Stone Doesn't Bend

I want to do two things in this post. First, take a candid look at my developing thoughts on religious belief—a topic I have engaged with continually for decades, though not publicly. In fact, my public writing has steered a wide berth around this topic. This post marks a significant deflection in that course.

I have to do a bit of work before we begin. I know many of my readers hold religious beliefs, and some of you cherish them. What I write here is not an attack; rather, it’s a very honest look at an internal conflict I’ve struggled with for much of my life.

I also know, from countless conversations over the years (stretching all the way back to my college days), that people often shut down over this topic. Walls go up. Rational inquiry becomes taboo, and people simply refuse to think about the topic. I hope that doesn’t happen here. The point of this is to think about thinking—specifically, rational thought, and to consider the uses, mis-uses, and limitations of reason in decision making.

One last preparatory note: This whole project, First Fire, is primarily about non-rational modes of knowing and experiencing. It may be a bit misleading to start with so much focus on reason. Three of my first four posts have focused heavily on reason, and so will the next. But this is deliberate. I think it’s important.

Rational thought is terra firma. It’s where most of us are most comfortable, and it’s certainly where our culture has sunk deep foundations. For better or worse, it’s where most modern thinkers feel safe. And before we cast off from this shore, let’s start off right here: with clear eyes, firm footing, and a shared understanding of our resources.

I grew up in a fairly religious, conservative American Baptist family. This was par for the course in middle America in the last part of the 20^th century. (We will return to that sentence in a moment, and it will carry much more weight.)

I went to college fully indoctrinated from years of Sunday School and youth group meetings, ready to share my faith with the world. I had, in my metaphorical pocket, lists of reasons why Christianity—and, in particular my brand of Christianity—was far superior to any other religion. A few examples:

• We believed in the Bible and only the Bible. The Bible was the inspired, infallible, and inerrant Word of God. And the final authority on all matters. It contains no errors. Archaeological evidence aligns with the Bible and where it disagrees, the truth still lies buried.

• The Bible is far superior to any other religions’ “holy books”. (We didn’t know that not all religions are “religions of the book”, either.)

• God himself is the author of the Bible. God wrote the Bible, even if men held the pen.

• We are all sinners and deserve to burn in a very real and very eternal hell. The only way out of that is to “accept Jesus into your heart” and to be “born again.”

• Christians who have other ideas are wrong. They are probably going to hell. (Though there were some sketchy, implied backdoors at times.)

• Other forms of Christianity existed, but they made serious errors such as worshipping the Virgin Mary. Oh, the sketchy backdoors probably don’t apply to Catholics (who are definitely going to hell.)

• Jesus was clearly better than Buddha. When Buddha died he told his followers “I am sorry. I must leave you now.” When Jesus died he said, “Lo, I am with you always, even unto the end of the Age.” (“…of the world” in the Bible we read, but when the Greek and King James were in conflict, God obviously inspired the English version.)

• Hindus worship cows. Enough said about that.

• Mormons and Jehovah’s Witnesses are probably going to hell first. So are people who drink alcohol. And I don’t think we knew Islam existed, but I bet you can guess where they were headed.

• Jesus was a perfect Man and lived a moral life without any flaw. Jesus fulfilled hundreds of prophecies. They were Jewish prophecies but the Jews missed them because they did not accept Jesus.

• Why is all of this true? Because the Bible says so and we believed the Bible.

• Furthermore, no other religion had a figurehead that was born of a virgin, died and was resurrected, was fully God and fully man, and who worked legitimate miracles.

• No rational thinker could possibly hold a different opinion on these matters, if that thinker only accepted the full authority of the Word of God.

• The world is in full spiritual warfare. Satan and his demons are just waiting to mislead people. If you don’t see this, or you listen to heavy metal music, there’s good chance they already got you.

If I am mocking, I am mocking a younger me, in my salad days, full of certainty. These were beliefs I held unassailable. Thinking back to the kind of belief I had, it’s easy to understand how wars start. These were beliefs firmly and unshakably held, but I could not see that a few critical pieces held it all together. And it was critical to not question those critical pieces.

Now, I’d had some dissonance. First, I happened to love heavy metal. The first concert I attended was Iron Maiden. Slayer, Black Sabbath, Megadeth, Guns N Roses… the list went on. I loved this music as much as I loved Bach, Chopin, and Schumann. Second, I was exceptionally well-educated (for a kid in middle America) in classical music and art. I was certainly aware that a library could be filled with beautiful and powerful music written by Christians from other traditions. (Imagine the conflict I was filled with, after first encountering Mozart’s Requiem, when I discovered what a Requiem Mass was!)

Third, and perhaps most important, I had a handful of experiences that I now fully recognize as classical transcendent, mystical experiences. Most of them had nothing to do with church or with anything I was ever taught in church. It was the difference between standing in the crater of an erupting volcano or seeing a single firefly in the grass. (Maybe that’s a better metaphor than I realized. You obviously can only survive one of those experiences, and I’m not sure all of me did survive.)

In fact, when I mentioned some of these experiences to the people responsible for educating religious youth, I was told they were misleading experiences and should be ignored—certainly not trusted. They were not important. No point thinking about them or trying to understand them because life wasn’t like that.

