{"id":157,"date":"2007-12-15T06:43:23","date_gmt":"2007-12-15T06:43:23","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.beliefnet.com\/conversationswithgod\/2007\/12\/is-religion-the-solutionbut-al.html"},"modified":"2007-12-15T06:43:23","modified_gmt":"2007-12-15T06:43:23","slug":"is-religion-the-solutionbut-al","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/conversationswithgod\/2007\/12\/is-religion-the-solutionbut-al.html","title":{"rendered":"Is religion the solution–but also the problem?"},"content":{"rendered":"

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\nNOTE: Saturday is Prose & Poetry Day here on the blog, a time to take a moment once a week to relax the mind, open the heart, and access the soul through the gift of prose from one of the many books of The New Spirituality, and through the poetry of m. Claire, author of the forthcoming volume, Come As You Are.<\/em>
\nThis week’s prose…an excerpt from The New Revelations<\/em>…
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\n(Note: In this excerpt, the dialogue approaches the delicate subject of the world’s religions. Nothing here is meant to offend, but only to sponsor and encourage further thought.)<\/p>\n

The soul always feels joy, because the soul is joy. The soul always feels love, because the soul is love. The soul always feels connected with the wonder of life, because the soul is the wonder of life, expressed.
\nIn order to feel this always, you have to be out of your mind. You have to get \u201cout of your head\u201d and into your heart.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

I thought you were going to say, into your soul.<\/p>\n

\nThe heart is the bridge between the mind and the soul. First get out of your mind and into your heart space. From there it is a quick jump into your soul.
\nWhen you are in your heart space with another, that is when you can have a real soul talk. When you are in your heart space with yourself, that is when you can experience connecting with your soul at a very deep level. That is when you can experience communion with God.
\nIf you stay in your mind, you will be affected by the constructions of the mind. If the mind is dampened or weakened, the body will function in ways that reflect that. If the mind is uplifted, strengthened, or renewed, the body will function in ways that reflect that.
\nIf the mind is discouraged, diminished, restricted, frustrated, angry, wounded, or agitated, the body will demonstrate that. If the mind is excited, enlarged, unlimited, exuberant, joyful, healed, and peaceful, the body will behave in an entirely different way.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

But isn\u2019t that just the way \u201cold time religion\u201d makes people feel? Doesn\u2019t it talk about \u201cthe renewing of your mind?\u201d Doesn\u2019t it make people feel excited, enlarged, unlimited, exuberant, joyful, healed, and victorious? Isn\u2019t that precisely its appeal? Isn\u2019t that explicitly its promise?<\/p>\n

Indeed. Yet it is a promise your old religions have not been able to keep for humanity as a whole. <\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Why is that? If religion can make individuals ecstatic, why can\u2019t it heal the world?<\/p>\n

Because organized religion as you currently create it is largely an exclusive experience. It is exclusive to the individual or the group experiencing it. You have not found a way to include everyone in the same experience\u2014that is, society as a whole\u2014because you have not found a way for everyone to agree on how the experience should be experienced.
\nIndeed, you disagree on this question so dramatically that it has caused you to interrupt your own ecstasy to express your disapproval of another for not experiencing the same ecstacy.
\nYou have argued with each other, battled with each other, and killed each other in your anger over this ecstacy.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Why? Why have we done this? And why can\u2019t…<\/p>\n


\n…religions heal this?<\/p>\n

Organized religions by their nature exclude as many as they include. This would be non-problematic if religions were tolerant <\/em>of those they exclude, yet far too often this is not the case.
\nReligions, which you count on to teach <\/em>tolerance, have not learned how to practice <\/em>it, and so, teach just the opposite.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

