Imagine No Religion
“Imagine there’s no heaven
It’s easy if you try
No hell below us
Above us only sky
Imagine all the people living for today
Imagine there’s no countries
It isn’t hard to do
Nothing to kill or die for
And no religion too
Imagine all the people living life in peace, you
You may say I’m a dreamer
But I’m not the only one
I hope some day you’ll join us
And the world will be as one…”
(John Lennon)
The world is most definitely NOT as one. Hell’s bells, we’re not even as 4 or 5. Or 20.
For a creature that is supposed to be the pinnacle of evolution (or the handiwork of God, but we’ll get to that), we are a very sorry excuse for beings with the one of the largest brains on the planet. As with *other* body parts, apparently size doesn’t matter. There are other living beings on this planet with brains that are quite small compared to ours…but somehow, they manage to live without destroying the very place they call home. We don’t do that.
No, we’re absolute experts on pollution, deforestation, landfills, poisons, war, and how many interesting ways we can obliterate anything that doesn’t meet our desires or beliefs.
Beliefs. Now there’s a loaded word, worse than any loaded gun, responsible for more deaths than pretty much any natural disaster. What do you believe?
Remember, not ALL beliefs are bad things. I believe in the Sun, the Universe, that gravity will continue to work, that there are natural cycles to life and that I am a human being. So far, so good.
The beliefs that I would classify as “bad” or perhaps a better, more accurate word would be “harmful” — those beliefs would be specifically RELIGIOUS beliefs. Not just religious beliefs, but also religious FAITH.
Faith is the “strong belief in God or in the doctrines of a religion, based on spiritual apprehension rather than proof”. My mother and I had an interesting conversation when she tried to point out to me that I had “faith” in the medical system for taking care of my health, that I had “faith” in the doctors and in the medicine and so on. I told her that no, I did not have “faith”. I had TRUST. Trust is the “firm belief in the reliability, truth, ability, or strength of someone or something”. Trust is provable, trust is based on actual evidence. (In the case of the medical system, it would be things like the doctor’s diplomas, the tools available to them, the training and experience of the entire staff.)
And when my trust is misplaced or proven to be wrong, I do not suffer an existential crisis. It doesn’t affect who I am or who I think I am.
I have mentioned before, in other writings, that I was baptized as a Southern Baptist. I have also been a member of the Lutheran, Methodist and Presbyterian churches. I also converted to Catholicism. And I have left that all behind me, to follow the Eight-Fold Path to enlightenment as a Tibetan Zen Buddhist.
Like so many others who have also sought answers to questions that Christians are apparently unwilling or unable to give…I am VERY familiar with the three major religions (who all happen to share the same god with different names). I have studied, as the saying goes. I have lived in Muslim countries and seen Islam in action. As someone who has read the entire Bible through, I know the history of the Jews.
From a personal standpoint, I would never convert to Judaism. I do not like the Old Testament God. He’s angry, jealous, and vicious. His own people do not escape any of that, suffering time and again because of his bad temper. And it’s a particular sticking point for me that this God (who loves us so, according to some) that he created a playpen for his new creations — and put a dangerous, lethal item in there with them. THEN he punished them for touching (eating) it. I have children and if I won’t do that, how can I respect, let alone follow, a God that does? This is not the Heavenly Father I would want to have. I’d run away from home first chance I got.
I would also never convert to Islam for the obvious reason of my gender.
Which leaves us back with Christianity. (But everything I want to discuss about that can be applied to the other two religions — or any religion, for that matter.) Let’s make sure that we all are on the same page with the definitions for what we’re talking about — specifically the difference between “religion” and “spirituality”.
Religion is the manmade (MANmade) hierarchy that surrounds, supports and implements a particular belief system. Which means that God may have nothing to do with — because you can have a hierarchy that surrounds, supports and implements a belief system of all kinds of beliefs. We generally use the term religion when we are discussing a spiritual belief system, as we are here.
Spirituality is the awareness of the interconnectedness of all and perhaps the idea of a higher being, although it’s not necessary. It’s actively honoring the sacred life within every other being — human or not — up to and including the Mother Earth, upon whose being we utterly depend.
