I think it’s fair to start with the observation that our religions have, and still can, play a highly controlling part in society.  This is usually informally and hand in hand with secular rulers (think religious politicians), but often with enough power of their own that these rulers would not provoke them thoughtlessly.  After all, priests could have you executed or banished for arguing with them, and whilst kings have their glamour, priests had a hotline to the ineffable. Of course, as we can see in the West, this power has now shifted heavily towards the secular rulers, to the point that the words of the priests are often disregarded and the police will happily raid a church if they feel they need to (as happened recently in Belgium).

This has, in my opinion, caused a significant move towards faith in a society and its agencies and away from faith in a religion and its agencies.  This tends to have a lot of the same characteristics, including an unquestioning belief for many that their society is always right and better, whatever the actual facts might be.  Of course, we have a lot invested in these things mentally and often physically and financially, thus the world view that stems from a persons faith (or indeed their society) can frame everything for them.  Any challenge to this is highly unwelcome, an observation that leads me onwards.

As in the case of religious faith, questioning this ‘societal faith’ invites swift and harsh criticism from some quarters, which is very understandable in light of my previous paragraph.  After all, any challenge to that faith is more than intellectual, it strikes emotionally as well.  Our answers to life’s questions and problems are found in the framework of our society or faith.  To question that can feel like a very personal attack, it attacks the persons life choices and possibly their sense of who they are.

In religious terms, you’d be a “Heretic”, an “Infidel”, or a “Heathen” and in secular terms you’re a “Commie”, a “Traitor” or a “Subversive”.  Interestingly, all of these are ‘ad hominem’ in that they condemn the person without addressing their ideas.  I think it’s fair to say that these sort of terms are used to put down the ideas of both secular and religious heretics without thought or consideration.  Of course, this is very likely because the faith (whichever that is) can’t afford to have those ideas examined closely.  In each respective system you can be ‘excommunicated’ or ‘ostracised’ and capital punishment has been an option in both systems and still is in many places.

In both secular and religious systems we have competing groups and also sub factions within those groups.  We can call the groups, ‘faiths’ or ‘nations’, it might then also be fair to call the factions ‘sects’ or ‘political parties’.  These groups most often form around a charismatic leader, be it a “Koresh” or a “Stalin”, then power hierarchies form and a dogma is drawn up.  There are always disagreements between groups, which can result in conflicts (armed or verbal) for ideology or practical power or the calving of sub groups.

To wrap up this first part, let me say that I take the view that there are definite parallels between a religion and a society.  I hope I’ve demonstrated this, or at least planted the seeds of further thought, as is my usual aim.  I’m hoping to get more into the ‘Tenets of the Religion’ in Part 2.

Creative Commons Acknowledgement.

The crowd image is by victoriapeckham and is licensed under Attribution 2.0 Generic.

Actually, I suspect that a comedian somewhere is getting some great material out of the Catholic Church’s recent announcement.  It seems that they’ve made the attempted ordination of women a serious crime, right up there with child abuse and heresy.  No, I’m not making this up, the Richard Dawkins Foundation has the story here.

I’ve spoken up in support of women priests before, and also here (also in support of gay clergy) but I would like to say a bit more as I find my patience is wearing very thin.

Now, quite aside from the fact that they’re dismissing half the human race out of hand and showing a breathtaking level of arrogance into the bargain.  Just who the hell do they think they’re impressing?

Maybe the Catholic church missed the part where we moved into the 20th century, and then from there into the 21st.  If anything is guaranteed to show how out of touch they are with modern society this is it.  The zeitgeist has moved on, things are changing and rapidly.  The church is going to have to adapt with the times or be swept away, do they not grasp this?

You want my advice?  You speak of your faith as a ‘rock’, well the tides of change are wearing at it.  Old handholds you thought you had are vanishing, in order to get a good grip again you will need to change position or be carried off by the tide.

With each problem, each speed bump along the way, more people get bumped onto the road towards waking up and people already on the road get moved along.  With that said, I know that many people have a colossal investment in Business As Usual, there are many who will fight the coming changes fanatically; even though their position in that of King Canute, their belief in the status quo is almost religious in it’s intensity.

