Classic conflict exists in life, art, politics and religion

Religion is like politics and art.

Conservatives and liberals feud about government. Realists and abstractionists feud over styles of painting. Authoritarian religion (think of the pope) feuds with free worship (think pagans).

I’m simplifying and over-generalizing, of course, to make a point. Which is just that religion, like art and politics, always struggles with the issue of freedom versus control. It’s the classic conflict between authority-driven rule of belief versus personal, private, unmediated freedom of worship.

This, of course, is the central question in civilized society: How much freedom do we allow and how much restraint do we need? The two tendencies are generally in conflict, generally unbalanced, and generally cussed up.

This being football season, let me explain it this way: In Western religions, at least, control won. Game over. Dogma gets the Rose Bowl; mysticism, Boise State and the Who Cares Bowl. (Or maybe the national championship game, this year.)

Some like me still refuse to believe it, fighting a rear-guard action, likely doomed. Oh, well. I’m so used to defeat that I hardly even notice: “Once more into the breach.”

What to do, what to do? Where’s the meeting ground? Let’s look at the turf.

As I see it, dogma, creed, and belief are the domain of institutional religious practice, whereas mysticism goes for pure experience, or gnosis.

Faith, it seems to me, is the town hall get-together. I call faith the insight or meaning attached to a spiritual apprehension.

Not everyone is able, or even wants to, give up God. So there are those who engage in a religious practice, not of belief but experience, but then choose to attach the experience to a belief. To a referent.

And they view this referent, this something, through the lens of belief that their religious system provides.

It is often automatic, this equation of faith with belief, hence the reason the two are so often conflated, i.e., made to be one and the same. But belief alone lacks faith and certainly gnosis.

I’ll say that some reach up through belief into experience, and then use faith to balance the two. They trust God – i.e., are faithful – because their experience provides an insight, an understanding, a meaning. But they also believe because they attach this insight to an institution, the religion that they are most comfortable with.

This is the best I can do to find the common ground in styles and modes of religion.

At one end of the spectrum there are those whose practice involves so much rigid belief that they can only see one way, one right way, one true way, one God. All in capitals and exclamation marks: Jesus! Allah! These are the religionists of belief.

On the other end, then, are the religionists of nonbelief. (Not unbelief, which is neither believing nor disbelieving, but simply experiencing.) They deny the validity of any religious experience and call it all a crock.

Yes, they include atheists and nonbelievers of various stripes, but not all atheists are nonbelievers. Some are unbelievers, who see no need for a theistic God, and whose conception of reality may or may not be “religious” at all.

I’m of this camp, and so I call myself not a “deeply religious nonbeliever,” as Einstein so aptly put it, but rather a religious unbeliever.

And not religious at all, in the institutional sense; the sooner all that collapses the better. Down with dogma! Including my own. Words, words, words, so much confusion over words.

There are things that cannot be put into words. As Wittgenstein said, “They make themselves manifest.” They are the mystical. Or so I think.

But, as I always remind myself, I may be wrong.