The Essence of Religion

By Mark Dempsey (1/14/17)

Jesus is famous for his “Great Commandments”:

Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy mind. This is the first and great commandment. And the second is like unto it, Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself. On these two commandments hang all the law and the prophets. — Matthew 22:35-40.

Jesus spoke Aramaic, which was translated into Greek for the New Testament, then translated into English for you and me. So when I suggest translating “commandment” as “observation,” I’m not proposing anything far out, at least when it comes to translating scripture. The idea that twice-translated speech can be perfectly accurate, never mind perfect, that’s far out.

The “observation” of loving one’s neighbor as oneself is pretty accurate too. You can’t really love your neighbor if you are consumed by self-loathing.

So then loving God is what consumes your heart, mind and soul. Whatever occupies your heart, soul and mind that wholly is your god. The connection to the Abrahamic God Jesus called “Father” may be there too, but I’d say we wouldn’t be out of line calling people’s driving passions “gods.”

If that’s so, then all the controversy about whether God exists is really beside the point. People are religious when they are passionately engaged, whether that’s in a church sanctuary or rooting for the Raiders. In fact that connection and attachment to the Raiders may be what Al Davis (the Raiders’ owner) took advantage of when he extorted stadiums from Oakland and Anaheim.

The commitment to so many non-religious “gods” also quashes a lot of Western secular arrogance. Bill Maher’s atheism may be terrific for comedy material, but it’s really beside the point in a lot of ways.

We may also have to rethink of the Western explorers’ culturally-limited reaction of feeling superior (because we’re Christian!) to Confucian culture’s ancestor worship (or Dia de las muertes), putting down people as “primitive” because they honored their ancestors (or the dead) with anniversaries and shrines.

Apparently the observation that families influence children’s behavior whether it’s acknowledged or not is foreign to the Western tribes and tradition. Actually, it’s not. Honoring parents is one of the ten commandments. But if that’s true, why not elevate it to consciousness with ritual? Insistence that ignoring family influence is correct is just tribalism (“My God is real, yours is voodoo”).

Similarly, ancient or traditional cultures (Romans, Greeks, Indians) often honored madmen. Julius Caesar was an epileptic whose fits gave him access to something transcending ordinary reality. Today we honor mad men too. They tend to be psychotic hoarders of dollars, but they’re obviously crazy...perhaps in a different way than the rest of us.

You might even say some kind of transcendent blessing is necessary for people to risk their lives. Modern societies rely on that kind of risk in their police, firefighters and soldiers. Try to think of a modern society that can do without those roles. You can’t.

So people are religious, whether they think they are or not, whether their religious sentiments fit within one of the historical, traditional religions or not. The big advantage of tradition is that it’s been tried; the downside: the solutions it offers may not apply in modern times without some metaphorical understanding of scripture, ritual or tradition.

So...we’re religious, but not necessarily responsible or without baggage. And religions are human creations too. That’s the real meaning of those prime directives / first commandments (“Have no other gods before me,” or “There is no god but God.”) You can’t, for example, be in the traditional religions and consider something earthly (e.g. the Bible) as divine or perfect (as fundamentalists do). That’s the meaning of idolatry: considering some interim item as ultimate.

So that’s religion for you: a mixed blessing.