For their part, the Vested Interests; the powers that be, are deploying every while and weapon in their not inconsiderable arsenals to fight this.  Every person whose consciousness is raised and who starts thinking freely is a loss for them, a body blow, and the more people that awaken to our situation the easier it is for others to do so.

For my part, I think the VIs are fighting a losing battle.  Once a person awakens, it’s impossible to unawaken; a consciousness raised cannot truly be lowered.  You may have denial and suppression but that’s all you have, consider that a religion knows that once the conditioning is broken that person is lost to them, it’s the same here.  This is a secular raising of consciousness that goes far beyond anything we’ve seen in religious terms.

But that’s a thought, and I will swing towards religion as my final thought in this post.  Religions hold views that are in some cases counter to the coming reality, those faiths are in for a shock.  For example consider Catholicism and contraception.  The coming population issues will challenge and break that teaching, the faithful believe the Pope is infallible, they are about to see both their leader and their faith shown to be in error.  Where does that lead?

Once again I’m left with the strong impression that the Catholic Church seems to have been responsible for the suppression of a lot of knowledge and scientific progress.  I think this is one of the things that should worry us all about the rise of so-called “Creation Science” and the resistance to the teaching of Evolution in the classroom.  Do we really want another lost millennium?  Do we really want the scientific investigation of the universe to be modulated and limited by the unverified and adulterated writings of a bunch of near stone age priests?

When Galileo said that the Earth moved around the sun, Martin Luther said:

“An upstart astrologer …. This fool wishes to reverse the entire science of Astronomy.  But Sacred Scripture tells us that Joshua commanded the Sun to stand still, and not the Earth” [1][2]

Some years ago, someone tried to tell me that it was the other way around, that the Catholic church had said the Earth orbited the Sun and Galileo that it did not.  To this day, I still shake my head now as I think of that incident.  My response to anyone who thinks that is to read the words of the Pope John Paul II on the issue:

“Thanks to his intuition as a brilliant physicist and by relying on different arguments, Galileo, who practically invented the experimental method, understood why only the sun could function as the centre of the world, as it was then known, that is to say, as a planetary system. The error of the theologians of the time, when they maintained the centrality of the Earth, was to think that our understanding of the physical world’s structure was, in some way, imposed by the literal sense of Sacred Scripture….”

Remember this was followed by a formal apology in 2000 for a lot of things in the Catholic Church’s history, including what happened to Galileo.
—
[1] Cosmos, Carl Sagan, page 69. ISBN 0-349-10703-3
[2] Refer to New International Version Bible.  Joshua 10: 12:13.

I like to define Spirituality as a sense of that which is common between us, regardless of Religion; that we are not islands in the world and that we are not separate from, but intertwined with the world around us.  It provides a sense of the sacred in the world, that some things go beyond our materialism, and that we should look beyond the daily grind and the “rat race”.

Some of what I just said can be said of what it though of as Religion.  I think that Religion is a set of rites, rituals and customs that sit on top of Spirituality, that provide more of a framework and structure.  To a degree this is needed, I don’t argue that point, but it is not a good thing it it should grow to stifle things.

The comment that spurred me to write this was that if you have Spirituality without Religion you just have a vague feeling of goodwill, in my view, that isn’t accurate and is quite derisive.  I’ve come to realise more and more over time that there’s a lot more to a simple Spirituality then a vague feeling of good will, it seems to be a much more intuitive thing and it also seems more feminine to my sense of it.  As any Taoist or Zen Buddhist will tell you there is a thing that can be dimly sensed that is beyond being articulated in words, that can only be glimpsed intuitively and can’t be grasped by reason as is the case with the scriptures of a by the book religion.  Further to this, you must do the glimpsing yourself, a priest cannot do the work for you, you must work to your own salvation!

