Let’s assume we all choose our religion.

I know that social pressures often dictate our religious “home base” – and even if we could choose objectively, we’d use our first experience with religion as a personal system of weight and measure. We’d consider it our constant; the test we did where things went wrong, and we’d sample other religions and study their flaws.

But in a convenient twist for me, we implicity choose our religion by virtue of the fact that with every passing second, it remains in our hearts.

If we are choosing a religious set of values – one that seems to advocate morally consistent behaviors, philosophical meaning, a set of freedoms or a set of goals – we have signed up to value the unseen.

The truth is that everyone values the unseen. But maybe it’s not a very natural thing to do, to check in with it, to use it as a home base, to continually weigh the tangible parts of life against it.

Religion then allows people to choose a governing system of morality to which they hold themselves accountable. 

It’s intuitive to look at religion as a force all its own. We know that it influenced us as children, before we could make real, rational decisions. “Organized religion” may as well be a curse word, and when we look at religion, we are tempted to see only the whole, and none of the parts.

But entering it from the perspective of one who treasures the moral and ethical approach to living, religion really seems like a friend.

And in that sense, religion cannot be a whole. It can only be its parts. No one wants a large organization to dictate their beliefs. We want a humble partner, who recognizes what it is that we already think we ought to value, and encourages us. There is no religion; there is only faith.

The work of religion is then only the work of the people who create its amalgamated values. This is said with no disrespect toward those who believe God has created faith, God has created religion, and at the end of the day, God runs the whole show. I’d be inclined to agree with them. But I doubt we’d come to an agreement on the specifics.

Again - religion is nonexistent; faith is all there is. Faith creates. Faith mobilizes. Faith initiates choice.

Faith does not create a belief system. And that is where the flower begins to rise from the dirt. It is faith that causes a man to see himself in a supernatural light. It is an external belief system that tells him he can be beautiful, and begins to draw him away from his roots. The Christian interpretation of the believer as a flower involves the systematic process of growth. My own perspective would focus on the fact that the seed never leaves the dirt.

The point is that religion is not an entity at all; it is a term to describe the way that people externalize faith. And that should not frighten us. That should encourage us.