Eliade and the Recollection of Undergraduate Studies

As part of our graduation requirements and exit interview in my undergrad program we were to come prepared with a statement on our understanding of religion.  It was an exercise in reflection as we were also required to write a similar statement when we entered the program.  Mine was relatively short:

Religion is a tool people employ to help them order their world. Whether it is making sense of suffering or explaining that which one does not know, religion and religious thought aids people by providing a framework that allows them to perceive understanding and control of the world in which they live.

The statement was meant to be as value neutral as I could manage while simply stating that religion is essentially utilitarian.  I took pains to make sure that it didn't set religion apart, that there is nothing particularly special about religion.  The reason is wrapped up in the naming of this blog and Mircea Eliade's seminal work The Sacred and the Profane.

In the work Eliade provides an argument for understanding both religious and non-religious experience (or to use the title of the work, the experience of the sacred and profane).  One of his contentions in the work is that non-religious people still act "religiously" when ordering their life or assigning value to specific events.  It is an interesting point as Eliade attempts to differentiate between sacred and profane experience via an understanding that the experience of the profane, while arguably religious in nature, tends to be personal and private and the experience of the sacred tends toward to the communal and becomes ritualized.

I loved Eliade (to be fair, I loved most of what I read in undergrad) but his concept of sacred and profane created a problem for me.  Creating the dichotomy of "sacred" and "profane" naturally created other dichotomies in his work that tended to force divisions in his analysis where I never felt there needed to be.  The part of Eliade's work that tended to embed itself in my thinking, however, was the fact that religious practice and experience is and has been an incredibly ordinary experience in human history.  Instead I choose to subvert Eliade's dichotomy of sacred and profane because I can't help but see the myriad constructions of religious belief and practice throughout the world and acknowledge that religion is not special or unique or at all sacred.  It is simply the experience of different cultures, both privately and publicly, attempting to make sense of life.

I bring all of this up because I'm truly fascinated by the way different people understand their worlds.  Whichever way one approaches the world, I've always thought the key to continued progress as human beings is through understanding of ourselves and those around us.  For myself, religion has played an important role in my life and over time I've come to understand that, in the end, religion is really a story about us.  For my own experience the journey to understand the meaning and purpose of the divine has really been a journey to understand myself.  As Eliade would admit religion is about the stories we tell and the meaning we assign to those stories.  It is, in an oddly peculiar way, what we do as human beings as well.  We tell stories.  We construct our mythologies and assign to those mythologies symbols and rituals to remember them by.  And I wouldn't call that a religious endeavor, I would call that a human compulsion.

What about you internetland?  How do you see the world around us?