To try to bind it in scriptures is (as Alan Watts so brilliantly said) to walk into the restaurant and eat the menu instead of the meal.  My own conclusion that has been spurred by the comment I read, is that Spirituality without religion is quite valid if difficult to grasp and also not so easy to fit into neat categories with names.  It can live without overt Religiousness quite happily.   Religion without Spirituality on the other hand is doomed from the outset.  It would seem to me to be a set of scriptures and rules and rituals that have had the original point somehow lost along the way, if this is the case, then is religion without spirituality a hollow soulless shell?

I have to admit to being something of an agnostic on all of this, I take the view that there is much we don’t know and will possibly never know.  As much as many would like to cling to a holy book and proclaim that this is certainty, it isn’t and I’ll refer the reader to my essays for more on that.  In many ways I can make a similar observation of the scientific orthodoxy, science seems to get a revolution every so often and is quite defined by the unknown.  I’m also not the first to observe that science seems to be gaining it’s share of fundamentalists, and I feel that a fundamentalist attitude does science no justice at all.

I’ll also step aside from the row surrounding the much misunderstood and misrepresented theory of Evolution, other than to observe that it seems to be producing the goods in a very practical sense across a number of fields and that its opponents have produced no science of their own that I’ve seen and seem to do nothing but throw mud.

So I’ll move towards the whole question of a creator prior to the beginning of the universe.  Now this, of course, assumes that there was a discrete beginning and that the whole thing doesn’t move in some kind of cyclical way that would make for a very interesting line of investigation.

Now, for what I can see of it everything we have regarding events prior to the big bang is pure conjecture, nobody really knows. It seems to me that every debate I’ve seen boils down to a “yes it was / no it wasn’t” with nobody willing to budge an inch. Now, this sort of thing is one of the questions that the Buddha described as being a net, I can see why, all it does it cause upset and you can never really settle the argument no matter which side you’re on.

But it makes me realise, that many people are shouting certainty from a position of not really knowing.  My sense of things is that true liberation and real courage is to openly admit that you don’t know and possibly never will.  Then get on with something more relevant.

I’m reminded of the idea the we have two parts to our minds, one like a searchlight and one like an illuminating candle.  The searchlight mind is the part of our mind that is calculating and intellectual, logical.  The other, less focussed mind is more intuitive and less logical, in the West I really don’t think we trust this one as much, which is a big mistake in my view.

I’ve relearned this lesson the hard way as a consequence of having spent a few weeks revisiting my old Anglican thought, which led to a re-assessment of why I left.  In short it’s been mentally stressful, and is an experience I’m not eager to repeat.  The problem is that as I’ve said previously it just seems to be one huge argument based on essentially unresolvable questions, in essence a wilderness of opinions.  The Buddha had a series of questions he would not answer, when drawn, he said they were like a net and weren’t really relevant to what he was trying to do.

He compared our situation there to that of a man shot with an arrow, who refuses all treatment till he knows all about the arrow, the bow it was fired from, the character and caste of the archer, etc, etc.  This man will die of his wounds before he gets any answers, and what good does that do him?  Our situation is urgent and lots of speculative arguments do us no service at all in resolving it.

The searchlight part of our mind is the part that runs after answers, often heedlessly.  The less focussed more “illuminating” (and never were quotes more needed) part is our inner Sage or Buddha, who if we will only listen, can save us so much trouble.

So I bought a copy of a NIV bible and a book on the history of the gospels, also a book on the history of the God belief and it’s interpretation[2].  Well, the bible is an interesting read, I found myself pointing out a problem before we’d left the Creation, and as for the flood and the whole Sodom & Gomorrah thing, well others have covered the Noah’s Ark story in more detail than I ever could.  S&G was just mishandled full stop, at least to my mind.

I fast forward to the New Testament and find myself perplexed by the differences in the Gospels, yes I appreciate they were written by different men for differing audiences, but there are problems that go beyond that.  Inconsistent reporting is the most outstanding, but that is something I can’t really overlook in a text that makes the claims this book does.

Then I wander through some sites and find that nobody agrees on the interpretation, some very literalistic (see my essays for my views on that) and some very liberal but nothing that really solves the issues I see.

