I go to church most Sundays and a lot of time I sit there mildly interested in the goings on. Once in a while I get mightily interested. I got mightily interested today during the opening of the service. It was a kind of prayer, and after the service I had the author agree that I could use the opening words in this column. Here are the parts that made me sit up and take notice:
…from arrogance, pompousness, and from thinking ourselves more important that we are, may some saving sense of humor liberate us…. …from making war and calling it peace, special privilege and calling it justice, indifference and calling it tolerance, pollution and calling it progress, may we be cured….
Most of the time church services try to convince the patrons that humans are the last, great and most wonderful creation of God. I think multitudes of churchgoers never even consider the possibility that humans might simply be just one of thousands and thousands of species, each unique, and deserving consideration. We humans run around selfishly populating the world to the detriment of other life forms. Talk about arrogance, we breed like flies but don’t have the two or three month life span of flies. We call the armies we send in to other countries peacekeepers. We’ve turned places like our Rocky Mountain Arsenal and most of Eastern Europe into pollution pits. We think we are being compassionate and big hearted when we send food to starving people, and thus encourage them to have more wretched babies.
For anyone to think that humans are the best that their God can do doesn’t say very much for their idea of God. We really need to be about facing realities and doing better. Humans are a pretty sorry species, but we can learn and we can make things better. But first we need to realize that God doesn’t have any favorite species.
Religion is man-made. Faith is God given. Jesus said: “The Sabbath was made for man’s sake, not man for the Sabbath, so that the Son of Man is Lord also of the Sabbath.” Mark 2:27-28. “But without faith it is impossible to please Him; for he who comes to God must believe that He exists and that He is a rewarder of those who search for Him.” Hebrews 11:6. “For by grace you are saved through faith, and that not of yourselves; it is the gift of God. It is not a result of works, so that no one may boast.” Ephesians 2:8-9
God cannot be seen, so, by faith, we know He exists. He proves His existance in countless ways in response to that faith. Faith isn’t hard to understand, we by faith, drive thru a green light, believing that those at the red light have and will stop.
Religion, however, limits the ways God proves His existance, puts the power in human hands so that faith is unnecessary.
Religion, it has long seemed to me, exists as a social ritualization of faith – the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things unseen – that gives comfort to those who, in the presence of hope’s untidiness, yearn for order even as they seek to develop or deepen the godly connection. In ritualizing expressions of hope, religion confers power on those who are happy and able to achieve orderliness. Those desirous of religion’s discipline find active means of channeling their hope, either in fellowship with others or in prescribed solitude. Those who love the social sharing of hope and who are tolerant of a certain degree of imposed conformity likewise find community.
Those who are not desirous of bureaucratic power, who are unhappy in conformity, or whose reserved natures find little joy in enforced socializing, may find in religion’s rituals and rules little to buttress their faith. For these – and I count myself among them – the skill of listening becomes paramount; listening for answers, awareness, authenticity.
Religion is Fenway, faith is the Red Sox…you need to have faith in the active relationship between you and the “whatever” not between you and place where the “whatever” is sometimes found.
Organized religion is just politics by another name….it offers a “platform” only to encourage more adherents to become engaged and contribute money to the cause.
I believe that if religion connects an idividual to G_d it is in the form of a Discipline. (i.e. Mathematics) It would simply be a basis for one to develop one’s own individual concept/relationship with G_d.
Unforunately, as with all montheisitc religions, the Dogma/Theology is accepted unequivically. Most peoples Religion/Faith does not evolve from this starting point. The wonderful thing about the major religions is that they give people A) a starting point or b) something to reject.
Faith! I believe it is intuitive. One either has it or doesn’t. I do not know if it could be developed.
Finally you talk about “knowing” G_d without any real concept of G_d and I thibk that is valid. As an analogy I will say that children always know that they are going to be fed, loved and sheltered. They do not doubt it. It always is the case in some degree or another. Ergo we can acknowledge the existence of G_d withut having any conept about who or what he is and how he works.
G_d is so “other” that we cannot compartmentalize him.
Some believe that it is inappropriate to write the word God. There are a number of reasons for this, but most – if not all – stem from reverence for the name, not shame of vulgarity.
Religion does not have the capacity to connect one to God. Religion is an orginization that is comprised of the faithfull, and relies on the faithful for its existance. Ones relationship to God is defined by ones faith.
Faith in God can exist without religion. Religion cannot exist without the faithful.
Religion connects people to God by providing a mechanism for human beings as a group to experience a common imagination. An individual experiences God naturally in their own unique way, which they call faith. Yet our most consistent problem since civilization began has been communicating that personal perception of the universe. We are unable to understand the scene from another set of eyes. Religion gives people a common set of terms and rules to experience the universe with: a social psychological template for the unexplainable sensation of our own cosmic connectedness. Even in that macrocosm, a religious idea is equally unable to understand a conflicting perspective, hence the current state of religious “dialogue”. Hopefully this forum will be a successful effort to remedy that lack of imagination between all our various brothers and sisters.
I see religion and faith as two different things. Religion has more to do with dogma and faith pertains to an individuals intrinsic knowledge of God. Some people experience God through community & dogma (religion)…others experience God through an internal knowledge of something greater than oneself in the world.
A few thoughts:
1. To paraphrase Paul Tillich (a now deceased prominent protestant theologian), “faith” assumes doubt, whereas “belief” does not.
2. Most humans are incapable of living with “doubt.”
3. In my view, it is sheer hubris to “believe” that which is unknowable.
4. It is worse (and cruel) to indoctrinate those with still non-fully formed pre-frontal lobes (everyone not in their early 20’s at the least) with teachings (any organized religion) that includes fear of abandonment, loss of love and acceptance, and/or punishment for not “believing,” and/or doing prescribed rituals, which are the modus operandi of all organized religion(s).
5. It is far more appropriate to live one’s life, and to teach children, to respect oneself , to respect others, to respect our planet, and to (paraphrasing Hippocrates and the ORIGINAL “Golden Rule”) “Do NOT do unto others what you would NOT have them do unto you.”
6. My 2 complaints about the “Great Whatever” and therefore life on Earth, are the phenomena of “mortality” and, in particular, the presence of a “food chain world”, wherein survival (and/or advancement) requires “eating” others, literally and/or figuratively.
7. Not the way I would have done it (but I was obviously not asked).
Faith is precisely the connection between the individual and God, the rapture of the individual — the individual’s inner feeling of God’s existence and presence and love. Religion is the God-focused interconnection among individuals of faith, a collective rapture shared with others and therefore magnified for the individual in its force and depth. Many people have a strong sense (or it has been their experience) that by sharing their individual connection to God in some fashion with their neighbors, their feeling of connection with God (their faith) becomes more powerful, and so too does their feeling of interconnectedness with other people in the world and their sense of purpose and meaning in their individual lives. Most of us are (or wish to be) social creatures, and many of us are not content to keep our own inner feelings of inspiration and meaning to ourselves, at least not all the time. For that reason, religion is quite natural. Religion usually involves the identification and development of an organized set of rituals or core principles for living life that are shared among people with similar faith impulses. In part, that’s because religion springs from the basic human tendency to organize beliefs about the world and how it works and to put those beliefs into collaborative action in hopes of inspiring others and achieving greater happiness. Most organized religions also coalesce around the inspired revelations of great thinkers from a formative past whose revealed truths have been instrumental in comforting and strengthening the lives of many and whose precepts have taken on the trappings of tradition. Revering the great thoughts of the past and accepting the imprimatur of widespread belief and tradition are also very human tendencies that are rational and understandable. Even the most elaborate rituals and traditions of an organized religion need not cloud the basic power and simplicity of the individual’s relationship to God. For example, Thomas Aquinas, whose theological writings exemplified many of the complexities of scholasticism, held what was in some ways a very simple concept of God and the individual’s relationship to God: For Aquinas, God’s essence is existence itself — and existence itself is a pure good, because no other good (not the world, not humanity, not human kindness and inspiration, not joy, nothing) can ever come to be without the potential for existence and the gift of actual existence that comes ultimately from God.
The question assumes that The Great Whatever (TGW) cares or desires a connection with each creature? Perhaps the plan all along was to spinoff living creatures of some kind into the universe and see what they would manage to evolve into. Perhaps TGW plans on checking in with these developing creatures from time to time but maybe not or not anytime soon. Maybe the creatures we have become are lacking or disappointing for some reason to TGW. We have absolutely NO idea of the reason for very much beyond the dimension and time we currently inhabit. That does not bother me. I want and need meaning in my life like every other human that has ever walked this planet with a brain big enough to wonder about the answer. I look to what I DO know to help me find that meaning. After thinking about that for some time, here’s what I think I know broken down in a very basic way: There are positives that create and negatives that destroy. I try continually to CHOOSE the positives that will positively effect the most people. It’s not black & white. It takes attention and thought. Then I ask, what do I think might be most important positive force to use as my guide, the thing that I value above all else to help me choose? I wish I could eradicate suffering of any kind. I wish the entire human race would value above all else the elimination of suffering for as many of us as possible. Our religion would be positive deeds and our faith would be that together we can have positive outcomes for most of us. I believe that could be possible regardless of the existence or nature of TGW.
Does that make sense to you?
All humans have faith in certain central ideas or values, things that can’t be proven. Many people draw important values from organized religion. Our language organ (part of the brain) tees up certain questions right in front of us, things like Why is the world as it is? Why do the good suffer? Where did we come from? Some of us quickly decide to ignore those questions, but they remain and may become more intense at times of personal loss. Organized religions provide answers to at least some of those basic questions; every primitive society appears to have had a creation myth. As we see how different the teachings of different religions are, it becomes difficult to think that any one of them is literally correct.
I can respect organized religions without accepting them as applicable to me. I can’t imagine that organized religions, any of them that I’ve run into, have the final word about any of basic questions. I don’t need organized religion to guide my actions. I believe that there is another world, which contains things that are beyond human ken. You may talk of God, but I don’t except in answer to questions.
I think that life must have meaning and a feeling of purpose. Some people are very cynical, their life boils down to “I’ll put my own well-being (and perhaps my family’s) above all else”; there is a meaning or theme to their lives but many of them lack the sense that their life has meaning or purpose; they are often angry and discontented. If you aren’t connected to something bigger than yourself and your family, you probably can’t have the feeling of a meaningful or purposeful life, except briefly when you fight against others. You can’t accept the complexity of our world. Individuals need to be connected to something that is serious and enduring, but I don’t think that they must have a God or a connection to a God.
Thank you so much for inviting us to have this most important dialogue. I was raised as a Christian but was always curious about other religions. After taking several world religion courses in college and also becoming interested in Hinduism through George Harrison’s music, I realized there is no right or wrong way of viewing God. It doesn’t matter what you call God, as long as you believe. I could no longer call myself a Christian as I did not believe that Christ was divine and was the only way to heaven.
I was born in Concord, Massachusetts, the home of Emerson, Thoreau, and Transcendentalism, so naturally I explored this view of God as well. I have found the view that “Heaven is under our feet as well as over our heads” to be something I can relate to more than any organized religion. I have felt closer to God on a hike in the woods than I ever did in any church.
You are totally correct when you say that religion can act as a barrier to God. If we follow Thoreau’s advice to “simplify, simplify” we can truly get closer to the divine. For some people, the trappings of religion such as priests, communion, baptism, and all of the myths and stories that have arisen to “explain” God are necessary in order for them to feel like they are taking the “correct” approach to commune with God. For others like myself, we can reach God in a more simple and more direct way–through nature and through looking within ourselves and having faith that God will hear us.
Religion is the form while faith is the content using terms that I learned in Scholastic Philosophy. Another way of putting it is to say that Religion is the physical structure say of a car and faith is the engine or the motor.
