I heard Deepak Chopra say, “Religion is buying into someone else’s experiences instead of having your own.” Hmm. The people at Merriam-Webster’s don’t seem to be aware of this definition. In Merriam-Webster’s series of definitions for religion, the one I think most people mean by this word is “the service and worship of God or the supernatural.”
Interestingly, we often hear Christians say of their faith, “It’s not about religion.” We might need to think this through. If most hearers have Merriam-Webster’s first definition in mind, won’t they compute those Christians’ statements as meaning “my Christianity isn’t about the service and worship of God”?
Also interesting is the fact that while most Christians would reject Chopra’s New Age/everything-is-god teachings, there is a sort of trend now to think that our faith (religion) is best defined in Chopra’s way—not by truth, but by experiences that feel spiritual.
