Inside The World of Religion
If you are a high-IQ recent graduate from a top college or university, here is where you probably stand when it comes to religion: It’s not for you. You don’t mind if other people are devout, but you don’t get it. Smart people who have investigated and researched the real history just don’t believe that stuff anymore. At least, not literally and historically.
Perhaps you are explicitly an atheist. Even if you are an agnostic, you don’t spend much time worrying about God, because there’s no point. If a God exists, it cannot be the kind of God who has anything to do with intervening in your day to day world, let alone with the lives of the individual human beings on it. God, or what would be best described as "Source Energy," is not going to swoop down from the sky and save Lois Lane from inevitable doom.
I can be sure that’s what many may think ... because your generation of high-IQ college-attending young people, like mine 50 years ago, has been as thoroughly socialized to be secular as our counterparts in preceding generations were socialized to be devout.
Some of you grew up with parents who were not religious, and you’ve never given religion a thought. Others of you went to Sunday school as a child (I’m going to use the Christian context in this discussion) and went to church with your parents in adolescence, but more than likely left religion behind as you were socialized by college ... or earlier.
By socialized, I don’t mean that you studied theology under professors who convinced you that Thomas Aquinas was wrong. You didn’t study theology at all. None of the professors you admired were religious. When the topic of religion came up, they treated it dismissively or as a subject of humor. You went along with the zeitgeist. It was the flow ... uncool.
Taking religion seriously means homework. It means research. It means seeking to find out what the underlying message is beneath the surface of the stories and fables. Ancient "Holy Writ" is parable, allegory ... metaphorically and myth in nature.
If you’re waiting for a road-to-Damascus experience (as Paul supposedly had), you’re kidding yourself. Taking one of the great religions seriously, getting inside its rich body of thought, doesn’t happen by sitting on beaches, watching sunsets, and waiting for enlightenment. It can easily require as much intellectual effort as a law degree.
Even dabbling at the edges has demonstrated the Truth of that statement to me for Judaism, Buddhism, and Taoism. I assume it’s true of Islam and Hinduism as well. In the case of Christianity, with which I’m most familiar, the church has produced profound religious thinkers for two thousand years.
You don’t have to go back to Thomas Aquinas (though that wouldn’t be a bad idea). Just the last century has produced excellent and accessible work. But whomever you read, Christianity ... considered seriously ... bears little resemblance to your Sunday school lessons. You’ve got to struggle with the real thing. You have to have your own Jacob/Israel experience.
A good way to jar yourself out of unreflective atheism is to read about contemporary science ... particularly quantum physics, and metaphysics.
The progress of science from Copernicus until the end of the 19th century delivered one body blow after another to simplistic religious beliefs. First, it turned out that the earth wasn’t the center of the universe (as was believed in Biblical times). It wasn’t even the center of our solar system.
Then the Newtonian laws of physics set up the image of a clockwork universe that didn’t need a God to make it run. Then Reason with a capital R was enthroned during the Enlightenment period, in direct conflict with the intrinsic nature of religious faith.
Then Darwin came along and destroyed the creation myth. Then Freud destroyed our confidence that we were autonomous beings and told us that faith was nothing more than wish fulfillment. If you’re waiting for that road-to-Damascus experience, you’re kidding yourself. You're not going to trip and fall into it.
But in the late 19th century quantum physics was born, and with it began the story of an underlying physical reality that was not only stranger than we knew, but stranger than we could have imagined. That story is still unfolding - dark matter is just one of the mysteries left to be solved, and entanglement is now accepted as proven with no one having the slightest idea how it works. Imagine that?
The 20th century also revolutionized our understanding of the universe and its origins. Suppose at the beginning of the 20th century an astronomer had announced that the universe began with a big bang in which space, time, and the raw materials for the stars and planets suddenly emerged out of a timeless, spaceless singularity. He would have been laughed off the platform, because obviously what he had done was drape scientific language over the creation story in Genesis: “And God said, ‘Let there be light,’ and there was light.” But it turns out that the imaginary silly astronomer ... was right. That’s how the universe really did get started. Something, DID come from nothing. From the void of unlimited potentiality.