While one can say that Religion in order to function needs a faith that defines it, faith meanwhile does not need an external religion (the rites and dogmas, etc) to sustain it. Religion is the external visible manifestation of someone’s belief (or faith) but faith meanwhile is the invisible energy that drives humans to God.
Now, one interesting thing about faith is that it is something that we cherish and keep without the need for absolute proof. In other words, it is a uniquely human activity where we humans respond to the mysteries of life and death and suffering without necessarily clinging to the dogmas of a religion.
Can one have faith without being religious ? Yes. Can one become religious without being faithful ? Yes. Meaning religion and faith do not have to be inter-twined all the time.
I have struggled with this issue also. But I’m not sure how one can claim to have a “relationship” with God if you don’t assume to know what he/it is? How can you talk to him, thank him, etc if you don’t give him some kind of identity. If we don’t know who or what God is, why do we assume that he is good? How did our moral beliefs come about?
Like you, I have complete faith in God, but I no longer need the Bible, nor a church for my complete faith in a Divine Being. I see a bird flying in the sky; I observe the stars, the Sun and Moon and other stars in our universe and my faith tells me there is a God. The fact that there is life and death, fair and foul weather and the changing seasons convince me there is God. The many examples of divine providence around us tells me that God is a reality. Our world confirms, for me the existence of God. However, I have grown away from the Christian concept of God.
I do not believe that God is comprehensible in the terms that man uses to describe God. I believe God is, in a sense, unknowable; however, who, what or which presence was in the Beginning is God to me. However, I find that the Bible , which is really a product of man, even if the men were inspired, they would have had to deal with the problems of translations of drawings from caves etc., in a language of communication that was foreign to them, would, necessarily, have led to interpretations that were clouded by the extent of their knowledge and interests and their fear of the unknown.
I live with the faith that all things are designed to strengthen us in some way and would eventually produce some form of “good” for humanity. it is not important that I see, or know the “good” that would result, but I must have faith that God’s Goodness cannot be prevented.
I do not believe that God ever gave man free will. Instead, I blieve that man was given the freedom to choose between God’s purposeful will and God’s permissive will. In this manner, man was freed to have a meaningful life with challenges, choices, successes and failures.
I believe that something or personality (not a human personality) must have been in the beginning. If all that we see around us has come from nothing, then “nothing” must be “something” to have produced all this. Just as some forces are not seen even though the effects are visible, so too, because God cannot be seen does not deny existence because we have so much around to marvel about. Can science produce a tree from nothing?
Beyond pure faith, there are the physical realities of the universe, the planets and solar systrems, the mountains, seas , rivers, clouds, people nd animals and sometimes dangerous acts of nature. The order and/or disorder of the known universe suggests an incomprehensible power and wisdom that is far beyond human intelligence and current knowledge. That power and wisdom is God to me. Faith does not require that we know the origin and the identity of God. Of course, if for some there is need for an internediary human form in order to believe in God, there is nothing wrong about it as long as the faith in God is supreme.
These thoughts are part of an unpublished book titled: God, the Christian religion and me.
It is only in recent years that I have begun to think of religion and faith seperately. My thoughts are that one does not necessarily encompass the other. Religion it seems is something that can simply be an act, ritual, or event that takes place at best once a week. It might be something you’re born into and brought up in. Faith on the other hand is something lived out, hopefully on a daily basis that you come to on your own understanding. It can grow, be tested, bring about lasting change and searched. I think each one can connect a person to God, but not necessarily with the same results. I think religion connects people to God through rules and discipline. It’s something people feel like they need to work at in order to understand God and get closer to Him. Faith on the other hand connects people to God through a relationship with Him. Rather than trying to live up to rules, which are often broken repeatedly, I believe faith in God changes you from the inside out. It’s not about breaking rules or not breaking them it’s about a desire, a change through a relationship with God that ultimately helps us understand what grace is and that we in turn begin to show that to people around us. How differen this world would be if we all showed a little more grace. Faith brings us a little closer to knowing God Almighty and His son Jesus who fulfilled the law so that we might live under grace. Religion restricts our connection to God, faith helps us freely connect to God.
During my formative years, I was immersed in the orthodoxy of the Roman Catholic Church, imbued with its absolutes: The Catholic religion is the only true religion; we were made in the image and likeness of God, etc, etc.
Looking back, it astonishes me that I actually fell for this stuff. But, then again, I had not yet reached puberty, and I was taught by my parents not to question adult authority. Yep — hook, line and sinker.
As I entered adulthood, went to college, served in Viet Nam, got married, and had kids, I floated in an out of the orthodoxy, all the while questioning more and more the absolutes. Finally, after much struggle, I concluded the orthodoxy was really not about God, but about enriching the Catholic Church and legitimizing its power.
I read William Manchester’s A World LIt Only by Fire and Ken Follett’s World without End and Pillars of the Earth. The corruption, debauchery and cruelty of the Church’s hierarchy just blew me away. It was all about them, not about God or even about others. In fact, it seemed the antithesis of religion.
Along the way, life was peppered with stories of abused altar boys, disgraced ministers, pedophiles, liars, cheats, clergy living the high life at the expense of others — incredibly, all part of organized religion.
I had had it. Organized religion to me was bogus, often nefarious, and hardly connected to God. No — it was about the grandeur of the church building, the size of the congregation, the false demonstration of piety, proselytizing, foisting guilt, pretending to know God like no other.
IT WAS NOT ABOUT GOD. It did not connect me to God; it drove me away.
If I were to have a relationship with God, it would have to be between me and him; no middleman of religion. To my mother-in-law’s great disappointment, I would not attend church. That would have been hypocritical.
In this one-to-one relationship, I prayed less and thought more. Nova on PBS became an important part of it: 100 billion galaxies, each with a 100 billion stars. Who did that? How did it happen? How big was the product of those numbers? God must exist, but where was he, what did he do?
It was this that connected me to God, whoever he was, wherever he was. Like trying to comprehend infinity, it became too complex. I just accepted that He was out there, somewhere, and to have a relationship would be between me and him, in a way I wished to explain to no one, because I couldn’t.
I don’t believe that religion connects anyone to God. As a matter of fact, I can make a case as to how religion keeps people disconnected from God. In my opinion, religion keeps people dependent on man/woman to provide answers and interpretations of God. Most of those interpretations are fundamentally flawed and tend to be self-serving. I spent my entire childhood completely immersed in the Catholic religion – schools, churches, all family, friends etc… Yet, I felt like I was the only person who bothered to question “why”. I felt like I was sacreligious for even questioning and not having blind faith. As an adult I realize that I wasn’t questioning the existence of God as much as I was questioning all the pomp and circumstance, the ying and yang, the “us” vs. “them” and all the other aspects that define an organized religion. Now comfortable with myself after having purposely exposed myself to a number of different religions I can say that I am currenly without religion but my faith, and most importantly, my relationship with God, is stronger than ever. I’ve eliminated the “middle man/woman” and devoted my time and energy to forming a direct relationship with God. Through this personal relationship I have found all the answers I need and I no longer require anyone to deliver or interpret messages for me.
I am Jewish and was raised in a somewhat orthodox home. Åt first I shared my parents’ belief system but as I have gotten older (I am now 78) and have witnessed so many terrible things, both on a personal and universal level (earthquakes, disasters of all kinds that kill millions of innocent people) that I have lost all faith in a loving or judgemental God and/or spiritual connection whatsoever. I feel that I need something to fill that void within me. How do I go about doing that?
Ms. Ruskin, I believe I understand. Unfortunately discussions of this nature often become too self-absorbed to be of much use to another but here is how I coped. I will leave out all the other things I tried and just say that I finally started reading the words of Christ as set out in the Gospel of Matthew in order to deal directly with the idea of a God who permitted so much evil. It took some time for me to come to grips with the idea that Christ was so comfortable recommending a life of doing as much good as possible for as many as possible in order to be more like his God, a God, he unapologetically tells us, who is comfortable in letting rain fall equally on the fields of the good and the wicked. So I tried it– a saying or two at a time, trying for a few hours a day to live by by those words. It was an immediate failure. And then I tried a few minutes at a time…Better luck there, and so there is where I started and still find myself. It has been a constant and uphill struggle for me and each day is harder than the last. My reward was an increasing awareness of everything and everyone around me, like a movie coming into sharper focus. I can’t really explain well that experience other than to say it is worthwhile and I keep trying to lead my own life in accordance with Christ’s words as set out in Matthew. And, to paraphrase, I hope not inappropriately, that has made all the difference.
Religion is a construct created by people when they set down their ideas, rules and laws for both peoples behavior and the way they relate to their centralized God figure. As people are social animals and want and need others – they will buy into or join a group of closely like minded individuals who in some way fullfill the social needs and faith aspect of their lives. They in turn keep the rules and raise their children – who don’t get a choice but are brainwashed into the system. The system functions as a social unit and people worst aspect frequently become the norm or the powers. Religion requires others. In todays world at least in the US – it is big business, money making, frequently charismatic ego figure centered and any self respecting God would shun it!! It really doesn’t connnect to a God as the God has disappeared under layers of human construct, ego, fear, need to control and need for power. Its group think. Its a way to control people who don’t have ability to think for themselves – its sheeple stuff. Its an institution for its self.
In the sense following the religous aspect – Faith is your personal connection to the Universe and the unlying power you accept as the God figure. It requires no social premission from someone else. It is a deeply held unshakeable individual belief. While faith can come from the brainwashed regimented beliefs of a religion and social group – it can also be a very private exploratory journey to your inner most thoughts and convictions – it can make you question organized religion and forge your own path, and your own connection to the deity – which ever one or ones you chose – or perhaps you chose none but a connection to the flow of the Universe and Life. Faith is beyond a single domineering religion or religious figure. No cult figure living, dead or legendary tells you what is right or how you live. You have forged your own morals and life pattern in accordance with what sits right with your convictions. You don’t spout endless words from someone else that sound good – you live your convictions. They don’t require anyones or any Gods seal of approval.
To me, religion is a process that teaches one about their Faith. Once a thinking person learns the basis, then they are free to determine how their faith will lead their lives and direct their behavior. Like others who have commented here I like to keep it simple. It’s a good vs. evil thing for me. It’s help vs. hurt and so on. People who have faith in God tend to believe that practicing good deeds is the way to live life. We are not perfect, and thus sin at times but correcting our mistakes and continually learning is what makes life’s journey so interesting. I would like to be more religious but my faith is enough to sustain me. I like what you are trying to do here and I really think it will help.
Religion and faith each connect an individual to God in the manner and to the degree the individual believes each connect him to God. I have no religous affiliation because it is too hard for me. All I can manage for myself is a simple path: I read the words of Christ as reported in Matthew, instructing us on how to be one with God, and I try each day to act in accordance with those instructions as I go about my daily life. I can’t do any of them well. I fail often. While the number of failures are not noticeably decreasing, my awareness of failing has increased and in that vein I am humbled and rueful and try to do better the next day. I am not afraid that I am blowing it. The words of Christ in Matthew comfort me and tell me I have nothing to fear by trying to live out my life in accordance with those words. So, in a sense, my religion and faith boil down to trying to live out my life in accordance with the words of Christ in the Gospel of Matthew.
“It is so much easier to argue religion than it is to believe in God and get on with living as a person of faith.” you say. I have discovered that the action-based faith-person you describe, Martha, is not the all of the person. Multi-dimensional, I continue to worship with others because I am not an island. Arguing religion has caused many sacrifices and losses throughout history. Religion helps me come together and seek fellowship by listening, observing, communing, seeing and participating. My enlightenment comes when I am alone with my God AND when I am in unison with other persons of faith. I choose both: faith and religion.
