Religions

Religions in Anti-religious Times

Religion as a Bugbear

Nowadays, virtually everyone I know rejects religion for one or more of a variety of reasons. Many feel:

* That religious institutions have too often betrayed their own ethics by not championing compassion and justice but encouraging war and bloodshed, abuse, exploitation and intolerance instead.

* That the faithful are expected to believe unreal, unscientific and fantastic stories and revere them as miracles that are supposed to prove divine intervention.

* That the dogmatic obsessions of religions have got in the way of rational and productive thought and have crippled adherents with enforced beliefs and inquisitorial terror against “heretical” ideas.

* That religious teachings concerning the reality of approachable divine powers have remained unsubstantiated and have proved disappointingly ineffective and misleading.

* That the churches abuse their power and have tended to allow self-seeking and predatory office bearers to misbehave without making much of an attempt to hold them to account.

* That religions are hopelessly antiquated and out of touch with modernity, paralyzed with social conservatism.

* That sacred texts are frequently confusing and contradictory and have failed to give people easy guidance and simple rules to live by.

* That religious texts like the Old Testament show God and his elect acting in ways that seem inhumane and immoral.

* That though people who claim to be divinely inspired can never prove this, they often have a disastrous influence on gullible people.

The Origins of the Great Religions

It is important to consider what would seem the initial attraction and purpose of religions before condemning them.

Prior to the beginning of the Axial Age around the middle of the first millennium BCE, religions had most often been an attempt to support the natural mechanisms of the world and to influence natural events. 

But once cities developed, controlling wild nature was no longer of central importance. New religions  (Buddhism, Hinduism, Judaism, Christianity and Islam prominent among them) started to focus on ethical matters, on regulating the behavior of people living together at close quarters. 

The initial aim of these new “humanist” religions was almost universally peace and happiness, fostered by compassion and non-violence. Most of them were inspired by known human founders such as Moses, Christ, the historical Buddha, Mohammed, Confucius, Lao-Tse and Socrates.

The religions thus created always responded to the specific needs of their societies and the conditions prevailing at the time. They then generally only became widespread, powerful and distinctive movements when they aligned themselves with political interests: 

* Thus Judaism became distinctive when the Jewish people had to define themselves against neighboring tribes or large empires such as Egypt, Babylon or Rome, all threatening to swallow up this small tribe or kingdom. In order to create a coherent and resilient community Judaism insisted on good communal behavior (the Ten Commandments), a God exclusive to the tribe, and eventually a great many rules and customs that allowed members of the group to demonstrate their loyalty and be identified with certainty. It is, however, questionable whether in later years the tribal exclusiveness their religion fostered has always served the Jewish people well.

* Buddhism was founded by a prince, whose horror at the suffering outside the affluent realm of the palace, something he had earlier been unaware of, caused him to live like the poor, the sick, the homeless and the starving till he could envisage a solution to their suffering. This did not entail directly disempowering the rich. The Buddha realized that it was the human desire for power and wealth and the human fear of hardship that initially had to change and in the wake of changed attitudes, societies would also eventually change. Buddhists seem to have remained a small fraternity for two or so centuries till the Emperor Asoka, horrified by the violence of his own military campaigns to bring India under central control, decided to adopt the compassion and non-violence of Buddhism for the good of his people. Some centuries later when new conquerors and their armies entered the country and official attitudes changed, the more aggressive and life affirming Muslim ethic of the Mughals replaced Buddhism in India. It would reappear in other countries and in other forms in the following centuries.

* People living in the mobile and multi-ethnic Mediterranean realm of the first century, who had outgrown the exclusive and tribal world of Judaism and needed an ethic that allowed different peoples to interact productively, developed Christianity from the ethic of traditional Judaism modified and expanded by Christ. It was Saint Paul who initially understood its potential as a religion for all the disparate peoples of the Mediterranean; the Emperor Constantine then turned it into the state religion for the vast empire he had inherited. But the desire to exploit the unifying potential of Christianity would eventually lead to un-Christian dogmatic rigidity, persecution and aggressive warfare.

* In the Arabian lands, Mohamed saw that tribal and eternally warring desert people, forced to subsist and compete under harsh conditions, needed something to unite them and turn them into caring communities. Those who came after him then realized the political potential of this religion. If you had the simplicity of one God standing for all the highest values in combination with very specific commandments and a religious routine that forced people to make a public show of worshipping this God five times a day, then you could unify, control and enthuse the most disparate people. Simplicity, specificity and community still make Islam attractive to displaced and needy people though an enthusiasm that was wholesome once, may not always be so in a different age.

