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A new year is, well, a new year.

As much as we might wish it would signal a new start to life, the reality is that things from the old year carry over into the new one in ways that usually guarantee nothing will actually change.

Something Einstein once said at the dawn of the nuclear age speaks to this fact of life. “The splitting of the atom,” he observed, “has changed everything save our mode of thinking. Thus, we drift toward unparalleled catastrophe.”

On a general level what the great scientist was saying is that the constant in life is that all of us cling to our ways of thinking, whatever the issue, making it impossible for anything of substance to change.

Yet we try to believe things will be different, but they can’t be because nothing about the way we see things changes. It comes down to perspective, to how we see the world.

For people of faith this is an important subject because perspective is where religion intersects with real life. Contrary to popular opinion, religion is not about beliefs, whatever religion you may practice.

True religion is about the lenses through which we see things.

Religion gives us a perspective we would not have without it. That is why a religious person is never objective when it comes to issues. It is the nature of religion to inculcate a person with specific values and priorities that influence how she or he sees the world and everything in it and about it.

Thus what I believe about Jesus is not the core of what makes me Christian. Instead, what is core is the fact that I see things in a certain way because of the life and teachings of Jesus. This doesn’t make me right about an issue, only that my view is shaped by my faith.

My first response to talk about war, for example, is to say NO to it. If I would ever support war it would necessarily have to be an absolutely last resort. Dick Cheney would not see it this way. My faith is what separates me from him.

My first response to cutting social programs, to give another example, while maintaining corporate tax cuts that serve to make rich executives richer is to say NO because nothing in the teachings of Jesus suggests that would be the right thing to do. This is what separates me from political conservatives.

If, on the other hand, corporate tax breaks would be used to increase worker’s pay, then I could support them as long as the money came from somewhere other than social programs.

It’s all in the way we see the world, and that is the difference religion should make in a person’s life.

That it often doesn’t is one of the reasons I will continue in the new year what I started last year, of once in a while addressing the problem of religious people failing to make the connection between the way they see the world and the way they should see it because of their faith.

This is not about hypocrisy, about religious people who claim to be one thing when they are something else.

It’s about religion being disconnected with real life, about people who think they are genuinely religious while failing to understand that how they see the world is the opposite of what their religion actually teaches.

No religious group has this problem more than the Christian community, which is why I want to address this subject from time to time as the year progresses.

As it turns out, the kind of lenses we wear is no small thing in our lives or the lives of others.