After the Big Bang became accepted science, astrophysics began to calculate the infinitesimally small probability that any Big Bang would produce a universe capable of sustaining life - so infinitesimally small that the theory of multiple universes has become the necessary default explanation. Unless you posit multiple universes (and a whole lot of them too), either we are a one-in-a-billion chance or some power created the universe explicitly so that it would produce life. It sounds weird, I know, but check it out. Just Six Numbers by Martin Rees, Britain’s Astronomer Royal, who is not himself religious, is a good starting point. We can no longer deal with one universe, but ... a multiverse.
The more you are around people who are seriously religious, the harder it is to deal with ... especially for people like me. I rode that bike for years ... and I needed answers as to why I just couldn't swallow it. It was an impossibility to part the Red Sea, the resurrect dead flesh ... the scientist and reasoning just wasn't there. You needed to have blind faith. I have none. I want Gnosis ... knowledge. I need to KNOW.
You will encounter people whose intelligence, judgment, and critical faculties are as impressive as those of your smartest atheist friends - and who also possess a disquietingly serene confidence in an underlying reality behind the many religious dogmas. They have learned to reconcile faith and reason, yes, but beyond that, they persuasively convey that there are ways of knowing that transcend intellectual understanding. They exhibit in their own person a kind of Wisdom that goes beyond just having intelligence and good judgment. There are "Christian Apologists" ... defenders of the faith ... that are really, really good.
My suggestion, is that you begin to research for yourself. Let your findings bypass the opinions of others and go directly to your heart and to your Spirit.
A bias is a way in which we systematically get things wrong, ways in which we miscalculate, misjudge, distort reality, or see what we want to see, and the bias I'm talking about works like this: Confront someone with the fact that they are going to die and they will believe just about any story that tells them it isn't true and they can, instead, live forever, even if it means taking the existential elevator.
Religions claim divine favour for themselves, over and against other groups. This sense of righteousness and entitlement leads to violence, because conflicting claims to superiority, based on unverifiable appeals to God, cannot be adjudicated objectively. Religions do tremendous harm to global society by using violence to promote their goals, in ways that are endorsed and exploited by their leaders. Yet, they claim to represent a loving God.
If we look at the evidence of science, particularly neuroscience, it suggests that your mind, your essence, the real you, is very much dependent on a particular part of your body, that is, your mind.
Religions, scams, and hoaxes succeed because they exploit powerful psychological processes. These processes are the very ones that have enabled humans to survive and create art and technology, but also transform people into crazy perspectives - 30% of people are pantheists, 25% Christians, 20% Muslims, 14% Hindus, 7% Buddhists, and 1% Jews.
Some people prefer to leave a more tangible, biological legacy - children, for example. Or they like, they hope, to live on as part of some greater whole, a nation or a family or a tribe ... their gene pool. But again, there are skeptics who doubt whether legacy really is immortality.
Albert Einstein says: The word God is for me nothing more than the expression and product of human weaknesses, the Bible a collection of honorable, but still primitive legends which are nevertheless pretty childish. No interpretation, no matter how subtle, can for me change this. For me the Jewish religion like all other religions is an incarnation of the most previous superstitions of earlier civlizations. And the Jewish people have no different quality for me than any other people. As far as my experience goes, they are also no better than other human groups, therefore I cannot see anything chosen about them ... literally.
The Occidental democratic practice of singling out religious liberty for special treatment under the law is not in sync with the world we live in today. The current status quo is predicated on a fundamental inequality. For example, a boy might be permitted to carry a dagger to school as part of his Sikh religion, but the same dagger would not be allowed if it were part of a family tradition. Namely, your claim of conscience counts if it is based in religion. My claim of conscience doesn’t count if it is not based in religion. That is a pernicious and indefensible inequality in the existing legal regime. And ... it is getting much worse day by day.
The origins of religious tolerance can be traced back hundreds of years to the European wars of religion. That turmoil gave way to greater acceptance of diverse religions, an important achievement of Western democracies. However, preferential treatment for religious toleration is not in step with changing times. While we understand the historical reasons why our constitution singled out religion and religious liberty 200-plus years ago, in the world we live in today, you don’t have to be religious in order to have a conscience, or morals and ethics.
