Definitions of the undefinable

Recently, this quest to find the meaning of life has led me to read and write about religion. I've gone about both tasks in a haphazard way and today I'd like, in typical fashion, to loop back to where I should have begun. I'd like to find out what is meant by 'religion'.

Much like irony, most of us know a religion when we see one, but defining exactly what makes a religion a religion proves difficult.

Defining religion seems to be a task that has defeated many others apart from myself and the web is littered with articles that discuss the difficulties that arise when one attempts to formulate a precise meaning for this commonly understood word.

I began my own search for the meaning of religion with the Oxford English Dictionary. AskOxford.com provides the following definition:

religion - noun 1. the belief in and worship of a superhuman controlling power, especially a personal God or gods.

2. a particular system of faith and worship

3. a pursuit or interest followed with devotion.

I find this definition lacking. 'The belief in and worship of a superhuman controlling power' could describe how some people might feel about a charismatic dictator. Plus, explanations numbers 2 and 3 would equally apply to fervent support of a favourite football team.

I continued my search with reference to my very old and indispensible copy of Roget's Thesaurus (yes Mum, I did steal your copy when I moved out). My mum's thesaurus provides the following suggestions for synonyms: religious instinct, religious bias, religious feeling.

Well, if you don't know what 'religious' means these are most unhelpful. A quick glance to the entry for religious turns up such words as: holy; sacred; spiritual; sacramental; yogic; mystic and devout.

After that first foray, I am no closer to finding any definition of the term.

I then opened my copy of Wordgloss by Jim O'Donnell, a surprisingly entertaining book that I can wholeheartedly recommend to anyone who is interested in the origin of words. O'Donnell provides the following explanation of the word's etymology:

from the Latin religio, religionis, was related by Cicero to relegere 'to go over again in thought' and by other Roman writers to religare 'to bind'. In both etymologies it denoted man's response to an awareness of the bonds that bound men to the gods. Religare derives from the prefix re 'again' and ligare 'to bind', which also gives us ligature (either the act of binding or a bond itself) and ligament (the bands of tough fibrous tissue that connect bones or support muscles).

Hmmmm, in my opinion, it is a good thing to know where a word came from, but I can't help but feel that this is merely an explanation of a word as a thing and that it goes little way to help me to understand what actually renders a religion religious.

Feeling technical, I then turned to the Harvard Human Rights Journal and to an article entitled 'The complexity of religion and the definition of 'religion' in international law'. This article makes two excellent points about the problem of defining religion.

The first of these states that to define religion you must first decide what is being defined and then, what type of definition you're aiming to draw up.

The second point, which I found to be particularly interesting, is that any attempt to define religion will be influenced by how the person or persons defining it understand religion. Some people believe that religion is something metaphysical, others that it is a psychological experience and still others that religion is a cultural or social force. In other words, if you are religious your definition of religion may be quite different from that that would be provided by someone who does not believe in any God or gods. Equally, people who worship in different ways may understand religion very differently, even if they all share a belief in a god.

Feeling even more confused than I had felt when I began today's posting, I turned to Wikipedia for a basic, collectively created, definition. Wikipedia offered the following explanation:

A religion is a set of beliefs concerning the cause, nature and purpose of the universe, especially when considered as the creation of a supernatural agency or agencies, usually involving devotional and ritual observances and often containing a moral code governing the conduit of human life.

This explanation would suggest that religions should answer for us the two most fundamental questions pertaining to life on earth: why are we here? how should we behave while we're here? For some people, religion does provide this very function however, here's another big BUT - many people believe in religion, but few of us can answer these questions.

Plus, if I were to believe that we were created by giant aliens to amuse them in a similar manner to how we might amuse ourselves by playing Monopoly or better, Risk, and did I worship icons of these beings and live my life in accordance with a set of rules that I believed had been sent down to me by the little green men, would this constitute a religion? If others began to believe similarly, would our belief system then constitute a religion? At what point would beliefs be recognized as such?

