Religion and the Sovereign Self

We all need a sense of belonging. A tribe. Connection to something larger than ourselves. This is not a weakness or a failure of character, it's a fundamental human need, as essential as food or shelter. Religion, in its many forms across cultures and centuries, has provided precisely that: community, meaning, ritual, answers to the unanswerable.

And for most people, it works. At least partially. You can be content with 90% of it, living by its values, drawing sustenance from its community and narratives, while leaving the contradictory 10%, the parts that don't quite add up, out of the conversation. Many do this their entire lives without conscious awareness that they're making a choice.

But what happens in that 10%? What is actually occurring when we accept contradiction, when we hold two opposing ideas simultaneously without examining the gap between them?

The Comfort of Forgetting

One of religion's most powerful functions is this: it offers absolution. Sin can be washed away. Shame can be forgiven. The uncomfortable parts of ourselves, the things we'd rather not face, can be buried beneath doctrine and ritual.

This is seductive precisely because shame is unbearable. We all carry things that make us deeply uncomfortable: moments we're not proud of, desires we fear, wounds we haven't healed. Religion provides an elegant escape: confess, be forgiven, move forward. The burden lifts.

But here's the cost: absolution without integration is merely burial. The shame doesn't disappear; it goes underground. It continues to influence our behavior, our relationships, our choices, all while remaining unconscious. We've been forgiven without ever understanding what created the need for forgiveness in the first place.

And in this gap, between what we're told to believe about ourselves and what we actually feel, the ego thrives. It uses religious identity as a mask. A curated self that feels safer, more acceptable, more righteous than the messy, uncertain reality beneath.

The Question of Authority

There's another tension that deserves examination: Who gets to tell you what is right?

Most of us carry an inner knowing. A felt sense of what aligns with us and what doesn't. When something conflicts with our values or our intuition, we know it, not intellectually always, but in our body, our gut, our deeper self. This direct knowing is a form of spiritual guidance, a compass connected directly to our psyche and our nature.

Yet institutional religion asks us to override this compass. To trust the doctrine, the priest, the pope, the interpretation handed down through centuries. To believe thatthey know better than your own inner sensing. To accept that you are, in essence, a sheep, needing guidance, incapable of direct knowing, requiring authority to show you the way.

What does it cost us to consistently override our own inner compass? What happens when we train ourselves, year after year, to distrust our own discernment in favor of external authority?

We become spiritually numb. We learn to ignore the quiet voice that says this doesn't feel right. We become complicit in our own diminishment.

And yet, this is the complexity worth holding, many people find genuine solace, community, and wisdom within religious frameworks. They're not all deluded or oppressed. Many have found something real. So the question isn't whether religion is good or bad. It's more subtle:Can genuine spiritual practice survive within an institutional hierarchy, or does the hierarchy itself inevitably corrupt it?

Reading Between the Lines

If we look at the oldest texts, not as literal truth, but as layers of narrative, certain patterns emerge.

The original Hebrew texts refer to Elohim, not one God, but many. Gods, plural. A more distributed, less hierarchical vision of the divine. Somewhere along the way, this multiplicity was consolidated into singular monotheistic authority. One God. One truth. One correct interpretation.

Why would that shift occur? What serves the consolidation of many voices into one?

Then there's the story of the garden, the fruit of knowledge. The narrative suggests that gaining knowledge, developing discernment, the ability to question and see beyond what we're told,expelled us from innocence. We ate from the tree and were cast out. Knowledge became transgression.

And crucially, after that expulsion, a new script was needed. A new narrative to replace the old one. Control through ignorance gave way to control throughmanaged knowledge, carefully curated texts, approved interpretations, authority figures deciding what we should believe.

These are observations. Patterns. Possibilities. Not certainties, because how can we possibly know the full truth of events thousands of years in the past? But they're worth noticing. Worth sitting with.

The Sovereignty of Your Own Senses

Here's what we're left with: thousands of years of layered narratives. Texts that have been edited, amplified, suppressed, reinterpreted. Stories told and retold, each version shaped by the agendas and wounds of those telling them. Some elements preserved, others lost. Some added, others obscured.

All major religions appear to have undergone similar processes of interference. The question isn't which one got it "right." It's: How do we navigate this landscape of competing narratives, each claiming to hold truth?

The answer, perhaps uncomfortably, is this:You only have your own sovereign senses to guide you.

Not blind faith. Not reactive skepticism. Not the wholesale rejection of one narrative in favor of another. But your own capacity to discern. To notice what resonates and what doesn't. To ask: Does this expand my sense of possibility or constrain it? Does it invite me into deeper knowing or demand I stop questioning? Does it unite me with others or separate me into an in-group?

Some elements within religious traditions are genuinely wise. The stories of compassion, of justice, of seeing beyond surface appearances, these have power regardless of their literal historicity. A story can be symbolically true even if it's historically uncertain. The image of someone choosing the vulnerable over the powerful, or overturning systems of false authority, these narratives have stayed with humanity for millennia because they speak to something real in us.

But the framework that claims toown these truths? That insists on obedience to authority rather than engagement with mystery? That offers forgiveness without requiring understanding? That asks you to surrender your sovereign discernment?

That deserves questioning.

An Invitation

The invitation, then, is not to abandon religion or to embrace it blindly. It's to think consciously about what you're actually adopting and why. To notice where you're comfortable with contradiction, and to ask yourself whether that comfort is genuine integration or just sophisticated avoidance.

To tune into your own inner knowing and ask: What feels true tome? Not what I've been told to believe, but what actually resonates when I sit quietly with it?

To recognize that belonging and community are genuine needs, and to ask whether you can meet those needs in ways that honor rather than diminish your sovereignty.

And to remember that many factions and interpretations existwithin religious traditions precisely because thoughtful people have asked these questions. People have noticed the contradictions, felt the limitations, and either adapted the tradition or created new expressions of it. Some have preserved older texts and interpretations that felt truer. Some have rejected institutional structures entirely while maintaining spiritual practice.

There is no single answer. But there is a question worth living into:How do I honor both my need for belonging and my need for sovereignty?

That question, sitting uncomfortably at the intersection of tribe and individual, of faith and discernment, of authority and autonomy, that's where authentic spiritual thinking begins.

Not in the answers someone else provides, but in the willingness to ask the question yourself.