Finally somebody who gets it. Faith is simple, something created this universe I don’t know what and won’t ever know. But, I don’t need to know, I do know that I need to behave in a manner that harms the least because it’s a really good universe. Religion is an artificial construct for societal purposes. Religion’s rules and regs were created by man who didn’t know God anymore than I do. They made it up as they went along. Sometimes it was to improve society sometimes it’s bloody political. People get an helping of the definition and limitation of God that their religion’s agenda contains.
In a book entitled “Faith, Belief, and Religion” I attempt to address this subject. And on a web site concerning the Bible (http://christian-bible.com) I try to explain how a person might be a secular and faithful Christian. This is my current statement of faith.
“The love of family and friends continues to convince me that love is life’s greatest gift. I am grateful for all those who have shared with me this wonderful gift, and I bear witness that these loving persons include Buddhists, Hindus, Jews, Muslims, Sikhs, Unitarian Universalists, agnostics, and atheists, as well as Protestant, Catholic and Orthodox Christians.
I also give thanks for the Source of all that is. I believe all that we know and are, including our consciousness, our freedom, and our morality, come from the way the cosmos is evolving. I look to scripture, science, literature, history, and religious experience for insight into this wondrous unfolding.
I am a secular Christian. I am secular because I believe all human knowledge is limited and must be tested by experience and reasoning. This includes religious wisdom as well as scientific theories. I support secular government rather than religious government, because history reveals that secular governments are more likely to protect our freedom to pursue the truth through open debate and the rule of law.
I am a Christian because I “live and move and have my being” (Acts 17:28) within the witness of scripture, the music it inspires, and the love and hope of those who humbly follow Jesus.
My faith, however, is not defined by a belief that Jesus Christ is the Son of God risen from the dead. I see this as mythological language, which resists (as we should) the claim that Caesar (or any ruler) is god and savior of the world. I find in the symbol of resurrection an affirmation that injustice does not have the final word in history.
The heart of the Christian witness, for me, is the hope that we may know and manifest the love that does not die when we do.
The New Testament stories of Jesus and his followers call me to be more forgiving and to struggle with others for justice and reconciliation. With humility, I embrace the hope that: “…those who abide in love abide in God….” (1 John 4:16)
I have found this wondrous hope in every act of forgiveness and in many traditions of faith.
I beleive you can change the definition “slightly” of religion and thus include athiests, agnostics and humanists, like me. If you define religion as our connection to life in its broadest sense, it allows involving those who “choose” not to describe the unknown about life as god. The root of the word religion comes from the Greek meaning connection. I would argue that traditional Western-based religions use the word god to denote that broadest picture or description of the unknown and of life. As a religious humanist and a Unitarian Universalist, I believe we humans have choices as we live out our lives, and our collective faith is around the search for meaning, hope and love FOR EVERYONE in our lives. We become religious when, as Dr. Forrest Church said, “We realize we are alive and we are going to die”. Believing in or using the word god to denote what we do not know is choice we make, but it does not exclude others from being religious.
I believe faith is what we should all seek and share. Our particular religion is contingent upon the options within our circumstance, i.e. the time and place we happen to live out our lives. Christian and other brands of fundamentalism notwithstanding, there is no one particular belief system that has the right to claim it has a higher source of truth over others. It would be a strange and flawed God to reveal her truth to only one people, in one place, in one time, in one belief system. Yet our respective contingent paths are crucial in providing us the chance to embrace as “our path”–a way to practice and nurture our faith. We embrace our contingent paths as though they were divinely given. But my path is for me, for none other. I do not seek to tell others they should take my path, i.e. to embrace my religion.
Faith is our common bond independently of our particular religion. I wish we would stop worrying about what is the “right” religion, or whether we or others have found the “right” religion. Too much human suffering is the result of fighting and killing over whose religion is superior. It is too easy to get distracted in one’s faith by worrying about how others have taken the wrong path, and the wrong belief system. Religious beliefs are contingent. Faith is sublime and approaches the eternal. Any contingent religion can be a source of faith. Our faith allows us to stand in awe of God which gives us patience, and compassion and respect for others. Religion is the place to find faith not a final truth via a belief system.
I also do not embrace any religion, but believe in God. God is revealed to me every second of every day, awake and asleep, by paying attention to everything around me. Everything I see, hear, touch and taste is an expressed miracle, an unveiling of a hidden vast mystery. My participation in the events of my day is a sacred journey, a dance with God. Attempting to define God as an entity is folly.
Religion when its teachings are of love and embracing the divine in each living being can act as a guidepost towards experiencing what we commonly refer to as “god.” Faith and religion can help us realize and experience our oneness and not our separateness from “god.”
However, it is far too often the case that religion divides human against human (as in MY religion is the ONLY TRUE religion) and promotes the concept that humans are separate from “god.” (duality rather than unity).
Tough question, particularly for a gay, recovering Roman Catholic. My religion taught me at a very young age that I was “anathema”, sinful in the eyes of All That Is because my orientation sexually (never chosen, simply deeply felt from my earliest memory) was sinful.
I left the Roman Catholic Church as a late teenager. It wasn’t until some ten years later that I began seriously trying to “understand” the nature of reality, the interplay between our physical existence and other possible dimensions of human existence.
I reached some “conclusions”, after a long and torturous journey. I believe in God (a word whose religious limitations I dislike intensely – my referred designation of this reality is “All That Is”) but don’t feel that the reality is personally accessible to me.
My intellectual rationale is the utter vastness and unknowableness of that reality. Emotionally, I think it is truer, and sadder, to say that my experience of the Roman Catholic Church and its teachings on sexuality in general and homosexuality in particular, which I absorbed (and believed) as a young teenager, have left me, despite a lot of therapy, alienated from that part of myself which might actually be able to participate actively with All That Is.
I suppose the direct answer to the question is my religion separated me from God, while my faith gives me an often tenuous comfort that there is meaning in the chaos of our existence.
Religion is a human social construct rooted in ancient myth that prescribes norms and ritual. It is typically hierarchical and often paternal. It is rooted in dogma, and is by design immune to introspection. Most are born into it, indoctrinated since birth, and as a result they harbor a self-superiority over other religions. People have historically been willing to kill each other to prove that superiority, or at least expand the footprint of their own kind.
If there is a god, surely these self-serving human organizations bear no connection to it whatsoever.
Faith is decidedly orthogonal to religion. Faith is a psychological construct. It is a safety valve: the answer to the unanswerable. It is the bliss of abandoning the heavy burden of objective thought and the bathing of one’s mind in the warm glow of surrender. It is comfort food for the intellect; it satiates our longings for an authority figure we’ve had since we left childhood. Faith is attractive in that it embodies a certain humility that religion will not.
Frankly, I’m struggling to understand how faith as I understand it could bear any connection to a purported omnipotent and omnipresent entity. I’m starting to think that if there is a god, surely faith bears no connection to it whatsoever either.
If there is a god, we should strive to know it objectively, not in some arbitrary supernatural framework. God by definition would not be supernatural, but strictly and quintessentially natural. We only deem it supernatural because our faith enables us to write it all off to things we’ll never understand.
The only problem is, by every objective standard, there’s nothing to know objectively. Fear of eternal damnation draws a bright line to admitting that fact for many, and that to me is irrational.
The concept of causation may be an artifact of the limited human mind, but if there is a first cause, there is no reason to suppose that it is singular, that its presence is detectable, and that its purposes, if it has any, are singular, non-conflicting and humanly knowable and understandable, either consciously or subconsciously. The inclinations of the human race toward religion and faith may alleviate human anxiety about the nature of and reason for human existence, both before and after human death, but there is no reason to suppose that the products of these inclinations mirror in any way the nature of any first cause nor capture in any way its preferences regarding human behavior. That said, it is possible that the near universality of human belief in a first cause and the substantial agreement among diverse human cultures regarding the basics of moral behavior indicate a subconscious connection with a first cause and its preferences for human action. Religion and faith could well be imperfect attempts by humans to accommodate and institutionalize the perceived essence of these subconscious perceptions.
Thank you for starting this site, it’s a great idea for promoting dialogue and mutual understanding. Religion has fallen on hard times these days, but faith seems as hot as ever. I’m a bit obsessed with these questions in my life, and have really been enjoying reading the responses in this first thread.
I’m not the best writer, but I made this video for my videoblog called “9 Possible Reasons Why I’m a Religious Person” and thought I would share it here in this conversation: http://salamanderslam.com/?p=1
This is the very first time I have ever encountered someone that believes, as I do, in 2 fundamental principles, 1 that there is a real loving God, and that it is sure human hubris to put any restrictions or limits to him or her. In fact as you call God the great whatever, placing human sexuality in the context of the great whatever is disrespectful and another way we place the limits of our imagination around this concept.
The essential component of any human transaction seems to be based mostly on barter. A give for a get situation. Not all transactions are this way, but most. But most religions seem to based on the concept that if I do something here on earth, I will be rewarded in a happier place when I die.
I find this very limiting. The love I give my children is mostly barter free. I don’t expect anything in return (except perhaps that they do their homework) and I am quite OK with that (they usually don’t do what I ask perfectly). I don’t understand why most people insist that their worship, or spirituality must lead to a reward, other than the simple joy of giving in and of itself.
This is what I define as the essence of my spirituality. The simple gratitude of life, and joy in the act of freely giving of myself.
Mr. Reusser, do you believe in a heaven? If so, how do you believe a person is granted access?
Do you believe God has expectations of HIS people? Or is it just enough to be here and try to be a good person being grateful and giving in the hopes that God will smile kindly upon that token gesture and graciously open the gates to heaven in the next chapter?
The Republic of Singapore is a multi-religious nation, many religions live here: Taoism, Buddhism, Confucianism, Islam, Hinduism, Christianity. We have many religious festivities, one key festivity for Taoists is the Seven Month Hungry Ghost Festival. My birth certificate says that my religion is Buddhism. I have not at any one time studied Buddhism although my children had and are still doing it. I believe in religion, in someone up there looking down on us. Faith rules my life more than religion, faith in the good that I can do and have done. So long as I do good, do not hurt others, do not scheme to hurt others, I think I am a good human being. That’s all I need to be – being a good human being and having the faith to know that we are put on this for a purpose. I am still trying to discover my purpose in life on earth.
Faith is a common term for a relationship that any individual has with God. Religion is the term applied to an organisation or a structure, often called a church, that provides for culturally aligned people to share the commonality in their faith. I beleive in God, but I have a serious personal issue with what I refer to as “Churchianity”. I was raised as a Christian, and while I respect those who practise that belief, I similarly apply that same respect to those who believe in God as a Muslim, a Buddhist, etc. I do not differentiate. I would suggest that the many problems that our world faces stem from lack of respect of others of differing cultures to our own, their “Faith” being used as a convenient excuse to judge.
For me, Faith connects me to God; my faith in God, not religion.
When you say “religion” are you talking about the concept of religion in general or a specific religion? Clearly, not just any “religion” will connect anyone to God. One religion may be true, but not all religions can be true since each affirms different things. For that matter, each has a different conception of who or what God is.
And, when you say “connect” to God, what does that mean? How can a finite, imperfect being connect with the perfect creator of the universe?
From a Christian perspective, the individual cannot connect to God no matter how hard he or she may try through good works or religious ceremony. God can not commune with us since we are all spiritually dead. Only by God’s reaching out to us – communicating his character through his creation and by his words and ultimately through his son – can we hope to have relationship with him.
Hi, Peace, very good question. I am Muslim. As such my answer to the question would require that all come out of their box or comfort zone. Knowing that non Muslims have little or no Frame of reference when comes to Muslim perspective but are filled with many ill notions, hopefully here common sense would suffice.
