WONDERING ABOUT FORMAL RELIGION

WONDERING ABOUT FORMAL RELIGIONS

James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© November 27, 2010

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Not long ago, BB and I were having breakfast at the Village Inn in Tampa (Florida). The waiter noticed I had a copy of a book. It was “The Prophet” by Kahlil Gibran.

Gibran was a Lebanonese-American that lived many years in the United States, and wrote and illustrated his books with compelling almost ghostly like figures. He had studied in Paris, and had been mentored by the sculptor Auguste Rodin, famous for his sculpture of "The Thinker.”

“The Prophet” was first published in 1923 to a tepid critical recession but the book took hold in the 1960s during the counterculture revolution in the United States. This was more than thirty years after the author’s death. I’ve read some twenty books by the author first discovering him in 1969 when I returned from South Africa.

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Gibran must have been popular with Ted Sorensen, writer for President John F. Kennedy, as he borrowed Gibran’s quote to his Labonese people, “Ask not what your country can do for you, but what you can do for your country.”

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“The Prophet” has never been out of print, while Gibran is the third best selling poet of all times, behind Shakespeare and Lao-Tzu, although you are not likely to find him in most biographical encyclopedias. Go figure.

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In any case, the waiter was quite exercised that I had a book with a ghostly image of a man on the cover with the title, “The Prophet.” He considered it was blasphemy of his religion. I gave the young man the brief history of the book that I’ve shared with you here, and managed to calm him down before he did something stupid. I had not known when I entered the restaurant that a Muslim group had purchased the franchise nor did I anticipate that a book would have such a reaction. But I assure you it did.

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Then I read in the St. Petersburg Times (November 26, 2010) that Asia Bibi in Karachi, Pakistan has been sentenced to die for insulting Islam. Bibi, who is a Christian, as was Gibran, has already been in prison for 17 months because Muslim women in her village accused her of speaking ill of the prophet Mohammed.

Others have been so accused and given a similar death sentence in Pakistan, but none has been executed according to government officials.

Gibran, who is often quoted, said, “Yesterday we obeyed kings and bent our necks before emperors. But today we kneel only before the truth.” If it were only so. Gibran didn’t live long enough to see the nightmare of religious strife in the late twentieth and early twenty-first century.

Of course, Christianity cannot take a seat in the bleachers to this religious strife by pointing an accusatory finger. There were terrible scourges in early American history including the Salem trials of Massachusetts. Then there is the Roman Catholic Inquisition of the twelfth and thirteenth century. Practically every religion on earth has punished non-believers within its cultural sphere with the possible exception of the Buddhists.

With the Inquisition, many were burned at the stake, perhaps the most famous being Joan of Arc in 1431 at the age of nineteen. Later in the fifteenth century, the Spanish Inquisition was established with its particular house of horrors for those accused of heresy to ensure orthodoxy. Moslems and Jews, who failed to convert to Christianity, were forced to leave the country.

So, Christians cannot look at what is happening in the Moslem world today and shake a finger. Christianity has blood on its hands, as does any religion that puts power and politics above human freedom and decency, and its stated mission of love.

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Some writers to this blog have a problem understanding my approach to religion, asking if I am a Christian, do I believe in God, or what? I’ll admit here that I haven’t replied to these queries because I don’t think what I believe is relevant to the understanding of what and why they believe and behave as they do. True, I am a provocateur recording my wonderings for public consumption, debate and discourse. But I have no answers for anyone.

I will say this I do wonder what the world would be like if there were no discrete formal religions or ideologies. That is not meant to imply that I am selling the idea of a Universal Mind, God, or Universal Intelligence. I think stories in various religions are quite beautiful and appropriate to human conduct and our spiritual temperament. But there is too much we against them in all faiths, and all denominations of all faiths for my comfort.

It doesn’t seem especially charitable to judge then ostracize, demote, or punish someone who thinks or believes differently than you do. I’ve seen incompetent people go up the organizational tree primarily on the basis of this pyramid climbing technique.

Nor do I believe in proselytizing faiths, and that includes Christianity. Nor do I think Europeans with their Christian culture did native North, Central, South and Caribbean aborigines any favors by converting them to the Christian religion at the expense of their indigenous religions and cultures.

What I see happening today is natural law invading social behavior across continents and cultures. Eons ago, people didn’t realize how closely they were connected. They took comfort and shelter in sets of mythological ideas that held them together and gave them courage to go forward. Today, thanks to technology, with all that I despise about its first iterations of excess, we have no other option than to come to an understanding and acceptance of people of difference.

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When I was a boy, there was a family in the neighborhood that was given no respect. The family was ignored like carriers of an untreatable disease. The family was in the community but not of it. Rather than accept its predicament, it drew attention to itself acting more and more bizarre.

Fifty years later, I was interviewing two members of this family for a book I was writing about life in the community in the 1940s. The wound of those earlier times was still apparent. “Why are you speaking to us now when you never spoke to us once when we were kids?”

The question surprised me. I sat there stupidly in silence. “All we wanted was a little respect. Was that asking too much?”

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Respect is a spiritual food that quiets the soul and turns the mind to constructive as opposed to destructive avenues of expression. The problems throughout the world are a matter of power and politics, but behind those motivations are the water and oil of fear and disrespect. Nations behave like individuals when it comes down to core values. Religions rose out of the theatre of fear as a means to give spiritual direction to the soul. Now, they are often the cause of the perturbations. The best evidence is not only human conflagrations across the globe but evidence of our dying planet.

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