✝️ Is Spiritism a Religion?

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🧭 A Philosophical Doctrine

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Spiritism is in itself only a philosophical doctrine built on concrete facts and natural laws still little understood. By profoundly modifying ideas, this doctrine touches all social questions — and consequently the religious question, like all others.

Do not all philosophies do the same? They all comment on the foundations of religions: God, the origin and nature of the soul. Materialist philosophy also concerns itself with these questions, by way of negation. It is impossible for a philosophy not to address them, in one direction or another. Spiritism addresses them in light of its own new elements — but this does not make it a religion; otherwise, all philosophies would be.

🔍 Religious Idea vs. Religion Properly Speaking

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We must distinguish the religious idea from religion properly speaking.

The religious idea is general, without fixed principles of detail, without any regulation. Religion, on the other hand, has a particular character of precision: it consists not only of a community of well-defined beliefs, but also of an external form of worship, the fulfilment of certain duties, and the bond that unites its adherents.

Spiritism has never had this formal character — and that is why it is not a religion. One is a spiritist because one sympathises with the ideas Spiritism contains, just as one is Cartesian, Platonic or materialist — but not by a profession of faith or any consecration.

🚫 No Dogmas, No Rites

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Spiritism has no dogmas, cults, rites, ceremonies or hierarchies. It neither asks nor admits any blind faith. It wants to see everything clearly; it wants us to understand everything, to perceive everything.

💡 The Philosophical Sense

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In the philosophical sense, Spiritism may be called religious — because it founds the bonds of fraternity and communion of thought not on an arbitrary convention, but on solid foundations: the very laws of nature.

Why then do we declare that Spiritism is not a religion? Because there is only one word to express two distinct ideas. In general opinion, the word religion is inseparable from the word worship — and Spiritism has no worship.

We vehemently reject:

• Dogmas that crystallise inquiry and often oppose reason
• Rites that tend to confer undue power on those who practise them

Source: cslak.fr