Disagreements and Divine Relationships

[kokopelle]

lupabitch, a wise LJ friend, asked:

You know....it really shouldn't matter what your relationship to the Divine is--monotheistic, polytheistic, pantheistic, even atheistic. Nor should your view of the world matter--dualistic, pluralistic, etc. Can't we all just agree to disagree and get on with our lives?

My reply was turned out to be very long. I'm posting the full version here.

We should be able to disagree and get on with our lives. In the end spirituality is a personal experience. The better question is why do people disagree? I think the biggest answer to this is that people confuse religious practices with a relationship to the Divine. Additionally, there is a guardianship aspect over religious practices. This plays out in several ways.

Religious practices are wonderful things. They provide the tools and direction for having that divine relationship. The ways that work are passed on to others. Relationships with entities are shared. These provide 'short-cuts' to the personal relationship with Divine. Many practices exist to facilitate the group participation in religious observation. People are told how to place nice with each other. Other religious practices are there to keep people safe when they poke at the 'dangerous' edges of the spiritual. Some doors are only opened after proper preparation.

While religious practices are useful, they are only tangential or ancillary to the real task of having that relationship with the Divine. An analogy would be that achieving a divine relationship is like moving from the top of a mountain to the bottom of the mountain. People could throw themselves off, with the likely result of reaching the bottom in a badly damaged state. The religious practices are like the instructions of where the trails are, what time of day to make the journey, and what equipment to bring. While this is terribly important information, the knowledge of how to make the descent is not the descent itself. The map of the descent is not the journey of the descent.

Confusion and disagreement occur when people forget that the map is not the journey. To judge a person by their practices is shortsighted. In the mountain analogy there are several paths to the bottom. A person can jump, rappel, take the quick and steep path, take the slow and winding path, use a pogo stick, wiggle on their belly, or just sit at the top of the mountain contemplating their belly button. Some ways are more efficient than others, some are quite silly, others are quite dangerous, but none represent the arrival at the bottom of the mountain.

There should be no grounds for disagreement if a person can say, with integrity, that they have a personal relationship with the Divine. In this place they have gotten to the bottom of the mountain, alive and relatively in one piece. How they did it should not matter.

The how does matter in one way. At this place I do have to mention that a 'rule' for the journey to a personal relationship should be that of minimal harm to others. The path to the bottom of the mountain should not be over the gently sloping pile of dead and damaged bodies. One could argue that a personal relationship with Divine is not possible for a person with sufficient malice in their heart. I don’t know if this is entirely true. I’ll leave that to another article or debate. The point is that purposeful harm should not be part of the journey to the personal relationship.

I have one last reason that people disagree on the how of personal relationships with Divine. This is a murky point. People can go into guardian mode when religious practices are similar but different. A proprietary feeling is placed on actions and words. The use of a particular word can trigger assumptions of a specific religious practice. Apparent deviation from the 'accepted' religious practice can cause people to react aggressively as they come to the believed defense of the word and the associated practices.

The irony here is that the personal relationship with Divine is not being attacked. Instead, the tapping of the religious practice is the target. This may seem trite, but can be incredibly ferocious battles in areas were people believe they have religious ownership. A person seeks to do some slightly different from an ‘established’ way. The modification, intentional or not, is seen as an attack on the institution and the personal relationship of the practitioners. Most of the time neither of these transgressions are true. The fault is only seen in the eye of the guardian.


Here is my summary. Religious practices are not the one-to-one equivalent of a personal relationship with the Divine. The practices are instead tools, guidelines and suggestion for good living. Disagreements occur when religious practices are equated to personal relationships. Disagreements also occur when a guardian of a religious practice perceives their system to be under attack, misrepresentation or appropriation. While there is a valid place to argue theological correctness in reference to a given word or set of actions, these should have little to do with the end results attained. In the end, the disagreements are about the 'correctness' of human constructs instead of the personal relationship with the Divine.

Comments

[iskender.livejournal.com]

A friend of mine once said that all political bickering was pointless, because conservatives and liberals all wanted the same things, only through different means. I'd debate that, but for the sake of argument, let's accept his claim. Does that mean that our differences don't matter, or that they matter but still shouldn't affect us in any substantial way? (It's semantics, but in the modern age, we love to say things matter if we feel they ought to matter--no matter how little effect they have on us and our conditions.)