I've come to the conclusion that I can't define religion absolutely. I THINK that a religion has the following elements: a creation story or explanation for why or how we got here; a practice that involves worship of a God or gods.

And I'm not even sure if that's correct!

Finally, because defining this seemingly simple term has stumped me, I will leave you with some other people's definitions, which I found at a Canadian website about religious tolerance (and the kind of website that I never thought I would find myself perusing of a Friday afternoon - does this mean I am growing as a person or that I have way too much free time?)

Religion -

William James: "the belief that there is an unseen order, and that our supreme good lies in harmoniously adjusting ourselves thereto."

Alfred North Whitehead: "what the individual does with his own solitariness."

Robert Bellah: "a set of symbolic forms and acts that relate man to the ultimate conditions of his existence." Karl Marx: "Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless conditions. It is the opium of the people." Paul Connelly: "Religion originates in an attempt to represent and order beliefs, feelings, imaginings and actions that arise in response to direct experience of the sacred and the spiritual. As this attempt expands in its formulation and elaboration, it becomes a process that creates meaning for itself on a sustaining basis, in terms of both its originating experiences and its own continuing responses."

The life of a living goddess

Can you imagine being a god on earth? Sounds like fun, doesn't it? You could flit around the globe from beautiful destination to beautiful destination, being fanned by young, lithe fan-bearers and eating strawberries and sushi while sipping ice cold champagne. Or maybe that's just my fantasy... sushi is not for everyone.

In Hindu and Buddhist traditions, the appointment of living goddesses is perfectly normal. Yes, that's right folks, you too could become a living deity! If you are a prepubescent female, with a suitable horoscope and perfect teeth that is.

The only living deity that I have ever knowingly been in proximity to (what a ridiculous phrase that must sound to those who were until now, unaware that god has been made woman many times over) is the Kumari Devi of Kathmandu, Nepal. I didn't actually see this living goddess, but I visited her home (or at least, I admired the outside of it).

The Kumari Devi is a prepubescent girl who lives in a building known as the Kumari Ghar, near Kathmandu's Durbar Square. It is said that this young girl is a source of supreme power who brings prosperity to Nepal. The living goddess is chosen from amongst the young girls (under seven years old) of the Sakya tribe. Preliminary tests must confirm that she has an auspicious horoscope and that her physical characteristics correspond with 'the 32 attributes of perfection', which include the colour of her eyes, the shape of her teeth and the sound of her voice.

The girls who make it over this first hurdle are then placed inside a darkened room where the infants are confronted with buffalo heads, demonic masked dancers and other tricks that are designed to scare them. According to tradition, the true Kumari Devi will not be perturbed by this madness and will remain calm in the face of extremely odd and ugly icons and contortions. Finally, the placid infant faces a test similar to that that confirms the identity of the Dalai Lama, during which she is asked to select items of clothing and decoration that belonged to her predecessor.

Once chosen, the living goddess takes up residence in the ornate Kumari Ghar. Traditionally, she appears on a regular basis at an ornately carved window where tourists can see her and ask questions, to which she will apparently respond by making particular facial expressions. However, in 2003, the living goddess 'Preeti' stopped appearing at the window where visitors could see her. Preeti's guardians told BBC reporters that they were dissatisfied that the Kathmandu municipality earned money in the name of the Kumari Devi, while the guardians did not receive a share of the spoils to maintain the rituals associated with the living goddess. Eleven months later, a deal was struck and she began once more, to show her perfectly formed face behind her window.

Once a year the Kumari Devi makes a rare appearance outside of her home. On Indra Jatra, in September, the Living Goddess is borne in a three tiered chariot around the older parts of Kathmandu. This festival is the focus of worship for the Kumari Devi and traditionally, during this festival she blesses the King of Nepal.

For most living goddesses, the days of being the object of worship by many come to an end just as those difficult teenage years begin. A Kumari Devi remains goddess in residence until either, her first menstrual period, or a loss of a substantial amount of blood due to a cut or similar event. When blood-loss has occurred the goddess falls back to earth and becomes a human adolescent, just like her peers.

