Gospel & Universe ⏯ Systems

Exclusive Geographies

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I'm a big fan of religion, yet I can’t stand the exclusion it generates. My problem is a general one, deriving from human geography. In perhaps the biggest absurdity in history, humanity has been divided for over a thousand years into groups that all claim a universal message. There are Christians in Europe and the Americas, Hindus in India, Buddhists from Ladakh to Japan, and Muslims from Senegal to Indonesia.

Religious divisions derive from, or at least conform to, this geography, and this geography ensures the endurance of division. Each religion continues to promote their own regional holy book, while at the same time maintaining that their religion is applicable to everyone and that it gets at the true meaning of our earthly existence. Yet not everyone hears the call of Jesus, understands God when He speaks in Arabic, or feels the universe vibrate with to the sound of AUM. In Star Trek aliens understand each other thanks to the universal translator. Yet even if such a thing existed, texts and priests would still point us to Jerusalem or Mecca, to Benares or Bodh Gaya. Not only does each religion promote its own holy book; each of these books has its own definition of the holy or enlightened reader. 

My problem is a general one, but also a personal one. First, I was brought up by liberal parents who encouraged their children to think independently. Second, I was brought up as a Protestant in the United Church, which is one of the most liberal churches in Christendom. Third — and here’s where the most personal part comes in — at the impressionable age of eleven I went to a supposedly Christian camp. Some of the counsellors abused the campers in between fervent appeals to accept Jesus — an alternation of depravity and idealism that I can still hardly fathom. This left me disgusted, rebellious, and angry toward their ejaculations from the pulpit. It being the early to mid-1970s, my reaction was to drink and smoke pot, to experiment with hallucinogens, and to listen to groups like Led Zeppelin, Uriah Heep, Black Sabbath, and Queen…

I could have been happily rebellious in my world of magicians and wizards, Striders and Great King Rats, were it not for another personal consideration: my sister. Only one year older than me, she was always with me on the journey through childhood and adolescence, riding our tricycles around the neighbourhood, swapping secrets in a sleeping bag, getting high on Red Lebanese and watching Disney animations.

We both remember going to a David Bowie concert in Paris, and laughing our heads off at a lyric sheet we found on the way. Rebel, rebel, you've got your mother in a world, She's not sure if you're a boy or a girl, Hay babe, your air's alight ... And I remember standing on our parents bed, singing a long drawn-out version of “MacArthur Park,” laughing hysterically at how it went on forever, like the end of the lines that we sung that went on forever until we exploded in laughter again.

In my last year of high school, I drifted toward Hinduism and Daoism and more hallucinogens, awe-struck by the floating uncertainty of it all. My sister, on the other hand, went to university and became an evangelical Christian. She found the Way just when I heard about the Dao, which is a Way that has no way.

My sister’s Christianity has nothing in common with the lewd Bible-thumpers of my unfortunate camp experience. If everyone was as loving and down-to-earth as she is, the United Nations of Religion would hold potlucks in the backyard, children would dance around the Springs of Paradise, and there would be fragrant rack of lamb and glistening bottles of Stella Artois.

My problem isn’t with my sister or with all the open, loving people of every religion. If only that kind of love could conquer all. Omnia vincit amor. Inshallah. Om shanti Om. As Earth as it is in Heaven. Rather, my problem is with the theological exclusion still advocated by many religious leaders, thinkers, and practitioners: namely, that in order to be truly worthy, and in order for you to be eligible for eternal life, you must subscribe to the notion of belief. They tell you, directly or indirectly, that you cannot get the wisdom and comfort of the great religions without believing in their particular take on existence. You must choose their truth, and write it with the capital T. Sincere and tolerant believers either have to ignore this or go around it somehow. 

This is easier in some religions than others. In Hinduism, you can always believe in a different god or a different version of reality, given that Hinduism has six major philosophies and innumerable sects. Yet the distinction between enlightened and unenlightened can create stifling boundaries, and the ubiquity of caste creates profound exclusion. Caste hierarchy operates on the level of the society and also on the level of the individual psyche, as one person is made to feel essentially inferior to another. The internal tensions that caste hierarchy creates is powerfully dramatized in Mulk Raj Anand’s 1935 novel Untouchable and in Premchand’s 1931 short story “Deliverance.” One can imagine the low-caste or untouchable person yearning to be treated equally and to be respected for who they are, rather than for the caste into which they were born. One might even imagine them yearning for the equality of a Quaker meeting!

In Buddhism and Daoism, caste isn’t an issue, and the very notion of an ineffable higher Reality (like that of Hinduism’s Brahman) opens up the theology to a large degree. Yet all the main Eastern religions — Hinduism, Buddhism, and Daoism — are rife with superstition, which can put the individual seeker under the sway of nebulous and supposedly spiritual forces.

The problem of exclusion is different in the Western or Abrahamic religions, since it’s mostly a matter of larger exclusionary divisions between religions themselves. I’ve gone over the notion of the one true faith in Abraham's Vice, Agora Phobia, Currents of Christianity, and Selective Grace, yet here I will simply note that theological exclusion is especially problematic in Christianity, since it’s a religion that prides itself on unconditional love and on overturning the wrath of a jealous Old Testament God.

If Christianity is about love, why do so many Christians put conditions on this love? Why do they say we must believe exactly what they believe in order to be loved? Why do they even talk about the elect or the saved? Saved from what? God? If God is about love, and God is all powerful, then love should conquer all, including the happenstance of climate, language — and belief system itself.

It seems to me that the root of this problem is that for almost two thousand years, Christians have made the categorical error of making belief a condition for redemption. This creates a caste more intransigent than brahmins and sets up an exclusivity in which love, the finest spiritual love, becomes a function of belief. 

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