THE RELIGIOUS IMPULSE AND GLOBAL AWARENESS

In earlier posts, particularly my post on religion, I defined the religious impulse in terms of how early human beings recognized their need for each.  I said that religions came from the drive for survival as a species, a recognition that we are better off working together as a means to survive in a hostile environment than to fend for oneself alone.  I want to expand on the fundamental concept of the Religious Impulse to broaden "We need each other" to include, in the Twenty-first Century, everyone and everything on this planet. 

 

THE RELIGIOUS IMPULSE AND POWER

 

 



I contend that there is more to the impulse of religion than just being nice or just being a warm and fuzzy thought. As I have previously discussed in my posts on secular and theistic religion, religion is about power.  Initially, religion was developed to generate power; as in the saying, "There is strength in numbers."  We needed each other to become stronger as species in order to survive within a hostile environment.

One could say the family became the first unit of power and the first binding force we call religion.  Unlike some other animals, humans do not do well being alone.  Our young take longer to develop into adulthood, and even as adults it was near impossible to go it alone, much less to continue our species.  Families extended into tribes. The larger the tribe the more power it had. Size brought along other difficulties, food, shelter, and the need for identifiable leaders to make decisions for the good of the tribe. 

The appeal to power came next.  Tribes migrated to find food, water, and shelter before the discovery of wells and cultivation. Getting along with other tribes meant or obtaining cooperation from another tribe to defeat a threatening tribe or engage in a project that would benefit both (such as the eventual digging of wells) required an appeal of some sort that resulted in cooperation. 

Power creates its own problems as in Lord Acton's famous saying, "Power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely." 

As tribes became communities and communities consolidated to form kingdoms, power became increasingly invested in an agent, such as a king.  Kings had total power over life and death. Yet, it soon became evident that total power of one person led to excessive abuse of that power and the use of power had to be controlled and mitigated.  This is were theism comes in. To mitigate the power of  a leader,kings needed to be subject to a higher power. As such, they became answerable to their gods from whom their authority was derived.

As mentioned in previous posts, with writing came the ability to codify beliefs into distinct ideologies, and religion morphed into two distinct branches, theism and secularism; each holding ideals and ideologies that people subscribed to and which bound them together in common perception and thought.  Sadly, the idea of secularism as a religious branch is not talked about in terms of its religious underpinnings.  When people say that religion is a problem.  I say, "Yes!" and mean the entire religious spectrum is a problem.

GLOBAL AWARENESS

 

 



My point is that the impulse to religion is deeply embedded within the human psyche.  The religious impulse is so much a part of our makeup that we fail to recognize it.  In modern parlance, we have defined religion solely as a theistic function.  We need to reacquaint ourselves with and reorient our understanding of the religious impulse in order to survive as a species and work together in saving our planet from ourselves.   

For the most part, the religious impulse has served us well.  In more recent times, it is the drive that brings us together as a force to meet our common needs.  It drives us to look at the face of difference and appeal to the strength  that is our common humanity.  It drives us to use power wisely in all of its manifestations.  This is its bright side - the good it does, but it retains a darker side also. The impulse of religion has also led to using power as a means to deprive others.  It has caused us to look at differences as a threat, and has led to the shameful abuse of power.

This does not change the religious impulse's primary function of addressing our need for each other.  Rather the challenge is to broaden our sense of the other and in defining the essentials necessary to sustain all life on this planet.  We remain as homocentric as ever, which is both a secular and theistic problem.  Our needs ultimately reflect and are connected to what makes life sustainable on this planet, as a whole.

As a species, we have dominated the Earth, but we have not subdued nature.  The power of nature continues to supersede our power to control it.  Nature as a whole reacts to life as a whole.  Thanks to science, we are beginning to understand the forces of nature.  We know it interacts with living organisms, both plants and animals. As such the Earth can be understood as an organic entity. In particular, science has made us aware of the human imprint, our abuse of power, that is stirring the forces of nature into increasingly chaotic patterns.

