The experiences that bring me closer to members of a church or any other organziation are activities such as community action projects. I volunteered my time to renovate an abandoned house in the middle of town a few years ago. I told the guys I have very little experience doing construction work of any kind, but I'm a big strong S.O.B. and I'll move anything around where its needed, pick up the trash generated by the various projects going on at the same time, and try to learn whatever I could to be useful. They were like
"Cool! We have a work horse!"
Each day I worked on that project I was exhausted, but I knew all of our efforts would ultimately lead to turning an abandoned home in the middle of town into a nice house that a family would be able to buy under special financing/low interest rate terms ala the non-profit's deal with the city in using volunteer time to renovate the abandoned property. That felt really good to me, and made me feel alot closer to God than sitting in a church singing songs that I've never liked, and throwing a few bucks in the basket when it makes its way down my aisle of pews...
Hm... I totally think that counts, actually. 'Counts'.
I want to go to gromit and Halla's church.
Me too.
-- but could you even call that [religion], without the active aspects of belief?
So let's discuss: What is the value in that? Why not leave a "religion" as a group of theories in one's mind?
I'm not sure I understand what you're asking... I think you could leave something as theories in your mind but I don't know that a set of theories would be a religion. Perhaps a philosophy. But unless you implement those theories somehow, use them to drive your decisions and actions, then what is the point, to make yourself feel good or something? (Not you specifically, generic 'you')
I've been thinking about this a little more, particularly as I've been sort of drifting in terms of formal religion lately. Here is a quote from this essay called
Department of the Interior by Linda Hogan.
The purpose of ceremony is to restore the individual to their place within all the rest...The real ceremony begins where the formal one ends, when we take up a new way, our minds and hearts filled with the vision of earth that holds us within it, in compassionate relationship to and with our world. We speak. We sing. We swallow water and breathe smoke. By the end of the ceremony, it is as if skin contains land and birds. The places within us have become filled...We who easily grow apart from the world are returned to the great store of life all around us and there is the deepest sense of being at home here in this intimate kinship.
That passage is describing a native American sweat lodge ceremony (I believe of the Lakota tradition). I had the chance to participate in one a few months ago, a friend invited me to attend. It's sort of like a sauna that's made by pouring water over really hot rocks. It's like nothing I've ever experienced. The person in charge lead us through different meditations, and chants and songs, and you really do feel like you are dissolving into this interconnectedness, a greater awareness (while you're doing it), and then afterward, you feel relaxed but somehow also alert, renewed, cleansed, able to refocus your attention. So I have felt, in my own way, what the author describes with that particular ceremony, in a very tangible, but spiritual/psychological way. So beautiful.
I have also felt similarly with other ceremonies from other traditions, too, though never as tangibly. I like the beginning of the second sentence 'The real ceremony begins where the formal one ends, when we take up a new way...' The ceremony itself tends to be more physical, but at the same time all of the elements are deeply symbolic. You bring that symbolism from abstraction to reality by changing the your attitude, your approach to things, by taking up the new way.