ARE RULES RELIGION?

Should laws governing social behavior be considered religion?

Here's how I arrived at this question: Having become distanced from Protestant beliefs by the time I was seventeen years old, I had a powerful insight that all existence was the manifestation of a mysterious spiritual Source. "Spirit" underlay all that we perceived.

That realization led me to a mystical attitude toward whatever it is we call "God". Rather than in the Bible, I found help in the Upanishads and other Vedantic writings, in Taoism, in the reports of mystics in all religions. For me religion became a matter of personal awakening and enlightenment aimed at comprehending more about our spiritual Source and living in harmony with it. I retained a strong sense of justice and fairness but it was unrelated to religious teachings.

When I said to my college philosophy professor, "I think it was a mistake when religion became equated with morality", he agreed.

A lawgiving God, particularly as described in the Old Testament of the Bible, will dispense rewards and punishments depending on how His laws are obeyed or disobeyed. When I look at the much-vaunted monotheistic religions, most of what I see mostly rules of social behavior, and mostly in the form of what not to do.

A person's behavior toward other beings is of course significant in forming that person's spiritual condition, but it is misguided to consider a system of social rules as "religion". The purportedly divine laws often emphasize restrictions on sexual behavior --masturbation, fornication, adultery, homosexuality -- but much more is included, such as laws concerning food and drink. In some Protestantism even a sip of beer considered almost fatal, dancing is prohibited, gambling is a sin (not just unwise), and even playing cards on a Sunday is a punishable offense. It is not a big jump from there to the Jewish tradition that even flipping a light switch on the Sabbath is a violation of Jehovah's law against working on that day.

The most famous set of supposedly God-given laws is probably the "Ten Commandments", presented as the foundation of Judaism and its offspring, Christianity. Those laws pertain almost entirely to human social conduct, although in the first commandment Jehovah talks about having brought the Jews out of Egypt (a myth rather than an actual event) and tells them to have no other god before him. This is essentially an ancient tribal god saying, "Don't put any of those other tribes' gods above me!" In the same vein is the prohibition against making images -- i.e. idols representing Jehovah's competitor gods. But most of the commandments are a code of interaction among humans, the likes of which could be drawn up by any committee of intelligent and well-meaning people.

I therefore suggest that the concept of religion is degraded when it is reduced to a set of laws, and that the concept of God is degraded by depicting the deity as greatly concerned with humans' sex lives, diet, and work schedules.

Short Bits

It seems to me, after re-reading the fascinating Comments on my last post, that the time is ripe for us to talk about dreams. While I’m working up an introductory post on dreams, here are a couple of quotes I like, along with a few remarks. As far as dreams are concerned, I’m really looking forward to hearing from readers, and so I want to make it clear that I have in mind dreams which are of interest for any reason, and not just dreams that foretell the future.



"Be kind, for everyone you meet is fighting a great battle."

Philo of Alexandria

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“To go out searching for God is like searching for an ox while riding on the ox.”

One form of a Zen saying.
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Years of treating disease in the human body left Dr. Sherwin Nuland in awe of the fact that health is the norm rather the exception. He said that knowing that so much can go wrong has given him a tremendous respect for all that goes right, moment to moment.

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“Creeds and doctrines at best point us to God. They never capture God. That is why I believe that religion must always fade into mysticism. It must move beyond creeds, beyond certainty and finally beyond words. That is not an easy realization for many who use religion as a security system and who need certainty for security's sake and who always turn religion into idolatry.”

John Shelby Spong

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“It must move beyond creeds . . . and finally beyond words.” I often ask myself why, when I know very well that words are a hindrance to illumination and intuition, I engage every day in an activity which is all words? Does my blogging in FLIGHTS OF PEGASUS obscure reality instead of helping reveal it? Wouldn’t I be better off just looking at a flower? The best excuse I can think of – other than pleading guilty to an addiction to writing as an escape from the Real – is that words are for communication with other people, and that perhaps I can participate in creating (to use an image from Eckhart Tolle and Bishop Spong) signposts that point in helpful directions.

