Devotion that Smells Like Religion
I looked up the word "devotion" on the Internet and I got some very interesting results, from hard-line Bible-thumpers that make millions of dollars on the concept to some of the most titillating and perverse yet free erotica which I chose not to click into. It seems to me that "devotion" is the act of deeply committing yourself to an idea or a person, to such a degree that you order your life and identify yourself according to that idea or person and that you defend such ideas or people in a way that goes beyond the casual.<p>
In pondering the connections between devotion and religion, it seems that most people have decided that religion is a subset of devotion having to do with the supernatural or in a term, God. Basically, there is no difference between devotion and religion, except that lots of folks now find it terribly silly for anyone to offer devotion to non-physical things.<p>
My contention is that all people desire to be devoted to something and that all people have a choice to decide upon what the object of that devotion, their God in a manner of speaking, will be.<p>
Let me be clear that I think that people lie to themselves all the time and they spend time trying to justify those lies both to themselves and to everyone else. When people say that they don't believe in God and try to say that they are somehow free of such foolishness, I think they misrepresent things, as I am sure they have a god, whether that be money, or logic, or their megala-maniacal egos. They devote themselves to something, perhaps their own skepticism, and that thing is just as much their God as the "religionist" one.