Russel, my own personal discrimination test between what is sacred and what is trappings – and this is off the cuff so please bear with me – seems to revolve on what is a repeated routine or action (being trappings) and what is the very essence of the supreme being and the inner voice message that one hopes will be derived from going through the trappings. Communion, sweat lodges, ringing chimes, lighting candles – these are trappings as I define them. A lot of folks claim religious texts are sacred, and for me they’re borderline, since to me they are a very human interpretation of what must by definition be way beyond human understanding. If we could understand God, it wouldn’t be God. This doesn’t – shouldn’t – stop us from trying, and for some, a set interpretation is the final word on the subject, period, and thus sacred. As our understanding of what is divine grows and changes, our texts must as well. We will/must rise above some one’s or some group’s limited understanding and in so doing grow closer to what is truly divine.

Of course, I’m pretty agnostic, so I’m wiling to posit that it may just be a goal, and we really are creating God in our own image. Even if that is so, if what we’re striving for is the best in ourselves, how can we not try?

The fact that there aren’t many 12 step programs for religious addiction does help make Heather’s point though. People are not near as likely to point out when someones religion has become a problem as when their drinking, eating, etc has.

There is one kind of OCD, scrupulosity, that is religious in nature. My understanding is that the therapist must be quite careful about teasing out the compulsions to treat while not trying to undermine the patients actual spiritual belief.

In regard to the boy with Hodgkin’s Lymphoma, I have to point out that if the case ended up in front of a judge then someone or several people did NOT just go along with the parent’s beliefs.

I agree with Heather that not questioning religious actions can be a problem, but I also know from experience that religious intolerance is also a problem. Sometimes it is a difficult line to walk.

“To me, as I understand sacred, that concept should be reserved for God, or Allah, or whatever higher being or ideal. To make the trappings that surround the group-think teaching, that describe the divine and set down rules to follow, as themselves sacred just succeeds in driving us a step farther away from the divine.”

I suspect religion hunters would voice their assent to your precept. The problem is that God or Allah or the divine are not present, at least not in any objectively observable fashion. Trappings are all that religions offer, reading the Bible and confession no less so than communion. It is empty to criticize religion hunters for going for the trappings rather than the substance unless you can provide a discrimination test between the two. I doubt you claim to do so, and if you did, I suspect it would be as meaningless as those offered by the religious.

I think you’ve hit on something in your 2nd to the last paragraph, “I have to get away from other people to explore my own spirituality…” Religion hunters, I suspect, are using the religious search to run from themselves, the way others do with excessive drink, drugs or sex. It’s not moving toward something, but a move away from yourself.

Finding that place of quiet is the most challenging thing we can do, because we must deal with ourselves. This, I think, is the point behind Psalm 46:10: “Be still, and know that I am God.” If we create too much noise and activity, all we find is another attempted escape from reality.

Nicely done.

I mention it because the theme you express here is that people are constantly looking for an external resource to satisfy an internal need to know the unknowable, and there are people willing to share their “knowledge” for a price; and in this shortcut case of the sweat lodges the price was not only her money but her life at the hands of someone who practiced another culture’s religion as though he learned it from reading an excerpt from a book jacket and decided “Hey, this is easy.” Cultures that do sweat lodges have from long experience and cultural practice learned how to properly prepare for such a ritual. I knew someone in Minneapolis who had been raised as a Catholic, converted to Wicca and was later invited by the Mdewankenton to learn their religion and spirituality, but before he partook in any of the spiritual ceremonies he had to study carefully to learn the depth of their religious beliefs. It took years for him, which is something that the “religion hunters” (I like the phrase you have coined because it fits in context with Avalos’ thesis,) seek to sneak out with in the middle of the night.

I’m not saying that the guy that I knew was any less of a “religion hunter” than the woman who died in a sweat lodge, but the point I am trying to make is that in trying to snatch a little piece of a religious culture like that the charlatans who arranged this event were grabbing at a small piece of a scarce resource and hoping to get at something much larger.

But even Christians engage in Religion Hunting, shopping church to church to find the one that follows the “true teaching” at the exclusion of the misguided souls in the church down the block.