I am so sad about that. And I wouldn\u2019t have believed how serious the problem was\u2014and is, to this very day\u2014if I hadn\u2019t come across evidence with my own eyes. The most recent, and to me a shocking, evidence of exactly what is being discussed here was contained in a newspaper article in the Arizona Republic, originally written and distributed by the Los Angeles Times, on December 1, 2001. I want to reprint that story here, in full, because I want all the world to know just how insidious\u2014and how serious\u2014this problem is. Most people to whom I\u2019ve shown this story are aghast. Their mouths drop.
\nHere\u2019s the article\u2026
\nLUTHERAN PASTOR ASSAILED
\nJoining Interfaith Event Called Heresy
\nSt. Louis \u2013 To the Rev. David Benke the ceremony at Yankee Stadium was a blessing, an opportunity to join other religious and civic leaders in offering comfort to a nation raw from the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. He joined the celebrities and politicians on stage to sing patriotic songs and to pray.
\nIt was, he thought, his duty as a pastor.
\nBut some fellow clergymen took quite a different view. They saw his participation in an interfaith event as heresy.
\nSix pastors from the Lutheran Church-Missouri Synod filed formal charges last week calling for Benke\u2019s expulsion from the church.
\nOthers have petitioned to oust church president Gerald Kieschnick for condoning Benke\u2019s participation in the event and himself for praying with chaplains from other Lutheran denominations after a tour of the World Trade Center wreckage in October.
\nBenke \u201cparticipated in idolatry by participating with non-Christians\u201d at the Sept. 23 service, one of the dissidents, the Rev. David Oberdieck, told the St. Louis Post-Dispatch. Oberdieck would not comment further Friday, saying the dispute was a \u201cfamily matter\u201d that should not be aired in the \u201csecular media.\u201d But he stood by his interpretation of Benke as an idol worshiper.
\nHe and other clergy also accused Benke of \u201csyncretism,\u201d which means promoting the view that all religions are equal. The 10-page petition against Benke called his participation in the New York ceremony \u201can egregious offense against the love of Christ\u201d that gave \u201cthe impression that the Christian faith is just one among many by which people may pray to God.\u201d
\nAccording to these critics, by standing alongside \u201cheretics\u201d such as Muslims, Jews, Hindus and Christians of other denominations, Benke implicitly endorsed their faiths, giving the impression that all offer an equal path to salvation.
\nChurch leaders hold that they must not pray in public with anyone from another faith, even Lutherans of other denominations. They believe in worshiping only with those who interpret the Scriptures and understand God in precisely the same way they do.
\n\u201cWe can\u2019t go to the communion rail with someone who thinks of communion in a completely different way,\u201d explained the Rev. David Strand, a spokesman for the church, which is based in suburban St. Louis.
\nThe nation\u2019s largest Protestant denomination, the 16-million-member Southern Baptist Convention, hews to a similar tradition. \u201cI do not have an ecumenical bone in my body,\u201d the Rev. Paige Patterson, a former president of the church, has often said. And indeed, many Southern Baptist clergy made a point of staying away from interfaith services after the Sept. 11 attacks.
\nYet Benke and Kieschnick insist that the Yankee Stadium ceremony was not a formal worship service and thus was not off-limits to Missouri Synod members.
\nThey viewed it as a secular event, organized by Mayor Rudolph Giuliani and hosted by actor James Earl Jones, that included some prayer.
\nWhen it was Benke\u2019s turn at the microphone, he recited a brief prayer that opened and closed with references to Christ. Although he stood in respectful silence while other religious leaders spoke, his supporters insist he was not worshipping with them. Nor was he assenting to their views.
\n\u201cTo suggest that when the imam was praying to Allah, Dr. Benke was praying right alongside\u2026it\u2019s an insult to even imply that was what he was doing,\u201d Strand said.
\nAs for Kieschnick\u2019s impromptu prayer session with chaplains from other denominations, Stand said the same justification applied.<\/strong>
\nNow I read that story and I think to myself, I guess I must just be na\u00efve. I mean, I thought I was a pretty savvy guy who knew what was going on in the world, but I\u2019m seeing here that I have no idea of what\u2019s happening around me.
\nThat story shocked me. I was shocked and saddened and sick at heart when I first read it. I just had no idea\u2026I thought that I had to look elsewhere in the world to find that level of hysterical, radical religious intolerance.<\/p>\n

