When I was a child, my family, as Catholics, attended church regularly.
I served countless masses as an altar boy.
It was my nature at a very young age, as it has been all my life, to be observant and contemplative.
I observed the restrained and reverential behavior of people in church.
They crossed themselves with “holy water” as they entered, bowed, genuflected, stood, kneeled, and prayed in reverent obedience.
“Holy water,” incidentally, is normal water that has been “blessed” by a priest!
I also observed outside the church the irreverent, insensitive, and sometimes brutal behavior of these same sanctimonious people.
- I sensed, instinctively, that there was something wrong.
- At that young age, I did not yet know the word hypocrisy.
As I continued to observe life, I was struck by how we complicated it unnecessarily.
I thought to myself, “Life is not this complicated. Why do we make it more difficult than it is?”
Wherever I went, as the years passed, I observed similar hypocritical and disturbing behavioral patterns.
I went on to live a very unusual life of many rich and diverse experiences in a variety of fields.
Later in life, I studied at two of the world’s most renowned divinity schools, Yale and Harvard.
At Harvard, I earned a Master of Divinity degree.
I went to these schools to study ethics, issues associated with global environmental problems, and world religious belief systems all relative to my interest in humanity and the state of the world.
I went to these schools to continue on the learning track I had been on all my life.
Also, while at Harvard, on my own, I studied cosmology, the origin and structure of the universe.
And with internationally renowned evolutionary biologist, the late professor E.O. Wilson, I studied evolutionary biology.
I was fifty years old in1993, the year I graduated from Harvard.
As an older student, I remained objective in my study and analysis of world religions.
- I studied all the major world religions.
- While they are all interesting and rich in history and rituals, one finds that they are human constructs formed thousands of years ago in the infancy of our intelligence by people like you and me.
- The historical context and ancient mindsets that produced these belief systems are abundantly evident.
- Clearly, they are all a part of our very early efforts to understand and cope with the withering and unrelenting demands of life.
- As such, they should be treated like all other institutions that we have created.
- Now, ancient and antiquated, these religions should be studied as history not adopted as belief systems.
No disparagement or disrespect is meant.
I appreciate the good efforts of all those who have preceded us honorably.
We are no different than they in our quest for life’s ultimate answers.
But as Gandhi observed, “Religious ideas are subject to the same laws of evolution that govern everything else in the universe.”
In other words, there comes a time to let go of dated ideas and advance as life demands just as we do in every other field of endeavor.
The study of religion, costly in time and funds, was a liberating and rewarding experience.
- It cleared my mind of the false religious dogma that as a child I was programmed — literally brainwashed by the church — to believe.
- Just as children continue to be today.
That clearance was the second most valuable benefit I derived from my divinity school experience.
The most valuable benefit was the discovery, step by step, on my own, of that for which I was searching.
It happened like this:
With a cleared mind, I compared and contrasted our present circumstances with our ancient past.
To paraphrase sociologist Lester Milbrath, over time we have developed a complex and integrated social, technical, economic, and military system so powerful that we can dominate and destroy each other and the rest of the natural world.
Alongside it, we have retained an ethical system based on very old ideas.
- Ancient western religions would have us believe that a god exists as a monarch, rules over a kingdom, is distant from the world, relates primarily to humans, and saves whatever he chooses, thus relieving us of our responsibility to save ourselves and other living things.
- Science, on the other hand, explains our physical world but provides no moral guidance for living within it.
The lack of congruence between our major inherited religions and the power and exuberance of our modern world is gravely problematic.
This is a reality that most of us choose to deny, or one of which we are unaware, and one that is perpetuated by clinging to ancient notions of what is sacred.
In a brilliant statement, some twenty-six hundred years ago, the Buddha said, “To insist on a spiritual practice that served us in the past is to carry the raft on our back after we have crossed the river.”
Having crossed the river myself, so to speak, it was time for me to examine the concept of sacredness.
A modern belief system must be based on a current understanding of what is sacred.
But who is to say what is sacred, the scientist or the priest?
Where does the truth lie?
Dr. Clinton Lee Scott wrote, and I paraphrase and agree, that no one person or category of people has the inside track on truth.
- Truth may be discovered by scientists, poets, prophets, housewives, and garage mechanics. And always by the way of human experience.
- Truths are derived by men and women, not cloistered from the world, but who live in it with all the temptations, problems, and perplexities of the daily round of human relations.
- Truths are found in common everyday living at home, in the community, and in the world.
It is here, in our daily lives, not in creeds and doctrines however long ago proclaimed, where we find the way of life, the architecture of life, the way life works.