A Series on the Opthēan understanding of religion
We have all acquired a definition of religion.
For some of us, it is God and scripture. For others, it is superstition or a tradition. Some of us have walked away from it. Some of us hold tight to it. Some of us never really cared about it at all.
But when we look honestly at our lives, we begin to see something quieter and truer:
The deepest structures of meaning in our lives were shaping us long before anyone used the word “religion.”
Instead of starting a discussion of religion with arguments or doctrines, we begin in the one place we all stand together:
our shared humanity.
Let’s take a moment and look at our lives with honesty and the curiosity of people trying to understand ourselves.
What holds our loyalty?
We are not loyal to the beliefs we debate, the opinions we defend, or the doctrines we inherit.
Rather, we are loyal to the things we feel in our chests. The things that shape us, whether we admit it or not:
the teams we follow through every season
the music that carried us through youth
the stories our families never stop telling
the political tribes we defend
the country that claims our allegiance
the communities that know our names
the traditions that “wouldn’t feel right” to break
We know these carry power. We feel their pull. They shape our identities more than we realize.
And when we look closely, we notice something unmistakable:
Each of these work through rituals, symbols, loyalties, myths, and emotional commitments.
What patterns hold these parts of our lives together?
Across all these loyalties, we see the same root elements:
shared stories
shared values
recurring rituals
symbolic objects
belonging and identity
emotional coherence
inherited expectations
These structures are not dependent on gods or doctrines.
Here is the quiet turning point—the one most of us never name:
What we are seeing is meaning itself.
Meaning is not an idea. It is the architecture of our lives: the way loyalties, memories, rituals, and relationships cohere into something that feels like a world.
Meaning tells us who we are, where we belong, and what matters.
And it forms long before anyone teaches us a creed. They’re simply the ways humans generate and share meaning.
And they show up across every culture and era.
So what does this tell us—about us?
It tells us meaning doesn’t wait for belief. Meaning doesn’t ask our permission. Meaning arises in the places where our lives actually touch the world.
And when we examine these loyalties honestly, we begin to see something we’ve always known but never named:
These are the places where meaning has always lived.
This is not found in metaphysics, in creeds, nor in theological arguments.
But in:
coherence
story
memory
devotion
identity
the unspoken threads that hold our lives together
We have been making meaning since long before religion was a word.
We are already living inside structures of shared meaning.
We practice devotion in ways we rarely name. We move through rituals without thinking of them as such. We carry stories that shape us and guide us. We gather into tribes of loyalty and memory. We hold symbols that anchor who we are. We know the ache of belonging—and the sting of losing it.
There is nothing foreign here. Nothing abstract. Nothing “other.”
This is us. This is how humans make sense of our lives.
If we are to discuss religion honestly, as we will in this series, we must start with recognition, not a definition or argument.
We have meaning already.
We share meaning already.
We live in meaning already.
We have been doing it all along.