Unconcerned

I found this to be an interesting question/statement:

I wonder if you have an Ultimate Concern–or, I guess more to the point, if you’re conscious of what your ultimate concern is, and how beliefs and practices in your life tend to that ultimate concern.

That pivot, from being curious about a person to questioning how they live their lives, strikes me as more commonplace than I'd given it credit for. Author John Green made the statement above at the end first episode of Crash Course Religion: "Is Yoga a Religion?" And it served to, effectively, define everyone as having a religion. Mr. Green had noted theologian Paul Tillich's definition of religion, which is “the state of  being grasped by an ultimate concern.” So, if everyone has an ultimate concern, then everyone has a religion; they just may not know it.

(Interestingly, when I dropped Mr. Green's quote into Google, so that I could determine which episode of Crash Course Religion he'd said it, Google responded: "As an AI, Google Search does not have personal beliefs, consciousness, or an ultimate concern in the human sense; it operates based on its programming and the data it was trained on." Search is going to become much more interesting if all questions are considered to be addressed to the search engine itself.)

While Mr. Tillich structured his ultimate concern in such a way that everyone had one, I don't know that everyone else should do the same. For starters, at least as far as I'm concerned, it renders the both term itself and considerations of religion somewhere between meaningless and tautological. Why bother to define "religion" at all, if everyone has one, and that religion is defined by something else? But more importantly, it gets in the way of genuine curiosity about other people. Were I to encounter Mr. Green, he would have no reason to be curious about whether I had an ultimate concern; he could simply presume that I did, and any protestation to the contrary on my part was simply the result of ignorance.

And this habit, of making presumptions about people, and then treating those presumptions as inerrant regardless of what the people in question have to say about it, tends to create barriers between people. And I'm not sure that it offers anything generally useful in return. Sure, one or all parties to a conversation can simply decide they know certain facts about the others and be done with it, but that tends to obviate the need for conversation in the first place.

Because why bother asking the question: "What is religion?" is there's already an answer, and one that simply decrees that everyone has one? Why not start with the idea of an ultimate concern, and go from there? It would have been more open, and more useful, to the audience. And it could have answered the question that was the episode's title... determine if the practice of Yoga tends to the specific ultimate concerns of its practitioners, and there's the answer, packaged neatly into a box.

In the end, I think, that's part of the point. Totalizing assumptions about people assist in determining which predetermined category they belong in, and that helps people feel that they understand, without having to undertake the messy project or getting to know them well, the other people they interact with. The fact that this may do them a disservice is left aside.