institutional religion is full of fail
Yoinked from southernpm
How to abandon your God...
by Mark Morford
San Francisco Chronicle
This much we know: God is failing.
Or more accurately, God is mutating. Changing. In flux. Becoming perhaps slightly less appealing as a dogmatic force of rigid closed-minded sit-down-and-shut-up paternal scowling and becoming perhaps more fluid, interesting, dynamic, unspecified, something you actually want to take into your heart and into your mouth and lick until you find the rich, creamy center and then define that taste for yourself, blissfully independent of what your parents or priest or president tells you, until you reach that point of deeper knowing where you can't help but go a-ha.
It's all part of that big new study from the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life, released just recently and ripe and ready to be spun a thousand different ways, the one that contains the big whopper of a statistic that says 28 percent of Americans have abandoned the religion they grew up with and have taken up another one, or none at all, or maybe more than one because polytheism certainly sounds tasty and, you know, what the hell, right?
It's not really all that shocking. People change religions. People swap denominations. People evolve, go to college, learn to think (and seek meaning) for themselves, change their minds or marry someone of a different belief or go through a personal revelation, or actually experience the spiritual/intellectual epiphany that reveals how all religions are one and God is not "out there" and you are not here to be its meek sinful guilty mindless servant.
And maybe you go even further, as you realize that it's actually quite dangerous and small-minded to hew too closely to one narrow way of seeing/feeling/tasting the divine as you perhaps come to the slippery conclusion that it's all about co-creating God in your own way and, therefore, any religion that contains more than one person (that is to say, you) is deviously suspicious and apocryphal at best, unhealthy and destructive at worst. Or maybe that's just me.
Chances are you already knew, or at least suspected, much of what this study contains, because it's all quite naturally as it should be. But it's always good to be reminded that 1) try as they might, no one system can ever have a lock on the divine experience, 2) more people are at play in the Wal-Mart of the Lord than our leaders, preachers and godmongers might imagine, and 3) despite the disturbing number of evangelicals in America (26 percent), there might yet be hope for the nation to evolve and grow and bust out of the archaic straitjacket of religious authority once and for all. Possible? Possible.
Or maybe not. Given the high rate of turnover, it's easy to see religious choice in America as essentially a dour marketplace, a consumer good, each system vying for your attention and your devotion and very, very much your dollar because, well, if you think it's all about deep personal enlightenment, I've got this noxious library of "Left Behind" books on tape to sell you, cheap. The pothole on the road of religiosity is obvious, and enormous. As the saying goes, most people use religion the way a drunkard uses a lamppost: as convenient support, not illumination.
Speaking of marketing, should we try to muster some pity for the Catholic Church? I mean, for so many reasons, but this time for how this study reveals that, were it not for a massive influx of immigrant families into America, its numbers would be not merely wavering and faltering, but tanking fast? Fact is, more people split from the Catholic Church than any other, so many that it turns out a whopping 10 percent of Americans are former (i.e. recovering) Catholics, and it's certainly easy to see why. Hell, even Christian megachurches have become more fluid and modern in their perspectives on love and sex and human evolution than the House That Dogma Built.
Ah, but what of the big numb stunner of a number, the one that says 78 percent of Americans still identify as Christian overall, no matter if they actually pray or attend church or run for Congress or secretly snort meth and visit gay hookers as they run an evangelical megachurch in Colorado? It certainly seems like an impressive number, like no matter how you slice it and no matter how many new beliefs spring up, we are overwhelmingly, devoutly Jesus-happy.
I'm not buying it. I suspect a huge chunk of respondents merely check the "Christian" box for lack of something else, because they felt they needed to choose something, even though they don't actually follow Scripture in the slightest, but since they're not technically atheists and they've never really ventured out on a unique spiritual quest of their own, they merely choose "Christian" as the default American position, the fallback, the safe bet, sort of like checking "average" on a customer satisfaction survey or saying "fine" when your barista asks you how you're doing today. Thoughtless, automatic, convenient.