Religions are on one level ethical programs that will always be adapted to solving specific regional and community problems. It is, for example, not hard to see why Christianity did particularly well in the multi-national patchwork of Europe.

Up-dating Religions

Because religions have developed in specific historical times they can become outdated. There have been different ways of renewing them, among them the following:

*  By Hybridization meaning the mingling of religious traditions. Anglo-Catholicism combines Anglican and Catholic perspectives, the three Australian churches united in the Uniting Church, or Christian traditions in South America and Africa that have absorbed native ideas and customs can serve as examples.

*  By restructuring, such as abolishing hierarchical structures and largely redundant institutions such as monasteries.

*  By reforming corrupt practices like the sale of pardons in the 16^th century Catholic Church.

*  By making teaching more accessible through the use of the vernacular  language rather than e.g. Latin. 

*  By returning to the simplicity, poverty and compassion of original founders like Saint Francis of Assisi

*  By modernizing the conventions of church music and art or taking nuns out of their antiquated habits.

*  More controversially, by insisting on hard and fast, simplified doctrine.

*  By incorporating new visions like the “rapturing” preached by born-again Christians.

*  By relocating to a “Holy Land” to experience the religion at its source.

But changes to hallowed custom also often caused rifts that could eventually be as embittered as the enmities between the different religions themselves frequently tended to be: Christians versus Muslims, Sunnis versus Shiites, Catholics versus Protestants. In an ultimate attempt to deal with sectarian rifts and modernity in general, fundamentalist “back to basics” movements have become prominent of late. These tend to discard much that is valuable and resort to distorting simplifications.

Civilizing Influences

Religious ethical systems were generally reinforced on the one hand by being promoted as directly divinely prescribed and on the other by the threat of punishment for transgressors in some future hellish existence. Graphic descriptions of hell were designed to terrify “sinners”, and to the extent that people accepted such doctrines they were likely to comply with prescribed rules and rarely need more brutal secular forms of enforcement. So by internalizing reward and punishment, religions could have an important civilizing influence.

After-life and its Abuse

One problem with religions has been that the various doctrines promising an afterlife have so often been abused to encourage a very off-handed approach to the sanctity of human life.  Today’s insistence on preserving life to the very last moment, even against the wishes of a seriously ill patient, is probably partly motivated by the assumption of widespread religious indoctrination concerning an afterlife and not only by worries about the policing of euthanasia.

Celibacy and its Abuse

While the monastic ideal of celibacy, which exists in both the Christian and Asian religions and which originated in a time long before contraception, had once responded to a real need to contain the procreative activity of unattached males and control their labor power (an alternative was in armies) it eventually led to sexual perversions that persist. The consequences of the rampant overpopulation celibacy was designed to control could of course be famine or war.

Magical Thinking and the Language of Myth

For many people in our scientific age one of the main barriers to religions is their apparent acceptance of the miraculous and supernatural. We need to remember that most of the great religions are two thousand and more years old and derive from a time that employed figurative language for difficult abstract ideas: a time that often used the language of mythos rather than the language of logos or science.  If we understand this, there is no longer a need to take religious myths and symbols literally; we should see them simply as a language we are no longer accustomed to and have to relearn. Though theologians have done their best to alert us to the wrong-headedness of literal readings of ancient scriptures for the last two centuries, the supernatural has in fact remained a hurdle and source of anxiety for the scientifically minded in modern times.

Religion in Modern Times: Benefits?

So what is there of benefit to humanity that might be lost if we try to jettison traditional religions? 

* Does society really need a unifying ethic and if so, would “humanism” suffice?

* What are the psychological consequences of living without the expectation of a life beyond death? Could drug addiction and suicide, so prevalent in affluent atheistic societies, increase as a result?

* Do people lose their will to do good or be good once they lose their faith in an observing and judging God who rewards good behavior?

* Will we be prepared to respect and care for nature if our world is not considered a divine creation or will we start looking only for immediate benefits to ourselves. Are we doing just that already? 

* And what about art? From the earliest ages on and until quite recent times art of every kind has most commonly been inspired and fostered by religion. Can social critique, introspection, aestheticism, entertainment or the like suffice as the sole motivators for great art? Could “idealism” and “spirituality” perhaps stand in for religion here?