So I revisited arguments, religious apologetics vs skeptics, I found that things haven’t really changed.  To be honest, I got heartily sick of debates where nobody really manages to resolve anything honestly.  All I saw were arguments full of smokes and mirrors obscuring tactics, which made me ask ‘If you religious apologetics can’t even discuss this on the level, is it even worth bothering with at all?’, I appreciate that everyone does it (even inadvertently) from time to time, but there is so damn much of it in what I was reading that it made me sick to the depths of my mind.

That was what did finally it, I have what I consider legitimate criticisms of organised dogmatic Christianity and couldn’t find a straight externally verifiable (i.e. not circular logic) answer that didn’t shoot at least some of the bottom layer of cards out from under the whole edifice.  All the answers I could come up with that worked left me with a thing that wasn’t much of anything (no omnipotent interventionist creator, no legitimate ancient dogma, etc) and I realise now I was applying the valuable lessons I learned from reading the Kalama Sutta.

Eventually, I realised I was reading the Bible as a Skeptical Buddhist, which kind of resolved things for me.  Things were finally sealed by my learning about the Panadura Debate (or Panadura Controversy) in Sri Lanka.  An exact transcript of this doesn’t exist as far as I know, but I have searched and found a commented summary of it gleaned via an Internet forum.

I support this campaign, and have already signed the petition linked to above. But it’s not just because I think Turing was treated abysmally badly, but also because I think we still harbour the sort of tendencies that led to Turing’s treatment and that needs to be highlighted.  We need to stop writing people off because of one bad thing, it seems that as soon as we realise that they’re not perfect there’s hell to pay, our treatment of high profile media figures is a perfect example of this.  Lao Tzu, Buddha and Jesus all warn us away from this behaviour, and while I’m not sure what Psychology has to say on the matter I can’t see it being particularly favourable.

What’s been equally interesting is comments I’ve been reading on the story, the feeling that maybe the British should apologise for everything from the Empire onwards.  Of course, if that sort of thing is acceptable, then the old colonial powers (yes, all of them, it wasn’t just us Brits) will be apologising for the next hundred years!

But the point I’d like to make is that the current generation can’t be held responsible for things that were done by past generations, I appreciate that people are hurt or national pride (and I think that this is mostly pride) has been injured, but once reasonable amends have been made (like the symbolic apology above) we need to move on and drop the blame game.

Of course, this failure to forgive grudges is mirrored in the doctrine of original sin.  I’ve been reading about the history of both the middle eastern religious movement and also the Bible, and it’s fascinating to see how the way the people have regarded the text has changed and to be honest, it tells you more about people than it does about God.

As for original sin, there are questions over how literally the story of the Garden of Eden was intended to taken, with the strong possibility that it was never intended (as with much of scripture) to be read literally.  My own feeling is that it is not.

The doctrine was heavily influenced, but not originated, by St Augustine of Hippo, the idea being that Adam’s sin is passed down to all of his descendants.  Now quite aside from the fact that several churches disagree with this doctrine, there is another problem.

Consider that our reasoning powers, the ability to have the kind of awareness we do, are evolved right there into our nature.  This would put that doctrine in the position of condemning a person simply for being Human, so along comes the Church with the cure.  Nice setup isn’t it?  I’ll also point out right here though that not all churches accept original sin, I don’t believe in tarring everyone with the same brush.

But, let’s face it, Evolution does rather torpedo the Eden story and with it original sin.  I prefer another reading of it, which is that the great weight and inertia of human history, culture and society have combined to put us in a position where we often fall short.  This sounds very much like Karma and is also the position of many Orthodox Churches.

To summarise?  We need to stop writing people off for not being perfect and once people and countries have apologised, stop guilt tripping them indefinitely.  Finally we need to realise that the sins of the fathers do not fall onto the shoulders of their sons.  If we’re to have a healthy future, we have to let go of things.

I’ve always believed that we can’t take ancient texts at face value, but must look beyond them using them as signposts to the truth, not literal truth themselves.  To make this mistake is to not see the wood for the trees, or to use a wonderful phrase I picked up from the brilliant Alan Watts, to eat the menu not the meal.

Anyway, without further ado you can find my new essay “Cafeteria religion” in the sidebar, or just click here.