Religion's Fatal Flaw

To look outside yourself for validation is to compromise your integrity 

Epictetus

 

 Religion has a fatal flaw: it substitutes attachment for love. And by doing so, it rewires our perceptions of good and evil, transforming violence into a sacred act of pure love.

 Real love is unconditional, and says “I want you to be whoever makes you happy,” but attachment is love’s near-enemy and sugar equivalent, and says “I want you to be whoever makes me happy.” The altruism of one allows our self-worth to rise in tandem with our freedom to be authentic; while the narcissism of the other leads us to measure our self-worth by the approval of others (who are often also narcissists). One invites us to find our true selves, and the other promises to “save” us from being rejected, but only if we “believe” in the “truth” brand of the tribe we wish to join. One fosters independence that allows for genuine connection with others and the self-confidence to develop healthy boundaries against those who judge us, the other impairs the development of the self-confidence necessary for developing healthy boundaries by fostering dependence on conditional connections to (and even an emotional preference for) those who judge us.  

Of these two, real love nourishes our creativity to blossom into a diversity of perspectives, while attachment is constrictive. It uses our fear of rejection to herd our creativity toward group-think, rewarding us with the feeling of belonging through conformity. One recognizes how our perspectives can be uniquely different, while the other sees those differences – or more specifically “feels” those differences - as a threat to group cohesion that needs to be “corrected.”

 Here’s the problem.

We live in an information age in which we are exposed to more information in a single day than people in the fifteenth century encountered over their entire life. In such an environment, the same creative capacity that is our greatest asset for scientific understanding inevitably leads to a plurality of perspectives, like the many different colored leaves of a single tree in autumn. Such a capacity is also our biggest liability, however, when the glue being relied on to hold society together are binary black-and-white religious perspectives that even religious people themselves have never been able to agree on.

Like a victim of the Spanish Inquisitions strapped to that medieval torture device called “the rack,” the new perspectives offered by science pull society in the opposite direction from the old perspectives offered by religion. With the growth and awareness of scientific knowledge comes greater uncertainty. That uncertainty creates a longing for the security blanket of simplicity found in old ideas and perspective, and hope the latter will save us from the former. In such a milieu, religious trauma can butterfly-effect from attachment to fascism. And it all starts with how our brains begin to process and store information.

 To illustrate, notice how these different perspectives can lead to opposite interpretations of essentially the same story. When looked at through the lenses of science or religion, both offer an understanding about human nature, but one lens is more factual and the other more metaphorical.  One is consistent in what it defines as wrong, the other consistent only in why something is wrong. Here’s how.

Have you ever seen “The Shining” by Stanley Kubrick? It’s a story about a man named Jack Torrance who takes his family into the mountains and tries to kill them. For most, it is a simple story about an alcoholic father driven to murder either by forces of supernatural evil or insanity or both. Metaphorically, however, our limitless creativity allows us to interpret the film to be about anything we are creative enough to read into it. Interpretations range from fake moon landings and allusions to Native American genocide, to the retelling of ancient myths like Theseus and the Minotaur, to being about hell, the devil, or Jesus Christ. The trick is having the courage to use our creativity with the reckless abandon of a child.

Like the telephone game, to see how creativity can become flesh, imagine traveling 4000 years into the future. There, you discover that 2.37 billion people around the world all claim the story of Jack Torrance is as an act of pure love for the voice Jack hears,  even though there are over 40,000 different interpretative ‘brands’ of that ‘love story’ (and growing).  Of those different interpretations, each brand claims it alone offers the one “true” meaning behind the story. In fact, the story is even the cornerstone of the world’s largest religions, even as its’ followers persecute anyone (including each other) who deviates from the “true” meaning each brand of that religion proclaims, with all of them holding up Jack Torrance as a moral saint to be emulated (even as they deny they are doing just that by persecuting each other for their different interpretations).

 Does this sound familiar? Or like pure sci-fi that could never happen in a million years?  

If so, travel back in time 4000 years, and there you’ll find a similar story to that of Jack Torrance.  And for 2.365 billion people around the world today, that story not only lays the cornerstone of their morality, meaning, and religious belief, it explains why the universe, and everything in it, exists at all! The difference is that, in the older version, the role of Jack Torrance is played by a man named Abraham, and the son he is told to kill “by a voice more powerful than his own” is named Isaac. While the newer version is seen as an act of insanity or demonic possession, the older version is seen as an act of love for God – a God who eventually enacts a plan to kill his own son; and all to forgive us for how freely we choose to use our “free will;” especially when it comes to sex.  

All of this raises a crucial question about what it means to be human: How is it possible that the same act of attempted murder, of a son by a father, can be seen in such completely different ways?  

 If a war of ideas exists between science and religion, understanding this difference is ground zero.  While the former answers with the pen offering new insights and understandings about human nature, the latter uses the written word to justify answering with the sword, again and again, to defend one lone interpretation of the story as sacred, and all others as therefore blasphemous. One illustrates our infinite capacity for different perspectives, while the other condemns those capacities as “evil” whenever they’re used to redefine the most abstract word imaginable: God. And although the names for this word have always changed, the violence we engage in for the “gods” we define in any infinite number of ways, remains as sacred as it ever was.

So why are there such different perspectives of this story, and why do we “believe” one like a “sacred” fact, and doubt the other as insane? Answer: because of how often facts give birth to metaphors like soil sprouts vegetation, and what both tell us about human nature.

As mentioned, the two versions of the story can be viewed through the lens of science or religion.  With the former, both Abraham and Jack Torrance look equally insane. With the latter, Abraham looks like a saint while Jack looks like a sinner. And both are said to have “free will,” even though both operate like hand puppets for the “voice” they hear. And we are all expected to know the difference. How? By using the same creative spark children rely on to believe in Santa Claus and the boogeyman. Why? For the same reason we believe in Bigfoot, or aliens, or ghosts: because it replaces the dullness of life with something more magical.

And this is why it is important to distinguish factual from metaphorical meaning. In the Bible, for example, there are countless tales of “God’s chosen people” committing genocide at God’s behest. For Christians, such mass human sacrifice is as morally justified as Abraham obeying God’s command to sacrifice his son Isaac.  By transforming facts into metaphors, such acts of mass murder are transformed from evil to sacred, like turning water into wine. If we see ourselves as lowly foot soldiers in a cosmic war between forces of good and evil, being righteous means never disobeying a command from our heavenly father, and never questioning those commands. Even if a command requires us to engage in evil, we can always rest assured it is for the greater good, for as the saying goes, “everything serves the will of God.” To non-Christians, such acts are evil regardless of whether Jack is engaging in it for the devil or Abraham is engaging in it for Yahweh, or even if both are simply insane. Nor can it ever be justified as part of a larger plan, no matter how “divinely” mysterious the plan may be.

That plan, after all, provided the same justification for the burning of witches and heretics, and even the genocide of Native Americans, by European Christians. While the latter acted like Jack Torrance by treating the former like his son Danny, they justified it by telling themselves they were the descendants of Abraham simply doing what God had commanded him to do to Isaac, and to disobey such a command was the greatest “evil” of all.   

Why does simply noticing this difference fail to change the beliefs that lead to such actions? In part, because of how two different parts of our brain interpret information, and how each stores experiences in two different memory systems: one conscious and the other unconscious. If the Abrahamic version of the story is stored in our conscious mind as a sacred narrative-recall, the horrors of the other version are written into our unconscious mind, which includes our nervous system, in the form of trauma. And next time, we begin to explore how the seeds of such stories constitute the religious trauma that serves to rewire our nervous systems by turning our dual memory systems into the Hatfields and McCoys.