What is spirituality? 

Many of us have experienced what Wordsworth called “intimations of immortality”, or “a Presence which is not to be put by”,  or “perpetual benediction” or  a “faith that looks through death”. It would be almost impossible to perceive and name such “mystical” or “numinous” experiences without the conceptions and the vocabulary of religion.

But mystical awareness is essentially a very private experience.  As a social movement mysticism often becomes destructively hysterical.

Is Spirituality a Psychological Phenomenon or the Perception of a Further Dimension?

Are we entitled to interpret numinous or mystical experiences as proof of the reality of the “supernatural”?  Would an individual’s experiences necessarily line up with received doctrine? And what would pass as more than merely personal evidence?  The frequency, significance or universality of such experiences?  Their coincidental significances?

Right through the ages there have been people who were convinced that they had contact with spirits or gods and that their often amazingly accurate wisdom and prophetic knowledge derived from these supernatural forces.  Does the fact that science cannot yet explain such things mean that they do not and can not exist? Should one try to research the other-worldly in e.g. séances, or conduct studies like Arthur Koestler’s attempt to investigate the apparently supernatural scientifically as described in “The Roots of Coincidence”?

The Roots of Religion

It appears that religious worship is as old as humanity. Eighteen thousand year old Ice Age cave paintings in the Pyrenees can best be explained as sites of worship and magical practices and researchers believe that they have discovered what the ancient “perennial religion” was. All early peoples that left records seem to have believed in higher powers.  Does that give the hypothesis of an actual otherworldly realm which influences human lives more validity?

Secrecy, Mystery and Uncertainty

Secrecy and mystery have been fostered in almost every religion.

There are mysterious “sacramental” acts.

There are sanctuaries which only the High Priest can enter.

There is knowledge which only the initiated can be given.

There are apparent mysterious abilities like the flights of the shamans or miraculous healings which seem inexplicable.

And there are sacred languages which few but the priests can understand.

This desire for secrecy can be explained in various ways:

*  as an honest admission of the limits of human knowledge

*  as the attempt by an elite to gain power by excluding others from knowledge and experience

*  as an acknowledgement of unknown powers that forces humans to delve into themselves, giving them the opportunity for choice and therewith a way of gaining the scope and freedom to grow and develop in different directions, e.g. to be either atheistic or a believer.

Religion as Ritual and Program for Action

According to Karen Armstrong, herself raised in the Catholic tradition, religion was originally not a “belief system” requiring faith but a form of communal activity, the site of practices and rituals which allowed people to act out and thereby deal with and begin to understand the nature and meaning of life, particularly its tragedies. And foremost among these tragedies was always the mortality of man and all living things. She maintains that modern man’s obsession with the literal truth of religious mythical dramas would have met with no understanding in earlier more traditionally religious times.

Replacement Rituals?

If religions are merely enactments of human concerns, as Armstrong suggests, can they be replaced by other cultural rituals? 

* In present-day Australia sporting events are widely experienced with a quasi-religious fervor. Enacted in this arena are myths like that of the mighty hero; the battle between good (our side) and evil (the others) exposed as little more than the harmless joy of competition; the idea of a race of supermen, like the gods of old, fighting your battles for you; the tragedy of failure – the brave injured in dangerous encounters and carried off to great public concern; a fervent belief in the importance of fighting to the end and never giving up; and above all team-work, tribalism, cooperation within the group. For most spectators it seems less the skill or strategies of the game than the communal experience in the grandstand and the proclamation of the nation’s values as represented here that matters. These values can be summed up as: health, physical beauty, youth, strength, courage, persistence, effort, resilience, a competitive spirit, team work and fairness. They are ideals that sit comfortably with the beliefs and concerns of contemporary capitalist democracies. A citizen of Melbourne who does not barrack for a team tends to be seen as a kind of traitor. In recent years even the hallowed Sundays, once the exclusive province of traditional religion, have been given over to the religion of sport. Greek Olympic sporting events originally had religious significance; arguably the same holds good in our society.

* An important version of the myth of the hero and his sacrifice is the Anzac legend, celebrated each year as an ever more highly emotional occasion. There is a telling reluctance to align this story with historical truth because it has become such a powerful myth.

