5.  What is religion and what is it for?

Summary:

•	Religion is a system of beliefs and practices about reality and how to live, while faith is personal trust. 

•	Although thousands of religions exist, most people belong to Christianity, Islam, Hinduism, or Buddhism. 

•	Most religions teach universal values—including love, compassion, forgiveness, and charity—because all humans share similar moral and spiritual needs. 

•	Religion helps people grow morally when its teachings inspire courage, kindness, and empathy, but it can cause harm when distorted into hatred or violence. 

•	Religious institutions are run by people, and people make mistakes—especially when ego, power, and money get involved. 

•	A group identity forms when a religion or an ideology takes over a person’s individual thinking, demanding total loyalty and encouraging hostility toward outsiders, making it extremely dangerous. 

•	If someone you care about is caught in a harmful group identity, the best approach is respectful, compassionate conversation and also patience—but never anger or shame. 

•	The true spiritual value of any religion lies not in its buildings or rituals, but in the universal values it teaches, such as forgiveness and compassion.

The typical religion is a set of beliefs about the nature of reality and how a person should behave.  It is often called a belief system and usually includes a moral code, ethical principles, and rituals.  An organized religion may call for a personal commitment to its institutional organization, such as by attending religious services at a temple, mosque, or church.

The words religion and faith are sometimes used as if they mean the same thing, but they do not.  In most European languages the word religion is based on the Latin word religio, meaning “respect for what is sacred.”  The word can be traced to the Latin word religare, meaning “to bind.”  A religion is a set of beliefs that a person feels bound to.  This means the person feels an obligation to respect that religion’s rituals and ethical rules.

The word faith comes from the Latin fides, meaning “trust,” and from fidere, “to trust.”  A person may follow a religion’s rituals without fully trusting its teachings.  A person may appear religious but lack faith.  Another person may trust in God but not belong to any religion.

Religion is structure.  Faith is trust.

There may be between 4,000 and 10,000 religions on Earth, according to some estimates.  Most people belong to one of four: Christianity, Islam, Hinduism, and Buddhism.  Each contains many branches, denominations, and schools of thought.  Hinduism is famously diverse.  Christianity is also diverse because it includes the Roman Catholic Church, several Eastern Orthodox churches, several Oriental Orthodox churches, many Protestant churches, and various other churches that call themselves Christian.  Islam’s two largest sects are Sunni and Shia (also called Shiite) and there are religions which emerged from Islam or were influenced by it, such as the Druze and Alawites.  Buddhism, like Daoism and Confucianism, is both a religion and a philosophy—meaning that a person can practice Buddhist ethics while belonging to another religion.

The world’s other religions have fewer believers but are still very important.  They include Judaism, from which Christianity and Islam emerged and, later, some smaller religions such as Baha’i.  One of the oldest of organized religions is Zoroastrianism, which originated in Iran and probably influenced Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, because their moral teachings are similar.  Sikhism, which originated in India, is not a Hindu sect but does teach devotion to God, service to humanity, and respect for other religions.  Jainism, which also originated in India, is one of the most demanding religions to practice, requiring absolute non-violence and strict vegetarianism.

The spiritual reason why religions exist is to help us grow spiritually.  Religions provide moral guidance in the form of stories, rules, or principles.  Some religions also specify punishments to help enforce their rules.  Learning about a religion other than your own can provide you with different perspectives and it may impress you in ways that you did not expect.  There is nothing immoral or blasphemous about learning about other religions.  No matter how much you know about your own religion, you might not fully understand it until you learn what other religions are teaching and why.

All people, regardless of their religions, belong to the same human species.  That means that all of us share the same history of human evolution and, therefore, all of us share the same basic psychological needs, including moral and spiritual needs.  For this reason, nearly all religions share a few fundamental values called universal values, including love, compassion, forgiveness, and charity.  There is no complete list of every universal value, but these values do exist. 

