Definition comes first and since it’s hard to define without a chain of thought leading to it, I must first describe some features for I myself don’t have a coherent notion of the idea.
The idea of an abstract religion should be devoid of “god”, for that’s merely a convenient construct to suppress; not born entirely of evil for it also gives purpose and significance, by proxy of a “higher being”; asking the commons to attain that otherwise is out of could be tragic.
But this not what my religion should be concerned with, not even tangentially. My religion must have two properties that are paramount, first, a logical consistency and second, isolation, it must exist only for me; then thinking can become my prayer. Existing as the only being in reference, I would be god.
Still, since I’m borrowing the word, I must alteast try to be in it’s semantic vicinity. What woul be almost “religion” life for me? How do I define my commandments? An easy way out is to borrow, not blindly, but I don’t have to go out of my way to contradict, and as such I must accept that the origin of an idea should not matter as long as I can justify it — even if I were to believe lies, that is acceptable, for there is no “truth” I can ascertain a 100%.
“Principles” or “way of life” or other such loose terms though do not quite capture, for me, what I want to imply through words the feeling of. Nor can I rationalise with full certainty some of the codified ideas of my being.
“Rules” and a rules based way of life is some start. But religion evokes those rules and their sense of importance much more than anything else. And once you start to bring in ideas that cannot quite be rationalised, not necessarily due to lack of an external all powerful or with any power at all being, that ventures into the religion category. Now maybe a religion would need followers too - would of course be me, and would anyone else be needed. Am I then — as far as the religion is concerned, the all powerful being? Freely changing what it dictates and manifesting constructs and ideas into reality. If you want to think of a supernatural plane, your mind is one — what you construct exists there, if you want an omniscient being creating and destroying worlds, that too can exist.
Such a dissociation can be harmful, the utilitarian benefit of imposing a religion ( provided that yours is atleast a semi good one ) is imposing some vague sense of morals and guidelines to people that would’ve been otherwise incapable of conferring one to themselves. And it’s a big ask really, to ask every individual to define for themselves what principles and morals they would want to live by when they are not even aware of their own deaths ( it’s one thing to know that you’ll die and another to confront your mortality and truly accept it; I don’t think I can do justice to the idea in two lines ). But for people like us, that had never taken up conventional religions, found our way through atheism, only to realise that the idea of a religion and following one very much makes sense.
If I were to really make it baser, you could say that I’m defining “discipline and rules” as a religion; but disciplines and rules is a limiting term. What about morals, inclusion of the supernatural, ideas outside the confines of reality, dissociation of reality itself and then defining how you interact with it. Religion gives me freedom to do all that — not that any of the existing ones utilise it fully or even in the right direction at all ( but then again, any that did would not have been popular at all ).
So many words to get to it and I’ve still been dodging it for so far. For those able and willing, as they move through life and define their own values, morals, ideas about the nature of reality, everything about the world itself, they’ve really gone and defined their own religion that they live by, whether they call it that or not is a different thing. And I’m not merely arguing semantics here, for “religion” if you start picking apart what has worked for the masses so far — and codify it in a similar manner, starts to give shape to the ideas. You would “know” what to do and have a vague sense of your beliefs, but unless you put it through a trial by writing that does not exist really. An interface between the mind and reality — defining a way of interface rather, is religion, what’s good, what’s bad and so on and so forth. The reality with so many individual minds otherwise is too fragile; for the mind wanders, and no matter what righteous religion you make, you cannot really make people “follow” it. But I don’t have that issue, my religion is purer than most for I’ll be the sole follower — and while it’s very much possible and quite easy so, to lie to oneself without even knowing it, I believe that if I codify what I think I can “direct” my mind much more strongly.
As I write more and more, I gain a little bit more clarity on my own thoughts. I wanted the permanence of a religion - a believer believes at any time, not when in trouble or certain times of the day or when convenient; now they may ignore it but the problem of “faith” is not an issue on a self imposed religion, and I fully expect myself to falter and fail even what I codify — still for the mind to believe in the “I must follow my religion” is easier and more correct rather than defining each day on the fly a “start” for the rules to kick in and making decisions from experiences and memory, “naming” and association and equivalence with the importance of a religion is VERY much the desired outcome here. The second major one would be self-consistency — experiences and memory are vague and can often be contradictory. Having it written and continuously rigorously verified and iterated upon ensures a self-consistency, a purity that a capable mind would appreciate. It’ll take the cognitive load off during the immediate moment and give you a framework to build upon. I don’t really like analogies being inserted everywhere ( unless it’s an equivalence which I guess it is here ); but think of trying to build higher and higher in mathematics, experiences and memories would just be using arithmetic. Now sure, it’s very much possible to do a LOT of what you need in life through just that, but to build higher and climb higher, in this case in the mental plane, I would need a rigorous foundation that defines in words what I believe in.
And it’s meant to be changing too. Not on a whim whenever you are not willing to put in the effort for, but time to time and as and when needed. The snapshot at a time should be self-consistent and well-thought, and it must be, as this is how you’ve decided to live your life, but as any notion of consistency across time is naive and not something to be sought after.
Such is my idea of a modern religion, self-consistent, documented in full and defined by self for self. Now from here on I might be mixing ideas from my own religion into the idea of an abstract religion a bit ( hopefully not too much ), but one more phrase to add to the list would be “and be an interface between the mind and the world”. As a bidirectional transform through which you perceive the world and information in your mind and project your mind onto the world. Purity would be essential, a religion must incorporate HOW to deal with the world but treat mind as the superior plane and not define that HOW under arbitrary unscrutinised ideals carried over from the real world. I don’t think I can explain without an example here but one would be defining morals for your religion; I cannot carry over what’s the established notion of good and evil into my religion; not unless I can derive my way, originating from the mind to those same conclusions.
scribbles
- in essence, I think I just really like the idea how someone deeply faitful would examine their life and day to day actions, everything really, in light of a set of rules they’ve decided to follow.
- I also wanted the convenience that religion gives to define what would be the equivalent of anxioms - things that you don’t need to prove and build on that — which I’ll use freely too and is fine to do so as long as their origin is “self-evident” to the mind or rather CAN originate from the mind entirely ( so I can copy ideas if I deem that I can get to them with no pre-existing beliefs given enough time ).