Religion & Spirituality
Whether we are introduced to spiritual faith by our families as children or through our own personal journeys, most of us at some point ask ourselves the big questions – Who are we? Where did we (life) come from? Why are we here? Who, what and where are the gods and have they abandoned us? Why is there suffering, cruelty and poverty in the world? and so on.
These are questions which we, as humans, have sought to answer since time forgotten. Many believe they have found the answers and have joined or formed churches, groups and followings based around them. Increasingly more of us find these institutions, these religions, to be lacking. They are not providing satisfactory answers. The reason for this being that we cannot recconcile our faith with our knowledge. This I will go into in greater detail another time.
So when we study and we engrose ourselves in the spiritual path laid out before us and we find it lacking, when we realise that we wont find our answers here, we move on to the next faith, the next mentor or what have you, and the next, never quite feeling that we are getting what we need in order to flourish spiritually and to understand our place in the world.
This eventually wears many of us down until eventually the seed of disenchantment strikes roots and soon we suspect that all of the religious faiths have it wrong, and that perhaps it is because there is no meaning to it all.
This idea can leave us feeling less, somehow. It creates a hole which is all too often re-filled with cinicism, bitterness detatchement and sometimes can lead to a sense of intellectual superiority to those who we see as naive enough to fall for the folly of religious or spiritual faith, or weak enough to need it. The problem with this particular brand of superiority is that it leads to loneliness and is rarely fulfilling.
Though this is the extreme it is in no way rare or unusual. Even when the sense of lacking does not lead to this contemptuousness, it does often lead to believing that only cold hard science has any relevence. One comes to deal only in facts, abandoning faith to the wind. This too is very common. It is accepted by many that science and spiritulity cannot co-exist. They are seen as contradictory and as effectively cancelling each other out.
Even within the wider pagan and other spiritual communities there is a trend among some traditionalists to scoff at those who abandon certain aspects of thier faith system in favour of a more contemporary means to an end. Also there is still a notable murmmering against the blending of two or more traditions to meet the same ends.
Largely, these difficulties can be traced back not to Spirituality itself but to Organized Religion. Now, before anyone gets their smalls in a knot, I am NOT saying that religious people are bad people or even that the spiritual ideals behind most religions are to be faulted. What I AM saying is that in the process of forming official, structured, organized religious groups there is almost always the required renunciation of all other spiritual ideas, ideals and faiths. Added to this, often, free, rational thought & the questioning of one’s faith or the acceptance of people who are of another religion, are all looked upon wih varying degrees of disapproval. The irony of it all being that it seems even as an organized religion grows over time, and it’s following becomes greater and more widespread, it somehow grows more and more exclusive.
So to those who would say “Science and Religion cannot co-exist,” it saddens me to say “I have to agree”. But to any who say “Science and SPIRITUALITY are mutually exclusive, they cannot co-exist,” I say… “Stay Tuned!”
