Can you conceive of religion apart from tradition, organization, church, priest, or story? Because that's what I'm talking about. The possibility of you and I figuring out whether there is anything other than stories or projections. What would we need to do to do that?
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I'm talking about seeing a tree or a blade of grass...I'm talking about very ordinary seeing and the mystery of our very ordinary world
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Yes, I think I understand what you're describing.
Here's a brief tale about Einstein (perhaps false, someone here will surely know and correct if that's the case...which is cool) that, I think, illustrates your meaning.
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Einstein was on his deathbed, hovering near the edge for weeks the way some people do when the end's close. At one point his sister, overcome with grief at her impending loss, began to cry bitterly. "Don't cry," Einstein whispered to her. "Look deeply into nature and then you'll understand."
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Again, I don't know if this is true but, to quote Fitzgerald 'isn't it pretty to think so?' To think that the culmination of the great scientist's life was an acceptance of death as a part of the working out of the intricate and, to an immense extent, still mysterious natural order. Pretty to think that a deep love of physics leads to equipoise at the final moment.
So I believe I have some feeling for what you're describing...a daily sense of wonder at the fact of reality itself...a form of religiosity without stories or dogma, perfectly comfortable with and indeed, symbiotically linked to a mature form of scientific inquiry.
I have to admit that I've fallen instantly in love this idea (the nature loving science geek in me can't resist the concept's charms).
However...
The past doesn't preordain the future (I think) but, as you know, it does provide strong indicators and a big old trajectory push. It seems to me that every attempt in the past to create spirituality without orthodoxy has led -- as lbotalk discussions of female orgasm inevitably lead to hilariously cerebral descriptions of fun -- straight on to rules and traditions and debate over doctrine and schisms and head smashing and all the rest of it.
So what I'm wondering, considering the huge anchor we drag behind us when it comes to religious thought, whether it's in our range of abilities to sustain a non 'organized religion' style of religious expression?
I accept that this can't be answered but I believe it's a non-trivial question.
.d.
-- http://monroelab.net/ <<<<<>>>>> groove to my groove