"Religion is not about God"

“Religion is not about God” is a book of Loyal Rue, historian of the religions, of 2004, but he is not, of course, the most notable writer concerned about informing that, against some usual opinions, the religious fact is not necessarily related to speculations about supernatural phenomena. Among other things, Loyal Rue describes religion as something “about manipulating our brains so that we might think, feel, and act in ways that are good for us, both individually and collectively".

   But long before we had already the classic Emile Durkheim, author of “Elementary ways of religious life” (1911), where it is stated that “there are big religions where there is no idea about gods and spirits, where, at least, that does not make more than a dark and secondary role. That is the case of Buddhism”

 For Auguste Comte, religion is just a social activity, based in the “organizing of rites, rules and ceremonies, with the target of taking mankind to a state of perfect unity”

Some years after Durkehim and Comte having published their books, it came along new non-supernaturalists religious phenomena, this leading to more modern anthropologists like Clifford Geertz to write about “political religions like communism and fascism”. Definition of religion by Clifford Geertz does not require, therefore, of the supernatural fact: "System of symbols which acts to establish powerful, pervasive, and long-lasting moods and motivations in men by formulating conceptions of a general order of existence and clothing these conceptions with such an aura of factuality that the moods and motivations seem uniquely realistic".
    
   We find more examples of this non-theist conception of the religión in the case of Cavalli-Sforza writing that “Buddah, Jesus, Mohammed, Marx are noted among the greaters founders of religions” or, in the case of Marvin Harris, pointing at the non-supernaturalist ideology of confucionism as “political religion”.
  
  Finally, wikipedia itself defines religión as "organized collection of belief systems, cultural systems, and world views that relate humanity to spirituality and, sometimes, to moral values”. The “spirituality” does not mean the “divine”, but the search for "the sacred," where "the sacred" is broadly defined as that which is set apart from the ordinary and worthy of veneration.

   The author on history of religions, Karen Armstrong, in her book “The Great Transformation” of 2006, tells us that religión is “compromising to follow an ethical life”, and that "benevolence is showing the path to transcendence". She enlightens us about the origin of religion in the Antique times: “religion was doing things changing us deeply”.

Unfortunately, there are still many dictionaries defining religión as “compound of beliefs or dogma about divinity”.

  This misinterpretation about what was the most significant and powerful feature of human cultural evolution is an example more about how, in XXI century, there are still deep changes in the conventional view of human nature to achieve.

     Nobody can deny the fundamental role of the religious phenomenon in the advance of cultures in the sense of making posible the change of human behavior. Religion is not just ideology (if doctrinally expressed) or esthetic background of a mythical story (in the case of the most primitive religions), but it supposes above all the practice of particular psychological strategies to modify each individual in the way they would act according to the wanted social formula reaching us thanks to symbolic messages.

   Today, by early XXI century, a liberal-democratic culture rules, what means a fairly hopeful achievement. With independence of this culture being the product of a very long evolution of compassionate religions (among them, Christian one was the most influential, but not the first one), the fact is that we can see a future without religion, that is, a future mankind in which individuals will not require to get involved in processes of interiorization of ideological values, being enough to accept the already established values in the mainstream culture no needing to cope with the cognitive resistance of a previous ideology.

  Nonetheless, the fact is that liberal-democratic culture today, in spite of its evident advances related to previous cultures, does not accomplish the whole of humanist expectations. It is not reached yet a totally cooperative society, violence and irrational behaviours persist (as supernaturalism, nationalism, private property and family privacy). Violence is still present and considered just as a mere “excess of agresivity”. A similar unsatisfaction made to surge the Marxist political ideologies, which religious character turned to be an expression of its final failure. Anyway, failure of Marxist religion contributed to the improvement of the liberal-democratic culture because made possible to learn more about human nature. The failure of Marxism should have also allowed to get visible the limits for political change. 
   
  A new ideological, and not political, formulation, with its side of religious character could lead finally the liberal-democratic intent up to its final humanist consequences (full universal cooperation).