Religion for Secular Folks
/How an atheist stumbled into religion without god.
I grew up religiously confused.
My mom is jewish. My Dad is a Christian turned buddhist. I said I was all three religions. Nobody believed me. The Jews said, “You are jewish because your mother’s bloodline is Jewish.” The Christians said, “You aren’t Christian because you don’t follow the teachings of Jesus.” The Buddhists did not respond because they were busy meditating.
Thus kicked off my way-word journey through religion. What began as lighthearted misunderstanding quickly nose dived to chaos. I read of violent crusades, intolerance of homosexuality, and tense turf wars.
The past 4,000 years turned me away from religion.
Until I accidentally got looped back in.
My freshman year my roommate Harry wanted to find a church. I joined him. We went “church hopping,” attending a new congregation every Sunday until he found a good fit. Over the next year I also spent time immersed in other religions. I studied Taoism, immersed myself in my fiance’s Jewish community, practiced a hindu-based mediation in India for three weeks.
What I found surprised me: religion has distinct benefits that seemed oddly … secular.
Even more fascinating: many secular folks discount these benefits because of religion’s baggage. They resist considering the value of these concepts because of traumatic religious experiences growing up or a bias that someone is trying to convert you.
The rest of this post outlines 5 practices of religion for secular folks: prayer, tradition, community, religious leaders, faith.
My hope is that these can help you evolve in our world.
🙏 Prayer
To many religions, prayer is communicating with a higher power. Prayer results in feeling good, filling a holy duty, seeking redemption, or perhaps bending life in their favor.
We get so afixed to this version of prayer that we miss the benefits of a secular version of prayer.
Prayer has utility. You spend focused time thinking and hoping for others rather than yourself. You shape your subconscious.
We can use our own version of prayer - fixing our attention on a hopeful intent - in order to subtly shape our psychology.
Try this 10 minute secular prayer: sit in meditation with the idea that all people in the world are growing in faith and love. Faith is not necessarily religious, but whatever faith means to them. As your mind wanders, which it always will, gently guide your attention back to the main idea that all people are growing in love and faith. Do it for 10 minutes.
As you meditate, you’ll notice people from your life come to mind. Perhaps a friend, colleague, someone who frustrates you. Your random thoughts of these people fuses with the guiding idea that they will grow in love and faith. You begin to subconsciously coat your frustrations, worries, and feelings about these people towards love. You subtly feel softer towards those who frustrate you and even more joyous for those you love. These feelings ripple into your interactions.
This prayer is no answer to a holy call - but it does build the holiness within you.
🤝🏾Tradition
noun - an inherited, established, or customary pattern of thought, action, or behavior (such as a religious practice or a social custom)
Each religion has it’s laundry list of traditions.
Each tradition fills one of three utilities: creates value, identity, and/or community.
Many traditions are valuable. Shabbat, the Jewish day of rest, prohibits people to us technology, creating space for community and study. The weekly act of listening to a church sermon reinforces the points in the Bible. The cadence of daily, monthly, yearly traditions can give people a grounding regularity in a life of flux and uncertainty.
The traditions can create a sense of shared identity. Jews can feel a common understanding and togetherness, similar to the way you may feel with people from your same home town, country or as fans of the same sports team.
Identity is also created in shared objects and symbols. For religious groups this may be a hijab, yamaka, an idol, a Christmas tree, religious books, Matza or a sacrement. We associate these objects with experiences and part of the story of who we are.
Tradition can ground us in our values and ourselves.
Together, this value and identity manifests itself in community.
👩👩👦👦 Community
Community. The first time I went to church someone greeted me at the door, another person walked me to a pew, passing me off to another person who helped me find a seat. The friendliness exceeded any conference or commercial attempt at community. People can construct amazing social systems around a purpose. In our increasingly isolated world we are in need of such community.
We can create our own community and and traditions around a purpose.
Start celebrating yearly holidays of your own creation. For when someone changed jobs, had a baby, finished a project.
Typical tradition is great: birthdays, baby showers, etc. But coming up with your own versions, based on your group’s unique personality can be a source of extra value and distinct identity.
Here are some examples of self-made traditions:
Cook dinner together every Sunday night
Have a reverse book club every quarter: each person summarizes the book they read
Meet monthly to discuss career challenges and opportunities
Have a yearly sports in the park day
Creating your own versions of Bar Mitzvah’s, Quinceañera, Anniversaries
Here’s a starter kit for community tradition creation:
What are the top three things you all value?
What activities do you all do individually to express that value?
Is there a place, time, or moment that best captures the value?
Could you all do that together on a weekly or monthly basis?
What objects, visuals, or insignia could capture your community’s spirit?
Schedule your traditions on the calendar
Viola!
👤 Religious Leaders
This is the Imam/Monk/Priest/Rabbi/Pujari/etc.
People turn towards these leaders for guidance. The leaders have a deeper understanding of religious texts and (potentially) stronger morals.
I think it’s unhealthy to see any person as “above others,” “more holy,” or “superior”. Your community, however, likely has individuals with different areas of expertise.
Call out the talents and areas of expertise of each member. These skills may be professional, domestic, interpersonal, etc. Secular communities can see themselves as having many “leaders” who can give guidance guidance.
Make a pact to open up “trade” to ask each other for help. American culture is too isolated; we overvalue self reliance and miss opportunities to collectively thrive. We can strengthen our collective groups by tapping into the expertise of each other more frequently. The Hive Mind wins.
You need to have an explicit conversation to open the trade routes - or else, the social norms will pull you back to … normal.
💨 Faith
There’s an atheistic assault on faith.
Maybe you’ve heard one of these:
“What proof do you have that god exists?”
“How do you believe a book that tells of impossible magic?”
”Don’t have faith in god, take action and responsibility yourself!”
The negative discourse on faith is mainly centered on the impossibilities of religious tales.
But before you discount faith, consider this: atheists have faith too.
This may feel foreign to you. But I assure it is not. You have beliefs in something. Maybe just that “things will workout” or “things will be ok”.
Faith is essentially hope in the unknown. It pulls you from the rubble of life like a safety harness. Many see faith as a source fo reliance “when things go wrong” - you can always fall back on faith.
Secular folks can find this faith in Rational Reality. Reality is the objective facts in life. Reality is almost always ok. Most Americans have food, water, and shelter. It’s the storylines about Reality that cause our suffering: “I’m not good enough,” “I’m a failure.“
Reality is more powerful than our stories.
Secular Faith sounds like this:
“Even though x happened to me, I know everything is ok”
”I’m anxious, but I’m ok.”
“My mind is making the problems bigger than they are”
You put your faith in something. Might as well pick objective truth rather than the stories that twist and bend our mind.
We can have faith in Reality - the objective truth of life. I think this is potentially even more powerful than having faith in God.