On What It Means to Be Sincerely Religious

13 August 2025 · 2 min read

Being a genuinely religious person means cultivating faith and compassion, not belief and judgment¹. So many claim religiosity but are the latter, and thus feel absolved from addressing their sins in everyday life.

What do I mean by sins? Putting negativity into the world.

You can be edgy and even a little cunty, and if you walk with a truly pure heart, empty of genuine negative thoughts and full of feelings of comradery toward those around you, people will know you are nice. But it does not work for truly hateful, bitter people, because their insides are rotting.

And let me be clear: pretty much all bitterness and seething hate in people’s hearts is schizophrenic. There is literally nothing more illogical. It is like the cowherd said, “It is like taking a poison and expecting the other person to die.” Everyone has free will, and some hate it.

Hatred and bitterness arise from an internal clinging to control. To live with no bitterness and no regret, one must accept the present and forge the future. The past is not real.² You cannot change people or the world, but you can change yourself to be good, and then you can help people better.

It is genuinely a revolutionary act to be genuinely kind. Even in the heartland of kindness in this country, true kindness and comradery are hard to come by, unmarked by a sad and tattered soul. So many live life as hungry ghosts³. There is so much more to life.

It is the easiest thing to be miserable, the simplest to shift accountability, the norm to wait for someone to save you. But save yourself or be saved⁴, and you stand among a broken culture. The answer is not to look down on others, but to help them too. We are all in this together.

There is a sweetness even in the worst of the world. It is not to be reveled in, but to give evening to the good. We must strive for goodness and a world of good, but we must not let the bad hold us back or cause us despair. We all have a right to live and prosper.

This is what it means to die daily.⁵ When you pass the roadkill on the street⁶, do not look away, do not revel in the brutality. Understand in it the interdependent nature of things⁷, death and rebirth, and your mortal frailty. Understand how little time we have, be kinder.

One could say, “Ah, but this is irrational! If I find it gruesome I must look away, I must wallow in grief over the world.” Yet this is how man lived for eons, in an irrational world. We are not rational beings.⁸ You must face the shadow of life, it is the face of the great mystery.

One must simply do what they can, and that begins with the self. One cannot help others if they cannot help themselves. Once they have helped themselves and can honestly say they have more good days than bad days, they can help others, and they will be great at it.

To understand the mind as the root of all things, the monadic principle⁹ from which all began, is freeing. Not only is it freeing, but it is the truth, and once you align yourself with this truth, everything comes into alignment.

Notes

By the editor.

The distinction is Wilfred Cantwell Smith's in Faith and Belief (1979): "belief" once carried trust and commitment, close to Latin credo, before it shrank to assent to propositions. By 1604 translators of the Authorised Version used "faith" for the older sense. That drift is why she can set belief, a gate and a judgment, against faith, a way of walking. Compare How Can Many Religions Be True?. source ↩
The same stance runs through her poems, where regret fails because you were there and touched the flame (You Touched the Flame), and through What the Ghosts Actually Are, where she calls time imaginary and says creation is happening now. ↩
In Buddhism, hungry ghosts (Sanskrit preta) are one of the six realms of rebirth. Beings there suffer constant hunger and thirst from insatiable craving, a result of greed in past lives. For the same figure turned inward, a grudge that feeds on its owner, see Hungry Ghosts in the Attic. ↩
The Buddha says as much in the Dhammapada: "purity and impurity come from oneself, for no one can purify another" (verse 165, Ānandajoti's translation). Verse 160 adds that the self is the friend of the self. She builds the argument in Carve Your Own Block. source ↩
Seneca's Letter 24 says it in two words, cotidie morimur: "we die daily," because some part of life is taken away each day. Paul wrote "I die daily" (1 Corinthians 15:31). The phrase is the heart of her poem The Fiddle and the Sand, where to be prudent is to die daily. source ↩
This is a Buddhist exercise. In the Satipaṭṭhāna Sutta (Majjhima Nikāya 10) a monk contemplates a corpse in a charnel ground, at nine stages from fresh to bones to dust, and each time applies it to himself: this body too has this nature and cannot escape it. The practice is called maraṇasati, mindfulness of death. source ↩
Dependent origination (pratītyasamutpāda) is the Buddhist principle that all conditioned things arise in reliance on other things: when one exists, the other exists; when one ceases, the other ceases. She follows it to its conclusion in Compassion Is Physics Applied to Consciousness. ↩
She argues this at length in Is Rationalism a Religion? What Is a Religion?: cognitive science of religion shows that agent-detection, ritual and narrative come to the human mind more naturally than abstract reasoning. ↩
A monad (Greek for "unity") is a basic, indivisible unit or first principle. The Pythagoreans held it to be the origin of all numbers and things; Leibniz later posited infinitely many monads as the simplest constituents of reality. The Buddhist text opens with the same claim: in the Dhammapada's first verse, mind precedes thoughts and is their chief. She builds her case in The Mind Is My Doctrine. source ↩