religion and spirituality

Thu Jan 8 07:49:53 CST 2009

As you point out, Regina, spirituality and religion are two different things...and a commonly heard comment  is that spirituality is good and religion is bad, because of all the bad things done in religion's name, like killing people who differ in their beliefs. But, as you also write, there is good in organized religion, too.

Another  thing that religion offers people is community...something sorely lacking in so much of our modern world. Church, synagogue, mosque, meeting houses...these all offer that to a large segment of our population. They help build connections between people...a web of support, a sense of belonging.

About twelve days after 9/11 about 30 people flocked to Boughton Place for a public sociodrama session. At the end folks stood in a line that represented time, holding hands. Several  of the people spoke about feeling that they had no church to go to ,being disillusioned with religion, and that it felt that this could be their church, where they could gather with people known and new, and address important issues and share difficult times with one another...not be alone. A home place where people know they will be welcomed in all their many roles, including spiritual seeker. Where they can be connected.

The night of this past US election people were dancing in the streets of NYC, strangers hugging one another, a spontaneous political community built from shared emotion. 

The question to me is how to sustain this sense of community..at Boughton Place,where we live, in the streets....organized religion knows how to do it. Can we?

Rebecca

----- Original Message ----- 
  From: REGINA SEWELL 
  To: list at grouptalkweb.org ; ibanaco at gmail.com 
  Sent: Wednesday, January 07, 2009 9:59 PM
  Subject: religion and spirituality

  Ivo,

  The issue that you bring up...  it reminds me of Marx's declaration that religion is the opiate of the people.  I live in Columbus, Ohio and have a sense that Marx is wrong...  the Opiate isn't religion, it's football....  except when the buckeyes lose, which they just did...

  But seriously, you raise the issue of religion/spirituality, but I think that the issue is broader...  it has to do with people getting stuck in a cultural conserve.  And while the downside of religion as cultural conserve of choice are easy to point out (you did in the example of John Travolta's son, and on the surface, we can blame religion for much of the blood that's being shed all over the planet), my sense is that people flock to religion and stay with it because it works for them somehow.  It gives meaning to what may otherwise be a frightening, overwhelming, pointless existence.  It gives them what Joseph Campbell dubbed "Myths" to help them navigate their world.  And it gives them rules for living.  Though we break them all the time, it's easy to see how the "thou shalt nots" of the Abrahamic religions helped to keep societies from killing each other...  

  Campbell also notes that perhaps the problem with religions today is that they myths have not caught up with the economic and social realities of the world in which we live.  Perhaps what we need are new myths.  Oddly enough, some of the new science and new religion is backing up what the Mary Baker Eddy prosletyzed to her masses -- the power of prayer, of "energy" and intention.

  So perhaps we should take to heart the words of Bruce Springstein on his album "war"  "Blind faith in anything will get you killed."

  According to the press:

  "A post-mortem examination determined last night that John Travolta's
  chronically ill son died of a seizure, as controversy erupted over the
  Scientologist actor's handling of the boy's medical condition. According to
  the family, Jett, 16, suffered a seizure and hit his head on a bathtub at
  their holiday home in the Bahamas, where he was found dead on Friday."
  ...Travolta
  and his wife, Kelly Preston, issued a statement saying they were
  "heartbroken that our time with him was so brief. We will cherish the time
  we had with him for the rest of our lives." The couple said that Jett
  suffered from Kawasaki disease, a condition that causes inflammation of
  small and medium-sized arteries. The disease affects the lymph nodes, skin
  and the mucous membranes in the mouth, nose and throat. Experts said that
  the disease was rarely fatal and seldom affected children over the age of
  8....Critics of Scientology suggested yesterday that Jett may have been
  suffering from autism, a condition that the church does not recognise
  because it considers mental illness to be psychosomatic and argues that it
  should be treated through spiritual healing...." From The Times January 6,
  2009

  Well, I will not discuss the way this church or others deal with humans. I
  think that the problem is deeper than this and deserves an urgent and
  serious consideration. My question is: What are the political consequences
  of spirituality? I will not bother you with this historical problem, but
  with the clear fragmentation between Governments and Institutions related to
  "faith" and "Spirituality" a big and increasing hole is there for we all to
  see if we want and have the courage to see it. The consequences can be
  disastrous if all remains the same. Governments can not pretend that the New
  Age Movement doesn't exist as a genuine mode of discourse or other types of
  movements that are pupping up now. With post modernism the respect for all
  kinds of truth are being mistaken for all truths are equal. And We all know
  this is simply not truth in our relative world.  Note the paradox. They say
  "All kinds of truth are equal" forming in that very moment another kind of
  truth. I will attempt to say that in our relative world there are not only
  various types of truths but various degrees of truths. I will call this
  degrees simply Evolution, defined as a truth that emerge, transcend and
  include the previous truth (but the topic is too complex to expose it here,
  I think, because it would divert from the real intention of my e-mail)

  Spirituality have to enter in the political discourse again, I believe,
  simply because spirituality, by whatever name is an intrinsic part of a
  human being, and the bad use of it makes the world poorer. By political
  discourse, I mean in the broadest sense of the world, including the explicit
  consequences of the work and the understanding of science, of arts, of
  culture, etc that have to result in a better informed political decisions.
  This, I believe, can only be met by a real transdisciplinary approach. Is
  Sociatry Era coming at last?

  regina sewell, Ph.D.

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