Spiritual, not religious

Tom Shepherd writes an excellent column, “That’s a Good Question,” for Unity magazine, which fosters “practical spirituality for daily living.” In the November/December issue, he comments that those who claim to be “spiritual, not religious” disparage organizations dedicated to the Divine. Good point.

But I find the distinction “spiritual, not religious” useful for communicating with persons turned off by religion, atheists, for instance, and some agnostics. To my observation, they can be intensely spiritual but hate religion, seeing nothing good in it and resisting evidence of any good done by it.

Atheists are driven by spiritual conviction. Because of it, they are disgusted by religious corruption and aggression, but they deny that they have spiritual beliefs because they conflate them with religious beliefs. Religions are types or brands of spirituality, in Shepherd’s words, “a trail of settlements along the path to support” our spiritual journey, but I see that atheists practice spirituality without such support.

As I wrote in “Food, shamans, atheists, lesbians” (a few posts down), I can find common ground with atheists when I distinguish between spiritual and religious and when I interpret Christian language non-literally. This is quite an achievement because atheists detest worship of the Christian god that Shepherd rightly says “does not exist.” I cherish the comment of the atheist who said I comforted her and take it as evidence that I showed respect for atheist spirituality.

For more on this subject see my column Does God exist? Wrong question!

Always More

No one commented on my previous post, but I have a comment. What I wrote could be misunderstood as reducing the Ultimate to the inner human divinity, what’s inside each of us, but regular readers of my blog have seen my posts on divine Transcendence, what I’ve even called the More.

In Hinduism, this transcendent Divinity is called Brahman, and the inner Self—the immanent divinity—is called Atman. They correspond to God and Christ, terms more understandable to those coming out of a Christian background.

What’s important is knowing that our reach for the Holy can never completely, definitively grasp it.

Christian atheist

We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.
(from the “Four Quartets” by T.S. Eliot)

I can call myself a Catholic Christian atheist. In the second half of the 1960s, I tried to be an atheist, not successfully. In the 1980s I learned that spirituality reigns in my life, that it trumps everything else and this explains my unbreakable ties to the religion I was born into. I can’t stop being Catholic, and I also can’t stop thinking about spiritual matters, which has led me to critically examining the beliefs of my childhood religion.

When I get together with past classmates (who remind me of my Catholic faith decades ago), I confess I’m bored if they want to tell me how many kids and grandkids they have, but I like hearing how they and their kids are opening doors of the mind. I want to know how people are evolving in ways that matter—wisdom and emotional/spiritual maturity.

My evolution has brought me the realization that Christians and atheists share common spiritual ground. Most atheists I know embrace humanism, a deep respect for the dignity and ability of humans. This connects well with the Christ symbol, the inner divinity or conscience in every person, the higher Self, the center of integrity.

I realize atheists chafe at the word “divine” because they associate this word with religion’s worship of outer gods. But I wonder how many can resonate with these words from Jungian psychologist Robert Johnson.

Christ is constantly being immaculately conceived and born, is confounding elders, teaching, being betrayed, being crucified, dying, resurrecting, and is making an ascension. All of these are occurring in every moment;

They occur in atheists too. Atheists who suffer on the cross of condemnation for expressing their true beliefs. Of course, I do not include the rash and polarizing activities of some atheists who make headlines. I am thinking of atheist friends with whom I identify.

How am I an atheist? As a non-theist, I reject worship of a god as an object outside of my deepest human self. How am I a Christian? I embrace the Christ as a symbol of the inner guide nudging us toward ever greater spiritual transformation, of becoming ever more divine. I realize the symbol’s significance on a new, profound level. I arrive back where I started and “know the place for the first time.”

Food, shamans, atheists, lesbians

I’m still coming down from this past weekend when I gave two presentations and heard three others. Since 1992 I have not missed the annual Women & Spirituality Conference in Mankato, MN, always a source of sustaining inspiration, and this year was one of the best. Where to start?

The keynoter was Vandana Shiva, a scientist and, in my view, one of the most admirable persons in the world. The outrage of seed patents—the pretense that corporations create seeds—turned her from nuclear science to food activism.

