Evolution of Religion

I remember countless childhood nights, lying in bed, feeling very afraid to die, even though I went to Church and Sunday school.  I just couldn't accept the version of heaven and the afterlife that I heard about there.  Also, I grew up in a scientific household and I wasn't raised to see how the two, Science and Religion, could coexist.  Now, years later as an adult, I can see plenty of room for both views.  This has taken a lot of searching and growing on my part, however. 

In order for Religion to evolve past having so many sceptics, it must reconcile itself with the scientific community.  In fact, Judaism has been doing this for 2500 years.  The first instance of this trend started after Alexander the Great and the Greeks conquered Judea in 500 BC and then culminated in the invention of Talmudic Judaism in the 1^st century AD.  Incorporating Greek terms and beliefs into the Talmud allowed Judaism to survive under Roman provincial rule.  Next, in the 17^th century, Baruch Spinoza again revolutionized Judaism by equating God with Nature and removing the idea of a personal God that meddled in the affairs of humans and punished our wrongdoings.  Spinoza’s philosophy was reflective of the 17^th and 18^th century belief that, “if people would only be rational in all matters, including religion, then all of mankind’s problems would be solved and the messianic hope would, in effect, be realized.” (SHOFAR, Summer 2004, God in Nature or Lord of the Universe? : The Encounter of Judaism and Science from Hellenistic Times to the Present, David G. Singer, 90)  

Baruch Spinoza

Finally, the 19^th century brought about a revolution of science and technology, which in part, led to two horrific World wars in the early part of the 20^th century.  As a result, Mordecai Kaplan founded Reconstructionist Judaism in which God is defined, “as the natural force in the universe that promotes morality and goodness in the human race.”  (Singer, 92)  This view is very much like that of the ancient eastern religions.  Yet many modern western scientists refuse to espouse Kaplan’s ideas of being somehow connected to a spiritual realm.  A prime example of a prominent 21^st century scientist who is a staunch atheist is Stephen Hawking.  When addressing the similarities between Asian philosophies and physics he said, “A few physicists like to make a connection between an “observer dependent” universe and ideas in Eastern mysticism: Hinduism, Buddhism, and Taoism.  The universe of Eastern mysticism is an illusion.  A physicist who attempts to link it with his own work has abandoned physics.” (Stephen Hawking / An Unfettered Mind, Kitty Ferguson, 104-105)

Stephen Hawking

 Hawking has an incredible need to push out the possibility of God’s existence.  It almost feels like a vendetta, but considering the circumstances of his existence, anger at a higher power is definitely understandable.  Diagnosed with ALS at twenty one, his mere existence 50 years later could be considered by some to be a miracle, but not by Hawking.  When asked about God’s interest in human life he quipped, “we are such insignificant creatures on a minor planet of a very average star in the outer suburbs of one of a hundred thousand million galaxies. So it is difficult to believe in a God that would care about us or even notice our existence.” (Ferguson, 80)  Hawking’s approach to his field of study is to negate the need for God by explaining all of life’s mysteries with science alone.  Many would argue, however that the human mind, no matter how brilliant is not capable of comprehending all of the universe’s mysteries.  I agree with Einstein who made the following analogy:

The problem (of God’s existence) is too vast for our limited minds.

We are in the position of a little child entering a huge library filled with

books in many languages.  The child knows someone must have written

those books.  It does not know how.  It does not understand the languages

in which they are written.  The child dimly suspects a mysterious order in the

arrangement of the books, but doesn’t know what it is.  That, it seems to me,

is the attitude of even the most intelligent human being toward God.

(Einstein/His Life and His Universe, Walter Isaacson, 386)

Einstein was very religious from a young age.  Later, as he matured into a scientist, he revered the beauty and perfection that Science revealed in the World around us.  Rather than choose to look at humans as pathetic and weak, unworthy of God’s notice like Hawking, Einstein instead chose awe for the realm that Science revealed, thereby equating the two.  Einstein believed that atheism was an unfortunately bleak way to experience life.  He had the following to say about atheists: 

The fanatical atheists are like slaves who are still feeling the weight

of their chains which they have thrown off after hard struggle.  They

are creatures who – in their grudge against traditional religion as the

‘opium of the masses’ – cannot hear the music of the spheres.  (Isaacson, 390)

By comparing atheists to slaves, Einstein implies that they are trapped in their way of thinking.  Just like slaves are often born into their condition of slavery, so are we all born into our unique set of circumstances that shape the way we view the World around us.  This renders the concept of Free Will, especially problematic and Einstein said that it was one aspect of Judaism with which he did not identify, saying instead:

I do not at all believe in free will in the philosophical sense. 

