What is Religion? What is God? Who are the Followers?

http://artbyleakelley.wordpress.com/2011/06/11/followers/

My smart group member, Olivia, requested a definition of Religion from the other group members.
This is really stretching it for me. I started out with all those philosopher definitions that we have been reading about, but that's not working for me.
So here's what I'm working on—hopefully I can narrow it down...

God.
A collective agreement.
An existential personification created by the need to perceive beyond the knowable.
A motivation to aspire from the mundane existence of the organism.
God.
Love.
God.
Terror.
God.
The evolution of cells, incorporating consciousness through tangible experience.
Subjective, metaphoric, and sometimes physical interpretation of neurological stimuli.
God.
The top of Mazlow’s pyramid.
The ultimate revelation.
Ecstasy.
Intermittent comprehension outside the limits of the corporeal.
God.
The most remote dimension of Flatland.
Kether.
YHVH
Elohim.
Jehovah.
Allah.
Zeus.
The Nameless One.
One.
A conspiracy of manipulation to modulate behavior of the masses.
Control of primal instincts through adherence to civilized laws and puritanical concepts. 
The funneling of deemed inadequacies into marketable forgiveness.
The simultaneous creation and alleviation of shame.
The annihilation of spirit.
God.
A mystery.
A legend.
A myth.
The truest story ever told.
The most insidious of deceits.
The most profound recognition.
Source of life.
Denial of death.
Authenticity.
Love.
The secret of the great void.
The artist’s hand.
Sherpa to the Universe.
Oracle of truth.
Every molecule in existence.

Group Think

I was born in the fifties.
Maybe that contributes to my need for defined structures and social order—or what I deem to be social "order".
I am being confronted with some of my obsolete ways of thinking in my religious studies class and it's a little uncomfortable but very exciting.
My group (Knosis) finally seems to be structured in a way in which I can interact, but my previous notions of what I need in a group interaction is creaking like a door in a haunted house.
The Group:

• Olivia: She is the Knower of Things. I absolutely respect this young woman's ability to retain and draw upon information at lightning speed but I can get lost on her road to comprehension and respond defensively when I can't follow. I really need to trust that she will come back from Deuteronomy to Taoism  and meet me—or maybe I need to let go of the need to be met in the middle and just listen and learn from her 

• Ken: He is "The Speaker of Things. Ken is very articulate man who is a good candidate for commercial voiceover work. He is supportive to the group in reiterating a point in an eloquent manner.

• Heather: She is The Seeker of Things. She expresses a genuine interest in learning, not only about why a grandfather may not eat meat on Fridays, but about the subject matter and the perspective of others.

• Phouthavady: She is The Watcher of Things. She quietly observes and then surprises a person with a verbal to-the-point punctuation of the interaction

• Kim: She is The Juggler of Things. Kim may present at times as overwhelmed by maneuvering through the information while maintaining many other factors in her life, but she has a razor sharp insight that is a delight to hear.

Then there's me. 

Here I am trying to be The Learner of Things.

Well, the first thing I am learning is there are many ways to learn things.

I am accustomed to figuring things out and assimilating information in an solitary manner where I have control over the information and method of assimilation.

Group Think is new to me. I am learning to learn in a social manner that I don't need to control anything to learn something. 

And I think there may be a wily plan to demonstrate that learning does not need to be broken down into categories once one grasps the big picture, but I still needed to break the group into segments before I become one with them in a unified view of religious studies.

The painting below is titled The Thirteenth Observer 

The capacity to observe life and Humanity, objectively, from a perspective outside the Self or one’s participation in environment and tribe is truly a challenge.Some believe it is impossible because we are subjective beings.Some believe we are limited to our physical experience in our observations and therefore can never truly experience objective truth about our existence.Perhaps consciousness consists of etheric optic nerves which are invisible to us through our limited vision.Perhaps these nerves are extending outward in each of us, reaching toward one another to create a unified view while the larger part of ourselves oversees the process?

