Worship as Obedience

I am dissatisfied with my two previous posts on religion as worship, so I have decided to approach the question from a different direction.

All religions ask us to do many things, the reasons for some of which we may not understand -- even Neopaganisms! In traditional Buddhism, for example, a lot of emphasis is placed on faith that the Buddha has the true Dharma (teaching) and that it is preserved by the Sangha (monastic community), so when Buddhists are in danger of becoming discouraged by their lack of progress in meditation, they reinforce our faith through an act of will.

In Christianity and other theistic faiths, things are little different, or at least they seem so to me. In these religions, the tenets of faith are given by a divine person, and breaking the rules becomes, at least in part, an act of disobedience. A serious, faithful Christian obeys the commands of God at least partly because he or she believes obedience to be essential to the religion. After all, with full understanding there would be no faith (at least for the Christian), but where we don't understand we must have another reason to believe, and that reason is often obedience to God.

Obedience. Let that sink in. Every day, day in and day out, Christians obey commands that they may not fully understand, that they might have reasons for believing are not to be obeyed, yet they obey them anyway because that is what God commands. This goes directly against the instincts of most of us in a modern, democratic, individualist society. For us, freedom is the rule except when it impinges on the freedom of others. So what do you do? Do you (a) change your religious beliefs to suit modernity ("God doesn't really hate gays!"); (b) abandon your religious beliefs, perhaps adopting others more compatible with your individualist values; (c) change your secular values to conform to your religious values; or (d) keep both conflicting value systems, obedience in religion and individualism in daily life?

I believe most faithful, conservative Christians choose a mix of (c) and (d). It's certainly possible to live this kind of double life; it isn't rationally out of bounds; but I think humans find that kind of double standard difficult to live with. If God is real, and we are used to obeying him, then obedience takes on a positive cast in our minds. Humans think by association more than strict logic, and if you are accustomed to thinking of your relationship with God as one where you are the servant (see Paul in the New Testament) and God is the commander, then that will naturally carry over into the rest of your life.

Obedience. Obedience to God is good, so obedience becomes, by natural association, the natural and good way for society to order itself. Need I spell out the implications this has for the political order? How about the family order?

This isn't to say that all Christians are fascists or that Christian families are authoritarian. There are many reasons why this isn't the case: for one, there are other messages about kindness and mercy in Christianity (and Judaism, and Islam) that offset this tendency. For another, people do not always follow this slippery slope perfectly. There is friction along the way. But I do believe that we see this tendency among Christians and other theistic believers, and for the reason I outline above.

If Christianity were true, we would just have to live with this fact of obedience. But it isn't, and if we choose to follow a Pagan path, then we must decide how we are going to interact with the divine. Will it be one of obedience? Of service, perhaps? Of communion? Perhaps a mixture of these and more? I don't know, but I know that I no longer think much of worship, at least insofar as it leads to the kind of authoritarianism I have outlined in these posts.

"A New Age of Reformation"

I spend a lot of my day listening to podcasts of NPR programs, among them On Point with Tom Ashbrook. On Thursday the author of Christianity After Religion, Diana Butler Bass, was on the show talking about her new book. I haven't read the book, but the show was an interesting conversation on the way Americans were expressing their religiosity as Christians in recent decades, and especially over the last ten or fifteen years. To wit, they are leaving organized religion, but not necessarily religion altogether.

Give it a listen if you're interested.

Now I'm waiting for them to do a program on the growth of Paganism..

Against Worship

When I first began reading books on Neopaganism, interactions with deities being described with words such as "communing" turned me off. As far as I could tell, religion largely consists of the worship of deities. Deities are better than us, and we ask favors of them. This is true of religions all over the world, even so-called "atheist" religions like Buddhism. Thus, I thought Wiccan descriptions of communing with the God and Goddess just as silly as Christians who talk about having a "personal relationship" with Jesus, a historically anachronistic (and thus wrong, in my view) theology if there ever was one.

But what's so great about worship? I certainly don't think much of worship in any other context. Worship of political figures disgusts me; I have to bite my tongue when I see friends fawning over Obama (or Reagan for that matter, but that's not so common now). Worship of sports heroes or movie stars is simply bizarre. The number of famous people deserving of admiration is really quite small, and I have never found anyone I thought I could adore, fawn over, or worship.