While some might wish there was a way to grant exemptions to all claims of conscience, this would lead to almost insurmountable practical problems. It would be tantamount to legalizing civil disobedience. While courts can verify a person’s involvement in a religion and that religion’s particular beliefs, non-religious claims would be much more difficult to verify. We don’t have a way to peer into a man’s soul to see if his claim of conscience is really a legitimate claim of conscience. We have no way of finding "intent."
The fact that some people believe that an omnipotent God will resurrect them to live again and others believe an omnipotent scientist will do it, suggests that neither are really believing this on the strength of the evidence. Rather, we believe these stories because we are biased to believe them, and we are biased to believe them because we are so afraid of death. My dog does not fear death. He knows nothing of it. He just enjoys right now.
Courts still should monitor for laws that arise from intolerance - for example France’s ban on headscarves worn by Muslim women as an example. But avoiding laws motivated by intolerance is different from granting special religious exemptions from neutral laws. Such special treatment for religion often defeats society’s promotion of the general welfare. If we start carving out exemptions, we defeat the purposes of those legitimate objectives.
Spirituality is the search for an ultimate reality, a transcendent dimension of the world, an inner path enabling a person to discover the essence of his being, or the deepest values and meanings by which people live. Spirituality is often experienced as a source of inspiration or orientation in life. It encompasses belief in immaterial realities or experiences of the immanent or transcendent nature of the world. Spirituality is more personalized, less structured, more open to new ideas, and more pluralistic than religion. Religion is doctrines, dogmas, and rituals.
Spirituality is not related to religion. Spirituality and religion lock horns ... ram to ram. Many people define themselves as spiritual but not religious. Spiritual people believe in the existence of many different spiritual paths, emphasizing the importance of finding one's own individual path to spirituality. Most people identify themselves as spiritual but not religious. Religion is a memeplex organized by churches, whereas spirituality is defined as an internal individual search. Even Jesus supposed said "the Kingdom of God is Within You."
Spirituality exists wherever we struggle with the issues of how our lives fit into the greater scheme of things. This is true when our questions never give way to specific answers or give rise to specific practices such as prayer or meditation. We encounter spiritual issues every time we wonder where the universe comes from, why we are here, or what happens when we die. We also become spiritual when we become moved by values such as beauty, love, or creativity that seem to reveal a meaning or power beyond our visible world. An idea or practice is spiritual when it reveals our personal desire to establish a felt-relationship with the deepest meanings or powers governing life.
God is a vision of the highest values of Truth, justice, love, and goodness toward which we strive ... FOR ALL. In this sense, God/Source is a standard against which to measure ourselves and our achievements. God reminds us of the relativity and limitations of our own ideas. God serves as a corrective to our biases and a basis for critical reflection. By bringing together our highest ideals in a single symbol, God provides a focus for personal devotion or a common society.
We experience God as love, light, power, and wisdom ... and the Source of all these things. The God we pray to is both transcendent and immanent, a part of us but also greater than us. Sometimes we experience God as a light that comes to us in the darkness. This light emanates intense love and compassion and leaves us feeling joyous and connected to all of creation. Other times, we simply hear God's guidance as thoughts ... .that still small voice trying to be heard over our shouting ego. It seems similar to a nudge or sometimes a whisper. This guidance usually comes suddenly and clearly, and it can arrive while we are deep in prayer or simply going about our business of the day. But we must be paying attention ... being mindful and aware of what comes from within.
The big question becomes, are we doomed to lead the one life we have in a way that is shaped by fear and denial, or can we overcome this bias? Greek philosopher Epicurus thought we could. He argued that the fear of death is natural, but it is not rational. "Death," he said, "is nothing to us, because when we are here, death is not, and when death is here, we are gone." Now this is often quoted, but it's difficult to really grasp, to really internalize, because exactly this idea of being gone is so difficult to imagine. So 2,000 years later, another philosopher, Ludwig Wittgenstein, put it like this: "Death is not an event in life: We do not live to experience death. And so," he added, "in this sense, life has no end." Life and death cannot co-exist.