There are religions built around that particular spirituality — Wicca is a prime example of the Nature-based belief system. The very earliest known religions tended to also be Earth-based, with multiple deities possible.
But…Christianity has spent a lot of time and money keeping its adherents as somehow separate from Earth and Nature. The very first book in their holy book says that God gave “dominion” over the Earth to Adam — which many Christians seem to understand as, “It’s yours, do what you want to it and don’t worry about the cost.”
One of my greatest disagreements with Christians is their insistence on keeping the Old Testament. It’s really nothing more than a history book, some genealogy, and a lot of wars. Christians are followers of Christ, hence the name. And Jesus Christ is all New Testament.
He simplified the commandments and all those hundreds of laws about diet, clothing, cost of a virgin daughter…down to this: Love your God and Love your neighbor. The natural results of doing that would lead to his followers doing as he did — and the six tasks he mentions in Matthew 25:31–46 are a major part of that. (Feed the hungry, give drink to the thirsty, clothe the naked, welcome the stranger, comfort the ill and visit those in prison.)
He spoke often about how those who strutted their religious piety in public had received all the reward they would ever get, from their fellow humans — and would receive nothing further from their God. He warned his followers to “do as the Pharisees tell you, for they know the laws — but do not act as they do”. He personally disobeyed the laws — gathering grain on the Sabbath (to have something to eat) and sitting down to eat with the undesirables. He drove the merchants and money changers out of the Temple — one of the clearest indications that commerce had no place within the house of God.
He told his followers then, time and again, that to follow him, they must give up everything and do as he did, that a rich man had no chance of getting into Heaven, that they were to minister to those who religion had ignored or damned — the “least of these”. He never turned anyone away, he reached out and responded to any — and all — that would reach to him.
He was the living example of Sacred Love and what it was supposed to look like.
If he even really existed. And before you get your knickers in a twist, I’m not trying to say that he never did. We do not really know beyond the churches’ faith. What I am saying is that it doesn’t matter if he existed or not.
There have been other Messiahs, other Saviors, throughout history and the world. Confucius, Buddha, Joseph Smith, Socrates, and so on. Anyone who offered a new way to live, a perhaps better way could be considered to be a Messiah or Savior.
However the inspirations were delivered, the ones that Jesus spoke of reflect the concept of LOVE. Which is damned hard to find in the Old Testament, between the stonings and battles and begats. So if we distill Christianity down to what should be the core belief, it should be love and living a life that is filled with love — for all.
You couldn’t prove this by the average Christian. And certainly not by the part of Christianity that defines itself as Evangelical (or Fundamental). Somewhere along the line, the people who call themselves by Christ’s name lost the reason for using it. There are entire groups of churches who are focused only on the sacrament of baptism; their entire purpose is to preach the word of God and then “save” souls for him.
Jesus never said that you had to be dunked in the water to follow him. He never said that you had to be baptized to be saved. It was to be a ritual, an outward sign, of belonging to him — but it was NOT the magic “Get out of Hell” free card that so many seem to think it is. And it was certainly NOT the end of the process.
Jesus also never said that you had to go to church every Sunday to be saved. Going to a manmade building with a bunch of other humans is not how you achieve salvation. Guess what? Singing in the choir, teaching Sunday School or being a deacon is also not how to achieve salvation. In fact, you can be the greatest Christian in the world and never set foot into any designated religious building. Actually? You can be the greatest Christian in the world and not believe in Jesus Christ at all.
Don’t believe me? You should. What makes a Christian? We’ve just talked about that it’s not about the church, the church activities or even being baptized. A Christian is anyone who does what Jesus says to do: Love your God and Love your neighbor, and live your life completing those six tasks whenever and wherever you have the opportunity to do so, to minister to the least of these, to show love and compassion as a natural response to their sacred being. A spiritual life. NOT a religious one.
