Chapter Two: What is Religion?
Broadly speaking, religion is the relationship to the Absolute, to That Which we call God. Since this relationship exists for everyone, even for an atheist, it is common to say that everyone has their own religion. However, when taken in this manner, in a broad sense, religion can be both correct and incorrect, true and false, moral and immoral – depending on what we understand as the absolute, highest, and ultimate value of the world and how we relate to it – what we believe in and how we believe, what we accept and what we reject. Positively and fundamentally speaking, religion is the communion with God (reunion). It is precisely about this religion that we must speak.
Religion, as an experience, is very complex. It is an immediate and specific experience that offers communion with God, which is prayer. Of course, prayer, as a mystical aspiration, as a flight of the spirit, as spiritual ecstasy, as faith and feeling, cannot be compared to science in any way. Between religion in this sense and science, there can be as many contradictions as there are between mathematics and music or between mathematics and love. We can only compare concepts and phenomena by considering them in the same plane, under the light of a single criterion. Therefore, we will separate from religion its intellectual (cognitive, accessible to the mind) statements about reality – that aspect which is common to both religion and science – and see whether this knowledge and these judgments about reality contradict each other. Or are they only contradictory in the sense that they speak of the same, yet different and mutually exclusive, aspects?
Here are some fundamental assertions about reality that we Christians profess. God exists – and moreover – He is the only one who truly exists. And that which is connected with Him and in Him. In Him, everything has its being; outside of Him, there’s only existence and the yearning of the spirit. Christ is indeed the God-man, who was crucified and resurrected, and will come again to this earth. The soul of man possesses personal immortality. Now tell me, where in our sciences – math, physics, biology, history – are there statements that contradict these just mentioned judgments? Statements that are educational, objective, proven, that is, scientific? There aren’t any, and there can’t be, fundamentally, because all these positions concern entities that lie outside the competence of science, not phenomena that are accessible to it.
Chapter 3
Religion, as an experience, is very complex. It is an immediate and specific experience that offers communion with God, which is prayer. Of course, prayer, as a mystical aspiration, as a flight of the spirit, as spiritual ecstasy, as faith and feeling, cannot be compared to science in any way. Between religion in this sense and science, there can be as many contradictions as there are between mathematics and music or between mathematics and love. We can only compare concepts and phenomena by considering them in the same plane, under the light of a single criterion. Therefore, we will separate from religion its intellectual (cognitive, accessible to the mind) statements about reality – that aspect which is common to both religion and science – and see whether this knowledge and these judgments about reality contradict each other. Or are they only contradictory in the sense that they speak of the same, yet different and mutually exclusive, aspects?
Here are some fundamental assertions about reality that we Christians profess. God exists – and moreover – He is the only one who truly exists. And that which is connected with Him and in Him. In Him, everything has its being; outside of Him, there’s only existence and the yearning of the spirit. Christ is indeed the God-man, who was crucified and resurrected, and will come again to this earth. The soul of man possesses personal immortality. Now tell me, where in our sciences – math, physics, biology, history – are there statements that contradict these just mentioned judgments? Statements that are educational, objective, proven, that is, scientific? There aren’t any, and there can’t be, fundamentally, because all these positions concern entities that lie outside the competence of science, not phenomena that are accessible to it.
Chapter 3