The AHA! Moment; Hume is the Root Origin of Humor

This morning I had a tiny AHA! moment—not quite a religious experience, but at least a lower case aha.
Yesterday I spoke with our wily instructor about how overwhelmed I felt at not really "getting the point" and how I was feeling a little fractured and disjointed about the religious studies structure.

She told me more about Hume as a person after I queried about his actual convictions, which I could not glean from his writings. He seemed to negate every religion and ism equally without ever telling us what he thought was a good thing.

Well, after understanding that Hume was quite the "character" on the Broadway of Religious Studies, I had a domino-effect realization (You know, where one thought topples another until you have a patterned row).

I will not speak of all the individual thoughts but the final row of dominoes looks something like this;

• I now associate the name, Hume with Hume-or and Hume-anity.
• Studying religion is a lot like abstract painting
• There is no structure, we bring structure to it—Joseph Campbell said "There is no meaning, we bring meaning to it" 
• Authors like Hume, Gill, Smith, and even Rodriguez get paid per word so that is probably why they use so many
• I will probably never be an academic writer (but we'll see after I take English 1A)
• I want to research a religion that is funny and does not take itself so seriously
• I am a bit intimidated by scholars
• Philosophers and Scholars also must appease their own Medici patrons
• Some of my dominoes are buried under other dominoes

The "Ism" of it All

I am completely overwhelmed in my studies regarding my study of religion.
Tonight my attempt at interacting with my group was a total bust. My first attempt to connect with Knosis (my group) was basically talking with one member while we waited for the other members to respond to my invitation to Google chat, which we agreed would be at 6 pm. After 30 minutes of a 2 person dialogue considering the definition of religion, Phouthadavy and I wondered how we could contact the others to participate and sent an email to the instructor for phone numbers.

After some frozen computer moments and a consideration that we may not hear from the other members of the group, we decided to meet for coffee tomorrow at 1pm for a continuation.

I went to the patio to work on my printouts for the summary which is due a 12:59am —yeah that means tonight, right?
Well, I came back to my computer after 7pm to check on something and discovered 2 other members on line for the group. I called Phouthadavy and said "Hey, Olivia and Kim made it! Oh wait, they are having technical difficulty and some personal stuff going on while I'm here waiving at a child. Maybe we can all meet tomorrow after all."
Yada Yada... We're meeting tomorrow for coffee.

I'm a little bit lost after rereading the chapter and other supplemental readings and I feel a bit fractured in my learning process. I'm still not quite sure what is expected to succeed at this class but there are a lot of things I want to learn within it

Now back to the summary due at 12:59.
It's loaded with "isms".
.
I'm loaded with some isms as well;

• Absolutism in which I am the single absolute ruler of my own schedule and not dependent on others
• Animism, in which my computer has a soul and is probably going to Hell
• Resistentialism in which my sofa is demonstrating malice toward me for not relaxing
• Self-determinism in which I will decide to learn about this subject with or without the intervention of Malism

The Right Answer

I get a little anxious about being tested on what I may or may not know.
Last night I took the first quiz for Introduction to the Study of Religion after putting it off all day.
Yup, I waited until I was tired to exacerbate my anxiety.
I took the quiz more than once, aghast that the first attempt did not elevate my self esteem to genius status.

I did do the reading, I should have been able to zip through it providing evidence of such but, sadly, no, I did not.
My head was still full of Sociology reading, History reading, and a video that made me cry in my Sociology class.
Also, there was a trick involved in the quiz; more than one answer to a question.
I did not see an "all of the above" answer so I checked the one I thought was most relevant.
Oops!