I don't think worship is healthy in any form, however mild it may seem. I realize that many people are inspired by people who are great at what they do, and that this attitude often tends toward worship. So is worship in that context a good thing? No, I say, for two reasons:

1. Even if someone becomes a great pianist or scientist or writer because they are inspired by some great figure in that field, that doesn't mean that behavior is healthy. Need I remind everyone that the highly driven type A personalities who reach the top in their field often struggle with psychological problems and/or misuse and abuse their loved ones? They are often deeply unhappy despite the obsessions that make them great; in fact, the obsession that makes them great probably leads to their misery. They often cause great harm to others. So as much as I often respect the quality of the work produced by such people, I cannot say that it justifies the hero worship.
2. Being inspired by a great person is different from worshiping them. They are separable, at least in theory. I could be inspired by a great pianist to work hard and become a great pianist myself, even though I don't think much of that great pianist personally aside from their natural talent and work ethic.

When we do see people worshiping other people in a political context, it is never a good sign. Those who seek power are corrupt, and those who actually grasp it even more so. Power in whatever form corrupts even the best of people (see a previous post of mine on how this can happen in Pagan communities). On an even stronger note, I would add that to have a leader is to ask for problems, and for similar reasons. Power by itself tends to produce admiration and worship. That is no doubt why the Occupy movement has thus far eschewed electing leaders.

If I were still a Christian and believed that God demanded worship, I would probably attempt to find a way to justify it despite my misgivings about worship in any other context. Luckily, I am not; I'm just a Pagan, and now I'm beginning to rethink my relationship with the God and Goddess in light of this newfound attitude toward worship.

Religion as Power Worship

I spent a large part of my adult life as a Christian, where religious activity largely consists of "worship," which I have come to believe is one of the most pernicious activities ever engaged in by humankind. In this first post I will discuss the political implications of worship.

In Christianity, prayer and worship consist of debasing oneself before a superior being, of praising Him for his power and superiority, of thanking Him for His gifts and proclaiming oneself unworthy of them, and so on. This power worship is a feature of many religions, but is particularly pronounced in the Abrahamic traditions. God here is a despot; His rules are law that must be obeyed even when not fully understood; and most importantly: what He does, what He says, what he demands of you -- all must be qualified by the adjective "good."

Power worship is something that can only be done in the context of authoritarianism. If we were truly equals of God, we could have a conversation with Him. Instead, we must praise, thank, and beg from Him as we do of a monarch, since He is the one created us, could kill us at any moment, and will send many of us to hell.

Is it any coincidence that Christians, on the whole, tend toward right wing authoritarianism?

As a Christian, I could actually feel the gears clicking in my associative cortex. While raised in a democracy, I accepted that Christian cosmology was essentially authoritarian, which makes sense given the time and place in which it developed, and I tried to find some consistent way of being a modern who believed in democracy while accepting a traditional view of Christian theology, with all its implications for the natural order (including how we organize our power structures). Let me tell you, I had to ignore a lot of cognitive dissonance to make it work for myself.

The traditionalist Catholic or Orthodox Christian who believes that monarchy is the only God-ordained and approved form of government is crazy, but at least he or she is crazy in a consistent way. On the other hand, the orthodox Catholic, for example, tries to be faithful to two contradictory traditions: that before the Second Vatican Council, which was for the most part reactionary, and that afterward, which embraced many Enlightenment values.

Many intelligent people pull this off... but like any contradiction, it cannot be lived by the majority of people for long. Enlightenment values are so superior to, and so incompatible with, traditional Christian values that the former eventually triumph, and people in technologically advanced countries (where you don't have to pray to God for rain so your family won't die) abandon Christianity in ever greater numbers.

I think this internal contradiction is created, in large part, by the power worship inherent in Christianity, and I think power worship is so inseparable from Christianity that there truly exists a cultural war of sorts between traditional religion and modern democratic values. Thus, I no longer believe that it is reasonable or even possible to be a committed traditional Christian and a full member of democratic society (at least, not without a good dollop of self-deception). The siren's call of authoritarianism is too strong. As for liberal Christianity, that always was a stepping stone at best, and more and more people are abandoning it as its cultural value diminishes.

