Sep 4, 2015
What I Hate About Religion
9-7-15
“He has told you, O people, what is good; and what does the Lord require of you but to do justice, and to love kindness, and to walk humbly with your God?” – Micah 6:8
When I was a college student, there were still such things as loyalty oaths. Students, teachers, applicants for many jobs in the government and the private sector, were required to answer and sign the following yes-or-no question: “Do you favor the overthrow of the United States Government by violence, force, or subversion?” As a young wise guy – now I am on old wise guy, not much wiser – one time I circled the word “subversion,” and added a note that I wished to avoid bloodshed.
Of course, it was not a multiple-choice question. I was no radical, and it was a reasonable question, especially in those times (maybe more so now, but that’s for another message…) and it was not right that my sense of humor eclipsed my common sense.
No less reasonable a question, and more serious, is the famous and favorite verse from Micah. Do justice, love kindness, and walk humbly. Not a multiple-choice, and, overall, not a hard choice in life. Right? I am reminded, when I think on this verse, what always is right about God’s will, and what often is wrong about organized religion.
What I hate about religion is that it turns the simplicity of God’s message into a tangle of rules, conditions, qualifications, codes, and seeming contradictions. In fact, when theologians, clergymen, priests, and pastors get hold of churches and schools, of texts and flocks, oftentimes the contradictions are not apparent but real.
A quatrain (not from the Bible, but pertinent) I discovered and memorized in my youth says: “All the saints and sages who discussed/ of the two worlds so learnedly are thrust/ like foolish prophets forth; their words to scorn/ are scattered; their mouths are stopped with dust.”
Humans, who by our natures are lost and confused, and almost preternaturally, every one of us, yearning for truth and for peace and for Answers – we need simplicity. We fool ourselves that Complicated equals Profound. On such momentous matters as sin and death and afterlife, after all, doesn’t it make sense that the way to the Truth be complex? … and that we need learned leaders – saints and sages – to show us the way? No: They invariably need to tell us the way, not show us the way.
And there we get back to organized religion. New rules get added to scripture, which the Bible says is unforgivable sin (and so is taking away anything in scripture). Remember that for more than a thousand years, believers were not allowed to read the Bible, or translate it to their native languages. People were taught that intercessors in Heaven were needed to petition, or thank, God. Way-stations between earth and Heaven that were never in the Bible were invented. Today, television preachers promise that “seed money” you send them will guarantee God’s return blessings; and other rank heresies. Organized religion or organized rackets?
For those who are confident in having “found the way” to God, no different with those who are lost and confused and wanting to find God – in other words, all of us! – everyone should realize that God is accessible. Knowing Him is easy. He is always as close as a shadow. Talking to Him is simple, not complicated; hearing from Him is clear, not a matter of superstitious mystery.
Oh! His commandments? Jesus’s words? The Bible’s directions? Yes, they exist… and thank God. He doesn’t leave us helpless! But… He is not the Great Pretender, the Author of Confusion. His rules are few. They are for our guidance, and our happiness, our ultimate fellowship with Him. The Commandments are still wise and valid. The words of the Prophets, so many fulfilled, are lamps unto our feet. The teaching of Jesus? His words were surprisingly few, astonishingly full of wisdom, and directly for our salvation.
The essence of the Bible is found in so few words and passages that anyone might memorize them. The 10 Commandments (not the “10 Suggestions”) are rules we need. Micah’s verse about doing justice and walking humbly. Jesus’s summary of the Truth as “Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind and with all your strength; and… Love your neighbor as yourself.” To get to Heaven? – no classes, exams, ceremonies, or human blessings; only to Believe in your heart that Jesus is Lord; and confess that God raised Him from the dead.
I am grateful for some human agencies in or out of organized religion. Much has been useful: the ancient creeds simply encapsulated the tenets of faith; Martin Luther recalled the Bible verse that by faith we are saved, not (complicated) works; Mother Teresa brilliantly told us that God does not care about our “success,” only our obedience. Clear teaching… genuine humility… patient praying… anointed teaching of God’s word, not mankind’s “improvements”… service and sacrifice… quiet witnessing, even martyrdom… these are the elements of Christianity that humans can receive and provide. The essence of the Gospel life, not the “stuff.”
