This is because few if any religions create a contract of equality with each member, allowing the members to reinterpret all of its important claims in any way they see fit. Instead, the member is required or at least expected to trust the religious authority, whatever form that takes, and ancient tradition, hierarchical authority, and inequality are the keys. This means that the kind of relationship one is expected to subscribe to religiously is almost the exact opposite of the ordinary relationships one sustains with others or contracts with as a part of a family, group, or nation. Wilmot knew his “duty” as a pastor, but a sense of “duty” was no longer enough. Yet his rigidity knew nothing else. It was all or nothing at all. It killed his self-integrity and self-respect.
How graphically I remember an incident that occurred when I took one of my college classes to a Bar Mitzva at a Reform synagogue in Santa Monica, California, many years ago. The rabbi kindly entertained questions after the service. One of my students asked him whether Jews believe in heaven and hell. He replied, “Some Jews do, some don’t. We just figure if God can take care of you in this life, if there is another life, God could take care of you then too.” I hoped this would satisfy my student, but he held up his hand again, and the second question was more pointed, “Then if you don’t believe in heaven, why do you do what is right?” The rabbi replied, as kindly as possible, “Why can’t you just do what is right because it is the right thing to do?!”
Yet as we noted in chapter 1, philosopher/psychologist William James noted that people do want something for being religious, and many times they expect a great deal.30 They “use” this God. Otherwise, he added, they don’t care anything about this God or His rules. Perhaps that explains why “Oh, my God!” has become the ubiquitous expression of surprise, exclamation, or even indignation, and insurance companies call “acts of God” anything they cannot explain, anticipate, or evaluate, so refuse to cover.
But what if there were no promises of anything for being religious or belonging to any faith in the traditional sense? Could not people be satisfied to do the good simply because it is good, or be satisfied with the mere promise of realizing who they are while helping others do the same by their encouragement? Is this not real self-integrity and therefore real faith or trust? Without self-realization or self-integrity, could any fame, good health, great wealth, fabulous friends and family, or longevity of life have any real meaning? Is this not the vital choice of which Jesus spoke, the choice between either gaining the whole world while losing one’s self, or self-renunciation that leads to full self-realization or living as one’s true self?
In Buddhist terms one must find the self in order to “get rid of the self,” which is primarily a form of self-renunciation or self-denial, absence of egoism. The latter emphasizes the impermanence of everything, including oneself, the “dependent co-origination” of all, and thus the “emptiness” of all by those two understandings. This deeper notion of the “no-self” necessarily must be accompanied in earthly life with a more conventional idea of the discernment of discrete objects or parts or individual identities strictly necessary for social responsibility. But the “no-self” is therefore an emphasis upon the basic unity (not mere identity) of all individuals, a theme we will see in a later chapter. I am suggesting that both levels of consciousness are necessary, as Buddhists know, which I discuss more in chapter 10, which focuses on the thought of Rabbi Richard Rubenstein. Buddhist scholar Masao Abe incisively spoke of the necessity of keeping intact these “two levels” of discourse in order to have any ethic at all.31
Those who exercise this kind of trust (with a sense of impermanence as well as unity with everything) will not feel threatened by science, new discoveries, new political or social structures, whether it be life in other galaxies, newly uncovered prehistorical bones, or new discoveries of past history such as the evolution of homo sapiens that were not known prior to the nineteenth century so are far beyond most religious cosmogonic myths that include the supposed origin of humans. Three thousand years ago, most religious people belonging to the nation of Israel as well as other nations such as Egypt, were convinced that the sun circles around the earth (so God could stop the sun in its movement for a whole day to benefit Joshua if need be), since the latter is the center of the universe. Copernicus and others put an end to that ancient idea. The great Christian theologian, St. Augustine (AD 354–430) was certain from his knowledge of the Christian Bible that every human lives on a flat disc so there cannot be people living on the other side (bottom) of the disc, which he referred to as “antipodes.” Today we know the earth is round, and our universe is heliocentric, and we are even seeing photographs of objects in space that are 4 billion miles from Earth.
Augustine was also certain that every human is born totally guilty of Adam’s sin and therefore deserves eternal punishment of the “second death” if he or she does not become Christian. How is one idea of his less credible than the others? St. Thomas could even assert, in the late Middle Ages, that a Christian’s resurrection body at the end might not be the same molecules as one had during life (since one might have been eaten by fish if one died at sea), but one could be certain to have the identical number of molecules! At that time, theology was considered the “queen of the sciences.”
As we learn more through our sciences, many of the formerly certain ideas of our ancient authorities in our religions become absurd, real burdens to bear. Great Christian theologians like Augustine were influenced not only by Neoplatonists such as Plotinus, but by a form of Pythagoreanism, so one can find all kinds of allegorical or spiritual meaning in numbers, making three, seven, ten, twelve, and so forth all numbers of perfection, so Philo could be thrilled to discover that the human head has precisely seven openings on it, which makes it perfect. But numbers such as six or eleven are terrible, either falling short of perfection or going past the standard of ten, so Augustine traces original sin through eleven generations at the beginning. It may be fun today to read those things. We do not blame any thinker in the past for being confined to the understandings of his or her age. It really can never be otherwise. The question is only why these kinds of ideas should have any relevance for humans in the twenty-first century CE? Especially is this the question when we recall that Michel Foucault showed how there was never a real “science” of what it is to be human prior to the late eighteenth century, when the old “metaphysics of infinity” finally gave way to the new empirical approaches to reality with its new forms of measurement and comparison.32
Some traditional doctrines of one’s particular religious tradition occasionally can be retained if they can withstand a significant revision and take on more social meaning. Hopefully, some will find it unthinkable to want to claim belonging to a “superior” race, sex, religion, or an “elect” group arbitrarily singled out for special favors by God, and will no longer fear developing meaningful relationships with those who are radically different in particulars when one discovers this sense of self within unity or one’s identity or I in the other. Yet sexual identity, racial identity, economic identity, religious identity, political identity—all seem to be extremely deeply set within our psyches, causing many people to fear any significant contact with those who differ. But we do still have a continual choice, not simply of which religion, if any, we want to belong to, but how much if any of the ancient myths, cosmogonies, and metaphysics we are willing to accept merely on the basis of the religious institution’s claims of authority, that is, its heteronomy.
The creation and preservation of self-integrity within a mutual autonomy could finally relieve one of any feeling of competition between religious groups, and partisan or ideological distinctions between the supposedly religious and nonreligious no longer hold since the categories no longer make sense. Of course, it may sound almost utopian for us to say that “faith” as self-realization obtained in one’s relation to the other could promote human relationships and move people beyond debilitating fears that are barriers to meaningful human dialogue in our societies. Yet when the other is no longer conceived of as an object or mere other, “outsider,” “stranger,” “infidel,” or “unbeliever,” one will be more likely to be moral in one’s relations with the other, even without having to be instructed of the Kantian maxim or even the “Golden