What It Means - Day 158

Normally this is where I would be posting a passage from the Quran or the ahadith, and that was the initial plan for this day's post, but, as is so often the case when I'm running one of our Discography music discussions, somewhere along the way it wandered off course. Obviously, this is completely fine because there's no great structure to this year's discussion anyway. Anyway, what bumped me off the initial posting was an article I read, not about Islam, actually, but instead about Christianity. The article briefly related the main points of a study that claimed that while regular attendance at weekly church services tended to make you more conservative politically, daily readings of the Bible, in isolation from attending the services, tended to make you, in some ways, more liberal politically. It raised all sorts of interesting points, including the role that Christian churches, especially the Evangelicals, play politically, but what interested me was the disconnect between what the faith is supposed to be and how it is practiced. How many Tweets or Facebook memes have we seen that quote the passages about quote passages about caring for the immigrants while people who are seemingly religious seem to get almost a perverse joy out of mistreating them? As I'm wont to opine, faiths are founded by an individual or individuals with a clearer view of the divine and how we can treat each other better, but then corrupted, and turned into religions, by generations of mean-spirited pricks. All of this made me think about my own faith and whether the same dynamic holds true: would reading the Quran and ahadith by themselves in isolation make you more politically liberal than regularly attending serves with a group every Friday? Or, divorcing yourself entirely from political issues, is there a fundamental difference between the time you spend with your holy scripture and the time you spend with your religious community, or, well, your religion? Isn't the point of religion to help guide you to the greater essential truths that are revealed in your scripture (whatever that scripture might be)? If your lived religious communal life leading you someplace different than a life spent simply reading and meditating on your faith, which one is the right path? I know that we should say that it's clearly the same path (just as in Islam we will often claim that there is actually no separation between the secular and spiritual world because of the omnipotence of God), but I don't know if I believe that.