Did religion or faith connect Jesus, Moses, Abraham or Muhammad, (Peace and blessings of God be upon them all), to God? I do not believe any one can claim that they did. But somthing and combination of things did. It was the purity of their heart and sincerety of their desire, wishing well for the fellow beings. Above all, they sought him with the very core of their being, they all lived by justice, sought justice and discharged justice. They practiced intellectual honesty in all thing, questioning outmoded practices, such as was done by Abraham in the case of co-mingling God and man. In other cases involving many other prophets, some discarded ill innovations and unsound practices and begged God for guidence and then through revealation re-newed the same religion. It happened again and again. And sadly it would end up being corrupted always by the priest class, that would also happen again and again. For example, Jesus (peace be upon him), a messenger of God, did try to undo just that with Chaiphaas the high Priest. He was trying hard to re-new the corrpted faith as God was guiding him to do so. But the old school and the priest class refused to shift thier imagination. And the rest is well known unclear event to this day. Religion, was still in its tribal settings, laws were out of date and impractical. Which Jesus (pbh) came to fulfil and not destroy as he claimed. But Jesus (pbh) never did become the king of the jews, metaphorically or otherwise, nor ever allowed to establish peace. It is interesting that in the collective imagination of later Christianity he would rise to be both, a king and a prince of peace but in reality he was neither. Then in 325 AD with the invention of Triune god and Church; faith and religion of Jesus, a Jew, lost all its Jewishness and were filled with ideas which he never promoted, such as the triune god. But enough of that, the rest is convoluted history as many well known Christian themselves claim. Be that as it may, but now the question is does that help or hurt in our settings today to connect a Christian to God? If the foundational base is weak and clearly not God sanctioned as we know that fact from the OT, how then can any member of any denomination of Christianity ever come even close to knowing HIM or HIS Essence? Especially when it is not even God their approaching but a man. At least if they tried to call upon the same God as did Jesus himself then they might find God real close to them. That is what Islam teaches. It does not shut the door to heaven to others sololy because they are not Muslim.
But of course one can not know God unless God so desires that one should know HIM, that is why HE chooses prophets to communicate with the rest of us, Islam also teaches they are humans, not angels or divines but humans of purified hearts with Grace of God on them. It is the divine truth, there have never been exception to that. Those who claime to come to know God, such as, Ted Haggard, Jimmy Swaggart (?), Jim or Tammy Fay etc would always end up disgraced. Thus Christianity, always making tall claims but find its loving flocks unsatisfied, unfulfilled unless of course one follows blindly his or her faith in all its totality, sacred and proface is all equal, such as a terrorist. The faith and the religion, whose integral parts are of Greek thought, Pagan Hellenistic ideas of yore and with Western triumphlism conveniently juxtoposed, can not posit anything but speculative thoughts in the hope to know God. That is also why it had been unable to solve mens problem for the last two thousand years. Without revealed truth it is futile that she can give her loving and kind and some wonderful followers this beautiful blessing of intimation with a Loving God. And the religion that can, has been in a way, if you will, hijacked temporarily from within and then rebranded, with that colored lense of western truimphalism in the same way the contemporaries of Jesus (pbh) rebranded Judaism both from within and without. So the question is how does Muslim fair in this regard?
Not much better now a days. It is true Islam does provide beautiful prescription for this experience but almost all negate it due to materialism. Though the devout who follow the ritual prayers are assured of intimation with the Divine. It is this ritual prayer that helps him or her through the answered prayer where he or she comes to realize that the Most loving God is indeed closer to him than the Jugular vein. As God points out in the Quran that all thing in nature follow a ritual, sun maintains its ritual of rising and setting, Moon does its part and does season and many other objects. Men, the product of an insignificant fluid thru ejaculation should he feel so arrogant that he ought not perform some ritual prayer for his Loving Creator? After realization of this beauty radical humulity should decend upon his heart and he should fall down prostrtate to the Creator of the heaven and earth and love him with all his heart and soul. Islam teaches and guarantees that he or she sould find the same Creator very near him or her. Islam, which teaches pure submission to One All Merciful God is the same religion given to Adam, Noah, Abraham, Moses, Jesus and Muhammad (pbh). It embraces all other religion and all the holy books thus it has been perfected and made universal and by truly embracing and acknowledging other faith and their truth and thus it is the peaceful religion. Hopefully one day, loving and kind Christians and Jews and all other faith groups will come to see it. And understand how Muslims find such closeness to the One same God. More later. Sorry, I am short of time so I will end for now. God Bless all.
When I hear “faith” and “religion” I think of the individual and society. Faith is about what an individual thinks, feels, and believes. Religion is about what “truths” a group or society embraces as important.
Groups and individuals are both capable of being misguided. Society at times is terribly misguided, and we celebrate as heros those individuals who step forward and redirect it. At times I am misguided and benefit from the guidance of others.
Religion at its worst provides bad guidance and results in evil here on earth; it separates or even drives individuals away from “the great Whatever”. Religion, when it is at its best, provides an avenue for the individual to share and celebrate and act upon their faith with other individuals.
In human relationships bonds are formed both by communicating those emotional connections with words or gestures and by actually engaging in actions with that other person. Saying you care for a friend is one way to form a connection, but going out and doing the things you both enjoy is also important. The things people do for one another is what truly bonds them. Religion can provide us an opportunity to “do something for God.” “Doing something for God” is impossible if God is an omnipotent otherworldly force or figure, yet if we are to be close to God then somehow we need to find a way to do that.
Faith is what get us moving towards “the great Whatever;” religion provides us with a path to guide our feet– for good or bad.
I am with you on this concept.
God is way to much for man to even begin to define. Religion however is that attempt to put boundries to our lack of understanding of the Whatever. Faith is a more personal way of just accepting we truly don’t have a clue but still know something is there.
Our trying to understand of what God is all about is like a Chimp trying to understand algebra.
At this stage in our development we don’t have the capacity to understand what “Whatever is or is not.
I have difficulty reconciling the concepts and beliefs of religion with faith in god. Religion seems to try to serve as an exclusive path to god. While a simple faith in god seems, to me, to be just that, a simple faith in god.
With religion you need to have faith in the religion to have faith in god. With a simple faith you need only have faith in god to have faith in god. Religion seems to try and create an exclusive faith in god. Meaning, you either follow the religion or you can’t connect with god.
Religion also seems to impart a type of instruction manual for god. As if god were a machine such as an elevator. Push a button, say a prayer, follow the dogma, and god has to act according to the instruction manual. A “deus ex machina” form of god.
I am not trying to say that religion is false, but rather that religion is limiting in it’s attempt to portray god. I have problems with the idea that god is limited to what a religion teaches.
I have always said I have faith in god, but at the same time can’t define god. Rather, only that I have an undefined faith that god exists. I act as though god exists, but again, I can’t define the why of why I act so. It gives me comfort just believing god exists. Why it does so, I have not been able to explain.
I speak to god, whether out loud or silently in my head. Does god hear me? I don’t know, but I believe god does. I have had conversations with god, but I can’t explain how god replies in these conversations. Only that it appears to me that I am getting a response in the form of a feeling, or that I am able to make a confident decision on some question based on my conversation. At times it seems that I am answering my question myself, even though before I asked the question I did not have an answer to the question.
I think religions can provide some signs on the road to faith in god, but the signs themselves, are not in themselves, an indication of faith in god. Rather they are indicators of belief in a religious proof of god. It is easy to believe a proof. But belief is not faith. I think faith is belief without an outside proof.
I call my faith a “simple faith” because, to me, it is very easy and simple. I have faith in god. It took me a while to realize, that in my search for god, all I need do to find god is have faith in god. I had always had the faith but I was searching for something to justify my own faith to me. I had not fully realized that my faith was all the proof I needed to justify my faith in god.
When asked to explain my faith, all I can say is that I have faith and that is the basis for my faith. It is very difficult to explain my faith in god. I can only really say “I have faith in god”.
Religion works for people that need help believing in god, but I don’t think faith in religion is the same as faith in god. Then again, who am I to judge how one comes to their faith. It works for those it works for, but it just seems easier to just have a simple faith in god, or maybe it’s harder. To tell the truth I don’t know for certain what path is better or easier for others. I can only say what worked for me personally.
I think faith reflects the very personal relationship with god; through prayer your experience with god grows and often faith grows with it; I associate religion with organizations such as a church or a temple; with religion I associate scriptures, such as the bible or the Koran; it often implies participation in a religious community and following certain rules that this community imposes upon its members. The beauty of faith is the freedom it gives you; just to believe and communicate with god on a personal level.
When I was a child I believed in saints, God and everything linked to religion, because my parents instructed me by that way.
Now, in my 60’s, I believe that Jesus (before called as God) was a very good man with excelent background to speak and to express good ideas. He is a man to be followed, as Confucio, Buda, Muhhamad, Mahatma Gandhi and others.
About faith, I have to believe in me and in what I can do to help to have a good world for all of us.
By the way, whithout the Earth – that we are killing every day – what should we do with the faith?
Some religions says that we go to the Haven when we die, but where is the first man – pre-historican – who died, as he only believed in the sun, thunder, moon, rain, etc? I think he was the first human being to believe in God, because of his fear in the unknown. Here started the faith.
Disclaimer: I don’t have a dog in the Christianity-vs-whatever hunt; I’m an agnostic by faith, and a Buddhist by philosophy.
Faith, as you’ve framed things here, Martha, is the *only* thing that connects an individual to a god (and I love your term, the “Great Whatever!”). Religion is what connects an individual to other individuals, as I see it.
It’s a fairly-rare mind, I think, that can handle an unboxed god, a god of faith without religion, so we as a species–on the whole–need something like religion to help us wrap our minds around that concept. In that context, it serves a very valid purpose, and some of those interpretations are very interesting and thought-provoking; take a look at Eastern Orthodoxy, or the Mennonites, or any of a number of Native American belief systems.
In theory, then, religion would connect individuals with more-or-less the same vision of what the Great Whatever is really like. That usage would be very useful to society, and the discussion between the groups educational and affirming for many. Way, way too often, it seems, it instead connects people not in their love and appreciation and analysis of their god, but in hatred of people who don’t love their god the way they do.
Whether that hatred manifests itself in rancorous argument or violence, it harms the society by creating artificial divisions that just don’t need to exist. Saying “He is not like me, and that’s bad” leads in four or five short steps to oppression, violence, and holocaust.
When you can point at another human being–as someone did to me recently–and say, “that person is an abomination before god,” then your religion has gotten in the way of faith (and also of good manners) and led you down a path that very few of the gods that we’ve come up with actually espouse–hatred, which leads to discrimination, which leads to violence. Don’t go there. There is a better way. Namaste: “that which is divine in me sees/greets/welcomes that which is divine in you.”
I certainly welcome this venue of discussion. I am an Episcopalian – read your story about your contact with a group of Episcopalians – and laughed. We are committed to our traditions – belief in God is a by-product. I have reached 60 years of age – and, this religion-thingey just isn’t satisfying anymore. I don’t want to argue about gays in the priesthood – or, women in the priesthood – or conservative vs liberal approach to practicing our religion – I want to know how religion is relevant to where I stand now in this journey called Life. In the beginning – religion is a way to connect a young person to the Great Whatever. However, if the religious practice is so overbearing, it may drive that person away from God (possibly identifying God as being the main oppressor). I don’t even want any of those silly childish promises of heaven if I behave and hell if I’m naughty – I just want a closer relationship God. As you age, it is faith that carries you through – not religion.
