Secrets of Mind and Reality

Religious Studies

When I first became involved in religious studies, I had no definite career plans. It actually started with an anthropology class. We covered a lot of different world religions, and my curiosity was piqued. I was raised by atheists, and I had never studied religion before in my life. Knowing the variety of beliefs that people held seemed like a useful life skill for me. I signed up for a full religious studies course load and dove straight into it. A lot of people in my classes were training to become ministers. Others wanted to go abroad and study various tribes around the world. It was funny how much religion studies polarize people. A lot of them were in it because they believe they held the one true faith, while others were there because they believed all faiths was of equal value. Eastern religion majors tended to be more ecumenical, while many of the people studying Christianity and Judaism tended to have a somewhat more dogmatic an approach.

As I studied religion more and more, I realized that I felt an absence in my life. Religious studies made me crave the experience of religious initiation. Basically every society in the world has some kind of religious initiation. In Judaism it is the Bar Mitzvah, and Catholicism it is confirmation, and among the Baptists it is – well – baptism. In more primitive societies, the rituals are more dramatic, but they function in the same way: to bring the convert into the community of religious beliefs.

I joined a few religion discussion groups and got to hear the opinions of different people about the nature of God and the meaning of life. For me, religious studies were very personal. It was all about spiritual exploration, and I was doing my fair share of that. I sat a lot of meditation, went to a few different services, and read all kinds of religious philosophy. Pretty soon, I had learned a great deal.

I had expected my religious studies to end neatly, but they didn’t really. I didn’t come out of it as a devoted member of a specific faith, although I did have some ideas that appealed to me more strongly than before. Nonetheless, it has given me a spiritual grounding. I feel much more of a sense of the meaning in life after studying religion than I did before. The world seems like a more ordered, structured place to me. For that, I’m thankful.