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A religion is an explicitly authorized understanding of human existence—or, as can also be said, of the basic faith in the ultimate meaning of life, the underlying trust and loyalty, constitutive of existence as such. Thus it is constituted as a religion by an explicit primal source of all existential, and therefore religious, authority, this source having both an ontic and a noetic component. The ontic component of the source is the pre-existing reality experienced as authorizing the religion; its noetic component is the immediate experience of that reality as thus authorizing it. These two components are interdependent, the ontic component being, in a way, dependent on the noetic, as well as the other way around. Even though immediate experience of the authorizing reality obviously depends on the reality's being pre-existent, its only reality, so far as such immediate experience of it is concerned, is its reality as thus experienced, Le., as authorizing, and hence both entitling and empowering, the religion in question.

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