Maybe There isn't Religion?

Ya, that is a controversial title.  This goes back to my days as a Religious Studies major, and the perennial problem of how to difine "religion" in general.  This comes up now as Reconciler and Mitziut had a Theology on Tap together and are coming together to celebrate Shavuot/Pentecost.

As we sat around a bonfire and talked about God,I had the distinct experience that there was no thing called religion that we could say we held together.  We were all perhaps religious (or in our current terms spiritual) but there wasn't either spirituality or religion in general, only the particular or positive instances of religion or spirituality.

This experience is potentially (as experience tends to be) mediated by my training in Religious Studies: At least in the early 1990's the discipline of Religious Studies questioned not the phenomenon of religious acts or religious, but found an overarching definition, or singular origin of these phenomena to be problematic and under question. It was an open question, but put from a phenomenological bias.  That is if there was an underlying unity of the religious it needed to be shown through the phenomena,  that is the particular manifestations of our subject of Study.  Most of my professors and most of the text books we were assigned were concluding there was no such phenomenological unity of religious phenomena.   The positive instances of religion could not be united except in abstract definition that failed to account for all positive instances of the phenomena.  Accounting for Religion either was so broad as to simply include all forms of human activity or too narrow so as to exclude a positive instance.

A particular instance of this problem of definition of religion resides in one meaning of the latin religio: devotion to the gods. If one posits as a general definition and unity of all religion a belief in a deity or deities, one runs into problems, in at least two instances. The first particular instance is certain forms of Buddhism particular Chan or Zen Buddhism for whom the ultimate reality isn't a deity per se. One can perhaps stretch the definition of deity in such a way so as to include the Chan Buddhist understanding of ultimate reality, but that can strain the definition of god or deity. At the other end are certain forms of animism which treat all things as inspirited but don't even have an overarching ultimate unified reality or over-spirit. This is just one part of possible definition and understanding of a general unity of religion.

Yet, religio also had to do with a binding, of binding oneself or being bound to something. What I experienced around the campfire and talking about God was more along this line. For those of us there our understanding of God was bounded by our commitments, and we were committed to God in particular and differing ways.

This is then possibly also a meditation oriented around a Christian perspective. Christianity was first called the Way. A particular path to which one was bound, and from which one would not deviate.

My thought here is that even in coming together even in attempting to speak together about God, what was most evident to me was the difference in our paths, and the ways in which we were bound. There are and were differences that simply cannot be ignored, the differences aren't what is in the way of our unity, we obliterate the difference and we have nothing around which to unify, in our differences we can come together and together talk about God, but in that activity our differing ways of being "religious" or "spiritual" are heightened, and there is no common thing we share beyond the particular instantiations of our spirituality and religious beliefs and practices.

I am coming to think the the problem of the definition of religion, is that there is no religion as such that exist universally apart from its particular instances. There is then no basis for a unity of religions and/or spirituality. We are stuck with our differences.

A quite day for the Rapture

Here in Chicago this 21st of May 2011, has been overcast with rain showers. Not enough rain to keep people indoors but enough to need an umbrella on hand and serve as a blanket of quiet and calm.  Well this may be my perception. Overcast gloomy days generally leave me with a feeling of melancholic contentment.   So this day has been a mellow day: made breakfast for the community and we had our meeting, then worked on the base drawings for some icons and then ran some errands.  Now sitting here at the computer writing this post.  As I check the news on the internet it seems like a fairly quiet and uneventful news day.  World events don't seem to be providing Harold Camping, with an alternative explanation.  Yet, Jesus said the day would come like a thief in the night unexpectedly, perhaps even unnoticed, until some future moment of wakefulness.

It doesn't seem to me that Harold Camping's last prediction in 1994 made quite the same stir it did this time around.  But then a great dealt has changed in the intervening 17 years.  In 1994 evangelicals weren't yet taken seriously as a political power house.  We have come to fear minorities and the fringe elements of religious belief and practice.  I have been dismayed at the mockery, and in that mockery the seeming ignorance that even among those Christians who believe in the "Rapture" that Camping and his followers were alone in believing the prediction.  Or even aware that Christians who believe in the "Rapture" are themselves only a portion of the Christian landscape, and while in the US they may consider themselves the representatives of True Christianity,  if you look at the historic Christian faith, their opinions would be largely seen as heretical.   My point is that to some degree the attention paid, and the energy that has been spent on this prediction is disproportionate to the role this prediction and the underlying belief system plays in the 2000 or so years of Christian theology teaching and practice.

I find it fitting that this is a quiet day.  For those who aren't Christian who think this is a time to mock faith, realize Camping may share a belief system held by a significant proportion of American Christianity, but even his co-religionists did not accept his prediction.  You can mock if you will, and I have made a joke or two myself, but recognize that the vast majority of Christians were not expecting anything to happen today.  This in fact says very little about faith or religion, though it may say something about our human nature.  And as a Christian it is our fallible sinful escapist human nature that is the reason Christianity exists.  We humans need to be saved from ourselves and when we are convinced that we have it, and saved ourselves is the very moment we confront our need for salvation.  So, I caution anyone of us if we are feeling superior for our not believing.

On this quiet day remembering that Jesus says the ultimate things, the last things, the End, will come quietly like a thief, unknown and noticed until it is all over.  I lift up Camping and his follower's to God, and in humility quietly pass on.  I recommend we all do the same.

Beginning a New blog and other possible changes

I have been feeling that some changes need to take place here at Priestly Goth Blog.  The current shape of this blog is the third iteration of the Priestly Goth Blog.  I will continue posting here on various subjects of art culture, faith and things goth.  However, the new blog I am thinking will deal mainly with my thoughts on what it means to be church, and my searches and researches in ecclesiology.  I may move/repost some old blog posts that were first published here over at this new blog.  I am working on a name, that will reflect the subject of the blog and its connection to this blog and reflect that the reflections there are from the Priestly Goth.

I am thinking of using Word Press for this blog,  this could also mean moving this blog to a Word Press website. If anyone has any thoughts on these plans and changes for this blog and a new one, and having a website, I welcome your thoughts.