It's perfectly fine to be a religion of one (or a non-religion of one)

I really like the idea of being a religion of one, for reasons laid out in "If you become a religion of one, your worship will be effortless." After all, since there already are thousands of different religions, why not add one more: your own personal faith.

That's why when I started this blog in 2004, it took me just a few seconds to come up with the tagline at the top of this page: Preaching the gospel of spiritual independence. 

Not surprisingly, Ross Douthat, the author of Believe: Why Everybody Should Be Religious, differs with the whole religion of one thing. 

Douthat rejects the notion that any individual can decide on their own whether some sort of supernatural being exists -- ignoring the fact that it was human beings who came up with the hypothesis of such a being, commonly called God.

So supposedly while we can trust that those who wrote holy books were speaking the truth about God as they knew it, we can't trust that those who reject holy books are speaking the truth about God as they recognize it. 

In his chapter, "The Case for Commitment," Douthat includes a Bible passage from the book of Revelations: "because you are lukewarm, and neither hot nor cold, I will spit you out of my mouth." (I assume this is God speaking, who apparently has a spittable mouth.)

Then Douthat writes:

Spit you out -- that's a harsh judgment, surely! And also perhaps unfair to the religious individualist, the sincere but solitary pilgrim. What if someone were not lukewarm but passionate and committed to beliefs that belong to them and them alone?

Would they too stand condemned for simply being true to their own explorations, loyal to the truth that their journey discovered? Especially given the evidence, discussed in the last chapter, for the universality of certain kinds of religious experience across different societies and cultures, why shouldn't we take for granted the existence of multiple paths to God, and set out to forge one on our own? 

Why is trying to be the master of your own religious fate, the captain of your soul, somehow inferior to showing up at a particular building on a particular day of the week, embracing a packaged set of dogmas or beliefs, and binding oneself to all the sins and fallibilities attached to all the world's significant religions?

There are several answers to these reasonable questions. The first is the simplest: you are probably not a religious genius.

I heartily agree, but will go further. I'm definitely not a religious genius. But here's the thing: there's no evidence that anyone in the history of the world was a religious genius. At least, not in the sense I look upon the word "genius" in this context: as being able to discover truths about reality that were hitherto unknown.

Albert Einstein was a physics genius because he discovered truths about time and space that revealed previously unknown qualities of the cosmos. Ditto for other great scientists, along with geniuses in other areas: art, music, literature, and such.

But I have great difficulty in coming up with any religious geniuses. All we have are people who through the force of their personality, marketing ability, or whatever were able to come up with religious dogmas that ended up appealing to many other people.

So I view them as akin to the genius of anyone who fashions and sells a popular product, such as the iPhone. Promise that believers in your product will escape death and be able to live eternally in the lap of God, and it isn't surprising that you will get some people willing to buy into that promise.

My view, which is shared by lots of other non-religious humans, is that it makes sense to chart your own course when it comes to finding meaning in life. You know better than anyone else what appeals to you in this regard, which includes the possibility of eschewing all organized religions and being either a religion of one, or a non-religion of one. 

Comments

[October]

Thats what attracted me towards Sant Mat. My Guru was genius. Ishwar Puri.
He knew how to bring best of one.

If you have just awaken,Mark yourself at zero.Now start.Let your spiritual journey flow like a river.Any obstacle is overpowered naturally. Love is the Answer to all Religions. Without Love for Supreme,They are Hollow.

[sant64]

Allow Douthat to get "You are probably not a religious genius" out of his mouth, but cut him off there, allowing him no explication of that point.

Yes, your view is shared by a lot of atheists. But so what? You and your gang think religion is wholesale bunkery. More power to you for that. But Douthat is addressing a different audience: The believer who wants to better live his faith.

How does a believer better his faith? By being an active member of a congregation of people of that faith. Believers say they get genuine value from such fellowship and mentoring. You being an atheist has no bearing on other people's perception of the value of their religious belief and their religious fellowship in a particular sect.

Looking at this another way, it's evident that even the "religion of one" characters are usually not the rugged individuals they think they are. They have their own particular religious views and their community of like believers in those views. The freethinkers have their own fellowship of believers. They may not meet in a building on a particular day, but they subscribe to apps where they hear religious authorities tell them things they like to hear, and they read endless religiously philosophical books of their pov for the same purpose. While these folks might style themselves a "religion of one," they hardly are. They got all their particular religious and philosophical ideas from other people.

Overall though, I think we all can agree that in all spheres of life there's undeniable value in fellowship and mentorship. There wouldn't be an I iPhone without the collaboration of minds, some of whom knew more than other minds. Indeed, everything demands collaboration with others, and we are most definitely not all equal in our skills and wisdom.

I'm still waiting on the Douthat book from my library and look forward to reading it. Then, I'll find out more on why he finds value as a church going Catholic. I suspect that part of the value of actively belonging to a church comes with friction. Many people -- Jordan Peterson is one -- find going to church a most irritating experience (an emotion I second). While this friction might be an avenue to greater personal growth in one's beliefs, I can agree that everyone certainly has the right to choose what kind of religious activity works best for them.

[Appreciative Reader]

"...ignoring the fact that it was human beings who came up with the hypothesis of such a being,"

Kind of goes to the crux of it, doesn't it. The likes of Douthat live in woo woo land, and don't realize that simple fact.

----------

"there's no evidence that anyone in the history of the world was a religious genius"

Agreed, absolutely.

But if I may focus on two incidental nuances there, while agreeing 100% with what you're actually saying:

Some charlatans can be thought of as religious geniuses, of a kind, that did uncommonly well for themselves. People like Joseph Smith, and Ron Hubbard, and very spectacularly Mohammed, and if legend were to be believed then Moses, and so forth. GSD would qualify as a junior member of that not so august club of those who personally did very well for themselves by posing as godmen and prophets.

And on another, very different tangent: The Buddha can be thought of as a religious genius, both in terms of rejecting clearly (many/most of the) the superstitions of the day, and also in terms of his own particular investigation into religiosity. But of course, that's a very different sense of "religious" than the monotheisms preach, and very different also than the woo woo of theistic halfwittery in traditions other than the Abrahamic.