The task of the community should be no other than GIVING you an environment where you can function best so you could do a better job in your solitary meditations. Nother other than this. True religion has no public aspects.
Meh. I disagree with this. I don't think the individual is necessarily the focus of the faith, although a person has to have a personal faith if he is to function in the group. I think we are both unique as well as integrated with each other.
(Isn't that how normal communities work, regardless of religion or not? A family is an integrated unit with its own rituals and structures, yet each member is still an individual, not losing his or her unique identity.)
But you can treat others with respect and have a moral code without having a religion so why religion?
Well, for a faith such as Christianity (and some others), which places such a large emphasis on how people relate to each other and the "Body of Christ" (i.e., all Christians together as an integrated unit, working as one even while retaining identity), religious structure allows people to worship together and work effectively together, just as a secular team might develop its own rituals to build comraderie and/or create a common narrative that the team could cling to in order to build unity.
[btw, I am assuming by "religion" you mean the structure of rituals, organization, rules, and what not that govern the institution. When I refer to religion, I mean that -- as well as the understanding that religion might be structure, but it is not the "spark" of life which necessarily begins in the individual and is shared among the Body, like many people lighting their candles at a Christmas Eve service.]
I don't think we can take religion out of the personal sphere into the social sphere without some form of structure to help guide the interaction and provide a framework.