PITFALLS OF RELIGIOUS ADDITIONS

A religion may be seen as having three layers, with the third layer divided into three parts again.

First, there are many people having personal spiritual experiences, that are perhaps in essence just experiences of emptiness or a void, a void that in itself can be experienced as harboring a lot of rich potential. These people can be doubted or criticized by people who don’t have such spiritual experiences, but in others they do exist.

Second, there are the sharings, often in ceremonies, with others who also have such spiritual  experiences.

So far so good. Then the sharing community creates a number of additions and the problems start.

One type of addition comes when the members of the community cannot resist the temptation to fill in the void with projections, fantasies, images, representations, words or even stories of human-like figures, call such figures god or gods, and image them to live on Mount Olympus or in ‘heaven’.

Questions arise, for instance, about the perceived inconsistency of an old father figure in ‘heaven’ who is supposed to be both a good god and the creator of Auschwitz. Also here belongs the endless debate between Darwinists and Creationists who both ignore the spiritual experiences that many people have without any additions.

Another addition comes when a sharing community creates an organization to arrange meetings and other mundane activities on behalf of the community. Their misconduct can be used as a means to criticize the particular religion.

Yet another addition arises when the religious community design certain rules of behavior for its members and both the community and the organization sanction the compliance to these rules by referring to the human-type projections called gods, or derive authority from such imagined figures to justify what others call misbehavior.

All such additions seem to have with the transformation from tribal to agrarian societies when humans added agriculture to what nature just had been offering them.



Mount Olympus