Who’s to Say What is ‘Sacred’?
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 are today. That clearance was the second most valuable benefit I derived from my divinity school experience. The most valuable benefit was the discovery, 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 an integrated and complex 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, for example, 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 for saving 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?
In an article entitled “What Does it Mean to be Religious?” Dr. Clinton Lee Scott, a Universalist Minister, wrote, and I 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 one way of human experience. Truths are derived from the experience of men and women living not apart from the world (not cloistered away), but within it, with all the temptations, problems, and perplexities of the daily round of human relations. It is in this round of the common everyday life that to many of us religion must have meaning, if it is to have any meaning at all. Not in formal observances, not in creeds or doctrines, however long ago proclaimed, but in the lives we live, in the home, in the community, and in the world, is the religious way of life to be found.”
Filed under: Earth and Life, quality of life, religion, sustainability