PLUS OR MINUS
October 1, l995 Jack Fish #118
I go to church most Sundays and a lot of time I sit there mildly interested in the goings on. Once in a while I get mightily interested. I got mightily interested today during the opening of the service. It was a kind of prayer, and after the service I had the author agree that I could use the opening words in this column. Here are the parts that made me sit up and take notice:
…from arrogance, pompousness, and from thinking ourselves more important that we are, may some saving sense of humor liberate us…. …from making war and calling it peace, special privilege and calling it justice, indifference and calling it tolerance, pollution and calling it progress, may we be cured….
Most of the time church services try to convince the patrons that humans are the last, great and most wonderful creation of God. I think multitudes of churchgoers never even consider the possibility that humans might simply be just one of thousands and thousands of species, each unique, and deserving consideration. We humans run around selfishly populating the world to the detriment of other life forms. Talk about arrogance, we breed like flies but don’t have the two or three month life span of flies. We call the armies we send in to other countries peacekeepers. We’ve turned places like our Rocky Mountain Arsenal and most of Eastern Europe into pollution pits. We think we are being compassionate and big hearted when we send food to starving people, and thus encourage them to have more wretched babies.
For anyone to think that humans are the best that their God can do doesn’t say very much for their idea of God. We really need to be about facing realities and doing better. Humans are a pretty sorry species, but we can learn and we can make things better. But first we need to realize that God doesn’t have any favorite species.
Religion is man-made. Faith is God given. Jesus said: “The Sabbath was made for man’s sake, not man for the Sabbath, so that the Son of Man is Lord also of the Sabbath.” Mark 2:27-28. “But without faith it is impossible to please Him; for he who comes to God must believe that He exists and that He is a rewarder of those who search for Him.” Hebrews 11:6. “For by grace you are saved through faith, and that not of yourselves; it is the gift of God. It is not a result of works, so that no one may boast.” Ephesians 2:8-9
God cannot be seen, so, by faith, we know He exists. He proves His existance in countless ways in response to that faith. Faith isn’t hard to understand, we by faith, drive thru a green light, believing that those at the red light have and will stop.
Religion, however, limits the ways God proves His existance, puts the power in human hands so that faith is unnecessary.
Religion is a dance around God; Faith is a partnership.
Religion, it has long seemed to me, exists as a social ritualization of faith – the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things unseen – that gives comfort to those who, in the presence of hope’s untidiness, yearn for order even as they seek to develop or deepen the godly connection. In ritualizing expressions of hope, religion confers power on those who are happy and able to achieve orderliness. Those desirous of religion’s discipline find active means of channeling their hope, either in fellowship with others or in prescribed solitude. Those who love the social sharing of hope and who are tolerant of a certain degree of imposed conformity likewise find community.
Those who are not desirous of bureaucratic power, who are unhappy in conformity, or whose reserved natures find little joy in enforced socializing, may find in religion’s rituals and rules little to buttress their faith. For these – and I count myself among them – the skill of listening becomes paramount; listening for answers, awareness, authenticity.
Religion is Fenway, faith is the Red Sox…you need to have faith in the active relationship between you and the “whatever” not between you and place where the “whatever” is sometimes found.
Organized religion is just politics by another name….it offers a “platform” only to encourage more adherents to become engaged and contribute money to the cause.
I believe that if religion connects an idividual to G_d it is in the form of a Discipline. (i.e. Mathematics) It would simply be a basis for one to develop one’s own individual concept/relationship with G_d.
Unforunately, as with all montheisitc religions, the Dogma/Theology is accepted unequivically. Most peoples Religion/Faith does not evolve from this starting point. The wonderful thing about the major religions is that they give people A) a starting point or b) something to reject.
Faith! I believe it is intuitive. One either has it or doesn’t. I do not know if it could be developed.
Finally you talk about “knowing” G_d without any real concept of G_d and I thibk that is valid. As an analogy I will say that children always know that they are going to be fed, loved and sheltered. They do not doubt it. It always is the case in some degree or another. Ergo we can acknowledge the existence of G_d withut having any conept about who or what he is and how he works.
G_d is so “other” that we cannot compartmentalize him.
Why do you not just spell out GOD? It is not a vulgar word, you know.
Some believe that it is inappropriate to write the word God. There are a number of reasons for this, but most – if not all – stem from reverence for the name, not shame of vulgarity.
Religion does not have the capacity to connect one to God. Religion is an orginization that is comprised of the faithfull, and relies on the faithful for its existance. Ones relationship to God is defined by ones faith.
Faith in God can exist without religion. Religion cannot exist without the faithful.
Religion connects people to God by providing a mechanism for human beings as a group to experience a common imagination. An individual experiences God naturally in their own unique way, which they call faith. Yet our most consistent problem since civilization began has been communicating that personal perception of the universe. We are unable to understand the scene from another set of eyes. Religion gives people a common set of terms and rules to experience the universe with: a social psychological template for the unexplainable sensation of our own cosmic connectedness. Even in that macrocosm, a religious idea is equally unable to understand a conflicting perspective, hence the current state of religious “dialogue”. Hopefully this forum will be a successful effort to remedy that lack of imagination between all our various brothers and sisters.
I see religion and faith as two different things. Religion has more to do with dogma and faith pertains to an individuals intrinsic knowledge of God. Some people experience God through community & dogma (religion)…others experience God through an internal knowledge of something greater than oneself in the world.
A few thoughts:
1. To paraphrase Paul Tillich (a now deceased prominent protestant theologian), “faith” assumes doubt, whereas “belief” does not.
2. Most humans are incapable of living with “doubt.”
3. In my view, it is sheer hubris to “believe” that which is unknowable.
4. It is worse (and cruel) to indoctrinate those with still non-fully formed pre-frontal lobes (everyone not in their early 20’s at the least) with teachings (any organized religion) that includes fear of abandonment, loss of love and acceptance, and/or punishment for not “believing,” and/or doing prescribed rituals, which are the modus operandi of all organized religion(s).
5. It is far more appropriate to live one’s life, and to teach children, to respect oneself , to respect others, to respect our planet, and to (paraphrasing Hippocrates and the ORIGINAL “Golden Rule”) “Do NOT do unto others what you would NOT have them do unto you.”
6. My 2 complaints about the “Great Whatever” and therefore life on Earth, are the phenomena of “mortality” and, in particular, the presence of a “food chain world”, wherein survival (and/or advancement) requires “eating” others, literally and/or figuratively.
7. Not the way I would have done it (but I was obviously not asked).
Faith is precisely the connection between the individual and God, the rapture of the individual — the individual’s inner feeling of God’s existence and presence and love. Religion is the God-focused interconnection among individuals of faith, a collective rapture shared with others and therefore magnified for the individual in its force and depth. Many people have a strong sense (or it has been their experience) that by sharing their individual connection to God in some fashion with their neighbors, their feeling of connection with God (their faith) becomes more powerful, and so too does their feeling of interconnectedness with other people in the world and their sense of purpose and meaning in their individual lives. Most of us are (or wish to be) social creatures, and many of us are not content to keep our own inner feelings of inspiration and meaning to ourselves, at least not all the time. For that reason, religion is quite natural. Religion usually involves the identification and development of an organized set of rituals or core principles for living life that are shared among people with similar faith impulses. In part, that’s because religion springs from the basic human tendency to organize beliefs about the world and how it works and to put those beliefs into collaborative action in hopes of inspiring others and achieving greater happiness. Most organized religions also coalesce around the inspired revelations of great thinkers from a formative past whose revealed truths have been instrumental in comforting and strengthening the lives of many and whose precepts have taken on the trappings of tradition. Revering the great thoughts of the past and accepting the imprimatur of widespread belief and tradition are also very human tendencies that are rational and understandable. Even the most elaborate rituals and traditions of an organized religion need not cloud the basic power and simplicity of the individual’s relationship to God. For example, Thomas Aquinas, whose theological writings exemplified many of the complexities of scholasticism, held what was in some ways a very simple concept of God and the individual’s relationship to God: For Aquinas, God’s essence is existence itself — and existence itself is a pure good, because no other good (not the world, not humanity, not human kindness and inspiration, not joy, nothing) can ever come to be without the potential for existence and the gift of actual existence that comes ultimately from God.
The question assumes that The Great Whatever (TGW) cares or desires a connection with each creature? Perhaps the plan all along was to spinoff living creatures of some kind into the universe and see what they would manage to evolve into. Perhaps TGW plans on checking in with these developing creatures from time to time but maybe not or not anytime soon. Maybe the creatures we have become are lacking or disappointing for some reason to TGW. We have absolutely NO idea of the reason for very much beyond the dimension and time we currently inhabit. That does not bother me. I want and need meaning in my life like every other human that has ever walked this planet with a brain big enough to wonder about the answer. I look to what I DO know to help me find that meaning. After thinking about that for some time, here’s what I think I know broken down in a very basic way: There are positives that create and negatives that destroy. I try continually to CHOOSE the positives that will positively effect the most people. It’s not black & white. It takes attention and thought. Then I ask, what do I think might be most important positive force to use as my guide, the thing that I value above all else to help me choose? I wish I could eradicate suffering of any kind. I wish the entire human race would value above all else the elimination of suffering for as many of us as possible. Our religion would be positive deeds and our faith would be that together we can have positive outcomes for most of us. I believe that could be possible regardless of the existence or nature of TGW.
Does that make sense to you?
All humans have faith in certain central ideas or values, things that can’t be proven. Many people draw important values from organized religion. Our language organ (part of the brain) tees up certain questions right in front of us, things like Why is the world as it is? Why do the good suffer? Where did we come from? Some of us quickly decide to ignore those questions, but they remain and may become more intense at times of personal loss. Organized religions provide answers to at least some of those basic questions; every primitive society appears to have had a creation myth. As we see how different the teachings of different religions are, it becomes difficult to think that any one of them is literally correct.
I can respect organized religions without accepting them as applicable to me. I can’t imagine that organized religions, any of them that I’ve run into, have the final word about any of basic questions. I don’t need organized religion to guide my actions. I believe that there is another world, which contains things that are beyond human ken. You may talk of God, but I don’t except in answer to questions.
I think that life must have meaning and a feeling of purpose. Some people are very cynical, their life boils down to “I’ll put my own well-being (and perhaps my family’s) above all else”; there is a meaning or theme to their lives but many of them lack the sense that their life has meaning or purpose; they are often angry and discontented. If you aren’t connected to something bigger than yourself and your family, you probably can’t have the feeling of a meaningful or purposeful life, except briefly when you fight against others. You can’t accept the complexity of our world. Individuals need to be connected to something that is serious and enduring, but I don’t think that they must have a God or a connection to a God.
Thank you so much for inviting us to have this most important dialogue. I was raised as a Christian but was always curious about other religions. After taking several world religion courses in college and also becoming interested in Hinduism through George Harrison’s music, I realized there is no right or wrong way of viewing God. It doesn’t matter what you call God, as long as you believe. I could no longer call myself a Christian as I did not believe that Christ was divine and was the only way to heaven.
I was born in Concord, Massachusetts, the home of Emerson, Thoreau, and Transcendentalism, so naturally I explored this view of God as well. I have found the view that “Heaven is under our feet as well as over our heads” to be something I can relate to more than any organized religion. I have felt closer to God on a hike in the woods than I ever did in any church.
You are totally correct when you say that religion can act as a barrier to God. If we follow Thoreau’s advice to “simplify, simplify” we can truly get closer to the divine. For some people, the trappings of religion such as priests, communion, baptism, and all of the myths and stories that have arisen to “explain” God are necessary in order for them to feel like they are taking the “correct” approach to commune with God. For others like myself, we can reach God in a more simple and more direct way–through nature and through looking within ourselves and having faith that God will hear us.
Religion is the form while faith is the content using terms that I learned in Scholastic Philosophy. Another way of putting it is to say that Religion is the physical structure say of a car and faith is the engine or the motor.
