Tyranny in Religion

About compulsion and what religion is

Religion can only be acquired naturally, like one does a foreign language. It must arise out of a sincere interest on part of the explorer. No language, and no religion, can be acquired by force. One needn’t—couldn’t—learn French if one does not desire to converse in it. Neither can we embark on a journey to truth if we bear no resolute interest in finding it. Religion is a means to truth, to fundamental truth. It is a compass that points to what is—anything less is not real religion. It is not what we are told there must be, or what we think there ought to be, or what we wish there would be. It is not to be given, it is not under ownership of some institution, it is not even a matter of convention or tradition. It is deeper than this, because it is rooted in the mysterious quality of being alive. It can only be actualized by the individual, because it is a voyage into ourselves. Religion is a meal that only appeals to the appetite of volition. If it is shoved down our throats we are sure to spew it back out. To enjoy its satiating potential, our mouths must water, our stomachs should roar—we have to be starving before ever coming near. Few in number are those convinced of a God that requires defense, and even less of one that demands it. Only those who themselves stand infirm in their belief make it a burden for others to support it. And support they won’t receive, because their position does not appear compelling. How can we expect others to swallow what we cannot stomach ourselves? The untenable position is by nature not believed. Instead it must rely on force, to perform as a surrogate mother for what it could otherwise never conceive. But the offspring is deformed—or at least resembles nothing of its original parents. The more desperate for allegiance, the more aversion it inspires, and the more distant the genes grow. Because we believe what we are attracted to, and attraction is devotion, the result of love, which is antithetical to force. Compulsion can neither kindle nor extinguish love. Nothing takes away our joy more than obligation, because it constricts. Thus to be impelled toward belief instigates disbelief. It degrades even the most exalted fact to a trivial fiction. If it were so true, why should one be compelled to believe it? Force makes religion an instrument of invasion and oppression, because all its qualities fall subordinate to the end of sequestering some kind of power. But religion, if true to itself, is always about acknowledgement of a power greater than what we can hatch in our own contrived conspiracies. Not a single tyrant, and probably to the great annoyance of them all, has ever managed to establish dominion over the facts of life themselves—nor will there ever be one. Their greatest weakness is their unwillingness to surrender to life as it is; to attempt to overrule the order of nature and overthrow God; to deny that power beyond themselves which lies at the birth of their own existence. This we may well call the antithesis of religion! How fractured a mentality! Can there be a greater delusion of grandeur? A more imprudent overvaluation of self-importance? A more uncurbed exclusion of all that is other? No—the tyrant is the inverted image of religion, not its example. A tyrant’s religion is as good as a thief’s promise, or a beggar’s cheque. A parade of vanity. He cannot provide it because it is not with him. Religion directs us to see our speck of self, our limited life, in the reflection of eternity and the whole cosmos, as roots inextricable from soil, as the umbilical connection to womb. Reverberations! Reverberations! We are the water drops that coalesce in the current of a vast ocean. Religion directs us to that mysterious energy which makes us who and what we are, which we cannot name because there is nothing other than it to compare it to. Nothing contrasts existence except its own absence or negation—being and non-being, life and death. We like to think religion is our answer around death but it is really only of use to the living. Religion itself lives. It is an attribute of life, about life, which shares an intimacy with death. This eternal dance, of which we are both bystander and protagonist, both witness and perpetrator, is what lives through us and what will die with us, part by part. That is what religion is in a nutshell. Much more religion can not answer, because much more we are not equipped to answer. But up to that it can, and this is sufficient—if not more than. This is why religion cannot be owned, or seized; it is to be experienced, to be received. It provokes surrender, and does not yield to attack—who do we stab at but ourselves? Tyranny and religion are no easy bedfellows. What rightful place could subjugation inhabit in the ineradicably private affair of belief? Force harvests belief—or its effects. It does not inspire it. It couldn’t. It may be swallowed but is inevitably followed by indigestion. All that force can ever do is to persuade subservience. And subservience is not the same as belief. Eliciting belief requires charm: the capacity to be convincing in the absence of force. Therefore religion can only be given insofar as it is willed to be taken. To make law of religion is to corrupt both law and religion. For the law is there for the common good, to produce harmony in society, which is impaired by interfering in what is nobody’s concern but our own. Conversely, religion is our personal possession, which it will cease to be when enacted out of compliance to law. We should understand that religion is a tool. No tool by itself can save us. A compass does but point the way, but we ourselves have to walk it. Both for good and for ill religion remains a servant to the hearts and hands of men, subjugated to the ends we decide to put it toward. It is what we will, what we demand of religion, that it becomes. Some will use it to hedge their bets. Some will use it to dominate others. Some will use it to boast, some to blend in. Some will use it to trick others, some to fool themselves. Some will use it to get to the root, to the essence, the ore of life itself, to see its cracks and feel its rumble, to look for nothing aside from aliveness itself, just as it is, while it emanates and echoes—to encounter ourselves as the emanation and the echo! To see ourselves as the limbs of one tumultuous and unruly being. God was never far away, and when we seek It there we only mute ourselves to its appearance, because we want It to do us favors. So many take up religion not to find God but for a cosmological precedence, to rescind in themselves the responsibility over their own fate. This searching far and wide has nothing to do with God. It was within ourselves, because we are nothing but a fiber of God, a grain of Its being—“in his image.” We can not seize it, nobody can seize it for us, and we do not get to decide where we find it. To think otherwise is hubris of a supreme order!—an existential order. Who are we to tell God what to be like, or where to be found? No, it only appears as what we cannot deny. Is this not fair—to say this in truth defines religion, because it defines according to its purpose? Sure, a compass can be put aside as a piece of decor, and many may do so, but does that take away its aptitude for navigation?