What Religion Really Means

I felt good as it took me less than 3 weeks finished reading the book, ‘The Case for God’ by Karen Armstrong. Of all the books that I’ve read, this book ranked the toughest and hard to digest so far. She suggests that if we draw creatively on the insights of the past, we can build a faith that speaks directly to the needs of our troubled and dangerously polarized world. I feel blessed with my true faith and will learn more about it. Not only that, I begin to develop sense of respect for all the religions in today world. As Karen said, religion was never supposed to provide answers to questions that lay within the reach of human reason; it helps us to live creatively, peacefully and even joyously with realities for which there were no easy explanations and problems that we could not solve. However, it requires a great deal of effort and cannot succeed if it is facile, false, idolatrous, or self-indulgent. Overall, she concluded it well what religion really means as the extract below which I taken from the epilogue:

From almost the very beginning, men and women have repeatedly engaged in strenuous and committed religious activity. They evolved mythologies, rituals and ethical discipline that brought them intimations of holiness that seemed in some indescribable way to enhance and fulfil their humanity. They were not religious simply because their myths and doctrines were scientifically or historically sound, because they sought information about the origins of the cosmos, or merely because they wanted a better life in the hereafter. They were not bludgeoned into faith by power-hungry priests or kings: indeed, religion often helped people to oppose tyranny and oppression of this kind. The point of religion was to live intensely and richly here and now. Religious people are ambitious. They want lives overflowing with significance. They have always desired to integrate with their daily lives the moments of rapture and insight that came to them in dreams, in their contemplation of nature, and in their intercourse with one another and with the animal world. Instead of being crushed and embittered by the sorrow of life, they sought to retain their peace and serenity and in the midst of their pain.

They yearned for the courage to overcome their terror of mortality; instead of being grasping and mean-spirited, they aspired to live generously, large-heartedly and justly and to inhabit every single part of their humanity. Instead of being a mere workaday cup, they wanted, as Confucius suggested, to transform themselves into a beautiful ritual vessel brimful of the sanctity that they were learning to see in life. They tried to honour the ineffable mystery they sensed in each human being and create societies that honoured the stranger, the alien, the poor and the oppressed. Of course they often failed. But overall they found that the disciplines of religion helped them to do all this. Those who applied themselves most assiduously showed that it was possible for mortal men and women to live on higher, divine or godlike plane and thus wake up to their true selves.

To listen to her voice, you can go to this link: http://www.bbc.co.uk/worldservice/documentaries/2009/07/090714_theforum_120709.shtml