The Harari book is filling my head with all sorts of thoughts regarding religion and its place in our world. What he says makes sense, even though it’s a bit difficult to read, as in hard to hear. And while what he says could be as much theory as anything else people postulate, it strikes me as having validity.
Harari pins a lot on our biological development and the characteristics and instincts encoded in our DNA. He doesn’t badmouth religion, but puts it in the category of the myth-making at which Homo Sapiens has become so proficient. Still, it has caused me to wonder about the various world religions, Christianity in particular.
First, if all religions are, in essence, made up—myths—what does this say about the level of deception being wrought on a large percentage of the world’s population? What does it say about the emotional and spiritual investment billions have made? What does it mean for truth, for the myriad ways religion has inspired and influenced our music and architecture and our daily conversations and behavior? And, lately, the political leanings and legislation and court decisions coming out of Washington and state governmental bodies?
Harari’s take on human development—especially the prominent place myth-making has held and continues to hold—is currently affecting the way I look at everything. I guess, in one sense, the myths and everything we’ve told ourselves about earthly life have done what they needed to do for us- given us guidelines and guard rails and reference points, not to mention hope. They’ve helped us navigate, for better or worse, in the absence of the built-in biological instruction manual that we apparently grew beyond a number of millennia ago.
But… all this has once again raised the question in my mind that I can’t shake. It may always be unanswerable, born of pretense and vanity, but also curiosity: what if Jesus existed and did the things the Bible said he did, and he is the One, the Savior of the world? What if Christianity is, among all the world’s religious movements, the one with historical precedence, historical validity?
And then I’m visited by the troubling– or humbling and grounding– fact that, outside of the scriptural witness, the only other place Jesus shows up is a measly paragraph from an ancient history book written by Josephus. And then I think about the myriad adherents of other religions asking similar questions, feeling similar ways about the prominent heroes of their faith. And I’m left standing no further along that path of enlightenment, which is probably also a myth.
I remember a conversation I had with one of the interns—vicars, they are called—who was at my home congregation for on-the-job training during his third year at seminary. I forget exactly how I worded it, but I asked him a question about the importance we held for our own Christian faith and how that squared with the rest of the world’s religions. What were we to make of the great diversity of religions and spiritual expressions that existed (and still exist) in the world?
I remember his answer being somewhat satisfying at the time: that this is apparently how God has chosen to speak to the people of earth, i.e. God speaks to different people in different ways.
I’ve more recently come to understand this response as a pastoral attempt at throwing spaghetti at the wall, an attempt at a diplomatic answer to an impossible question, or at least a question that can have no definitive answer, most likely because there isn’t one.
At best, we move through earthly life encountering an existential Babel, annoyed and confused by the diversity, maybe bewildered by the passion with which religious beliefs different from ours are embraced by so many people around the world. And I arrive back at the place I have lately found myself: religion is a salve, a construct–a myth– that helps us get through the day.
But it is also a pile of dry tinder, always capable of ignition, ready to engulf us in unspeakable and non-mythical oppression and violence and bloodshed, driving us to embrace some future hope, a heavenly home where all is resolved and forgiven, and life is good and eternal.
Which renders this current experience of consciousness, what– a trial run, a rough draft, proving grounds, a warm-up for the “real thing”?
That all seems convenient and somehow insulting, reflective of a certain futility and ignorance. Unrealistic and disappointing, too, more a seeing what sticks.
Anyway, signs are pointing to myth.
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