Universal Spiritualism – Woo Or A Merging Of Science And Religion?

A Zen Priest Reflects on the Origin of Religion

The Origin of Religion

A Sermon

by

James Ishmael Ford

Patheos

February 10, 2019

In O&I’s treatment of this essay, this sermon, I am trying something different. I have invited three friends with expertise in evolutionary anthropology, economics, and sociology to comment and engage in a written discussion. Of the three commenters/discussants, one has experience as a former Christian theology student at a seminary and another as a former Christian cult member.

It is hoped the three discussants’ comments will lead to a far-ranging discussion about matters brought up in the sermon in the following areas:

-         The origin(s) of religion;

-         The validity of the claim that modern spiritualism is making religion more universal and less culture-bound and tribal;

-         That universalist spiritualism may be the only hope for Humankind’s survival;

-         The current and future relationship between our scientific understanding of material reality and the spiritual reality of religion.

As always, all other O&I regulars and visitors are also welcome to comment and join the discussion. All comments are below.

What follows is an introduction to the above-linked sermon.

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James Ishmael Ford is an American Zen Buddhist priest and retired Unitarian Universalist minister. He was born in Oakland, California in 1948 and holds a BA in psychology from Sonoma State University. He also has a Master of Divinity degree and a Master of Arts in the Philosophy of Religion degree, both from the Pacific School of Religion. For more about Ford see here.

In his sermon Ford claims that there is a growing unbound-by-culture unity among many of the religious believers of the world. That is, a growing spiritual approach to religion and reality that is contending with older, culture-bound book-centered religions. He further claims that this new, emerging view is one where religious or spiritual beliefs are compatible with, in fact intertwined with, material reality. And that this provides common ground for unifying the world’s people who hold disparate religious beliefs. Finally, Ford claims, this universalization may be the only hope for Humankind’s survival as a species.

Jewish Portugese-Dutch philosopher Baruch Spinoza (1632-1677) held a pantheist view that God was nature, nature was God. That is, God was not the Abrahamic God rather it was all things inherent in the natural processes of the cosmos. Einstein declared he believed in Spinoza’s god. Pantheism of this sort and its kin panpsychism have their adherents today. See here, here and here.

Even renowned American philosopher Thomas Nagel, a self-avowed atheist, takes a swing at material reductionist accounts of the mind, consciousness, soul, or spirit. He claims the mind-body problem of consciousness is not just a local problem but “invades our understanding of the entire cosmos and its history.” See this review of his 2012 book, Mind & Cosmos: Why the Materialist Neo-Darwinian Conception of Nature is Almost Certainly False, a book that infuriated many scientists and philosophers.

What’s going on here? What is Ford telling his congregation? What is he telling the rest of us?

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Here’s a synopsis of and very brief comment on Ford’s sermon:

Ford rightly claims that religion has been an integral part of each society’s culture for the vast majority of cultural evolutionary time. He claims, again correctly, that “no one has ever succeeded in fully untangling religion from the rest of the mess of human lives in specific cultural contexts.” And that “religions have always been tied up with the transmission of culture, reinforcing the various ways in which people identify themselves and, critically, separate themselves from others.”

In the African context which I am most familiar, what Ford says is true.

In a section of my book Circumcision and Coffee in Uganda, “Above All, the Supernatural,” I describe religion as the repository and integrating force of the indigenous African worldview. That is, religion in pre-Islamic and pre-Christian contact sub-Saharan Africa was pervasive, something far more than a compartmentalized subset of culture.

Traditionally, I wrote, sub-Saharan Africans approach life – the biological, social, religious - simultaneously. The basis, the foundation of traditional African culture is religion within which all their beliefs, values, and behaviors about nature, work, social life, morality and virtue have life and meaning. As one elder of the Bamasaaba of eastern Uganda put it: A traditionalist Mumasaaba individual “lives his/her religion with conviction” as a “cultural institution in which one lives and through which one dwells in constant relation to the Divine.” This is still true of the traditional worldview of the vast majority of rural sub-Saharan Africans.

However, contemporary Africa-wide religious beliefs and practices, especially among the urban and educated, are an amalgam of traditional and Christian or traditional and Islamic ideas and behaviors. There is very little in all of Africa of the religious universalization that Ford speaks of. I think his notion of universalistic spiritualism is a dubious Western phenomenon to the degree he is correct, and far from the global movement or process he claims or, more likely, hopes for.

Ford further states that “with the birth of Buddhism, then a bit later Christianity, and lastly Islam, we find missionary religions. They no doubt carry with them cultural elements from their places of origin. Lots. But they mostly bring certain ‘big ideas’ at their heart that are meant to be shared with the whole world.”

Ford argues that this “untangling” of religion from its cultural milieu can help us understand “that part of what it means to be human that we call religious or spiritual.” That in looking at religion in this de-cultured, untangled sense we can “examine the parts of religion in hope of understanding the whole.” What he claims emerges when we do so is a “’purer’ distillation at the heart of the matter,” what religion really is and is becoming.

Ford claims that a new Axial Age began with the 18th Century European Enlightenment and was followed by the emergence of a “modern interreligious dialogue.” And from this he claims that “a new whole is emerging. Something totally unexpected. Like a new dawn, a world perspective. If you will a universalism.” He then regrettably notes that such a global, non-cultural religiosity or spirituality must still contend with the older, culture-tied religions. In this struggle he offers little hope for resolution claiming that he “can’t put money on our species surviving for a whole lot longer.”

Finally, here is the crux of Ford’s argument:

I think the spiritual at the heart of it, the secret truth that floats through all religions, that universalist current sometimes held up, sometimes scorned and suppressed, but always present is a knowing that within all our diversity there is some mysterious unity. And, frankly, I think it is our only hope for survival as a species.

If there is a universalism emerging within a new Axial, it is this. Each thing as it arises, you, me, a rock, a star is precious and beautiful. And. It, that you, that me, that star arises out of a profoundly connected web of relationships. That web itself is simply the relationship of things, coming together, holding for a moment, falling away. But each thing [that] it presents is the universe itself. And, we human beings, blessed beyond all reason, get to notice this.

He closes his sermon with this:

The truth has always been there.

Hidden in plain sight.

You want to know the origin of religion?

“To see a World in a Grain of Sand/And a Heaven in a Wild Flower/Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand.”

Just notice. Just be present. Just this. Just this.

The origin of religion.

Amen.

Perhaps the current, often bloody contending between the old, culture-bound, book religions and anyone not in their fold, including Ford’s purported new universal spiritualists, is the real issue here.

Maybe it’s all just woo.

Your thoughts?

}:> ~:)