Good Religion

Its very common to hear someone say the following: "I don't need religion. All I need is to be a good person, and that is my religion."

Is that really what religion is about?

I certainly hold that most of the world's religious traditions have come to the understanding that being good is an important, if not an essential manifestation of being "religious." But I think it comes as a result of a long meditation on who we are, where we come from, and how we are all related. "Being good" is therefore the natural consequence of religion.

It may go something like this: You somehow, someway come to an understanding that there is something beyond us, beyond the 3 dimensions, and you end up calling that something God, and you come to understand that we are somehow in relationship to this God, and are actually related to God in that we are God's creation, sculpted right from the Divine hand, in fact, and that therefore all humans are really brother and sister to each other, or maybe appendages of the same body, so that another person's happiness is related to our own happiness, and I'm not fulfilled unless they are fulfilled, and nobody wins unless everybody wins, and their life is precious and so is mine, so doing all we can to support, protect and encourage life just flows naturally from all that. Capice?

However, if you believe that "God is love" (as I do), then simply being good is a sure access point to the Divine, so in the end it may not matter if you belong to a church and practice a formal spirituality (i.e. religion) since all roads lead back to Rome, in a manner of speaking.

People often eschew religion because they see a gap between an ideal of goodliness and what is done in the name of religion. All I hear in that statement is that religion is actually good, its just not living up to its own ideals--but thank God for high ideals. Its ironic because the word "goodliness" is a derivative of "Godliness", so that which is good is that which is of God. These notions are embedded within our own vocabulary and worldview. And the notion that "religion = being good" is in fact a very Christian idea itself! (Not that it is absent from other religions, either, but the flavoring is very Christian influenced.)

So then does it matter to "do" religion at all? I hold that it does. Its about meditating and pondering who we are and how we are related to each other. Where do we come from and where do we go. Science is approaching this from the deductive side, but we need to engage from other angles, as well. We are not purely deductive creatures. Its part of the natural romance of being human, that quest to explore and to see what is up-river, and that thirst to know and one day ultimately return to the source of our life and being.

If you don't feel a need to do religion, then who am I to say you should? I do know that many of us need to go to the well to drink. We have a thirst and to know what is out there and to be in relationship with what is out there.