Two Well-Traveled Paths that Lead Nowhere

Note:  I believe that God is neither male nor female but I use the masculine in this paper to avoid cumbersome language (i.e. he/she/it).

          You should know at the beginning of this effort that I have not received any special revelation.  Most certainly, I do not want anyone to follow me personally.  I will be the first to admit that I am not fit to follow.  This work is merely a reflection of my personal spiritual journey and understanding after a lifetime of seeking God.  Should anyone make any effort to create a following based on these ideas or attribute any sacredness to anything written here; that alone will be clear evidence that they did not understand a word of the message intended here.  On the other hand, if I help you see the folly of fundamentalism (regardless of your religion) I will have accomplished my goal.  If I can persuade just a few people to leave the division, strife, and hatred that organized religion (with its enslaving dogma and priest craft) brings to our troubled world, I will be delighted.  If one Christian, Muslim, Buddhist, Jew, Hindu or any other extremist lays down his gun and quits hating his brothers and sisters, I will be very pleased.

     The world has developed two major approaches to establishing their world view of reality – reason and faith.  Each claims to be the superior means of deriving truth.  Both are absurd and have utterly failed humanity.  Who can honestly look at the condition of the world today and believe that it has been bettered by any organized religion founded on a “holy” book, including the Bible?  Or who can honestly look at the condition of the world today and believe that it has been bettered by any intellectual or philosophical system?  Every religious leader with a new revelation eventually has some kind of a book(s) or scripture created which purports to contain the fullness of their “Master’s” teachings.  Future followers of the prophet, messiah, or savior inevitably interpret the original message differently and more often than not, they physically change the words by adding or subtracting from the original book to reflect their new interpretation, understanding, or vision.  In time there are a multitude of interpretations and therefore a multitude of divisions or denominations and the fighting begins.  When different factions seem to be equally right, some new disciple on one side or the other will conveniently and suddenly have a brand new revelation “directly from God” that reveals yet more of what the original book supposedly intended but did not clearly state.  Within a few years, the actual words of the original founder are lost in confusion and nobody can be really sure of the original message.  This is certainly true, and very sad, with Christianity, the major religion of my land.  The fundamental teachings of Jesus were lost and replaced by the bizarre theology of Paul of Tarsus.

     In my experience, it seems that people devoted to faith based reality are dedicated to the task of burning mental energy to read, understand, and defend some form of scripture about God (sometimes to the death).  They will wrestle endlessly with some contradictory phrase or some apparent flaw found in their sacred book.  In the end, every final explanation of such obvious contradictions will require intense verbal explanations followed by a leap of faith across a chasm of reality that resembles the Grand Canyon.  Some will fall in the challenging leap, never able to trust the book again, but most will hang on because they have invested far too much mental and emotional energy in the Book’s demanding journey to give up now.  Some will rationalize, “Well, I don’t understand it but Reverend (insert favorite minister here) does, so it must be right.”  In time, these people will love, cherish and serve a Book – mere black ink on white paper, and service to the Book will far exceed any service to God or man.

      Those devoted to reason based reality believe themselves to be far superior intellectually to the faith folks because they long ago dismissed the silly notion that a mere archaic book full of poorly translated words contains the necessary tools to understand the infinitely mysterious Divine.  Instead they burn their mental energy in word twisting debate with impressive multi-syllabic words and catchy phrases with the final goal of somehow trapping the correct definition of the indefinable, unknowable, inconceivable, Ultimate Reality in a tight neat little cage made of flimsy semantics held together by the glue of cultural language and mores.  Nothing seems to please them more than to have a longer more impressive quote memorized verbatim from some “mental giant” than the trite quotes from their current adversaries.  They bask in their commitment to intellectual honesty and originality but, almost without fail, in the end they are closet disciples of Saint Nietzsche, Saint Barth, Saint Kant, et al.  Both reason and faith based seekers appear to have the tenacity and commitment of a mendicant monk to understand all they can about the Ultimate Reality and his nature and ways, while neither seems remotely interested in learning how to actually serve humanity and make the world a better place.  There is an unspoken rule in both camps that they will eventually reassign all this mental energy spent in knowing about God into service for God just as soon as they get the last soul in the world completely converted to their mindset. 

     Both the Reason folks and the Faith folks are never satisfied until they know it all.  And once they know it all, and have fiercely defended their personal concept of “all,” they have locked themselves into a prison cell, unable to move along to any other position as they grow spiritually and more data becomes available.  To do so would mean a clear admission of having been wrong and a horrible wound to the pride.  In addition, their once smug idea of the possibility of their individually and unilatirally being able to arrive at the truth will be forever humbled, because after all, they were wrong before. 

