Diversity of belief and finding out the truth
I have recently become aware of just how vast the breadth of human spiritual beliefs are. There is a fascinating series on BBC 2 at the moment called “Around the World in 80 Faiths” with Peter Owen-Jones, an unconventional (and I think slightly eccentric in a nice way) Anglican minister. This and loads of reading on the internet have combined with my new emphasis on objectivity to give me insight I never had before. One usually thinks of major world religions versus local or pagan traditions, but it’s not as simple as that. Even the history of Judaism may not be as monolithic or even monotheistic as we are accustomed to think. Perhaps the distribution of religious group sizes is scale-free, just as many things in the natural world are (including earthquakes)… and the major world religions are the rare extreme events – like the earthquakes that span a large fault. But it puzzles me how a religion can develop into a major one. Is it just chance? Or do the ones that last do so because they are especially equipped to last?
So many people have claimed to hear from God – from the famous prophets, to ordinary individuals, to cult leaders who conveniently hear things that allow them to commit atrocities. They cannot all be completely right. Unless, of course, in some strange way there are many truths. But are any of them real? How do we judge, other than by (1) assuming our inner sense of morality is God-given and (2) engaging it in the evaluation – or, by hearing from God ourselves.
Miracles are often used as evidence of truth. I’m not particularly impressed by miracles per se*. I’m more intrigued by the idea that these phenomena occur in such a way as to communicate something, or that they offer insight into a divine personality. Or things like prophecies that are later fulfilled, or pre-scientific explanations for things that are later proved to be scientifically correct. I don’t know how you would evaluate the significance of these, but they are at least superficially quite compelling.
But if you do become convinced that, say, a scripture reflects a divine interaction with a person, does that mean you have to accept the whole scripture as truth? Shouldn’t we remain critical; doesn’t the diversity of religious belief in the world indicate how easy it is for a person to be wrong? Why should anyone be completely right? Muslims generally maintain Muhammad was without error, yet I find this an impossible position to take, not just based on the above argument, but because there are verses in the Qur’an that actually admonish him for things he did. There are also, of course, sources of error in preservation and interpretation of scripture that many refuse to acknowledge. Why is it that people are so uncomfortable with shades of grey and insist on the black or white, the all or nothing, the heaven or hell view?
It frightens me, if I’m honest. Religions tend to insist on unfaltering belief as a condition for salvation, and I cannot find a way to justify that right now. It’s not that I don’t want to believe in anything and am looking for excuses. It’s more like the other way round. My ruminating over this issue has almost reached OCD levels. (Classic me…)
What makes me curious is that I do see some broad similarity across even very different and culturally separated traditions. What I think is common is a sense that humanity is less than it could be (we take “no-one’s perfect” for granted) and a multitude of solutions are proposed.
* I’ve always maintained that the God who wrote and sustains the laws of physics, shouldn’t need to break those laws to be believed in. Besides, science is just a description of those laws, which is updated as new discoveries are made, and when surprising phenomena are observed, it adapts to encompass these. Science is man-made and approximate and discrepancies between it and reality certainly aren’t proof of direct divine intervention. I am of the view that science describes the physical universe, while the question of why things are the way they are is outside its remit. I like the idea of spiritual meaning within what is natural, not necessarily outside it.
Religious belief
At this point in my life I find it hard to relate to an uncritical, submissive approach to religion. To get to that point, you have to:
- believe that there’s a God, a creative consciousness behind the universe
- believe that God created us for a purpose, or requires certain behaviour of us
- believe that God chooses to communicate with us about these requirements through prophets/revealed religion
- believe that a particular religion truly has this type of divine origin
I have been religious in the past, but at this point, and it frightens me to say so, I can really only tick the first of these, and am less sure about the rest. When you’re an insider to a religion, faith reinforces itself experientially. But if you have to decide from scratch about religion, how do you decide?
It seems to me that you can only judge the truth of what a religion teaches by how much it agrees with the opinions you already hold… in which case why do we need religion to tell us things we already know? Having said that, learning about Islamic dress has taken me to a happy place I wouldn’t have got to otherwise, so I do think that religious morality has something to offer us. Some would say only “weak” people rely on external guidance for how to live; I reject this. We are not as independent and free-thinking as we would like to think we are; we all rely on external ideas. But nevertheless, deciding a religion is true on the basis of liking its principles (and lots of converts do just that) has two problems for me: firstly, it assumes that God necessarily wants the things that we like, and where’s the basis for that? Secondly, if it leads to wholesale swallowing of religious doctrine and toeing the party line thereafter, this could be disastrous if the religion is not in fact true or if its interpretation has not been done correctly. Given how many widely differing scholarly opinions there are on just about everything in religion, one has to admit there is a high probability of that. I cannot stomach the arrogance of people who firmly believe they’ve got it right and go around attacking anyone who disagrees.
At this point, I feel that after years of learning and thinking, I have loosened myself from all attachments and am now as near to unbiased about spiritual questions as I could possibly be. I’m painstakingly aware of all the temptations and pitfalls that make people join religions for wrong reasons, but I can’t help wondering sometimes if the reasons for joining are less important than the direction it takes you in. I envy people whose spiritual beliefs and pursuits are an anchor in their lives; people who have a source of calm and a sense of direction and meaning; people who are not easily torn apart by skepticism and fear. And I know that it wouldn’t be called faith if you could work out for sure that it was true. But I hesitate. I hesitate not least because I know how immoderate I am; my zeal exceeded my maturity when it came to my own religious escapade and this led me into peril. It hasn’t been possible for me to be unquestioningly committed since then. Actually, I was never unquestioning; I just thought the path I was on held answers I was yet to find. Now, I am no longer on any path, and I don’t know where I am going. But I finally feel free of all constraints and I wouldn’t have it any other way.
Wrestling With Religion 