Substitute spirituality for each instance of the word religion in this paragraph and then you'd be off to an amazing start. But you would never do that as you think it will offend people. I don't have those concerns. Religion is dogma and rules. (I include "new age spirituality" as a religion). This message from "God" as channeled by Neale Donald Walsch I discern as truth and actually spoken by God:
"Religion cannot stand Spirituality. It cannot abide it. For Spirituality may bring you to a different conclusion than a particular religion — and this no known religion can tolerate. Religion encourages you to explore the thoughts of others and accept them as your own. Spirituality invites you to toss away the thoughts of others and come up with your own."
You may recall my essay, Ménage à Trois Between Science, Spirituality and Philosophy, They should have a permanent and mutually satisfying interdependent polyamorous relationship (https://medium.com/p/a634f5446364). What do I mean by interdependent? The parties to the relationship share goals. They each view the other(s) as having something to contribute to those goals for everyone’s benefit. The contributions do not have to be equal but the expectations of all are understood— they don’t keep score and have no hidden agendas. They do not have to agree on everything and they can disagree, even often. That’s ok — they respect each other's boundaries, values, and priorities. No one belongs to or feels subservient to another. Through open and vulnerable communication, they hope to share their completeness with each other and yet know that they can continue to grow.
That relationship in searches for answers can and should work once each discipline accepts the humility that so many answers are and will always be beyond human comprehension, which these channeled words of God delivered through Neale Donald Walsch also speak to:
“Do not waste the precious moments of this, your present reality, seeking to unveil all of life’s secrets. Those secrets are a secret for a reason. Grant your God the benefit of the doubt.”
The other issue with including religion in the formula is there are so many religions, often insisting that each is right and the others wrong. Well, none of them are very right, and many of them are wrong about many things because their sacred texts have been mangled by mistranslations from the original languages and moreover, they were written by humans with biases and agendas (for example most of the New Testament was written over 300 years after the life of Jesus by a bunch of men hired by Emperor Constantine of the Eastern Roman Empire to create a religion that he could get people to follow so he could raise taxes and an army to wage war against the Western Roman Empire. Even the story of Adam and Eve is very wrong, even if viewed as an allegory, because the words man and woman are not in the original text. Properly translated and understood the story is of the creation of a specially evolved species that is a symbiotic relationship between a highly evolved type of animal represented by Adam and a specially evolved type of soul represented by Eve that together form a human. See White Feather’s https://medium.com/grab-a-slice/simultaneous-selves-8eca7d61801d. See Graham Pemberton's https://medium.com/@graham-pemberton/what-do-the-first-three-chapters-of-genesis-really-mean-chapter-2-the-creation-of-eve-7aa72143925b and https://medium.com/@graham-pemberton/what-do-the-first-three-chapters-of-genesis-really-mean-chapter-2-further-thoughts-b6797482fd5c.
And humans (Adam and Eve) were not banished from "Eden" and they did not defy God. The tree of knowledge represents Earth and the Tree of Life, or Tree of Souls in Kabbalah, represents heaven and the story actually represents the choice that each soul makes regarding staying in Heaven or reincarnating to continue its growth and learning about the human experience, a choice my soul has now made 17,043 times. See my https://medium.com/promptly-written/reimagining-sacred-texts-and-their-messages-ac5f6306a7f7
