As I said in an earlier post, I prefer the word “religion” to “spirituality,” or at least to “spirituality” without an added qualifier such as “Christian” or “Islamic,” etc. It’s become commonplace in our time to hear the word “religion” disparaged, usually by persons with an understandable reaction to bad experiences they’ve had in this or that “organized” or “institutional” religious context. But quite nearly as often, prejudice against “religion” is more an expression of ignorance (occasionally, of the invincible variety) than a genuinely coherent thought. So, for example, we got Christopher Hitchens’s claim some years back that “religion poisons everything” as the embarrassingly petulant subtitle of one of his worst books; here was a man who frequently had many intelligent things to say, but this wasn’t even remotely one of them. At the other end of the spectrum, we have those Evangelical Christians who tell us that Jesus and “religion” have nothing in common and, in some cases, they go so far as to say that he was a foe of religion – a notion that anyone passingly conversant with, say, the Gospels and Jesus’ cultural milieu, and has the barest shred of historical sense, knows to be an absurdity of the first order. Likewise, there are Buddhists who make a distinction that would have stumped Gautama and most of the great teachers of the Dharma down the ages: that Buddhism is something called a “philosophy” rather than something called a “religion” – a distinction, of course, that flies once again in the face of the ample evidence of history and the numerous religious varieties of Buddhism in the East. And then, there are the “spiritual but not religious” folks – most of whom would be hard-pressed to define either word in any substantive way if challenged to do so, apart from feeling the hazy sentiments the two terms awake in them. And yet, the word “religion” endures, despite those who take potshots at it. The reason for its durability is simply that it’s a useful word; it expresses something recognizable and instantly understandable, something that no other term we have in our vocabulary does. Some may not like it, but to be blunt, that’s tough – because it’s a word too tough to die. The first mistake of those who disdain it is that they saddle it with moral implications; for them, “religion” as they understand it (or have experienced it) is not wholly “good,” therefore it must be wholly “bad” (now, there’s an example of dualistic thinking for you). But “religion” isn’t a moral word at all; it’s a descriptor, capacious in what it includes, but likewise a word expressing a demarcation. In and of itself, it’s amoral; you can have good religion and bad religion, just like you can have good political ideas (democracy, say) and bad political ideas (fascism, for instance). (There’s good music and bad music, too – but I’ll refrain from giving examples; I have but one life to live.)
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