Welcome to Religion’s Depths!
This site has a few related purposes and goals. First, it exists to provide reliable facts about religions, with scholarly sources cited throughout, and to present those facts in a clear and enjoyable way.
Second, it strives to identify and articulate the underlying spiritual worldview that all religions share. This, in turn, is in order to 1) help people to deepen their spirituality, whether they’re pursuing it within a specific religion or outside of all of them, and 2) foster mutual understanding and appreciation between members of different religions.
Third and finally, this site endeavors to provide a compelling intellectual defense of religion and spirituality in the face of modern materialism and secularism.
This site is still in its early stages, so what’s here now is only a tiny fraction of what will eventually be here: an immense encyclopedia of religion, and more. So far, an initial set of articles on general themes in religion has been written, and these together are a foundation for the rest of the site. The next rounds of articles will focus on major elements of specific religions, starting with Hinduism, Buddhism, Islam, and Christianity. If you’re interested in following the development of the site, the News/Updates page is the place to do that.
Everything on this site, including all of the research and writing, is the work of a real, flesh-and-blood human being named Dan Tilreath. I’ve never used AI for anything, and never will.
What Is Religion?
In the absence of spirituality, life is a senseless and ultimately doomed struggle to obtain what our egos blindly yet ferociously deem to be “pleasure” and to avoid what they deem to be “pain.” Our everyday selves are like pieces of driftwood hurled up and down, back and forth, right and left by the stormy ocean of insatiable craving. As the Buddha says in the Pali canon, the earliest collection of Buddhist scriptures,
That bond, the wise say, is not strong
Made of iron, wood, or rope;
But infatuation with jewelry and earrings,
Anxious concern for wives and children –
This, the wise say, is the strong bond,
Degrading, supple, hard to escape….
The world is led around by craving;
By craving it is dragged here and there.
Craving is the one thing that has
All under its control.[1]
No matter how hard we try to fulfill our desires by turning to mundane things, true fulfillment eludes us. So we try other mundane things, and then others, and on and on, never finding the wholeness that we seek. A life defined by craving therefore turns out to be a life defined by suffering. To quote the Buddha again,
Now this… is the noble truth of suffering: birth is suffering, aging is suffering, illness is suffering, death is suffering; union with what is displeasing is suffering; separation from what is pleasing is suffering; not to get what one wants is suffering.[2]
Throughout the ages, there have been people who have done the only rational thing there is to do in light of this grim state of affairs: embark on a quest for something beyond the ego and everyday life. As the Muslim mystic Attar writes,
The world is like a tract of manure;
creatures die in it left and right, miserably, dreadfully,
like a hundred thousand tapeworms.
If we are going to die in disgrace in the end,
better not to do it wallowing in smut.
If this quest is wrong and in vain,
and if we die of distress from it right now,
then so what?
Mistakes abound in this world –
add this one to the list.[3]
Some people who have undertaken this timeless spiritual journey have succeeded. They’ve found something marvelously perfect that transcends this world, yet is also hidden within everything in the world, including ourselves. They’ve realized that the way we perceive things from day to day is an illusion, and that the deeper reality is instead that we’re all one with the blissful, otherworldly wholeness that people have called “the divine” – or “God,” “the Great Spirit,” “the Self,” “the Tao,” “Buddha-nature,” etc. In the words of the Shvetashvatara Upanishad, a sacred poem in Hinduism,
All your desires will be fulfilled in him
Who is One without a second.
Know him to be enshrined in your heart always.
Truly there is nothing more in life to know….
He fills the cosmos, yet he transcends it.
Those who know him leave all separateness,
Sorrow, and death behind. Those who know him not
Live but to suffer.[4]
Likewise, the Christian Saint Catherine of Genoa exclaims from the same spiritual height that “Might but one little drop of what I feel fall into Hell, Hell would be transformed into a Paradise.”[5]
In today’s language, this incomparable experience is most commonly referred to as “spiritual enlightenment” or simply “enlightenment.” For the sake of convenience, we can use that term to refer to it here, too.
Religions exist in order to facilitate this journey out of suffering and into bliss. More or less everything in a religion’s traditional form points toward this destination in some way or another. This is why, despite the great differences between different religions, they share a certain core in common. Many of the main parts of that core could be summarized in something like the following way (and each of these linked articles contains considerable scholarly corroboration of the assertion that more or less all religions do indeed teach these things):
• The Meaning of Life: Religions agree that life has an inherent meaning, which is the pursuit of enlightenment.
• Divine Immanence and Transcendence: They further agree that the divine is both immanent (within all things) and transcendent (beyond all things).
• Monism or Non-Dualism: They teach that, at bottom, the divine is one, and that all things are one in the divine.
• Mysticism: They offer a concrete path of spiritual and moral disciplines for overcoming the ego and drawing closer to enlightenment.
