This project is not about creating a new religion. Irreverent people like to pretend they are doing such a thing in order to tease the pretensions of solemn religiacs. Two professors of religion in Bozeman formed an institution of two that had only one rule: that the person who died first had to be buried standing up, vertical, which would be more work but maybe more respectful. It was the duty-- in order to be saved themselves -- for each to make sure the other was buried properly. Of course, the second guy who died was on his own.
The precursor of a religious institution cannot be planned or arranged or schemed. It rises up like yeast from the mass of the people, responding to both the known and the unexpected, plus the desired. It will be founded on feelings, that Damasio guide to "valence," the inner guide that feels like doing the right thing. But this is neither the sensation of the "Holy," an inner epiphany that grips a person or even a group, nor is it above or free from secular government. Government will try to incorporate it, use it to legitimize itself, and write its name on the money. In fact a religious institution IS government, sometimes competing, other times collaborating.
When I went to PNWD-UUA leadership school in 1975, and particularly the third year when Ord Elliot taught us about Organizational Design, I felt that at last I could take on the institution of religion. These ideas and strategies were tools that would protect against in-fighting, grid-lock, dominators and so on. Either no one else was impressed or I was very bad at it. At the least I was not remembering that the school was invented and sponsored by the sons of ministers who took a very institutional position about religion. Both of them were corrupted and eventually taken down by the institution.
The part of getting over the institution so as to get at the difference between the "sacred" (which often is a matter of taboos and stigmas or heresy) and the "holy" (which is more like the individual experience of oneness and inclusion) took me more than a decade. Formal traditional seminary gave me what I needed to get out of the cocoon, though that was not the intention on the part of either of us.
U of Chicago Div School is meant to be a traditional sectarian school as founded by the Baptist Rockefellers, but it evolved through academic influence into a stellar location for comparative religion. Within the context of the US, Martin Marty founded a group that explored religions in America with all their variations and impacts on the institutions of the nation without endorsing any one of them. https://divinity.uchicago.edu/sightings It's a purposely impressive place, stone-and-gargoyle buildings, that sweeps away sects and boundaries in one sense -- by looking at them as directly as possible -- and endorses them in another -- by showing how they operate and what they achieve. This is fascinating stuff but hardly holy.
The expression used to explain is that of the "believing circle" that includes thought from those who are convinced of a system's literal truth but allows just outside that boundary the study from those who have no particular attachment to that specific position of faith. "Comparative religion" or "history of religion" are the terms of those who are outside the circles of belief, but respect and protect them.
They also make room for people like me. My U of C Div School MA is in religious studies. "Religious studies, also known as the study of religion, is an academic field devoted to research into religious beliefs, behaviors, and institutions. ... Religious studies draws upon multiple disciplines and their methodologies including anthropology, sociology, psychology, philosophy, and history of religion." In short, it is a study of everything human, which today includes the body itself and how it interfaces with the world through institutions, but not necessarily AS institutions. The cells of our brains record, map, and valorize the world for us and propose what we should do about it.
There is no way this can be ultimate reality because what is outside our skins can only get through our skins so as to interact with our brains by using a code of waves and molecules that our brains can use to build a virtual equivalent, drawing on our muscles, guts, and respiration to enrich this inner map. Religion is what we make of our virtual maps according to the actual molecular structure and connections of our neurology as learned in the womb and the first years after birth. Hopefully there is a caretaker who provides this through interaction which creates a "space between" where the brain's virtual world can interact with that of another human. Some call that love and others call it art.
I wish the word "plastic" hadn't been assigned to molecular chains of polymers, because I would like to use it to refer to what some call "open-mindedness" -- that is, a willingness to keep seeing new ways to admit the world -- "admit", let in, recognize as belonging, accepting the possibility of change. Despised and feared by institutions and those who control them.
We are in a time when everything is so challenged, so expanded, so different than what anyone knew earlier that our old religious institutions have a hard time even recognizing them. Remnants of the old order, sometimes their actual human children, try to insist on what went before, but the evidence is always against them. At least they make a little money in the debris of the 19th century, but they are irrelevant to the future.
Something like a near-universal systemic institutional religion is probably forming right now, though it's anyone's guess what it will be like. I would vote for open, growing, exchanging of ideas and support for the venture as well as ways to rest, to remember identity, and -- tired as I am of the word -- to heal. I would like to be less dependent on demographics and economics, which means a safety net aspect. Hierarchies and priorities are necessary, I suppose, but they inevitably corrupt. Therefore, mechanisms of self-correction are vital. I just want readers to realize what I'm doing.
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