On Beliefs: Part I

However, as part of my agenda to solve world peace, I am obliged to say what I have to say. I know it’s unlikely that it will change anything, but maybe, just maybe it will plant a seed, and as a result, I have to try. Because we’d all be a lot happier and get along a lot better if we would acknowledge those parts of our belief system that are beliefs, not truths, and therefore, not being truths, things that we should be willing to accept that while we hold them tightly, we are not necessarily right.

Here are a few examples. Last week, Nova aired a documentary on the fight in Dover, Delaware about “Intelligent Design.” Essentially, someone in the community didn’t believe in evolution and decided that the public schools should teach both evolution and ID, because, in his opinion, students should be exposed to both viewpoints.

Here is a belief that I hold sacred. Parents are the ones who are responsible for bestowing their beliefs onto their children. Public schools are meant to be secular, to serve the needs of all the taxpayers. I’ll never understand the Religious Right. Their agenda and self-righteousness to institute Christian religious education in schools is dividing society and making them a much hated group. There are so many avenues for them to give their children a religious education: Sunday school, private parochial schools, church on the weekends, or even, crazy as this may be, teaching their children their values themselves. Why try to take over the public schools too? Public schools are not the place to teach religion.

Back to the Intelligent Design debate. The debate centered around whether ID is a viable, testable scientific theory, or creationism. After researching the history of the “textbook” on ID, it turned out, surprise, surprise, that ID was in fact creationism, deliberately renamed, with the specific agenda to provide a Christian alternative theory to evolution. The proponents of ID knew that the theory was nothing more than creationism, but singularly focused on accomplishing their agenda, regardless of the cost to the community. These good Christians lied. That’s not all they did. They issued death threats to teachers and members of the school board. Death threats. What a religion they have! What principled people! Now, that’s the way to convert me.

Can I remind everyone that it’s 2007? Where’s Galileo? Let’s kill him too, while we’re at it! Pity our DNA is evolving without us, while our intellect is stuck in the Middle Ages.

I wonder how do people, knowing that what they believe isn’t provable, and is based purely on faith, so narrow-mindedly dismiss, not just science, but all other belief systems. It seems to be our human nature, “I believe this, so everyone else must be wrong.” Why instead don’t we say, “I believe this, I have no proof, maybe it’s true, maybe it’s not. Maybe the people who worship the moon are right.” Those who believe in traditional religions dismiss new age beliefs, and likewise, those who have adopted new age beliefs think traditionalists are narrow-minded and wrong. No one has any proof, yet all are steadfastly convinced that there is one truth and they have found it, without need for any evidence whatsoever.

Here’s another example of what I’m talking about. I’ve been listening to a podcast called “Sacred Contracts.” It’s a new age call-in radio show with host Caroline Myss (pronouned “Mace”). There’s an expression about not being able to turn away from a train wreck. I don’t understand it, because if there was a train wreck, I would definitely turn away, but that’s my general feeling about this podcast. In my opinion, and I mean no disrespect to anyone, it’s completely ridiculous, but I can’t stop listening because it’s so fascinating.

Here’s a summary of the average call:

Caller: “I can’t lose weight. When I was six years old my mom started weighing me and I’ve always been obsessed about my weight. I’m a vegetarian, and in the last year I’ve gained twenty pounds, but I haven’t changed my diet or my exercise patterns. What can I do?”
Myss: “[blah…blah] When I’m in your energy, I feel like I’m trapped in an apartment. Your creativity is trapped.”
Caller: “Well, I’ve been that way for a while, but the last couple of weeks I’ve been writing eight hours a day.”
Myss: “There you go. You can’t lose twenty pounds in two weeks. The target is not your weight. The target is your creative overload.”

In another show, a caller had recently enrolled in graduate school and wanted to know if it was the right decision. People call in asking for a diagnosis for medical problems. Mind you, Myss is not a doctor. Callers want help deciding whether to leave their husbands so that they can be with their soul mate, who they just met. They want to know why they have to work for someone else and can’t work for themselves, what career they should enter into…and so on.

Sometimes Myss gives good advice and I don’t mean to sound condemning about the callers or Myss. I’m not. I think it’s great that people who are so lost feel like they have somewhere to turn for answers. It’s just that I wouldn’t call a mystic to ask about help with weight loss and I don’t think bottled up creativity causes weight gain. I think there’s a scientific reason for weight gain, such as hormonal levels (leptin for example), calorie consumption, and metabolism.

