Separating God and Religion.

An ex-neighbour of mine once asked me to talk to her about religion because, she said, she wanted to ‘find a faith.’ Well now, the concept of ‘finding’ a faith raises serious considerations of its own, but that can be left to another time. What interests me for present purposes is the fact that I thought about her request this morning (heaven knows why) and I was suddenly struck by a notion of no known provenance:

God and religion are not inseparable. Neither needs the other.

Since I wasn’t at all sure that I’d originated this notion, I thought it would be fun to examine the concept and see whether I could make sense of it. This is what I’ve come up with so far:

Religions have two functions. The first is to address a fundamental suspicion (for which read ‘belief’) that material reality is only one part of a wider span of existence, and that the human animal, at least, contains an invisible presence which is capable of experiencing the wider reality. Further, that this invisible reality, usually referred to as the soul, continues to exist and be sentient after the material body has ceased to function. I see no reason to have a God as part of that function, and indeed Buddhism doesn’t include one.

But religions are also systems of life management, and I think we can be fairly sure that they were formulated by humans in far off times as a way of providing structure and stability to ancient civilisations. I’m prepared to accept that the sages who devised the systems might well have had a level of knowledge which later generations lost, but it doesn’t alter the fact that the systems themselves were man-made. (‘Man’ being non-gender specific, of course.) And so the rules and the protocols and the practices were laid down and the less enlightened beings who formed the majority of the population learned to follow them slavishly.

But in order to have sufficient authority, these systems needed a distant and all-powerful chief who was omnipresent, omniscient, omnipotent, indefatigable, and unquenchable. In other words, the ultimate embodiment of the supreme leader whose will was absolute and could not be challenged. And this is where it gets interesting.

I suspect that the early sages were aware of the notion that reality was created by some supreme, unfathomable intelligence who (or which, if you prefer) decided one day to create light, sound, and the energy on which to build individualised expressions of itself (I gather that ancient Hindu scriptures referred to what we now call sub atomic particles thousands of years before modern science discovered them, and their creation ‘myth’ is much closer to the view of Universal Consciousness than people are routinely taught today, at least in the exoteric Judaic tradition to which we in the west have become habituated.) And so they would have held the view that every fragment of material reality was a fragment of the creator who created it in order to observe itself. So I am part of God, you are part of God, every tree, every stone, every animal, every blade of grass, is part of God. Forget the ‘transcendent’ in ‘Immanent and Transcendent’. God is not a separate being, but rather we are God, all of us right down to the tiniest grain of sand on Blackpool beach. The ancient sages probably saw it that way.

But this didn’t quite fit certain practical considerations with regard to the mass of the great unwashed who simply wanted to know the best way of killing a mastodon and a reason not to fear death while making the attempt. And so they encouraged the notion that up there somewhere was a divine and all powerful being who watched and made rules and judged and punished the transgressor and rewarded the virtuous and demanded to be worshipped unquestioningly. And they gave It a name which varies from tradition to tradition. And when the time came to fight wars and grab land, this supreme and separate being was the ultimate in convenient scapegoats. Do whatever you want to suit the exigencies of the tribe, no matter what level of depravity, cruelty, and abuse may thus be occasioned, and justify it on the grounds that you are acting in accordance with God’s will. And that, it appears to me, is a major component of what religion has become. It’s evident that such an organisation needs no concept in God, only a convenient, conditioned belief in such a being.

(And if you choose to believe that the earth was seeded by beings created by a superior race of aliens, the argument still holds because the aliens are also fragments of It.)

And I’m sure I’m saying nothing entirely new here, but it’s as far as I’ve got off he top of my head.

Does that explain the sudden thought that God and religion are not mutually inclusive? I have no idea. It’s just a ramble that spilled out of my ageing brain, and I’m sure it doesn’t matter a jot what I think anyway.

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I’m a tiny bit preoccupied at the moment, having just read that David Lynch died today. I think I would have liked to know him.