* The respect for celebrities in our culture is also more akin to the veneration once accorded the bickering Olympian gods or the Germanic gods of Walhalla than to any acknowledgement of the genuine achievements of people in the limelight. Celebrities are seen as larger than life, mythical humans with all the foibles and passions we recognize and accept as typically human. They seem to serve to celebrate the pageant of humanity.

* Fitness challenges, fasts and the like to aid charities resemble the rigors of pilgrimages and fasts once undertaken to benefit individuals or causes. Churches often help to organize these.

* Comedy programs tend to attract large audiences. Laughing together has become one of the important communal activities in this humanist religion.

* Art is no longer illustrative of the Divine but has found a new purpose in training people to see themselves and the world in new ways.

* Music has taken upon itself the task of keeping alive, developing and refining people’s emotions or attuning large groups of people to each other.

These arts are no longer illustrative of the Divine, as in earlier, religious times, but serve the development and celebration of human potential.

(The inspiration for many of our quasi religious cultural activities comes predominantly from the Greco-Roman tradition.)

What is the Role of Churches in a Land of Sport?

* In the larger cities the more traditional churches now tend to have dwindling congregations of elderly people, most of them women.  (Until recently the values of sport and war were almost exclusively masculine and therefore of less interest to women.) The focus here is on contemplative worship and community.

* The Uniting Church, built of an amalgamation of three traditional churches, has reconceived its mission in order to concentrate on actively fostering and nurturing the ancient religious values of compassion, brotherhood and non-violence, often in the form of community actions or programs. Other churches are following its lead.

* A different group of churches that are thriving today are those whose members profess a literal and often quite naïve and intolerant faith in a morally rigid and demanding supernatural divinity. To an outsider, it can sometimes seem as though the more extreme of these churches were modeling themselves on the same paradigms and values as the sporting enthusiasts. Like them its members see themselves as an elite group out to defeat “the others” in a battle for power at the end of which they alone will gain victory. In token of this they will be “raptured” up to the winners’ platform of heaven where they can celebrate their superiority eternally and delight in the destruction of their enemies. The problems such churches pose are in part ethical: are these really the values we believe should govern our lives. But they can also be political. Such believers (Tea Party adherents foremost among them) can be dangerous because they are used to confusing myth and reality, believing in all sorts of things that are unsubstantiated or unreal. The more militant Muslim groups at present causing the world so much grief have a similar fundamentalist orientation.

Is Religion a Fraud?

Does the fact that traditional religions could be interpreted to have been designed to organize and manipulate human beings in ways meant to create favorable results within the relevant society prove that these religions were nothing but human inventions? Does the fact that all the great Axial Age religions originally separately saw compassion and non-violence as the most important human values make them more likely to be “divine” rather than just mythical? Perhaps human worshippers have always misunderstood or misrepresented the nature of religions, particularly their supposed “supernatural” character. But even if that were the case, this is not necessarily proof that religious beliefs or actions were not “divinely” inspired. For how could anyone really prove whether an idea is his own or something “God-given”, presuming there is a God? 

Religion and Genetics

Is it possible that a religious sensibility that can satisfy our need for meaning in life and help us master our various fears, particularly our fear of mortality, has been hard-wired into our brains in the course of evolution, much like Chomsky surprisingly revealed grammatical language structures to be? (Religion has certainly always been a part of human life as we know it.) That would mean that individuals or social groups can be presumed to be capable of taking and adapting the religious myths or stories they currently need from a universal common fund, a little like Jung’s Collective Unconscious. (If humans were genetically programmed to be religious, the uncompromising anti-religious campaigns of biologists like Dawkins, Harris and Hitchens could be seen as a paradoxical attempt to pervert human biological laws.)

But even if our religious preoccupations could be accounted for by genetics, it can still not be ruled out that we might be guided by higher powers or even that a superior intelligence (a Creator God) might be constantly at work within the very structures of nature.

Given the ever present uncertainty, however, it must be up to each individual to examine and test all supposedly “divine” calls to action very carefully indeed with the help of generally recognized humanist values. For what can we ever really know of things divine? Our perception could be as inadequate as our perception of e.g. the atomic structures of objects. People who have not been scientifically educated would swear that the wood of a chair was by nature hard, dense and solid whereas physicists tell us that in reality it consists of movement and vast areas of empty space.

Freedom of Choice

The philosopher Paul Davies in “The Mind of God” has tried to show that it is as impossible to reject the argument for “God” as it is to reject the argument against “God”. For a different reason, namely because the concept “God” belongs to the realm of mythical language to which scientific truth does not apply, the scientist Stephen Jay Gould agrees.

