That is the question asked by Deepak Chopra.
Since science has falsified much of what the Bible tells us as stories, Chopra suggests that most people have two different choices they can make.
With no privileged link to God, no Adam and Eve who could be claimed as ancestors, believers had two choices. They could discover a deeper personal spirituality or they could compartmentalize reason and faith.
The first choice, discovering a deeper personal spirituality is the route most people have taken, and the Liberal Religions have moved right along with those people. This is personal religion, however, so it does not lend itself to the growth of large homogeneous and controlling organizations.
The second choice is the route taken by the Evangelists and the Fundamentalists. In an organized and institutional religion one is told by the institution what to believe and how to express it. This choice allows, and in fact requires, the growth of rigidly controlled institutions to provide the doctrine the believers are allowed to use and teach.
It is interesting that this distinction is what split the Southern Baptist Church. The Baptists, who used to pride themselves on not having someone who told them what to believe about the Bible and on the “Priesthood of the Believer” now have a conservative church which requires every theology professor in the Seminaries they control to sign a statement of belief which is dictated from their conservative leaders like Paige Patterson. This is what fundamentalist religion is about.
Fundamentalism took the second road. What’s so compelling about joining a fundamentalist sect is that you instantly regain a personal relationship to God, as if science had never broken that link. In a wink Darwin disappears (only 15% of Americans polled say that they accept evolution as the truth without some input from God). Old dogmas going back to the Middle Ages suddenly become true again (the abortion debate is essentially a medieval one, since believers are asserting facts about when the soul enters the body). In a way it would be better to label fundamentalism as “literal metaphysics.” Christ is the son of God, period. He sits in heaven on the right side of his Father’s throne, period.
But the first road, which seeks to heal religion in light of science and rational thought, was the one taken by the vast majority of thinkers and believers. For God to exist side by side with science has proved enormously difficult, however. Sheer momentum kept people going to church, yet it was obvious that someone can be good, lead a moral life, uphold all the virtues taught by Christ, etc. without the benefit of religion. (I am using the terms Christ and church, but with a change of vocabulary the same schism prevails in Islam and Judaism).
If you don’t need to attend church regularly to be a good and moral person, and in fact the church you attend is not answering the questions you ask about religion and calls you a heretic merely for asking those questions, what is the value of an institutional religion?
Most people I know have gone out and found some other people who are asking the same questions they are and created their own personal spiritual networks. These are networks in which no authority penalizes you for your beliefs and questions. Such people will look at a question on a form that asks “What religion are you?” and respond “Spiritual.”
It is true that the fundamentalist religious organizations are the most rapidly growing in America. That is because true religion in America is not found in organizations. It is a personal religion.
Those who fear leaving the nonrational pablum handed to them by their organizations band together and try to force everyone else to join them through the actions of government.
This is the source of the battle against science, among other things. But it is a losers’ strategy. The fundamentalists and evangelists are people who have been passed by in modern life, and they cannot win. They will in fact find their children reaching out to the more modern liberal ideas and abandoning them.
It is this last which frightens them most. They see it coming. It is this fear that motivates them and mostly prevents them from finding solace in their own personal religion.
It is sad to see people live in such fear. But it is their choice.
Does God have a future? Without any doubt. We just can’t determine what that future will be. Whatever it is, it won’t be found in the sad misreadings of the various religious books. It will be found in the real world, by real people open to real spiritual experiences. No one will be able to tell them who God is, because they will recognize the falsity of such instruction. They will find him themselves.
Trust Deepak Chopra to ask interesting questions.
But I so detest fundamentalists and evangelists that I am in danger of rejecting all personal relationship to something larger than myself. The F & S’s are wrong, but that leaves a lot of room for something more than just me in this world. This is my latest attempt to convert such feelings into mere words.
I am in danger of rejecting all personal relationship to something larger than myself.
I have just starting reading about Zen Buddhism. For those of you more informed – please correct me, but I think they would say, “You are something larger than yourself.” This is what’s making sense to me these days.
I agree with you. Buddhism, not just Zen, has a lot to teach us. The absence of any concept of some “God” helps me a lot.
My problem is living in Texas and having suffered for over 50 years with fundamentalist religion as the controlling form of spiritualism.
Even as an Episcopalian, which I still consider myself, right now I live in the most “conservative” diocese in America. I am hoping that Bishop Iker retires or dies soon.
The key, as far as I can tell, is that religion is a very personal thing and is based on personal experience more than on what some “authority” tells us. Pat Robertson and Jerry Fallwell are fools. So is James Dobson. But they speak from a real tradition of religion, and it is not always easy to tell when they speak reality and when they depart from it.
But I consider myself their equal as theologians. If their position and credentials impressed me, then I would fear contradicting them. That isn’t religion, that’s organizational hierarchy. And they are wrong.
I find the “compartmentalization” philosophy to be unsatisfactory, as do many others. I believe that we’re at a point in time where a new synthesis of science and philosophy-theology is in the process of being developed, a new worldview which will be the underpinning of our culture for the next several hundred to maybe 2000 years of progress.
We are at a moment much like Rome in the first Century AD, where there were many competing worldviews in competition.
I tried for many years to “make it work” as a liberal Catholic and a scientist, telling myself “It’s like quantum mechanics – just as you can view everything from the photon on up in terms of particles or in terms of waves, likewise you’ve got two orthogonal worldviews, both equally valid in their own limited perspectives, of describing the universe.
But in the end I found that unsatisfactory; perhaps like modern physicists I was drawn to the quest for a unified, underlying “theory of everything.”
And in grappling with these issues I found that if you let go of the idea of a personal god, a “God as father” or a “God(dess) as mother” you can bypass many of the issues that have most troubled theologians through the years, such as “How can a good god allow evil?
As a side point, you also find yourself framing questions in terms of “wise versus foolish” instead of “good versus evil”, but that’s another conversation for a different diary.
What you’re left with is a concept that I’m hesitant to call “god” because it is so different than what most folks mean by the word, so I typically find myself using words like “the divine,” “the godhead,” “the force,” (a la Star Wars) or the Tao. It turned out that the personal theology I was developing from a bit of Spinoza here, a bit of Heraclitus there, had been developed several thousand years ago in China, and is the underpinning of both Taoism and Zen Buddhism (although the vocabularies and ritual practices differ a bit, the underlying concepts are virtually identical).
So I’m a bit of a quandry trying to decide how to answer your poll. I believe there is an underlying order to the universe, a mystery, from which both the processes generating the universe and the matter in it (which is just a kind of “condensed energy” in any case, according to science”) proceed.
Ironically, a lot of very old Christian language is still operative in this new view, but it has a different interpretation, one more comfortable with modern science. I believe this is where mainstream religion must head in the next few centuries, not only to survive, but to remain relevant and “make sense” to an increasingly scientifically-literate public (unless we fall victim to another dark age of superstition).
If you’re put off by the Oriental aspects of this, you might want to check out the “Scientific Pantheism” website, which is similar to, but a bit more materialistic than, where I’m at.
Getting rid of the transcendent concept of “God” also allows you to get rid of the heirarchical nature of most of the organized religions. Which made a lot of sense to me.
Absolutely – if god is immanent instead of transcendent, then there is no need for any “mediators;” god is not only all around you but even within you. And any act that needlessly harms your neighbor – or the environment – is thus a sacrilege as well. And if god is everywhere, any hierarchical or militaristic politics are sacrilegious as well. No wonder authoritarians throughout history have seen pagans as such a threat (and Chinese governments down to the present have felt the same way about Taoists – look at the reaction to the Taoist splinter group Falun Gong).