Unfortunately, throughout history, some arrogant people have obscured these universal values or violated them by distorting religious teachings.  The reasons include selfish ambitions for money and power.  Every major religion has a percentage of followers who are driven by their egos, and a number of them are inclined to violence. 

Nevertheless, religions throughout history have also produced great peacemakers.  In the twentieth century, widely considered the most violent century in human history, Hinduism produced Mahatma Gandhi, Islam produced Abdul Ghaffar Khan, Christianity produced Martin Luther King, Jr., Buddhism produced Tenzin Gyatso (the 14th Dalai Lama of Tibet), Daoism produced Chen Yingning, and Confucianism produced Xiong Shili.  And they were not alone.  Their examples of faith, tolerance, and non-violence inspired millions of people.  The Holy Quran commands, “Let there be no compulsion in religion.”  (Holy Quran, Surah 2:256.)

Religions benefit humankind when they encourage us to improve morally—to become more caring, more helpful, more willing to help strangers in need.  Religions do tremendous good when they overcome a person’s hatred, fear, and desperation by providing the opposite: compassion, forgiveness, charity.  Religious faiths have transformed many lives of misery into lives of joy, self-respect, and empathy for others.  Religions do their greatest good when they encourage a person to do something loving and morally right, even if the choice is not always easy or popular.  Morality encourages bravery.  Charity encourages peace.  Injustice encourages outrage, and outrage encourages action.

Unfortunately, outrage can also encourage violence, and violence can encourage revenge.  Religions do harm when their warnings against immoral behavior are misused to encourage violence against people or groups.  Religions should never do that, they should never teach that, but sometimes they do or their believers do.  When religions mix devotion, excitement, and violence, they encourage physical harm against people who are vulnerable and often misunderstood.  The victims (and they are victims, not enemies) deserve respect and compassion, not harm for being different.  Religions do harm when they turn love into hatred, ignore the needy, and provide moral excuses for immoral behavior. 

Most religions are complicated, and that is why they become institutions.  The typical religion has religious literature, customs, traditions, temples, and perhaps other buildings including schools.  For thousands of years, most people could not read or write, and so their communities relied upon a relatively small number of educated people to preserve religious knowledge and perform important rituals.  Those people became the clergy.  Religious knowledge was preserved, but the clergy became a privileged group and, eventually, also wealthy, powerful, somewhat isolated, and somewhat secretive—capable of committing immorality and hypocrisy.  A clergy is supposed to be morally perfect, but nobody is always perfect.  Behind the image of a devoted clergy might be rivalries, intrigues, selfish ambitions, bigotry, and other moral flaws.  Sometimes even good people make bad decisions.  When a religious institution makes a bad decision, the result can become a precedent, which later becomes a principle, which eventually becomes a tradition.  The consequences can last for years, decades, even centuries.

Religious institutions make mistakes because people make mistakes.  And the worst mistakes occur when the ego gets involved. 

Humans have a variety of superficial differences, including race, ethnicity, nationality, culture, economics, gender, sexual orientation, and social class.  Religion is also a superficial difference.  A superficial difference may appear to be important because it looks obvious, but the extent of its importance is decided by people.  If people decide that it has little importance, then it has little importance.  The largest religions teach that superficial differences are not reasons to hate someone; instead, they represent the wondrous variety of people that should be at least tolerated and perhaps celebrated.  Tolerating differences encourages spiritual growth, and celebrating variety brings joy.  The Holy Quran proclaims:

Every person is an individual with a unique personality.  Nevertheless, many people want to belong to something larger than themselves.  A belief system can provide that.

Not all belief systems are called religions.  An ideology can be a belief system.  It may not believe in anything supernatural, but it has believers and they may treat it like a religion.  It can take the form of an organization, or a political party, or perhaps a secretive group. 

The term group identity refers to a feeling of belonging to a particular group whose beliefs become a collective personality—which may dominate the personality of each member.  In other words, the person’s spirit becomes dominated by a collective ego.  This happens because the person allows it; the person may even choose it, welcome it, adopt it.  When a person feels abandoned by society or somehow oppressed or desperate, that person can become psychologically vulnerable to adopting a group identity. 