Unlike her peers, the once-god-now-human will have lived a life of luxurious isolation. While fulfilling the role of Kumari Devi, she rarely will have left her intricately carved home and will have been permitted few playmates. Furthermore, it is deemed unlucky to marry an ex-living goddess and few of the previous Kumari Devis who are still alive have been able to convince potential suitors that their attractions merit throwing karmic caution to the winds.

The bad luck associated with marrying an ex-goddess may stem from the assumption that a little girl who gives her blessing to the king and is worshipped by Nepali people far and wide is probably going to grow up to be a very spoilt little lady - but this is merely an assumption suggested by my own experiences with one too many a daddy's princess.

Personally, I feel sorry for Kathmandu's living goddess. Firstly, she can't fly and has no super powers... but seriously, the child is essentially sequestered for between six and ten years of her childhood and then becomes a regular mortal, with little training to equip her for the process of coming back down to earth. It sounds like a very lonely existence and one that would ill prepare a young woman to cope with the rigours of modern life in Nepal, where poverty and unemployment are common and where women are expected to marry and produce children in order to fulfill their role in society.

Being worshipped as a god on earth may sound like a great deal in theory, but the reality is most likely disappointing. Many people find meaning worshipping gods, but being one doesn't sound like a very meaningful experience. Plus, in my research for this posting I didn't come across one mention of sushi, or for that matter, champagne - this goddess business is clearly not all it's cracked up to be!

330 million gods or none at all

I've made a (somewhat feeble) attempt to learn something about Hinduism. I'm totally confused. From what I can gather, it is a luminous patchwork of a religious tradition but one with so many different patchwork pieces that, as an outsider looking in, it's hard to gain any clear understanding of what the whole actually stands for.

Here's what I have so far (and please stop me if I err, particularly if you, unlike me, actually know what you are talking about):

Hinduism grew organically and spread throughout a wide area of what is now India, Nepal and surrounding territories. Today, there are approximately one billion Hindus, 905 million of whom live in India, Nepal or Bangladesh.

The religion encompasses a wide variety of traditions, including schools to which millions belong and also many small groups made up of just a few hundred adherents, or often fewer.

Hinduism is often defined in terms of its belief in the law of karma and the belief in reincarnation, although these belief systems are common also to Buddhism and Jainism.

The concept of God differs depending on which tradition and philosophy one subscribes to.

Some Hindus believe that the meaning of life is to realize that one's true self is identical to Brahman, the supreme spirit, and in so doing, to achieve liberation (every religion and philosophy that I have 'studied' in this search talks about achieving some sort of liberation. Am I the only one doesn't feel horribly constrained by the physical experience of life? Perhaps, if through this search I ever become smarter or wiser, I will find my human condition to be more of a burden).

Dualistic Hindu schools also understand Brahman as the supreme being, but in their case they think of him as having a personality that they worship as Vishnu, Brahma, Shiva or Shakti.

Some people call God Ishvara, sometimes identified as Vishnu, or as being Krishna. (It is a mark of my ignorance about this major world religion that, even at this point, I am beginning to feel as if I am reading a Russian novel).

The 330 million devas (oh yes, you read that correctly - 330 MILLION) are heavenly beings or gods about whom mythological stories are told and of whom icons are often made. These devas are sometimes thought to be quite different from Ishvara, but some people worship Ishvara as a favourite deva, or heavenly being.

Which deva you are particularly attached to depends normally upon your background and will often be dictated by which deva your family, caste or people in your local area worship. Certain devas are associated with particular needs or times of life. (So far, while I am confused, I can, to a point, make sense of this by remembering pictures that I have seen of some of the various devas. That said, imagining 330 million of anything is beyond my capacity.)

