“Literalism is a relatively new way to understand religion, and the result of literalism is that religion is rendered into nothing but a superstitious belief system. And today a great many people are absolutely certain that’s all religion is. I argue that religion was, is, and can be something else entirely, a “something else” that might offer much to us today if we could re-learn how to understand it and express it.
Modernity teaches us that reason alone is the key to knowledge and wisdom, and all other modes of understanding are “magical thinking” or “superstition.” But the truth is that none of us are as rational as we think we are. Even the brightest among us are being jerked around by our subconscious minds more than we realize; even the most rational and educated are navigating the world in a fog of projection and cognitive bias. How do we know this? Science is telling us this, for one thing. For example, there is a growing body of evidence that most of our decisions, opinions and moral judgments are really being made by our emotions or intuition, and we use reason largely to explain to ourselves how we reached our decision or formed our opinion. Entre nous — Yes, I’m sure that doesn’t apply to you, but it certainly does apply to everyone else, doesn’t it?
For a more thorough explanation, see The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion by social psychologist Jonathan Haidt (Pantheon Books, 2012). Haidt explains in detail the many ways people have been tested to reveal that reason plays only a supporting role in why we actually think as we do. Most of our decision- and opinion-making processes are taking place on subconscious levels. I say reason is grand, and the world could do with more critical thinking, not less. But the reach of reason is far more limited than we might assume. Further, in embracing reason over all, humankind appears to have lost touch with other ways of perceiving, understanding, and experiencing that are just as “real,” and just as natural and valid, but which can’t always be explained with words or subjected to empirical testing. In short, most of us are just as blinkered and oblivious to reality as our superstitious ancestors; it’s just that we’re blinkered and oblivious in new and modern ways.
Where does religion come into this? I propose that religion really does have a role to play in modern life if we can pry it away from literalism. Religion can be a means to extend the reach of insight and expand awareness beyond the boundaries of the limited self. And it can still do what it has always done, in myriad ways — guide us in our experience of living and dying
Lots of people today genuinely hate religion, and I can’t say I blame them..
I don’t think everyone has to be religious. Some of us are drawn to some sort of religion or spiritual practice. Some of us aren’t.
People are drawn to religion for many reasons. Some of those reasons are psychologically healthy, and some aren’t. By the same token, some religious paths can help one find peace and sanity, while others are likely to make you buggier than you were when you started. And sometimes it’s not the religion itself, but how one relates to it, that makes the difference between the saintly and the assimilated.
Throughout human history religion has served as the glue holding communities and societies together, and it also has given authority to tyrants and moral cover for atrocities. It has comforted and terrified; it has inspired and corrupted. In short, it is an expression of the best and worst of humanity. I believe it’s possible to preserve and enhance the “best” while scaling back the “worst.” And if we do that, perhaps religion might finally get to work on its promise of peace on earth. Doing that will require — surprise! — applying at least some reason and critical thinking skills to religion and the behaviors it inspires… Lots of people of many religious traditions are doing it already. And this can be done without cherry-picking doctrine or re-writing scripture, although it does require relating to doctrine and scripture in a way foreign to fundamentalism. Unfortunately, such people are rarely the ones who get interviewed on the TeeVee…
Speaking as a religious person myself, I think religion is worth salvaging, but only if we can come to terms with why it so easily becomes a tool for regression, repression and oppression. What is the connection between religion and violence? This must be understood clearly… For the record, I was raised Christian but now practice Soto Zen Buddhism, a tradition that discourages proselytizing. I will refer to Buddhism frequently, but I’m not trying to sell it… I know Christianity well enough that I feel comfortable offering opinions about it… Christianity is the 800-pound gorilla of western religion, so to speak. And you may notice I’m not always sparing of Buddhism. Regarding my use of the word fundamentalism — I understand that Christian fundamentalism originally was a movement in American Christianity that proposed a particular set of doctrines. Sometimes I use the word in that sense.
I also use it in a broader sense, as explained by religion scholar Karen Armstrong in her book The Battle for God: Fundamentalism in Judaism, Christianity and Islam (Knopf/HarperCollins, 2000). She defined fundamentalism as a “militant religiosity” that is a “reaction against and a rejection of modern Western society.” Fundamentalism in this sense has infected religious traditions around the globe, not just Christianity. In its most extreme forms, fundamentalism isn’t even religion. It’s more of a social pathology that expresses itself as religion...
His Holiness the 14th Dalai Lama (82 years old), gets up at 3:30 every morning so he can put in a few hours of meditation and ritual before breakfast. If that’s not religious, what is? This exemplifies the degree to which our definition of “religion” in the early 21st century West has been degraded into nothing more than a kind of supernatural ideology mostly based on the most conservative and dogmatic parts of Christianity. Meanwhile, activist atheists love to knock religious faith by quoting Ambrose Bierce — faith is “belief without evidence” — overlooking the facts that Bierce was writing satire, that faith as religious people use the word is not always a synonym for belief, and that not all religions are primarily about believing things. Contemporary Christianity especially appears to have signed on to the notion that “religion” equals “faith” and “faith” equals “belief.” But that is not true of most of the world’s religions, and indeed, it wasn’t true of Christianity originally. This is not to say that belief has no place in religion. I acknowledge that religious traditions function within a kind of conceptual or doctrinal framework that proposes or accepts God, or Brahman, or immortal souls, or samsara… The view among many religious people in the West, that everything that one reads in scriptures must be accepted as literal fact, actually is relatively new. Within many Asian religions the idea that scriptures must only be literal truth would be considered weird, even ignorant.