Losing the Chains

The following is from an emailed brochure I received from the College of Metaphysical Studies, Clearwater, Florida. I am unfamiliar with the College of Metaphysical Studies, and I’m skeptical of places with names like that, but I enjoyed the title and description of this course:

"RELIGION – THE CULTURAL BASIS FOR STUPIDITY (CT-109/1.0 CH): Starting Monday, January 22. Instructor is Dr. Paul F. Daniele. As a cultural constant, stupidity is routinely transmitted from one generation to the next by the time-honored mechanism of the vicious cycle. Poorly adjusted children mature into maladjusted adults, and then using the same techniques their parents used on them to raise yet another generation of misinformed conformists or malcontented sociopaths. If there is some selection pressure acting to weed stupidity out of each generation, it is, apparently, easily offset by a willing disposition of people to spread it and encourage its continual, spontaneous synthesis."

There’s no doubt that one of the most difficult things facing any individual is to break the vicious cycle of “stupidity” (ignorance, second-hand beliefs) and to find some footing beyond what was passed down by previous generations.

We all know that we are victims of negative ideas about ourselves and the world which we gleaned from the words and example of those who raised and taught us. Probably the most difficult thing in my life has been to shake off such ideas, especially after experience reinforced some of them, even though my parents were very well-meaning and provided what most would consider an unusually benign environment. While I complain about my father’s negative attitudes and the contagious insanity of the Bible according to the Baptists, there very well may be something in me, in my genes, in my other lives, which made me inclined to accumulate negative thoughts in childhood and adolescence.

Environment is not a good predictive factor. One of the things which makes humans so unpredictable is that of two brothers raised in the same circumstances by the same parents – say in a slum – one will blame his endless failures and degeneracy on his environment, while his brother will become a dynamic and creative “success”, which he credits to the stimulation of rebelling against the same circumstances which crushed his brother.

If there were one way I could choose to help other people, it would be to give them a key to freeing themselves from the bondage of their pasts. I haven’t been granted that key. All I can say is that rather than giving in to severe defeatist notions (some of which I creatively invented for myself), I was driven on by desire and enthusiasm and ambition, so that I was never willing to accept the deprivations that surrender would have brought.

The only method of solution I can offer to anyone, based on personal experience, is to keep trying and trying and trying, and although many years of effort may be required, some freedom from the past is gradually achieved.

I was helped not only by luck and a strong life force, but by books such as PSYCHO-CYBERNETICS, by Dr. Maxwell Maltz, a plastic surgeon who realized that the self-image held by his patients was more important than their physical appearance. CREATIVE VISUALIZATION, by Shakti Gawain, while not dealing particularly with freeing oneself from the past, was a great help to me, showing the power of imagination and will to bring the results one wants.

I realize that “self-help” books offer no magical cure, and that currently popular authors like Chopra and Wayne Dyer have supplanted those who first helped me, but there is only a small core of truths, and it emerges repetitiously, with minor variations, generation after generation. There is never a time when the “self help” sections of the bookstores don’t carry the same old ideas wearing new cosmetics.

From the 1920’s my mother remembered Emile Coue, of “Every day, in every way, I’m getting better and better” fame – and I saw it pop up in a new incarnation in the Silva Method. I scoffed at Norman Vincent Peale, but some of the same core of truths made THE POWER OF POSITIVE THINKING a best-seller as did Napoleon Hill’s staple of comic book advertising –THINK AND GROW RICH. Say what you will about those messages being simplistic, I think that over a long time they had the cumulative effect of eroding stones that kept my river from flowing.

And the truth about consciousness and Self, as far as we humans can know it, IS simple. . . maybe because we’re capable of grasping so little. The best book I’ve ever read on consciousness and self-transformation is THE POWER OF NOW, by Eckhart Tolle, and his message is so simple that I suspect he had trouble filling a whole book . . . and what he has written and spoken since then is essentially a repetition of what he said in the first place. Rather than a criticism, this is actually a tribute.