(Here's where it takes a turn into territory that I was not expecting to trod in this, my introduction to Hinduism) Many Hindus are atheists (does this come as as much of a shock to you as it did to me, or am I particularly ignorant?). Yes, within a religion that seems to be jam-packed with gods, many practitioners do not believe in the existence of any creator god or gods. Unlike your commoner-gardner atheists, who tend to believe (again, I must specify, that I mean this in my extremely limited and predominantly Christian personal experience) that if we are godless, we are also soulless, many Hindu atheists contend that the spirit is strong and exists in tandem with nature, only that within this system there is no supreme God.

It all seems so desperately confusing - how does one decide what one believes or who one believes in, or not? I mean, it's just so multifarious! Yet I wonder if it is as much a matter of choosing a stream of faith as it is of being born into one? Belief is rarely logical, I think that if anything, to make a leap of faith is to believe in the absence of logical reason to do so. I can imagine that few people have the opportunity to weigh up the various attractions of competing traditions or devas, before their belief has been shaped by what they learn from those around them.

How complicated the territory must become for someone who grows up in a world where faith comes second to fashion (or more usually further down the pecking order) but where their parents worship one deva or other, and have a complete understanding of the nature of their faith, absorbed, as if by osmosis, by being and living in a society where that faith was the centre of the world.

While many younger Hindus living in western society may find it difficult to balance their faith with modern existence (as do most people who live in the west and who practice any religion) it is reassuring to think that for many of the one billion Hindus, there is an answer to the question: what is the meaning of life? From my own point of view, the search must continue. It has become my practice to dip a toe here, make a few snatched observations there and I'm not always sure that I am doing more good than bad, but the searching, at least, is very interesting and I am satisfied even just to have learnt today that many of the most devout Hindus do not believe in God - what a wonderful contradiction of everything I had previously assumed that I knew about the major world religions. Holy is not always godly.

It is sometimes wonderful to discover that one has been wrong, if only because it gives one cause to realise that one is most definitely not always right.

Habits of a lifetime

Yesterday, I traveled across Ireland to the wild and, at least over the weekend, mist-covered western coast of the island, to celebrate the life of my friend's mother, who passed away during the week. It was a moving day that was remarkable for the elegance with which her family conducted themselves throughout the day and for the heartfelt remarks made by anyone who knew my friend's mother.

On the journey home, myself and my traveling companions discussed funeral ceremonies and specifically, the fact that it must be much easier to give a eulogy for someone who is universally liked (or almost universally, surely no-one is liked by absolutely everyone that they come in contact with?) than someone who is loved but not liked by many. My friend's mother was clearly very well liked and very much loved, as are the rest of her family.

In the circumstances that someone is well-liked it is not difficult to say 'a few kind words' that will connect to many of those who have come to say goodbye. However, in the case that a person may not have been the most popular, it is still necessary to take the opportunity to celebrate who that person was and their best features. It is not only the person who has gone who we disrespect if we do not, but also our own relationship with them and our experience of their dying.

Our relationships with one another are often extremely complicated and the emotions that we feel about a person are not always clear cut. I can't help but think that the ceremonies that we create around the passing of another person help us to find our way through what are often labyrinthine emotional circumstances.

It is sometimes difficult to know how to feel when we are angry but also sad, perhaps sorry that we did not make peace with someone before they were gone, but still unforgiving. By taking part in the ceremonies that we practice after someone is gone we find a way to say goodbye and to show respect, even if we cannot still, forgive or forget their actions or ours.

Even in the best of situations, where a person is beloved and dies old and happy, it can be comforting to go through the motions of celebrating their life and marking their death. Religion has created ceremonies that punctuate our lives and that form rites of passage that can help us to navigate our way across the oceans of noise that surround us as we travel this journey.

As I said, I am not a religious person but I can see the value in the Catholic ceremonies, in the practice of habits around the most joyful and the most tragic moments. I am of the belief that there are stages of grief and if in the first few days after we loose someone we are forced to put on a brave face, greet friends and concerned strangers and listen to the same prayers said for someone we love that we have previously heard said for those we were not so very close to, maybe this helps us not only to come to terms with the reality of what has happened but also to accept that we must continue on, surrounded by people who care about us but for whom we must sometimes smile when we don't feel up to it, until we want to smile again.

