Simplification about religion as a concept is too complex.
Simplification about our relation with religion comes down to two perspectives: we follow the rules of a god and make our life depend on it or we are our own rules and make our god depend on it like a life.
This over simplification is superficially useful.
It identifies how our society either accepts or opposes religion. I am not talking about meaning, belief and commitment but instead relating resistance and obedience with one condition: control.
Be in control or let someone be in control.
For some, the notion of control is very easily understandable and relates submissive behaviours with rewards. For some others it is critically oppressive and must be practiced as a self determination mechanism.
Any way, you either are a god or follow a god, and the fear of control is present nonetheless.
I think there is more to this than we realise at the surface. If we choose not to control our lives we are adrift in time and rely solely on external events but if we choose to control our lives we have to relate control to an entity somehow and force dynamical events. Definitely extreme, this perspective is the base of discipline and that is why it can be compared with religion, in any God like perspective you choose.
What if we live a life with the notion of death instead? Not death with the persistence of trauma, but with the fluidity of cosmological scale and quantum proportion? What if we trained people to see the universe and not our feet in this planet’s land? What God would emerge? Does any? How big is our competence about the limit? Do we have thresholds in death?
Scale and proportion can be events in life. Space and time too. Death as an end to life is a fearful manifestation of our compliance to control. We must evolve to loss from the acceptance of loss and thrive in the essential elements of existence, not of a life.
There’s a range of abstract words that trouble me. They seem to strand me in thoughts of conformation like happiness, love, belief and god. They are poorly used and overly simplified.
These universal terms are perhaps a commodification of our compliance, lack of competence or perhaps something intentionally left ambiguous.
We can evolve, you decide when and where to.