David Dark

For many of us, the word "religious" evokes thoughts of brainwashing, violence, and eye-rubbingly tiresome conversations. Why not be done with it? Combining wit and candor with sharp cultural observations, David Dark flips the script on religiosity, arguing that "If what we believe is what we see is what we do is who we are, there's no getting away from religion."

Life's Too Short to Pretend You're Not Religious

Lizzy Jensen

To speak of one beloved format, this is the hope of the paleo-playlist, mixtape tradition, an early experience of mine in the giving, receiving and trading of attention collections. Here's a little something that orders my existence, we might say as we hand our enthusiasms over. It's a more time-consuming and tactile procedure than we're lately accustomed to in our age of social recommendation where a "like" or a tweet or an article posted online seems to sink to the bottom of the oceans of Internet within seconds, but it's the same communal impulse. Sharing what we're up to, what we believe we're discovering with others is what stewards the possibility of friendship and revelation. It's the handing down and over that's tradition- of what sacred intuition we hope we've accessed. How else do we access the meaning of our own experience? How else do we see what we've seen? 

For my money, religion is the farthest-reaching readily available concept for looking hard and honestly at our own lives, for really leveling with ourselves and for abandoning our dysfunctional ideas for better ones, truer, livelier, more sustainable ways of nego- tiating our existence. Life's too short to pretend we're not religious. 

Let's talk about religion. In its root meaning, religion (from the Latin religare, to bind again, to bind back) is simply a tying together, a question of how we see fit to organize ourselves and our resources, a question, we might say, of how things have been tied together so far and of how they might be tied together differently, a binding, an unbinding and a binding again. 

This is the way it goes with our words. When I label people, I no longer have to deal with them thoughtfully. I no longer have to feel overwhelmed by their complexity, the lives they live, the dreams they have. I know exactly where they are inside-or forever outsidemy field of care, because they've been taken care of. The mystery of their existence has been solved and filed away before I've had a chance to be moved by them or even begun to catcha glimpse of who they might be. They've been neutralized. There's hardly any action quite so undemanding, so utterly unimaginative, as the af- fixing ofa label. It's the costliest of mental shortcuts. n ed Of course we get to call it like we see it. What else can we do?

this book was so confusing for me to piece together. great premise and i was SO excited for it but it just felt like pieces of a whole

Life's Too Short to Pretend You're Not Religious

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