Religion and its I/maturity

Most religion is spiritual immaturity. No religion is exempt, but I see the "Abrahamic" faiths, in their most prevalent devotional forms, as the most immature expressions of religious yearning, now extant. One influential philosopher - Alain - noted that the "spiritual" religions of the city are the culmination of religious evolution (so far). To a certain extent, but no further, he was right. Urban religions are a culmination. But not as the highest expression of the human spirit. Today, the world over, religious people are the greatest threat to human inquiry, to science, to discovery and innovation. They are a threat, in short, to growth, the growth toward human maturity.

Modern urban religions are the culmination of a process of social deconstruction, and despair.

These urban religions (as modes of practice and belief) infantilize men, and more so women. They make - in the practice of them - children of adults. Begging a deity for favors and parental concern, the modern religionist acts the part of spoiled child, or worse, an abused one.

"Religion is a survival mechanism and a matter of personal experience. The survival mechanism works best in crisis (which is not a healthy normal state) and the personal spiritual experiences are incommensurate with rational communication. Religion as a cultural force and faith as personal experience of the divine are not one and the same. The culture warriors act on the beliefs which bind men to authority. Those who experience the divine in its mystery often separate themselves out from community for long periods of time, demonstrating two different processes at work and play in human affairs. The one (culture) is memetic, a matter of learned responses and socialization - the heart of the culture wars. The other (experience of...) cannot be explained in rational terms and does not lend itself well to the binding of men, as it tends to liberate them from social bonds."

The religion to which I refer, above, is the behavioral religion of culture warriors and believers-in-conduct. Religious experience - mysticism, ineffability, presence - is a different matter entirely.

These modern, mostly urban (megachurches, jamiyyah, et cetera) religionists are crisis believers. From desiring the apocalypse as a world-destroying event (instead of a personal revelation of gnosis) to a strident insistence on the domination of social affairs, they act from powerlessness, from resentment - in short, from immaturity.

"Crisis is not a healthy, normal state. Although I am an unbeliever, I don't find any evidence to support the assertion that religion itself is dangerous, wrong or unhealthy. Religion - particularly in its cultural variants - is a survival mechanism, especially effective during periods of crisis. What becomes dangerous is the habituation to crisis, not religion. We see this in Islamism - which is the cultural "addiction" to crisis, as well as in certain culturally apocalyptic (as opposed to ultimately spiritual eschatologies) Christian sects.

Cultural "safety," especially when incubated in religio, is as dangerous as artificially sustained emergency behavior. There are all manner of expressions of this adaptation to extremes: in the sort of cliche knee jerk paternalist liberalism of the nouveau riche, in single church evangelical communities where church elders and town alderman are indistinguishable, in the small middle class of shopkeepers on the Arabian peninsula, in small midwestern single industry dependent cities - anywhere safety and conformity has been elevated to a virtue, out of specific and local social conditions.

This safety - as a social condition - stifles necessary innovation, the sort of alterations over time which allow a community to adapt to changes in environment, economy, mores or a combination of factors."

This religious need for safety - for security, in spirit, for conformity in society - is akin to the childish need for the protection of parents.

"What I find telling - about the human condition and social interactions - is that the nearly ineffable experiences of spirit (purposively leaving this word vague), in singular persons, are the diverse wellsprings of healthy change and adaptation, as well as social amerlioration, restoration and tradition. When those personal experiences become codified in social mores, and enter into society as cultural norms, the process of ossification turns the ideas of those experiences into pale and often dangerous counter-reflections of the original almost inexpressible experiences themselves, so that new (and often very lonely) men and women are compelled to listen, again, with the heart of wonder."

But that unspeakable experience - as a wellspring of religion - is not what drives modern religion. Instead, it is adherence, childish adherence to doctrine, to church, to leaders that characterizes the dominant religious communities of our time. It is not the adult journey into the unknown which informs them. It is obedience. And obedience is not an adult trait. It is my opinion that spiritual obedience is the hallmark of immaturity; when it defines adults and is taken as the standard of adulthood it is corrosive of social bonds, destructive of inquiry, and ultimately unfolds into the now too-common hostility to science, discovery, innovation and education.