The Latin etymology of the word religion is “to bind.”

In the Greek, the word translated as religion in the New Testament means “reverence as expressed in ritual acts.”

“Pure and undefiled religion in the sight of our God and Father is this: to look after orphans and widows in their affliction, and to keep oneself unstained by the cosmos.” - James 1:27

In the age of demeaning and disunity, in the era where every truth is arbitrary and self-selected, why religion? Why not the path of your own making? Why religion when many religious people hate religion, calling it abusive, controlling, or evil?

Because reality demands us to be be bound.

Existence requires our reverence.

“Those who wish to be bound to nothing will of course find themselves belonging to nothing.”

Christianity does not believe itself to be first or primarily a moral set of principles or a series of wise sayings; instead it is an exploration of existence itself. Those who wish to be bound to nothing will of course find themselves belonging to nothing. Those who choose no reverence will come to believe nothing is of any value, not even themselves. We are always bound to something, even if it is only our own anarchical or tyrannical ideas (and these are often one and the same). Trapped in the prison of our own minds, delirious in the daytime and walking in the nightmares of the evening, we find ourselves disillusioned with life itself. Where shall we turn to? Christianity answers by asking whom shall we turn to.

If you want to know why the morals exist within Christianity, I will tell you they are not to enslave us but to bind us to staying within reality instead of falling off of it (and indeed you may fall completely off of reality into madness). Perhaps gravity is real and so are cliffs. The morality of Christianity is about choosing wisdom. Wisdom is only found in believing in truth and letting it guide us. If there were no truth, wisdom could be only nothingness. Everything would be meaningless.

More than any other this is the word which defines our present time: meaninglessness. We are constantly choosing to demean words, people, everything. These are the stainings which James speaks of. They are different from age to age, as rule passes from one spirit of the age to the next, but wisdom has always been about something larger than the current attitudes and impressions. Wisdom has always been leading us out of the door of time and space and into the world beyond the world.

Christ is that door and Christianity the company you find yourself in when you embark on your journey outwards. If you wish to know what the door leads to, it is right there in the verse: a God who is a Father, a belief in loving even the most destitute among us, and a narrative which explores the whole of the cosmos, and maybe even goes beyond it. This is the true religion.

For those longing for something more. For those searching for something better. Seek and you will find. The door awaits. You are not alone.

Do you doubt these words? Do not be dismayed, to doubt truth is not an evil, to fail to explore that doubt is. To explain these assertions as truth we must turn to parables.

Let us together discover the things hidden since the foundation of the cosmos.