Anthropologist and geologists have identified the age we live in as the Anthropocene Age.  We can trace our collective imprint in the very rocks and soil under our feet. We have left an indelible mark that is more likely to indict our use of power than glorify it.  As a species, we need to redefine our moral imperatives in terms of global survival.

KNOWLEDGE, BELIEF, AND DENIAL

WHAT WE KNOW


It is an odd human trait that as intellectually advanced as we have become, intellectual knowledge is not valued by the vast majority of our species.  As a species, we remain highly reliant on experiential knowledge to drive us to change.  This is the problem scientists and experts of every kind and type encounter on a daily basis.  Even though scientists and experts can provide factual evidence to support their findings, most people don't react until directly affected or personally experience what has been predicted.

This is particularly concerning in light of the information we have regarding the human causes of global warming.  This is perhaps the single most urgent natural threat to existence we face. It has driven the scientific community to appeal to the powers of the international community, the community of nations, in order to prompt a monumental reduction in the carbon emissions that have been identified as the major cause of global warming.

This is not the only threat to existence. Apart from this and other natural disasters, we have the capacity to annihilate life via biological, chemical or nuclear means.  What appears to be deeply embedded in our brains and collective psyche is an instinctual distrust of the religious impulse. This instinct predates human language and thus predates the intuitive insight of our need for each other. This instinctual distrust is embedded in religion itself, in what I have identified as the differentiating paradigm of religion. In other words, religion is paradoxical, holding and generating two contradictory views of the other. Religion recognizes both the need and the fear of the other. 

The theistic side of religion, in large part, has evolved to mitigate the fear of the other by giving us something larger than ourselves to fear - the gods or God. Theism has also evolved to sustain our need of the other by projecting that need on to an out-there-other; an omnipotent, omnipresent, and omniscient God who judges us by how we judge and treat our fellow human beings.  This too has evolved into what has become known as the Golden Rule and the greatest monotheistic commandment that, in essence, states the love of God is contingent on how well we love others, or, to broaden that out, to love God is dependent on how well we love what God loves. Yet, theism retains both a sense of fear and love of God as other.  Luther's Small Catechism, for example, captures this paradox in its explanation of the Ten Commandment with starting each explanation of them with, "We should fear and love God that..." 

Theistic religions, as a whole, are trending towards recognizing and embracing the religious impulse as they come to identify the core beliefs they share with each other and in honoring the differences that have evolved around them. This is evident in any number of interfaith dialogues that are becoming common place.  This trend has also led to a fundamentalist backlash and a drive to retain difference as a means to maintain their identity and power.

The secular side of religion, on the other hand, is harder to gauge.  Although it too has narrowed into identifiable ideologies affecting nationhood, politics, economics, culture, and social issues, it is still in a young adolescent stage with regard to its recognition and embrace of the religious impulse that has given rise to the nations of world.  While there has been and are recent efforts to find common purpose in mitigating the arbitrary use of power by any one nation; such as, in the establishment of the United Nations, buy in is slow as there is tremendous pushback and resistance to global unification in meeting common goals for fear of losing national identity and power.  We must not forget that what brought about the need for nations to talk to each other was a global experience, the development and deployment of atomic power to wreak death and destruction on a previously unimaginable scale.

The instinctive fear of the other has resulted in our becoming a narcissistic species which has turned this instinctual fear on ourselves. I once heard that there is more genetic differences between two fruit flies which, for all practical purposes, look identical to the human eye than there is between two human beings of a different race.  In some ways, our instinct to survive as a species may very well become our undoing.  

We may not eat our young as some species are prone to do, but we have no qualms about killing each other at will and by the millions.  Some might argue that our instinctual will to survive has resulted in an evolutionary overdrive which heightened our sense of difference with regard to other human beings in order to cull our own as a means of species survival. In other words, killing another human being is easy to do if one can identify another human being an imminent threat or as less worthy of existence. We hear of such sentiments as in the movie lines; such as, "You dirty rat..." which is generally followed by a hail of bullets.   We are also a highly phobic species, prone to fear the differences we perceive in others because we "know" they see a difference in us. Such an overdrive has pushed us to the point of having the capacity to annihilate not only our own species but every living thing on the planet.  In essence we, as a species, are capable of committing globicide.

