The Peripatetic Philosopher reflects:

Spirituality & Religion

Is there any connection?

James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.

June 1, 2017

TO BE NOTED:

This is a nondenominational attempt to answer a legitimate question from a reader who is inclined to ask very legitimate questions as an honest reflection of his concerns.  I was reared a rather strict  Irish Roman Catholic, which remains the foundation of my philosophical perspective.  I also am a Christian because that is the belief system that has supported that perspective and given meaning to my life.  And I believe in God because I need that connection with the unknown and unknowable as a way to render my life with some meaning.  Like the writer of this question, I have no trouble with those who differ with me as they are armies within and outside of my professed beliefs.  Moreover, I believe Jesus lived, died on the Cross, but beyond that -- although a Christian in mind -- I cannot get my arms around his deification.  That said I believe Jesus was close to the perfect man and often I have attempted without success to write my "Jesus Story."  I believe in history, and he is one of the lights of that history.

James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D. 

A READER WRITES:

I don’t think spirituality has anything to do with organized religion.  People participate in religious for multiple reasons but from what I can see no matter how intelligent they are or not, they accept the behavior of a god that none of or at least most of humanity would find reprehensible in a human being.  

I have said this before: Hitler was responsible for the death of six million Jews, Stalin was supposedly responsible for 20 million deaths and Moa for 30 million, and I don’t think most people hold these individual in high esteem.  

But the god of the Christians wants to be worshiped and glorified, but if you don’t believe that the human sacrifice he required was necessary, you will be condemn to hell for all eternity which if you believe that you believe in something worse than the holocaust.  

I mean he didn’t like the way humans were behaving so he destroyed them all, but apparently he was not aware of genetics because he saved a family that then supposedly repopulated the earth.

Then you have the Muslims.  I tried to read the Koran twice after 9/11, but both times I did not get past page 89 because that book beats the Old Testament with constant anger of the Muslim god.  They too believe that anyone who does not accept their way will go to hell.  And yet people talk about the god from the Middle East as a god of love. 

The same reason that many people join churches is the same reason people joined the Communist party or the Nazi party or any other group like political parties. 

And as I have said before: I don’t care what people believe in as long as they don’t try to force it on the rest of us.  Also, I don’t think a god is necessary so that people will behave.  Even crooks have been known to go to church.

K

DR. FISHER RESPONDS:

Dear K:

Since the shaman, the unknown as well as the unknowable has troubled the human mind as anthropologist point out.

Man has consciousness, but not all men embrace that consciousness.  The majority, since early man, as scholars would suggest, retreat from its demands into terror and fear, and now more recently into anxiety and paranoia; and yes, out of ignorance, but also out of a failure of imagination and self-containment, looking for assurance, for escape from the demands of self-responsibility to some source that would allow them a modicum of safety.

The early shaman provided that using his imagination along with his critical observation of repeated phenomenon disturbing to the many; phenomenon that constantly were repeated but did not destroy, such as the light of day and the dark of night; the thunder and lightning and the cascading rains.  It must have been more difficult for the shaman with tornadoes, floods, mud slides and hurricanes where likely life and death situations were part of the phenomenon. 

Since he stayed calm in such circumstances, finding it was a way to establish his power, he was likely to invent stories to explain the boiling sun of summer and the frigid cold of winter.  The point is people came to look on the shaman as “the” authority figure instead of on themselves for perceiving what the shaman perceived and what they could not perceive; to understand and to explain what forever a mystery remained. 

People, to this day, look for answers from specialists, experts, people with credentials, people who purport to be in the know when it comes to phenomena they choose to think that exists beyond the pale. 

The prophets of the Old Testament were like other men, not gods, fallible men and that includes Moses who metaphorically parted the waters of the sea to lead his people back into the Holy Land. 

The prophets, like the shaman, were story tellers, and they embellished their stories to establish moral and immortal significance, but they were stories by men for men, and if you want to say they were divinely inspired stories, they share that same territorial imperative with the shaman.  This does not make these stories less significant; in fact, it establishes the significance of the stories as guiding commentary to life worth living.

The Bible – the New Testament and Old Testament – like all Great Books of spiritual meme, are embellished to provide a message.  These stories still resonate today because as sophisticated as modern man appears on the outside, he remains a common but troubled soul on the inside and very much kin to the people of the ancient prophets and disciples of the two great religions of Judaism and Christianity. 

Islam is an equally great religion but established by a soldier and a conqueror in Mohamed who saw to it that the Koran had that flavor and perspective of a soldier, but with stories and messages to give his people hope, identity, courage and resolve to, incidentally, follow the same God worshiped by Jews and Christians.  

Islam of the three faiths is the most recent, and the Islam wars between Shiites and Sunnis that are terribly violent today have much in common with the wars of the other two faiths more in the past.

The Manichean contrast between intent and bellicose is a gap filled by the spiritual in all three faiths, imperfectly so, as all three are inventions of fallible man.

Organized religion – beyond its rites, rituals and pageantry – is simply the granddaddy of the shaman, the prophets, the disciples and the caliphates. 

Organized religion is the home where doubt is assuaged with hope; and where hope resides in the sanctuary of the spiritual state; and where God is an idea that man is still attempting to understand in terms of a Universal All-Knowing Mind that can act as critical and/or nurturing parent to man in his conscious wonder.   

Organized religion be it Christian, Judaic or Islam is the sanctuary of spirituality and the place of affirmation of the sanctity of the human soul so that man behaves a little better than an instinctive beast. 

Organized religion exists because most men need a place to affirm the meaning of their existence – not all men, but most men – because otherwise life would be meaningless. 

Organized religion, like man himself who is its inventor, is flawed and only too human. 

Organized religion pulsates with the highs and lows; the contrasts and contradictions; the esteem and shame of man as it remains the custodian of that which man believes sacred, which is human life, and what gives that life meaning, which is the citadel of the human spirit. 

Organized religion as custodian of that sanctuary cannot help itself but be involved in the crafting of elaborate belief systems as well as confining dogmas.  These propensities are as human as man is to himself. 

Were man ever to get beyond his doubt, religion might not be necessary, but my sense is that such optimism is unlikely because man seems to be more stirred if not obsessed with his dystopia.