The older I get, the less I worry about whether there’s actually someone “out there” (somewhere) who’s watching me to see if I behave or not. My personal belief system actually includes the concept of a higher, perhaps Supreme Sacred Being and the possibilities of reincarnation. I would not say that I have faith in an afterlife…rather, I welcome the possibility of “beyond”.
However I also have no problem, no unease of mind, about the concept of this being all there is, with nothing more once we die. We’ve certainly denied an afterlife to every other life form on this planet in our human arrogance and (misplaced) sense of superiority. Well, except to maybe our pets, whom we “allow” to go “over the Rainbow Bridge” when they die.
The Christian concepts of an afterlife, the Heavenly reward, is probably its single biggest sin. In ancient Greek, the word for sin also means “to miss the point” and that’s just what a lot of Christians are doing. They are missing the point of being a Christian, of being like Christ because they are marking time until they die to be in Heaven with God — instead of doing the work they were given by their own Christ. My parents are two of such Christians. They’re not “bad” people, they are just so smugly secure in their faith and their own actions as Christians that they fail to meet the actual requirements on a nearly daily basis.
I have been pondering a lot about religion lately — some of it has been an ongoing process for more than 30 years, other of it is based on the current socio-political-religious bullshit that’s going on in our own country. My surmise is that pretty much every problem in humanity — historically and currently — can be laid at the feet of some religion. Let’s take a brief look at what I mean.
The Old Testament is FILLED with war, violence, death, murder, and child sacrifice. We had NINE crusades with Europeans going into the Middle East to establish Christian control in Jerusalem. The Catholic church has done more than its share of politics and war to keep ascendancy. All over the world, men and women were killed because they were accused or thought to be witches and Christianity believed they were the Hand of God to do so. (The verse in the Bible that says, “Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live” is NOT the original verse. King James was terrified of witches and had his translators substitute “witch” for the original word, which was “poisoner”.)
The words “war” and “holy” should NEVER be used together. Not even if you pronounce it “jihad”. War is NOT NOT NOT holy. EVER.
If God is Love, then why is war done in his name?
As bad as war is, there other results of this focus on the afterlife instead of living this life — and they may actually be worse in the long run than war itself. If God is Love and his Son’s message was to love one another, how do we correlate that with what we are seeing from self-avowed Christians? You know the ones I mean — the ones that use their Bible and their God to treat others with hatred, contempt, and violence. The so-called Christians who KNOW that they are “chosen” and “saved”, who work to limit others’ freedoms, who claim religious persecution when they are called out for that limiting. The modern Pharisees who seek to put everyone who isn’t like them into subordinate, subservient positions because of their inherent sense of superiority.
When did the religion of Love become a political creature, involved with the governments of man? Oh, right. It has ALWAYS been a political creature — hiding within the robes of religion as protection against any resistance. The council of Nicea was not a group of spiritually motivated MEN, trying to unite the various Christians sects into coherence. It was a political and commercial gathering of the Emperor Constantine and the wealthy merchants to form this new religion into a powerbase. Even in Jesus’ own day, his movement was politicized, so that the Romans would execute him and save the Pharisees from losing their jobs.
If we cannot separate the spiritual back out of this sinful, manmade hierarchy of dogma, tenet, church law, political necessity and arrogance…I suggest it’s time to get rid of it. Imagine no religion. Imagine a world where people live their lives to their fullest potential because they have no faith, no wishful thinking about “something more” after their death. They do their living now, and if there is a Heaven, that’s their reward, not their life. I find great wisdom in the words of Marcus Aurelius:
“Live a good life. If there are gods and they are just, then they will not care how devout you have been, but will welcome you based on the virtues you have lived by. If there are gods, but unjust, then you should not want to worship them. If there are no gods, then you will be gone, but will have lived a noble life that will live on in the memories of your loved ones.”
Live a good life. That means a life of compassion and lovingkindness to all that you meet, to do what you can to help others, to live a life of love. Live a good life NOW, HERE. It’s all that we can really be sure of, TRUST in, to have. What we see is what there is and if we are not seduced into believing that our “real” life starts once we’re dead…imagine all that could be done.
