One of the things I see religious writers trying in vain to define is just what the hell it means when something is “sacred”. This is yet another case of them trying to reach too far to explain shit that everybody intrinsically knows about. And no, I’m not talking in the sense of some kind of hocus-pocus mystical union with the divine. What I’m talking about is games.
Everybody knows about games. Everybody has played all kinds of games growing up. Everybody understands how they work. To me, the best way to describe what is meant by sacred is just to look at how things work in games. Some philosopher named David Kelley seems to have put forth the definition of games as:
- “a form of recreation constituted by a set of rules that specify an object to be attained and the permissible means of attaining it.”
So, to reword that a bit in relation to religion, games consist of ritualized systems of rules and behaviors for reaching some goal. So, when something is sacred, you could just say that it’s part of the game. Everybody understands that on a very basic level. From there, a game is basically just a story that you are acting out. The outcome of the story may not be necessarily known, but the important thing is that you assume the roles correctly, and play according to the rules. Roles + Rules = Games = Rituals = Acting out a story = Religion. But, of course, that’s a bit of an oversimplification.
This equation of the sacred with games is actually very useful for understanding some of the sociological theories about religion, such as Emile Durkheim’s:
- Durkheim suggested that the sacred is that which is cohesive to a society, that enables people to bind together in that society… Religion, in its celebration of all things sacred, is therefore celebrating that which enables society to be a celebration of societal cohesion.
Cohesive? Bind together? What does that mean? That means that religion (whatever it’s form) is the game which everyone plays by which society is held together. Makes sense to me.
On a similar note, I wrote an essay about games and religion sometime last year that is worth checking out:
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