While one can say that Religion in order to function needs a faith that defines it, faith meanwhile does not need an external religion (the rites and dogmas, etc) to sustain it. Religion is the external visible manifestation of someone’s belief (or faith) but faith meanwhile is the invisible energy that drives humans to God.
Now, one interesting thing about faith is that it is something that we cherish and keep without the need for absolute proof. In other words, it is a uniquely human activity where we humans respond to the mysteries of life and death and suffering without necessarily clinging to the dogmas of a religion.
Can one have faith without being religious ? Yes. Can one become religious without being faithful ? Yes. Meaning religion and faith do not have to be inter-twined all the time.
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I have struggled with this issue also. But I’m not sure how one can claim to have a “relationship” with God if you don’t assume to know what he/it is? How can you talk to him, thank him, etc if you don’t give him some kind of identity. If we don’t know who or what God is, why do we assume that he is good? How did our moral beliefs come about?
Like you, I have complete faith in God, but I no longer need the Bible, nor a church for my complete faith in a Divine Being. I see a bird flying in the sky; I observe the stars, the Sun and Moon and other stars in our universe and my faith tells me there is a God. The fact that there is life and death, fair and foul weather and the changing seasons convince me there is God. The many examples of divine providence around us tells me that God is a reality. Our world confirms, for me the existence of God. However, I have grown away from the Christian concept of God.
I do not believe that God is comprehensible in the terms that man uses to describe God. I believe God is, in a sense, unknowable; however, who, what or which presence was in the Beginning is God to me. However, I find that the Bible , which is really a product of man, even if the men were inspired, they would have had to deal with the problems of translations of drawings from caves etc., in a language of communication that was foreign to them, would, necessarily, have led to interpretations that were clouded by the extent of their knowledge and interests and their fear of the unknown.
I live with the faith that all things are designed to strengthen us in some way and would eventually produce some form of “good” for humanity. it is not important that I see, or know the “good” that would result, but I must have faith that God’s Goodness cannot be prevented.
I do not believe that God ever gave man free will. Instead, I blieve that man was given the freedom to choose between God’s purposeful will and God’s permissive will. In this manner, man was freed to have a meaningful life with challenges, choices, successes and failures.
I believe that something or personality (not a human personality) must have been in the beginning. If all that we see around us has come from nothing, then “nothing” must be “something” to have produced all this. Just as some forces are not seen even though the effects are visible, so too, because God cannot be seen does not deny existence because we have so much around to marvel about. Can science produce a tree from nothing?
Beyond pure faith, there are the physical realities of the universe, the planets and solar systrems, the mountains, seas , rivers, clouds, people nd animals and sometimes dangerous acts of nature. The order and/or disorder of the known universe suggests an incomprehensible power and wisdom that is far beyond human intelligence and current knowledge. That power and wisdom is God to me. Faith does not require that we know the origin and the identity of God. Of course, if for some there is need for an internediary human form in order to believe in God, there is nothing wrong about it as long as the faith in God is supreme.
These thoughts are part of an unpublished book titled: God, the Christian religion and me.
cal
It is only in recent years that I have begun to think of religion and faith seperately. My thoughts are that one does not necessarily encompass the other. Religion it seems is something that can simply be an act, ritual, or event that takes place at best once a week. It might be something you’re born into and brought up in. Faith on the other hand is something lived out, hopefully on a daily basis that you come to on your own understanding. It can grow, be tested, bring about lasting change and searched. I think each one can connect a person to God, but not necessarily with the same results. I think religion connects people to God through rules and discipline. It’s something people feel like they need to work at in order to understand God and get closer to Him. Faith on the other hand connects people to God through a relationship with Him. Rather than trying to live up to rules, which are often broken repeatedly, I believe faith in God changes you from the inside out. It’s not about breaking rules or not breaking them it’s about a desire, a change through a relationship with God that ultimately helps us understand what grace is and that we in turn begin to show that to people around us. How differen this world would be if we all showed a little more grace. Faith brings us a little closer to knowing God Almighty and His son Jesus who fulfilled the law so that we might live under grace. Religion restricts our connection to God, faith helps us freely connect to God.
Not much to say that hasn’t already been. I am very glad to see this discussion. I consistently question the establishment.
During my formative years, I was immersed in the orthodoxy of the Roman Catholic Church, imbued with its absolutes: The Catholic religion is the only true religion; we were made in the image and likeness of God, etc, etc.
Looking back, it astonishes me that I actually fell for this stuff. But, then again, I had not yet reached puberty, and I was taught by my parents not to question adult authority. Yep — hook, line and sinker.
As I entered adulthood, went to college, served in Viet Nam, got married, and had kids, I floated in an out of the orthodoxy, all the while questioning more and more the absolutes. Finally, after much struggle, I concluded the orthodoxy was really not about God, but about enriching the Catholic Church and legitimizing its power.
I read William Manchester’s A World LIt Only by Fire and Ken Follett’s World without End and Pillars of the Earth. The corruption, debauchery and cruelty of the Church’s hierarchy just blew me away. It was all about them, not about God or even about others. In fact, it seemed the antithesis of religion.
Along the way, life was peppered with stories of abused altar boys, disgraced ministers, pedophiles, liars, cheats, clergy living the high life at the expense of others — incredibly, all part of organized religion.
I had had it. Organized religion to me was bogus, often nefarious, and hardly connected to God. No — it was about the grandeur of the church building, the size of the congregation, the false demonstration of piety, proselytizing, foisting guilt, pretending to know God like no other.
IT WAS NOT ABOUT GOD. It did not connect me to God; it drove me away.
If I were to have a relationship with God, it would have to be between me and him; no middleman of religion. To my mother-in-law’s great disappointment, I would not attend church. That would have been hypocritical.
In this one-to-one relationship, I prayed less and thought more. Nova on PBS became an important part of it: 100 billion galaxies, each with a 100 billion stars. Who did that? How did it happen? How big was the product of those numbers? God must exist, but where was he, what did he do?
It was this that connected me to God, whoever he was, wherever he was. Like trying to comprehend infinity, it became too complex. I just accepted that He was out there, somewhere, and to have a relationship would be between me and him, in a way I wished to explain to no one, because I couldn’t.
I don’t believe that religion connects anyone to God. As a matter of fact, I can make a case as to how religion keeps people disconnected from God. In my opinion, religion keeps people dependent on man/woman to provide answers and interpretations of God. Most of those interpretations are fundamentally flawed and tend to be self-serving. I spent my entire childhood completely immersed in the Catholic religion – schools, churches, all family, friends etc… Yet, I felt like I was the only person who bothered to question “why”. I felt like I was sacreligious for even questioning and not having blind faith. As an adult I realize that I wasn’t questioning the existence of God as much as I was questioning all the pomp and circumstance, the ying and yang, the “us” vs. “them” and all the other aspects that define an organized religion. Now comfortable with myself after having purposely exposed myself to a number of different religions I can say that I am currenly without religion but my faith, and most importantly, my relationship with God, is stronger than ever. I’ve eliminated the “middle man/woman” and devoted my time and energy to forming a direct relationship with God. Through this personal relationship I have found all the answers I need and I no longer require anyone to deliver or interpret messages for me.
I am Jewish and was raised in a somewhat orthodox home. Åt first I shared my parents’ belief system but as I have gotten older (I am now 78) and have witnessed so many terrible things, both on a personal and universal level (earthquakes, disasters of all kinds that kill millions of innocent people) that I have lost all faith in a loving or judgemental God and/or spiritual connection whatsoever. I feel that I need something to fill that void within me. How do I go about doing that?
Ms. Ruskin, I believe I understand. Unfortunately discussions of this nature often become too self-absorbed to be of much use to another but here is how I coped. I will leave out all the other things I tried and just say that I finally started reading the words of Christ as set out in the Gospel of Matthew in order to deal directly with the idea of a God who permitted so much evil. It took some time for me to come to grips with the idea that Christ was so comfortable recommending a life of doing as much good as possible for as many as possible in order to be more like his God, a God, he unapologetically tells us, who is comfortable in letting rain fall equally on the fields of the good and the wicked. So I tried it– a saying or two at a time, trying for a few hours a day to live by by those words. It was an immediate failure. And then I tried a few minutes at a time…Better luck there, and so there is where I started and still find myself. It has been a constant and uphill struggle for me and each day is harder than the last. My reward was an increasing awareness of everything and everyone around me, like a movie coming into sharper focus. I can’t really explain well that experience other than to say it is worthwhile and I keep trying to lead my own life in accordance with Christ’s words as set out in Matthew. And, to paraphrase, I hope not inappropriately, that has made all the difference.
Religion is a construct created by people when they set down their ideas, rules and laws for both peoples behavior and the way they relate to their centralized God figure. As people are social animals and want and need others – they will buy into or join a group of closely like minded individuals who in some way fullfill the social needs and faith aspect of their lives. They in turn keep the rules and raise their children – who don’t get a choice but are brainwashed into the system. The system functions as a social unit and people worst aspect frequently become the norm or the powers. Religion requires others. In todays world at least in the US – it is big business, money making, frequently charismatic ego figure centered and any self respecting God would shun it!! It really doesn’t connnect to a God as the God has disappeared under layers of human construct, ego, fear, need to control and need for power. Its group think. Its a way to control people who don’t have ability to think for themselves – its sheeple stuff. Its an institution for its self.
In the sense following the religous aspect – Faith is your personal connection to the Universe and the unlying power you accept as the God figure. It requires no social premission from someone else. It is a deeply held unshakeable individual belief. While faith can come from the brainwashed regimented beliefs of a religion and social group – it can also be a very private exploratory journey to your inner most thoughts and convictions – it can make you question organized religion and forge your own path, and your own connection to the deity – which ever one or ones you chose – or perhaps you chose none but a connection to the flow of the Universe and Life. Faith is beyond a single domineering religion or religious figure. No cult figure living, dead or legendary tells you what is right or how you live. You have forged your own morals and life pattern in accordance with what sits right with your convictions. You don’t spout endless words from someone else that sound good – you live your convictions. They don’t require anyones or any Gods seal of approval.
Psalms 33:3 “Sing unto him a new song, play skillfully with a loud noise.”
To me, religion is a process that teaches one about their Faith. Once a thinking person learns the basis, then they are free to determine how their faith will lead their lives and direct their behavior. Like others who have commented here I like to keep it simple. It’s a good vs. evil thing for me. It’s help vs. hurt and so on. People who have faith in God tend to believe that practicing good deeds is the way to live life. We are not perfect, and thus sin at times but correcting our mistakes and continually learning is what makes life’s journey so interesting. I would like to be more religious but my faith is enough to sustain me. I like what you are trying to do here and I really think it will help.
Religion and faith each connect an individual to God in the manner and to the degree the individual believes each connect him to God. I have no religous affiliation because it is too hard for me. All I can manage for myself is a simple path: I read the words of Christ as reported in Matthew, instructing us on how to be one with God, and I try each day to act in accordance with those instructions as I go about my daily life. I can’t do any of them well. I fail often. While the number of failures are not noticeably decreasing, my awareness of failing has increased and in that vein I am humbled and rueful and try to do better the next day. I am not afraid that I am blowing it. The words of Christ in Matthew comfort me and tell me I have nothing to fear by trying to live out my life in accordance with those words. So, in a sense, my religion and faith boil down to trying to live out my life in accordance with the words of Christ in the Gospel of Matthew.
“It is so much easier to argue religion than it is to believe in God and get on with living as a person of faith.” you say. I have discovered that the action-based faith-person you describe, Martha, is not the all of the person. Multi-dimensional, I continue to worship with others because I am not an island. Arguing religion has caused many sacrifices and losses throughout history. Religion helps me come together and seek fellowship by listening, observing, communing, seeing and participating. My enlightenment comes when I am alone with my God AND when I am in unison with other persons of faith. I choose both: faith and religion.