Many Churches are dens of murderers, because those judged guilty of heresy incurred harsh penalties including death by fire, torture, boiling in oil, and a whole list of murderous devices. Religions are on the way to eventually turning into mere historical curiosities ... like so many other myths before them. The central conclusion about religion has to be that it has not made any lasting impact on human ethics, the primary engine for its existence. In this respect alone, religion has failed dismally. And if Christianity's main-claim that Jesus died on the cross for the sins of mankind ... then it was an utter failed mission. The world is still filled with sin.
Now some Churches have issued restrictions to human reproduction and stem cell research. Many religions have concerns about where scientific research is going and the risk it is posing to their beliefs. In the long run these restrictions will not be effective. There can be no doubt that science will eventually triumph. After all, the word SCIENCE means "proof knowledge."
Every attempt to reconcile literal religion with science and technology is a virtually unattainable goal. A discouragingly futile effort to achieve consistency between science and religion is broadly ongoing today. A dominant factor is the individuals’ repeated but failed attempts to seek at least a rational link between religion and ethics.
Ethics is a major factor in science but plays no discernible role in technology. Ethics consists of wise guides for human behavior that are vitally important to civilizing pursuits ... for all. They ensure the survival and prosperity of the human society. By contrast, religious precepts and prohibitions usually impose a hostile burden on outsiders and infidels who reject adherence to traditional and ancient norms, most of which long ago reached obsolescence. They are mostly archaic.
Religion is incapable of granting believers the thought that there may perhaps be errors in its tenets that might contradict any part of the platform on which they stand. H.L. Mencken, witheringly summarized how science could overcome the limitations of theology and autocracy: "Every time the scientists take another fort from the theologians and the politicians there is genuine human progress."
Abrahamic Religions are inherently violent, because of an exclusivism that inevitably fosters violence against those that are considered outsiders. Abrahamic legacy is actually genocidal in nature. Just read the Old Testament with new eyes and you will see. The War God YHWH that became Christianity's God, when taken literally, is a bigoted, violent, temperamental, egotistical, and destructive Autocrat. Of this, there is no doubt. He was their Thunder, War, and Storm God ... born of an earlier polytheistic tribal tradition. Much earlier than their Assyrian and Babylonian influences.
Overcoming the afterlife bias is not easy because the fear of death is so deeply embedded in us, yet when we see that the fear itself is not rational, and when we bring out into the open the ways in which it can unconsciously bias us, then we can at least start to try to minimize the bad influence it has on our lives.
By dwelling on inequality, the pope is promoting envy. Christianity disapproves of envy, deeming it one of the deadly sins. Civil society expects the pope to urge all people to think of themselves in relation to God and to their own fullest potential. Encouraging people to measure themselves against others, only leads to grief ... and of course, failure. Resenting the success of others is a sin in itself.
Pantheism is the belief that everything composes an all-encompassing immanent God and the universe is identical with divinity itself. Pantheists, thus do not believe in a "personal god." Pantheism was popularized in the modern era as both a theology and philosophy based on the work of the seventieth century philosopher Baruch Spinoza. Einstein says: "We followers of Spinoza see God in the wonderful order and lawfulness of all that exists and in its soul as it reveals itself in man and animals. I do not believe in a personal God, and I have never denied this, but have expressed it clearly."
It helps to see life as being like a book: Just as a book is bounded by its covers, by beginning and end, so our lives are bounded by birth and death, and even though a book is limited by beginning and end, it can encompass distant landscapes, exotic figures, fantastic adventures. And even though a book is limited by beginning and end, the characters within it know no horizons. They only know the moments that make up their story, even when the book is closed. And so the characters of a book are not afraid of reaching the last page. Long John Silver is not afraid of you finishing your copy of "Treasure Island." And so it should be with us. It is the pages and the stories we write and live, it is the dash between our two dates that is most important.
Imagine the book of your life, its covers, its beginning and end, and your birth and your death. You can only know the moments in between, the moments that make up your life. It makes no sense for you to fear what is outside of those covers, whether it be before your birth, or after your death. And you needn't worry how long the book is, or whether it's a comic strip or an epic novel. The only thing that matters is that you make it a good story. And do your best to make it righteously memorable to others.
Just a thought ...
~Justin Taylor, ORDM., OCP., DM.
My thanks to Charles Murray and Venitism.com