And again, yesterday, I was reminded of the community aspect of religion. There is great support in the coming together of a group of people, each of whom says: 'this is OUR way to say goodbye and thank you for this person we love'. This is not to exclude anyone else who does not share out traditions, but to find collective expression at a time when many people feel similar feelings (of varying severity) about one person and the loss of them.

In conclusion, religion is 'not my thing', but I am glad that I can fall back upon the habits that were ingrained in childhood and the ceremonies that help in times when otherwise we might not know what to do or how to move forward.

My friend's mother was laid to rest in an idyllic location, looking over water and in the shadow of mist-covered Irish hills. Yesterday it was mystical in the cold, damp weather and I imagined it in summer time, blue and green and fresh and peaceful. I am sure that anyone would be happy there, but particularly someone who feels that this is where they belong.

A first word (no wincing) on religion and meaning

I've come to the realisation that it is time to take a peak into what religion can tell me about the meaning of life. This thought leaves a strange, sour and cynical taste in my mouth.

I am not a person without faith, I have faith in bucket loads however, I'm not exactly sure what it is that I have faith in. Certainly, I do not have faith in the Catholic church, and Catholicism being the religion within which I was raised, this has led to a natural suspicion of all organised religions.

Religion is, in my mind, not far removed from politics, but at least politics is open about the influence of political motivation upon those who operate within the scope of its influence (wait, in a democracy shouldn't that apply to all of us?). Most of my problems with the Catholic church (aside from the abuse of children that occurred at the hands of members of this organisation) stem from its operation as an organisation that resembles both a business and a pressure group.

However, I am a great believer in a good yarn and I think of religion as being the story within which we frame our faith. I'm interested in marketing and media, as well as writing off the top of my head and am always fascinated by the creation of narratives to communicate ideas. People love a story that they can sink their teeth into and religions, of whatever flavour you partake of, provide just that - a tale complete with characters, plot, beginnings, middles and ends.

Best of all, religions provide us with a role in the very centre of the fray - they explain our position within this narrative and how we interact with the central characters. Who wouldn't love a story that they star in? However, this is one bed-time story that comes with a rule book. Oh I am all for freedom, free thinking and free markets, but let's face it, we do like a bit of structure. Like newborn babies, most of us crave a little routine, a few guidelines to tell us how to live our lives in accordance with best practice. Religions provide this playbook and in most cases, they also provide for the human contact and community that most (non-nut-type-forest-hermits: see yesterdays post) of us crave. And they give us hope - the true secret of life?

As I said, I have faith and I do believe that it is entirely possible that Jesus walked the earth and even that he may have been a messenger from God, I also believe that aspects of other religious tales may have some basis in truth. It doesn't seem to matter who we believe in or where we believe we are going when we leave this planet, what matters is to have a story, to find a way to interpret what we see, touch and feel around us and, more importantly, where we fit into it all.

I've studied quite a lot about the early modern period, when people read the world as a complex sign system and did not believe that anything was as it was, but rather that it was a representation or symbol of something else that was deeper and closer to God. I don't believe that this is an accurate understanding of our world and I'm all for seeing a table as a table, a bird as a bird, a milkshake as a dense and sugar-filled drink, but if I lived in a world where food was limited, sanitation pretty much non-existant and where, if I gave birth or cut my leg badly I would probably die, I might also find solace in believing that THIS was not IT.

In my opinion, religion is a means of understanding our own place in time and space and for investing meaning and hope into a life that can sometimes seem so difficult that we don't know how to go on without believing that there is something more and better beyond, and a life that can sometimes be so spectacularly beautiful that we cannot fully enjoy it without finding someone and some way to say thank you.

As I take a first peak at some of the religions of the world I will attempt to keep this in mind and to try to be respectful, because I will be dealing in other peoples' language of life and of hope.