Finally somebody who gets it. Faith is simple, something created this universe I don’t know what and won’t ever know. But, I don’t need to know, I do know that I need to behave in a manner that harms the least because it’s a really good universe. Religion is an artificial construct for societal purposes. Religion’s rules and regs were created by man who didn’t know God anymore than I do. They made it up as they went along. Sometimes it was to improve society sometimes it’s bloody political. People get an helping of the definition and limitation of God that their religion’s agenda contains.
In a book entitled “Faith, Belief, and Religion” I attempt to address this subject. And on a web site concerning the Bible (http://christian-bible.com) I try to explain how a person might be a secular and faithful Christian. This is my current statement of faith.
“The love of family and friends continues to convince me that love is life’s greatest gift. I am grateful for all those who have shared with me this wonderful gift, and I bear witness that these loving persons include Buddhists, Hindus, Jews, Muslims, Sikhs, Unitarian Universalists, agnostics, and atheists, as well as Protestant, Catholic and Orthodox Christians.
I also give thanks for the Source of all that is. I believe all that we know and are, including our consciousness, our freedom, and our morality, come from the way the cosmos is evolving. I look to scripture, science, literature, history, and religious experience for insight into this wondrous unfolding.
I am a secular Christian. I am secular because I believe all human knowledge is limited and must be tested by experience and reasoning. This includes religious wisdom as well as scientific theories. I support secular government rather than religious government, because history reveals that secular governments are more likely to protect our freedom to pursue the truth through open debate and the rule of law.
I am a Christian because I “live and move and have my being” (Acts 17:28) within the witness of scripture, the music it inspires, and the love and hope of those who humbly follow Jesus.
My faith, however, is not defined by a belief that Jesus Christ is the Son of God risen from the dead. I see this as mythological language, which resists (as we should) the claim that Caesar (or any ruler) is god and savior of the world. I find in the symbol of resurrection an affirmation that injustice does not have the final word in history.
The heart of the Christian witness, for me, is the hope that we may know and manifest the love that does not die when we do.
The New Testament stories of Jesus and his followers call me to be more forgiving and to struggle with others for justice and reconciliation. With humility, I embrace the hope that: “…those who abide in love abide in God….” (1 John 4:16)
I have found this wondrous hope in every act of forgiveness and in many traditions of faith.
I beleive you can change the definition “slightly” of religion and thus include athiests, agnostics and humanists, like me. If you define religion as our connection to life in its broadest sense, it allows involving those who “choose” not to describe the unknown about life as god. The root of the word religion comes from the Greek meaning connection. I would argue that traditional Western-based religions use the word god to denote that broadest picture or description of the unknown and of life. As a religious humanist and a Unitarian Universalist, I believe we humans have choices as we live out our lives, and our collective faith is around the search for meaning, hope and love FOR EVERYONE in our lives. We become religious when, as Dr. Forrest Church said, “We realize we are alive and we are going to die”. Believing in or using the word god to denote what we do not know is choice we make, but it does not exclude others from being religious.
I believe faith is what we should all seek and share. Our particular religion is contingent upon the options within our circumstance, i.e. the time and place we happen to live out our lives. Christian and other brands of fundamentalism notwithstanding, there is no one particular belief system that has the right to claim it has a higher source of truth over others. It would be a strange and flawed God to reveal her truth to only one people, in one place, in one time, in one belief system. Yet our respective contingent paths are crucial in providing us the chance to embrace as “our path”–a way to practice and nurture our faith. We embrace our contingent paths as though they were divinely given. But my path is for me, for none other. I do not seek to tell others they should take my path, i.e. to embrace my religion.
Faith is our common bond independently of our particular religion. I wish we would stop worrying about what is the “right” religion, or whether we or others have found the “right” religion. Too much human suffering is the result of fighting and killing over whose religion is superior. It is too easy to get distracted in one’s faith by worrying about how others have taken the wrong path, and the wrong belief system. Religious beliefs are contingent. Faith is sublime and approaches the eternal. Any contingent religion can be a source of faith. Our faith allows us to stand in awe of God which gives us patience, and compassion and respect for others. Religion is the place to find faith not a final truth via a belief system.
I also do not embrace any religion, but believe in God. God is revealed to me every second of every day, awake and asleep, by paying attention to everything around me. Everything I see, hear, touch and taste is an expressed miracle, an unveiling of a hidden vast mystery. My participation in the events of my day is a sacred journey, a dance with God. Attempting to define God as an entity is folly.
Religion when its teachings are of love and embracing the divine in each living being can act as a guidepost towards experiencing what we commonly refer to as “god.” Faith and religion can help us realize and experience our oneness and not our separateness from “god.”
However, it is far too often the case that religion divides human against human (as in MY religion is the ONLY TRUE religion) and promotes the concept that humans are separate from “god.” (duality rather than unity).
Tough question, particularly for a gay, recovering Roman Catholic. My religion taught me at a very young age that I was “anathema”, sinful in the eyes of All That Is because my orientation sexually (never chosen, simply deeply felt from my earliest memory) was sinful.
I left the Roman Catholic Church as a late teenager. It wasn’t until some ten years later that I began seriously trying to “understand” the nature of reality, the interplay between our physical existence and other possible dimensions of human existence.
I reached some “conclusions”, after a long and torturous journey. I believe in God (a word whose religious limitations I dislike intensely – my referred designation of this reality is “All That Is”) but don’t feel that the reality is personally accessible to me.
My intellectual rationale is the utter vastness and unknowableness of that reality. Emotionally, I think it is truer, and sadder, to say that my experience of the Roman Catholic Church and its teachings on sexuality in general and homosexuality in particular, which I absorbed (and believed) as a young teenager, have left me, despite a lot of therapy, alienated from that part of myself which might actually be able to participate actively with All That Is.
I suppose the direct answer to the question is my religion separated me from God, while my faith gives me an often tenuous comfort that there is meaning in the chaos of our existence.
Religion is a human social construct rooted in ancient myth that prescribes norms and ritual. It is typically hierarchical and often paternal. It is rooted in dogma, and is by design immune to introspection. Most are born into it, indoctrinated since birth, and as a result they harbor a self-superiority over other religions. People have historically been willing to kill each other to prove that superiority, or at least expand the footprint of their own kind.
If there is a god, surely these self-serving human organizations bear no connection to it whatsoever.
Faith is decidedly orthogonal to religion. Faith is a psychological construct. It is a safety valve: the answer to the unanswerable. It is the bliss of abandoning the heavy burden of objective thought and the bathing of one’s mind in the warm glow of surrender. It is comfort food for the intellect; it satiates our longings for an authority figure we’ve had since we left childhood. Faith is attractive in that it embodies a certain humility that religion will not.
Frankly, I’m struggling to understand how faith as I understand it could bear any connection to a purported omnipotent and omnipresent entity. I’m starting to think that if there is a god, surely faith bears no connection to it whatsoever either.
If there is a god, we should strive to know it objectively, not in some arbitrary supernatural framework. God by definition would not be supernatural, but strictly and quintessentially natural. We only deem it supernatural because our faith enables us to write it all off to things we’ll never understand.
The only problem is, by every objective standard, there’s nothing to know objectively. Fear of eternal damnation draws a bright line to admitting that fact for many, and that to me is irrational.
The concept of causation may be an artifact of the limited human mind, but if there is a first cause, there is no reason to suppose that it is singular, that its presence is detectable, and that its purposes, if it has any, are singular, non-conflicting and humanly knowable and understandable, either consciously or subconsciously. The inclinations of the human race toward religion and faith may alleviate human anxiety about the nature of and reason for human existence, both before and after human death, but there is no reason to suppose that the products of these inclinations mirror in any way the nature of any first cause nor capture in any way its preferences regarding human behavior. That said, it is possible that the near universality of human belief in a first cause and the substantial agreement among diverse human cultures regarding the basics of moral behavior indicate a subconscious connection with a first cause and its preferences for human action. Religion and faith could well be imperfect attempts by humans to accommodate and institutionalize the perceived essence of these subconscious perceptions.
Thank you for starting this site, it’s a great idea for promoting dialogue and mutual understanding. Religion has fallen on hard times these days, but faith seems as hot as ever. I’m a bit obsessed with these questions in my life, and have really been enjoying reading the responses in this first thread.
I’m not the best writer, but I made this video for my videoblog called “9 Possible Reasons Why I’m a Religious Person” and thought I would share it here in this conversation:
http://salamanderslam.com/?p=1
Peace.
This is the very first time I have ever encountered someone that believes, as I do, in 2 fundamental principles, 1 that there is a real loving God, and that it is sure human hubris to put any restrictions or limits to him or her. In fact as you call God the great whatever, placing human sexuality in the context of the great whatever is disrespectful and another way we place the limits of our imagination around this concept.
The essential component of any human transaction seems to be based mostly on barter. A give for a get situation. Not all transactions are this way, but most. But most religions seem to based on the concept that if I do something here on earth, I will be rewarded in a happier place when I die.
I find this very limiting. The love I give my children is mostly barter free. I don’t expect anything in return (except perhaps that they do their homework) and I am quite OK with that (they usually don’t do what I ask perfectly). I don’t understand why most people insist that their worship, or spirituality must lead to a reward, other than the simple joy of giving in and of itself.
This is what I define as the essence of my spirituality. The simple gratitude of life, and joy in the act of freely giving of myself.
Mr. Reusser, do you believe in a heaven? If so, how do you believe a person is granted access?
Do you believe God has expectations of HIS people? Or is it just enough to be here and try to be a good person being grateful and giving in the hopes that God will smile kindly upon that token gesture and graciously open the gates to heaven in the next chapter?
The Republic of Singapore is a multi-religious nation, many religions live here: Taoism, Buddhism, Confucianism, Islam, Hinduism, Christianity. We have many religious festivities, one key festivity for Taoists is the Seven Month Hungry Ghost Festival. My birth certificate says that my religion is Buddhism. I have not at any one time studied Buddhism although my children had and are still doing it. I believe in religion, in someone up there looking down on us. Faith rules my life more than religion, faith in the good that I can do and have done. So long as I do good, do not hurt others, do not scheme to hurt others, I think I am a good human being. That’s all I need to be – being a good human being and having the faith to know that we are put on this for a purpose. I am still trying to discover my purpose in life on earth.
Faith is a common term for a relationship that any individual has with God. Religion is the term applied to an organisation or a structure, often called a church, that provides for culturally aligned people to share the commonality in their faith. I beleive in God, but I have a serious personal issue with what I refer to as “Churchianity”. I was raised as a Christian, and while I respect those who practise that belief, I similarly apply that same respect to those who believe in God as a Muslim, a Buddhist, etc. I do not differentiate. I would suggest that the many problems that our world faces stem from lack of respect of others of differing cultures to our own, their “Faith” being used as a convenient excuse to judge.
For me, Faith connects me to God; my faith in God, not religion.
When you say “religion” are you talking about the concept of religion in general or a specific religion? Clearly, not just any “religion” will connect anyone to God. One religion may be true, but not all religions can be true since each affirms different things. For that matter, each has a different conception of who or what God is.
And, when you say “connect” to God, what does that mean? How can a finite, imperfect being connect with the perfect creator of the universe?
From a Christian perspective, the individual cannot connect to God no matter how hard he or she may try through good works or religious ceremony. God can not commune with us since we are all spiritually dead. Only by God’s reaching out to us – communicating his character through his creation and by his words and ultimately through his son – can we hope to have relationship with him.
