Religious Beliefs

Beliefs are collections of thoughts or ideas we hold to be true. We’re not born with them – all beliefs are learned, many in childhood.

Nothing we believe is ever certain. Beliefs are transitory in nature, and millions have died for beliefs that no longer hold water, for instance that the world is flat, heavy objects can’t fly and metal ships can’t float.

Having adopted a belief, we take it for granted. We make the ‘facts’ fit the belief and ignore any evidence that doesn’t support it. That’s the essence of religious belief – giving sanction to an idea that doesn’t bear rational scrutiny and then clinging to that idea despite the evidence.

Religious beliefs form when people gravitate towards a set of ideas that appear to explain the some or all of the mysteries of our existence. These beliefs are reinforced by rules, rituals and social pressure; fear of punishment too in some circumstances. Minds close and an ‘us and them’ attitude forms.

Most regions are inspired by high ideals, but, like all beliefs, they must be open to analysis, appraisal and criticism. All contain SOME truth, but none contain the WHOLE truth because this has not yet been revealed to us at this stage of our evolution.

How do we know what religion we are?

A friend told me of an incident that took place many years ago when he attended Sunday School as a child. The teacher asked, ‘How do we know we’re Methodists and not Catholics or Church of England?’ He retorted, ‘How do we know we’re Christians and not Muslims, Hindus or Jews?’ The teacher had no satisfactory reply.

The religion to which we subscribe depends largely on where were born and what our parents believed. I was born in England at a time when Christianity was the dominant faith. If I had been born in Southern India, I would probably have been brought up a Hindu; in Nepal, a Buddhist; in Israel, a Jew; in Saudi Arabia, a Moslem, and so on.

Nowadays, less than one in five Brits claim to follow an organised religion, and these include virtually all Muslims, Hindus and Sikhs who take their religion very seriously. Those born in today’s Britain outside the Asian community are likely to be raised with no religion at all.

Is this a bad thing? That’s a matter of opinion. Truth does not depend on our belonging to a particular religious group!

Religious symbolism

How do we account for the animosity that exists between various religions and even between different denominations of the same religion when 90% of their teachings is the same? The explanation lies in the fact that the living message of spirituality is all too often hidden beneath symbols and metaphors that are mistaken for reality and rituals that divide rather than unite.

Look behind the superficial differences in religions

Look beyond the superficial differences to what the religions have in common. For example, all major religions teach modesty in dress. That’s why men and women are expected to cover their legs, shoulders and sometimes their heads when visiting a place of worship. Some religions take this further, insisting that women cover their hair when outside the home. The underlying motivation is the same – only the expression is different.

Just because another person’s faith doesn’t resonate with you doesn’t mean it has no value. There are many paths leading to the same Truth. If someone wants to argue that one religion is better or worse than another, tell them you see the good and bad in all religions and want everyone to be free to find the truth for themselves wherever they may find it.

As we grow in spiritual awareness, religious differences fall away, leading to a common experience that encompasses all.

 

©David Lawrence Preston, 11.11.2016

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People don’t like inconvenient facts getting in the way!

A Brummie friend told me about his upbringing. ‘If I’d been born in Pakistan,’ he said, ‘I’d be a Muslim. If I were from Israel, I’d be a Jew, if from Italy, I’d be a Catholic. When you’re from my part of Birmingham, you’re an Aston Villa supporter. It doesn’t occur to you to be anything else.’ He added, ‘I was in secondary school before I met anyone who supported any other team.’

I know supporting a football team is not the same as following a religion, but can you see the parallels? Both sets of beliefs are acquired in more or less the same way.

When we’re born, we have no beliefs. Like language, they are acquired as we grow. At first we get them from the people who raise us and those with whom we grow up – parents, siblings, relatives, friends and teachers. Later on the peer group and media play a big part.

Most of us tend to conform from an early age; it’s hard to resist when everyone around you thinks and behaves a certain way and there are serious consequences of not conforming.