So should we see our inability to prove or disprove the existence of God as a problem for mankind? I think not. Ultimately, freedom of choice has always been what gives us humans the best opportunities for growth and self-directed, conscientious decision-making.   

I can not see that there is anything that decisively favors either the argument for or the argument against the reality of a supernaturally guided world. It is clearly up to us to choose to be religious believers, religious practitioners, or non-believers either in accordance with our own experiences and convictions or in conformity with the needs and customs of our communities. To me it seems just as possible and permissible to reject religion and its strictures and comforts as a misguided habit of thought along with Dawkins, to accept religion as no more than a psychologically and socially useful practice along with Karen Armstrong, or to experience it as some kind of dialogue with the Divine as religious people throughout the ages have done. Mystery and uncertainty help humanity to face life and its demands with an open and creative mind.

Religious Guidance

People who believe they have received genuine religious guidance or been in contact with ‘the numinous’ have always tended to be under suspicion of fraud, self-aggrandizement or at best naivety. Nowadays, in our modern world, few will admit having had “irrational experiences” to other than close and trusted friends. Many of the saints of the Catholic Church (like Bernadette of Lourdes) were treated quite harshly during their life-times. Other visionaries were persecuted as heretics.

At play here are the skepticism of rational people, among the devout the suspicion of sacrilege, a widespread fear of falling prey to a fraudster, incompatibility with vested interests, and the envy of people who have been denied such gifts. As Dostoyevsky’s Grand Inquisitor story confirms, it has become very difficult in our day for the Divine, if it does exist, to make contact with man and religious institutions are usually the most determined gatekeepers.

How should skeptics best approach and examine their doubts?

In a first step, corroboration of visionary messages is often sought from signs, which themselves will need to be accepted and interpreted.

But since all the great religions were born from an ethic of compassion and non-violence, it would seem to me that compatibility with a humanist ethic must be the safest initial criterion by which to judge whether any “instructions” received could be genuine and beneficent or are likely to have a more selfish and sinister source.

Personal perspectives

   At this point I should probably reveal my own experiences and biases.

For me, the writer of this skeptical survey, a religious sensibility has always been the pivotal guiding principle of my life to the extent that I find myself becoming quite disorientated if I try to ignore it.

   My preoccupation with things divine began early and there is a record of this. When I was two years old my mother’s younger sister came to live with us and undertook to keep a diary of my early sayings and later also of the first excursions into language and thought upon which my two younger brothers embarked.

   From this diary it emerges that we were given a certain amount of religious instruction. We were told there was “a god”, that he was “in heaven” and that if we were “good” or “devout” we could one day join him there. This doctrine was summarized in the nightly prayer:

         Lieber Gott, mach mich fromm, dass ich in den Himmel komm.

         Dear God, make me good/pious, so that I can go to heaven.

There was another less favored and more cryptic prayer occasionally used:

         Ich bin klein, mein Herz mach rein, soll niemand drin wohnen als       Christkind allein.

         I am little, make my heart pure, no one must live in it but the   Christchild alone.

We were also told of angels. They were envisioned as beautiful and kind winged ladies who protected children and moved between heaven and earth. Since German used the same words for “heaven” and “sky” it was not surprising that we conflated the two and one of the stories I made up at the age of not yet three was of building a tower of chairs and tables on the beach to hand back a flute mistakenly dropped by an angel. I was going to wash it carefully before returning it and politely ask people on the beach for a loan of their towel to dry it, with a promise to return it straight away.

   Around Christmas, which was the most important occasion of the year during our childhood, child-angels were always busy helping with the present-making and we emulated them by busily making presents for our family and friends too. Giving to others and making them happy was the ethos of Christmas.

   The Christ we were told of was only ever the “Christchild”, a baby born on Christmas day. Much like us, he had three parents, a mother Mary, a father Joseph, and a second father, God. We of course had two mothers, our aunt counting as one of them, rather than two fathers. The Christchild was both a baby surrounded by all the marvel of a newborn and a very kind, powerful and mysterious intimate of God. When new babies like my brothers were born onto this earth, they were always former angels who had decided to become human beings. My recorded comments show that I thought my new little brother Peter cried so much because he was so sad at losing his heavenly home.

The religious world of our childhood could be called a Platonic world. In it, there seemed to be a perfect version of everything in existence up in heaven, and a parallel and imperfect version on earth. The people on earth were, however, always endeavoring to use heaven as an example and guide in order to perfect themselves.

