Disclaimer: This is not a scientific, religious or geographic post but it does mention Einstein, Descartes, God and Michigan . To read more, please click here:
I believe I have a healthy suspicion of religion. Too many people have been killed or harmed by those who use it for ill. Spiritualality is pretty cool though. :). And I'm certainly in agreement that the majority of religious folks are wonderful, kind, loving, spiritual people with good hearts. I think religion's great when it joins us rather than divides us.
Here's a provocative quote I came across in a Tom Robbins book. In a paragraph, it kind of sums up what may be a problem with the typical concept of God and sort of points the way to a more useful definition. Also wonderfully points out that divinity is within us all...that divinity is rather "ordinary" and accessible for everyone, something magnificent to be cultivated and felt within....And something to be nurtured, recognized and celebrated in others.... NOT something to be studied from a distance. To borrow a phrase from others, talking about tasting the honey here rather than just knowing ABOUT the honey.
In the novel "Another Roadside Attraction," Tom Robbins main character says this in an attempt to sum up where American religion ran off the rails in some cases: "On a Michigan funny farm, there are three inmates, each of whom believes he is Jesus Christ. They are all correct, of course, but when they learned the secret -- that everyone is divine if only he knows he is divine -- they became confused and behaved in a manner that led them to the looney bin. Their culture hadn't prepared them for divine revelation (that everyone contains divinity within). It hadn't even encouraged them to ask the only important question - "Who am I?" - let alone taught them to give the only logical reply. So when these three lower-middle-class working stiffs stumbled onto self-knowledge, they translated it into the absurd vision of the Sunday-school Superman, then wondered why they got locked up when they each started saying they were Jesus. Tough titty, boys. Most of us Americans prefer our God to be as singular as he is distant."
Not saying that there aren't great ministers and texts at present and from the past that capture the accessible nature of divinity within us all. . But I think an awful lot of us Americans have been led to believe in the God of TV evangelists and southern fire and brimstone churches: "And with lightning coming from his fingertips to fry the sinners!". You can hear that voice booming from the pulpit and can see the negative results of that dualistic mindset in our politics, communities and personal relationships. God as something outside us rather than within each of us...divinity, as many have said, is really within each of us, not in some angry white haired old white man above the clouds who gets involved in the outcome of sporting events and supports a good war now and then. :-)
It appears a lot of us folks in this modern culture have COMPLETELY missed the point and made the exact opposite point. In doing so, we may have gotten ourselves further away from god, more sinful, less prayerful and less happy. . We're probably more boring too. :) A huge wrong turn. Oops. Do you think we'll stop to ask for directions now that we're lost? (I think this is the job of writers, novelists, ministers and professors actually, to stop and say, wait a second this Chinese box is only a box, the world is bigger than this).
By the way...I think part of the problem is Descartes. (the film "Mindwalk" and the book "The Turning Point" wonderfully reveal this). That bastard Descartes taught us that everything can be understood by simply dissecting it and analyzing the parts. In teaching us that, he took us down a very long dark wrong road, a road we now consider to be the whole world. On that road, NOTHING is greater than the sum of its parts. To Descartes Central Market is 480 tons of lumber. Jim Smith is 192 pounds of flesh, etc. Descartes' thinking causes us to miss the animating force, the mystery, the soul of a place or person or movement. He misses the feeling that must have been in the air after one of Martin Luther King, Jr.'s speeches. Even after the room was empty, that feeling wqs likely still there. Descartes seemed to never taste the honey. He only learned ABOUT the honey. And it's possible that we human beings, most of us, seem to have followed Descartes down that road thereby developing a certain blindness to the realities of life.
So by believing in Descartes reductionism and following him on that wrong turn for nearly 400 years, we've really lost touch with the reality that things are often greater than the sum of their parts and lost touch with internal divinity, interconnection.....and value of community, the commons, etc. Want to know why people haven't invested more in the future of poor African American children's in the city? It doesn't seem like too big a mystery to me. Most people's current worldview cause them to believe that there is no inextricable link between people. . . That the future of that poor African American child has nothing to do with them. I blame Descartes. I'm not kidding. I also blame the ministers and professors for not adequately revealing how lost Descartes has gotten us. How long are we going to keep following that bastard. The emperor has no clothes. And this mindset of his isn't a clear view of the entire world. It's a view of the inside of a Chinese box. It's up to the great ministers out there, the great writers, the professors and all of us really to lift the lid.
Descartes' reductionism has led us to believe that nothing is greater than the sum of its parts, anything that's not visible isn't real, and there are no connections between people. I'll end with a quote from a guy most of us consider to be pretty smart who clearly thought Descartes was full of crap:
It was Albert Einstein who said:
“A human being is part of a whole, called by us the Universe, a part limited in time and space. He experiences himself, his thoughts and feelings, as something separated from the rest a kind of optical delusion of his consciousness. This delusion is a kind of prison for us, restricting us to our personal desires and to affection for a few persons nearest us. Our task must be to free ourselves from this prison by widening our circles of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature in its beauty.”
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