Hi, Peace, very good question. I am Muslim. As such my answer to the question would require that all come out of their box or comfort zone. Knowing that non Muslims have little or no Frame of reference when comes to Muslim perspective but are filled with many ill notions, hopefully here common sense would suffice.
Did religion or faith connect Jesus, Moses, Abraham or Muhammad, (Peace and blessings of God be upon them all), to God? I do not believe any one can claim that they did. But somthing and combination of things did. It was the purity of their heart and sincerety of their desire, wishing well for the fellow beings. Above all, they sought him with the very core of their being, they all lived by justice, sought justice and discharged justice. They practiced intellectual honesty in all thing, questioning outmoded practices, such as was done by Abraham in the case of co-mingling God and man. In other cases involving many other prophets, some discarded ill innovations and unsound practices and begged God for guidence and then through revealation re-newed the same religion. It happened again and again. And sadly it would end up being corrupted always by the priest class, that would also happen again and again. For example, Jesus (peace be upon him), a messenger of God, did try to undo just that with Chaiphaas the high Priest. He was trying hard to re-new the corrpted faith as God was guiding him to do so. But the old school and the priest class refused to shift thier imagination. And the rest is well known unclear event to this day. Religion, was still in its tribal settings, laws were out of date and impractical. Which Jesus (pbh) came to fulfil and not destroy as he claimed. But Jesus (pbh) never did become the king of the jews, metaphorically or otherwise, nor ever allowed to establish peace. It is interesting that in the collective imagination of later Christianity he would rise to be both, a king and a prince of peace but in reality he was neither. Then in 325 AD with the invention of Triune god and Church; faith and religion of Jesus, a Jew, lost all its Jewishness and were filled with ideas which he never promoted, such as the triune god. But enough of that, the rest is convoluted history as many well known Christian themselves claim. Be that as it may, but now the question is does that help or hurt in our settings today to connect a Christian to God? If the foundational base is weak and clearly not God sanctioned as we know that fact from the OT, how then can any member of any denomination of Christianity ever come even close to knowing HIM or HIS Essence? Especially when it is not even God their approaching but a man. At least if they tried to call upon the same God as did Jesus himself then they might find God real close to them. That is what Islam teaches. It does not shut the door to heaven to others sololy because they are not Muslim.
But of course one can not know God unless God so desires that one should know HIM, that is why HE chooses prophets to communicate with the rest of us, Islam also teaches they are humans, not angels or divines but humans of purified hearts with Grace of God on them. It is the divine truth, there have never been exception to that. Those who claime to come to know God, such as, Ted Haggard, Jimmy Swaggart (?), Jim or Tammy Fay etc would always end up disgraced. Thus Christianity, always making tall claims but find its loving flocks unsatisfied, unfulfilled unless of course one follows blindly his or her faith in all its totality, sacred and proface is all equal, such as a terrorist. The faith and the religion, whose integral parts are of Greek thought, Pagan Hellenistic ideas of yore and with Western triumphlism conveniently juxtoposed, can not posit anything but speculative thoughts in the hope to know God. That is also why it had been unable to solve mens problem for the last two thousand years. Without revealed truth it is futile that she can give her loving and kind and some wonderful followers this beautiful blessing of intimation with a Loving God. And the religion that can, has been in a way, if you will, hijacked temporarily from within and then rebranded, with that colored lense of western truimphalism in the same way the contemporaries of Jesus (pbh) rebranded Judaism both from within and without. So the question is how does Muslim fair in this regard?
Not much better now a days. It is true Islam does provide beautiful prescription for this experience but almost all negate it due to materialism. Though the devout who follow the ritual prayers are assured of intimation with the Divine. It is this ritual prayer that helps him or her through the answered prayer where he or she comes to realize that the Most loving God is indeed closer to him than the Jugular vein. As God points out in the Quran that all thing in nature follow a ritual, sun maintains its ritual of rising and setting, Moon does its part and does season and many other objects. Men, the product of an insignificant fluid thru ejaculation should he feel so arrogant that he ought not perform some ritual prayer for his Loving Creator? After realization of this beauty radical humulity should decend upon his heart and he should fall down prostrtate to the Creator of the heaven and earth and love him with all his heart and soul. Islam teaches and guarantees that he or she sould find the same Creator very near him or her. Islam, which teaches pure submission to One All Merciful God is the same religion given to Adam, Noah, Abraham, Moses, Jesus and Muhammad (pbh). It embraces all other religion and all the holy books thus it has been perfected and made universal and by truly embracing and acknowledging other faith and their truth and thus it is the peaceful religion. Hopefully one day, loving and kind Christians and Jews and all other faith groups will come to see it. And understand how Muslims find such closeness to the One same God. More later. Sorry, I am short of time so I will end for now. God Bless all.
When I hear “faith” and “religion” I think of the individual and society. Faith is about what an individual thinks, feels, and believes. Religion is about what “truths” a group or society embraces as important.
Groups and individuals are both capable of being misguided. Society at times is terribly misguided, and we celebrate as heros those individuals who step forward and redirect it. At times I am misguided and benefit from the guidance of others.
Religion at its worst provides bad guidance and results in evil here on earth; it separates or even drives individuals away from “the great Whatever”. Religion, when it is at its best, provides an avenue for the individual to share and celebrate and act upon their faith with other individuals.
In human relationships bonds are formed both by communicating those emotional connections with words or gestures and by actually engaging in actions with that other person. Saying you care for a friend is one way to form a connection, but going out and doing the things you both enjoy is also important. The things people do for one another is what truly bonds them. Religion can provide us an opportunity to “do something for God.” “Doing something for God” is impossible if God is an omnipotent otherworldly force or figure, yet if we are to be close to God then somehow we need to find a way to do that.
Faith is what get us moving towards “the great Whatever;” religion provides us with a path to guide our feet– for good or bad.
I am with you on this concept.
God is way to much for man to even begin to define. Religion however is that attempt to put boundries to our lack of understanding of the Whatever. Faith is a more personal way of just accepting we truly don’t have a clue but still know something is there.
Our trying to understand of what God is all about is like a Chimp trying to understand algebra.
At this stage in our development we don’t have the capacity to understand what “Whatever is or is not.
Look forward to your next question.
I have difficulty reconciling the concepts and beliefs of religion with faith in god. Religion seems to try to serve as an exclusive path to god. While a simple faith in god seems, to me, to be just that, a simple faith in god.
With religion you need to have faith in the religion to have faith in god. With a simple faith you need only have faith in god to have faith in god. Religion seems to try and create an exclusive faith in god. Meaning, you either follow the religion or you can’t connect with god.
Religion also seems to impart a type of instruction manual for god. As if god were a machine such as an elevator. Push a button, say a prayer, follow the dogma, and god has to act according to the instruction manual. A “deus ex machina” form of god.
I am not trying to say that religion is false, but rather that religion is limiting in it’s attempt to portray god. I have problems with the idea that god is limited to what a religion teaches.
I have always said I have faith in god, but at the same time can’t define god. Rather, only that I have an undefined faith that god exists. I act as though god exists, but again, I can’t define the why of why I act so. It gives me comfort just believing god exists. Why it does so, I have not been able to explain.
I speak to god, whether out loud or silently in my head. Does god hear me? I don’t know, but I believe god does. I have had conversations with god, but I can’t explain how god replies in these conversations. Only that it appears to me that I am getting a response in the form of a feeling, or that I am able to make a confident decision on some question based on my conversation. At times it seems that I am answering my question myself, even though before I asked the question I did not have an answer to the question.
I think religions can provide some signs on the road to faith in god, but the signs themselves, are not in themselves, an indication of faith in god. Rather they are indicators of belief in a religious proof of god. It is easy to believe a proof. But belief is not faith. I think faith is belief without an outside proof.
I call my faith a “simple faith” because, to me, it is very easy and simple. I have faith in god. It took me a while to realize, that in my search for god, all I need do to find god is have faith in god. I had always had the faith but I was searching for something to justify my own faith to me. I had not fully realized that my faith was all the proof I needed to justify my faith in god.
When asked to explain my faith, all I can say is that I have faith and that is the basis for my faith. It is very difficult to explain my faith in god. I can only really say “I have faith in god”.
Religion works for people that need help believing in god, but I don’t think faith in religion is the same as faith in god. Then again, who am I to judge how one comes to their faith. It works for those it works for, but it just seems easier to just have a simple faith in god, or maybe it’s harder. To tell the truth I don’t know for certain what path is better or easier for others. I can only say what worked for me personally.
I think faith reflects the very personal relationship with god; through prayer your experience with god grows and often faith grows with it; I associate religion with organizations such as a church or a temple; with religion I associate scriptures, such as the bible or the Koran; it often implies participation in a religious community and following certain rules that this community imposes upon its members. The beauty of faith is the freedom it gives you; just to believe and communicate with god on a personal level.
When I was a child I believed in saints, God and everything linked to religion, because my parents instructed me by that way.
Now, in my 60’s, I believe that Jesus (before called as God) was a very good man with excelent background to speak and to express good ideas. He is a man to be followed, as Confucio, Buda, Muhhamad, Mahatma Gandhi and others.
About faith, I have to believe in me and in what I can do to help to have a good world for all of us.
By the way, whithout the Earth – that we are killing every day – what should we do with the faith?
Some religions says that we go to the Haven when we die, but where is the first man – pre-historican – who died, as he only believed in the sun, thunder, moon, rain, etc? I think he was the first human being to believe in God, because of his fear in the unknown. Here started the faith.
Disclaimer: I don’t have a dog in the Christianity-vs-whatever hunt; I’m an agnostic by faith, and a Buddhist by philosophy.
Faith, as you’ve framed things here, Martha, is the *only* thing that connects an individual to a god (and I love your term, the “Great Whatever!”). Religion is what connects an individual to other individuals, as I see it.
It’s a fairly-rare mind, I think, that can handle an unboxed god, a god of faith without religion, so we as a species–on the whole–need something like religion to help us wrap our minds around that concept. In that context, it serves a very valid purpose, and some of those interpretations are very interesting and thought-provoking; take a look at Eastern Orthodoxy, or the Mennonites, or any of a number of Native American belief systems.
In theory, then, religion would connect individuals with more-or-less the same vision of what the Great Whatever is really like. That usage would be very useful to society, and the discussion between the groups educational and affirming for many. Way, way too often, it seems, it instead connects people not in their love and appreciation and analysis of their god, but in hatred of people who don’t love their god the way they do.
Whether that hatred manifests itself in rancorous argument or violence, it harms the society by creating artificial divisions that just don’t need to exist. Saying “He is not like me, and that’s bad” leads in four or five short steps to oppression, violence, and holocaust.
When you can point at another human being–as someone did to me recently–and say, “that person is an abomination before god,” then your religion has gotten in the way of faith (and also of good manners) and led you down a path that very few of the gods that we’ve come up with actually espouse–hatred, which leads to discrimination, which leads to violence. Don’t go there. There is a better way. Namaste: “that which is divine in me sees/greets/welcomes that which is divine in you.”
I certainly welcome this venue of discussion. I am an Episcopalian – read your story about your contact with a group of Episcopalians – and laughed. We are committed to our traditions – belief in God is a by-product. I have reached 60 years of age – and, this religion-thingey just isn’t satisfying anymore. I don’t want to argue about gays in the priesthood – or, women in the priesthood – or conservative vs liberal approach to practicing our religion – I want to know how religion is relevant to where I stand now in this journey called Life. In the beginning – religion is a way to connect a young person to the Great Whatever. However, if the religious practice is so overbearing, it may drive that person away from God (possibly identifying God as being the main oppressor). I don’t even want any of those silly childish promises of heaven if I behave and hell if I’m naughty – I just want a closer relationship God. As you age, it is faith that carries you through – not religion.