MysteriousFaith

The Point of It All …

Do we all care about the same things? Do religious skeptics care to accomplish more than the mastication of religion in general? Do we find, folded within their criticism not only a rejection of religion’s errors, but the advancement of alternative means of making the world better? Or is it possible that skeptics are the mirror reflection of the religious fundamentalists they hate; that they seek nothing more than to fully discredit certain ideas they find noxious? I fear too much religious skepticism is based on what can be best termed insincere motives. Too little of religious skepticism is balanced between the need to point out the problems with making faith stand above reason and a recognition that religion, at its epoch, has served as a vehicle for people transforming their lives. If religious skeptics are successful in tearing down religion as a cultural convention, those positive contributions religion has made must be replaced by something else. It is possible that the ideal is not to tear down religion or the church, but to envision a new religion and a new church that makes internal transformation primary and makes creedal statements unimportant. We seem to have two choices at hand: the first is to tear down the church on the basis of its past indiscretions, political agendas, cockamamie theologies and plain wrong truth statements or, to ask that the church unite itself with non-believers (and vice versa of course) under the banner of simply a better world that begins with an individual process of intense self-discovery.

Religious icons stand through the ages not because of their miracles, but because of their wisdom. The wisdom they shared was many times so blinding it cost them their lives and families. This cost was able to be born because they had discovered certain truths of immense value, truths whose transformative realities dwarfed the safety, security and status that was previously theirs. Martin Borg, in his Jesus & Buddha: The Parallel Sayings has this to say about the striking commonalities he found when comparing Christian and Buddhist sacred texts: “Both Jesus and Buddha offered a similar diagnosis of the typical human condition: blindness, anxiety, grasping, self-preoccupation. In both cases, the prescription for cure is similar: ‘seeing,’ ‘letting go,’ ‘dying.’” (page 10) This process of seeing our blindness, the anxiety that comes from being preoccupied with our own desires, and the vanity of grasping is what both teachers taught stood in the way of spiritual ascendancy. But letting go of these desires sets into motion an internal change of heart that is terrifying, an internal journey very few of us (myself included) have the courage for. This internal journey, what some call enlightenment and others call salvation is the point of it all. The point is not, as a former fundamentalist such as myself will struggle life long to appreciate, getting all the facts and ideas “just right.” The point is to be reborn, to become something new, someone special in his ethics, values and morals. This process lies on the other side of intense self-reflection and a willingness to have faith that on the other side of the process is a way of being more grounded, authentic and at peace than where you are now.

Thomas Hobbes, a famous critic of religion, once wrote that “our religions arise primarily from fear, and theories of our divinity must be subordinate to the reality of how we behave.” Hobbes was not entirely wrong; in particular his comments have value when they are projected onto religious institutions becoming wed to political agency. But religion is, at its best, much more than a political ideology owing its cultivation to our collective fear of death and nothingness; religion can be an absolutely essential tool for remaking our interior lives. Skeptics such as Hobbes look at the “reality of how we behave” and attempt to identify a way of transforming the inner dimension to our being, our ethics, and morality without the archaic structure of theology and orthodoxy. Religious adherents seek the same thing, but do so through a religious experience that makes theology and orthodoxy primary. If we could agree to focus primarily on what being an ideal human consists of internally and externally, for once it would be possible to unite broad groups of people with wildly disparate opinions about religion under the banner of making ourselves and the world better. To do so requires that skeptics no longer attack the historicity of certain religious events and that religion no longer make the primary bastion of defense said religious events. Doing so would be an act of enormous grace on the part of both camps and would, as a byproduct of making that which is most divisive secondary, make internal transformation primary. That, in a nutshell, might just be the point of it all.

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• August 10, 2005

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