Today, there are two great veins of theology-doesn't-matter thought.

One is found on the right. Check your Maggie Thatcher, PM of the UK, on her statement that, roughly paraphrased, Christianity is a doctrine of personal salvation, not social liberation. Rightists want us to all make money and God forbid we use religion to actually do anything.

And it's been very successful for them. They've moved the split from between faiths to between faith-in-general and lack-of-faith in general. And of course, the religious agree on about as much as the nonbelievers, but the believers have more will to power, so they win. As long as you believe in God and making money, you can be in the club.

But that's not it. On the left, there is a push for touchy-feely conditionless spiritualistic bullshit. All the comfort of religion without any of the social restraint. But of course, you can take the faith out of authoritarianism, but you can't take the authoritarianism out of some faiths. And so we see the same collectivism and "self-"discipline of the 1960s, again turned inward, with no social animus beyond claiming to love everyone. There is no weight, there. It's all psychodrama, and there's no way anyone notices that anything's wrong, because they preach that the whole world is inside anyway.

Both ignore the social dimension of religion, addressing only the interpersonal, if that. Larger society is repudiated. The world is made less and less immediate. Solipsism is the rule of the day.

So while it's comforting to say "Why can't we all just shut up and get along," I have to ask why spiritualists introduce all this metaphysical garbage if they don't want it to matter. Latter-day religionists, the heirs of ten thousand years of social religion, are now telling us to mind our business. And the idea that we're all trying to find our path to the same place is hopelessly naive, man. No. We're not all seeking the same happiness, the same heaven, the same end. Some of us don't want to end at all. Some want to stay in the cycle, while others want moksha, while some don't believe the cycle continues and that this is the whole of their existence. Likewise, my friend was wrong. Different political ideologies, like faiths, want to see different worlds created, and this "let's all get along" rhetoric smooths over only so as to appear more tolerant. If you think all world faiths express the same divine truth, you've missed a lot. It's mushy, sentimental thought with no respect for the history of religious practice or profession.

[greensh.livejournal.com]

My friend said, "let's just disagree and get on with our lives" instead of "let's all get along". Disagreements can be vigorous. When the combatants disengage, assuming somebody wasn't killed, they do go on with our lives. The disagreements can still exist. There is more to do in life than bicker about one or two things to exclusion of others.

One of the things I left out of my article was the role of power in religious disagreements. With the aid of attaining and holding power, it's a short walk from 'religious' issues to 'political' issues. People do mean ass stuff in the name of religion so they can have their political cake and eat it too.

[iskender.livejournal.com]

Well, she said agree to disagree. Fair enough, disagreements can be vigorous, but one has to have a criterion by which one can judge the meaningful conflicts that must be maintained and the petty ones that ought to be tabled.

[lupagreenwolf.livejournal.com]

Good points.

I think I made the assumption of "believe as you will with a minimum of impact on others".

But you make a good point, and one that I agree with--the only arguments about personal connection people can make about each other is calling their tools and symbol sets ineffective. It's impossible to get inside another person adn figure out whether they're connected to the Divine, or just their own psyche--or BOTH.

[greensh.livejournal.com]

I went out of the way to mention the minimum impact thing because I had visions of my words being correlated with human sacrifices, etc. Eck. To me, 'anything goes' is impalpable as 'only a narrow dogma goes'. Call it a desire for mutual spiritual manners. You know, that's perhaps what this entire conversation is about.

I like your use of the term "symbol sets". I'll borrow that if you don't mind!

The other angle that I didn't talk about is the gaining and maintaining of political power via religious debate and entrenchment. Personal relationships with the Divine mean very little in this arena. That would be fine fodder for another article (grin).

[lupagreenwolf.livejournal.com]

GOod point again. And feel free to gank "symbol sets". I forget where I got it from.

Oh, geez--religious politics (or political reloigions) are another thing entirely! I was talking about the simple practice of one's religion. Don't go muddying the waters with politics ;)