   These were the typical stories and teachings that were a part of our upbringing and probably that of many Protestant German children. Whereas my first brother seemed to accept religious personages as though they were family on a par with everyone else, my second brother later obviously considered them to be nothing but characters in a rather ridiculous fairytale.

In contrast to my brothers, according to the diary, I myself seem to have been constantly preoccupied with the transcendent world: asking questions, making up stories and suggesting possible scenarios, some clearly intentionally absurd so as to provoke reactions from listeners and elicit more information.

   But the adults, it seemed, were always more interested in hearing what I myself made of the material they had given us. They rarely used the opportunities for religious instruction I provided. When I read the diary now, it seems to me almost as though, with Wordsworth and the Romantics, our adults thought I, the child, could have retained remnants of divine knowledge lost to them. And while many of my questions were skeptical or fanciful and even silly, the dreams I told them about sometimes did seem to have a visionary and thought-provoking dimension. The god whose heaven I climbed up to in one dream was a father who took me on his lap and who just laughed when I tickled him.

   It appeared I had three preoccupations at that time: First, I believed in an ultimately accessible human-like but somewhat mysterious otherworldly divinity. Secondly, I was in search of a perfect world peopled with the ideal figures needed to make perfection possible. When I made up stories about these, I showed them almost ritual courtesy. Thirdly: at the same time as I believed in the existence of a god, I did not believe in a god who could or would randomly play with the laws of nature. I remained a realist.

   Almost all the statements recorded for me in my aunt’s diary can be read as theological in nature. In retrospect, it seems that the very rudimentary religious toolkit we were given was sufficient to enable us to develop our own personal religious thinking.

   Though my brothers and I were christened in our family’s church, these visits remained the only ones of my early youth. They were given special glamor by the white hand-embroidered heirloom dress I was allowed to wear on those occasions. We never attended Sunday services.

   I next became interested in things religious some years later, towards the end of the Second World War, when we spent a year and a half in a Catholic school. I was not allowed to learn about Catholic doctrine and ritual because I was not of that denomination. But I was taken to see The Song of Bernadette with the rest of the class and this film gave me a fair idea of what being a saint was about: the crushing demands made of such chosen people but also the opportunities they had to bring help to others. These ideas preoccupied me for quite some time.

   In my early teens I was then confirmed in our church. I had hoped to have all sorts of questions concerning Christianity and its promise of salvation answered during the preparatory sessions but it seemed that the minister who provided the instruction had no answers himself. I ended up having to decide whether to ditch religion at this point or to give it another chance. I half-heartedly chose the latter.

   As a young adult I then met my husband to be and his devoutly Catholic family. This time I was encouraged to learn about the rich history of that church’s ritual and doctrine and recognized Catholicism as a valid pathway to exploring things divine.

   But in a strangely asymmetrical development: to the extent that I gained insights, my husband lost his faith till he could only curse religion and abandon it. It became clear to me once more that people are different and will go their own ways and that the very essence of life seems to be balance and counter-balance.

   During that time I had a series of visions that set out a path for me and provided me with guiding symbols. It has come natural to me since then to follow this path which has given direction, power and companionship in sometimes difficult and lonely times. Concern for the Divine is essential to my way of life, but traditional churches have so far been almost irrelevant. When people ask me about my religion I find it difficult to know what to say to them.

Preliminary Conclusion

   It must seem paradoxical to most that an essentially religious person like myself should condone, even welcome the anti-religious trends of our modern age. The reason is, of course, that the abuse of religion seems to me and many others to have become so widespread, entrenched and horrifying, that “being religious” can be seen as at best fanciful, at worst socially destructive and utterly indecent. There is now a wide consensus among thinking people, and it ought to be respected, that it has become necessary for societies around the world to radically cleanse themselves of the corruption caused by dishonest or power-hungry religion. In doing so they are also likely to experience both what the loss of religion entails and what humans can achieve without referring to a dimension spoken of as the “Divine”. I am assuming here that human societies instinctively know how to go about healing themselves.