Which brings us to perhaps the most interesting stat of all, wherein 16 percent of Americans (and 21 percent of godless, sinful, heathenistic Californians, both much larger percentages than perhaps anyone expected) don't hook into any religious affiliation whatsoever, thus making them/us the fourth largest "religious" group in America - and growing fast. They are the unaffiliated, the wayward ones, not just agnostics and atheists but also the poets and the grazers and spiritualists, the mystics and the explorers and the cosmically, intellectually, divinely self-determined. (Or maybe they're all just actors and bass players and trust-funded art students. But let's try to be optimistic).
It's a heartening number indeed, and it brings up a delicious question, pondered for ages and yet seemingly more pertinent than ever: Are we headed for a more secular age? Is dour organized religion finally losing its grip? Does it all point to something grander, perhaps more luminous for us as a society, as more and more people abandon religion's authoritarian hammers for spirituality's exquisite seeds?
And what of the other big question, the one no one really talks much about and certainly no one really teaches you? It is this: How does one actually abandon a religion? How do you dump your God and choose another, or none, or the one deep inside yourself? I mean, besides lots of wine and Yeats and education, open-throated sex and experimental drugs and sitting on the lap of the Buddha sipping absinthe and reading old Tom Robbins books and meditating on the nature of stillness and the divine feminine and Cate Blanchett?
Tentative answer: Maybe you don't. Maybe it's not about abandoning God at all, and instead merely broadening your definition of the divine so as to encapsulate and swallow it all, every God, every dogma, every attempt to corner the market on belief and parse it and put it into cute little boxes and break us all up into angry tribes who stomp our feet and wave our little gilded books and launch screaming bloody wars over promised lands and chosen peoples and crucifixes and crusades and witches and pagans and gays.
In other words, maybe you abandon God by realizing it's all God, it's all divine, all hot, thrumming, vibrating connection in all places in all things at all times. And hence, to try and parse it and restrict it and beat it into submission and claim it for one people, one history, one country or church or authoritarian body, is actually the highest form of divine insult.
Or, you know, grand cosmic joke. Same thing, really.
original link: http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/gate/a/2008/03/05/notes030508.DTL
How to abandon your God...
by Mark Morford
San Francisco Chronicle
This much we know: God is failing.
Or more accurately, God is mutating. Changing. In flux. Becoming perhaps slightly less appealing as a dogmatic force of rigid closed-minded sit-down-and-shut-up paternal scowling and becoming perhaps more fluid, interesting, dynamic, unspecified, something you actually want to take into your heart and into your mouth and lick until you find the rich, creamy center and then define that taste for yourself, blissfully independent of what your parents or priest or president tells you, until you reach that point of deeper knowing where you can't help but go a-ha.
It's all part of that big new study from the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life, released just recently and ripe and ready to be spun a thousand different ways, the one that contains the big whopper of a statistic that says 28 percent of Americans have abandoned the religion they grew up with and have taken up another one, or none at all, or maybe more than one because polytheism certainly sounds tasty and, you know, what the hell, right?
It's not really all that shocking. People change religions. People swap denominations. People evolve, go to college, learn to think (and seek meaning) for themselves, change their minds or marry someone of a different belief or go through a personal revelation, or actually experience the spiritual/intellectual epiphany that reveals how all religions are one and God is not "out there" and you are not here to be its meek sinful guilty mindless servant.
And maybe you go even further, as you realize that it's actually quite dangerous and small-minded to hew too closely to one narrow way of seeing/feeling/tasting the divine as you perhaps come to the slippery conclusion that it's all about co-creating God in your own way and, therefore, any religion that contains more than one person (that is to say, you) is deviously suspicious and apocryphal at best, unhealthy and destructive at worst. Or maybe that's just me.
Chances are you already knew, or at least suspected, much of what this study contains, because it's all quite naturally as it should be. But it's always good to be reminded that 1) try as they might, no one system can ever have a lock on the divine experience, 2) more people are at play in the Wal-Mart of the Lord than our leaders, preachers and godmongers might imagine, and 3) despite the disturbing number of evangelicals in America (26 percent), there might yet be hope for the nation to evolve and grow and bust out of the archaic straitjacket of religious authority once and for all. Possible? Possible.
