Obedience

Religious faith, or more specifically the satisfactions of religious faith from the point of view of the believer, are actually the potentially intense pleasures of obedience. I don't mean particular obedience (as it might be: the pleasure of obeying one specific law or prohibition); and nor do I mean the self-satisfaction of thinking of oneself, as it might be, I am a law-abiding individual. I mean that much more profound, much deeper-buried hypostasis in which, psychosymbolically, individual and social animal meet, as crucial for dogs or apes as humans. I mean the elevation of obedience into a mode of being-in-the-world.