From shared feeling to solitary obligation

I showed my “God Wrestling” class—which traces how philosophers have wrestled with the idea of God—a moment from just before a 2017 Green Day concert at London’s Hyde Park. Tens of thousands of people were singing Queen’s “Bohemian Rhapsody” in perfect unison. No conductor. No script. Just a crowd becoming one voice. I asked my students: What is happening to them in that moment? We then discussed it.

https://youtu.be/cZnBNuqqz5g?si=1jzpQrNg3waRgHB

After sitting with the moment, I posed a simple question: What is religion? As we talked, with me guiding the conversation, this answer began to take shape:

Spirituality vs. Religion

Spirituality is about what we feel. Religion is about what we owe. Religions do not primarily explain the “what,” but the “how”—how to live. Many assume religions exist to answer questions, but just as often they teach us how to live with questions that have no answers. The real divide is not between belief and doubt, but between experience and obligation. That divide raises a pointed question: Is every spiritual experience a religious one, or has spirituality become a way of avoiding religion altogether?

A spiritual experience is immediate. It is a feeling of awe, transcendence, presence, or dislocation. It may come in nature, in music, in love, or in solitude. It does not require doctrine, community, or discipline. It asks less to be interpreted than simply to be felt. Spirituality, in this sense, is episodic—sometimes inward, sometimes outward. It happens to us, and just as quickly, it passes.

A religious experience, by contrast, does not end with the feeling. It binds the experience to a structure of meaning, practice, and demand. Religion takes the raw material of experience and asks what follows from it: What must I do now? How must I live? What obligations........

© The Times of Israel (Blogs)