Anti-Religious Zealotry

Or, to be more accurate: “anti-religious and/or anti-spiritual zealotry.” But that’s kind of long…

Here are some signs. The person…

1. Is on a kind of personal crusade to put an end to religion.

2. Associates religion with its most dogmatic, intolerant, aggressively outspoken, ignorant and even violent manifestations and sees religion as pretty much the primary source of evil and immorality in the world.

3. Overlooks or minimizes its positive aspects such as religion’s involvement in social justice movements around the world – helping to end apartheid in South Africa, its role in Poland’s Solidarity movement, Gandhi and MLK, to name a few from recent decades; the way that religion helps millions of people lead more positive and productive day-to-day lives; and the fact that, as you move toward the progressive end of the religious spectrum (also the eastern…), dogmatism tapers off to the point where I’m not really sure what atheism has left to argue against. For example, Buddhism’s Eightfold Path focuses on how to live in the here and now, and not by way of telling people how to live through references to authority, but by offering a set of practices that people can put to the test in their own experience. And consider that today there are Christians who view Jesus as an entirely human teacher.

4. The person responds to anyone using words or phrases from the religion and spirituality lexicon with predictable rant-monologues, internally if not in speech or writing, figuring that he/she already knows where anyone who would use such words must be coming from.

Notice…

1. That this is a highly reactive, proselytizing mentality that resembles religious zealotry.

2. A lot of folks with this outlook were brought up in highly dogmatic religious environments.

3. Yet some people raised in the same sorts of environments become non-crusading atheists, agnostics or religious progressives.

4. To spend a lifetime reacting against a dogmatic upbringing is to be permanently controlled by it.
_______

Thanks to Editors Meg Torbert and Anne Downey of "University of New Hampshire Magazine" for the write up of Original Faith in the fall 2008 issue.

Piety and Politics

First, thanks to Matthew Holt and Sarah Arnquist of The Health Care Blog for inviting me to post my article, “Finding 'Original Faith' but not in the health care system” on their blog yesterday.

And speaking of the relationship of faith to one’s views on matters of political policy…

Many people prefer leaders who don’t base their policies on their religious beliefs, if for no other reason than that we live in a pluralistic society. That means that even if you’re religious, somebody else’s religion could get voted into office next election cycle.

At the same time, any office holder is a human being with a life that goes beyond his or her political role and that may well include religion or spirituality.

Do you see any constructive role that a politician’s religious beliefs can have in his or her political life? For that matter, if you consider yourself spiritual or religious, do you see this aspect of yourself as informing your own political thoughts?

Just how would you describe any such constructive relationship that you may see between a person’s religious/spiritual life and his or her political views?

And how – or would you – distinguish this from the manner in which an atheist’s or agnostic’s outlook on life affects his or her political views?

“Everything happens for a reason...”

If you agree:

By “everything” do you mean literally everything or do you have a narrower category of things in mind? People usually seem to mean “things that happen to people...”

What sort of reason or reasons do you have in mind?

Are there exceptions? If so, how do you account for them?

Do you reject or question the idea of randomness? If so, with regard to all events? Human events? Some human events but not others?


If you disagree:

Explain why you disagree. Examples:

Is it the implication that everything may happen for a purpose that you reject?

Is your position that things happen not for a single reason or kind of reason but for many different reasons?

Is it the concept of causality that you question or reject?

Thanks... to Darcy at Spiritual Blog Reviews and to Marilyn Strong & Jerry Wennstrom at In the Hands of Alchemy for linking to my book, Original Faith.

Attached to God

“Non attachment” can be tricky to discuss. In standard usage, to be attached or have attachments means to genuinely care about something - usually a person or place. In religion and spirituality, however, attachment refers to identifying egoistically with things or people. Some obvious examples of egoistic attachments are identifying with one’s possessions, wealth, good looks, social status or those of a family member.

“Non attachment” in a spiritual context refers not to a lack of caring, but to putting distance between the self and the ego. In positive terms, it refers to caring that transcends the egoistic self – that isn’t contained or bound by that limited sphere of interest.

Ego attachments include something that we’ve all noticed from time to time in discussions of religion and spirituality: attachment to spiritual thoughts or beliefs. The clearest sign that someone is defending the self and not God may be defensiveness itself, with its rancor, sarcasm, ridicule, condescension and various more or less veiled forms of hostility that are the puff and bristle of an underlying sense of insecurity and threat.

Surely God, (of all people, so to speak) doesn’t need defending. And if a truth remains true even when a particular individual or group fails to recognize it, how unassailable Truth must be!

Everyone has an ego. And probably everyone, at one time or another, has been bothered when someone hasn’t seen things their way in the area of religion and spirituality. It’s a question of degree.

The question of why it bothers us when others don’t share our religious views may be worth looking at if we find ourselves strongly or repeatedly agitated when this occurs.

PS: It’s worth noting that unbelievers can be as attached as believers to their perspective on the truth of the matter where religion is concerned.