                                                                                                                                                

My Christianity

   For my own part, I would describe myself as a Christian. Over the years, I have consulted many books on religion to find an exposition of Christian beliefs that seems satisfactory to me; unfortunately, most of them resort to either custom, sociology or mystery to avoid a more coherently logical account. So I shall try to fill this gap and explain what I believe to be the core Christian message. But I would ask readers to keep in mind that like all humans talking about religion I have to use language that is inexact and clumsy and often figurative. Since I have to keep in mind the preponderance in our society of modern scientific rationalists highly suspicious of all religion, I will try to make what I say sound as rational as possible.

   In line with accepted Christian doctrine I will speak of the Divine as a Trinity. This consists in the first place of a Creator or Father God (“God the Father, the Maker of Heaven and Earth” in the words of the Creed, or better, God continually making and upholding the world) who could be seen as working through the Laws of Nature “he” set in motion, (laws including Darwin’s Natural Selection) as they have developed from the presumed Big Bang and the simplest sub-atomic particles to the immensely complex and inconceivably perfect web of life which modern science has learned to explore and which we cannot but admire with great awe. It does not seem to me important whether the creation, the creator or the father, or all of them together or in turn are our foremost focus of devotion.

   God the Son, the second “person”, is the human being in its most perfect and therefore divine form. Humans differ from animals in that we are not only guided by the natural instincts appropriate to our species, but additionally by a fairly autonomous mind, which is often at loggerheads with our nature. We can overeat just because we like the taste of something; similarly we can let fear, aggression or sexual desire run amuck. Such lack of proper moderation is rare in animals. The story of the Fall of Adam and Eve points to conflicts between the “natural goodness” of the inhabitants of the completely natural Garden of Eden and the independent mind and rebellious desires of humans. Humans have to learn how to balance their natural drives, now become desires, with ways of living together in this world in the best possible way. This can be seen as a human continuation of divine creation. The Old Testament describes many aspects of this struggle.

   Jesus, the Christ, known to us through sayings and stories about him that give us a perception of what a perfectly harmonious and balanced life might look like, is revered as God the Son. He is at one with the divine natural world of which his own human nature is a part but also an ethical human being: someone who lived by the precept “do onto others as you would they do unto you”, who was peaceable but could also get angry with those who did wrong, who was religious but also very critical of religion misused. The four gospels give slightly different accounts of his life showing that the perfect person always looked and will always look different to different people. Like all humans, Jesus was mortal and the destruction of his body in the course of the crucifixion leading to his death was for him as painful and terrifying an experience as it would be for any of us. But Jesus was also God and at one with the Creator insofar as his life was both completely natural and a manifestation of the exemplary balanced human being as God intended him within nature: he was also the Christ. The many stories of Jesus’ healing the sick attest to his understanding of natural goodness or health.

   Christian churches have two main sacraments. The first is Baptism which is a symbolic, or by other accounts real washing away of our propensity to abuse our nature, a flaw that has come down to us in multifarious ways through the generations of man. Theologians speak of this as “original sin”. Jesus himself, we are told, also underwent baptism before beginning his life as a preacher, but his baptism was the moment where his divine status became obvious and was proclaimed: he was at one with all nature and therefore had no need of baptism.

   The second sacrament is the Eucharist or Holy Communion. It originated in the last meal Jesus had with his disciples before his death. Here he broke the bread and divided it among his disciples saying that by eating it they were making their bodies one with the body of Jesus and by drinking from the cup of wine he passed around they were uniting their spirit or blood with that of Jesus. In other words: in spite of his death Jesus would continue to live, namely in their bodies, and his spirit would always be part of them as long as their commitment to him persisted. Seen merely symbolically this meant that those who participated agreed to continue representing the values Jesus embodied; but seen mystically, it meant that there could now be a substantial union between humans and Jesus as God, that the body of Jesus will be resurrected in his disciples’ bodies and their spirits will have eternal life in the union of Jesus and all those who participate him.

   This union is known as the “Communion of Saints” in which the Holy Spirit is active; it became possible only with the untimely and highly visible death of Jesus at a time when he had found disciples completely committed to him: in other words, with his sacrifice for us. The Eucharist was intended by Jesus as an agreed sign between him and his followers which would never lose its power and its meaning. Catholic Christians believe that only those in the direct apostolic succession (meaning that their power to dispense the Eucharistic sacrament goes back to Saint Peter as the designated leader of the church) have the right to transmit this sacrament. For those Christians who find it hard to believe literally in the resurrection of Jesus from the dead or in an eternal life after death for his followers (orthodox theology insists it will be a bodily life) the Eucharist can be seen as proclaiming the same reality as the Resurrection at Easter.: “the resurrection of the body and life everlasting” in the words of the Creed.

