I was raised without religion (technically), until I was 13. I call it technically because whenever we would visit a grandparent, we (my sister and I, not my parents) would attend church with that grandparent. One side was Methodist and one side was Southern Baptist. I could not fathom how the same book could be interpreted in two such opposite ways. One side was bright, joyful, and appreciative and as long as you gave your tithe you could do just about anything. The other was dark and full of certainty that regardless of what good you had done or what bad you had not done, you were an evil sinner and sure to bun in hell, ultimately unworthy of God’s love.
I saw such hypocrisy – preaching love and caring for your neighbor but in words and actions outside of church they could be so spiteful, negative and hateful, even at times within the same sermon.
Today, I look across the world and see religion used to justify acts of hate, love and anything between. Anything you can think of can be justified and equally condemned by your religion. The other day, I saw an article about Buddhist monks loudly advocating violence. WTF?!?! I went back through the Dhammapada and it seems pretty clearly against violence to me, but under the auspices of kill or be killed, what does one choose? Sean Carter (AKA Jay-Z) said it best… “They say an eye for an eye, we both lose our sight. And two wrongs don’t make a right. But when you’ve been wronged, and you know all along that it’s just one life, at what point does one fight?” On the other hand, they are Buddhist so they have many lives, right?
Religion is a form of ideology and along with social and political beliefs forms the ideology that we (in stage 5) use to define ourselves. The point of having an ideology is to help us prioritize our needs among the needs of others. It may be family first, then fellow church-goers, and never mind those liberals, etc. We use our ideology more to JUSTIFY how we prioritize our needs and the needs of others, rather than to tell us what to do. Overall, ideology exists to JUSTIFY how we behave, more than it TELLS us how to behave “properly”. You can argue that many religious texts do tell you how to behave properly but I can show you how the same text suggests the opposite (or at least justifies it).
And that is why I can tend to feel some discomfort and periodic rejection of religion. But at the same time I am drawn to the comforting idea that maybe, somewhere in these many books of wisdom are all the answers. They are there, for sure, buried under layers of historical context. If you recognize and excuse the historical context for what it is, you can see the truth at the heart of each and it is the same. Have you found it?
