Lexy, thanks for the topic.

The word "religion" has both a psycho-spiritual and a social meaning. Much needless confusion and heat in discussions results from misunderstanding in which sense a person uses the word.

There is the sense in which you are using the word: an affiliation with an institution which purports to perpetuate certain theological beliefs. And there is the other meaning: a state of being tied to, or aiming to be tied to, a centre in one's inner life that may be called "God" or something else, or may even be unnamed. (These distinctions are in my own words.)

In the second sense religion has always been an active and essential component in my life. As an institutional attachment religion played little or no part until I was about ten years old and was introduced to church (Anglican). Until about fourteen years of age I was an active parishioner, and then divorced myself from Christianity. For decades I explored spirituality quite intensely in a number of ways outside of any institution. In my late forties, both the church and I having changed considerably, I decided I could develop spiritually within the church and joined a parish. For the last twenty years I have continued as a consistent worshipper, although there have been radical changes in my theological understanding and in my practices.

You ask whether the (institutional) religion be re-invigorated as a vital backdrop to contemporary Australian life. From my experience I must say it can and is being "re-invigorated" in different ways and to varying degrees in some quarters. What I call vigour, however, is the energy which the institution can help generate for each person's spiritual growth. The institution becomes moribund when it is preoccupied with fortifying its own structures and enforcing dogma that is meaningless to today's humanity.

No Lexi, is the short answer.

Lexi,
I think what you wanted to say was that being a Catholic is embedded in your identity, since some kind of religion, if suitably (e.g. psychologically) defined, is embedded in everybody’s identity.

I can see your point but from what I have read from you on this OLO I cannot agree that you were “probably not a very good Catholic”. The Church is a millennia old, not only institution but also cultural, intellectual and moral framework, consequently one has to look at it - and at our relation to it - from a historically detached perspective.

Was somebody, who happened to live e.g. between 1492 and 1503 but could not approve of Alexander VI, necessarily not a good Catholic? The Church survived for at least another five centuries not just in spite of Alexander VI but mainly because it did not let its “sub specie aeternitatis” vision get blinded by amoral leaders like him. Today it is the problem of not so much amoral as self-centered and shortsighted leaders. You don’t seem to have lost this vision. Maybe you are sometimes just a little bid like those first two little pigs - and there are many good Catholics like that - in http://forum.onlineopinion.com.au/thread.asp?discussion=2909&page=0#66836.

Nevertheless:
>>But I don't go back as the spiritually half-interested, complacent congregants that many of my relatives were when I was growing up. I go back with an interest in actually having a religious experience.<<

This somehow reminds me of:
“God, I thank thee, that I am not as other men are, extortioners, unjust, adulterers, or even as this publican. I fast twice in the week, I give tithes of all that I possess.” (Luke 18:11-12)

Thanks Lexi.

I have a similar background to both Morganzola and Cossomby, attended Sunday School as was expected in a small country town. Parents not particularly religious. Rejected the bible at age 12 for reasons ranging from outright contradictions to the paternalistic tone. Do not require a "subsitute" religion as I find the surrounding world, universe and everything of great awe and satisfaction.

Have had some experiences for which I cannot find sufficient explanation, but none of them provided evidence of any of the world's religions, just that there is always more to be learned.

Pericles

Thanks for the great gluten report.

George, it's good to have you with us again. Thank you for your reminder of the Toynbee perspective on the "true mission" of religions. Squeers' aversion to the mystical probably led him to reject that view at the time.

Squeers, in that interchange about Toynbee between you and George (on the other thread to which he has linked us)you seem to take "higher religion" to be more subservient to the state or prevailing culture. I would suggest that Toynbee was meaning exactly the opposite: the concern of higher religion "is the relation between each individual human being and the trans-human presence of which the higher religions offer a new vision.” I would suggest that your current focus on religion as an "individualised component of modern life" is perhaps starting to roughly align with Toynbee's.

George's elephant analogy seems pertinent once again. Maybe, despite our denials, we're all sitting in the same room with this "presence" looming as large as an elephant. And yet, because every human being is unique in perceptual and cognitive qualities, we cannot all completely agree on a definition of it.

Thank You so much for all your inputs. They've been varied and I value each and everyone of them. I think that one of the positive signs in contemporary society is the interest in meditation and spirituality. Some of the most widely read and well-known spiritual writers today are people such as American monk Thomas Merton, the
English Benedictine, Bede Griffiths, who lived on a Christian ashram or hermitage in India, and Thomas Moore the American author of the best selling book, "Care of the Soul," (1992). I used to believe that only nuns, brothers and priests were able to be "spiritual," and that this was typical of religious orders, especially contemplative orders, and that ordinary people such as myself were not privy to "spirituality." I felt this way, until I went on my first "retreat." It was a week-end of prayer with an emphasis on
silence and contemplation. In those gardens of solitude, the experience for me proved to be a turning point - that has stayed with me every since. Through prayer I have found a peace that is not of this world.