Young children don’t have the same critical faculties as adults, and by the time we’re able to work things out for ourselves, we’re already programmed. Of course religious leaders are well aware of this. The Jesuits believe that if they can train a boy for his first seven years, he is theirs for life. That’s how strong our programming is.

As we mature, we gain new knowledge and experiences and begin to interpret the world for ourselves. We acquire new beliefs and let go of some of our previous beliefs, but few of us change completely. Research shows that few religious people change their religion.  This is partly because the programming process is so strong, and also because people can be treated very badly in some parts of the world for speaking out against the local religion and way of life.

Once we accept a set of beliefs as true, they become part of who we are, and if we depart from them we feel profoundly uncomfortable (this is known as ‘cognitive dissonance’). If someone criticizes our beliefs, we feel personally under attack. We fight to defend them. Then no logic, no evidence, no arguments can budge us. Every new item of information is screened, and if it doesn’t correspond with our current beliefs, rejected.

We certainly don’t want any inconvenient facts getting in the way unless – and this is the only exception – we decide to change. If the new evidence is so convincing that we feel the old belief is no longer true, we can drop it and adopt a new one. Sometimes an individual decides to believe something because it meets their current needs or just because they want to. Then the very same process that used to reinforce the old belief – cognitive dissonance and so on – sets to work to defend the new belief. And it doesn’t matter a jot if the new belief is actually ‘true’!

Christianity is full of inconvenient facts. Wake up! It’s time to stop looking at the Twenty-First Century world through First Century eyes!

 

©David Lawrence Preston, 30.8.2016

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[1] A soccer team from the English Midlands.

Is religion just a form of placebo?

Our beliefs rule our lives and help to create our experience of life. They influence us whether we are paying attention to them or not and it doesn’t matter if they are true – the effect is the same. An untrue belief has just as powerful an effect as a true belief. The world we see is the sum total of our perceptions filtered through our beliefs.

We humans can convince ourselves of anything if we really want to. When we do our minds close, then we seek and find ‘evidence’ to support our views. That’s when beliefs run the risk of turning into prejudices. We even seek out people who agree with us and turn away from people who do not.

The Placebo Effect demonstrates how powerful beliefs can be. When people believe strongly enough that something is right, wise and useful then it usually has a positive effect on them. So if they believe that a personal G_d is watching over them, supporting and comforting, then they feel supported and comforted. It’s a nice feeling.

Similarly, when people believe that they are riddled with sin and that if they don’t reform a nasty fate awaits them after death, then their psychological (and in all probability their physical) welfare is negatively affected. Guilt, regret and despair are never healthy when carried to extremes. This is the Nocebo Effect.

Placebo and nocebo have been demonstrated time and time again in the medical world. In experiments, inert substances can heal or cause harm simply because the recipient believes they can. Coupled with the power of suggestion, placebos can give miraculous results.

So what about religion? Religion is all about belief, whether or not substantiated by factual evidence. Karl Marx famously referred to religion as the ‘opium of the masses.’ Perhaps ‘placebo’ or ‘nocebo of the masses’ would have been more appropriate.

 

Copyright David Lawrence Preston, 22.8.2016

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Six Steps in the Formation of a Religion

Step One: the charismatic being

Most religions can be traced back to a teacher, usually with great charisma, who either appears or claims to have answers to the deeper questions. Often they claim that G-d spoke directly to them and expect their followers to believe it.

Step Two: he attracts followers

The charismatic one comes to the attention of a wider public. He (it is usually a ‘he’) attracts followers.

This can have drawbacks for the teacher. Many have been ridiculed, persecuted or even put to death (including Yeshua and Socrates). Gandhi was scathingly referred to as the ‘half-naked fakir’ by Winston Churchill and eventually assassinated; the Dalai Lama is in exile from the Chinese government; Sai Baba, L. Ron Hubbard and Bagwan Shree Rajneesh/Osho are frequently accused of being frauds; and David Icke is widely considered to be mad (author’s comment – ‘no comment’).

Step Three: they document his teachings

When the charismatic one dies, his followers want his ideas to live on. This is where distortions and exaggerations start to creep in.

