DISSECTING RELIGION

Religion etherized upon the table.  I’m finding parts and putting them in Pyrex containers, but expect to relabel them.  This is equivalent to those crime scene walls where they pin up photos of the victims, criminals and suspects, drawing lines and arrows with comments.

Ritual

The earliest evidence (gotta have evidence) of ceremonial actions connected to something resembling our modern sensibility is the strewing of flowers in Neanderthal graves.  Elephants are also known to cover the bodies of dead comrades with boughs, which suggests that such ceremonial actions are deep in our mammalian ability to react to grief with patterned and symbolic actions. 

Artistic expression

Nearly as old are the cave paintings, which have persisted a very long time in their hidden locations, but I suspect that the first painting was on the human body and it persists today as tattoos.  In fact, we seem to be in a renaissance of bodily ornamentation and alteration.  We do find jewelry in graves and commonly there is red ochre paint almost everywhere.  Maybe because it suggests blood.

Morality

It was a great revelation to me in seminary when Don Browning explained the various ways people derive and maintain their ideas of right and wrong.  The list includes rules (the Ten Commandments), principles (the Golden Rule), obedience to authority, according to origin, according to goal, imitation of a great example, reasoned greatest good for the greatest number.  Often morality means clinging to the status quo (from Is to Ought) but it can also mean the defiance of society in the name of justice or love.  Or direct clashes between two groups with opposite standards.

Theory of existence

Trying to figure out where we came from has undergone a massive a change.  Little clay dolls brought to life (man made first and woman made from his rib), dropping down from outer space, rising up from a world within the planet, scrambling out of a clam shell -- survivors, intruders, or evolved animals?  Now we’ve gone even beyond “monkey” evolution to see that we are code: each body a colony of coded cells interacting.  The nature of a human being is not a set-in-stone identity, but a kind of dance of molecules connected to everything else but holding identity long enough to intend, to act, to be dissipated.  Hard to grasp -- not yet registering in “theology.”

Identity

Belonging.  Self-presentation.  Confidence and self-esteem.  Motivation.  Self-control.  Maintenance of the body in a healthy state.  Or self-hatred, self-destruction, fleeing.  Or possibly, again, caught between two groups.

Guide for human arrangements, a framework for practical daily living 

How do we take shelter?  Who prepares the food and cleans the abode?  Where do we sleep and with whom?  Must we come home at night?  Do we sleep the day away?  Should we take the seventh day off?  Must everyone know where you are?  What are the uses and rights of children?  How should we dress?  Should there be prayers at the doorway, beside the bed at night, at a household altar?  What possessions can be kept private?  What about bathing?   

Hierarchy

The struggle to keep order.   Who is the boss of whom?  Which authority takes priority, church or state?  Within the church how to keep order.  Descent from the founder, authorization by a founder, authorization from a supernatural source, written authority, democratic process, internal inspiration, crowd-sourcing?

Economics

The source of sustenance, kinds of work.  Attitude towards the very rich and the very poor.  How much is enough.  At the heart of profit is inequality: people want what someone else has.  But what about those who cannot pay?  At what level does the society as a whole become responsible for those who suffer?  What are the limits of luxury, the evils of investment and credit as a source of profit rather than direct action, the dynamics of what is craved but destructive.  When is it justified to buy and sell people themselves or parts of them or to assign values as insurance companies do?

Physical ecology 

This is in part the source of the above: what natural resources, what social interactions, what inventions and elaborations will add up to a living?  If there is coal, there will be coal miners -- but will those miners go underground with picks or will they drive humonguous trucks in a giant pit?  How does the individual then interface with social bodies?  What is the role of organizations in mediating between profiting corporation and individuals damaged in the course of exploitation?  What is the proper protection for the earth itself?  How much can we remove and destroy before we hit limits?  Are we stewards or is this all put here for our use?

War

When is violence, force, embargo, poisoning, and other forms of defense justified?  What does war do to those who fight and what does the whole owe the subgroup that fights?  How do people believe that war is justified when all that is at stake is ideas or identity?  What is the difference between war by remote control and war fought in one’s own collapsed house next to the bodies of one’s family?

Material culture, science, and metaphor

Humans can only access what is outside themselves through their sensory apparatus which is far more subtle and yet more limited than five senses.  We know now that brain is “built” by its experience -- in terms of the actual cells, their interactions, sub-organs, and memories.  The potter who makes clay into containers is not different from technicians who design electronics except in terms of their experiences.  The science of art, the art of science, are interwoven.  What gives it sacredness is its meaning to the maker and to the user.  A burning candle or a time-lapse photo of star birth in deep space both have meaning -- but not to the same people.

Goals some consider “religious”

Pleasure

Immortality

Participation in life itself

Privileged status

Contributing to one’s human community 

Reaching an internal sense of the Holy  

Coming to terms with death  

Sex in service to intimacy and devotion

Birth

Enlightenment

Meaning

Obviously this is only a beginning and when one gets really “into” it, “religion” that is not owned by an organization or by historical continuity or by written material or by traditional story, dissolves into human life in all its aspects.  It has become conventional to speak of religion stripped of its organizational husk as “spirituality.”  But that is uncomfortably close to the idea that “religion” is a matter of something supernatural, that the impossibility of really capturing and controlling the Holy Spirit comes from its superiority, immateriality, and entirely Other and Greater power.   It is alien.

This point of view misleads individuals into trying to capture some of that “magic” for their own uses.  Our recent helplessness as the world tries to integrate -- a task that took Europe thirty years to approximate -- and the recurring sporadic eruptions into violence, has made Superheroes more appealing than they’ve been since WWII.  The struggle to understand how economic forces really work and how to keep them from shifting so suddenly and radically that thousands of people are suddenly impoverished and homeless has made us search for magic formulas, whether they come from scientific think tanks or from obsession with ideologies.

In the background lingers the growing understanding that we are destroying our only planet and thus will disappear ourselves.  Sacred meaning has to be defined as that which will make us confident in finding better ways to live.  This not a matter of organizing something.  It must be a shift in how to be human.  There’s not time to grow a new organ, but there is time to change the code and the way the human brain sorts and enforces it.  “Religion” is too narrow a concept.  The whole planetary culture must let what is Sacred well up from within.