Religion

No way of thinking or doing, however ancient, can be trusted without proof - Henry David Thoreau

To my grandmother – a staunch Methodist – religion was vital to her life because it gave her the answers to all those questions about life and what it was for, and so on, that she – probably unconsciously – realised that she did not have the equipment – either mentally or temperamentally – to discover for herself. While – to me – that was the very reason – probably the reason above all others – to despise religion, because it had the temerity to attempt to give answers to questions that I felt – and still do feel – can only be discovered by the individual through individual effort.

People often say that all human societies have religion. That is - as far as I know – true, but what does it really mean? People speculate about things - it is what we do, we have brains and we use them. We make up stories to cover the gaps in what we know. Some of those stories become myths, become religion.

Just as from the Greeks onward, knowledge was a subsection of philosophy which as over time developed and became the separate branches of knowledge like biology, physics, chemistry, psychology and so on, the same has happened to theological ideas. People would be religious in earlier ages, or in less developed societies, because there was no other word, no other concept, for them to use to describe that particular branch of their experience. But, as we have learnt more, understood more, the theological has become replaced as it has become irrelevant.

Of course, it is a wild generalisation, but religious people - to me - always seems to have a missing… dimension, seem incomplete, as though they have refused to take that necessary step towards full self-definition. Often they have the look of people who have remained living in the parental home long after they should have left. Perhaps it is that fear of parental admonishment; long after it should have been nullified, that gives them that vague, distracted, haunted look, an aura of intellectual naivety, timidity and blandness.