She analyzes the pathology of the Western mindset that thinks conquest of the earth is a good thing, that nature exists only to serve “man,” that animals are only factories to produce goods, that artificial is better than natural, that Monsanto’s genetically altered seeds deserve priority over centuries of indigenous expertise, which had produced drought-resistant, flood-resistant, and pest-resistant seeds. She made us aware of the insanity of industrial agriculture with its reliance on pesticides, chemical fertilizers, and antibiotics controlling the world’s food. She told us of corporate greed inducing a rash of suicides among farmers in India.

Unfortunately, Shiva could not stay to answer questions but went off to another venue in the States and then on to Germany. Her busy schedule of engagements gives me hope that the corporate hold on food production can be overcome. Unless it is freed from obscene profits, world hunger will not diminish.

I learned about and watched a video of shamans healing people in Nepal. It reminded me of the shaman Jesus of Nazareth, apparent in the Gospel of Mark. I absorbed a presentation explaining scientifically that consciousness—our thoughts, beliefs, intentions, desires, and feelings (including those of which we are unaware)—shape our reality. Wow, what a realization that is!

I spoke on “Atheist Spirituality,” bridging Christian language with different spiritual beliefs, including atheism. How can we find common ground between the religion that claims “we are the one, true church” and atheists? By realizing, first, that atheists are driven by spiritual conviction. They are disgusted by religious dishonesty and corruption because of their deep spirituality. Second, by realizing that religious language must not be interpreted literally or taken as fact. Heaven and God are ways of imagining the Invisible, not factual descriptions of the Invisible. Heaven can’t be described in miles or feet. When we die, we’re not going to meet a fellow called “Father” with a man called “Jesus” sitting on his right side.

Much of my talk focused on the The Little Book of Atheist Spirituality by André Comte-Sponville, and readers of my blog can find some of his content by poking around in my blog index under “Atheism,” starting with Mystic atheist.

As usual, my presentations ended in participant discussion, which always fills me, gratifies me. It’s so exciting when they get it! From an atheist I received a new compliment I cherish—she said I comforted her. Another atheist who is also a lesbian recounted the time someone learned these facts about her and exclaimed, “You don’t look like that!” We could laugh, but it is sad that the stereotypes exist.

It was good to be among people who have moved out of the box.

Christians borrowed from pagans

This follows “Like the pagans,” posted on October 16.
A person, who often submits comments that I don’t publish because of their rudeness and repetitiveness, denied that Mithra had a virgin birth. So I looked for more evidence, and found it from Mia here.

There is reference to Mithra as being born of "Anahita, the Immaculate Virgin Mother of the Lord Mithras." Anahita was said to have conceived the Mithras from the seed of Zarathustra preserved in the waters of Lake Hamun in the Persian province of Sistan. In other contradictory traditions, he is also born without any sex but from the rock wall of a cave. One must know that there were separate Mithra traditions that may have changed and been adapted over time. This information comes from a Temple that bears this inscription dedicated to Anahita and dated to about 200 B.C.E.

Hugo Rahner, brother of theologian Karl Rahner whom I like to quote, admitted that "much of the stock of ideas and verbal images that belonged to the mystery cults found its way into Christianity." Indeed it did.

They used the simple human acts of eating, washing, and anointing as symbols of sacred power. They fasted, made sacrifice, sang hymns, recited litanies, walked in processions, bore sacred vessels, kissed the altar, communed with their God by partaking of a sacred meal, and had a professional priesthood. Their words and phrases endure in our literature: "mystery," "sacrament," “salvation,” “epiphany,” "the handing on of truth," and the good religious life as "victory" in a "war." Every time we recite the Gloria of the Mass with its paeans to the "most High," we revert to Hellenistic piety. From it, likewise, comes our gesture of priestly blessing—thumb and first two fingers raised, the other two bent. And our ideas of hell or Hades. And our saints who took on the traits of their lesser deities. And our halo which first adorned Mithras.

Christian apologists cite Old Testament verses as prophecies of Jesus Christ, proof to them that Christianity was more ancient than paganism. And so, the argument goes, pagans borrowed from Christians instead of the reverse! It’s nonsense. The influence went both ways but mainly from pagan to Christian, because pagan religions existed in the Mediterranean region before the Christians arrived. Non-evangelical theologians acknowledge our debt to Hellenistic paganism, and it does not necessarily insult Christianity. It can affirm the Christian myth by showing its deep seat in the human psyche.

Fear of Sharia

My previous post presents abstract ideas, difficult to understand, so I added another paragraph, hoping to make clear its important point about idolatry.

