Religion and people go hand-in-hand.  Wherever you find one you necessarily find the other.  There are those who claim to be exceptions to this rule… those who subscribe to no standardized religious doctrine and therefore profess to be non-religious.  As we shall see however, this is nonsense.  When the function of religion is properly understood it is apparent that religion is integral to being human.  The question is, why?  Why are human beings innately religious?  

      As with most things, in order to understand a concept one must first define it in its most basic terms.  If we can define the barest essence of a thing then it may be possible to avoid much of the tangential junk that has gotten stuck to it over time and which all too frequently leads to confusion and pointless debate if not violence.  In that light I would suggest that the barest essence of religion, its most fundamental function, is that it is how we cope with the unknown.  It is rather like a set of tools or thinking patterns, tenants, doctrines or dogmatic suppositions that we use to hold the enormity of the unknown at bay.  In other words, it is how we explain the inexplicable.  Or to be more precise… since the inexplicable cannot be explained, religion is how we pretend to explain it.  It is what we suppose to be true, but cannot know for sure.    

      The reason why human beings unfailingly put their faith in one set of beliefs or another is because we are surrounded by the unknown.  It is the sea upon which we are sailing, searching for safe ports where we might enjoy a few, brief moments of respite.  It is vast and by its very definition, utterly unknowable.  It is infinity… it is eternity… and it is completely beyond our ken.  Therefore we must develop some ruse, some subterfuge or clever thought pattern capable of preventing sensory overload so overwhelming that it would simply blow all the fuses in our little mental circuit boards at once, leaving nothing more than some hissing and popping noises, a little smoke wafting in the breeze and melted wires dripping molten copper onto the floor.  To avoid this kind of mental melt-down we humans reflexively bring one of our strongest traits to bear; i.e. our cleverness.

      It is indisputable that human beings are enormously clever.  We take great pride in the conviction that we are the most intelligent form of life on this planet… a presumption based on definitions and precepts of our own design of course.  We search the cosmos for what we call “other forms of intelligent life,” which would serve to put any other life forms in our neighborhood on notice that we are a dreadfully arrogant lot.  Or as Oscar Wilde put it, “I think that God, in creating Man, somewhat overestimated his ability.

      Despite an overabundance of self-confidence regarding our mastery of the intellectual arts however, none among us can lay credible claim to omniscience.  And unless one knows everything, then one must concoct some sort of scheme for coping with the unknown.  We know just enough to know that we do not know a great deal.  We are just about smart enough to have an inkling of how ignorant we really are… which, when you think about it, is pretty smart.  But we don’t like to think about how ignorant we are too much.  It is a rather depressing thought to dwell on, so we do our best not to.  The array of schemes human beings have invented for avoiding thinking about the enormity of what we do not know can all be lumped together under the general heading of “religion.”

      Human religions, when one takes a moment to consider them rationally, demonstrate just how clever the human mind can be.  And it only makes sense that anything as frail as the human mind would necessarily be heavily reliant on well-crafted defense mechanisms.  After all, the degree of one’s vulnerability dictates the size of one’s defense budget, and ours is significant.  The human mind, confronted by eternity, can only play and poke at it like the proverbial monkey toying with a typewriter.  Perhaps the limitations of our current perspective, burdened by ego and the scaled-down view of reality we call the physical universe, restricts our capacity for comprehensive understanding.  Regardless of cause however, the end result is irrefutable.  The shear mass of what we do not know relative to that which we do know is so enormously out of balance that protecting ourselves against the crushing realization of how puny we really are is clearly a matter of survival.  So to accomplish this we employ most clever of all human inventions, religion.         

      And here, dear reader, I shall let you in on a little known secret… everyone has one… a religion that is.  Given even minimal capacity for self-awareness and analytical thought, the sheer size of the unknown is inescapably evident.  It cannot not be noticed.  It can be overlooked, avoided, shunned, lied about, camouflaged or disguised, but all of these gambits are, by definition, ploys for obscuring that which has already been acknowledged.  It is a plain case of denial.  We glimpse the massive unknown and are horrified, then frantically we scamper about trying to find some way of convincing ourselves that we did not really see what we saw.  But obviously, had we not seen it there would be no reason to convince ourselves that we didn’t.  Some part of the human mind, no matter how deeply it may be buried, knows there is an awful lot that it does not and cannot know.  Therefore it instinctively constructs a defense to protect itself from this devastating realization.  If there were no threat there would be no concomitant need to construct a defense against it.  But the threat is obvious and colossal, so a defense mechanism is imperative.  And the generic term used to reference these defense mechanisms is, religion.

      Now, as you can see, this way of thinking about religion is both practical and inclusive.  Practical because it merely describes the function of religion, as opposed to getting sucked into the bottomless pit of arguing about which religion, if any, is more valid than any other.  And it is inclusive because it leaves out no one.  Religion is universal because no one is omniscient.  If someone actually did know everything he would have no need to steel himself against the unknown, because for him there would be no unknown.  But alas, there is no such person… at least not on this planet.  We are all ignorant alike, so we must all tell ourselves some sort of little white lie about how smart we are.

      With this description of religion in hand we can now forge ahead to search for commonalities in the underlying thought patterns we humans use to fend off the impact of the unknown.  However, not all of them are generally thought of as a bona fide religion.  Science, for example, is not typically thought of as a religion, but it is.  Agnosticism and even atheism are also religions in their own right.  Everyone has a religion; that is, everyone has a way of coping with the vast unknown.  Some of them we think of as being a bona fide religion and others we think of as being the absence of religion, but when you get right down to the crux of the issue and consider what religion actually is, or does, then it is clear that we all practice some sort of religion, whether it be common and highly regimented or uniquely personal, whether it be practiced ostentatiously or so confidentially as to go virtually unnoticed, whether followed consciously or insensibly.  Regardless, the unknown is ever-present and therefore all people are forced to take it into account and make allowance for it in their daily thinking patterns.   

