You
can’t read a magazine or watch TV without hearing some rock star or movie actor
gushing on and on about being a “spiritual person.” Same goes for Facebook,
where people post such profound bon mots
as, “I am not religious. I am spiritual.” Maybe it’s just me but this
always leaves me wondering: You’re spiritual? To what spirit are you referring?
It begs the question, doesn’t it?
“Being
spiritual” doesn’t say enough for me to have even the slightest clue as to what
you are describing or asserting about your beliefs. If we have a Buddhist, a
Baptist, and a believer in Brahman, each saying he is spiritual, aren’t they
all saying something categorically different? And if a word can mean so many
different things to different people, why confuse your listeners with such an
amorphous word?
Why,
indeed.
While
there are probably more reasons than I can imagine, I believe that most all of
them can be traced back to two.
When
I say that I am spiritual, I am letting you know that I believe in something
higher than myself, but am not suggesting – the pantheon of gods forbid—that my
spirituality is superior or higher or nobler than your spirituality. Well,
unless, that is, your “spirituality” includes what you believe are divinely
given moral codes with which I disagree: then you are “religious.” My
spirituality makes no base and disgusting judgments about the behavior of
others because doing so is my one sacred prohibition.
Okay.
There are some behaviors upon which my spirituality demands I call down hell
and damnation.
It
always baffles me when people go on and on about the horrific nature of God’s
Ten Commandments, only to discover that they actually have created far more
sacrosanct laws than we find on Moses’ two tablets. They sit there telling me
how restrictive The Ten Commandments are, how morally reprehensible or barbaric
it is, and then, when I light up a cigar or order a 24 oz porterhouse or they hear
about my stash of banned light-bulbs I am still using or my belief in a free
market economy or of the one hundred other sacred cows of theirs that I am
goring by my behavior, they want me stoned or shunned…or at least have my right
to vote taken away.
Which
brings me to the second reason. By referring to myself as being “spiritual and
not religious,” I get to believe and behave however I choose. Is that cool, or
what? There are no dogmas, no codes of behavior, and no traditions, other than
those I create for myself. Maybe I’ll take a little from Buddha, a smidgen from
Hinduism, and something from Jesus about loving others, and, Voila: I have my self-created designer
religion that demands nothing of me other than what I want it to.
Why
not just say, “I have designed my own religion”? I can’t say that because it
would make me sound like I have a god-complex. Then what about professing that
I practice syncretism: a combination of various beliefs and practices taken
from many religions that were chosen according to what makes me feel good about
myself, fits my personality, and supports my chosen cultural mores. O. Wait a minute. Those are basically
saying the same thing, aren’t they.
Copyright, Monte E Wilson,
2015
No comments:
Post a Comment