Atlas
19th January 2005, 12:56 PM
This is one of periodic looks back at the influence that religion and god have had in my life. I like having the forum in which to vent these thoughts. I find that doing so and responding to the ideas of others is illuminating. I invite all comment.
I was born in 1952 and I grew up in a large family, if 12 kids seems large to any of you. Often that means growing up on a farm but not so with us, I grew up in small towns of between 1000 and 2000 people. By most measures you would have included us in your definition of poor folks. When I was old enough I got to be an altar boy, I loved it and often served mass during weekday services when there were maybe 6 people in attendance. I pretty much knew I'd grow up to be a priest. I felt that way up until about 15.
I mention this because of the elevating influence religion brings to the poor. The poor pay big time for this entertainment but often it's the only show they can afford. They do seem to get alot out of it. I know I did.
I had a particularly scary experience in the Navy that turned me back toward god. Not the Catholic god either. The Protestant god. For this god the Bible was required reading. And even though there was the same old familiar eternal hellfire of anguish and torment, among the motley crew of believers there was a rich participation in something we called the love of Jesus.
I actually credit the experience with awakening aspects of my "self" to love in general. After I got out of the Navy and went to college and met my future wife I was much more prepared for the emotional and intellectual complexities of human love. Human contact in my family was seldom about hugs, it was about slugs. Oh sure, when my aunts visited we had to line up for uncomfortable hugs and sloppy kisses. To us, it was all pretty icky.
I mention this because of the elevating influence this religion brings to the emotionally stunted.
Some of you who have read my previous musings on the subject and nature of God know that my middle way approach grants God existence, not as any oversoul or inner soul, but as a human feeling. The intellectual approach to god is a walk though convoluted dilemmas. But anyone, at any age or religion, can be captured by the feeling.
Apart from the value I found there was a price. Fealty to whichever idea of god is real to the mind. It can be old testament, fire and brimstone, or the baby Jesus and all encompassing love - or anything in between.
There have been some excellent threads on the tsunami and a very interesting thread (http://forums.randi.org/showthread.php?s=&threadid=51295) started by a new member, Winterfrost, that offers among other things a little insight into the minds of a parent and of an 8 year old on how god and religion invade and affect one's life.
It occurs to me that I have been at odds with myself. The elevating feelings of life were first presented to me through my association with the church. Our church was ornate and it was inspiring. The services were in Latin and there was a mystery about them and the choir was obviously supervised and recruited by someone who cared. For a poor kid there was a lot of human art there that I attributed directly to god. Kneeling before the statue of Mary holding the baby Jesus and smiling down on me was not just a feeling experience but an intellectual contemplation engendering a desire to do good. I think if I were a parent I'd want my child engaged in some activity that made them engage in a similar contemplation. What that would be I don't know.
The problem for me was never the positive feelings and thoughts that were engendered by the religion. It was in how to deal with the lie. Fortunately, I never heard of pedophile priests until I was much older. But people I knew were drunks or violent or unJesuslike in other ways were more regular church goers than many good people. What was the deal with saying you believe one thing but living your life the opposite?
The other problem was Hell. It made some sense growing up under the discipline of my Father. Ultimate authority is capricious and given to fits. The punishment of Kings is something that small minds cannot understand but probably deserve.
Escape from the thought of hell was the most difficult and most liberating aspect of my flight from religion. If there wasn't enough reason for fearing death Hell filled any gaps and then multiplied the fear a million times. It was in a sense debilitating. My Dad would on occasion wail on us kids with his belt. With 12 kids a bit of that kind of discipline went a long way. He could merely stand over us threateningly with his hand on his belt and we got the message. We slinked and cowered. Hell is a similar control mechanism for a threatening god. After wailing on us with earthquakes and tsunamis we know the threat of Hell is real and something we should be expecting from the god who watches us.
Fealty to the idea of god was the next most difficult escape. Why this god and not that god? Why not Odin and Thor or Chronos and Zeus? Even as I tried to tell myself that Hell was merely a control mechanism for the masses under a religion I still had the concept of the trinity. A creator who stood apart from creation, a holy spirit that permeated creation, and a human component to the deity that insured that god understood my plight. It was as reassuring as it was illogical.
Escape from that idea has led me from Zen to Deism to this "Experiential Deism" where the reality of God is really the set of human feelings that combine into that which constitutes proof of god to religionists.
This long arc of which I've described in terms of value, price and escape leaves me free. The cost is gone. The value is retained. It was, is, and remains a set of elevating feelings that I've chosen to nurture. Fighting the intellectual illogic of God was suppressing. Realizing that God is in no way an intellectual apprehension helps to appreciate how God is held by the masses. It helps to appreciate the magnitude of the problem as well in the fight for the minds of those locked in fealty to their idea which has been foisted on them by the clever manipulations of their feelings.
The mind deserves to be set free from the imaginary controller of lives and from ideas of eternal suffering. The self deserves to be uplifted by appreciation of the elevating emotions, love and joy and peace and others. Our awareness must be informed enough to recognize that this land we live in is at once a garden of Eden and is encircled by prowling wolves. That is, life is beautiful but threats to it remain all around us. Many are natural, many are human, many are of our own making. No deity will step in and save us. But we can appreciate the ideal with both heart and mind. Using the terms of god and soul should not require us to automatically raise the barriers we've constructed against those ideas. As shapeless emotions they can be keys to self illumination. I rebel though once religion tries to force fit its meaning of those terms and its controlling influence onto the minds of the credulous.
