Elijah Walker shared this Tweet on Twitter today that gives a secular person a clue about what religiousness is. Elijah writes:
Elijah Walker (they/them) 4:45 PM · Jul 31, 2022
- This is the first time I’ve shared this publicly. I’ve made a decision to permanently step away from ministry. I no longer identify as a Christian. I no longer experience the thing that I used to call God. With that, I’ve lost everything familiar.
So, we see religiousness is not just a set of ideas or beliefs you have, but a way you experience the world. Elijah once experienced the world as “god-infused,” but no longer does. So, the experience of the godly/holy is not an encounter with the holy, with God, but a way the mind projects itself onto things, like experiencing the book as boring. We really do feel boringness to be a quality of the book like redness and hardness, but understand the next person may not experience the book to be boring. Similarly, the schizophrenic may experience the world as conspiracy infused. And so, thinker Friedrich Nietzsche pointed out we can go from experiencing a gospel song as holy to as irritating/boring just by playing it 50 times in a row.