Everybody is Religious

Many years ago, basically every person living was a practitioner of some kind of religion. These religions were shared stories that prescribed how people should behave and explained what the meaning of their existence was. Of course there are still many adherents of organized religions today and I would claim that, despite some commentators observing a general decline in religiosity among people, especially in the west, the percentage of religious people among the general population never really changed. It's still at 100%.

A religion is an interpretative framework (or story) that tells us how to read our perception of reality so that we can explain and derive meaning from what we experience. Whether we are fully aware of it or not, each of us uses such frameworks constantly. The question of which ones we are using is strongly shaped by our past, particularly our upbringing. David Dark points out that our religious upbringings are always "mixed bags". If you just thought "wait... I didn't have a religious upbringing..." I invite you to think again. For example, most of us likely grew up in the "capitalist faith", or maybe your parents, and later school, taught you the "dogma of materialism".

The best kinds of religion are those that invite questioning, those that don't pretend that their adherents always have everything figured out, or are always on the right side of history. We could say, together with Paul Tillich, that the maturity of a religion can be judged by its capacity for self-criticism and its willingness to sit with its own ambiguity. So what religions are you practicing? And how mature do you rate them to be?