple, like the fitness moviment.
So, like Euclid, let us postulate. When relating to religion working, I postulate that:
1st Postulate: you can find a JUMP joing two any elements;
2nd Postulate: you can find something MISSING that is never included nor noticed;
3rd Postulate: when something MISSING appears, you can negate it;
4th Postulate:when you need something important, you can INCLUDE it;
5th Postulate 5: you can and must CONNECT all elements;
The first postulate is the most simple to identify. So much so, that most critics of any religion act first on these. People love say against religion: but this don't constitute a proof for that. I know I know Nobody cares: it's a jump. We love jumps. They save time. Not everybody likes to analyse every single step that leads to a social phenomenum. Heck! I sometimes have doubts about how to say I'm in front of a nominative relative clause, and my hobbie is translation and writing.
Religions tend to make small jumps, specially when recruting people. People like jumps but jump off long jumps.
If a visitor comes to a protestant church like those there are spread in Brazil and hears: God loved so much the world that he gave his only son, Jesus, to be crucified, in order to give you the eternal reward, so boys and specially girls you better keep it to your panties until after marriage, that must happen to someone within the church or that you brought in.
The visitor would see that jump a mile away. But many don't, if it is spread in the course of three sermons a week, every month, for a year.
I postulate you can make these jumps. And that is a misuse of word, because everybody knows they exist.
So why jumps go unoticed? Because, betwen jumps, you can find something MISSING. You may not think that those motivational couchers, quite learned men, don't know about the wholes in their sermons? That they don't know that when they say "if you follow this 7 steps of the successfull people" there is someone that followed them for a year but got hit by an economic crisis or a personal tragedy.
But if the MISSING is stuborn, and insist in appear, no problem: you can always negete it. Negation is a beautiful tool of every religion because Negation has many works. You don't need, for example, to deny something right away and full against. Faith can embrace it with a careful NO. So you are preaching to your beloved church about how God cares and protects and allows only good things to happen to his people. And going through your passionate words while you look into the eyes of one and another and another of the audience and, fuck! Sister Julia is sitting in the third row and you remember she had an abortion of her first waited pregnancy. So you wisely amends "And even when the good things does NOT happen, and it seems that its an radom thing that just happen for no specific reason, don't lessen your faith, because everything is as God wills it". Don't be foolish to think that "it is not like this seems to be but is in truth like that" is exclusive to the christian religions. We will find the negating-facts gloves in the hands of Exu.
But, most important of all are the two last elements, because if everything was to be negated or missing, where would be the good things that all religion have. All religion have meaningful INCLUSIONS. The simple-minded critics would jump right away and say: of course religion will include everything good as a product of its god or concepts. Again, that is just to simple. Good bad things can be inclused for the greater couse in religion, like the opretion of certain teenage impulses. Why cannot boys and girls enjoy their bodies in protect and responsable sex? As we know that very few of them do, and their parents are not prepared or willing to teach them to, we can simple add a whole complex net of JUMPS-MISSINS-NEGATION all connect to try to minimize the ocurrences. In fact, teenage pregnacy is lower among the most educated population, and many protestant groups are ingluded by the power of their studies they do in church.
Finally, there are connections. Religion is way to close to philosophy in the sense they deal with totality, with fullness, with completudes. That is why many early church fathers were in fact converted philosophers (and some not converted that worked for churches), Most of religion propagators are quite informed and conected thinks, as they have no problem to make links between facts, problems and solutions, specially if the links allow for jumps, go sideways of things that are convinient to miss, and help with meaningful negations.
So religion is a reasoning process where jumps and connection are made while things are included, negated or missed, and yet it doesn't seem strange to the person that enjoys it.
You may well find this to be an oversimplification and you will be right. I have not the intention to describe in details the nouances of every religion, and I live that to each religion propagator as they know better and live them. My purpose and my philosophy are in favor of unity. I like to look at things as they are similar to one another and have things of common, as "there are more things that unite us than devide us".
Theseare the basic things that unite all religions processes into one single phenomena, from which everyone of them will get more complex and specific, and each individual has it's own manifestation of them with his/her own personal traits.
Now for the manifestation size of the religion process, we will have:
1) Expression;
2) Moviment;
3) Congregation.
A religious expression is a small and simple manifestation in the form of religion. It is quite straightfoward, having few elements and simple goals. But yet it can be seen as a religion manifestation.
I will give a personal exemple, my father taught me, when I went on my first bird hunt: Don't shoot the she-washer, because she washed the cloths of Jesus.
The she-washer is a black-n-white small bird that is very common in brasilian northeast and is usually found feeding off bugs in puddles. There is no mention of it in the Gospels (I don't think my father or his father had ever read an entire gospel and they were not that much religions people). And there is not no other detail to make that statement more complex: I would not even be punished by my father if I had shot one.
Misss - quotes of the bible where it could be read;
- confirmation that the bird exists where Jesus lived and preached;
Negs - many other birds of similar traits you kill in a hunt
Adds - that bird is special
Cons - high concept of a mature hunter
Jump - you should not kill that bird
A religious moviment is form by some religious expression (singular or plural) that puts a group of people into the same way. It's like on sunday many bicycles pass through the highway close to my home, men and women with cloths and helmets and shoes and bags of water specially bought to that very activite.
Misss - if they needed to use the bicycles daily they would probably hate them;
Negs - they do more for the sport and for the group;
- if you just take a simple bicycle and just go from point a to point b you also belong to the group.
Adds - you need the cloths and the accessories to truely belong;
Cons - to the sport and to the style of doing it
Jump - I love bicycling.
In a religious movement people feels they are similar and that they belong to the moviment. But this feeling doesn't constitute a proper congregation, because it is still a small manifestation. A moviment is very much like a expression with the added factor that more persons do the same thing for the same reason at about the same frequency.
A religious congregation requires a more complex and more all-present manifestation. People in the bicycles go to the gym in their cars, but protestant people go to the gym with the church. To better understand, imagine if you add a dozen of religious moviments to a thousand of individuals: they would converge even more to the same way and ther lives would be similar even despite their individualities. They would have many ways to behave in many situations, then, if religious congregation, in the movies they would act a specific way, in the mal they would act a specific way, on the vocation in the beach they would act a specific way. Indeed, in many activites of everyday, they would be making religious reasoning that would impact their decisions. So lets work with an easy example: the (real) naturalists:
Misss - they indirectly participate in the harming of nature;
- they are seletive about whats natural;
Negs - to use products or do actions that harm nature;
Adds - to wast less resources both natural and economic;
Cons - to the cause
Jump - we are helping the planet
People adherent to this religious congregation don't have a temple built somewhere where day go every saturday to do their worship. But I don't find nothing of a mistery (as Belchior would agree) why you can spot a naturalist girl just as easly as you can spot a gospel girl, and that bar in my home town that has a vegan menu has quite a lot of them, everybody needs a drink once in a while.
