Is Religious Faith Inherently Idolatrous? (ritual, Creator, mystic, tradition)

[doppelgänger]

From my blog . . .

If [man] thinks of the totality as constituted of independent fragments, then that is how his mind will tend to operate, but if he can include everything coherently and harmoniously in an overall whole that is undivided, unbroken, and without a border then his mind will tend to move in a similar way, and from this will flow an orderly action within the whole.

Difference exist because thought develops like a stream that happens to go one way here and another way there. Once it develops it produces real physical results that people are looking at, but they don't see where these results are coming from - that's one of the basic features of fragmentation. When they have produced these divisions they see that real things have happened, to they'll start with these real things as if they just suddenly got there by themselves, or evolved in nature by themselves. That's [a] mistake that thought makes. It produces a result, and then it says, I didn't do it; it's there by itself, and I must correct it. But if thought is constantly making this result and then saying, 'I've got to stop it', this is absurd. Because thought is caught up in this absurdity, it is producing all sorts of negative consequences, then treating them as independent and saying, I must stop them.

- Quantum Physicist and theorist, Dr. David Bohm

As I've written before, I have no interest in doing Theology. The word itself (theos + ology) literally means the study of that which is beyond study or knowing. What is of interest to me is that some people do imagine such a field of endeavor as "theology" in which we purport to draw conclusions in logic and language about "God" as though it were a thing about which logic and language could draw conclusions. What we perceive are bits of reality we carve out as significant to which we attribute the symbol "God." Thus, we imagine some things as "God's" effects in our reality, but even on the level of this imagining, there is no direct experience of a thing or being despite that the language of traditional and mainstream Christianity operates as though there were. As John Shelby Spong, author of A New Christianity For A New World, argues:

We visualize and experience God's effects, not God's being. We never see God as a disincarnate or separate Self. To embrace that simple truth is to watch the whole theistic theological enterprise totter under the weight of its own irrelevance. It is also to recognize that those endless rows of weighty theological tomes that fill library shelves in great centers of learning - every page of which attempts to explain God - must now be recognized as little more than monuments to human egos. I do not argue for a moment that God is not real. Indeed, the reality of the God-experience overwhelms me every day of my life. I assert only that no human words, no human formulas, and no human religious systems will ever capture that reality. To claim that any one at any time has ever done so is idolatrous.

Why do we imagine that idols must be images drawn, painted or carved from wood or stone? Why do we not think of an idea expressed in words as an idol? Is there really a difference between subjectively imagining a "God" with six legs and two horns and worshiping the thing I've imagined with carving that very image into stone and worshiping it in its carved form?

What is idolatry and what is wrong with it?

To me idolatry requires two steps: First is the objectification of the experience of the spiritual into a human creation, be it a statue, a painting, a poem, a tome of theology or just an idea captured in thought but never fixed in a tangible medium. That step in and of itself is not idolatry. To a person wishing to convey artistically their own sense of spirituality, awakening, or whatever they are choosing call their direct experience of love or the divine, our human ability to fashion art as a metaphor for that experience is simply a part of being self-conscious. To come back to being "I am" after a transcendent experience is to imperfectly reflect on that experience of not being "I am" and vainly try to bring it back into the world of thought and words and images and symbols.

No, to be idolatry, a second step is necessary. Idolatry occurs when those products of human creativity meant to imperfectly remember the "God-experience" (as Spong puts it) are mistaken for the "God-experience" itself and the person experiencing the art, whether a painting, a mythological story, a poem or philosophical insight sees these symbols as the end in themselves rather than pointing to something else.

When we get caught up in the details of the myth, we miss the point of where to look for the mystery of "God." It's not "out there" to be discovered and brought down here. As Campbell was fond of saying "Thou Art That" or in other words, the mystery is within you. Campbell explained in Pathways to Bliss:

[T]his power, which transcends all thought, is the very essence of your own being. It is immanent - it is right here, right now, here in the paper of this book, in the chair your sitting in. You can take any object from this point of view and draw a ring around it and explore the mystery of its being, not knowing what it is because you can't know what it is. Fine, it's a chair, and you know what to do with it; however, its essential substance is ultimately and absolutely mysterious. The mystery of the existence of your chair is identical with the mystery of the existence of the universe itself . . . As early as the eighth century B.C. the Chandogya Upanishad explicitly states the key idea: tat tvam asi - "you are it." The whole sense of these religions - Hinduism, Jainism, Taoism and Buddhism - is to evoke in the individual the experience of identity with the universal mystery, the mystery of being. You are it. Not the "you," however, that you cherish. Not the "you" that you distinguish from the other.

