Religion and Selflessness

Religion and Selflessness In “Homo Religiosus,” Armstrong presents the idea that people need to believe in God to make sense of their own lives, to order their lives, and to give their lives meaning.  She argues that this is a very ancient idea and that people should be used to this need by now because it is not going away and is unlikely to ever go away.  Nelson suggests, however, that our consciousness is not necessarily linked to our desire or ability to “do better.”  Nelson points out how reality TV watchers find the horrific and the brutal to be “great to watch”—and she cites a number of examples to prove it:  from To Catch a Predator to Shattered and Unbreakable.  These programs show that people are no different from the days of the Gladiators:  they still want to watch others suffer and be tormented—it stimulates them and entertains them to see another human being going through some insane torment.  For that reason, it would be inappropriate to suggest that everyone is constructing a meaningful life for himself, or that just because we can imagine the idea of God or believe that God exists does not actually mean that we care to make that idea or reality a part of our daily lives.  Just as much as we are made comfortable by the fact of salvation does not mean we are likely to feel bad about watching person get waterboarded on television.  Thurman objects that religion without selflessness is really not much of a religion at all.  That seems to underscore Nelson’s point, which is that human beings can call themselves religious all they want, but if they are still indulging their depravity, their religion is not going to do them much good.

As Robert Thurmann notes, “One of the most significant changes you will notice upon discovering you selflessness is that your sense of being separate from everyone else has now eroded. Your new awareness enables you to perceive others as equal to yourself, a part you, even.

You can see yourself as they see you, and experience empathically how they perceive themselves as locked within themselves.”  Selflessness allows one to see others and to put their needs first.  This was essentially the example that Christ showed:  by putting the needs of others before His own, He showed we all might live.  Christ argued, moreover, that the two greatest commandments were to 1) love God, and 2) love your neighbor.  One cannot do either without selflessness.

Thus, the future direction of religion in our era is likely to consist of a tug of war between a kind of Happy-Meal type of religion in which one gets a serving of drive-thru, feel-good religion over coffee on Sunday mornings while catching up on the latest sports talk; and a more serious type of religion on the other hand in which one undergoes a kind of penitential commitment, a journey towards selflessness by way of self-denial and self-renunciation.  This tug of war is likely to continue for as long as the current trajectory of today’s consumerist culture continues—for it is that culture, Nelson suggests, that keeps everyone glued to their screens, anticipating the next outrageous, insane human act for their consumption.  Without any kind of mediating body, the tug of war over the future of religion in our era is also likely to end with either a bang or a whimper, as one side either becomes completely outraged at the other, or the one side simply resigns or despairs and gives up the struggle altogether.

Ritual violence has become so much a fixture of our popular culture because popular culture has for decades appealed to the lowest common denominator in the masses—the basest instincts and the most depraved aspects of humanity.  There is a side of humanity (humanity’s fallen nature, as the Old World religion defined it) that delights in the torture or misery of other human beings.  If it did not, the myriad number of reality TV shows on today would not be aired.  People may not still be going to the Coliseum to witness the brutalization of their fellow human being, but they can simply turn on the TV or the computer and hop on the Internet to get a real life dose of murder any time they want—whether it is the bombing of children going to school in Yemen, or the slaying of half a dozen people in one’s local community by a deranged person.  Violence appears to have become so utterly ritualized in our society as though the whole world were involved in human sacrifice—each week or each day tuning in at 6 o’clock in the evening to get one’s daily dose of human sacrifice.  This has a Satanic ring to it—a kind of inhumane and evil worship of the anti-God—celebrating the misery of others or even just accepting the horrors of our small and big towns as though it were something to give one’s attention to every day.   It may have something to do with the fact that people are not interested in their own lives enough to obtain stimulation or satisfaction, so they have to go where the drama is in order to feel alive.  They live in a low arousal state and thus have to turn to highly stimulating ritualistic violence on TV by watching a crime show in order to sleep at night.  It may also give them a sense of outrage that supports their own world view by way of reinforcement:  a TV viewer believes he is righteous and one of the elect and that the rest of the world is going to Hell.  He turns on the TV and TV confirms as much.  He reflects that he must be doing all right; after all, he has a house, a family, a dog, and a job.  He is on the straight and narrow and thus may feel good about the fact that God obviously loves him—otherwise, he would probably be being punished with all sorts of horrors and misery like what he sees on TV.  It is a type of reinforcement of the selfishness that some type of religious belief can foster.  It is not religion for the sake of betterment and drawing nearer to God but religion for the sake of feeling self-satisfied and okay about one’s place in life.

What we can learn about our unmet needs from the recent interest in meditation and the experience of selflessness is that clearly the type of thinking described above is not fulfilling:  people need more than to feel smugly self-satisfied.  The hole in themselves will continue to exist and ache until it is filled with a sense of God, as Armstrong appears to suggest.  To fill that whole and gain that sense, people turn towards meditation and selflessness, as both draw one out of oneself and move one either towards God or towards one’s neighbor—and both movements would enable one to fulfill one of the two main commandments expressed by Christ—love God or love one’s.