WHAT SHALL WE DO TO BE SAVED?

Two websites about "religion" are pretty well known to me, neither of them really about the content of “religion”.  I have no interest in being converted to some system of thought complete with dogma, buildings, and mighty leaders.  These websites are what some call “comparative religion” or “history of religion” or I suppose you could call it “meta-religion.”  That is, not so much the familiar “ecumenical” or anthropological categories and lists of tribal systems, but the relationships among them, their evolving ideas, and where all this stuff comes from anyway.  

The newer and more sophisticated website, Aeon, announces itself as addressing the adversarial relations between science and “religion,” which is kind of behind the times, because as soon as that big old man on the cloud throne walked off, it turned out he had been sitting on the fact that science had always had its religious side, dogma and all, and that religion is an attempt at science.  They are opposed only because our turf wars have set up false dichotomies for the sake of the drama of it all.  A “feeder” for Aeon is Ideas.aeon which lets the people participate by suggesting questions and writing short answers to those questions.  What that mostly shows is that they are white European males with education and opinions that are pre-WWI, mostly part of a canon, acquired by studying for a Ph.D rather than through experience.

The other website, Religion Dispatches, is journalistic and describes itself as “The latest in religion / politics / sexuality / art / culture.”  They probably ought to have thrown economics in there, because economics -- in the sense of finding enough resources to survive -- is the ultimate purpose of both science and religion.  I have a few principles that I use over and over as basic guides.  One of them is Ray Rappaport’s insight that survival has two levels: one is the group and one is the individual.  When the two levels fit together and reinforce each other, times are happy and people are content.  But if the two levels, the individual’s integrity and the group’s beliefs about survival, are against each other, there will be blood and corruption everywhere.  

Also, the roots of every religious system come out of their level of social success, so groups form on the basis of wealth and their understanding of how to get and protect it, which they pretend is “morality” and about higher things.  There is a third website, Martin Marty’s “Sightings” which he issues from the U of Chicago Div School.  Formal essays  are posted on Monday and Thursday.  He is a respected observer of the scene, with good reason.

I should note another website that has the same schedule and that is “Francis,” the cartoon strip that takes off from St. Francis of the past and Pope Francis of today, often interacting with a holy fool, called Brother Leo, to make a point as Catholicism tries to return to the word of Jesus.

Homeostasis is the idea (Rapaport again) that a person or human organization must stay within two extremes, boundaries beyond which the entity cannot survive, both too much on one side or not enough.  At present we seem to find ourselves in worldwide turbulence struggling to find the central (which is not the same as the middle) deepest flow of all life, which is technically (this is a geology term) called “the thallwag.”

So Aeon is still fussing about human consciousness without having read any of the recent research because they were taught that “thinking” meant philosophical introspection and therefore dislike Science which means opening the horse’s mouth to count its teeth  (Ick) and worrying about end times.  But “Religion Dispatches,” true to its name, offers breathless observations about proper legal families, police brutality and why Wiccans don’t get no respect.

Here’s a recent Francis strip so you can calm down.

This whole surging and merging and dispersing melee is much crippled by the need for vocabulary.  I’m not going to suggest any new words, but hopefully they will emerge, because at the heart of all successful “religions” is emergent meaning and understanding.  Taken from that point of view, ecology is one of the most powerful religious terms -- the idea of everything fitting together in a synergy (there’s another good religious word) in which each tiny part contributes value to every other part.  So is evolution though most of the Aeon thinkers haven’t found out about "horizontal evolution" or jumping genes yet because it challenges their conviction that “every day in every way the world is getting better and better” -- meaning that they are climbing the hierarchy of human beings.  They do not appreciate the notion that there IS no hierarchy or that ecologies of mutation and gene-sharing are not based on virtue.  They want to be “progressive”, esp. if that means going their way, “up” the path to the “peak.”  

And yet, what they secretly hope to find is the enduring imprint of God’s butt on his Cloud of Thrones, which only they can see.  Many places are said to bear the impression in rock of God’s foot -- or maybe it was just a prophet.  Or an accidental image like Jesus’ face on a piece of toast or the Madonna immortalized in a screen door, limned in rust.  One of my fav stories in the Bible is about the prophet to whom God spoke, saying, “Avert your eyes and get down in a crevice because I’m coming through and seeing my overwhelming body in all its brightness and radiation will strike you blind.”  So all the prophet ever sees is God’s fundament in a flash overhead, and feels honored by it.  Writing from deep history often has this homely kind of endearing reality.  Much better than greeting card descriptions of God or mathematic arguments about his existence.

The progression of spiritual and conceptional development is from the basic categories of survival a baby brings with it out of the womb (safety/danger, warm/cold, embraced/
abandoned, hunger/satiation, and so on) as the basic structure of understanding.  Then comes the shaping by those who raise him in the earliest years of learning to walk, talk, and interact.  (Kindness, laughter or punishment, desertion.)   Pretty soon there’s entry into adult communities of belief that supports their life in that place and time, usually merging politics with the supernatural.  

Sooner or later these communities are likely to harden into institutions.  If there are enough resources, buildings are created to be monuments, palaces and sanctuaries and individuals or groups of individuals become priests and administrators. Books are written and become dogma.  As power grows, dissenters are thrown aside or killed.  The necessity of keeping the institution alive prompts wars and taxes.

Save yourself.

The dissenters may start new systems, may return as terrorists, may seize the political system, or may invoke their individual consciences and become wandering monks and prophets.  These are all part of the human ecology and also part of the planetary ecology, so that famine or contagion may change the terms of survival.

We speak of non-institutional spirituality, which can become bright comforts (god’s glowing humanoid butt passing overhead), and we speak of science, which has now turned its attention to the particled patterns of life as a kind of music, which so often accompanies deep meaning, and dance, a better use of bodies than warfare.  On ideas.aeon it is clear that our “religious” impulses go every which way, but mostly lean back to the familiar old ways, the assumptions of the pre-genomic discoveries, when a baby became “ensouled” at a certain time, or “quickened” when movement was first felt by the mother.  No one had to worry about whether human life began at conception or implantation or presentation at birth.  No one fussed about the “meaning of life.”  Everyone just got on with the task of staying alive.