Sometimes it is not so difficult to know what he stood for because he leaves behind an authentic body of written work. Modern gurus such as Osho, Yogananda, Mary Baker Eddy and L. Ron Hubbard made sure their teachings would survive by committing them to paper. Some make extensive audio and video recordings.

But nobody knows who wrote the key Christian Scriptures although we can be certain they weren’t actually called Matthew, Mark, Luke and John, and scholars only have a vague idea who wrote the Jewish Torah except it couldn’t have been Moses. Similarly the authors of the great Hindu texts are unknown, and approximately half of the New Testament letters weren’t written by the person to whom they are attributed.

There are many examples of teachings being passed down by word of mouth and written down decades later. As far as we know Socrates never wrote a word; we know of his pronouncements second hand through the writings of Plato.

Similarly our knowledge of Yeshua comes primarily from stories that were transmitted orally and written down years later by people who were neither witnesses to the events they describe nor known to people who were. These writings were not even in Yeshua’s native language, Aramaic, but in Greek. They were then added to, edited and re-edited, translated and mistranslated (including into Latin), then copied and re-copied many times while being declared ‘gospel’.

Distortions and deletions are easily spotted by the experts, yet many people believe that every word of the Gospels is literally true despite incontrovertible evidence that many passages cannot possibly be true.

Step Four: the mythology grows

As time passes, the charismatic one’s followers feel the need to organise and structure his teachings. They fill in the gaps with their own interpretations and enlarge on the details.Fantastical stories begin to circulate about, for instance, his birth, his extraordinary accomplishments, great revelations, miracles and so on. The original teachings get lost beneath a welter of exaggerations and contradictions.

This accounts for the apparent deification of such religious icons as L. Ron Hubbard, Rev Moon, Emperor Haile Selassie, Rajneesh and many others. Indeed, the latter has even undergone a change of name since his passing and is now promoted worldwide as ‘Osho’. And Prophet Mohammed is portrayed in Islam as the final once and for all religious teacher as if spiritual wisdom can never progress beyond what was revealed to him in the deserts of Arabia fifteen centuries ago.

Jesus

Step Five: dogma and conformity

At some stage the organisation becomes more important than the ‘truth’ it is supposed to represent. Ritual has become divorced from, and more important than, the pursuit of genuine spirituality. Free discussion is stifled.

Anyone who is not part of the group is to be pitied or condemned – they simply don’t ‘get it’. An ‘us’ and ‘them’ mentality develops, and ‘they’ are labelled misguided, sinful or just plain wrong. They could be ‘saved’, but only if they ‘see the light’ and join the group.

In these circumstances the patently ridiculous can easily become accepted as the ‘truth’, for example, that bread and wine are literally transmuted into flesh and blood, and yet the more you believe it, the stronger your ‘faith’ and the more admirable you are!

Many religions share a common thread – sacrifice life’s pleasures now and enjoy everlasting rewards later. On the very day I am writing this, a senior member of Northern Ireland’s Free Presbyterian Church is on the radio supporting an edict to its members that they should not participate in line dancing – yes, line dancing –  because this ‘immoral practice’ is an ‘invitation to lust’!

Step Six: power games

In some religions, believers are expected to hand over control of every aspect of their lives. Strict rules are applied to the processes of birth, maturation, marriage and death. The penalties and sanctions for non-conformity can be severe, and the rule makers don’t let go lightly, not even in the 21st Century.

Enforcing the ‘rules’ can easily interfere with compassion for the individual when the rules are believed to come from a dead, disincarnate or supreme being.

In some countries (e.g. Iran) the head of government is the religious leader. In the United Kingdom, the Church of England is the established church. From time to time it is suggested that the C of E should lose its preferential status since less than 5% of the public attend church regularly and there are more Roman Catholics and Muslims in the UK than Anglicans. The result is howls of anguish from the establishment, as if the moral welfare of the nation would be irreparably damaged if a few crusty old bishops were excluded from the corridors of power.