   After his death, it is reported, Jesus sent us the Holy Spirit, the “Comforter”, revered as the third “person” of the Trinity, which is, to say it again, one God in different manifestations relevant to humans. We could also speak of God perceived in different ways accessible to the human mind. In my understanding this means that Christians now have intuitive access to the wisdom and guidance of Christ and to the spirits of those who became Christ’s disciples and were merged with him. A manifestation of this seems to have occurred at Pentecost or Whitsunday after Jesus’s death when followers from different countries congregated and found that though they spoke different languages they were able to understand each other. This experience gave new confidence to the previously often confused and doubting disciples. Though many modern people feel uncomfortable about acknowledging psychic powers such as mind-reading, there are also those, and by no means all of them religious or Christians, who have encountered such phenomena and will vouch for their reality as an actual potential of human nature. The conversion experience many Christians speak of is often of this union.

   This is in brief and much simplified terms what the Christian message is about in my view. Different churches emphasize different aspects of it and present their versions in sometimes more, sometimes less realistic, symbolic or fantastical terms, often in accordance with the intellectual fashions current at the time and place of the founding of a particular grouping or denomination. But in their attempts to broadcast their message and recruit followers, churches have, of course, also tended to become powerful worldly institutions. As noted earlier, political agendas can overlay and distort the relatively simple basic message of Christianity.

A Personalized Religion?

   To sum up: Religion has today lost the trust of many thinking people. How should one react to this? By an attempt to reform churches and religious institutions? In Australia the merging of three denominations in a new Uniting Church was such a well-intentioned attempt that I witnessed at close hand. By abandoning religion as a nonsense? At the invitation of friends I once attended a conference of atheists and found many of the speakers persuasive. Or alternatively: by personalizing and spiritualizing religion so that it relies mainly or wholly on the genuine experiences of the individual rather than the prescriptions of an institution? Perhaps all three approaches can to some extent work in consort.

   I myself have not come to my Christian faith through any church although, as previously stated, I was more or less aware of Christian teachings from an early age. The process led from personal experiences that were so startling they needed an explanation to a gradual realization that the Christian story was the richest and most accurate, though by no means the only way to remember and understand my own life and its meaning and purpose. Christianity was, of course, also the religion on offer because it was specific to my own culture.

   My story of Christianity may, however, sound a little different to the customary one, particularly the centrality I give to “God the Father” as Nature. Like many others today, I believe that traditional Christianity has tended to be seduced by the creator and father images, which are nothing more than images, and the resulting disregard for nature has often been a great tragedy for humankind and all life. Today more than ever we need a religion that accepts the laws of nature as universal and divine and gives up its obsession with the supernatural and miraculous. We have to learn to appreciate that it has always been difficult to speak of things divine and those who have tried have often had to resort to expanding and reemploying language in ways that can be confusing. We should, however, also accept that science, however much it researches and discovers, is and will always be a long way off fully understanding the world.

   I firmly believe that things divine are ultimately beyond human comprehension and therefore texts concerning them will of necessity always be subject to interpretation and reinterpretation. Though uniformity of belief may seem politically expedient to religious institutions vying with each other and may even be valuable in creating social cohesiveness, imposing such uniformity on people of faith rather than simply offering it can stifle vision and creativity and eventually leave us with an unsubtle and lifeless religion that is no longer of interest to anyone.

   Keeping Churches at arm’s length does not mean that ritual, so characteristic of many Churches, should be of no importance in communicating with the Divine. While ritual can be communal and a customary part of worship, it can also be a powerful individual form of expression, a language, that does not have to follow traditional patterns.

   Many committed members of Christian churches feel it is incumbent upon them to be active missionaries, recruiting people to their faith. My own religious experiences have come in private and unexpected ways; nothing about them is likely to be particularly convincing to others. Moreover, other people too can be assumed to have insights of importance. While I would perhaps not refuse to talk about such personal things, I don’t anticipate a genuine request to do so. Most of the people I know and respect are very private about their religiousness.                           

   As a general rule, it has always seemed best to me to let my behavior be guided by conscience based on respect and humane compassion rather than on the often very “socially conservative” prescriptions of institutions like Churches which, when examined closely, are always subject to a great variety of secular influences. Of course it goes without saying that it is important to examine the opinions and convictions of others, even churches, before discarding them.

  

Silke Hesse