Religion -1st installation

There are three sorts of religion.

The first is Mystic. It is not based on text or tradition.
Instead the mystic experiences the divine from within
herself. The mystic may see G-d in fluttering leaves,
sunshine or baby birds. Many mystics have had
experiences with the divine since childhood. The
experiences are so vivid and real that they can dismiss
text and tradition if it conflicts with what they know
first hand. There is a mystic strain in all established
religion. In the Christian world the Quakers are mystic,
in the Islamic world the Sufi’s are mystic and within
Judaism the Hasidic communities are mystic. But
mysticism reaches far beyond these bastions of
acceptance. There are mystics in every group of
significant size. The Roman Catholic church has
always had a large complement of mystic individuals
and numbers of them can be found in mainline churches
everywhere. With a few notable exceptions, including
the Hasidic communities, mystics are rarely members of
a fundamentalist group.

The second group, arguably the true bedrock of
organized religion is the mainline religious. There are
mainline denominations, including the major Methodist,
Episcopal and Presbyterian churches, and mainline
individuals within denominations and groups that are
predominantly mystic or predominantly Fundamental.
Mainline religious place tradition and positive texts
above personal experience and absolute interpretation
of texts. Mainline religious typically consider the
responsibility to feed the hungry and cloth the naked as
being more important than the duty taken on by
fundamentalism to convert the masses.

Fundamentalist groups, including most Baptist, most
Church of God, and independent Church of Christ,
place text before experience or tradition. Typically,
within these Christian denominations, Jesus has
replaced the G-d of the Old Testament as “Lord.”
Mystical experience is viewed with great distrust except
for conversion and healing experiences which are
encouraged and celebrated. Likewise, mainline religion
is often ridiculed by fundamentalist as lukewarm or
merely social religion. Historically, fundamentalist have
seen the missionary duty as primarily one of
conversion.

The knowledge most individuals have of the groups
they are not part of is very limited. Often intentionally
so. Some groups are proudly, and sometimes
belligerently, ignorant. Fundamentalist often home
school, not to provide a better education for their
children, but to insulate them from such things as
modern science and non-fundamentalist classmates and
instructors. Frequently the depth of their elected
narrow way includes embracing a particular version of
sacred text to the exclusion of all other translations.
Mainline denominations are viewed as of dubious
authenticity and members of mainline denominations
are often viewed as not fully Christian.

Mainline religious tend to embrace secular education,
including higher education for men and women.
Mainline religious often view fundamentalist with
either alarm or with blind acceptance of them as fellow
Christians with similar beliefs. Mainliners rarely
indulge in absolutism, which is the hallmark of
fundamentalism.

Mystics are more often a result of nature, as opposed to
nurture, and may find themselves in seemingly unlikely
places. The most beautiful of these unlikely places may
be the Hasidic community. Hasidic Jews are
fundamentalist (within their individual groups) in their
absolute rules and views of food, charity, observance,
ritual and practice. They also are mystical in their
individual relationships to G-d. Hasidic celebrations
have a palatable sense of the numinous and of joy
which I believe is the result of mystical experience
within the framework of fundamentalist life style.
Because they span the entire spectrum of religious type
they also include mainline belief and form, although the
middle ground is in this case, the least prominent.