You know a religion doesn't start with a book. In fact the person who inspires the religion often doesn't even write the book. Religion starts with an experience and the person who has the experience tries to communicate that experience to others. This experience is like the opening of a door, and once opened, one is able to walk through that door again and again; in fact, after a while, this person can walk through that door at will, and can even walk through the door, keep it open, and then communicate to people on the other side of that door.
Notice that I am using a parable. When you talk about spiritual experience, actually any experience, you are not talking about things. You are talking about something that is not directly observable or measurable, and to communicate these experience you use parables. So I am not talking about an actual door. I am talking about a spiritual door, or the experience of being held in by a boundary and then being liberated from that boundary.
There is something different about a person once they walk through that door. And there is something noticeably different about a person who manages to stay outside that door and communicate to people who are within the confines of that door. Those confined people see and feel and sense the freedom and the peace and the clarity of the person outside the door and beg that person to show them how they can get outside the door themselves. The person who inspires the religion usually leaves behind a group of people who were following this person in an attempt to get beyond the door of their confinement.
People who followed Buddha didn't do so because they were Buddhists. There was no such thing as Buddhism. Just as the people that followed Jesus didn't do so because they were Christians. They became followers because they sensed that Buddha and Jesus were liberated from the confines in which they experienced their lives and they believed simply that, if they did the things that Buddha and Jesus told them to do, that they would experience liberation as well. And many of them did. And this experience of liberation was such a profound experience that they devoted their lives to the pursuit of it and, after the passing of Buddha and Jesus, to teaching the manner in which they were taught, and through which this experience could be achieved.
So religion starts as a way of having an experience and it requires no more faith than you have whenever you commit yourself to anything. You do so in the hopes of having a certain experience. Whether you committ to going to a particular college for four years in the hope that you will have a good experience and get a good education there; or whether you invest $15 to see a certain movie, in the hope that you will have two hours of an entertaining experience. To say that this world is divided into realists and believers is a gross exaggeration. When you walk down a street you are operating on the belief that that street will support your weight. A fairly safe belief given your past experiences. Yet just the same as the belief that an hour of yoga or prayer or meditation will give you a sense of peace and a broader perspective; also fairly safe assumptions based on past experiences.
Now there is a lot of talk in every religion about an after life. When you get behind the door the experience you have is profound and liberating and does not seem to have anything to do with your body or your mind, except in the sense that you have somehow transcended them. This experience naturally leads to the understanding that you are more than your physical being, that you are non-physical and that you are not what you experience, but the ground, or the context, of your experience. Not what you experience, but the experiencer of your experience. And while we're on it, not what you do but the doer; not what you hear but the hearer; not what you think; but the thinker. You also notice that this self, this experiencer, thinker and doer, has not changed from your earliest memories. What you experience, what you do and think have changed but you have not changed. This non-physical, immutable you, that does not change no matter how much you age or how dramatic the things are that happen to you, gives you a very natural sense of the continuation of the self beyond the death of the brain and the body.
So this is what religion is at base; a way of getting to an experience that is liberating. What religion becomes is something else entirely. And this thing that it becomes is the thing that those very deep thinkers like Dawkins and Hitchens and Pinker rail against. And this is because religion becomes not more spiritual, but less so. It is the materialization of religion, not by the people that inspired it, but by the people who inherited it, that has been so problematic in history.
I will repeat that a spiritual teacher who has actually experienced spiritual things (which are not really things) is forced, as I am forced in this simple explanation, to use material things as parables or examples of what spiritual experience is and what the self and God and the relationship between the two are like. This is necessary for two reasons. One is that words explain what is observable and understandable. Words can explain spiritual phenomena only in so far as to say that they they are not observable or understandable. And yet when talking to someone who yearns for an experience, but has not yet had it, we can only use words and concepts that she can understand to encourage her and fuel her desire.
The spiritual understanding that we are all striving for when we involve ourselves in spiritual activity is the understanding and the experience that we are not things but are spirit and that we transcend our physical body and our physical brain and are immutable as opposed to what we can observe which always is, ultimately, mutable and transient. God is not a thing either. God is that ultimately subtlest level of existence that transcends the entire physical universe and is immutable and also transcends us and is at the very center, the subtlest level of our existence. We are all, every living creature, plant, animal, bacterium, every single one, is an aspect of the divine. We do not change, although our distance from God, which lies at the very deepest center of our selves, does change depending on what we do with our lives and how we conduct ourselves.
The problem is that holy books are not necessarily written by holy people, and are rarely written by people of the level of holiness as the person who inspired that religion, or even inspired that book. It is very clear to a person who has had spiritual experience, just what level of spiritual experience the author of a book, whether holy or not, is on. For instance, there are codes of behavior. Each religion has a somewhat different code. But in its essence, the code, if it is a true religion, based on actual spiritual experience, should be some version of the Golden Rule, "Do unto others as you would have others do unto you." This rule, when actually practiced, will help the practicioner get to the understanding that the other actually is you, and that we are all aspects of the Divine living out our lives in different ways. At that point, the rule becomes unnecessary. We treat each other as we would like to be treated ourselves, because the other is, in the most important way, in the only way that is immutable and unchangeable; because the other is ourself.
So when Dawkins and Hitchens and Pinker cherry pick through religious history and fault people of spirit for war and torture and all sorts of abominations, they are condemning the devolution of religion from the spiritual to the material. With the passing of the inspirational leader, comes codes and laws. The religion that they inspired, but did not found, was founded in their name, and becomes the 'one' true religion. Their God becomes the one true God. Their followers become the one group that is pursuing the true path. And understand that religion is based on the most powerful experiences of oneness, of love and brotherhood. So various people, having had exactly the same powerful experience, but who have materialized their experience in a particular way, so that they come to think that it can only happen in their church, their mosque, their synagogue, their temple, saying their prayers, in their language, performing their particular religious rituals, and praying to the God whose name they have assigned, will battle to the death others who say no, that those practices are wrong, that you are calling God by the wrong name, and that what you think are important spiritual experiences, are actually devilish delusions, that you must renounce these practices, voluntarily or forcefully, and come to join our religion which is the one true religion and the only way of having true spiritual experience.
Of course history is also filled with leaders who, having no spiritual experience themselves, but knowing how powerful that experience has been for their followers; have used that knowledge to exploit their people to sacrifice themselves. This sacrifice has been made seemingly for religious purposes, but actually for the lust for wealth and power of these deceitful leaders.
You can watch on line debates between Christopher Hitchens and William Dembski, or Hitchens and David Berlinski. These debates are conducted on a very high level of urbanity, with lovely sophisticated words bandied back and forth. But underneath this urbane exterior, is some very basic confusion. You cannot defend what has been done in the name of religion, and you cannot defend what has been done in the name of pure materialism. Both have led to terrifying atrocities. But it is not spirituality that has created such an odious history, but the materialization of spirituality, that we commonly call religion. And certainly a joyless, smug, superior life guided by the belief that material things are all that exist, and that everything, including ourselves, is mutable and perishable, so what's the point; everyone who lives in this self-deluded pathetic manner should not be held up as inspirations to anyone except those that want to be as miserable as they are.
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