A group identity exaggerates the superficial differences between people.  It insists that its own people are special.  It demands conformity and loyalty, whether to the group or to its leader.  The collective identity becomes each member’s personal priority.  “I must believe what my group believes.  I must do whatever my group does.”  Perhaps they imagine that they have sacrificed their egos in devotion to their group, but in fact the group identity is only a collective version of the ego.  It distorts universal values or blatantly ignores them.  “This is my family, my tribe, my homeland, not yours!  You don’t belong here!”  A group identity does not respect the rights of other people.  It does not feel empathy and compassion for all.  Instead, a group identity wants to impose its own subjective interpretations of “justice” and “fairness”—interpretations which conveniently favor the group’s material interests.  Forgiveness becomes conditional because a group identity cannot accept that forgiveness cannot truly be conditional.

When a religion or an ideology becomes a group identity, it has become extremely dangerous.  Its believers may say they support the public good, but in practice they want to disregard the rights of any individual or group they dislike, or hate, because they want to get rid of those people.  Since a group identity has a collective ego, it may believe its own lies.  It tries to survive by promoting hatred and inventing problems it claims that only it can solve.  It indulges in corruption.  It inflicts destruction upon the innocent, claiming they are its enemies. 

When someone you care about is caught in a group identity, you can encourage that person to leave it—but the process may take a long time.  Prepare yourself for frustration and tragedy, but do not quit.

Educate yourself about the group identity, including its leaders, beliefs, and any controversies involving it.  When you converse with the person, be respectful, compassionate, empathetic, and especially patient.  Show genuine curiosity about what the person believes and why.  Do not assume that you already know and understand.  Ask what the person likes most about the group.  Be humble.  Listen carefully.  The goal is to slowly encourage the person to think about the group identity in new ways because slowly, eventually, the person may discover the identity’s flaws and hypocrisy.  To do that, you must earn the person’s trust.  Ask questions about the person and the group, gradually encouraging the person to think but without triggering the person’s anger.  Seek to understand why the person joined the group; the reasons may include a search for meaning, a purpose, a community, a feeling of belonging.  Remember that the person has already invested time and effort in the group’s identity—so do not attack it.  Do not judge.  Do not interrupt.  Never get angry.  (Anger may cause the person to cut off all communication with you.)  If the person does not know how to answer your questions, let the person think.  Be patient; you do not need to fill silence.  When the person finishes speaking, paraphrase what the person said because this shows that you are genuinely listening.  Share facts, but only gently.  Avoid overwhelming the person with facts and logic because the person may not be ready to think that way.  Instead of debating facts, explain how a particular issue affects you or affects people you know.  Gently point out inconsistencies between the group’s teachings and the reality.  For example, if the group’s leader preaches selflessness but lives lavishly, ask how that fits the group’s teachings.

Never try to shame the person.  Talk about the connection you once had with that person and how you miss it.  If that relationship is broken, rebuild it.  If you had an argument, apologize.  Openly remember the good times the two of you had together.   Actively stay in touch with the person and keep showing that you care.  Leaving a group identity can be terrifying, like a crisis of faith and not knowing what to believe, and so emphasize that you will be available to help the person.  And keep that promise.  

The spiritual importance of any religion is not what material things it displays among its rituals and temples, but what it teaches us about its core values, which are usually universal values.  For example, most religions teach the universal value of forgiveness.  Forgiveness means releasing your envy or hatred of someone because you accept that forgiveness is more important than property, even more important than the emotional property of resentment and hatred.  Forgiveness and other universal values ​​largely require this independence from material things.  Group identities allow the ego to distort, corrupt, and ignore those universal values.  Religious teachings offer moral guidance, but you need to ask why.  The guidance might be religious, but why is the guidance moral?