If you weren't in the religion that you are, what religion would you be? This question kept occuring to me when I taught Intro to World Religions last spring. Let's review the options:
Judaism. This would be a logical choice for me, a Christian. Christianity's founder was a Jew, and Jews and Christians share many of the same sacred texts. I could probably affirm Moses Maimonides's 13 articles of faith with not too many problems, provided that no one presses me too hard on what sense I consider the Torah to be immutable.
Best of all, Judaism has a better sabbath than Christianity. Calvinists made the Christian sabbath a day of tedium. In reaction, today's Christians largely ignore the sabbath. We may shoe-horn worship in between soccer and the NFL, but for Jews, at least from my outside-looking-in perspective, the sabbath seems to be a day of true rest--a day of joy, deep peace and renewal.
Islam. I couldn't be a Muslim. Not because Islam is violent. A Christian accusing Islam of violence is the pot calling the kettle black. It's something I can't place my finger on, but there's this foreboding austerity to Islam that I find off-putting. And, I'm not about to give up a glass of wine with dinner.
That said, if I were a Muslim, I'd have to make a pilgrimage to Mecca, and that'd be pretty neat. I like to travel! Traveling in the name of God--so much the better.
Hinduism. Which Hinduism? I think I read somewhere that there are as many deities in India as there are people in the United States. On the one hand, What's not to like about Gandhi's Hinduism? He was monotheistic, non-violent, and he had a deep respect for Jesus. And his favorite Hindu text, the Bhagavad Gita, is edifying stuff.
On the other hand, I can't see myself worshiping a god with an elephant head. If veneration of images is going to be in my new religious milieu, I'd want to worship a perfect human specimen--like the Greeks did. And the Ganges River is just too brown and polluted for me to want to bathe in.
Buddhism. I appreciate Buddhist meditative techniques. I'm sure that the Centering Prayer method I've learned from the Trappists is more Buddhist than Christian. But I frankly recoil from the Buddhist concept of anatta, "no-self." I suppose I'm too Western in my thinking, too sold on individual rights and an image of God as personal, to think that the self is illusory.
I don't want to extinguish myself. I want to perfect myself. Or rather, be perfected. Is that so wrong?
Daoism. Click here for my opinions.
Animism. I think it would be cool to live in a universe where everything hums with spiritual energy--the tree, the river, the rock escarpment. In some sense I already live in such a universe. I'm a monotheist, but the God I worship is immanent as well as transcendent, although my awareness of divine immanence is not so much rooted in a conviction that every object is haunted with one sort of spirit or the other, as it is in uncanny experiences in which the veil between heaven and earth drops for a moment.
The problem is, animism is a religion best born into and not adopted. Adopt a primal religion, and what you get is Sedona, Glastonbury, and Dances with Wolves. In other words, you get a certain amount of goofiness, hucksterism and sentimentality that's not befitting of religion.
Scientology. No.
Rastafarianism. Sorry, but I could no more smoke pot than I could cigarettes. There's carcinogens in pot. And after you read this blog post on magic mushrooms, you'll have to admit that psilocybin is a far better pharmacological path to transcendence than THC. So despite what I wrote about primal religions, I'd be more likely to dissolve the space-time continuum under the care of an Incan shaman than I would to roll a big ol' fatty with some news friends I made on a trip to Jamaica.
Atheism. Not an option. I don't think that a purely materialistic worldview can do justice to the complexity of the human being's encounter with the universe. The mystery that surrounds us is an ever-receding horizon we'll never reach. It's a abyss our knowledge will never fill. It's an act of faith to say that the abyss has a face, but not altogether unreasonable, either.
To conclude, it looks like it'd be the Torah and shrooms for me! It's good to have options.
(And for what it's worth, I'm aware that Christianity is equally vulnerable to this type of superficial analysis. There's the fuzzy math of the Trinity, the ritual cannibalism, and the strange phenomenon of a nice guy like Jesus attracting such jerks for followers.)
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