To Be Spiritual Is To Act Spiritual

Due to some personal difficulties, my religious practice has waned a bit as of late, as one can see from my blog entries. I have been reading leftist literature, so my intellectual life hasn't quite dried up (I just started D'Amato's The Meaning of Marxism), but I haven't had the time or inclination to continue with what meager Wiccan practice I was doing in the first place.

I do think this is important. I suspect that many Pagans spend little of their time doing their religion. I don't actually have any evidence of this other than my online reading; I haven't really met many real-life Pagans yet. But a spirituality that isn't practiced never goes anywhere, never develops. I can call myself a Wiccan, but that won't mean anything if I don't do anything about it. Religion, like almost any aspect of life, is mostly in the doing. Can you imagine someone calling themselves a tennis player if almost all they did was occasionally watch tennis or read about it?

I've dropped the ball! I suspect some going back to some Wiccan ritual would particularly do me good right now; it is indeed a paradox that when we most need to do something is when we feel most averse to doing it!

Religion as Life-Denying

After a bit of pondering, I have realized what it is about most religions that bothers me (such as Christianity and Buddhism, my two main interests before I wandered over to Paganism):

Most highly developed religions (i.e. those that are the introspective product of a civilization rather than organically developed practices "on the ground") claim that there is something wrong with the universe or with humankind, and that their religion has the cure for it.

Christianity has original sin. Buddhism has craving. The key to fixing your relationship with yourself, God, or the universe is the practices of the religion.

This appear to me to be a flat-out, head-in-the-clouds denial of the universe as we have it. Having a strong scientific bent, it seemed to me that the scientific evidence points to physics and evolution as explaining the world as we see it. Yes, much, probably most, of life is ultimately tragic, but in trying to find a solution to that, most religions paper over it with a promise of salvation, rather than trying to celebrate the tragedy that is the cosmos. Christianity is particularly guilty on this front because it claims that God created the world, but that should include the laws of physics, which gives us all the variety, good and bad, that we see today.

Clearly Neopaganism in many guises may fall victim to this tendency as well, especially when heavily influenced by the New Age, or by old-fashioned Christianity. It seems to me that "getting back to nature" as a Neopagan soteriology has its dangers if divorced from an earthy, evolutionary context. I also wonder about The Summerland as a copout, though I don't think it necessarily falls into this trap.

Having said that, however, Neopaganism seems much better able to integrate into its theology the death and evil that exists in the universe. They are not desirable, but they are part of the cosmos and to pretend we can make them all go away is a delusion. At least, I'd like to think that Neopaganism does a better job of this than other religions. Of course this must take into account the fact that there is no one Neopagan religion, and that each one has no dogma that its believers are required to follow.

How is Worship Possible?

While trying, off and on over a period of more than a decade, to be a sincere believing Christian, I frequently ran up against the embarrassing fact that prayer is not only difficult but unnatural and even bizarre, at least for me. Not only did it feel odd to be addressing a deity who never talked back, but I could never be quite sure how seriously I could take petitionary prayer.

Just today I was listening to a local NPR program discussing Tim Tebow, and someone made the obligatory snarky remark that God really cares who wins this or that football game. That's emblematic of one problem: competing petitionary prayers. But there's also the problem of unanswered prayer, not helped by the stock Christian answer that "sometimes God's answer is "no."" Then there's the question of how your prayer you could, by itself, change God's mind, especially since God is eternal (outside of time) in traditional Christian theology.

Finally, there is the fact that although God is technically a "Person" in the Chalcedonian sense, he's not a person you can really relate to, the way you can to your best friend, at least in traditional Trinitarian Christianity. God might as well be an all-powerful hibiscus or Linux server. The incarnation of Christ was no help for me on this front.

I felt more comfortable around Catholicism and Orthodoxy, where praying to saints has a long history. Praying to saints (even if you are technically asking for their intercession with God) feels much more natural, for here are humans, albeit imaginary, with personalities like you're own, however saintly and exalted they may be. I suspect that is why that the cult of the saints is so prominent in traditional (pre-Reformation) Christianity; it is much more of a human, livable form of worship than the unapproachable, inhuman Deity.

Is Neopaganism any better on this front? Yes, I think so, because it allows a full gamut of beliefs about what constitutes the divine and individual divinities. From Jungian archetypes to literal polytheism, I feel that I can find the psychological space for worship. I haven't quite found my place yet, but I'm searching.