Deconstructing Religion

I have to admit, one of my main motivations in creating this blog was to provide a host for this, my attempt to deconstruct religion. (And because I refuse to toss around poorly understood and hazily defined words, I feel obliged to tell you that by deconstruction I mostly just mean an attempt to call into question oppositions and rigid distinctions).

Because one of my underlying assumptions is that we use words to separate ourselves from others, and that this 'othering' process helps us construct a secure sense of identity. We define ourselves as different — even the opposite — of a group of people who possess a characteristic that we dislike. Often our characterization is a little suspect, (if not blatantly inaccurate) and it says more about who we would like to be than it does about who they are.

For example, gender identity is almost meaningless without a contrasting, 'opposite sex,' in spite of the fact that every gender sterotype is just that — a stereotype so riddled with 'exceptions' that it's more lie than truth. Similarly, the Canadian colonies confederated largely to prevent themselves from being gobbled up by their neighbour to the south, and 'not-American' has remained the only concrete element of what is a pretty amorphous and elusive identity. (And that's in spite of the fact there's relatively little separating us. To pick on a few things we see as uniquely Canadian, the US prides itself on its multiculturalism these days, generally does a better job of protecting the environment than Canada, and has a government that pays 30% of health care costs -- our 'universal' healthcare system pays 70%).

Meanwhile, religious people often think of nonbelievers as sinful and sex-obsessed. Quite a few atheists seem to think that since religious people believe in things they can't prove, they're all irrational and incapable of thinking independently. But as my favourite dead French Christian anarchist writer (ok, so there's not a lot of them around) once wrote, ""The fact is it is much easier to judge faults according to an established morality [or classificatory scheme] than to view people as living wholes and to understand why they act as they do." (Jacques Ellul, Christianity and Anarchy, p.7)

Everyone wants to think that they're totally unique and different, (un-labell-able, if you will, even as we're constantly labelling others for convenience sake). A lot of it is our unhealthy cult of the individual, but there is something natural and understandable about this impulse. As William James said, "Probably a crab would be filled with a sense of personal outrage if it could hear us class it without ado or apology as a crustacean, and thus dispose of it. 'I am no such thing,' it would say, 'I am myself, myself alone." (Way back in the 1929 Modern Library edition of The Varieties of Religious Experience, p.10).

All religions are not one, and neither are all humans. What I've written isn't an attempt to wish away real difference, just an invitation to realize that we may have more in common than we originally thought. (This has got to be one of the great challenges we presently face — how to acknowledge and make room for difference without letting the poison of 'othering', denigration, factionalism, and conflict seep in. 'Tolerance' might be a good, but 'understanding' and 'respecting' is better. And one of my assumptions — and deeply held beliefs — is that if we truly understand something or someone, respect will automatically flow out from that. I think one of the simplest ways this works is that as we begin to understand others, we actually start realizing they aren't quite as different as we originally thought. It's not just about 'doing unto others,' it's about 'seeing ourselves in others,' and vice versa.)

It's also an attempt to think about a very charged word that we toss around all the time. Surely, 'religion' is a very important word, denoting a very important 'thing,' but after all what is religion? What does it mean to be a religious person in a secular society? A spiritual person in a world that doesn't believe in spirit? Why should a secular world care about this weird little thing called 'religion', about these fantasies of some sort of 'spirit?'

Part 1 - The Sacred (AKA Understanding Religion -- The Divine Play)
Part 2 - The Spiritual (AKA Holy Holism, Batman! The Breath of Spirit)
Part 3 - The Secular (AKA Now Where Did We Go Wrong? A Geneology of the Super-Natural)
A Personal Note (To be read before or after the other parts -- or not at all)
An Attempt at a Summary (ditto)