What I learned on my Thursday vacation in Religious Studies:

• I am not as smart at night as I am in the morning
• Being tested makes me anxious
• Sometimes I forget what I thought I knew
• You can check more than one box in life
• My head has a limited capacity to hold on to previous information when there is a constant stream of new information

Sunday In Religious Studies, Not Church

 Sunday is not a typical school day but I went to school in my slippers today because I got an email notifying me that Olivia made an announcement on Canvas, which is THE facilitator of student and instructor communications. I like the Canvas site and I'm learning more about using it every time I visit. I even uploaded a picture today!
Olivia seems to be a great student facilitator of communications in our group, Knosis.
I think I will also like Olivia.
I have been reading the introduction assignment from Introduction to THE STUDY OF RELIGION.
I'm a little fuzzy on what the word religion means and this reading did not provide me with the clarification to define that yet, but I learned a few other things—as you will note in my bullet points below.
I did take special note of the sentence, "Religion is always expressed in action, and among the kinds of actions encountered within religious traditions one frequently finds rituals." and I had to look up a word, semiotics in the next paragraph after I read that sentence.
I like rituals and I like symbols but most of the ones I am attached to have nothing to do with deciphering the definition of religion.
I did not overlook the Oxford English Dictionary (1971) definition of religion, tucked neatly on page 4 of the assignment but I still cannot find a tangible definition of what exactly I am in the process of studying. How does one study a "faith" or a "reverence" or a "divine" something or a "worship" of a divine something?
Okay, so I get the part about how one can observe the evidence of religion through actions of others (you know, rituals and such) but I am still trying to grasp how I will be able to actually "see" the subject I purport to study. This is definitely not like studying something under a microscope.
Oh, wait! Maybe it's like studying something under a macroscope! Yeah, that's probably it. I need to zoom way out here.  I have to get some better tools to practice Religionswissenschaft. 

What I learned on my Sunday Vacation in Religious Studies:

• I wish I could speak German
• The dictionary is my friend (even if it did not show me a picture of religion)
• Ambrose Bierce wrote The Devil's Dictionary but not the Oxford English Dictionary
• Theologians supposedly study the nature of God so they probably have better eyeglasses
• A religious studies scholar has a lot in common with a good actor
• You can can upload a picture to Canvas—watch!

Introduction to Religious Studies

Today I was introduced to Religious Studies.
Please note that I was inducted into a specific religion once many years ago and this was nothing like that at all—this was far more fun.

The painting below is titled Out of the Dark. It is a visual representation of what I experienced from 9 am this morning until 1 pm this afternoon during said introduction to Religious Studies.

I felt an ascension from my preconceived dark notions about what I believed to be "Religion" into a cloudy potential of new ideas and exciting opportunities to restructure my thinking methods.

Out of the Dark

Today Sam Gill and I have a lot in common. 

His attempt to define a structure for the study of religion in his article The Academic Study of Religion is much like my attempt to create rules for my own apotropaic tendencies and magical thinking to ward off religion and it's followers. 

By the way, that word, apotropaic, yeah, well I just learned that today when the wiley instructor tossed it out there like a shiny bone for me to run home and chew on (meaning that I had to look it up).

I am not an academic like Sam Gill but I do understand the need for structure. I, too, want to design an outline that may help me communicate about abstractions more effectively.

What I learned today is that I am not the only person throughout history attempting to create tangibilities out of subjective intangibilities and metaphors. Poor Sam Gill. He had an academic audience for an irrational concept. 

But the exciting part is, like the above painting; the abstract nature of it all. 

I am excited to explore this class, the characters, and the new approach to defining things differently—with a structure. 

What I learned on my Friday Vacation in Religious Studies:

• Apotropaic tendencies can be magical.
• Sam Gill lived in a time when being wishy-washy and apologetic was a source of academic survival
• I have ideas about religion that may need revision
• There's a dude in my class that went to Bali
• Richard Dawkins may think a bit like Nietzsche in regard to the life of God
• J.Z. Smith is not the creator of religion
• My dictionary does not have the word, Primatism in it
• There's a woman named Emily Durkheim
• You cannot find Jonic Velibor by Googling "Vabor" because that's what you thought the instructor said after she said Freud
• Greco Roman concepts and monotheism may piss me off, but I am totally into this class