Saints and I go way back. I used to read volumes of "Lives of the Saints". They were my fairy tales. Right now I might be able to write a book on the significance of such tales being held up as ideals for young people. I am no friend of the Catholic Church. And after at least two significant and profound transformations in my life, my view of religions and what it is has also changed radically. Not by choice, as I was at one time an enthusiastically proselytizing Catholic, but by the necessity of inner experiences and, now, decades of studying religion and philosophy structurally and as phenomenology. I'm kind of in the same position now as I am when asked to critique artwork. My first question is always "Do you want me to tell you what I see, or to tell you I like it?" The conversation about religion then becomes an exercise in determining what can be said that is kind and good, as distinct from stating what is, by all measures I can find to apply, true. This is especially tricky when talking with someone who is "inside" a religion, whichever it might be, as distinct from someone who is distant enough to see religion as such as a phenomenon, and it's astoundingly numerous varieties as curiosities of variations on a theme.
Yet believers are seriously sincere. And the good of that must be respected. What I find curious is that it's exceptionally difficult to abstract the idea of simple good, the kind we universally extend to each other familially, filallay, ane fraternally, from the vast and different and even in-one-stream of belief contradictory accountings and attributions as to why and how we are what we seem to be. This is why I choose to go with Universals rather than an organization. And that's sad in a way.
For instance. My next oldest sibling, a sister, converted from Catholicism to LDS. She is, perhaps, one of the most saintly people I know, and other than her accounting of religious attributions for many things which don't need such, is also remarkably reasonable and rational, and genuinely open-minded. Except in the particulars of her faith as to how things work "behind the scenes", and of course, as a kind of christianist, regarding the idea of a personal God as part of what can only be called, in that faith, a hyper-personal relationship.
As far as a social structure is concerned, I'd become a Mormon in a minute! As far as theological attribution, my conscience won't allow that, as I'd be a flaming hypocrite if I joined. Similarly with other organizations which do actual material good. It's the (how do I blend the words "theology" and "psychology"?) gestalt of real-world functionality and the literally tens of thousands of variations of attribution stories. To simplify, I will give someone a glass of cold water or a dollar, or help them change a tire without attributing it to anything more complicated than the Golden Rule of "Women and Children First" ALL civilized and civilizing behavior can be extracted and projected from those, without speculation as to the structure of an invisible kingdom and reward system, as especially, for me, all full and necessary reward is in the moment. One way or another.
So, sadly, I have to agree with Krishnamurti when he said that “When you call yourself an Indian or a Muslim or a Christian or a European, or anything else, you are being violent. Do you see why it is violent? Because you are separating yourself from the rest of mankind. When you separate yourself by belief, by nationality, by tradition, it breeds violence. So a man who is seeking to understand violence does not belong to any country, to any religion, to any political party or partial system; he is concerned with the total understanding of mankind.”
If I give someone a glass of water because they are thirsty, I am recognizing our essential unity. If I give it as a Christian, or anything else, I have created a division for no valid reason other than my need for assuaging my sense of lack of explanation, for which I need none, other than that someone was thirsty and it pleases me to aid in relieving that if I can. If there is a higher "person", as there likely is, as I can't' imagine we are the highest stage in evolution, it's difficult for me to believe that they care what I do. That impartiality as to outcome, in fact, is the hallmark of those we call "enlightened", as well as diplomats. And if the Universe as such is Conscious, it is doubtful it is so as a person. All indications point to an interest in nothing more than a magnificent and eternal explosion of experience--any experience and ALL experience without reservation or judgment or reward. It simply IS. And looking at the Hubble Deep Field photos, and considering the enormity of our Space, that seems more likely than an origin story thousands of years old from a speck just barely visible even from Mars, as we know.
Too often God is a measure of our insecurity and a lack of submission to simple and sheer utter personally debilitating Wonder,* and somehow, an inadvertence to our own actual Nature before our programing by experience and the imposition of memes on our minds. But who has experienced their mind without thought? It's a good trick, if you can do it. But it is fabulously revelatory if you can. An analogy would be the carrier wave of a broadcast channel. We are aware of it because it's modulated. An unmodulated carrier wave is perceived simply as silence on a radio, and a blank screen on a monitor. This carrier wave can be modulated to produce any sound of image. Any. It's that simple. When you know that you are that carrier wave, in essence, and that your thoughts are necessary modulations due to environment, impositions, and inculcations, it all changes. It's all the same, and all-new, in that "you" now understand that it's totally a construct. And you take it up each morning as "my body and my life". You, as awareness, as the Witness, are always already there to see "yourself" wake up.
In that understanding, you cannot see others as essentially different from yourself. You functionally, as far as your deep training allows, become the living Golden Rue, because why in the name of yourself would you harm yourself, and why wouldn't you want to do good for yourself no matter what that other carrier wave manifestation calls itself or looks like? Thus a "Person" which may have been worshiped as an external is seen as BEing itself, not separate, the substrate and substance of ALL THERE IS.
* This may be why, on "enlightenment", whatever that is, the experiencer wanders around blank, or sits, like Eckhart Tolle, on a bench for two years, while the brain re-wires. But even then there are problems with language and beliefs, and the change doesn't stop.
