differences between religious people and atheists. How does it do that? 2) I’ve heard that when you first sat down to research and write your book, you were looking for a way to reconcile Science with Religion. Did you find any answers? 3) You’ve suggested that all religions are really teaching the same thing, an idea that is certainly going to be offensive to many adherents of different faiths who believe they are following the only ‘real’ teaching. What do you say to them? 4) You’ve mentioned aspects of Christianity, Judaism, and Greek Mythology. What about Islam? Do you include Islam in your theory of the underlying Unity of religions? 5) A common complaint among secular people is that religion degrades women: Orthodox Jews separate them off in Synagogues, Catholics refuse to ordain women priests, Muslims keep them veiled and at the mercy of tyrannical husbands. Do you discuss this issue in your book? |
religious people and atheists. How does it do that? Atheists object that religious teachings are filled with justifications (or even 'divine commands') for violence and cruelty toward others, and that religious people turn their backs on the splendid opportunities of life in exchange for the promise of something better after death. When religious teachings are taken only literally, this is true! The stories are filled with gore and terror and impossible demands for a rather hypocritical morality. If an earthly father treated his children the way God often treats the characters in the Bible, we would declare him crazy and have him locked up. But what I try to show in my book is that these stories are not meant to be taken literally. They are symbolic stories about the internal battles that an evolving soul must wage against its own negativity and weakness. It all takes place in here! The harsh treatment against 'wicked people' is really talking about how we can conquer and destroy our own negativity. When the Bible is read this way, it’s not about “blind faith in an angry God” or “killing in the name of the Lord". It’s about working on oneself to become all that a human being ought to be, here in this life, right now. There is nothing offensive about this to any open minded person, whether they call themselves atheists or believers. 2) I’ve heard that when you first sat down to research and write your book, you were looking for a way to reconcile Science with Religion. Did you find any answers? Yes, I believe I did. Again, when taken literally, as nothing more than a record of historical events, the Bible is full of fantastic stories that defy scientific analysis. But taken symbolically and psychologically, the stories have nothing to do with scientific analysis. The single most important thing that I try to show in “The Purpose of Religion” is that contemporary scientific people have lost the appreciation for Levels of Being. In other words, the material world around us, that we can touch and see and experiment upon, is only one Level of Being. Within the universe, and within the human soul, there are also higher Levels of Being, higher Levels of Consciousness. When the New Testament says that the Kingdom of Heaven is “not here”, “not there”, but is inside us, it means what it says. It’s a state of consciousness, a high Level of Being that we can potentially attain -- but it will take a lot of inner work. The Bible is really nothing more than a symbolic instruction manual for how to do it. So here’s the point: The purpose of science is to unravel mysteries within the physical world. It is not the purpose of science to discover a sacred meaning behind the physical world or to arrogantly pretend to ‘prove’ that no such meaning exists. The purpose of religion is not to explain material phenomena or to tell us what ‘really’ happened in history. The purpose of religion is to help us perfect our inner souls and to discover life’s meaning for ourselves. These are complementary (not antagonistic) human endeavors on the same exquisite continuum of life. We can appreciate both of these complementary levels of reality precisely because human beings are a unique combination of matter and spirit. This is what makes a human being human. 3) You’ve suggested that all religions are really teaching the same thing, an idea that is certainly going to be offensive to many adherents of different faiths who believe they are following the only ‘real’ teaching. What do you say to them? First I would say that they are right, they are following the only ‘real’ teaching. Because there’s only one ‘real’ teaching – just different ways of expressing it. Here’s an example of what I mean: When Jesus tells his followers that the “only way to the Father is through him”, it’s true. But this is not because Christianity has an exclusive path to God. It’s because the Level of Being that the Bible calls “Father” can only be attained through the Level it calls “Son”. To believe in the ‘Son’ is to believe through him to the ‘Father’, for the ‘Son’ represents the mediator between the Father and the material world, and this means that we are connected to God only through this very high Level of Being which is represented in Christianity by the Christ. You can’t get around it. But needless to say, there are other “Father and Son” stories in the various traditions – Abraham and Isaac, Uranos and Cronos -- as well as “Mother