When I lecture I always describe myself as an avowed Marxist-Leninist. My audience hears "Marxist-Leninist" but what I'm really saying is Marxist- Lennonist - that's Groucho and John, not Karl and Josef.
I identify with Groucho because he said he would never belong to any club that would have him as a member. In my Jungian analytical work and my early work as an Episcopal priest, I've often heard this same sentiment echoed about organized religion or church. I love John Lennon because he exhorted us to "Imagine," which is where we ultimately find God and the Divine.
For myself as a Jungian analyst, one of the most important lifelong tasks I continue to undertake is to offer hope, insight and healing for people who feel wounded by religion.
If I could somehow by proclamation heal every broken and self-estranged soul out there, I would gladly retire to a life of fishing.
I believe that each person can claim our true religious nature and untangle ourselves from that punitive old-time religion and re-vision a healthy spirituality for the twenty-first century. The most basic function of religion has to do with making us whole, as suggested by the etymological root of the word. Legare means to connect, so re-legare, which gives us religio and religion is essentially about reconnecting our broken, disconnected, and split-off parts to become whole again. Humpty Dumpty may have been a lost cause, but the healing resources of religion offer
us an opportunity to put ourselves back together again. Religion originated as a resource for finding and attaining wholeness.
What may be surprising to many is that the United States has the highest rate of church attendance in the developed world, with nearly half of the Americans reporting they attend regular church services at least once a week.
It is hard to think of another first-world nation with more extroverted religious fervor than the United States, where 90 percent of citizens believe in God, 80 percent identify themselves as Christians, and fully 40 percent are self-professed evangelicals, or born-again Christians.
The American religion is a set of deeply held values, largely unconscious which has a tremendous influence over our attitudes, both religious and secular. It is the filter through which we form our worldview. Instead of being rose colored, the lens of our national ego religion is red, white and blue. This may seem sentimentality patriotic, but clear vision it is not.
The main problem with American religion is that, for a nation, where so many millions are so deeply and sincerely religious, the values of our own national cultural religion are often at odds with the true Christian values as Jesus taught them.
What I will write about in these posts is how one can find the divine without fundamentalist self-judgments about whether we are good or bad, worthy or unworthy - whether we've been productive enough to earn God's grace and abundance, or whether we're doomed to a life of inner and outer impoverishment.
As a fisherman I see a metaphor for our souls thrashing too often in rivers of fundamentalism without understanding that we are already enough and we need do nothing more than simply let our soul swim on its own and find its own place in the stream of God's divine and abundant love.
Too often we let the shiny bait of good vs. bad, guilt, powerlessness take us out of this stream and put us in a shallow place that is barren of individual soulful buoyancy.
It has been said, ""The charm of fishing is that it is the pursuit of that which is elusive but attainable, a perpetual series of occasions for hope." I believe the same holds true when we are fishing for our soul and its divine transcendence in the river. Spirituality is like a fingerprint, each must find his/her own way.
Here's to our fishing together in these posts.
Religion - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Why should I believe in organized religion?
I look forward to reading more from you.
Where do you find that fact?
Please follow up with background there.
"It’s somewhat daunting to reflect that Hell is—possibly—the place where you are stuck in your own personal narrative for ever, and Heaven is—possibly—the place where you can ditch it, and take up wisdom instead."
A beautiful inspiring post. It is quite unusual in British politics for a politician to talk about the spiritual side of life. Last year, our London Mayor, Boris Johnson, supported National Prayer Day and urged all religions to pray together. This caused some controversy, but I believe he is totally right,. (please read my post above.)
:P
How can the God of Creation really be obsessed with gay marriage? Or condemn people to eternal hell fire for sexual behavior? Because that's what it mostly comes down to in these churches--SEX.
It's as if a form of profound pathology has been framed as spirituality in this country.
I offer an unabashed YIPEE!
John told us to Imagine
Imagine there's no Heaven
It's easy if you try
No hell below us
Above us only sky
Imagine all the people
Living for today
Imagine there's no countries
It isn't hard to do
Nothing to kill or die for
And no religion too
Imagine all the people
Living life in peace
You may say that I'm a dreamer
But I'm not the only one
I hope someday you'll join us
And the world will be as one
Imagine no possessions
I wonder if you can
No need for greed or hunger
A brotherhood of man
Imagine all the people
Sharing all the world
You may say that I'm a dreamer
But I'm not the only one
I hope someday you'll join us
And the world will live as one
So .. just for a moment, Imagine there's no Heaven
and the rest falls into place.
there is no such thing as a soul to fish for, and no imaginary god to save us from our own stupidity or greed.
Change and preserving our future is up to us.
God is what makes both you and I appeal to the same set of rules and universal standards. God is like the set of rules that you find under the lid in a board game. Without such rules and agreed upon standards the game is no fun. We cannot live in the present when everyone simply writes their own rules which best suit their own circumstances. God is the thing that lays out the boundaries for how we can treat our neighbor. God is the thing which teaches us how we belong to a closed system that is larger than ourselves.
It's all good and well to believe that we can live for the now, but the universe is designed for us to plan, to grow, and to pass on a little of ourselves for tomorrow. It's wonderful to think of a world without "nations", unless of course you live somewhere in which there is no functioning government.
There is no brotherhood of men without the fatherhood of God.
The Fatherhood of god is a myth. One does not gain enlightenment from following untruth. There is something larger than our selves, but it is not a sky daddy.
What makes both you and I appeal to the same set of rules and universal standards is that we are dependent on each other. We do not provide our own homes, clothes, transportation, communications, or food. All these are provided by group efforts and we each contribute to a common pool of resources (usually using cash transactions to buy for our needs and get paid for our labors), and yes, personal greed is always an issue where people try to gain more than they deserve just because they have opportunity.
My success is to some extent based on your success.
Our morality is based on group interaction.
Reality is far more uplifting than myth. We are part of a community, and a part of mankind, and part of nature, and a part of the universe.
Good luck.
It's really not all that hard...
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Dare I ask for even the slightest shred of evidence to support this totally made up conjecture?
Perhaps Spirituality originated in this manner, but not religion. The whole catalog of books on Spirituality refer to finding oneself, wholeness, integration, without and within.
Religion replaces independent spirituality with dogma and doctrine. It removes the ability of the individual to interpret scripture and dogma on their own and remain in the confines of a religious organization. Since individuals do not make doctrine but leaders of religions do, then they are not able to incorporate their own discoveries into religious dogma. Religion controls spirtuality, always has. Organized belief sets are at best a guessing game that came about to try and explain man's condition, the forces he was impacted by, but did not understand. I believe organized religion originated for reasons of power and control, not for attaining individual wholeness, as the two are on dissimilar paths.