It has been said, and truly, that religion is mankind reaching up to God, but Christianity is God reaching down to us.
Let us learn to distinguish between the artificial rules and the True Faith. One is confusingly complicated, one is refreshingly simple. One might be wrapped up in memories and sentiment, but the other opens doors to joy unspeakable. One can keep you from peace; the other delivers it. You can discern. If not… that is why God instituted the communication-channel of prayer; and why He sent the Holy Spirit. Such prayers, such questions, such seeking, never go unanswered by your Father in Heaven.
We are aware that many things in our lives are right or wrong, true or false. We know. Experience, if nothing else, teaches us many things. Are the important things in your life mere check-boxes in a multiple-choice quiz?
Is Faith in God?
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The Gospel group Found Wandering sings its version of an old Stanley Brothers standard.
Click: That Home Far Away
Another winner from you, Rick. Thank you very much.
Gosh, I’m tired of the canard that people were forbidden to read Scripture at any time. They were certainly forbidden to preach – a case can be made that they lacked the learning to draw accurate conclusions. And the ignorant were at times (and wrongly) discouraged from reading and interpreting the Bible on their own. Some priests and bishops got very high-handed and told their individual flocks to listen only to them, to not read for themselves. This was NOT Church teaching, this was arrogance at worst and over-concern at best.
There are hundreds upon hundreds of hand-written copies that existed in wealthy households and monasteries and abbies. Chained copies ( to prevent theft) of part of the Bible were in churches (let’s not forget that everything was hand-written and therefore costly and rare).
The Rosary was originally a recitation BY MEMORY of all of the Psalms, by lay people to whom the Scriptures had been read at Mass, over and over again, (let’s also not forget that few people could read at all, and had to learn by rote, and memorization).
Could you just stop? You dilute the veracity of some of your remarks by careless repeating of “history” like this.
Thank you for the qualifications in your first paragraph, and the compliments in your last. I think the middle ground between these points supports my overall view. Obviously I am not a catholic, but I had Catholic friends growing up, and they told me they were not allowed to read the Bible, only listen to priests on Sundays and nuns at school. You might say they were “ignorant,” as those proscribed in the Dark Ages. Well, their parents were told (and believed) the same, and they were normal, apparently educated suburbanites. And my parents heard the same things from their friends in childhood… etc. OK, they might have been taught wrongly by “high-handed” priests. But we have the evidence of the Councils of Toulouse, Tarragona, Constance, and many more councils and encyclicals. And the experiences of Catholics like William Tyndale, who translated the Bible into English and was arrested, tortured, burned at the stake, his bones later disinterred, ground to dust, and cast into a river. You might say that the Church protected itself from error… but that is circular reasoning, when the church itself became the arbiter of error. I have fully granted the excesses and even heresies of contemporary Protestantism (e.g., “Prosperity Gospel”). It strikes me as ironic that the Catholic church relies on the perceived and inherited wisdom through the centuries, granted by the Holy Spirit’s inspiration (interpretation, etc) — yet condemns evangelicals and Pentecostals who cite the same spiritual sources: inconsistency on the part of both parties as they cast stones. And this very week we have the gentle spiritual earthquake as the Pope seems to be overturning centuries of doctrine on divorce, annulment, abortion.
We are all, in the end, reliant on our consciences and our reason… but not DEPENDENT on them. For that — where else can we go except to Scripture? To human sources?? Perfect wisdom is not humanly possible! Where else but to Scripture? Sola Scriptorum! And if we are confused, I would rather pray for guidance than ask a priest or evangelist, at least at first.
Thank you.
As a former Catholic, I can tell you from experience, we were never encouraged to read our Bibles. We were to attend Mass and every day of holy obligation, or else HELL! What a fearful life without Christ…and that is what it was. Jesus is the only one that anyone needs for Salvation. Rick, you are so correct and state so well – the TRUTH.