Cult Necessity

Liturgy is an antidote to the abstraction of rationalism and to the utility of moralism and to the vain self-sufficiency and narrow outlook of both.

"The soul must learn to abandon, at least in prayer, the restlessness of purposeful activity; it must learn to waste time for the sake of God, and to be prepared for the sacred game with sayings and thoughts and gestures, without always immediately asking 'why?' and 'wherefore?'"
 --Guardini, The Spirit of the Liturgy

Rationalism is the belief or theory that opinions and actions should be based exclusively on reason and scientific knowledge, claiming that any other source of knowledge is mere opinion or sentiment.

Moralism is the belief in or practice of a system of ethics apart from religion. Morality becomes your religion without reference to the living God.

True religion has a morality and is reasonable, but it cannot be reduced to it's moral code or to it's ideas. True religion consists in a real relationship with the living God and it is fundamentally in divine worship where that relating between God and man is exercised.

Worship (God's action in the world and in history and man's response to the divine action in adoration, thanksgiving, repentance and petition) is the basis of religion, nothing else. Cultus!

Religion, true religion, is God with man and man with God! It's a relationship, incarnated once and for all in the Person of Jesus Christ, perfect God and perfect man: the Lord!

I'm spiritual and religious! Necessarily! The devil is spiritual and not religious!

N.B. In this regard, finding it's definition for "moralism" wanting (it defined "legal moralism" only, and, that, as democratic morality!), here is my feedback to the Google dictionary this morning.

"Did not define moralism which definition I did find in my Websters: 1. moral teaching; moralizing. 2. a moral maxim. 3. belief in or practice of a system of ethics apart from religion.

In contemporary theology it is a term used very frequently and always in this third sense as a cheapening, distortion, substitute (since Kant) for true religion; which consists rather in having a relationship with the living God.

"True religion includes morality but cannot be reduced to morality. "