The formula is a way of identifying yourself with the witness and with what is beheld. The commonsense view of the world is dualistic: I behold my body, I am not my body. I know my thoughts, I am not my thoughts. I experience my feelings, I am not my feelings. I am the experiencer, I am the witness. Then Buddah comes along and says there's no witness either. You can drive yourself out the back of the wall in this way . . .

It's the mystery of our own [the West's] mystics as well. Many of whom have been burned for calling attention to these ideas. West of Persia, in the traditions that have come from the Near East - namely, Christianity, Judaism, and Islam - that is the prime heresy against the unbending truth: God has created the world. Creator and creature are not the same.

But such a position draws fire from all directions as those trapped within the "common sense" of the dualistic world of "belief" insist that mystics are heretics for not recognizing a dividing line between "God" as solely something without the human "being." This, even though the spiritual geniuses who created much of their own purported foundational mythology tell them, if they were to look carefully, that "God" is within and without and that the truth, the life and the way is through letting go of certainty in this fragmented reality - losing my self to find my identity with the Divine.

And on the other side, those who likewise only think of the world as a place of things and motion and demand all reality be brought into a formal logic and taxonomy of "knowledge" rather than "belief," decry the mystics as speaking nonsense because it fits into no logical, empiricist template for reality that a dualistic self can grasp and use. Yet again, the wisdom of science: ecology, quantum mechanics, and chaos lead those open to that wisdom to see that the divisions between "substances" are in the observers, and that "things" only practically "exist" as the things we identify, study and use. The finer the examination, the more the thinglyness of all "things" merges into an interrelated whole.

In both instances, they are falling for the same idolatrous trap. Both are doing theology: talking about the unknowable in words about "being" and "existence," without any sense that the reality lurks behind, around and through the words, in the meaning to which they point, rather than apprehending "truth" in the words and symbols themselves.

The Truth is One, though the sages speak of it by many names. Some of those sages appear as Christian mystics like Paul and Meister Eckhart, some as Buhhists, Taoists, Hindus or Sufis, some as philosophers like Spinoza, Nietzsche and Brunner, and some as scientists, like David Bohm, the quantum theorist quoted at the top of this post, and Albert Einstein:

A human being is part of a whole, called by us the Universe, a part limited in time and space. He experiences himself, his thoughts and feelings, as something separated from the rest a kind of optical delusion of his consciousness. This delusion is a kind of prison for us, restricting us to our personal desires and to affection for a few persons nearest us. Our task must be to free ourselves from this prison by widening our circles of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature in its beauty.

[doppelgänger]

Is religious faith inherently idolatrous?

[BruceDLimber]

>Is religious faith inherently idolatrous?

Maybe yours is; I don't know.

Mine isn't!

Peace,

Bruce

[doppelgänger]

Originally Posted by BruceDLimber

Mine isn't!

Care to elaborate, Bruce, in light of the OP?

And for everyone: If the answer is "yes," then is there anything wrong or "bad" about that? Why or why not?

[Mister Emu]

no human religious systems will ever capture that reality.

If you do not accept this statement, then you will not see religion as nessecarily idolatrous.

[Sunstone]

Isn't faith necessarily limiting?

[doppelgänger]

Originally Posted by Mister Emu

If you do not accept this statement, then you will not see religion as nessecarily idolatrous.

How so? And do you accept this statement? Why not? Which human religious system captures a non-subjective reality?

[Mister Emu]

How so?

If you believe that God can be know, then you believe it is possible that one could worship the true God in a non-idolatrous manner.

And do you accept this statement?

No, I do not.

Why not?

Because God has made Himself known to me, and indirectly confirmed what was once belief.

Objective: not influenced by personal feelings, interpretations, or prejudice; based on facts; unbiased:
from dictionary.com

Which human religious system captures a non-subjective reality?

Christianity in particular, though others may capture fragments of reality.