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Poking Religion

Lately, I’ve been doing social media posts that don’t hold back on the foundational theologies and doctrines of Christianity. As most people know, I’ve been very public about deconstructing my beliefs and the processes behind this.

One thing that I’ve found fascinating is how any attack on a person’s religious beliefs is usually taken as an attack on the person themselves.

This is understandable because of how powerful religious beliefs are. They govern our whole world view – from how we see ourselves, others, the state of the world, and our eternal destiny, so when someone challenges the very foundations of those beliefs, we can tend to get very defensive, because we’ve invested our lives into them.

Many don’t notice that in all my controversial opinions, I never actually attack the person, and go out of my way to make it clear that although I may find their beliefs completely untenable, I also completely understand why they believe them, and respect their sincerity with genuine empathy (mostly… I have my moments!), remembering only too well that I’ve been there myself.

I also try to make it very clear that underneath it all, the real enemy is dogma – the absolute conviction that our beliefs are the incontrovertible truth and everyone else is absolutely wrong. There are many of course, who are willing to concede that there’s room to accept various interpretations of traditional views and biblical writings, as long as they don’t undermine the foundations.

Religion thrives by claiming its inherent and inerrant truth.

But I often get challenged by people claiming that I’m also being dogmatic about my opinions, which on the surface sounds legit, so really, it comes down to looking at the substance of various claims that religion presents, and my own stance on dogma.

The whole idea of challenging dogmatic thoughts/beliefs/religious systems is not to promote yet another “truth” and replace them with its own dogma. It’s about helping people to see that all religious/spiritual and philosophical beliefs are subjective. There is absolutely nothing that can be proven to make any one system the “winner”.

If people ask, I happily present my personal views and why I find them to be the most viable. I’ll even engage in deep discussion as to why this is the case, and also have a Facebook page where I present my ideas.

But I do not hold my views as dogma, because there’s no way I can prove them! They feel right to me at the moment, but I’m also evolving and growing, constantly looking at “life, the universe and everything” to see what I can glean to broaden my outlook, and most importantly, to bring unity and love to the world.

So if you’ve been offended by my provocative poking of sacred cows, it could be that you’re far more locked in dogma than you realise.

Most importantly, unconditional, universal love is the end game, and sometimes we need a bit of a kick to break through our thought patterns to achieve this.

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The “religion of love” illusion

I often see people talking about the dreadful (and even evil) things that evangelicals and fundamentalists believe and practice in the name of God, supported by the bible.
And I agree!
The problem is – we THINK the bible doesn’t support all those horrific things, and that it actually espouses a life of love.
But it doesn’t.
It’s a hodgepodge of ambiguity that has been cherry-picked to justify anything humanity is capable of.
It’s awesome that the loving bits are generally recognised as what Christianity should be, but that’s at the expense of the huge amount of scripture that says otherwise.
We have become so use to twisting and manipulating the bible that we’re almost incapable of seeing how absurd the whole thing really is.
Instead, we fight over interpretations, and who are the “real” Christians – and who is led by the Holy Spirit – and who is deceived – endlessly – for two thousand years – and we are still no closer to the unity we dream of – possibly further than ever – driven by the latest and greatest eschatology, exegesis, and whatever tools we want to make the cherry-picking work!
It’s worth noting that even our desire to simply embrace the teachings of Jesus, carefully avoids many of the harsh divisive things he apparently said.
It’s also worth noting that the texts we use to refer to “what Jesus said” are not even reliable sources anyway. We don’t ever bother to ask how a scribe followed him around endlessly transcribing every word, accurately, on parchment, with ink, balancing his little table, often at night. How often do we stop to consider how absurd that is? And don’t get me started on oral traditions!
It’s a complete mess, and yet we go on and on and on trying to make it work.
You’d think we would have realised by now that it’s time to question everything, and actually learn from history. But that’s unlikely, when our whole identity is built around a 2000 year old religious institution.
This is not to invalidate the work many have done over the centuries to promote unconditional love using the bible as a backdrop. It’s all about recognising the complete and utter subjectivity of a religious belief system that has dominated humanity for 2000 years.
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Unity or Uniqueness?

There are many reasons why we love religion: purpose, meaning, security, community and so on.

One reason, that I find is overlooked to some degree, is a desire to unite humanity with common beliefs so that we can all get along and live loving, meaningful lives. We think that if we all believe the same way, we will have world peace.

This is, in itself, an understandable and noble goal. In fact, in a way if we really did have the same religious beliefs it would solve a heck of a lot of problems.

In the real world though this will never happen, although most Christians believe Jesus will return to rule the world and everyone will become Christians or burn in hell (or something to that effect).

To embrace this idea however is lazy – really lazy. In fact it’s everything that’s wrong with religion!

We cannot all believe the same thing no matter how hard we try. There have been, and still are, thousands of groups trying to create communities and organisations that all believe the same theologies and doctrines. Every church’s main focus is to make sure everyone is on the same page, faithfully shaping people’s lives to match their particular denomination’s rules.

Religion demands (overtly or extremely subtly) that we all become clones. Like it or not that’s the bottom line. Sure, we can have varied lives and roles in our community. As long as our belief system matches everyone else’s we can do whatever we like.

Solving the world’s problems and creating a better world however, requires hard work – just not the type of work Christians (and all other religions) think.

It requires that we actively go out of our way to encourage uniqueness.

You see, even in a tight church group, no one has exactly the same beliefs. They can say they do, but it’s impossible. Every mind is different. The way we all process information and our environment is different. We respond differently to everything, with different emotions. The variations are limitless. And yet we pretend that we are all in unity – until someone expresses the fact that they see something differently. We give them a certain amount of liberty, but if their thoughts run too far off track we have to bring them back into line. We have to help them force that unique thought process back into our particular group’s mould.

History has shown that this never works – ever! And it never will. It’s like “whack-a-mole”, eventually the moles always win.

The key to growth is through accepting our uniqueness, and helping each other discover our own unique approach to spirituality. We need to help each other discover how to live with integrity (the “concept of consistency of actions, values, methods, measures, principles, expectations, and outcomes. In ethics, integrity is regarded as the honesty and truthfulness or accuracy of one’s actions.”). It doesn’t matter what we believe if we do so with honesty and integrity, and that, most importantly, we display love – for ourselves and others.

To force uniformity of beliefs is to bring death.

To encourage freedom of beliefs with personal integrity brings life.

When I say to Christians (and all religious people) “it’s time to grow up”, I get slammed for being arrogant and patronising. And yet, after thousands of years of religion, it’s clear for those who really want to see, that unity through religion has failed. It’s failed in a way that is horrific. It really is time for all of us to grow up as a species.

Time to love each other for who we are, not who we think we should be to appease any religious expectations.

 

 

(Originally published 13/9/17 on Jim’s Awesome Blog)

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