THINKING ABOUT RELIGION & GOD

THINKING ABOUT RELIGION & GOD

JAMES R. FISHER, JR., Ph.D.
© June 2007

“Men will wrangle for religion; write for it; fight for it; die for it; anything but live for it.”

Caleb C. Colton (1780 – 1832), English clergyman


My da once told me when I was a boy to never get embroiled in a discussion of politics, religion or race, and he was Irish, which makes this suggestion an oxymoron.

In a way, religion embraces everything including politics and race.

Religion has succeeded, for example, to generate selective forgetting by insisting on its territorial imperatives. How else can we explain the thousands of religions and the hundreds of dominations. Yet, the fact remains there is but one race, and that is the human race.

No other race exists except in the mind, which is the playground of religion.

Religion throughout our Western history has displayed the full range of human emotion from the sublime to subterranean.

Dante showed great skill in this with his "Divine Comedy." He found himself lost in dark and frightening woods, and as he was trying to regain his path, he came to a mountain, which he decided to climb in order to get his bearings. Strange beasts blocked his way, and he was forced back to the plain. As he was bemoaning his fate, the poet Virgil appeared and offered to conduct Dante through Hell, Purgatory, and blissful Paradise.

This is all like a dream, and it might well have come to Dante as such, along with his Beatrice, the soul of his beloved.

Beatrice is more prominent in a less well known work of Dante's, "The Vita Nuova" (the new life). This work is a celebration in prose and poetry of the great poet's love for Beatrice Portinari.

When Dante first saw Beatrice he was nine and she was eight. He was so affected by the sight of her that his "vital spirit" trembled, his "animal spirit" was amazed, and his "natural spirit" wept. He was in love, and to know love as love was meant to be known.

Notice that love, even in the very young, embodies life, instinct and lust, all essential components in the heart of man that give expression to his humanity.

If you read the definitions of religion in the dictionary, you discover the seeds of the problem immediately.

Religion is defined as "the state of a religious; the service and worship of God or the supernatural, commitment and devotion to religious faith or observance, a personal or institutional system of religious attitudes, beliefs, practices, or scrupulous conformity to a system of beliefs held to with ardor and faith."

Dante (1265 - 1321) was fighting through this narrow view of religion in the dawn of the Renaissance, long before the Medici’s and Michelangelo and da Vinci would take on prominence.

The foundation of the early Christian Church was by such Church Fathers as Tertullian (160 - 220). He was a harsh theologian whose influence was demonstrated centuries later with "The Inquisition." He ranted against heathens and Jews, and heretics while championing asceticism. No one was a greater influence between Saint Paul and Saint Augustine, as his rigors proved endemic to Latinity followers for centuries.

Somewhat later, Saint Benedict (480 - 550) came along. Benedict had an outlook characterized by prudence and moderation in a framework of authority, obedience, austerity, stability and community. His product was the domestic life, which, obviously, was common to few but still influenced many.

This gentle saint had a rather harsh view of married love. If the "husband was transported by immoderate love, his intercourse with his wife so ardently in passion would be a sin."

James Cleugh studied the impact of this psychology in his book "Love Locked Out: A Survey of Love, License and Restriction in the Middle Ages" (1970).

The startling nature of this study is that the source of many problems of the twenty-first century life appears through the lens of this period of repression, suppression, suspicion, and guilt that were being programmed into the religion of Western man.

This psychosexual obsession with "locked out love" has had aberrant manifestation in scandal after scandal with the contemporary clergy. As Cleugh points out, it "gave birth to pornography in the middle ages."

Cleugh sites that unnatural fear of the natural has festered like a cultural plague throughout the ages.

Saint Benedict's aversion to sexual love was an invitation to make it an obsession. Love is the diet of the mind as food is diet to the body.

Obsession is fed by the perversion of the natural object be it of food or sex, or, indeed, of religion.

Society, for one, has become obsessed with obesity. It hasn't reduced obesity but increased it. At the same time, placing society on a diet has created a multibillion-dollar industry, which is constantly being replenished by the turnstile of recidivism. People today think constantly about food. It has become the narcotic of the pathology of normalcy and its bi-product is a bloated culture.

When you force people to stop smoking, all they think about are cigarettes. It is like an inverted chemical equation -- always getting the opposite reaction of what is desired or expected.