     I maintain that no book, including the Christian Bible, contains the only (or even the best) path to God.  I further maintain that no human being now or in the past, including me, can tell you how to find God.  You alone must find and follow the path your heart opens before you.  Therefore, in my mind, all so-called sacred books that have given rise to Organized Religions (from the Christian Bible to the Muslim Koran, and from the Hindu Bhagavad-Gita to the Taoist Tao te Ching, and all other “sacred” books) are ineffective for directing human beings to the universal path to God, and ultimately these religions evolve into monsters that do more harm than good, regardless of the alleged good intentions of the founders.  I strongly suspect that more blood has been shed over the defense of a “holy” book and its alleged word from God, than any other cause on earth.  Surely, if the founders of these many diverse religions were truly divine or inspired, they would have foreseen the harm their words would eventually cause, and simply kept their mouths shut.  How can all these books originate from the same God?  And if they don’t originate from the same God, how can we possibly know which one(s) does and which one(s) don’t?

     Very often scriptures from two different religions say opposite things.  For instance the Christian New Testament says that, “He that believeth on him [Jesus] is not condemned: but he that believeth not is condemned already, because he has not believed on the name of the only begotten Son of God.”  (John 3:18)  Again in John 3:36 we read, “He that believeth on the Son [of God] has life: and he that believeth not the Son [of God] shall not see life; but the wrath of God abideth on him.”  For the Christian, the message is simple, you must believe that Jesus is the only begotten Son of God or you will receive the wrath of God [assumedly hell].  But for the child born in a Muslim family in Saudi Arabia, where one can be sentenced to prison or even death for simply owning a Christian Bible, he will never be able to read more than the Koran. Like almost all people, he will accept the religion of his family and his culture.  For him, the Koran is enough.  He has been taught since birth that the Koran was delivered directly, word for word, by the Angel Gabriel to the Prophet Mohammed and is the only true word of God on earth.  In his Koran in 5:72 he reads, “Indeed, they have disbelieved who have said:  ‘God is the Messiah (Jesus), son of Mary.’  The Messiah said: ‘Children of Israel worship God, my Lord and your Lord.  Whoever associates partners in worship with God, then God has forbidden Paradise for him, and his home is in the Fire (Hell).  For the wrongdoers, there will be no helpers.’”   For the young Muslim, he will learn through his scripture (the Koran) that Jesus is not the only begotten Son of God, and anyone who says he is will go to hell!  After all, in his Koran, Jesus said it himself!  The young Christian has been taught that God is some kind of bizarre three-in-one being called a Trinity – Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.  This is another belief that is a foundation to the faith based religion of Christianity and the young believer was baptized in the name of “the Father, and the Son, and the Holy Spirit.” (Matthew 28:19)  But the young Saudi Arabian Muslim believer reads in the Koran 5:73-75, “Indeed, they disbelieve who say: ‘God is the third of three (in a trinity),’ when there is no god but one God.  If they desist not from what they say, truly, a painful punishment will befall the disbelievers among them.  Would they not rather repent to God and ask His forgiveness?  For God is Oft-Forgiving, Most Merciful.  The Messiah (Jesus), son of Mary, was no more than a messenger…’”  Similar examples could be given between any two defining scriptures of any two of the world’s organized religions based on books.  Do you not see the paradox in religions based on books?  Do you not see the cause for division, strife, and hate among people who each accept scriptures that claim absolute authority as God’s only word for man and yet say such opposite things? How can they live in peace when each thinks the other is going to hell for eternity?

     I further maintain that all people of reason that depend on personal intelligence and individual logic are equally false.  Such religious or philosophical systems are patently unjust, since reason is so limited by intellectual capacity, which in turn is largely determined by genetics. If God can only be understood through reason, then God is not Just unless he gives all people identical IQ’s and the same set of facts to work with. He clearly does not.  All such systems of intellectual philosophy have equally failed humanity.  None have brought peace to the world, and none have brought a lasting peace to the individual inhabitants of the world.  To use reason alone to arrive at knowing God is utter foolishness.  Reason requires two things.  First, one must have an intellect capable of logical thought, and second, one must have all the pertinent data.  Not only do people have varying intellects with IQ’s from idiot to genius level, but no single person has all the pertinent data to arrive at a correct conclusion about any complex problem.  Ten intellectual people facing the same problem will arrive at different conclusions just as often as not.  Spend time with a few intellectuals and see how much they disagree about God and everything else.  The atheist, whose reason has lead him to the religion of non-belief, will say that God does not exist.  In saying this he is arrogantly implying that he has all the facts.  He knows everything.  For if he was forced to admit that he did not know everything, he would have to reason (since he follows reason as the great purveyor of truth), that the evidence for God’s existence, or the person of God, may very well lie in that huge block of information that he is not privy to.  He may angrily say, “Well, I’ve got as much right to declare that there is no God as the Theist has to declare that there is a God.”  He certainly may have as much right but he may not have as much authority.  The theist may have experienced God which adds a new level of authority to his argument.  A good many years ago I was walking in my lawn when a sharp pain doubled me over and dropped me to the ground.  I felt as though someone was repeatedly stabbing me in the gut.  I was rushed to the hospital, and after appropriate tests it was determined that I had a perforated peptic ulcer.  It was the most painful experience of my life, and after surgery I spent several days in the Intensive Care Unit.  But from that day on, no one, regardless of their credentials, would ever be able to persuade me that perforated peptic ulcers don’t exist or are not painful, because my own personal experience gave me far more authority about the pain and reality of a peptic ulcer than any scientific data that could be presented by the most learned doctor or authority.