Not that science has everything figured out, but they’ve figured out enough that governs my daily life, so I trust the methods used. Science has created pharmaceuticals, electron microscopes, the space shuttle, wireless Internet and airplanes that fly, for the most part, safely. I mean, I think they’re onto something. Science doesn’t know everything yet though.

Therefore I allow that while I trust science first, maybe Myss really is a mystic. Maybe I should worship the moon. Maybe everyone’s spiritual beliefs are right and maybe no one’s are. Because I don’t have proof, while it seems far-fetched to me that someone can “feel energy” over a telephone, how do I know?

I mean no disrespect to anyone, in fact my point is just the opposite, but I think other belief systems are equally far-fetched. Christians believe that Jesus was borne by a virgin. A human being was the spirit of God, incarnate because, all-powerful God needed to become human in order to reach our lost species. Jesus died to save humans from their sins, as part of God’s plan that Jesus royally tick-off the Romans and then get crucified. Why did Jesus have to die to save humans from sins? I don’t see the connection. Hindus believe in Kali, a deity with four arms, all without any sort of mention of radiation toxicity. Ganesh is an elephant God. The Romans had all sorts, as did the Vikings. Why would a God, who is supposed to be all-powerful and better than we could ever be, have so many character flaws like egotism and regrettable rage? I know we’re supposedly created in God’s image, but if all-powerful God can’t lick his bad habits, what hope do I have?

Is any one of these beliefs more far-fetched than another? Is religion meant to divide or to refine us? Is it meant to bring out the worst in our human nature or to help us become as good and loving as we can possibly be? Why can’t we live and let live? Reinforcing our beliefs in our religious house, living in a way that is morally appropriate in our daily lives and accepting that we don’t have a monopoly on the truth, without attempting to force the rest of society to adhere to our belief systems?

To quote a dear friend of mine, I don’t care if someone worships and howls at the moon, as long as he/she respects my boundaries and doesn’t tell me what to believe. I joke about the Jehovah Witnesses trying to convert me, but it’s just because they’re an easy target. Honestly, I’ve had more new-agers try to convince me of the truth they’ve discovered. There’s no shortage of the facts: all medical conditions are rooted in a psychological cause (finally a cure for MS!), thinking hard enough about something can change the outcome (still haven’t seen anyone win the Lotto though!), anything bad that happens to you is because of something you did in a past life. Sadly, though they’ve come to their beliefs after rejecting a traditional upbringing, they can be just as stubborn, arrogant, pushy, and righteous.

Maybe they’re right. I don’t know. That’s the point. I don’t know and neither does anyone else. We want comfort. We want logic and fairness and a way to impose order on a chaotic world. We crave meaning. However, we each have to find our own “truths.”

In my ideal world, we would all be able to acknowledge that beliefs are based purely in faith and be open to the possibility that we are no more “right” than anyone else. We would return to a society where we can keep ID, renamed in whatever form, in our religious house, understanding the logical division between belief and truth. Our country was founded on the principles of religious freedom. Is it possible for us to return to a society of peace, where there isn’t fighting and bitterness over religious values, expressly created to engender a divide among Americans that makes some people more or less electable in our eyes? Is it possible for us to see through politicians who are the only ones benefiting from magnifying our differences, for us to no longer get sucked into their game?

It took a lot of courage to publish this, and my hope is that instead of being offended, if you are religious-minded, you seek peace, seek to find our commonalities, seek to acknowledge how our divisions are not only arbitrary, but actually deliberately fabricated. We create the divides. We can’t say that we have absolute truth when we say that there is an absolute law that murder is a sin, except when it suits our needs, say in war. Abortion is murder, but how often does the church take a stand on war with the same vigor? Where are those protesters? Murder in war is not an equal sin to the sin of abortion?

If it’s possible that the church changes it’s position through the centuries, all the while using the same guidebook, perhaps that’s a clue that we should allow that we don’t have “the truth,” we have an understanding that continues, hopefully, to evolve. That same understanding should make us peace-seekers, acknowledging our own hypocritical and contradictory beliefs, and peace-makers.