Oh, there’d still be problems. Of course there would be. We are, after all, only human. But that is also our greatest strength — to be human. To have the freedom of choice for how we shall live, with the understanding that all of our choices have consequences (negative or positive) and to make our choices based on the consequences we would most prefer have happen.
We’d still have war. But hopefully it would not be built upon the idea that one side is somehow blessed by God to win — and both sides believing that they are that blessed side, prepared to die for the glory of their belief system. Maybe our wars would be more…well, honest. Land grabs, stealing resources, controlling the government. That’s what they’ve been about all along.
We might even see worse things, because no one would have to fear eternal damnation to prevent them from doing things. But at least we would be able to call it what it has always been: man’s evil. Not God, not Satan. Just each person, being what they want to be — and if that’s evil, then they have to deal with others who won’t stand by and let it happen. Death would be the ultimate punishment for criminals — they could not count on salvation and resurrection and would therefore not welcome a glorious death as the gateway to the afterlife.
I would hope that what we might see would be the better side of us, the chance to be good as a natural part of living, self-imposed instead of mandated by another person or a book or a building. Part of my rejection of Christianity is that I could never seem to make it work the way I understood it should have. I could not find a way to incorporate the spiritual message of Jesus of Nazareth with the religious doctrines and dogma I was taught to have a spiritually filled life. There was no instruction on how to feed the hungry and etc on a daily basis, in whatever format these tasks presented themselves.
Instead of working on “witnessing” to others, to “save” them, I have stepped away from religion and into a spiritual life that more than meets the Carpenter’s instructions to his followers. Which is an irony that I can appreciate — that I am more of a Jesus follower now than I ever was as a Christian. I prefer to use another name for him — I call him LOVE. And it’s from the New Testament that I share the definition I like best for just what love is:
“Love is patient, love is kind. It does not envy, it does not boast, it is not proud. It does not dishonor others, it is not self-seeking, it is not easily angered, it keeps no record of wrongs. Love does not delight in evil but rejoices with the truth. It always protects, always trusts, always hopes, always perseveres.”
(I Cor 13:4–7)
Each and everyone of us wants to love and be loved — and not just in the mating rituals, but as ourselves, for ourselves. With love comes equality between every person, with love comes compassion so that none are left needing. With love, each wants what is best for all the others because we are each better if all are better.
Religions have preached that this is what they want, but their own history and their actions today prove that they are not delivering on this avowed goal. And what kind of religion is it really, when those who follow can choose to be haters, bigots, racists, sexists, and hypocritical about their own actions of sin? They miss the point of our human experience by insisting that it doesn’t matter, only salvation and an eventual address in Heaven is important. How we treat the least of our own, the least of beings — human or not — is the measure of our own being and our own goodness.
We fail that test and most fail because of their religious beliefs which have no room for love that welcomes differences, that feeds the hungry, gives drink to the thirsty, that clothes the naked, welcomes the strangers, comforts the ill and visits those in prisons. The first three tasks address basic human needs; the second three address social justice issues. And we are now living in a world where politicians and corporate heads spout such inane nonsense as “having water or adequate food is not a human right” and “there are people who just don’t care about having healthcare”. There are people who think that Roy Moore, pedophile should be a senator because at least “he only screwed little girls, the Democrats will screw everyone.” The metaphoric damage is considered to outweigh real and actual damage.
There are people who can tell you with a straight face (and believe it themselves) that our current President is a Christian, a follower of Jesus. How, in all of the names of the holy, can one reconcile his past, his actions, his words and his current administration with anything resembling what Jesus said to do? Would these same people still support him if he wasn’t a Christian? And these are the same people who did not support the prior President, even though his Christianity was well established before he entered office.
Religion is the manmade hierarchy that surrounds a belief system and that makes it one of the largest sources of pain, suffering and death on our world. There is no limit to what its followers will do because they are armored in faith and God is on their side; to Hell, quite literally, with everyone else.
Imagine a world with no religion, only Love as a guiding belief system. You may say I’m a dreamer, but I’m not the only one. I hope someday you will join us. Then the world will be as one.
It’s got to be better than what we have going on now.
