Religion?

I was recently asked if the Heaven Path was a religion.

My immediate answer was that it was instead a philosophy, but it occurred to me that that wasn't really an accurate answer.

The Heaven Path, or more properly Sub-ascetics, is actually a framework for religion. Adherrants of Sub-ascetics could rightly call themselves Sub-ascetic Catholics, or Sub-ascetic Mormons or Sub-ascetic Episcopalians if they approached their religion of choice with the following understandings:

That there can be no objective proof of God's existence.

That fundamental structure of the world and everything in it is necessary and sufficient if God does exist, and is simply the way it is if no God exists and it isn't possible to prove which it is.

That each individual person is necessarily of equal intrinsic and extrinsic value because God, if such exists, chose to create that which is not created by God and therefore cannot know the means of fulfillment of the Great Work, and that each individual person is necessarily of equal intrinsic and extrinsic value because if no God exists there is no way for any person to determine the value of the fulfillment of any other person in terms of our own or others future.

And that it is the responsibility of each person to fulfill his or her own unique potential without interfering with any other person's responsibility to fulfill their potential, for the same reason as noted directly above.

So, a logical question to ask now is "Where does that leave religion?"

Religion qua religion has always been the means of integrating the religious feelings that we all experience. There have been, across time, those persons who through their unique potential have been able to convey their religious perspective in a way that, when experienced by others sets up a more or less harmonic resonance with the religious feeling apparatus of others.

This created resonance serves those with less of the particular potential for religious integration to find a greater degree of religious integration than would otherwise be possible, and the state of being that accompanies religious integration is generally perceived to be fulfilling.

The problem is that there are always those opportunistic ones that can create the resonance, but are not satisfied with having aided others to higher resonance and so seek to also profit in one manner or another from the practice of the resonance creation. And once profitability becomes the objective, marketing is never far behind.

And what better product could one market than "Grace Directly from the Pneuma of God-brand Scripture".

It's enough to make you want to corner the market.