We know this.

The question is do we believe what we know?


WHAT WE BELIEVE


We need to accept and embrace what we know.  We need to believe it in order to do something about it, but in order to do so, we have to do something that is not natural to our species.  We need to invest faith in each other. We must trust the other in order to save our imperiled planet.

It's easy to say this because it is so obvious, but it is hard to hear, and near impossible to do.

 Scientists and experts in a host of fields  are warning us of the need to do something  now, but are finding themselves placed in the same category as the prophets of old.  They are seen by far too many as inconvenient gadflies who annoy us by telling us things we don't want to hear, much less believe.   As we have mindlessly passed one dire environmental threshold already and are speeding to the next, their pleas to change our destructive ways, to turn from our abuse of the environment and the exploitation of its resources is being met with a belief that "It ain't so" by people who consider what they want believe as knowledge instead of believing the knowledge offered them.


WHAT WE DENY


We are in a worldwide zeitgeist of populist fundamentalism and nationalism.  If there is one word to describe this zeitgeist, I would choose denial.   People are trying to stop a clicking clock by their sheer belief that the changes in the environment are not as bad as they appear. On another scale, fundamentalist and nationalists in this populist zeitgeist are attempting to divert attention from the life and death issues of our planet by ironically claiming the biggest problem we are facing is the result of the progress we have been making in coming together as a species to meet the needs of the other on a global scale (i.e. taking in refuges, helping the starving and war torn areas, aiding the victims of natural disasters, protecting wild life, forests, and waterways, etc.) - that we have become too accepting of difference within our own species (race, gender, culture, ethnicity, etc.) - and  that we see the plight of the other (including plants and other animals) as our own.

The irony is that the fear of becoming more accepting of our need for diversity and being more sympathetic to the needs and suffering of all living things has led to what I refer to as the terrorism of intolerance - religion gone mad.

The rise of violent terrorism is in large part generated by radicalized theistic fundamentalists and secular nationalists of all stripes.  While the current rise in violent terrorism can be traced to extreme Islamic fundamentalism which contains both theistic and secular (nationalist) religious views (for example, the  attempt to established a caliphate), it is interesting to note the resonance such Islamic fundamentalist movements have with other theistic and national fundamentalist movements worldwide.  This resonance is particularly noticeable in the United States.

Such ideologically fundamentalist groups espouse isolationism, a circling of the wagons against those believed to be the enemy.  They see the embrace of diversity as an attack on their version of the status quo and the acceptance of things they have deemed unacceptable (for example, same-sex marriage) in their concrete understanding of ancient scriptures as inerrant and inviolable.  Interestingly, populism of a fundamentalist and nationalist flavor is a reaction to their sense of diminishing power and control in light of knowledge that reveals the ideologies  they long held to be false. To that end they often engage in rewriting history to favor their views.

The appeal of populism is also generated by a sense impatience and a longing for an idealistic past in which those now outdated ideas and beliefs were accepted as fact.  They seek a quick fix and will listen to any who can label the problem as being a threatening other and offer a quick solution.  As a result we see a worldwide populist pushback in the form of increased racial tension, xenophobia, homophobia, and an overt fear of globalism and moral relativism.  The fundamentalist backlash against progress is from people who are experiencing disorientation in form of denial as their views of the world are no longer sustainable or correct.

On a broader perspective, as global awareness and interconnectedness grows, both secular and theistic religion narrows. This too has led to the recent rise of nationalism, and virulent forms of fundamentalism.  While we muddle our way through this current zeitgeist, events beyond our capacity to control them loom in the near future of our planet. 

The hope is that as experiential knowledge is accessible at the speed of light in our interconnected and internetted world, it will lead to an awakening of such a magnitude as to shake us into becoming a realized global community we must become; a world where belief is based on knowledge, and faith is invested in our fellow human beings.

If not (permit me to wax scientifically prophetic for a moment), the very mountains, the seas, the torrential rains, and the heated winds of the earth will rise up to put an end to our foolish ways - that is, if we don't annihilate ourselves up first.

Until next time, stay faithful.