Why Study Religion? (Day 6)

Date: August 6, 2026

Last modified: August 7, 2026 (05:42 UTC)

I was an oddly contemplative child. Most likely owing to an unfortunate set of genes that predisposed me to severe depression and anxiety, I spent most of my childhood feeling like I was utterly lost in the entire world. I could not understand the purpose of my existence or why suffering was abound in our world. I felt an attraction to something that was beyond myself – I very firmly believed that there was some sort of spiritual essence that was an addition to the physical world – but I had no idea how to pinpoint it. As a result, I became a sort of religious wanderer. I played around with Christianity and Islam for a bit before settling into Wicca and neopaganism for my teenage years. I would now describe myself as Buddhist with influence from neopaganism.

While this may lend some explanation into how I ended up with a fascination on world religion and why entering college I decided to study Religious Studies, it does not give reasons why others should study religion. I firmly believe that to understand humanity one needs to understand religion, for religion at its core is utterly concerned with the affairs of humanity, and to do so I must explain what I see the purpose of religion being. In a future post I’ll also discuss why I study Chinese Buddhism in particular.

The Humanness of Religion

The process of being human is a difficult one. All of human history has seen suffering from the betrayal of close family members to wars of unbelievable levels of atrocity. It is thus natural for us to find some resolution between the contradiction of our want for peace and the reality of the world: out of this comes religion. I do not say this as some sort of handwaving away of religion as just an illogical tool of comfort. Religion is in fact a way of viewing the numerous contradictions of the world and supposing a solution to these.

I find that religion is humanity’s quest to end the eternal contradiction of comfort vs. suffering. We view ultimate reality and the divine as a place free of this contradiction. Religion is thus the blueprint of getting to this place of comfort. By following certain rituals and practicing certain values, you are more likely to reunify with this ultimate reality, and at least in this lifetime perhaps have less day to day struggles. The study of religion is the study of how various culture groups answer this problem.

Of course, the average believer is not going to be doing a deep philosophical deep dive in to the doctrine of the Trinity or the exact formulations of anatman. But they may still go to a house of worship on set religious days or when they are in the midst of a crisis and need support. As a result, religion will focus itself around the needs of its congregants and the larger culture to maintain a presence. It’s really interesting to look at how exactly each religion does this.

The Act of Pilgrimage

Pilgrimage is the act of temporarily turning the status of a person from a householder to a pilgrim. I generally think in religion that the two main statuses of people are householder/laity, those who are not apart of a religion’s hierarchy, and the monastics, who are apart of that hierarchy. The pilgrim straddles between those statuses: during the act of pilgrimage, they do not have the typical responsibilities of the householder (raising children, taking care of the house, working, etc.) but do not have the fully level of regulations that monastics have. If monastics are the ideal that the religious look towards, then pilgrims are only a rung below them. They maintain an elevated status from others during the pilgrimage, and in some cases after the pilgrimage. Consider the Arabic hajji, an honorific title for a Muslim who had completed the Hajj, the mandatory pilgrimage to Mecca. The end location (along with the route itself) of a pilgrimage, is also of particular note, as they are traditionally viewed as having some level of sanctity that results in extra regulations being placed on the area.

My interest is thus why do people embark on pilgrimages and where do they end up going to.

Bad Monastics

There is a quote that I particular love from my favorite movie of all time, Conclave:

We’re mortal men. We serve an ideal. We cannot always be ideal.

This, to me, perfectly sums up what I find fascinating about monastic communities in general. In religious texts we encounter the perfect form of monastics, where they act in good faith and in accordance to all the regulations. But this is obviously not how most humans are. Many monastics privately commit mistakes, and all are subject to the same folly and whims as the rest of the laity. Uncovering these stories and how communities react to these scandals, along with how the religion responds, is very interesting.

How to Start Studying Religion?

I don’t expect nor think that everyone that reads this post needs to re-enter their undergrad and pick up a Religious Studies major. Instead, I’d recommend going down rabbit holes studying various religions. I particularly enjoy the YouTube channels Let’s Talk Religion, ReligionForBreakfast, and ESOTERICA, so check them out. Also, just simply look up religions on Wikipedia and click on various articles. In addition, read the actual religion texts of different religions and exegesis to see how the religion and its worshippers view it!

My final piece of advice is to always go into studying world religion with an open mind. Especially if the religion is not from your cultural context, it can be very easy to dismiss various beliefs as illogical and incorrect. Instead, delve deep into why each religion makes a claim and compare it to your own beliefs. What advantages and disadvantages does your claim and their claim have?

I recall my favorite professor who taught my introduction to Buddhism class telling us why we should care about points of doctrine that may seem useless to us. He was studying Sanskrit in graduate school, and they had to read a dense text on Vedic religion. In the Vedas, there is a section where it mentions that during a ritual, you are to wrap a pole in cloth. However, afterwards it mentions that you have to touch the pole itself. How can that be possible? His class was assigned a reading that was a treatise on how to deal with this problem. My professor, frustrated by the dense reading, told his professor that he simply didn’t care about it. Who cared about whether or not you could touch the pole? His professor responded simply: “Then you must be imaginatively stunted.” While harsh, it’s something that I think is important to consider when you are studying religion. Why do worshippers care so much about this? What impact does it have on the religion and the wider culture at wide?

I hope this post gave you something to consider :)