Why You're More Religious Than You Think You Are

Some people say they like spirituality but not religion.  Some people say they're spiritual, but they don't believe in God.  I don't think they realize what that means.

Yes, that's right.  I'm here to tell you that some people believe in God more than they think they do.

The first question to consider isn't, "Do you believe in God?"  It is, "Do you believe in love?"

The answer may seem obvious to the point of ridiculousness, but for many groups of people it isn't.  I should first clarify what I mean by love.  Love is wanting another person's wellbeing, interests, and happiness more than you want your own.

There was (and still is) a group of Psychologists in the United States called the Behaviorists that basically rolled off the altogether real human tendency to seek pleasure and avoid pain.  The problem was that they believed that that was all humans did.  They were simply input-output machines thinking and acting how they were conditioned to based on the reinforcements and punishments they had been exposed to in their lives.  As you can see, this way of thinking doesn't leave any room for love the way I've described it.

The fight against discrimination, if taken to an unhealthy extreme, can also reveal a disbelief in love.  In its purest sense, attempting to do away with discrimination should be a work of love in and of itself.  For what is discrimination, I wonder, if not the failure to love a group of people as dearly as we ought?  The issue is that sometimes prejudice in a person's mind is thought of in the same way as dust accumulating in the closet:  You can do some things to get the worst of it out, but in the end there's always going to be a little residue in there regardless of what you do.  This is because modern anti-discrimination efforts are based on an unrealistic expectation that we should think of people who are inherently different from each other in identical ways.  The unintentional implication is that people should pretend that differences between people don't exist.  The rationale is that if we think of people the same, we will treat them equally.

This is such a common worldview now that it's easy for us not to see what makes this idea unrealistic.  If you were a doctor, would you treat a patient with heart disease the same way as someone with a kidney stone?  I hope not.  You would speak differently to a college professor that an uneducated homeless man, not because the professor is any more valuable than the other person, but because they both understand the world in entirely different terms.  Thus there are always inherent differences in the way we treat people simply because they are, in fact, different.  This is what creates that "dust in a closet" feeling.  We are to see all the colors of the rainbow and treat them all as if they were yellow.

No, the issue isn't equality.  It is love.  We aren't capable of thinking of, or even treating people, absolutely perfectly equally, but we can LOVE THEM equally.  Ironically, loving people with differences equally inherently means that we treat them unequally because we adapt our actions to their unique characteristics to better help them!

Do you believe that people can love that way?  Do you believe that you can?  Do you believe that you can actually put other's interests above your own, or do you believe, like the Behaviorists, that we are irreparably selfish and that there is no other option?

Believing that love is possible is religion.  "God is love"  (1 John 4:8) and the more powerfully we experience love, the more deeply we know God.  Unlike many feel-good ideas of the day, "God is love" is not some kind of literary metaphor like "her face was a waterfall."  It is as literally true as it is that He is an actual physical being.  To know Him as an actual physical being and to not believe that He is love is not to know Him at all.

The questions, "Does God exist in the world?" and, "Does real love actually happen?" are not just similar, they are synonymous.  If you believe that despite all the wiles and difficulties of life there are in fact men and women who choose love over selfishness, despite what you may initially feel, you do believe in God.

I believe in God and in love.  I believe that light will triumph over darkness and that the good in the human heart combined with God (love) will overpower evil.  It's the best way to live.


When other people believe the same thing, it's only natural to meet together to help each other be better at loving others and provide an additional context in which to do so.  Organized religion is nothing more or less than this.

People show their love in different ways.  Sometimes the right thing to do is to comfort and support.  Other times love is shown by refusing to condone behavior that is known to be damaging.  The next time you see someone act in a way you disagree, consider whether the very act you find reprehensible may in fact, for them, be an act of love.

A heart that is convinced of the power of love can literally change the world.

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Picture attributions:  Hernan Pinera, "Loneliness," https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0/legalcode  Sumarie Slabber, "Fly me to the," https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nd/2.0/legalcode rich_28 "Small bit of paradise," https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nd/2.0/legalcode Ramon Portellano, "Tocare las estrellas," https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/legalcode