Or maybe not. Given the high rate of turnover, it's easy to see religious choice in America as essentially a dour marketplace, a consumer good, each system vying for your attention and your devotion and very, very much your dollar because, well, if you think it's all about deep personal enlightenment, I've got this noxious library of "Left Behind" books on tape to sell you, cheap. The pothole on the road of religiosity is obvious, and enormous. As the saying goes, most people use religion the way a drunkard uses a lamppost: as convenient support, not illumination.
Speaking of marketing, should we try to muster some pity for the Catholic Church? I mean, for so many reasons, but this time for how this study reveals that, were it not for a massive influx of immigrant families into America, its numbers would be not merely wavering and faltering, but tanking fast? Fact is, more people split from the Catholic Church than any other, so many that it turns out a whopping 10 percent of Americans are former (i.e. recovering) Catholics, and it's certainly easy to see why. Hell, even Christian megachurches have become more fluid and modern in their perspectives on love and sex and human evolution than the House That Dogma Built.
Ah, but what of the big numb stunner of a number, the one that says 78 percent of Americans still identify as Christian overall, no matter if they actually pray or attend church or run for Congress or secretly snort meth and visit gay hookers as they run an evangelical megachurch in Colorado? It certainly seems like an impressive number, like no matter how you slice it and no matter how many new beliefs spring up, we are overwhelmingly, devoutly Jesus-happy.
I'm not buying it. I suspect a huge chunk of respondents merely check the "Christian" box for lack of something else, because they felt they needed to choose something, even though they don't actually follow Scripture in the slightest, but since they're not technically atheists and they've never really ventured out on a unique spiritual quest of their own, they merely choose "Christian" as the default American position, the fallback, the safe bet, sort of like checking "average" on a customer satisfaction survey or saying "fine" when your barista asks you how you're doing today. Thoughtless, automatic, convenient.
Which brings us to perhaps the most interesting stat of all, wherein 16 percent of Americans (and 21 percent of godless, sinful, heathenistic Californians, both much larger percentages than perhaps anyone expected) don't hook into any religious affiliation whatsoever, thus making them/us the fourth largest "religious" group in America - and growing fast. They are the unaffiliated, the wayward ones, not just agnostics and atheists but also the poets and the grazers and spiritualists, the mystics and the explorers and the cosmically, intellectually, divinely self-determined. (Or maybe they're all just actors and bass players and trust-funded art students. But let's try to be optimistic).
It's a heartening number indeed, and it brings up a delicious question, pondered for ages and yet seemingly more pertinent than ever: Are we headed for a more secular age? Is dour organized religion finally losing its grip? Does it all point to something grander, perhaps more luminous for us as a society, as more and more people abandon religion's authoritarian hammers for spirituality's exquisite seeds?
And what of the other big question, the one no one really talks much about and certainly no one really teaches you? It is this: How does one actually abandon a religion? How do you dump your God and choose another, or none, or the one deep inside yourself? I mean, besides lots of wine and Yeats and education, open-throated sex and experimental drugs and sitting on the lap of the Buddha sipping absinthe and reading old Tom Robbins books and meditating on the nature of stillness and the divine feminine and Cate Blanchett?
Tentative answer: Maybe you don't. Maybe it's not about abandoning God at all, and instead merely broadening your definition of the divine so as to encapsulate and swallow it all, every God, every dogma, every attempt to corner the market on belief and parse it and put it into cute little boxes and break us all up into angry tribes who stomp our feet and wave our little gilded books and launch screaming bloody wars over promised lands and chosen peoples and crucifixes and crusades and witches and pagans and gays.
In other words, maybe you abandon God by realizing it's all God, it's all divine, all hot, thrumming, vibrating connection in all places in all things at all times. And hence, to try and parse it and restrict it and beat it into submission and claim it for one people, one history, one country or church or authoritarian body, is actually the highest form of divine insult.
Or, you know, grand cosmic joke. Same thing, really.
original link: http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/gate/a/2008/03/05/notes030508.DTL