Today on “X (Twitter)’ Kant Specialist Prof Anita Leirfall posted about the nature of being religious and here is my response:

Jesus is speaking here of how his teaching is an innovation of the Judaism of his time: 43 “You have heard that it was said, ‘You shall love your neighbor and hate your enemy.’ 44 But I say to you: Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you,”

We often go astray trying to understand the nature of religion because we think in terms of the hermetically sealed ego of the enlightenment and so fail to see Heidegger’s insight of our “Being in the world.”

For example, Dickens in David Copperfield writes of love: “I was sensible of a mist of love and beauty about Dora, but of nothing else … it was all Dora to me. The sun shone Dora, and the birds sang Dora. The south wind blew Dora, and the wildflowers in the hedges were all Doras, to a bud  (Dickens, 2004, ch 33 Blissful).”

We see this when we have a headache or stomachache, and this casts a pall over beings so they appear or show themselves irritatingly.

This model allows us to understand the experience of the holy/numinous, not as a contact with the divine but a way we “ek-sist,” are outside of ourselves. So, as Nietzsche would say a favorite gospel song will go from appearing holy/numinous to appearing irritatingly just by playing it 20 times in a row.