1.
Religious practices... make up a distinguishable field of human practices.
To say that they are human practices is to emphasize that to understand them, we must set them in relation to the kind of beings we are, and view them as responses to different experienced needs.
With the core assumptions in mind, we see that what makes religious practices special is that in order to fulfill their function, they have to recognize the reality of a divine power which
can come into your life and transform it...
Most important here is that I will assume that religious practices have conceptualizations of their own, conceptualizations we draw on to constitute part of our environment.
2.
The narratives, symbols, and teachings of religious traditions can influence our life orientations in different ways and to different degrees. A life orientation thus consists of a number of habits and more or less explicitly formulated views of human life, and what constitutes a good human life. These both reveal themselves in, and guide, conduct, mainly in regard to situations of existential significance. Situations of existential significance are, for instance, situations which concern matters of life and death, illness and recovery, love and hatred, success and failure/loss, and so on. Any life orientation that aspires to be adequate must offer satisfactory responses to such situations, and a religious tradition that aspires to be adequate must show appreciation for these situations and offer tools that help us cope with them.
3.
We need to acknowledge that even as our life orientations are heavily influenced by, for instance, religious elements, this in no way rules out that we can come to experience some of the elements of the religious tradition that we draw upon as sanctioning and even encouraging oppression or inequality, exploitation, and other things that we cannot help seeing as obstacles to human flourishing. Such experiences call for critique, and such critique, I would argue, inevitably has a public dimension, as the tradition that I draw on is never merely mine, and the interpretations that others, including outsiders, make set certain limits for which kinds of reinterpretations and renegotiations that are currently available. If we cannot make space for our life orientation within those limits, or manage to expand them in some ways, then we may, in the end, abandon the tradition entirely.
4.
Human beings are always situated in a reality that offers resistance and constantly
threatens to frustrate our purposes. To deal with such resistance in the best possible
way(s), humans have developed practices.. We are contingent beings that experience love, hatred, grief, joy, birth, flourishing, illness, and death in the course of life... for certain purposes, we need science, for others, we need views of life—religious and/or nonreligious pictures of what life is like at its best—which provide us with existential “orientation” and help us articulate what it is, existentially, to be human.
5.
Given views of life’s orientating function, it is always possible to raise the question whether a certain view of life is adequate or not — that is, whether it supplies us with insights about the human existential condition that we can acknowledge and draw on in our transactions with the environment.
(U. Zachariasson, philosopher)