Can a religion include ideas understandable without supernatural referents?

[struggle4progress]

In particular, if you have religious beliefs, can you express any important fragment of those beliefs in a language comprehensible to atheists?

Uni caritas et amor, Deus ibi est.

I came back to the Church in the era of Liberation Theology, when I realized that there really are people willing to put many other things aside in order to live in solidarity with the poor and the oppressed -- not for abstract ideological reasons but simply because they care. Such an ability to care seems to me the essential aspect of what it means to be human, and I consider it closely related to the real content of any worldview I would consider genuinely religious (as opposed to merely superstitious or magical). Whether people really live as if they cared isn't necessarily related much to religious self-description, of course: I've had friends who were absolute atheists but whose humanism I considered profoundly religious, for example.

[JDPriestly]

1. Have you checked out the Unitarian religion?

I'm not sure it's what you are thinking of, but you might look into it if you haven't already.

[struggle4progress]

2. I'm happy enough with my current church: the question I'm asking ..

.. is whether the religious can explain any of their essential notions without using religious language.

[roguevalley]

3. there is nothing in the message of Jesus that is dependent upon

the miraculous.

[TheBaldyMan]

4. the most convincing statements and testaments are those that

appeal to a sense of common fellowship. The miraculous stuff seems to be window dressing. Mystery, in a metaphysical sense, can always be acknowleged but I'd say a sense of the mysterious was another thing everybody has in common.

Maybe that was why magical explanations for those things we cannot ever understand came to be. We can perceive the wonderful and inexplicable but lack any rational explanation.

[Lydia Leftcoast]

6. Your post appeared while I was writing mine

:7

[Lydia Leftcoast]

5. Well, I think the Latin phrase sums it up

"Where charity and love are, there God is."

The church has brought me together with dozens of wonderful people whom I never would have met otherwise because they are of a different race, a different social class, a different nationlity, a different set of interests, follow a different political inclination, have a disability, are much older or younger, or whatever. Finding a good parish is like finding a second family, and over the years, churches have provided me with love and support, spiritual experiences, intellectual challenges, opportunities to serve the community, and the opportunity to sing great music. (Yes, I do have a secular life, too :-) )

My brief time in Mississippi earlier this year was especially profound, spent at a relief camp run jointly by the Lutherans and Episcopalians. The workday began with prayer and ended with the Episcopal service of Evening Prayer. One hundred fifty of us slept on camp cots in a gym with four toilets and four showers for each gender, ate frankly rather tasteless food, and worked really hard for six days. (I didn't work as hard as some, because I got a bad cold on the second day.) We all spent more money than we could really afford buying food for the food shelf, clothes for the clothing tent, and OTC drugs and first aid supplies for the medical tent. I'm usually a "princess and the pea" type, but when that week came to an end, none of us wanted to leave, and as we sat in the airport waiting for our flight home, we realized that we hadn't even thought of our own normal problems.

At their best--and they aren't always at their best-- worship services can be a real high.

I have attended both secular and religious funerals and memorial services. The religious funerals (almost all of them either Lutheran, Episcopal, or Catholic) have always made me feel a kinship with all the billions of people who have mourned over the centuries, with psalms that date back 3,000 years, Scripture readings that date back 2,000 years, prayers and liturgical passages that go back to the Middle Ages, and music of the past 400 years. The knowledge that people in ancient Israel sang Psalms 90 and 130 is profoundly moving to me.

[kwassa]

8. "a good parish is like a second family"

A bad parish can be a very dysfunctional family. Been there, done that.

We are in a very good parish. A men's group was recently formed; our chief activity so far is to help renovate and repair the home of one of our parishioners who is confined to a wheelchair. It has been a great experience. We have many outreach programs to our local community.

I also like the connection to the history of the church, the sense of connection with ancestors from a thousand years before us, reading the same stories, performing the same rituals. The emotion in the Psalms, voices from thousands of years ago, also moves me as well.

[bryant69]

7. Are you referencing a specifically Christian religion?

Confucionism and Taoism are usually lumped in with religions, and yet there seems to be a very low supernatural compenent to them.

Bryant
Check it out --> http://politicalcomment.blogspot.com

[kwassa]

9. well, who knows what an atheist can comprehend? %^)

I think many of us here can express our beliefs in a language that atheists can comprehend, but not offer proof of God that is acceptable to atheists.

[Finder]

10. Yes...Religion as Philosophy. n/t

[muriel_volestrangler]

11. I don't see why not

You'd be saying that something ought to be done not because a god has told people to do it, but because the people think it's the moral thing to do. One could have abstract arguments as to whether god really put an unconscious tendency to do it in people, whether there's free will or not, and so on, but for all practical purposes it's a purely human decision. I think religious people have had to decide their stances on some things that weren't thought of earlier, such as cloning, on purely human grounds.

And should that read 'Ubi caritas ...'? Otherwise it sounds like a translation of U2 lyrics :D

[struggle4progress]

13. Yes, it's ubi. My "n" must have mysteriously switched places with my "b"

[hunter]

12. The vast majority of my own posts here on DU are not religious...

... but my own religion is always lurking about in them.