Replacing Religion

Image via Wikipedia

Ritual

Rituals are not the exclusive province of religion. We humans love them. Initiations, ceremonies, family traditions, and daily routines are all rituals.  They give us a sense of security and continuity, and they can provide a feeling of connection to the past. Religions use the comfort and connection we take from ritual as a way to make religious services seem more mystical and timeless.

Non-religious folks should not abandon ritual. Ritual makes us feel better in times of turmoil or distraction.  It provides small certainties in a world of big uncertainties. Your morning ritual gets you through preparing for the day when all you want to do is go back to sleep, and a wedding ceremony carries a couple through one of the most emotional and overwhelming moments of their lives. It’s a huge mistake to think that living a non-religious life makes one immune to the need for ritual in one’s life.

Religious services force the congregants to make time for ritual in their lives. The non-religious need to make this time on their own. A ritual can be almost any repeatable sequence of words or actions that speaks to the emotional or mental state the ritual is designed for. It doesn’t need to mean anything to anyone other than the practitioner. Those creative enough can invent their own, but some folks may need a group to find common ground with before they find the rituals that satisfy their needs.

Self-Examination

Just because a person is non-religious doesn’t mean that they have no need of introspection. “Know thyself!” is a common refrain in all words of wisdom, be they religiously inspired or not. In a very real sense, it is the basis for modern psychotherapy, and virtually every self-help book on the market.  If a person doesn’t know what they really want, and more importantly why they actually want it, they can never hope to effect changes to the world to achieve their goals. Religions recognize this, and traditionally use prayer and meditation to achieve knowledge of the self.

There are two basic kinds of prayer, ritual and intercessory. The first is part of the discussion in the previous section on ritual, but the second is about asking a higher power for answers or finding solutions. Many critical thinkers see intercessory prayer as a useless endeavor, a wishing for magical solutions to their problems. However, in science and mathematics, the formulation of a problem is often the key to solving it. The very act of organizing one’s thoughts about what the problem is can often either reveal the real problem underlying the perceived one, or at the very least inherently suggest the answer. In this way, intercessory prayer (when it is more than just a desperate wish) *can* serve a purpose in the lives of the religious, and a valuable one, at that. The non-religious may not need to appeal to a higher power, but they need to learn how to formulate their questions in order to get what they want in life!

Meditation’s goal is to quiet the mind, so that the practitioner can “listen” for information not normally available to them.  In religion, this information is supposed to come from a higher being or beings, or from some innate metaphysical connection to the universe. It is the “touchy-feely” part of religion, the one that usually involves group chanting or quiet isolation. However, there are many meditative traditions that hold no religious connotations, where the inner quiet is intended to reduce stress, enhance relaxation, and “listen” to information from inside the practitioner’s own mind. These traditions can be extremely useful to the non-religious, enhancing both self-knowledge and health.

Image by alicepopkorn via Flickr

Spirituality

Spirituality has supernatural connotations, but the parts that make it up, connectedness and peace, ritual, and meditation are all real things in the real world that serve real purposes for the human animal. The non-religious should be careful not to “throw the baby out with the bath water” when it comes to these things, and the newly non-religious must be aware that their comfort awaits outside religion, so there’s nothing to fear in exploring their new philosophy, whatever it might turn out to be. There can be spiritual freethinkers and atheists!