• Animism: They point out that all things are spiritual in some way or another; there are no truly “inanimate objects.”
• Myth and Mythology: Many of their central teachings come in the form of stories that take us from mundane time into the ever-present sacred time in which those stories occur. These stories are called “myths,” and they serve as a bridge between ordinary time and eternity.
Each religion takes this same core and presents it in whatever outer garb is best suited to certain people, times, and places. This is why it’s good that there are so many different religions. Even though their intended destination is the same, we’re all starting from different points, so we need different paths to reach that same end. But not just an arbitrary multiplication of the number of paths – instead, we need lots of paths that all contain the uncanny, apparently superhuman wisdom and discernment that can be found in religions and hardly anywhere else.
Religions therefore have exactly the characteristics we would expect them to have if they were revealed by the same divine source in order to bring us closer to it. They’re beyond anything that unaided, unenlightened human minds could make up, even if we tried. We can analyze them in all kinds of ways (like the above bullet-point list does), but they always retain a mysterious power that eludes our full comprehension and our ability to put it into words. Because of this, the conclusion that religions really are the products of divine revelation that they claim to be is quite reasonable, and perhaps inescapable.
Thus, we could define “religion” in terms that go something like: a religion is a system of beliefs and practices whose origin is divine revelation and whose goal is to bring its adherents closer to spiritual enlightenment.
Religion and Spirituality in the Modern World
Before the sixteenth century, virtually everyone in the world spent his or her life in environments that were steeped in some religion or another. A solid path to enlightenment was readily available to most anyone who wanted to pursue it. From the sixteenth century onward, however, the situation has become much more complicated.
One factor here has been the transition from the medieval subsistence economy to the modern commercial economy. This set of radical changes in people’s lifestyles and material conditions has naturally turned people’s attention more toward mundane things at the expense of spiritual things.[6]
But material changes alone can’t sufficiently account for the unspiritual character of the modern world. The really decisive factors behind that have been intellectual changes – changes in how we see ourselves and the world around us.[7] These intellectual changes aren’t simply effects of changed material conditions, because the intellectual changes began well before people’s material conditions started to change significantly.[8]
The snowball that set this avalanche of intellectual changes in motion was the sixteenth century’s Protestant Reformation. While the Reformers thought of themselves as restoring Christianity to its original, pure form, their project turned out to be exactly the opposite: they introduced a set of sweeping innovations that, taken together, amounted to a rejection of more or less all of the spiritual core of religion that we explored above, especially anything pertaining to divine immanence and mysticism. God, the Reformers said, is still somewhere out there, but the world is inherently and irreconcilably separate from him, and the overarching point of life is not to pray, but to work. After all, if union with God (the Christian term for enlightenment[9]) is by definition impossible, what’s the point of being particularly spiritual?[10]
While the Reformation did preserve some degree and kind of traditional Christian spirituality (i.e. Catholic and Eastern Orthodox spirituality), its general thrust was to turn the outer shell of Christianity into a weapon against its spiritual heart. This not only largely reduced religion to a set of rules whose ultimate purpose had been lost, but initiated a process of deliberate and often forced secularization that continues to this day. Subsequent milestones in the process of intellectual secularization, such as the seventeenth century’s “Scientific Revolution” and the eighteenth century’s “Enlightenment” (an Orwellian name if ever there was one), have been conscious or unconscious attempts to take the general thrust of the Reformation further toward its logical conclusion: outright materialism, the belief that only matter is real.[11]
Since the Reformation, similar movements have risen to prominence in other religions, too, such as the Salafi and Wahhabi impoverishments of Islam (the fundamentalist movements from which al-Qaeda, ISIS, and the like come).
At the same time, many popular spiritual movements outside of religion have corrupted spirituality in their own ways. To mention just two prominent and related examples, they’ve often tried to replace the divine with a non-transcendent counterfeit called “the universe,” and to jettison traditional morality on the grounds that it’s apparently “oppressive” to think that one’s desires could be legitimately constrained by something that transcends them. A significant amount of such “New Age” pop spirituality (or whatever you want to call it) is an attempt to make spirituality more congenial to the ego. But as the Gospel of Saint Matthew famously notes, that’s a hopeless effort to have one’s cake and eat it, too: “No one can serve two masters; for a slave will either hate the one and love the other, or be devoted to the one and despise the other. You cannot serve God and wealth”[12] – or, by extension, any other mundane craving.
Meanwhile, in our allegedly spiritually “neutral” secular societies, the belief system that everyone is expected to uncritically accept is modern science, which is based on materialistic assumptions about the basic nature of reality.[13] Modern science has certainly proven to be an extremely useful tool for manipulating matter in accordance with our egos’ cravings, but we’re all taught as children that it’s also a literally, objectively true account of reality, even though history and philosophy of science have resoundingly demonstrated otherwise.[14] The large numbers of modern people who consider themselves atheists or something similar typically point to modern science to justify their beliefs, which is exemplary circular logic.
