Why Should We Question Religion?
The Religion of Ritual Consumption and Programmed Desire
The word “religion” usually brings to mind temples, dogmas, sacred scriptures, and spiritual practices. However, if we understand it as what Mircea Eliade called a system of fundamental principles organized around myths, rites, archetypes, and magic—or fetishism—then the religious goes beyond the theological. In fact, it is alive and active even in contexts that proclaim themselves as secular, rational, or modern. Questioning religion, therefore, does not necessarily mean doubting a god, but interrogating the symbolic and practical systems that organize our perception of reality, our choices, and our desires. And this, today more than ever, is urgent.
Western liberal capitalism functions as a modern religion. It has its founding myth—the autonomous and free individual who achieves (economically) through merit and effort—, its daily rituals—consumption, work, competition—, its archetypes—the successful entrepreneur, the investor, the “self-made man”—and, of course, its magical object: money, acting as a fetish capable of transforming anything into value. This religion does not present itself as such, but it operates with a symbolic power that organizes our life in all aspects. It tells us what is worthwhile, what is desirable, what is failure, and what is freedom. Just as a hammer sees everything as a nail, our subjectivity, shaped by this system, tends to see everything—including ourselves and others—as resources, means, useful things, or things to be discarded.
When we do not question this symbolic system, we allow it to determine how we relate to others. The other, when not fitting the values of our religion, comes to be seen as a mistake, an anomaly, or a threat. We reduce them. We judge them. They cease to be someone with their own meaning and become an obstacle or a flaw. And if we do not question the system that makes us think this way, we will only be able to truly relate to those who fit into it. All others, sooner or later, will be left out. Without critique, there is no real hospitality, no deep empathy. There is only strategic tolerance and distance disguised as inclusion.
But it is not only the other who is affected by this symbolic automatism. Our own future is too. When we do not question the religion that structures our desires, the future is reduced to a series of prefabricated options. We choose from a menu we did not design, we dream what the system allows us to imagine, and we confuse repetition with freedom. Our decisions are inscribed in a logic that has already been decided for us, even though we believe we are choosing. We change forms without changing content, spinning in a loop where what seems like novelty is only an authorized variant of the same. Thus, what we feel as choice is obedience. What we live as freedom is automatism.
Questioning religion is not about destroying meaning, but about reclaiming the possibility of creating it. It is to interrupt automatism, open a crack in the script, challenge the desire that already comes written. It means ceasing to act as if everything were a nail just because we were raised as hammers. Because if we do not do this, if we do not dare to interrogate the logic inhabiting us, then the truly new can never take place.