RELIGION & THE REBEL

Here’s a thought from Douglas Coupland in Life After God: “As long as there is a wilderness, I know there is a larger part of myself that I can always visit, vast tracts of territory lying dormant, craving exploration and providing sanctity.”

It’s clearly a spiritual thought, but God is absent or at best unnecessary.

Religion and spirituality are different, and this isn’t just splitting hairs. Take two polar opposites: Gandhi and the Rev Ian Paisley, both of whom are examples of people who follow/ed a religion. Gandhi is physically dead, but appears to have been spiritually very much alive. As for Ian, you can draw your own conclusions.

The etymology of the two words is different. Religion comes from the Latin religio, meaning respect for divine power. (Some authors, both ancient and modern, have even taken a more unsympathetic stance and traced the word to religare, to bind fast.) Even if we reject the latter contentious definition, religion has connotations of social control. It is something that happens when a group of people subscribe to a collective myth, and will almost certainly involve liturgies, rituals, and some kind of moral code. There will probably be such a thing as what it is to be a member of this belief system, or an outsider, and membership may involve some kind of initiation and/or vows. I cannot think of a religion which does not meet all of these criteria. So it’s a good enough working definition.

The modern sense of "recognition of, obedience to, and worship of a higher, unseen power" is from 1535, according to an online etymological dictionary. (my italics)

Spirituality on the other hand derives from the Latin spiritus "soul, courage, vigor, breath," related to spirare "to breathe." We have the related English words "spirited", “inspired” and also its near synonym “ehthused” from en-theos, full of god.

The key is that one concept is social and the other is something to do with solitude.

There is a concomitant difference in the locus of power. On the one hand, there is deference to some higher Authority “out there”; on the other, self-empowerment through attention – in the first place - to the most vital process in human life: breathing.

We can see in Jeanne d'Arc, for example, that there is often an overlap between the spiritual and religious aspects of someone's life but the sine qua non of spiritual experience is that something is going on internally and while some idea of God may be present, it need not intrude. The experience itself is more fundamental than the (necessarily public) linguistic concepts that may be used to frame it afterwards.

If we move on a little from the words, it’s clear how in any conceivable civilisation, religion, because of its tendency towards conformity, will have a very specific appeal to the worst sort of people, those whose success depends on controlling the belief-system of society. Hence the real-world manifestations: the Spanish Inquisition, the religious right in the US, and militant Islam. Among plenty of others.

Spirituality is more readily associated with mystics, poets, children and dreamers. Because the spiritually adept have found so much energy, and “inspiration” from this process, it’s no accident that they can end up as the founders of great religions, especially if they start talking about cosmology and/or morals. But I know plenty of spiritual atheists. It's not a contradiction in terms.

(The title of this blog comes from a Colin Wilson book which I haven't actually read, but I suspect it covers the same sort of ground.)