Everybody acts not only under external compulsion but also

in accordance with inner necessity.  Schopenhauer’s saying,

“A man can do as he wills but not will as he wills,” has been a

real inspiration to me since my youth; it has been a continual

consolation in the face of life’s hardships, my own and others’,

and an unfailing wellspring of tolerance. (Isaacson, 391)

Albert Einstein

Like Einstein, I know that I don’t have control over a lot of really influential factors governing my life and neither does anyone else.  Fortunately, despite my negative childhood experiences with religion, I was able to find a spirituality that works for me and now I can share that with my children.  The following vignette about me and my son illustrates exactly why I think it is so important that religion evolve.

“Henry honey, why aren’t you going to sleep?” I ask sternly, but not yet too annoyed.

“I’m afraid of dying,” came back the honest and slightly terrified reply.

“Ok baby,” I walk into his room and climb in bed next to him.  “Why are you afraid of that?”  Fortunately, we haven’t ever had any pets or relatives die.

“Because I don’t know what’s going to happen.”   

“Well guess what Henry, I used to be afraid of that too when I was your age.  But I’ve done a lot of growing and learning since then and I’ve learned a lot about God and dying and I know there is nothing to be afraid of.  I promise.” And I kiss him on the forehead and hug him in my arms.  “You know what I do when I’m afraid?” I ask.

“No, what?” he asks.

“I pray, do you want to pray with me?” He nods his head against my chest.  “Ok, please God, help me not to be afraid, say it with me, ‘please God help me not to be afraid, please God help me not to be afraid….”

I hear his voice reciting with mine.

A week later, we are driving back from the grocery store talking about Pokemon, when Henry interjects a sudden topic change.  “Mom, guess what?”

“I don’t know, buddy, what?”

“The prayer worked, I’m not afraid to die anymore!”

A healthy spiritual existence is an important part of the whole person.  When Religion obstinately refuses to evolve it pushes people away who can’t reconcile what they hear at Church with the messages being heard out in the rest of the World.  The Jews have addressed this problem and have been working to reshape Judaism to fit with scientific teachings for millennia.  Einstein, a Jew and one of the world’s most prominent scientists of all time, had a perfectly evolved view of God and Spirituality.  As humans, we must accept there are mysteries not even the most brilliant scientist can solve.  Any Religion claiming to have all of the answers forgets the message of humility and acceptance at the core of any spiritual teaching.  Why couldn't all of the world's religions come together with the scientific community and evolve?

Moveable Feasts and Misquotes

If you are lucky enough to have lived in Paris as a young man, then wherever you go for the rest of your life, it stays with you, for Paris is a moveable feast.”
― Ernest Hemingway, A Moveable Feast

Taking a quote out of its original context often results in misinformation.  For example, this quote was not taken from the book itself, but from a letter that Hemingway wrote in 1950, 11 years before his death.  His 4^th wife, Mary and his biographer friend, to whom the letter had been addressed, used it to title the posthumously published memoir.  Hemingway’s father, a doctor, wanted his son to follow in his footsteps.  Yet, Ernest knew he had to write.  A Moveable Feast is the story about how he launched his career while living in Paris, mentored by Gertrude Stein and immersed in a literary community that included James Joyce, Ezra Pound and F Scott Fitzgerald, to name a few.  He was writing A Moveable Feast at the time of his suicide.  Ironically, despite young Hemingway’s stolid determination to forge his own path through life, he ended up exactly the same way his father did. Both men killed themselves with a shotgun.  

