Life's Too Short to Pretend You're Not Religious (David Dark)

We should cease and desist from referring to others as religious as if they’re participants in games we ourselves aren’t playing, as if they’re somehow weirdly and hopelessly enmeshed in cultures of which we’re always only detached observers. - David Dark

Life's Too Short to Pretend You're Not Religious gets to the core of our existence.  Author David Dark argues that everyone is religious- and everything we do is an act of worshiping something.  But I'm getting ahead of myself- a synopsis is below, with ample quotes from the book.


What is religion?  

"Religion is perhaps most helpfully conceived of as the question of what tales and traditions our lives embody. Everybody embodies something, after all. We’re never not embodying."  It is "the question of how we dispose our energies, how we see fit to organize our own lives and, in many cases, the lives of others."  In other words, "the question of religion is the question of who and what we’re bound to, how it is we find ourselves tied up and what our biggest big ideas actually are, the ideas to which we find ourselves helplessly, unknowingly or even gratefully attached."


Everyone is religious.  All the time.

"If what we believe is what we see is what we do is who we are, there’s no getting away from religion."  We adhere to different belief systems, organized or personal or whatever- but we can't claim we're not religious.  After all, "a religion is a controlling story, and there are at least as many as there are people. Stories change but the fact of story doesn’t."  Therefore, "you can’t bring your values—your faith or your supposed non-faith—suddenly into play. That program is already in progress. It was always already there, being voiced. Sometimes louder and sometimes clearer than you intended."  "We can’t get past religion any more than we can live without communal ties, societies, stories or symbols. It’s what we’re up to. It is, in so many ways, the human subject."

Because this is so important, I'll reiterate: "we’re never not speaking and acting upon our religion. We’re never not involved in everyday worship."  "Our real sense of what’s really sacred is regularly on display."  "All day long, nonstop, we value and devalue people, places, things and the possibility of arable land and potable water for the babies to come. “What shall we value today?” we get to ask ourselves each morning."  There's no escaping it:

Your obsession with Game of Thrones? Religious. Your determination to hold on to that plastic bottle till you’ve found a recycling receptacle? Religious. The song you sing when you’re alone? Religious. Your response to your fellow pilgrim who just cut you off in traffic? Religious. The bad ideas you’re leaving behind and the new ones you’re trying on: Religious.

Failing to acknowledge this leads to isolation and hate.

We are of course welcome to find one another’s fervently held ideas about life and how to live it, the world, and God or no god perfectly ridiculous, but we need to remain in a conversation to have one. “Well, I’m not religious, so . . .” gets played like a trump card. If the word applies to thee but never to me, I’ve made a distinction that is an ultimately isolating move. I stand on the higher ground of reasoned detachment while you’re inevitably awash in folklore and craziness yet again. Am I permitted to feel isolated and disconnected from your strange convictions? Absolutely. But I’m putting on a front (frontin’, as the parlance of hip-hop has it) if I presume there’s nothing strange about my own, that I see clearly where others only see confusedly. I’m forsaking the possibility of fellowship, of seeing myself as one avid pilgrim among others, as I resort to the intellectual laziness of snobbery, that refuge of the shallow. It’s a dead end.

So do we know what we truly believe?

Just because we're religious doesn't mean we know what we believe.  We think we know, of course.  But . . ."our witness isn’t what we say we believe or even what we think we believe."  "The surest evidence of what we believe is what we do. Faith without works is . . . not actually your faith, as it turns out. We do what we believe—maybe it’s a relief to even say it aloud—and we don’t do what we don’t."  We do this all the time.  We disregard our stated beliefs out of perceived necessity.  We use phrases like 'necessary evils,' and do all sorts of unthinkable things- and sanction unthinkable actions.  But "by drawing a line between our supposed convictions and our actual practices, we hold and exercise power without taking responsibility for it. But what we believe is what we do."  "Our policies and our liturgies are one and the same."


We need, therefore, to live an examined life. 

This isn't easy.  "We can hardly see past what’s been normalized for each of us in our lifetimes of cultural immersion."  Yet "an unexamined religion is not worth having."  So "why not take a look at what we’re into, those patterns of behavior we’re often immersed in so thoroughly and hypnotically that we have to fight for the right to even think about them?"  It's important- in fact, "a self-conscious grappling over what actually animates us might be the most essential, sacred task any of us can take on."  In effect, the author is saying we should all "be a practitioner of simple self-awareness, [and have] a way of wondering at ourselves and all the strange things we put up with, sustain and perpetuate, a way of bringing it all to consciousness."


What is the end result of an examined life?
We'll work towards a better society; a truer existence.  "If religion names the ordering of our priorities, what miracles might come when we begin to pay attention to ourselves?"  We'll find that "a mind on alert won’t accept that the way things are is the way things have to be."  In fact, "at any moment, I can change the story I’m telling myself."

We'll stop labeling and disregarding others.  "I want very badly to challenge the ease with which we succumb to the false divide of labels, that moment in which our empathy gives out and we refuse to respond openhandedly or even curiously to people with whom we differ. As I see it, to refuse the possibility of finding another person interesting, complex and as complicated as oneself is a form of violence."  In fact, 

When I label people, I no longer have to deal with them thoughtfully. I no longer have to feel overwhelmed by their complexity, the lives they live, the dreams they have. I know exactly where they are inside—or forever outside—my field of care, because they’ve been taken care of. The mystery of their existence has been solved and filed away before I’ve had a chance to be moved by them or even begun to catch a glimpse of who they might be. They’ve been neutralized. There’s hardly any action quite so undemanding, so utterly unimaginative, as the affixing of a label. It’s the costliest of mental shortcuts . . . This is why it often seems to me that calling someone liberal, conservative, fundamentalist, atheist or extremist is to largely deal in curse words. It puts a person in what we take to be their place, but it only speaks in shorthand. When I go no further in my consideration of my fellow human, I betray my preference for caricature over perception, a shrug as opposed to a vision of the lived fact of somebody in a body. In the face of a perhaps beautifully complicated life, I’ve opted for oversimplification.

We'll be in better relationship with each other.  "When we really admit to the fact of our own context, we’re less prone to deny others the complications of their own and empathy becomes a living possibility."

Numbering ourselves among those who conduct their lives according to strange ideas about the world, acting out one form of devotion after another, whether inspired or ill-conceived, means refusing to keep ourselves aloof from the rest of humanity and accepting a place among our fellow pilgrims also searching for meaning, also trying to make sense of their own lives, and also living with the difficult and pressing question of what to do in light of what we know. We begin to take up the task of empathy when we’re susceptible to the sense that the inner lives of others might be as real and as realistic as our own.

And it's all about relationship.  "Our inescapable network of mutuality—our common existence—is a living fact that can’t be reasonably denied."  "Our life is one long process of mutual aid, and what a relief it is when people act on this knowledge."  And so

understanding ourselves to be just as religious as any and everyone else might afford us time, space and vision with which to see ourselves more clearly and honestly, the better to grasp or begin to grasp—it’s a life’s work after all—the deepest implications of what we’re doing to ourselves and others.

Review

You've probably gathered that I thought this a phenomenal book.  The fact that I highlighted 106 passages in a 200-page book validates that.  This is one of those must-reads.  For everyone.

Rating: A+