and Daughter” stories such as Demeter and Persephone. They are all teaching the same inner Truth. And even St. Augustine said, “That which today is called the Christian religion existed among the ancients and has never ceased to exist from the origin of the human race until the time when Christ himself came and men began to call ‘Christian’ the true religion which already existed beforehand.” [from Augustine’s ‘Reconsiderations’, I.13.3] 4) You’ve mentioned aspects of Christianity, Judaism, and Greek Mythology. What about Islam? Do you include Islam in your theory of the underlying Unity of religions? Absolutely. No religion is more emphatic than Islam in teaching that we are all children of the same God. No religion states more clearly, “There is no God but God!” We’re all human, and one thing that happens to humans is that wisdom and understanding tend to fade over time and our souls need to be refreshed. In many ways, Christianity was a response to a dwindling of wisdom that had gripped Judaism -- many Pharisees, for instance, were observing rituals automatically but had lost touch with their real inner meaning. Likewise, Islam was in many ways a response to a dwindling of wisdom in Christianity – people were focusing so exclusively on God and the afterlife, that they thought God’s creation, this world, was somehow “evil”. Muhammad’s mission was not to create a new religion, but to re-balance the two already-existing expressions of the One religion of the One True God. This meant that he had to adjust the equilibrium between the ‘Above’ and the ‘Below’, and renew humanity’s respect for all of God’s Creation. Contrary to the foolish assumptions of a few Islamic terrorists (who are really no different than Crusaders and Klansmen and the JDL and countless other fools who have misunderstood religious teachings and gone off murdering in the name of God), Islam is not about violence. Islam is the religion of harmony, a harmony that is brought about by Faith in God’s Oneness, Surrender to God’s Will, and moral Virtue which is achieved through the constant remembrance of God throughout the day. 5) A common complaint among secular people is that religion degrades women: Orthodox Jews separate them off in Synagogues, Catholics refuse to ordain women priests, Muslims keep them veiled and at the mercy of tyrannical husbands. Do you discuss this issue in your book? Yes. In fact, the meaning and significance of the Sacred Feminine -- in individuals, in society, and in the cosmos – is a major theme that runs through the book. And again, an exclusively literalistic reading of the stories has led to horrifying misunderstandings and distortions that have become ingrained in many people. But we have to look deeper. It begins, of course, with the stories of Eden, where God allegedly created Man first, and only secondarily created Woman from the man’s rib. Actually, the name ‘Adam’, in Hebrew, is a genderless noun that means “creature of the earth”, and the word tsela, which is translated in Genesis as ‘rib’, is translated everywhere else in the Bible as ‘side’. So what the Bible really says is that God created an androgynous being first (“male and female created He them”), and later separated one side of the creature into a distinct female and the other side into a distinct male. Neither of these creatures is secondary or subservient to the other. By the way, this story of an original androgynous creature that is later broken in half, is a common tale throughout the world’s mythologies. Among other things, it conveys an acknowledgment of the perfect equality of men and women. Then we come to the pervasive belief that Eve was evil, that she committed the despicable act of ‘tempting’ poor Adam and overwhelming him with her treachery, and therefore women are to blame for all the ensuing sorrows of the world. This is also a total misreading of what is said. Eve never tempts Adam: in fact she says nothing to him at all. In an act of mere passive acquiescence, Adam takes a bite of the fruit. And this is the real “sin” that the story is about. Speaking symbolically, Adam represents the human Mind, which is supposed to be awake, active, and in charge of the soul. But he takes no responsibility whatsoever. Eve represents the Heart, and our hearts ought to be obeying our minds, not fawning over the cravings of the Body (represented by the Serpent). All of this is a psychological lesson that relates to each of us today. It’s not a history lesson meant to “pin the blame” on women. There is much, much more of course, but I’ll leave that to a reading of the book. Let me just conclude by saying that in “The Purpose of Religion” I make it eminently clear that the reason we must restore the Sacred Feminine to her full divine stature in our lives and culture is because without her all spiritual evolution is impossible. Without her all the ancient myths and holy scriptures are useless! We cannot follow Demeter and Persephone back to Olympus, we cannot obey the Law of Moses, we cannot walk in Christ's footsteps, if we continue to misconstrue everything that is said about the perfect equality, the required harmony, and the absolute inter-dependence of `Male' and `Female' at every level of Creation. |
SUGGESTED INTERVIEW QUESTIONS (Repeated with Answers Below) |
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