The Devil is in the Details

Religion is a phenomenon emergent from God and Man. Therefore, from different perspectives, it will seem like divinity or like humanity; it is the elephant in the old story who, being inspected by five men who could not see it in its entirety, was described as massively columnar - the legs - to lithe and snakelike - the trunk - each description according as the portion of the large animal each man was limited to in his study.

Holy writings are inspired by God, but it is mankind which reads them, interprets them, and speaks of them.
Divine commands emanate from God, but it is mankind which hears, understands, and promulgates.

What is human takes on the myriad faces of humanity: quot homines tot sententiae, there are as many differing opinions as there are different men. The human is the intense and obsessional attention to detail, eventuating in an unfortunate chain of misapprehensions: obsessional focus becoming Faith and obsessed over by our descendants and future devotees.
To occupy his obsessional intelligence, man creates detail, the easier to make a fetish of it. Language is the basis of the splintered reality which we spend our time putting back together, then ripping apart, only to resew the hems - the tattered seams - of what is left.

What is Divine is so rare and so prone to escape intelligibility that it takes lifetimes to grasp. It is silent and is mirrored in the silence of monks and nuns in all the lands of the Earth who devote themselves to God. Its intelligibility is action and doing, not speaking and reading: hence we have to learn from mentors who teach us the most important articles of faith in silence, in zen koan, in  parables and ironies, pointing to paradoxes to jolt our minds from the details of the ordinary.

If the modern is ungodly, it is ungodly in its deification of Laws and Writings and Symbolic Speaking, and its ensuing tendency to trap God within the bounds of human symbolisms. It reduces God to an article of our science, whose divine soul is known by mere men, so well known that we are completely at ease discovering the intention and will of God, and destroying those who disagree.

God is not an object of belief. He is an expectation when I awake into the waking state from the sleep state.
God does not prescribe, nor does He compel. He attracts.
God does not speak, urge, nor exhort. He persuades us by our natures and lives.
We pull the carriage of the universe, like teams of horses and mules. The carrot dangled in front of us to get us moving is a Mobius strip - a topology extending forward, yet based on the past; it attracts and pushes by a bright and shining orangeness of the carrot of our quantum desires.

In the world of detail, there are too many carrots, and they are haphazardly strewn about; in the world of detail, it is dark and no one has kindled a fire, nor has anyone struck a light.