     To further complicate the use of reason to arrive at truth, in order to arrive at the identical conclusion, any two people would not only have to have equal intellects and equal access to all the pertinent facts (two practical impossibilities), they would also have to use the same type of reasoning.  There are many types of reasoning.  There is analogical reasoning which relates facts to other situations and circumstances.  There is comparative reasoning where things are compared with other things.  There is deductive reasoning which starts with generalities and moves to specifics.  Inductive reasoning would start with specifics and reason toward a general idea.  Conditional reasoning says “If this is so… then this must be so.”  There are others, but you see the problem.  Further, will these two great thinkers use Western modes of logic like Aristotelian logic or Stoic logic or will they use some Eastern form of logic like the Chinese Mohists or the Japanese Koans?

     The world is divided into Christians, Buddhists, Muslims, Hindus and a host of other religions.  The minute we call ourselves something, we have immediately divided our self from the rest of humanity who call themselves something else.  In effect we have said, “We are right and you are all wrong.”  Both people of faith and people of reason have led to a law that humanity seems enslaved to – the law of naming things.  We are obsessive compulsive about it.  We have a compulsion to name our “school of thought” if we are people of reason, and we have an equal compulsion to name our “faith or denomination” if we are people of faith.  We must compartmentalize.  We must sort and label. We must call ourselves something.  There can be no exceptions.  Everyone must be something.  We must define and divide.  Of course the instant we put a name on something, we have built a brand new way to divide humanity.  The rest of the world is either with us or against us.  We named our new thing because we are convinced we are right, and since we love to use Aristotelian logic currently in vogue today in the West, if our thing is right all the others must be wrong, or at least not completely right.  Our task now is to get all others to be right just like us.

     It may sound as though I condemn all religion, but that is not true.  While I unapologetically condemn the far right path of faith alone and the far left path of reason alone, I wholeheartedly support a third, seldom followed way.  I support and try to follow the path to God/First Cause/Ultimate Reality by seeking to love and service to others. I maintain that the path to God is universally open to every hungry heart seeking him. I also maintain that all people everywhere innately know they should be good to others and treat them fairly.  The ultimate reality is this: you cannot know a personal, working relationship with an inconceivable Ultimate Reality with no more data and intelligence than we have at this point in evolution, any more than the marble in Michelangelo’s David could fathom the incredible complexity of its makers mind. Nor are you expected to.

Our energies should be spent in serving others selflessly.  The followers of faith alone let someone else do all their thinking.  They have their scripture and so there is no need to think.  The book is always right.  The problem is that there are too many books!  The followers of reason insist on thinking for themselves and have deluded themselves into believing that they can arrive at truth with the pitifully inadequate amount of data available to us at this time. 

The only sense in which we can experience God at this time is when thoughts end and actions begin.  No one can tell you how to find God, for the Light of God dwells within your own heart.  Therefore, the Single Way is a path of spiritual individualism.  You don’t need a prophet or a guru or a great teacher, and you don’t need to memorize any scriptures or perform any rituals.  You don’t need any priests, and you don’t need superior reasoning ability.  You don’t need to follow any great world religious leader.  You don’t need a rigid unyielding creed or a well crafted confession, and you most certainly don’t need to follow anything you read in this material.  Spiritual truth cannot be written in a book that can be altered by anyone with an agenda. It cannot be written in a book in one language that will not adequately translate into another language. Fundamentalist Muslims say that no book in the true Koran, unless it is written in Arabic, because Arabic will not adequately translate with the exact original Arabic meaning into some other languages.  Someone else’s “revelation” (like Mohammed or Moses) is their revelation.  It is just for them.  Anyone else who tells you what God has revealed to them is asking you to believe hearsay evidence.  God didn’t reveal it to you.  He could have had he wanted to but he didn’t.  Therefore, you are free to believe or not believe someone else’s revelation as you wish.  After all it is not revelation to you.  You don’t know what God really told them.  Over 900 people committed suicide in the jungle of Guyana because they chose to believe Jim Jones’ revelation.  Seventy four men, women, and children died at Waco, Texas because they chose to believe David Koresh’s revelation.  Thousands of people are Mormons solely because they believe Joseph Smith’s revelation.

On the other hand, if you are constantly searching for the path with your intellect, looking outward with your eyes, you will not find the path.  Natural Religion is an inward contemplative journey toward God and learning to listen, rather than reason. God’s spirit dwells in your heart, residing in you as an ever present guiding Light.  The Single Way to God is universal and available to every human being on the planet.  The Single Way to God is love and service to others and it is the only hope for world peace and the only practical faith for a global community.