Anyone who wants to seriously pursue spirituality these days must therefore navigate these twin challenges of a civilization whose day-to-day workings effectively take the absence of spirit for granted and the corruption of religion and spirituality from within.
But all is not lost – far from it. Religions in the full, traditional sense of the word are still alive. And because of the cosmopolitan character of modern society, more religions are accessible to more people than ever before.
Pursuing one’s spirituality outside of formal religions is always a possibility, too. This approach is more dangerous, because without the time-tested guidance and richness of a formal religion, one risks wandering into all kinds of dead ends and traps laid by the ego – including, but by no means limited to, those that are prominent in today’s pop spirituality. But as the Gospel of Saint John points out in a well-known verse, “The spirit bloweth where it listeth”[15] (in other words, the spirit does whatever it wants to do, no matter what people think about it), so this independent approach can’t be ruled out in principle. A small minority of people are genuinely well-suited to it.
This site seeks to help people to navigate the treacherous but bountiful waters of religion and spirituality in the modern world. It does this in a few ways.
First, by providing quality information about religions and presenting it in an engaging way, it aims to help people to discern which religion might speak to them the most. Second, that information is also geared toward helping people who already belong to a specific religion to deepen their spirituality within it by becoming more aware of their religion’s inner teachings. Third, this site’s analysis of the spiritual heart that all religions share provides something of a “template” that people pursuing their spirituality outside of any formal religion can use to deepen their spirituality, too.
And fourth, many of the articles on this site contain intellectual defenses of some aspect of religion and spirituality. Many people who reject religion and/or spirituality these days do so because they only know about them through the caricatures of them from secularism and fundamentalism. Unbeknownst to these people, what they’re really rejecting is the caricatures, not religion or spirituality themselves. The more one understands religion and spirituality on their own terms, the more sense they make. Some articles on this site are entirely devoted to this purpose, such as Why All Religions Are True, The Problem of Evil and Its Solution, and Only Spirituality Makes Morality Rational.
In all of these ways, this site seeks to help people to fulfill the meaning of life: to chase after enlightenment. No matter where you are in life, there’s a path from where you are now to where you want to be in your heart of hearts. Godspeed!
References:
[1] Bhikkhu Bodhi (transl.). 2000. The Connected Discourses of the Buddha: A New Translation of the Samyutta Nikaya. Wisdom Publications. p. 172, 131.
[2] Ibid. p. 1844.
[3] Attar. 2018. The Conference of the Birds. Transl. Sholeh Wolpé. W.W. Norton & Company. p. 122-123.
[4] Easwaran, Eknath (transl.). 2007. “Shvetashvatara Upanishad.” In The Upanishads. Nilgiri Press. p. 161, 167.
[5] Otto, Rudolf. 1958. The Idea of the Holy. Transl. John W. Harvey. Oxford University Press. p. 38.
[6] Wilby, Emma. 2010. Cunning Folk and Familiar Spirits: Shamanistic Visionary Traditions in Early Modern British Witchcraft and Magic. Sussex Academic Press. p. 242-249.
[7] Ibid. p. 249-252.
[8] Thomas, Keith. 1991. Religion and the Decline of Magic. Penguin Books. 786-787.
[9] Lossky, Vladimir. 1976. The Mystical Theology of the Eastern Church. St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press. p. 9-10.
[10] My assessment here has been particularly heavily informed by the following three books, amongst many others that have contributed various bits and pieces:
Eire, Carlos M.N. 2016. Reformations: The Early Modern World, 1450-1650. Yale University Press.
Thomas, Keith. 1991. Religion and the Decline of Magic. Penguin Books.
Easlea, Brian. 1980. Witch-Hunting, Magic, and the New Philosophy: An Introduction to Debates of the Scientific Revolution, 1450-1750. Harvester Press.
[11] See previous note ([10]).
[12] Coogan, Michael D., et al (eds.). 2018. The New Oxford Annotated Bible: New Revised Standard Version. Oxford University Press. p. 1393.
[13] Burtt, E.A. 2003. The Metaphysical Foundations of Modern Science. Dover Publications.
[14] There are far too many great books and essays that make this case to list them all, but some particularly compelling ones that address modern science as a whole (rather than specific theories within modern science) are:
Kuhn, Thomas S. 2012. The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. University of Chicago Press.
Laudan, Larry. 1981. “A Confutation of Convergent Realism.” In Philosophy of Science, Vol. 48, No. 1. University of Chicago Press. p. 19-49.
Duhem, Pierre. 1982. The Aim and Structure of Physical Theory. Transl. Philip P. Wiener. Princeton University Press.
Wray, K. Brad. 2018. Resisting Scientific Realism. Cambridge University Press.
[15] John 3:8, KJV. I quote the KJV here because this specific wording has become something of a proverb in the English language.