Posted by:
Tal Bachman
(
)
Date: March 12, 2014 01:55PM
Educated modern humans have a problem: we retain religious instincts, but many of us are no longer capable of believing in religion.
This is the problem German philosopher Nietzsche pointed out in the late 1800's. For the modern mind, "God was dead"; but he didn't say it triumphantly, but with trepidation. What would happen to communities - to human life - as individuals grew more and more incapable of believing in the old myths and gods? As Yeats would say a few decades later, anarchy could be loosed upon the world. Religion, for all its problems, seems to have been crucial to human existence, over eons. What would replace it?
Some might say science, but that's doubtful. Science is a method for discovering physical laws. It cannot answer life's most pressing questions: how should I live? What happens after we die? Is there any real point to my existence? Did someone or something create the universe, and everything in it? And if so, why? What are we even doing here? At least, science has not answered them yet; and it is doubtful it ever will.
Another answer might be, New Age or occult philosophies. But for many people, these are too amorphous, too unorganized, too haphazard, to take seriously. There is little that is invigorating or inspiring there, nothing that would provoke most people to heroic action, even on a small sphere. Yoga and platitudes are just not enough for most people. Somewhere, deep inside of ourselves, most of us yearn for the raw meat of clear, communal religion. We want it to captivate us, enthrall us, motivate us, inspire us with awe, fill our lives with purpose and direction, joy and determination, and even sacrifice and labour. In a word, we want what it seems impossible now to find.
Catholicism is unbelievable. Evangelical Protestantism is unbelievable. Mormonism is unbelievable. Scientology and Jehovah's Witnessism are a joke. Universalist Unitarianism is a blank. Judaism and Islam...not going to happen (not even Jews believe in Judaism anymore). Buddhism has some wonderful wisdom teachings..but again, it's just not enough.
It seems like what we need is a set of basic, but "transcendent", propositions about existence which are (A) believable, (B) emotionally/spiritually captivating and inspiring, and (C) adequate to building a strong faith community upon, along with a system of individual and communal rituals, customs, traditions, etc., linked to, and helping further, the community's beliefs and goals.
What could those believable, "transcendent" propositions be? It's hard to say. No one knows if any intelligent force created the world, or if so, why; or whether there is some eternal part of us which lives on after we die; or whether there is some final reckoning for each of us. We can only ever guess, even though, by nature, we so desperately want to know.
But maybe that inherently impenetrable mystery is itself the starting point and ending point. Maybe *acceptance* of that mystery is the key, rather than futile attempts to explode it. After all, those futile attempts have given us thousands of false prophets, thousands of false mediums and gurus, all of whom claim to have "penetrated the veil" to some degree or other, and allowed them to pass off their own fancies as absolute cosmic truths.
But a statement like, "the truth is, we have no idea why we are here, or where we are going, or what happens after we die. That is our starting point"....*that* I can believe in. And perhaps, in a way, it is "transcendent", in that the proposition itself is that The Big Answers forever transcend our ability to comprehend, if they even exist.
And if that is an adequate starting point, the next question is: what would come next?
(To be continued).
Comments of course are welcome!
Edited 4 time(s). Last edit at 03/12/2014 02:02PM by Tal Bachman.