If you spend enough time on Earth, you begin to think of religion as a clever way to charge for something that is inherently free. Spirituality is like photosynthesis for the soul, whereas religion is a kind of shuttered greenhouse, artificially controlling everyone’s growth rates.

The Catholic church, which has been having a bad couple of centuries (first locking up Galileo, then wink-wink-nodding through the Holocaust, then molesting everybody under the age of 10) should have been listed at top of the Fortune 500. Tell people they can’t access their souls without help from the experts, and you have an income source for life. Which is not to say that some parishioners, miraculously, manage to find their spirituality with help from the Robed Rubes. The appeal of thinking like other people—of having a sense of ‘community’—is hard to turn down. But when you have to ask forgiveness for having a sex drive, is that really the sort of community you want to belong to?

Religion, at its best, provides a series of steps and instructions on how to become a better person. This can be helpful; the problem comes in the fine print. For example: don’t kill, unless of course that person insults our God. And who is our God, these days? Materialism? Energy resources? Twitter?
Being spiritual on your own isn’t easy, of course. There are no guidelines except the ones you intuit, and sometimes you can fuck it up. Spirituality demands that you acknowledge that you will never, ever, completely understand what’s going on, and that sometimes, things will swing out of your favor. But at least you have responsibility over your own soul. You may never get to heaven, but at least you won’t wind up in somebody else’s hell.