I've noticed that every time I offer an analysis of religion in a public forum--not of any particular religion, but of religion as a whole--invariably there are some who rush to assure me that what I say does not apply to them.
"I'm a Buddhist," one will say. "What I practice isn't a religion; it's a way of life." Another will insist that Unitarian Universalism has long since abandoned the tribalism associated with the major Abrahamic faiths. Yet another will patiently inform me that what I say about religion being quintessentially anthropocentric, and therefore cut off from Nature, does not apply to the Native American tradition, which has never lost its connection to the Earth.
This is what they say, but it isn't what I hear. What I hear is that they don't want to be wrong.
This is, of course, completely understandable. Wrong is the last place any of us wants to be. In the world we have made for ourselves over the past few thousand years, there are consequences for being wrong, and those consequences are sometimes dire. As a result, we live in fear of it. We fear wrong decisions, fear being wrong-headed, fear taking a wrong turn in life. In countries with a strong judicial system (or a weak and violent one), the last place we want to get caught is "in the wrong." Being in the wrong can make you an outsider, an outcast, or a prisoner. It can even get you killed. And so we worry about it, and that is what makes us religious.
In my last post I defined religion as "a human plan for salvation that replaces Nature's plan." That seems like such a simple statement. And yet it requires considerable unpacking.
The Bible explains the birth of religion in terms of two trees: the Tree of Life and the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil. The Tree of Life represents Nature's plan of salvation. The Tree of Knowledge represents the human plan. The story of the Fall of Man seems mysterious to us (or tragic, or simply a piece of wrong-headed nonsense) only when we fail to understand it in such a simple, straightforward way. What the serpent tempts us with is nothing more or less than a way of saving ourselves rather than trusting Nature to do that work.
We recoil at Nature's plan of salvation--which embraces us as yet another flower of the field--and instead formulate a special salvation of our own, one that seems to recognize our status as conscious beings with one foot in and one foot out of Nature. That "special" salvation takes many forms, and is adept at masquerading as something other than religion. It migrates to philosophy, to politics, to the arts and sciences, and in each of those "alternative religions" assumes a different face.
Surprisingly, religion can take on a secular humanist complexion. It can even become atheistic and still remain a program for salvation--one which trades on being right, not wrong, about God. Even for the agnostic there is no escape--only the middle ground between believing in the claims of religion or disbelieving them. There is no way off the playing field of religion for human beings so long as we are concerned about the knowledge of good and evil. There is no escape so long as we are concerned about right and wrong.
What religion needs to get right if it doesn't want to go wrong is one thing and one thing only: Nature. Over the last ten to twelve thousand years (roughly, since human beings first conceived of religion as a form of special salvation), we have imagined a destiny for ourselves apart from Nature. The one thing all Homo sapiens archaeological sites have in common is burial with a view to some life beyond. It seems to be almost a byproduct of our consciousness.
In the Eden story God brings all the different animals to Adam to see if one of them can become a "helpmete," or partner, to him, but Adam rejects them all, giving them names instead. Finally, God causes a deep sleep to fall over Adam and, removing one of his ribs, fashions a woman to be his partner instead. It is a very curious story, especially since the previous chapter of Genesis tells us that the man and woman were created together, at the same time, as a mating pair. This leads me to believe that what is being created from Adam "out of himself" is not really woman, but rather this sense we human beings have of being "self-created"--a thing apart from nature.
Unfortunately, this is an illusion. We do not create ourselves. Nor do we exist apart from Nature. We are thinking animals who have not yet come to terms with that fact or figured out what it means. Religions promise to answer our dilemma--traditionally by offering some sort of opt-out from biological, planetary life--but they don't work for the long run. Seeing ourselves as special beings leads inexorably to the kind of impasse we face today--an end-game scenario where human beings struggle to wrap their minds around the idea of their own extinction...the one idea they have never been able to grasp in any form because it seems antithetical to individual consciousness that it should find partnership with plants and animals, and that its only immortality lies in that.
This is not the same as saying there is no salvation for human beings. And it is not the equivalent of saying that consciousness has no point. It simply means that Nature is the answer to both questions. Nature is our salvation. Likewise, Nature is the point of human thought.