I’m glad there are courageous Muslim women who escape Sharia or Islamic law and, after they’re safe in the West, denounce its inhumane treatment of women, such as stoning victims of rape and enslaving women and girls in marriage. Ayaan Hirsi Ali and other Muslim women who speak out do an important service by educating fellow Muslims in the West and in Arabic countries.

But fear of Sharia’s spread in the West is misplaced. Here’s a sample I received in an email:

radical Islamists are working to impose sharia on the world. If that happens, Western civilization will be destroyed. In twenty years there will be enough Muslim voters in the U.S. to elect the President!
I think everyone in the U.S. should be required to read this, but with the ACLU, there is no way this will be widely publicized, unless each of us sends it on! This is your chance to make a difference...!

This kind of fear-mongering foments hatred and mistrust against all Muslims and the same against President Barack Hussein Obama and the ACLU.

The origins of Sharia excess are tribal culture, not the religion of Islam, but ancient habits often take on religious sanction and that happened in Arabic Islam. Indonesia, the largest Muslim country in the world, does not practice these excesses, and the most outrageous incidents take place in rare parts of the world.

Islamic law can never take over America because the influence goes in the other direction. Some American Muslims, for instance, are starting to realize that gays exist and are normal human beings. Unfortunately, less healthy influence also happens, such as adopting the American obsession with sex and money. Some Muslim teenage girls have worn a hijab while dressing provocatively on the rest of their bodies.

I do not fear the influence of Sharia on the West, but I fear right wing Christians, who also support male power over females and who support Israel’s elimination of Palestinians from the land of Zion in the nonsensical hope that this will set off the apocalypse, sending good believers to heaven and the rest of us to commence weeping and gnashing of teeth in hell.

Richard Dawkins

Richard Dawkins was on Kerri Miller’s Midmorning (MN public radio) again but I called too late to get in my comment. He and other atheists say they reject God, but they really reject the Christian god and not what thoughtful religious people think of as God. Misleading Christian language—the monopolistic “Father” and “he/him/his”—gives the impression that God is a humanlike individual.

The atheist André Comte-Sponville in The Little Book of Atheist Spirituality rejects belief in “a God,” in a “subject,” “in something,” “in Someone,” and “in his existence.” And I don’t believe in that god either! Each of his phrases indicates an individual something, an object or subject, something alongside other individual things in the universe, and that’s not God.

One of the foremost theologians of the twentieth century, Karl Rahner, explains that,

the mysterious and the incomprehensible . . . can never be defined by being distinguished from something else. For that would be to objectify it, to understand it as one object among other objects, and to define it conceptually. . . . we do not know God by himself as one individual object alongside others, but only as the term of transcendence.

Despite Rahner's unfortunate use of the male pronoun, he clarifies the mistake of believing in A certain humanlike God. It substitutes a particular God-image for the Divine Mystery beyond anything we can imagine. We must not fall into the idolatry of worshipping a particular God-image—father, mother, bear, sun, moon, turtle, or Jesus—for no image can adequately represent the Transcendent Mystery.

I sympathized with Dawkins this morning when he said it was hard to avoid contempt for people who deny evolution and think the planet is 6,000 years old. I confess I struggle with contempt for people who can’t see that there’s something wrong with always talking about God as if IT were a male individual.

Comte-Sponville gives beautiful and appropriate descriptions of what we call “God” but he calls IT “the All” or “nature”:

• the infinite, the eternal and the absolute.

• . . . what has traditionally been called the absolute or the unconditioned, that which depends on nothing but itself and exists independently of all relations, conditions and points of view.

• It is the silence of that which can be neither explained nor expressed . . . not meaning, but being.
• How can it not exist, given that, without it, nothing could exist?

• . . . the truth of the universe must indeed be mysterious. How can we expect to understand and explain everything, given the fact that the ‘everything’ was here long before we were, and formed us, and permeates our very being, and surpasses us in every direction?

I’m sure he doesn’t know he is describing God as thoughtful Christians would describe IT, and as IT’s described in Exodus 3:14, “I am who I am.” In the original Hebrew this was rendered, YHWH, which derives from the Hebrew word for “being.” And from that we get Yahweh, who degenerates into a god of war and genocide. The atheist Comte-Sponville captures beautifully the true meaning.

Ironic that an atheist does a better job than most Christians would!