      One person supposing he is more religious than another is incongruous.  It is the equivalent of one fish supposing he is more wet than another fish.  In contemporary usage we often hear references to “people of faith,” as though they were some sort of peculiar species mixed in among the rest of us.  Some folks are more inclined to wear their religious beliefs on their sleeve, if not on a flashing neon sign over their head.  But this does not, by any stretch, mean that they are any more or less religious than anyone else, only that they are more given to making a spectacle of themselves, or worse, proselytizing.  All people employ one or more techniques to fend off the enormity of the vast unknown, and that is their personal religion.  I have heard it said that in some American Indian traditions the concept of “God” is expressed as “Great Mystery.”  This strikes me as being very apt.  It captures, in just two words, part of the essence of the concept of what most folks here in the west call “God.”  Although “Great Mystery” is not the only attribute one might ascribe to, or associate with, the God concept.  Another would be “Intent.”

      Classical science disdainfully eschews any presumption of there being intent involved in the formation of this reality we call our "world" as being “religious”  in nature... which, by implication, reduces all such views to the level of superstition.  However, the joke is on them, for classical science has come full-circle to quantum science, which has determined that there is no clear distinction between the observer and the observed.  To some mysterious degree, the observer affects, or intends, the observed.  Therefore we are, in some as yet unclear fashion, creators.  Apprentice creators to be sure... we certainly are not masters at this early stage in our development.  We don't seem to be terribly cognizant of our capabilities a lot of the time.  Then again, when you stop and look around, we ain't exactly chopped liver either.  Messing around within the parameters of this 3-dimensional universe, transient as it is, does provide a good technique, or opportunity, for consciousness to experience itself, grow and learn.

     But let's get back to the categories of thinking patterns we typically use to fend off the crushing weight of realizing how much we have yet to learn...  

      The atheist’s way of coping with the vast unknown is to simply declare that anything I cannot see, confirm in the laboratory or conceive of in my mind, puny as it may be, simply does not exist.  It is, in short, denial.  What I cannot get, ain’t so… period.  Of course this technique does not work very well when we are dying… when it becomes apparent the vast unknown is alive and well, with or without benefit of our understanding, and is about to overtake us.  At that point practitioners of the atheist’s doctrine begin to scramble about with noticeable frenzy. 

      The fundamentalist’s perspective is one which attempts to parry the vast unknown by claiming to already know it.  This is the doctrine of, “What unknown?  There is no such thing.  I have the answers to all things right here in black and white.  End of discussion.”

      The fundamentalist’s perspective is remarkably similar to the atheist’s.  It too is essentially a form of denial.  We are consciousness and the passion of consciousness is to become more conscious… more of what it already is.  And this process never ends.  It is, in a word, eternal.  This is exhilarating to be sure, but it is also frightening.  It leads us directly towards eternity… which is sort of large.  So large in fact that we cannot grasp it… which is innately frightening.  And since we do not like to be frightened we are sorely tempted to close our minds… to shut it out… to deny.

      And finally we have the agnostic perspective.  This one says, “I don’t know.”  But not knowing can go one of two directions:

1- “I don’t know and so there is no use in looking, or…

2- “I don’t know but I am committed to searching… and for eternity if need be.” 

      It is the latter doctrine that works best while dying.  These folks die with the greatest ease and grace… for it is the only doctrine that embraces, rather than shuns, eternity.  The contrary side of agnosticism; i.e. the agnostic who stops looking, does not deny the vast unknown, he simply tries to ignore it.  But in the proverbial end (while dying) eternity intrudes itself into his awareness and he is stuck.  He cannot escape it.  But the cheerful, optimistic and persistent agnostic… the one who admits not knowing the vast unknown, yet never stops searching, is the only one who ACTS like an immortal being.  He who claims to understand immortality while pointedly acting like a mortal is, well, a little confused.

      Claiming to know the unknown is, on its face, ludicrous.  Denying or ignoring the existence of the vast, eternal unknown does not make it go away or prepare anyone to enter its domain.  To understand eternity one must act like an eternal being, entering into it knowingly… or perhaps I should say, unknowingly.  Which, when you think about it, is a pretty good description of “faith.”  

      One final note…

      Most folks are not pure practitioners of any one technique (atheist, fundamentalist or agnostic) for coping with the vast unknown… either at any one point in their life or especially, over the course of their whole lifetime.  Most folks employ some mixture of all these perspectives at one time or another.  It is also true that some folks pose as practitioners of one thinking pattern while secretly adhering to another.  There are lots of people sitting in houses of worship who inwardly adhere to atheistic thought patterns.  And there are lots of self-proclaimed scientists praying for insight.  Being rational is not a prerequisite for being human... obviously... which is what makes us so entertaining to watch. 

     Human contradictions aside, spending time with and studying dying people reveals that the attitude which yields the best results is that of the cheerful, dauntless agnostic.  He is ignorant and he knows it, but constantly works at diminishing his ignorance.  He allows the little piece of consciousness he possesses and is responsible for to pursue its innate passion; that is, to become more.  He is the most honest with himself and thus, the most self-aware.  And if you place any credibility in the adage that the purpose of life is to discover who we truly are, then he who is the most self-aware clearly has the inside track.

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"To live a creative life, we must lose our fear of being wrong."

Joseph Chilton Pearce

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Essay written by: Michael Holmes

author of: Crossing The Creek, A Practical Guide To Understanding Dying Process

and

Key Elements Of Transitions

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Dying To Know