I was born in 1952 and I grew up in a large family, if 12 kids seems large to any of you. Often that means growing up on a farm but not so with us, I grew up in small towns of between 1000 and 2000 people. By most measures you would have included us in your definition of poor folks. When I was old enough I got to be an altar boy, I loved it and often served mass during weekday services when there were maybe 6 people in attendance. I pretty much knew I'd grow up to be a priest. I felt that way up until about 15.
I mention this because of the elevating influence religion brings to the poor. The poor pay big time for this entertainment but often it's the only show they can afford. They do seem to get alot out of it. I know I did.
I had a particularly scary experience in the Navy that turned me back toward god. Not the Catholic god either. The Protestant god. For this god the Bible was required reading. And even though there was the same old familiar eternal hellfire of anguish and torment, among the motley crew of believers there was a rich participation in something we called the love of Jesus.
I actually credit the experience with awakening aspects of my "self" to love in general. After I got out of the Navy and went to college and met my future wife I was much more prepared for the emotional and intellectual complexities of human love. Human contact in my family was seldom about hugs, it was about slugs. Oh sure, when my aunts visited we had to line up for uncomfortable hugs and sloppy kisses. To us, it was all pretty icky.
I mention this because of the elevating influence this religion brings to the emotionally stunted.
Some of you who have read my previous musings on the subject and nature of God know that my middle way approach grants God existence, not as any oversoul or inner soul, but as a human feeling. The intellectual approach to god is a walk though convoluted dilemmas. But anyone, at any age or religion, can be captured by the feeling.
Apart from the value I found there was a price. Fealty to whichever idea of god is real to the mind. It can be old testament, fire and brimstone, or the baby Jesus and all encompassing love - or anything in between.
There have been some excellent threads on the tsunami and a very interesting thread (http://forums.randi.org/showthread.php?s=&threadid=51295) started by a new member, Winterfrost, that offers among other things a little insight into the minds of a parent and of an 8 year old on how god and religion invade and affect one's life.
It occurs to me that I have been at odds with myself. The elevating feelings of life were first presented to me through my association with the church. Our church was ornate and it was inspiring. The services were in Latin and there was a mystery about them and the choir was obviously supervised and recruited by someone who cared. For a poor kid there was a lot of human art there that I attributed directly to god. Kneeling before the statue of Mary holding the baby Jesus and smiling down on me was not just a feeling experience but an intellectual contemplation engendering a desire to do good. I think if I were a parent I'd want my child engaged in some activity that made them engage in a similar contemplation. What that would be I don't know.
The problem for me was never the positive feelings and thoughts that were engendered by the religion. It was in how to deal with the lie. Fortunately, I never heard of pedophile priests until I was much older. But people I knew were drunks or violent or unJesuslike in other ways were more regular church goers than many good people. What was the deal with saying you believe one thing but living your life the opposite?
The other problem was Hell. It made some sense growing up under the discipline of my Father. Ultimate authority is capricious and given to fits. The punishment of Kings is something that small minds cannot understand but probably deserve.
Escape from the thought of hell was the most difficult and most liberating aspect of my flight from religion. If there wasn't enough reason for fearing death Hell filled any gaps and then multiplied the fear a million times. It was in a sense debilitating. My Dad would on occasion wail on us kids with his belt. With 12 kids a bit of that kind of discipline went a long way. He could merely stand over us threateningly with his hand on his belt and we got the message. We slinked and cowered. Hell is a similar control mechanism for a threatening god. After wailing on us with earthquakes and tsunamis we know the threat of Hell is real and something we should be expecting from the god who watches us.
Fealty to the idea of god was the next most difficult escape. Why this god and not that god? Why not Odin and Thor or Chronos and Zeus? Even as I tried to tell myself that Hell was merely a control mechanism for the masses under a religion I still had the concept of the trinity. A creator who stood apart from creation, a holy spirit that permeated creation, and a human component to the deity that insured that god understood my plight. It was as reassuring as it was illogical.
Escape from that idea has led me from Zen to Deism to this "Experiential Deism" where the reality of God is really the set of human feelings that combine into that which constitutes proof of god to religionists.
This long arc of which I've described in terms of value, price and escape leaves me free. The cost is gone. The value is retained. It was, is, and remains a set of elevating feelings that I've chosen to nurture. Fighting the intellectual illogic of God was suppressing. Realizing that God is in no way an intellectual apprehension helps to appreciate how God is held by the masses. It helps to appreciate the magnitude of the problem as well in the fight for the minds of those locked in fealty to their idea which has been foisted on them by the clever manipulations of their feelings.
The mind deserves to be set free from the imaginary controller of lives and from ideas of eternal suffering. The self deserves to be uplifted by appreciation of the elevating emotions, love and joy and peace and others. Our awareness must be informed enough to recognize that this land we live in is at once a garden of Eden and is encircled by prowling wolves. That is, life is beautiful but threats to it remain all around us. Many are natural, many are human, many are of our own making. No deity will step in and save us. But we can appreciate the ideal with both heart and mind. Using the terms of god and soul should not require us to automatically raise the barriers we've constructed against those ideas. As shapeless emotions they can be keys to self illumination. I rebel though once religion tries to force fit its meaning of those terms and its controlling influence onto the minds of the credulous.