So, as Cleugh points out, if you tell people they can't have sex, or that they shouldn't enjoy sex, or thinking about sex is not healthy, then they are going to be obsessed with sex, when sex in the most active members of society in chronological time is fleeting at best.

It is psychological time that is the killer. Obsession is fueled by psychological time.

The irony is that if you choose to be master of psychological time, then you eat to live rather than live to eat, and you quit smoking "cold turkey." No drugs, no patches, no diets, no gurus. And sex emanates naturally from romantic to physical love and is expressed in other ways such as a look, a touch, or a caring remark.

Young males believe there is something wrong with them if they are not obsessed with sex, and girls think there is something wrong with them if someone is not hitting on them constantly. It is a double bind that has created a whole new industry of gurus that pander to these obsessions.

Men of the cloth have taken a back-seat to the shock jocks of radio and television, and the pop artist that weave sexual themes into their lyrics often of a barbaric nature. Then there are those "doctors of this and that" who probe willing psyches on the tube, persons who appear to have little clue they are being used and exploited if not abused, reminiscent of obsessed clerics of the past.

These new advisers, often rich and famous, have been given the power by a passive society to tell them how to run their sex, personal and dietary lives, only to exacerbate their problems and fuel their turmoil.

When the natural becomes unnatural, when the pathological becomes the norm, the other side of religion surfaces and dominates. The spirit is driven out of religion and it becomes a shell game.

Religion is not a church but a mindset and as such, it can be engaging or cruel, reassuring or defeating.

Madonna knows this and has used religion to exploit the popular mania, as have sex clubs, the phone sex and pornography industry, and now the Internet. Still, the answer is not to restrict these ventures under rights provided by the first amendment of the United States Constitution. The answer, it seems to me, is to allow young people to experience their religious education, entertaining their doubts in a safety zone of trust where they can discover for themselves what is relevant and what is not.

Children are not own by their parents but only pass through them. It is however an equal problem when children own their parents.

Unrealistic, you say? I don't think so. We are moving into a truly multicultural society in which fences and walls, psychological and physical barriers cannot hold back what Alvin Toffler called "the Third Wave." Toffler envisions a gyrating economy, a "blip culture," the post-nuclear family, the "electronic cottage," the stripping away of the nation-state, and the shift in politics from totalitarian to twenty-first century democracies.

Toffler is a mechanic. He thinks like a mechanic, and sees the future in mechanistic terms with more sophisticated "Machine Age" thinking.

But such thinking is still geared to a "machine age" focus and projection. We have left the Machine Age even if we don't know it. Were all these things Toffler envisions to take place, there would still remain the problem of cultural man and entropic spirit.

He is part of the organic landscape every bit as much as other plants and animals, and is not the master of nature but simply a factor in nature, subject to its laws and limitations. Thus far his intelligence has failed to make this connection.

At the heart of culture is language and religion, and at the heart of language and religion is man with a capacity to love and an inclination to hate, a lust for power and a fear of death. This will not change as man has not changed in tens of thousands of years.

Religion has always been a vehicle for man to run away from life and nature and into what is often called "God." God exists but in the heart of man, not outside of him. As soon as we separate God from man, we run into all these obsessions, all these religions that separate man-from-man and man from himself, which are founded in fear, not in trust, and are devoid of spiritual connection with all of life.

We have been stuck a long time in this "Sensate Culture" that Pitrim Sorokin wrote so eloquently about. Sorokin even predicted more than 70 years ago that we would become obsessed with sex in the dying Sensate, and that the church and religious would lose their way. I don't expect to be around for "the coming Ideational culture of the creative tomorrow," which may take a hundred or two hundred years to become truly established. But it will come. Tensions now are but signs of the restless spirit for embracing it.

That said man is not patient and he forgets that a habit of a lifetime, say smoking or eating too much, or insisting on believing "this or that" cannot be precipitously changed with a patch, a diet, or a new messiah. Man is stuck with himself on this small planet, which is shrinking all the time, so he had better get used to sharing toothpaste with the neighbor next door who looks and speaks and thinks differently than he does. Religion, after all, is of the mind but affects the body. It has always been so and it will always be so.

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Note: Themes such as this are perused in my new book A LOOK BACK TO SEE AHEAD (AuthorHouse 2007).