Sadly, the later years of Hemingway’s life were plagued by serious health problems, heavy drinking, family strife and depression.  His last major work of fiction, The Old Man and the Sea, was published in 1952.  It was the discovery of a trunk of his early writings in the basement of the Paris Ritz hotel that spurred the memoir he was working on when he died.  His son Patrick identified this quote as the last thing that his father wrote which he apparently had intended as a forward to the work, “This book contains material from the remises of my memory and of my heart.  Even if one has been tampered with and the other does not exist.”  It seems as if the older man experienced a wave of inspiration, but also of disappointment, when confronted by the sparkling years of his youth.  The passion he once felt so strongly had waned and given way to despair. 

I too, moved to France in my twenties, perhaps in part like Ernest, to escape a career more respectable than that of part-time, ex-pat, English teacher.  There, in Bordeaux, I experienced my first adult communication from God.  When I remember it now, I picture a normal Sunday afternoon. I know the exact date: May 19^th, 2002, because it was the Feast of Pentecost, a moveable feast, like Easter.  I went out to Lunch with some girlfriends and discussed my plans to stay in France for a 2^nd year.  Walking home afterwards, the sun shone down on me from a bright blue sky.  I looked up at it and took in a horizon filled with the pink angles of terracotta tiled roofs.  I hadn’t gone to Church that day or any other day in a long time, but suddenly I was filled with a certainty that God exists and that I was exactly where I was meant to be.

As soon as the feeling of certainty washed over me, a wave of doubt threatened to smash it.  I hurried my steps and almost ran up the stairs in the crumbling, centuries old stone building where I had a tiny, but recently refurbished, attic nook apartment.  I picked up the phone and called home, to St. Louis.  I left an excited message on the answering machine, then hung up, immediately feeling stupid.  I knew it would sound crazy, just like I always feared I was perceived.  Just a few weeks before, my Mom had told me how my Dad and brother laughed and laughed while reading my letter, the one where I outlined my dream of being a writer.  I had included a simple, hand drawn chart, complete with arrows and question marks.  Of course the scientists would be amused, I remarked bitterly to my Mom.  “No, no, Amy.  They thought it was cute,” she defended, not meaning to intensify the blow.       

In today’s world, people are taught not to trust their feelings.  Similarly, creative thoughts are deemed, at best, too impractical to deserve nurturing. For the most part, unless one is lucky enough to be part of an artistic community ‘thinking outside the box’ is not tolerated.  René Descartes (1596-1650) lived at the time of the Spanish Inquisition.  Though he was a profoundly spiritual man, he went to great lengths to hide the true nature of his spirituality fearing retribution from the Catholic Church.  But Descartes did keep meticulous records, written in code, of his more unconventional studies and beliefs.  On the night of November 10, 1619 (The Feast of St. Martin) he discovered his life’s purpose in a series of three dreams.  Descsrtes’ interpretation of these dreams is explained in the following excerpt from the book, Descartes’ Secret Notebook, by Amir D. Aczel:

Descartes’ charge was to develop his geometry – to bring its ancient Greek principles to the seventeenth century, in which he lived, and ultimately to bequeath to the world the new science he would create: analytic geometry. (59)

Descartes believed the 3 dreams to be spiritually inspired and according to him, they resulted in the famous mathematical treatise, Discourse on the Method, published almost 20 years later, in 1637.  This highly influential work would lay the foundation for the fields of physics, engineering and modern technology.  His proposition, “I think, therefore I am,” brought mankind fully into the age of reason, when man’s intellect reigned supreme. Yet, this famous quote has been taken out of context.  Many would-be philosophers quote it as if to say that human thought is a superior force of nature.  However, Descartes’ original intent was quite different.  The 'I think' was meant to imply doubt which then started the following chain of philosophical thought:

Doubt implies uncertainty. And uncertainty implies imperfection.  Human beings and everything in their environment are imperfect.  But the idea of the imperfect implies the existence of something that is not imperfect. That which is not imperfect is, by definition, perfect.  And perfection belongs to God. (Aczel, p. 157)

Thus, Descartes’s Discourse includes a mathematical proof of God’s existence.  Man’s thoughts are imperfect which proves the existence of God’s perfection. Ironically Descartes famous quote is used to prove the power of human thought, when he in fact was arguing for the supremacy of the Divine.

