What is Religion?

(a) The world we live in is a collection of a bewildering plurality of games, and you have (already!) been born into one of them (congratulations!). Therefore, when you arrive on the scene, you find yourself immersed in the middle of a game that has already commenced and that has probably been played on for hundreds of years. You grow up learning and assimilating the rules of your home-game, and you try to play (in the beginning, at least) that game according to these rules. What we call 'education' is, largely speaking, the process of the internalisation of these rules.

(b) This does not mean, however, that you shall always play only one game. (Though, to be sure, many people do precisely that.) Indeed, many of us have to become highly skilled, because of various social, cultural, or economic necessities, in playing more than one game in different fields or locales of our life. Some of us play two games quite proficiently, and there are also some who undergo specialised training in order to be able to play as many as five or six games at different times in different contexts.

(c) What this implies, in turn, is that there are certain areas of mutual overlap across these games for otherwise we would all remain hopelessly trapped and insulated within our indigenous game. We can make sense of at least some of the rules of those games that we ourselves do not play (or even wish not to play or believe should not be played by anybody at all).

(d) That game which is most important to us in the sense that it provides a normative framework within which we play out the various dimensions of our existence is called Religion. This game is quite often the one that we are born into, though sometimes we can glide away, like an enterprising spider from one net to another attached net, from the native game into a foreign game, assimilating ourselves to the latter and indigenising the latter into ourselves.

(e) There is, in other words, a certain degree of flexibility regarding the rules of most of these games. In some of them, however, any violation of these would be immediately rewarded with severe punishment so that people who are within those games would normally not wish to play around (no pun intended) with the rules. However, many other games have developed internal mechanisms of coping with, tolerating, or even supporting conscious opposition to these time-honoured rules, so that these rules are not simply regarded as timeless verities but also as temporal constructions that are being contested, challenged, and reformed with every generation.

(f) This does not, however, mean that every human being has to have a Religion. There may be some people who simply refuse to play any game at all (though the heated debate over whether the refusal-to-play-any-game is itself another disguised game will never cease!), some who relentlessly keep on shifting between ten different quite disconnected games in the course of a single day, or some who view the rules of their native game only with the barest minimum of an ironic indifference.

(g) Now whenever there is a conflict of play between the master-game that we have called Religion and the other micro-games that are encompassed by it, we can adopt various means of conflict-resolution. For some people, the rules of Religion will have over-riding veto power over all other rules stemming from the micro-contexts; for others, a long and patient process of negotiation between the respective rules might become necessary; and for others, the rules of the autochthonous Religion game will be jettisoned and those of a foreign Religion game will be adopted, even if only hesitatingly at first.

(h) There are therefore what might be called Degrees of Religosity : not everyone within the same Religion game plays by the ground-rules with equal intensity and passion, or even for identical reasons. Consequently, the Religion game can be inward- or outward-looking : sometimes the players may deliberately raise the barriers that separate themselves from the surrounding games in the environment and focus more on the explicitation of their native rules for their fellow-players; sometimes, however, they may also wish to raise the portcullis and try to understand the rules of the people in the contiguous games.