Religion and superstition are essentially the same. They are both types of belief. The only difference is that religion is taken more seriously and has much higher status.

Institutionalised religion has little to do with genuine spirituality. It latches on to people’s natural sense of awe while exploiting their fear of the unknown.

There is nothing and no-one standing between you and your Spiritual Self, just as long as you are willing to take responsibility for discovering and living it for yourself.

©David Lawrence Preston, 15.6.2016

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Musings in Mostar

Browsing through old photo albums recently reminded me of a holiday in the Balkans several years ago. We took a day trip to Mostar in Bosnia Herzegovina, the site of vicious fighting a few years earlier. On the way we stopped briefly at a village (the name of which I didn’t note down at the time) perched in a hillside near the Croatian border. Not long before it had been a thriving Muslim settlement, but now was almost in ruins. Half way up the hillside was an abandoned mosque approached by a cobbled track overgrown with weeds. It had no roof, but the walls were more or less intact and covered with superb mosaics and frescos, slightly faded but nonetheless impressive. We wondered how such a beautiful building had been allowed to deteriorate so badly.

We found the answer  400m away, in the part of the village that had escaped the worst of the devastation. In the centre of the square stood a huge wooden cross standing proud. Obviously the mosque was a victim of the consequences of centuries of religious conflict.

When we arrived in Mostar we were even more horrified by what we found; everywhere once beautiful buildings were completely gutted, and, worst of all, a 600 year-old footbridge, one of the wonders of its day, had been completely destroyed. The stones that once formed it were lying in the river far below. Alongside was a temporary structure made of scaffolding which formed the only direct access between the Muslim bank and its Christian (Serbian) equivalent.

We learned from our guide that until the early 1990s Mostar’s Serbs, Muslims and Croatians shared an uneasy coexistence. When civil war broke out, the (mainly Orthodox) Serbs had attempted to expel the Muslims and (Catholic-leaning) Croatians, but were themselves driven out. Then the Muslims and Croatians turned on each other, and one night in an act of sheer spite a gang of Croatian youths blew up the historic bridge. What made this calamity even more pointless was that it had no military function; it was not wide enough to take a jeep, never mind a tank.

Later, I was admiring the stunning view of the river running through the gorge in the centre of town, trying to imagine what the bridge had looked like in its heyday and marvelling at the skills of the medieval civil engineers who built it, when a strong feeling of anger came over me. Not only was I gazing at a symbol of ethnic conflict, but of bitter religious intolerance. No doubt all sides would claim they acted in the name of G_d and that G_d was totally on their side, like in the famous Bob Dylan song from his protest days. Then a small voice in my head said, ‘Go on, write that book you’ve often contemplated. Write from the heart, say what you mean. Rebuild a few bridges of your own.’

Others have had similar experiences and claimed it to be the voice of G_d, but frankly I’m not convinced that G_d, if ‘he’ exists in any form that we can comprehend, has a ‘voice’. I might even have ignored it altogether if it were not for what happened a few minutes later.

C Cross

Having crossed the river from the ancient and narrow streets of the Muslim quarter to the so-called modern sector, we looked up and saw, on top of the highest hill, another enormous cross. It stood triumphant, proclaiming, ‘We won. Our religion is the right one, superior to yours.  Our G_d is better than your G_d.’

I thought of the tragic events that had taken place in Afghanistan shortly before, when two giant Buddhist statues carved into a mountainside were destroyed by Islamic fundamentalists. I thought of the well-meaning, down to earth British folk in a town well-known to me who were up in arms because the Muslim community wanted to build a mosque close to a Sikh temple, the hostile rantings of certain TV preachers in America, and the armed security guards outside an evangelical church I had recently seen on my travels. I reached for my pen…..

Religious intolerance is a primitive, fear-based response to something unfamiliar, that we do not understand, fostered by centuries of cultural and religious programming and conditioning. Spirituality is something else entirely. Being grounded in experience, it transcends beliefs, and can be shared by all with wisdom and goodwill. It is, above all, about peace.  Bring it on!

 

©David Lawrence Preston, 6.4.2016

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