Spirituality and Religion

                                                          Spirituality and Religion

 

                             

 

                                                   Imagine there's no countries
                                                       It isn't hard to do
                                                  Nothing to kill or die for
                                                 And no religion too

                                                                John Lennon

 

In these times of religious and political extremism, I think it is valuable to outline some key differences between religion and spirituality. It is simplistic and reductionist to paint religion as “bad” and spirituality as “good”, but I have to make choices of focus here to make a few basic points, so I will accentuate how bad religion can get and how liberating spirituality can be so as to differentiate where I see us in our human evolution.

Let’s begin with etymology; the word religion comes from the Latin word religio meaning "taboo, restraint."

So we can see from the beginning something indicating a “no no, that one should hold back from.” This is our first clue that religion is fundamentally about holding back, holding on, or clinging. Other etymology of the word religion reveals the word comes from the two words re and ligare. Re is a prefix meaning "return," and ligare means "to bind;" in other words, "return to bondage." In surgery a suture that ties a wound together is called a ligature.

 

By contrast, the etymology of the word spirit comes from the Latin spiritualis "of or pertaining to breath, breathing, wind, or air; pertaining to spirit, from spiritus of breathing, of the spirit."

Thus, spirit is connected with that which is life giving and life promoting as in “God breathed life into her.”

 

                                    

 

This life giving, life promoting quality is the animating principle. Jungians describe the anima and animas as the soul quality of a man and woman respectively, and developing a relationship with one’s anima and animas is seen as the core of spiritual/soul work for Jungians.

 

Very early in religious thought, there was a dichotomy between that which is of the flesh and that which is of the spirit. So we can see a real divisiveness set up in religious thought which has contributed to a lot of suffering. I am pointing here to the exclusivity of religious thought as black/white, with us/against us, either/or thinking. Whereas the essential nature of spiritual experience is unitive in nature vs. dualistic.

 

I am pointing here to religion as “belief in God or gods to be worshipped, usually expressed in conduct and ritual” or “any specific system of belief, worship, etc., often involving a code of ethics.” I am pointing to spirituality as an individual experience of the divine that is transcendental. I am denoting religion as conceptual and spirituality as experiential.

 

In my therapeutic style, I take a very spiritual approach regardless of one’s religious beliefs. I’m interested in how one’s beliefs are experienced in the present moment. This is because I see humans as essentially spiritual beings (yes, this is a belief and concept). So we do bring concept in here, but it is used to point beyond concept. As in Zen, and all good spiritual practices, concept is used to transcend concept; a finger pointing at the moon. But we must remember the map is not the territory!

 

From a biological, anthropological, and social perspective, I’m placing spirituality in a context that is conducive to the well-being and survival of social animals, particularly the great apes:

"attachment and bonding, cooperation and mutual aid, sympathy and empathy, direct and indirect reciprocity, altruism and reciprocal altruism, conflict resolution and peacemaking, deception and deception detection, community concern and caring about what others think about you, and awareness of and response to the social rules of the group".

 

 

All of these qualities contribute to groups and individuals “doing well.” And conversely, a lack of these qualities can and do endanger groups, nations, civilizations and species.

 

 

Religion and religiosity can be seen as attempts to organize and bureaucratize these qualities of spirit. Religion is the attempts of organizing, politicizing, and controlling others, which has very little to do with spirituality, which is about freedom.

 

Stephen Jay Gould suggests that; religion may have grown out of evolutionary changes which favored larger brains as a means of cementing group coherence among savannah hunters, after that, a larger brain enabled reflection on the inevitability of personal mortality.

 

For humans, the increased size of the neocortex is associated with our sense of self-consciousness, language and emotion, which contributed to tool use, social complexity, magical animism, and art. Neocortex size correlates with a number of social variables that include social group size and complexity of mating behaviors. In chimpanzees, the neocortex occupies 50% of the brain, whereas in modern humans it occupies 80% of the brain.

 

In addition to this self-awareness, would be the evolving capacity for symbolic communication, a sense of social norms, realization of “self” and a sense of continuity, that is to say; birth, life, death, and beyond.

 

The earliest religious rituals including; burial of the dead, magical hunting cave pictures, and eventual causal supernatural “explanations” of natural phenomenon such as lightening, and earth quakes, evolved into the  need to share individual hypotheses with others, which in turn led eventually to collective religious belief.

 

 

A socially accepted hypothesis becomes dogmatic when it is backed by social sanction. This dogma, backed by social sanction is what I’m calling religious, and although it has served a particular psychosocial purpose in our past, it is now time to assess it in a whole new light.

 

 

Religious beliefs of supernatural explanations are arbitrary and confuse the symbolic meaning with historic fact. Whether it’s a burning bush, golden tablets, rising from the dead, black cats, #13, or any number of beliefs that have become codified and subsumed into some kind of orthodoxy, they are leading humans toward greater and greater suffering and division.

 

The violent and oppressive orthodoxy of the three Western religions that all originate from the same ethnic, geographic, and spiritual genesis which is Abrahamic, are contributing to most of the world’s terror and distress.

It is time, like Lennon’s song says to “Imagine no religion, I wonder if you can…”

 

 

I’ll leave you with just a few happy, uplifting religious quotes to drive my point home.

 

"Make ready to slaughter his sons for the guilt of their fathers; Lest they rise and possess the earth, and fill the breadth of the world with tyrants."

- Isaiah 14:21

 

"You are my battle-ax and sword," says the LORD. "With you I will shatter nations and destroy many kingdoms. With you I will shatter armies, destroying the horse and rider, the chariot and charioteer. With you I will shatter men and women, old people and children, young men and maidens. With you I will shatter shepherds and flocks, farmers and oxen, captains and rulers."

- Jeremiah 51:20

 

"Cursed be he who does the Lords work remissly, cursed he who holds back his sword from blood."

- Jeremiah 48:10

 

"This is what the LORD, the God of Israel, says: Strap on your swords! Go back and forth from one end of the camp to the other, killing even your brothers, friends, and neighbors."

- Exodus 32:26

 

"Slaves, obey your human masters with fear and trembling, in the sincerity of your heart, as to Christ." (Ephesians 6:5)

 

"Slaves, obey your human masters in everything; don't work only while being watched, in order to please men, but work wholeheartedly, fearing the Lord." (Colossians 3:22)

 

"Slaves are to be submissive to their masters in everything, and to be well-pleasing, not talking back ." (Titus 2:9)

 

"Slaves, submit yourselves to your masters with all respect, not only to the good and gentle but also to the cruel. " (1 Peter 2:18)

 

"One of illegitimate birth shall not enter the congregation of the Lord." (Deuteronomy 23:2)

 

"If your hand causes you to sin, cut it off. It is better for you to enter into life maimed, rather than having two hands, to go to hell, into the fire that shall never be quenched." (Mark 9:43)

"If any man takes a wife, and goes in on her, and detests her, and charges her with shameful conduct, and brings a bad name on her, and says, 'I took this woman, and when I came to her I found she was not a virgin..." (Deuteronomy 22:13,14)

 

"But if ... evidences of virginity are not found for the young woman, then they shall bring out the young woman to the door of her father's house, and the men of her city shall stone her to death with stones..." (Deuteronomy 22:20,21)

 

“Judge for yourselves: Is it proper for a woman to pray to God with her head uncovered? Does not even nature itself teach you that if a man has long hair it is a disgrace to him, but that if a woman has long hair, it is her glory? For her hair is given to her as a covering."

1 Corinthians 11:13-15

 

"Women should be silent in the churches, for they are not permitted to speak, but should be submissive, as the law also says."

1 Corinthians 14:34

 

 

 

 

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