The Double Refuge ⏯ Systems

Exclusive Geographies

⏯

I'm a big fan of religions, yet I can’t stand the exclusion they create. My problem is a general one, deriving from human geography. In perhaps the biggest absurdity in history, humanity has divided itself into geographical groups that all claim a universal message. As if the Divine Powers sat around a table — in some etherial variant of the Berlin Conference where Europeans divvied up Africa in 1884-5 — we find Christians in Europe and the Americas, Hindus in India, Buddhists from Ladakh to Japan, and Muslims from Senegal to Indonesia.

Each religion promotes their own regional holy book, while at the same time maintaining that their religion is applicable to everyone, and that it gets at the true meaning of our earthly existence. Yet not everyone feels the presence of Jesus, understands God when He speaks in Arabic, or feels the universe vibrate with to the sound of AUM. In Star Trek aliens understand each other thanks to the universal translator. Yet even if such a thing existed, their translators would still point to Jerusalem or Mecca, Benares or Bodh Gaya. Not only does each religion promote its own holy book; each of these books has its own definition of the holy or enlightened reader. 

My problem is a general one, but also a personal one. First, I was brought up by liberal parents who encouraged their children to think independently. Second, I was brought up as a Protestant in the United Church of Canada, which is one of the most liberal churches in Christendom. Third — and here’s where the most personal part comes in — at the impressionable age of eleven I went to a supposedly Christian camp. Some of the counsellors abused the campers in between fervent appeals to accept Jesus. This left me disgusted, rebellious, and angry. My reaction was to start drinking, smoking pot, experimenting with hallucinogens, and listening to Led Zeppelin, Uriah Heep, Black Sabbath, Queen, etc.

I could have been happily rebellious in my world of magicians and wizards, Striders and Great King Rats, were it not for another personal consideration: my sister. Only one year older than me, she was always by my side during childhood and adolescence. We rode our tricycles around the neighbourhood, swapped secrets in a sleeping bag, got high on Red Lebanese, and watched Disney films in 5-D.

We both remember going to a David Bowie concert in Paris, and laughing our heads off at a lyric sheet we found on the way. Rebel, rebel, you've got your mother in a world, She's not sure if you're a boy or a girl, Hay babe, your air's alight ... And I remember standing on our parents bed, singing a long drawn-out version of “MacArthur Park,” laughing hysterically at how it went on forever, like the end of the lines that we sung that went on forever until we exploded in laughter again.

In my last year of high school, I drifted toward Hinduism and Daoism and more hallucinogens, in a sort of vortex of the swirling uncertainty of it all. My sister, on the other hand, went to university and became an evangelical Christian. She found her way just when I heard about the Dao, the Way that has no specific path.

My sister’s Christianity has nothing in common with the coercion and hypocrisy of my camp experience. If everyone was as loving and down-to-earth as my sister, the United Nations of Religion would hold potlucks in the backyard, children would dance around the Springs of Paradise, and there would be fragrant rack of lamb and glistening bottles of Stella Artois.

My problem isn’t with my sister or with all the open, loving people of every religion. If only that kind of love could conquer all. Omnia vincit amor. Inshallah. Om shanti Om. As Earth as it is in Heaven. Rather, my problem is with the theological exclusion still advocated by many religious leaders, thinkers, and practitioners: namely, that in order to be truly worthy, and in order for you to be eligible for eternal life, you must subscribe to a particular religious notion of belief. They tell you, directly or indirectly, that you cannot get the wisdom and comfort of the great religions without believing in their particular take on existence. You must choose their truth, and write it with the capital T. Tolerant, open theists have to ignore this or go around it somehow. 

This is easier in some religions than others. In Hinduism, you can always believe in a different god or a different version of reality, given that Hinduism has six major philosophies and innumerable sects. Yet the distinction between enlightened and unenlightened can create stifling boundaries, and the ubiquity of caste creates profound exclusions. Caste hierarchy operates on the level of the society and also on the level of the individual psyche, as one person is made to feel essentially superior or inferior to another. The internal tensions that caste hierarchy creates is powerfully dramatized in Mulk Raj Anand’s 1935 novel Untouchable and in Premchand’s 1931 short story “Deliverance.” One can imagine the low-caste or untouchable person yearning to be treated equally and to be respected for who they are, rather than for the caste into which they were born. One might even imagine them yearning for the equality of a Quaker meeting!

In Buddhism and Daoism, caste isn’t an issue, and the very notion of an ineffable higher Reality (like that of Hinduism’s Brahman) opens up the theology to a large degree. Yet all the main Eastern religions — Hinduism, Buddhism, and Daoism — are rife with superstition, which can put the individual seeker under the sway of nebulous and supposedly spiritual forces.

The problem of exclusion is different in the Western or Abrahamic religions, since it’s mostly a matter of larger exclusionary divisions between and within religions themselves. I’ve gone over the notion of the one true faith in Abraham's Vice, Agora Phobia, and Selective Grace, yet here I will simply note that theological exclusion is especially problematic in Christianity, since it’s a religion that prides itself on unconditional love and on overturning the wrath of a jealous Old Testament God.

If Christianity is about love, why do so many Christians put conditions on this love? Why do they say we must believe exactly what they believe in order to be loved? Why do they even talk about the elect or the saved? Saved from what? If God is about love, and God is all powerful, then love should conquer all, including the happenstance of climate, language, and belief system itself.

It seems to me that the root of this problem is that for almost two thousand years, Christians have made the categorical error of making belief a condition for redemption. This creates a caste more intransigent than brahmins, and it sets up an exclusivity in which love, the finest spiritual love, becomes a function of belief. As well as an instrument of division, exclusion, and distrust.

⏯

Next: Christianity 2.0

Back to Top

Contents - Detailed Contents - Core Beliefs - Overview