The 17^th century marked a complete turning point in human thought.  Scholars began to favor a world view based on that which could be observed, measured, understood, and controlled by the power of the human mind alone.  On the other hand, in the ancient world, Greek philosophers like Socrates and Pythagoras sought knowledge of the world around them by looking inward, via contemplation and meditative thought.  Karen Armstrong explains this in her book A Case for God:

In the ancient world, people experienced an idea as something that happened to them.  It was not a question of the “I” knowing something; instead, the “Known” drew one to itself.  People said, in effect, “I think- therefore there is that which I think.” (67)

 Leading up to the 17^th century, scholars sought Divine inspiration in order to discover the Truth.  A person gained understanding of life by cultivating one’s life of prayer and meditation.  In this way, the ancient Western civilizations resembled the early Eastern religions.  As older texts were updated and translated and recopied, however, changes were made, or the original context was lost.  Armstrong also explains the famous “I am that I am,” quote from the burning bush on Mt. Sinai, “Ehyeh asher ehyeh (I am that I am) is a Hebrew idiom that expresses deliberate vagueness… So when Moses asked God who he was, Yahweh in effect replied: “Never Mind who I am!”  (The Case for God, 39)  Though modern biblical scholars interpret the quote to mean that God is being, an awareness of Hebrew dialect points to a far less philosophical connotation.  The God of the Old Testament was like a cranky father, eager to get to the point (in this case, the 10 commandments). 

Shavuot is the Jewish holiday commemorating the giving of the law on Mount Sinai.  It follows Passover like Pentecost follows Easter in the Christian Church.  Pentecost and before that, Shavuot, took the place of an important harvest festival in the Ancient World.  In Greek, Pentecost means ‘fiftieth day’ since the first wheat was ready for harvest 50 days after the planting.  Similarly, Easter and Passover are the more modern versions of the fertility festival at the planting.  This explains why modern, secular Easter celebrations incorporate bunnies and eggs (symbols of fertility).  In a metaphorical sense, the seeds of Faith are planted on Easter and Passover and then they are harvested when God or the Holy Spirit visits on Pentecost or Shavuot.

Pentecost is also known as the birthday of the Church and is the commemoration of the Holy Spirit descending on the disciples fifty days after Jesus’ crucifixion.  Last year I went to Church on Pentecost and was struck by this reading from 1^st Corinthians 12:3b-13:

No one can say “Jesus is Lord” except by the Holy Spirit.  To each is given the manifestation of the Spirit for the common good.  For just as the body is one and has many members, and all the members of the body, though many, are one body, so it is with Christ.  For in the one Spirit we were all baptized into one body – Jews or Greeks, slaves or free – and we were all made to drink of one Spirit.

I took it to mean that everyone is meant to pray to one and the same God.  However, when reading another book, Misquoting Jesus, The story behind who changed the Bible and why, by Bart D. Ehrman, I found this:

The word Spirit (Pneuma) would have been abbreviated in most manuscripts as PMA, which understandably could be-and was-misread by some scribes as the Greek word for “drink” (POMA); and so in these witnesses Paul is said to indicate that all have “drunk of one drink.” (91)   

Further evidence for the existence of numerous different biblical interpretations exist.  Considering that it has been around for 2000 years and translated time and again, the possibilities seem infinite.  All languages have the capacity to be highly nuanced due to factors that range from dialect to idiomatic expressions and on to translator discretion.  One of these factors alone can completely change the meaning of a passage, so when the factors are added together, the potential for variation in meaning is compounded exponentially.

When Hemingway wrote to his editor friend about Paris as a moveable feast, I believe he meant that spending time in France was something that would feed him for years after he moved away. Yet while the lost trunk of his early Paris writings inspired a memoir, it also led to his suicide.  Hemingway wrote in A Moveable Feast, “By then I knew that everything good and bad left an emptiness when it stopped.  But if it was bad, the emptiness filled up by itself.  If it was good you could only fill it by finding something better.” (52, restored version, 2009)  Apparently it was not possible for Hemingway to improve upon those Paris years.  It would appear that, when confronted with his life in Paris, he realized nothing better would ever replace it and so he shot himself.  Like Hemingway, I miss France and constantly yearn to go back.  Also, like Hemingway, I struggled with alcohol.  Luckily for me, I stopped drinking when I had my children.  Yet the emptiness didn’t fill up by itself.  For me it was replaced by something far better, by God.