Some religions are mostly supernatural belief systems, but in others belief plays only a supporting or provisional role. In many schools of Buddhism, for example, doctrines are regarded as something like hypotheses to be tested, not as “facts” that must be believed in because somebody says so. Many religious people, East and West, see doctrines as provisional teachings that fall short of an ineffable absolute, whatever that is. I tend to see the doctrines of most religions, including mine, as what Buddhists call upaya — expedient means — or something like learning aids that point to truths beyond the reach of conceptualization. For this reason other people’s religious beliefs don’t bother me as long as the beliefs aren’t causing them to do harm.
It’s all upaya. In many Asian traditions it is accepted that understanding of doctrine will — and, in fact, should — change over time, because the practice of that tradition will enlarge one’s capacity to understand it. A beginner’s understanding of Brahma or Buddha will be considerably different from a master’s, and everybody’s okay with that. Indeed it’s often the case that doctrines mostly function as markers on whatever spiritual path that tradition has laid out. They are guides to the truth, not the truth in itself. In those traditions, simply accepting some prefabricated package of beliefs as “true” is hardly religion at all. There are arguments for some kind of practice leading to greater understanding in western theology as well. Saint Anselm’s fides quaerens intellectum — faith seeking understanding — is one example… My point is that in the West our contemporary ideas about religion have become rigid and narrow, and much that used to be accepted as “religion” is left out. We have stuffed religion into a very tiny conceptual box…
In the West, most people appear to base the definition of religion on Christianity. This is understandable; Christianity is so pervasive in the West no westerner can avoid being exposed to it, including those who would prefer it left them alone… Christianity shares historical roots with Judaism and Islam, and these three traditions are sometimes called the “Abrahamic” religions, because they all claim the Prophet Abraham as a patriarch… Their main concern, in one way or another, is the relationship between man and God. Westerners often assume that all “religions” share all three of those traits. In fact, outside of Abrahamism, most don’t. Some religious traditions don’t share any of them. The Abrahamic conceptual framework leaves out pretty much everything else in the world that usually is referred to as “religion,”…
These days lots of people are so allergic to the R-word that as soon as they hear it, they’re outta there. But I tend to agree with Karen Armstrong that saying Buddhism is not a religion is mostly western cultural bias…
There is a vast and riotously diverse spectrum of understanding of God within monotheism. And when you wander outside of monotheism “god” can be understood so many different ways the word is almost meaningless. In fact, not all religions have gods, exactly. Even some religions with gods may not consider relating to gods to be the ultimate concern of religion. In some of the traditions that emerged from Vedanta, for example, the ultimate concern is the absolute nature of existence and whether the self is or is not distinctively separate from everything else, including gods. (Answers vary…)
The word religion is from the Latin religio. However, the Romans did not agree among themselves what the word meant. Cicero connected religio to relegere, which means to re-read or review a text, other possible source words are religare, meaning to fasten or bind; re-eligere, meaning to “choose again,” or re-ligare, meaning to bind back or re-connect… If religion, at its root, is about union or re-connection, the next question is — union with what? Reconnection with what? Not all religious traditions will answer that question the same way. For that matter, who is this person seeking union? What is the self? We all like to think we know who we are, but hardly any of us do. From birth we’ve been conditioned to understand ourselves as our families and culture define us, and we march through our lives conforming to our conditioning and measuring our value by our jobs and possessions. But rip away our contexts, our connections, our stuff, and who are we, then? What’s left?
One of religion’s most ancient functions is to provide a means to step outside of our conditioning and connect to something beyond the limited self. That something may be God, although not necessarily. And in doing this, we may achieve a profoundly different understanding of ourselves. Consider the story from the Upanishad, in which a father, helps his son perceive the vast, unlimited absolute reality beyond ordinary appearance. The father says, tat tvam asi — thou art that. Or, it’s all you. The physicist Erwin Schrödinger — yes, the Schrödinger of Schrödinger’s cat — said of this, This life of yours which you are living is not merely a piece of this entire existence, but in a certain sense the whole; only this whole is not so constituted that it can be surveyed in one single glance…
The familiar story of the Garden of Eden is a rich allegory that speaks to us of exile or estrangement — from God, perhaps, or from nature, or from each other, or maybe even from ourselves. It can be understood many different ways. Who are we? What are we missing? How do we reconnect..?
The notion that Christianity is mostly about arranging one’s mental furniture in accord with a belief system would have been alien to most of the great Christian theologians of history. “Faith” to early Christian theologians — and many recent ones, for that matter — was not at all a synonym for belief. It was more about love of or trust in a God whose nature and opinions were beyond human understanding…
Let’s get over the idea that religion is mostly about believing things. In many religious traditions beliefs are a vehicle, not a destination. In some religious traditions beliefs aren’t even the vehicle, but more like training wheels. And let us agree that religion is best regarded as a personal commitment and not something that entire societies must be cajoled or intimidated into accepting. Religion can be a strategy for avoiding yourself, or it can be a means to come home to yourself. Religion is as much about the intimate experience of the self as it is about celestial metaphysics... Religion has physical as well as mental components; it is not something you do only inside your head. Religion is a living process, and it will mature as you mature. If you are 50 and your religion is the same to you now that it was when you were 20, you’re not doing it right.”
~ Barbara O'Brien, Rethinking Religion
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