What is Religion?
Posted: May 15, 2021
By: Phoenix Giardino
(image courtesy of morguefile.com)
A Priest, a Rabbi and a Minister walked into their favorite bar, where they would get together two or three times a week for drinks and to talk. On this particular afternoon, someone made the comment that preaching to people isn't really all that hard. A real challenge would be to preach to a bear.
After discussing this amongst themselves, they decided to do an experiment. They would all go out into the woods, find a bear, preach to it, and attempt to convert it. Seven days later, they're all together to discuss the experience.
The Priest, who has his arm in a sling, is on crutches, and has various bandages, goes first. "Well," he says, "I went into the woods to find me a bear. And when I found him, I began to read to him from the Catechism. Well, that bear wanted nothing to do with me and began to slap me around. So, I quickly grabbed my holy water, sprinkled him and, Holy Mary Mother of God, he became as gentle a lamb. The bishop is coming out next week to give him first communion and confirmation."
The Minister spoke next. He was in a wheelchair, with an arm and both legs in casts, and an IV drip. In his best fire and brimstone oratory he claimed, “Well brothers, you know that we don't sprinkle! I went out and I found me a bear. And then I began to read to my bear from God's Holy word! But that bear wanted nothing to do with me. So, I took hold of him and we began to wrestle. We wrestled down one hill, up another and down another until we came to a creek. So, I quick dunked him and baptized his hairy soul. And just like you said, he became as gentle as a lamb. We spent the rest of the day praising Jesus."
They both looked down at the rabbi, who was lying in a hospital bed. He was in a body cast and traction with IV's and monitors running in and out of him. He was in bad shape.
The rabbi looks up and says, "Looking back on it, circumcision may not have been the best way to start."
Do you know what makes a joke “funny”? There’s at least a little truth in it. However, my grandfather, a Baptist minister now retired, honestly will not--by any stretch of the imagination--find the opening joke “funny”. Shameful? Yes. Humorous? No. From his perspective, a fate far worse than my twisted sense of humor lies in the fact I converted to Buddhism at the tender age of 16.
As a budding scientist, I firmly believed everything physical on this planet—from rocks to human beings—are unique arrangements of compressed energy. Just important as our physical forms, our thoughts and emotions are likewise energy, and it stands to reason so are our very souls. Based upon the laws of physics, energy can neither be created nor destroyed, only changed from one state to another. Therefore, it seemed logical to me that when our physical bodies expire, the outcome for our life force (soul) wouldn’t be retirement, but recycling.
The very moment I discovered the concept of reincarnation in my Global I course, I dropped Christianity like a bad date and immediately hooked up with Buddhism, no rebound needed. Ironically, at 27, as I searched for the Buddhist “bible”, I stumbled upon a book of Zen by Osho—and I dumped all religions faster than last night’s trash.
“I call Zen the only living religion because it is not a religion, but only a religiousness. It has no dogma; it does not depend on any founder. It has no past; in fact, it has nothing to teach you. It is the strangest thing that has happened in the whole history of mankind -- strangest because it enjoys in emptiness; it blossoms in nothingness. It is fulfilled in innocence, in not knowing. It does not discriminate between the mundane and the sacred. For it, all that is, is sacred.
Life is sacred whatever form, whatever shape. Wherever there is something living and alive, it is sacred.” --Osho1
The mission of religion is to unify a group of people under a single set of values and principles to enable them to connect, both individually and collectively, with a Higher Power and/or philosophy separate from ourselves. And this is a problem, why? Because it tells us the truth but doesn’t show us the way. It imposes divine rules interpreted by human minds and replaces authentic experiences with mindless rituals. It creates a black and white vision of our technicolor world and divides our humanity on the basis of divine philosophy. Skeptical? What about the “shameful” joke I told at the beginning of this post? What about it made it so “shameful”? That I teased Christians and Jews alike about their obvious religious rituals? Or that I had the audacity to make light of something so sacred as religion in general?
The Crusades
(image courtesy of morguefile.com)
Pick a religion—ANY religion--and you will find rather than encouraging us to explore the urgings of our own soul, all religions specify we must rely upon the outside advice of their beliefs, all of which limit the perception we are in control our own lives. By focusing on an external force that judges our choices, thoughts, and actions, religions insist we will be punished when we fail to live up to their prescribed religious convictions. And if we don’t subscribe to the ideology of the judges, we are considered infidels often not worthy of conversion; sometimes better dead than alive.
Snub my statement if you like, but let me ask you a couple of questions: Remember the Crusades? And what about the Inquisitions? Historians estimate between 1095 and 1291 A.D., up to 9 million people lost their lives—simply because they placed their faith in the wrong prophet, no matter which prophet they followed.2 And from 1184 and 1826, The Catholic Church didn’t simply kill you for heresy, they burned you alive at the stake for opposing The Doctrine3. Case in point: Nicolaus Copernicus, the famed astronomer who brought us the truth the sun doesn’t revolve around the earth and isn’t the center of our universe, didn’t publish this knowledge until he was on his deathbed. Afterall, it’s hard to hang a man for treason after he’s already dead and buried. However, fifty-seven years later, a well-meaning but less than fortunate monk by the name of Giordano Bruno who openly agreed with Copernicus, met his end via a flaming stake courtesy of the Catholic Church.4
Contemplating my perhaps less than admirable beginning to this post, the words of the now wise Rabbi float through my ego: “Looking back at, circumcision may not have been the best way to start.” Seconding his motion, I raise my hand to delete this perhaps poorly thought-out gesture. Just as I’m about to hit ‘delete’, the disembodied voice of Barbara Johnson replaces that of the wise, yet fictional Rabbi: “The brook would lose its song if God removed the rocks.”
With a smile upon my face, a twinkle in my eye, and a belly washer of a laugh, I send my gratitude to the Universe for this spiritual guidance (we’ll dive head-first into spirituality in the next post). “So, a Priest, a Preacher, and a Rabbi walk into a bar…”
NEXT UP:
1. Osho. Osho Quotes on Zen Osho on Zen. https://www.messagefrommasters.com. Retrieved April 30, 2021.
2. History.com “Crusades” Published June 7, 2010. Updated February 21, 2020. https://www.history.com/topics/middle-ages/crusades
3. History.com “The Catholic Inquisition”. Published: . https://www.history.com/the-catholic-inquisitions
4. Lipton, Bruce H. The Biology of Belief, Tenth Anniversary Edition. United States: Hay House, Inc. 2015, (205).
