What in the Everloving F*** is Going On?

I used to be quite religious in my youth. But I grew up - or so I thought. I’m now wondering whether the rejection of some aspects of belief in a “higher power” might have been a mistake. Indeed, if you’re trying to get yourself straightened out and battling addiction a key component of a 12 step program is to surrender yourself to, have ‘faith’ in, a higher power. What that higher power is isn’t specified - but there’s obviously something about the process involved in this surrender, or faith, that is beneficial.

I’m still no defender of religion - a lot of it seems bonkers to me. If there is a ‘God’ then our ideas about God cannot be, almost by definition, anything but totally inadequate. What kind of God do we imagine when we hear statements along the lines that “unbelievers will go to hell”? I really don’t think the Great Creator of the Universe, if He/She/It exists at all, will turn out to be some narcissistic and psychopathic whack job who wants to fry people for all eternity for the mere crime of disbelief.

Sounds all a bit covid-propagandery to me where those who “disbelieved” were treated very badly.

Then we also have the weird and wonderful beliefs themselves. In Islam, for example, some Muslims believe that God wants us to enter the bathroom with our left foot and exit with the right foot. I’m sure the author of the cosmos, the arranger of the sublime dance of atomic potentialities at the quantum level, stays up all night getting his divine knickers in a twist over whether people are going for a number 2 on the wrong foot. And what if you’re caught short in the woods? Do you have to remember which foot you walked into the forest with?

I don’t want to single Islam out for special treatment because these kinds of weird ‘rules’ and ideas exist in all religions, and religious scholars seem to have spent a baffling amount of time thinking about stuff like this.

The best answer to some of this apparent nonsense I ever got was from an orthodox Jew. I was chatting to him over lunch at a conference. He was a really smart guy and I put it to him that, surely, God wasn’t really interested in all of these crazy rituals. He said something along the lines of : Of course not. These rituals are meaningless in themselves. They exist as a daily reminder to keep God front and centre in everything we do.

That’s an answer I can live with.

The religious will bemoan the apparent godlessness that is evident in society today. I’m beginning to think they might have a point. Putting a “higher power” front and centre, whatever you conceive that higher power to be, might have some purpose after all.

The ‘surrendering’ to a higher power is, in some sense, a recognition that you’re not really all that special. It’s a kind of abnegation of identity, an understanding that to some extent it, really, isn’t about YOU as an entity - but more about your relationship with things that are not you.

Yet identity, and the seemingly endless quest for some kind of identity, appears to be something of a current trend. Defining oneself by what you choose to do with your naughty bits is such a bizarre and empty thing. Defining yourself, for example, as a woman based on how much you feel you match up with some notional and subjective set of stereotypical behavioural traits associated with women is similarly odd.

Narcissism and self-absorption seem to be par for the course these days. Surrendering to a “higher power” is the exact opposite of that.

The Semitic languages have a fascinating structure where words are based around ‘root’ words. Not being very good at languages I never really did get to the bottom of it. The word ‘Muslim’, for instance, has slm as its root. It can be translated as “a slave of God”. But that bare and stark translation only captures a fraction of what the word ‘Muslim’ points to. When you add in a wider understanding based on the root slm you can equally translate the word as “someone who surrenders to God in order to be made whole”.

And what about Buddhism where a sense of self is definitely seen as an obstacle and merely an illusion?

The astute here will point out that this notion of “surrender” is also based on feelings. Yet perhaps some feelings can be said to be more constructive and healing than others. I don’t know, but with something of a twinkle in my eye I might say that I feel some feelings are better than others.

The images in the picture above are representative of this trend towards putting oneself at the centre of everything - the opposite of surrender to a higher power. They may be trying to convey a message in some sort of shocking way, but they’re really not primarily about the message at all. They’re about the people giving the message. They’re using a message, whatever that message is, as a vehicle to promote themselves.

Look at how much I care about this issue is the main message I get from these kinds of public demonstrations.

It’s not a word you hear a lot these days, but I wonder where our sense of dignity has gone? Of course, like the danger of piety in religion, dignity can become mistaken with a kind of po-faced sanctimonious attitude.

If you’ve ever met a truly ‘holy’ person, and I met some back in my questioning days, they seem to shine with an inner light (sorry, that’s about the best I can describe it). They also seem to have a great deal of joy and humour and are the least po-faced and pious individuals you can imagine. They are not ‘dignified’ but one might say they are super-spreaders of dignity.

I’m not sure what the folk in these demonstrations represented in the pictures are spreading, but it certainly isn’t dignity.

I’m off now - to go to pray to, you know, the thing.

---