In another story, Jesus asks a rhetorical question about those who refuse to leave any comforts and security behind in order to follow him: “What does it profit them if they gain the whole world, but lose or forfeit themselves?” He promises, on the other hand, could they deny themselves and be willing to give up themselves even to the point of giving up their lives, they would in the process “find” their true selves or “save” their lives. That sounds like paradox if not a personal demand. That the “life” promised is not some mere quantity of years, even if limitless, is obvious. For it is no fair exchange to gain the whole world if it involves losing one’s true self.
But this “true self,” this integrated self, this “authentic” Dasein is not found in isolation—does not and cannot exist by itself. Rather, that is precisely where it is not found. Even Heidegger saw Dasein as being shaped primarily by Sorge or “caring,”22 which involves the others, so is ethics, not simply self-absorption. Most religions were not originally preoccupied with simply creating isolated and asocial self-sufficiency in which only the individual obtains some form of relief, wholeness, or salvation, independently of all human relationships. The monastic orders that were spawned in several religions became problematic as they directly contradicted the social nature and teaching of the common people modeled by the very founders of those religions.23
But merely belonging to a group does not provide one’s true or integrated self either. Jesus did not spend time trying to convince people that they should find their true selves within any religion, not even within Judaism. To the contrary, he viewed religious leaders as full of hypocrisy, legalism, and on a quest for power by their using religion as a form of show or self-advertising. He did not suggest that a sense of belonging could compensate for a loss of one’s self when the belonging caused one to be divisive or exclusive or to neglect others’ needs or rights, or to feel better than others.
Self-integrity or avoiding the loss of self is a matter of the “inner person,” not the particular trappings or happenstance elements in his or her life.24 If one discovers the loss of self when in isolation from others, one can also experience the same when one has a very social life or is an active member of a large religious group. The message of many contemporary megachurches and other gurus and their apparent “success” in terms of numerical growth does not assure one of self-integrity. This size and apparent growth, however, may only attest to the fact that the higher the promised jackpot, the more people find their way through the front door. A collection of “donated” Rolls Royces does not prove the religious teacher is either moral or legal.25 In fact, self-integrity may, ironically, be left behind at the front door as people think only of themselves just as their isolation from others can be a restriction by which they experience a loss of self.
As I noted in chapter 2, Dorothee Soelle not only argued that the famous New Testament scholar, Rudolf Bultmann’s, interpretation of Christianity resulted in a gross individualism but also insisted that in choosing the status quo in the sense of political and economic structures of exploitation, thus “objective cynicism,” people may ultimately be choosing death rather than life.26 But those very structures of thinking about self and others within the megachurch are as destructive as one experiences them in any material or social isolation, as the loss of ego within one’s egocentrism. In a very real sense, the “Absolute” traditionally found in a religion, may take on primarily the characteristics of a particular culture’s ideals such as success or power, leaving behind even some of the ethical restraints in the religious Absolute’s traditional description, and this transference of qualities can take place subconsciously.
What I am proposing is that despite what people feel they as individuals are being promised in religion, regardless of how disproportionate such promised rewards or benefits might be, they find their religion meaningful not because they really experience all these benefits but because of a mutual self-realization within the specific religious group to which they belong. Therein may lie religion’s real value, which would not be attached to any metaphysics or mythology or even claims about past history or incursions into history by some god. William James said that the answer for the “more” life the religious people seek does not require some deity, but anybody that can help the person take the “next step.” Sometimes that next step is very hard to take, however, and there are cases such as Reverend Wilmot, in which the person who of all people should not have needed help to take that step, not only did not take it but found no one to assist him to do so. But that was a rather extreme and unusual case. As a rule, the religious community is quite supportive in sharing its members’ joys and problems, their celebrations and tragedies. To use Nietzsche’s metaphor of the “camel” stage of maturing or realizing one’s responsible autonomy, which was mentioned at the beginning of this study, Reverend Wilmot needed to go to the “desert” and dump that “burden” in order to preserve self and others, in order to live in true trust rather than blind faith in some Absolute.
This self-realization must include what we saw Whitehead calling “character,” and it counts so much that other expected or apparently promised rewards can be subconsciously postponed indefinitely to the future, completely reinterpreted or de-emphasized, or even finally forgotten. Yet, as we noted in chapter 2, the exclusiveness of religion’s typical segregation of humanity may sooner or later take its toll on the adherent, despite the embrace he feels from members of the group. Unfortunately, most religious groups teach their members to look to the future for the fulfillment of all the promises, the better life, the relief from suffering, and the like, and often their attachment with this world has become so unscientific in its religious ideas that even a hope for future improvement seems unrealistic. At that point, the cognitive dissonance becomes detrimental, with rigid religion as the problem.
A member of an Appalachian fundamentalist church is promised that she need not worry about holding rattlesnakes in her hands as she dances to the music because the last chapter of the gospel of Mark promises God will not allow her to be bitten. If and when she does get bitten, and all the members get shook up over it, her consolation is that by holding that snake, no matter what happens to her in the future, she proved to herself that she was just as good as her present peers, therefore that she too had God’s Spirit and was therefore one of God’s elect. To feel equal to the others of one’s group, to feel totally accepted by them—is very important. Even more important in certain religions is one’s conviction that one belongs to God’s chosen who are the greatest and most fortunate of all. There is no greater promise or reward than being part of His “elect people.” The self-fulfillment of that promise by such groups’ rituals with snakes is less obvious than its lethal, illogical danger.
But the actual content of the promise can get altered because of one’s new self-realization or sheer accident. The fact that there is still too much conscious emphasis upon what the isolated individual can achieve (with a snake) is obvious. But the social aspect of the episode can possibly serve as the early unarticulated stages of self-consciousness that hopefully can eventually involve mutual self-identity, which is not dependent upon old images of being literally the chosen people of God or of God’s elect that have to prove the fact by handling poisonous snakes or drinking poison.
This example is consistent with the insight of present sociologists of religion, namely, that people’s primary reason for belonging to a religious communion is predominantly social, so is much more explicable from a sociological approach than doctrinal or traditionally theological one, even if the believers appear to think otherwise because