The problem here is that I was also a kid who lived in libraries. I discovered that my experience was one that had been recognized for at least a thousand years. (Far longer than that, but I was a lone explorer without a map and all the guides were telling me to stay home.) When I read Meister Eckhardt, St. John of the Cross, and Thomas Merton (oh, and Rumi, but I did somehow still manage to not know Islam existed), something happened.

I remember a particular passage from Rumi that caused a physical pain in my body—I am not being poetic. This was not imagined. It was as real and as corporeal as if I had pushed a rusty nail through my sternum. Something cracked open in my chest. I thought I was having a medical event. Maybe dying. And once I recovered from the pain, I found myself crying from the beauty of the experience and for reasons I did not understand. And there was a strange light around everything for a while.

This was not the only time this sort of thing happened to me. A flower spoke to me in the forest. I had an hour of full absorption into the way the sunlight bent around my hand as I sat on the toilet one morning. (It was not possible for sunlight from a window to reach that spot in the house, in retrospect.) This type of experience had nothing in common with the Roman Road we were being taught in Sunday School. When I mentioned it to a Sunday School teacher, her fumbled, confused response was that Satan was the great deceiver. I’m guessing my Sunday school teacher had not read Rumi.

Despite these strange experiences tugging at the margin, doctrine won. Long, stale sermons in joyless pews were the core of my “actual” religious experience. And I believed what I had been told to believe—fully, sincerely, and without doubt.

All of this is necessary to lay out the conviction—the utter certainty—that followed me to my first days of university. I managed to reconcile all of this and to ignore the pieces that didn’t fit. Most of those Christians who wrote great music did so, I reasoned, before my brand of religion had been figured out.

As for the times something had reached across the veil and sunk his or her (definitely not “her”. “God the Father” after all…) or its fingers into my soul? Well, Satan works in mysterious ways too, I guess. So, just focus on the Bible.

If my tone has been irreverent, if I’ve mocked anything to this point in my writing, I hope you see I am mocking myself. These were beliefs around which I built my world—firmly and sincerely held and not subject to change. Stone doesn’t bend.

It breaks.

So, early on in my studies, I took a good comparative religion class. For those of you who might not have taken a class like this, the idea is to take an honest look at each of the world’s traditions, and to examine it as an expression of a people, place, time and culture. Also, perhaps it’s useful to try, as much as we can, to see it through the eyes of the people who either initiated that tradition or who lived it. Done well, this work seeks not to evaluate any belief system by relative value, but to appreciate each one as a unique blossoming of the human spirit.

Now, when I did that, I discovered that these other traditions were far more nuanced and internally consistent than I had been led to believe. I began to realize that many of the people who had taught me so much with such confidence certainly did not have all the facts. In some cases, it seemed they didn’t have any of the facts.

It was hard to believe—in fact, it became impossible to believe—that the countless men and women who had lived these traditions for thousands of years were nothing more than fools. Much of what I had been told about other religions was wrong, at best, and likely deliberately misleading. I had been lied to. (I guess this wasn’t “bearing false witness against they neighbor.” Why didn’t it say, “don’t lie”? They found a loophole!)

When I really started reconstructing some of these worldviews from first principles, I was flummoxed because I could not find obvious errors. The only way to say these religions sucked was to compare them to my own beliefs. Even simple, silly Animism would not fold. (To paint with a very broad brush, Animism is the idea that everything, living or not, has a soul or spirit.) When I talked to my professor about this problem, he laughed and said something like, “You know what the real problem with Animism is? It works. As a worldview, it’s consistent and it works.”

But the real kicker was—I remember the room I was sitting in, the direction I was facing, and where my hands were positioned on the book I was holding when I had this random thought—the only reason I believed the particular set of religious beliefs I held so fiercely, so certainly, was that I was born in the early 1970s in Ohio.

Full. Fucking. Stop.

Had I been born in India, Africa, Ireland, or even New Jersey, I probably would have had a very different set of beliefs. Had I been born to the neighbor’s house I might have even been Catholic!

And then, I realized that with very few exceptions, this was how everyone “chooses” their religion. Of course, some people find religion during a crisis. (“… in foxholes.”) Of course, there are conversion experiences. (And I was also aware of one fairly obscure medieval manuscript that made the argument that religious conversion was a no-no because every religion had a seed of truth. Converting was denying that truth.)

People do somehow, sometimes reason their way into certain sets of beliefs. But I already knew that rational analysis, at least in my growing experience, really did not give reason to show strong preference for one religion over another. Mostly, people just kinda stuck with the religion their parents told them was true. And their parents before them, and on, and on.

And, of course, people have strong emotional resonances with certain sets of beliefs. But how can that be trusted? Someone surely could believe something sincerely and be wrong. I remember sitting in one of those joyless pews and hearing a preacher go on and on about all the sincere, good people in hell. They went to hell because they sincerely, honestly believed the wrong thing.

So how to know what to believe? How to be sure? How would I see it if I had been born in a different time and place?

So, this was a problem. A very big problem…