\nIt is time you acknowledged a human truth at which no one wants to look.
\nOne of the biggest problems in the world today is organized religion.
\nOrganized religions are a problem.
\nThey are not a solution, they are a problem.
\nNot all religions, but most. And certainly, most of the largest.
\nWhat you have in the case of most of your largest and most influential organized religions is the blind leading the blind.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Really. I mean, here is a nation in the midst of incredible grief, searching for spiritual support in a moment of need, seeking to experience its unity and oneness at a time of turmoil, only to have its own religions letting it down.
\nHere are a people wanting only to link arms and walk in-step, each person appealing to the God of his or her understanding, each person knowing that healing begins with the expression of tolerance for every other person\u2019s understanding, only to find that organized religion forbids it.<\/em>
\nReligions forbid tolerance<\/em>. Can you imagine? Baptists refusing to pray with Jews or Catholics. Lutherans refusing to pray with other Lutherans.<\/em> As if there was a wrong time, or a wrong place, or a wrong person with whom to pray.
\nIs it any wonder that human beings around the world are asking, \u201cWhat\u2019s wrong with this picture?\u201d Is it any wonder that bumper stickers and billboards have begun to appear saying, GOD, SAVE ME FROM YOUR PEOPLE? Who in the world wants to believe in a God who is less charitable and less tolerant than they are?
\nHow can we ask the world to heal itself when organized religion\u2014the very institution which was meant to provide that healing\u2014does nothing but inflict more and more damage, open wider and wider the wound, spread further and further its righteous indignation, its non-acceptance, its utter distain, its total intolerance?<\/p>\n

\nYet how can you blame religion if religions believe in a God who does exactly the same thing?
\nIt is your understanding of God that is the main problem.
\nI will say again, so that you cannot miss it\u2026the problem confronting humanity today is spiritual.
\nYou do not understand who you are. You do not understand who God is. You do not understand how the world works. You do not understand that love is the basis of all of life, nor can you comprehend a love that is unconditional.
\nYou imagine that God is a small, petty, jealous deity who says to people bowed in prayer, \u201cSorry, it\u2019s my way or the highway. Your prayer I hear. Your prayer I don\u2019t, because you didn\u2019t do it right. You did not please me.\u201d In this you turn me into a replica of the worst of humanity.
\nYou claim that you are striving to be God-like in your lives\u2026and if this is the God you are striving to be like, you have succeeded brilliantly.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

= = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = =
\nThis week’s gift of poetry<\/em>
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\nWhat I couldn’t say was…
\nBeloved, will you be here
\nin this world with me
\nlong?
\nWhat I didn\u2019t say was…
\nBeloved, where have you
\nbeen?
\nWhat I didn\u2019t do
\nwas rise,
\ndraw the curtains,
\nand
\ntake the cup from your hand.
\nWith God watching,
\nI should have shown
\nhow Humans
\ncan
\nLove.
\nI should have
\ntaken your upper lip and
\ncaressed it with the warmth of my tongue,
\nrun a fingertip, along your lower lip,
\nand had you taste me.
\nI should have found
\nyour breath
\nand remembered it.
\nI should have placed myself
\ninto the nape of you,
\nto know your scent.
\nI should have undone one by one
\neach of the buttons on your shirt,
\nand brushed my lips over every place
\nany clothing had just been.
\nAnd
\nwith God watching
\nI should have taken you \u2013
\nrigid, pulsing,
\nto hear you cry out
\nevery last word that
\nI didn\u2019t say
\nto
\nYou
\nMy Beloved.
\n(I Didn’t Say – m. claire – copyright 2007 – all rights reserved) <\/em>
\nFor more of the work of this new poetic voice you are invited to www.mclairepoet.com.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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