Religion is a dependence on and submission to the irrational facts of existence. These include the accidental and random happenings of social and physical existence, but even more importantly, the instinctive and often chaotic contents of the individual psyche. Religion helps us build up a reserve, as it were, against the obvious and inevitable force of circumstances and inexplicable accidents.
Just as an individual human, a social being, cannot in the long run exist without a tie to the community, so the individual will never find the real justification for his existence and his own spritual and moral autonomy anywhere except in an extramundane principle, capable of relativizing the overpowering influence of unexplainable and unpredictable external factors -- life's vicissitudes.
When the rationalist directs the main force of his attack against the miraculous effect of the rite as asserted by religious tradition, he has in reality completely missed the mark. He has overlooked the essential point of religion -- the psychological effect.
(Adapted loosely from C.G. Jung's The Undiscovered Self (Princeton: Bollingen Series; Princeton University Press, 1990).
God is Great.
