“Man is an animal who must imagine he is more than an animal.”
Religion does not describe reality, it commands it. The Bible is not geology, the Qur’an is not astronomy, the Vedas are not physics. They are codes of conduct disguised as stories of the world. Religion is the grammar of duty dressed in myth. It says ought, never is.
Science begins with is. The sun is a star. Water is H₂O. DNA is a code. These statements do not bind our lives. They explain but they do not command. Religion begins with ought. Thou shalt. You must. Live thus. It legislates. It does not describe.
The priest is not a scientist in robes; he is a lawgiver cloaked in metaphor. His truth is prescriptive, not descriptive. Religion survives because it insists: you cannot live without law.
And yet the charge of “Pollyanna trips” strikes close. Many creeds were born in trance. The Eleusinian Mysteries: visions under barley and kykeon. The shamans: smoke and song. The prophets: dreams on mountaintops. A whole metaphysics erected upon altered states. Civilization canonized hallucination.
But illusion alone does not endure millennia. Ecstasy must be institutionalized. Drugs wear off; commandments remain. What begins in a trance becomes codified in tables of stone. The trip dissolves; the law persists.
Religion is thus double: ecstasy and duty. The vision gives it fire, the law gives it endurance. Strip away the visions and you get cold ethics. Strip away the ethics and you get babble. Only together do they form a system.
To call religion an is is mistake. To call it only a trip is reduction. Religion is an architecture of ought sustained by the memory of visions. It is man legislating his own transcendence.