I had a conversation recently with someone about religion. I had said how odd it was that the local town council here in the south of England had hoisted a blue and yellow flag on top of their offices. I was referring to the way we have all been swept up in a wave of emotion and speculating on why this may be. I was not belittling the suffering of people caught up in war but questioning the attitude of those who seem to care deeply about this because the media tells them to but ignore similar things which occur all over the world all the time in greater or lesser forms.
But the person to whom I was talking took a different approach. "I thought you were a religious person and yet you don't seem as upset as most people about the terrible human suffering in Ukraine. Surely anyone who believes in God should be concerned about relieving human suffering?" This attitude seems to encapsulate so much about the materialistic attitude to religion (shared by many believers not just the attitude of non-believers) that I thought I might address it in a post here.
What is the purpose of religion? Is it to make people happy and comfortable in this world or is it to prepare them for the next? Is it to relieve suffering or is it to understand suffering? Now, obviously it is important to relieve suffering where one can but that is not the main issue from a spiritual perspective. Nothing I say here should be taken as refuting the simple fact that we should always seek to heal wounds when we are able to do so but there are deeper matters to consider. Relieving physical suffering is clearly a noble act but it should not be used as an excuse to obscure spiritual understanding.
If you believe in God, really believe in a spiritual God, then you have a different attitude to the world and to human beings. Human beings then become not what they appear to be in the phenomenal sense but souls with a spiritual purpose and in need of spiritual development. They are not just minds and bodies as we would ordinarily perceive them. They are spiritual beings and that puts them in an entirely different light. To fulfil them in the earthly sphere might have a detrimental spiritual impact. That does not mean you turn a blind eye to suffering but that the real significance of life lies elsewhere. It lies in developing first an awareness of and then a relationship with God and with God as a spiritual being, seeing yourself as a soul not the incarnated personality.
Most people live entirely in the world of appearance. They identify themselves with their outer being, their human body, emotions and thoughts, and when they think of God they think of him interacting with this person or saving this person. Even many, maybe the majority of, religious people materialise spirituality in that they think the earthly human being is what matters. But the earthly human being is inherently and by default a sinner, and a sinner can only be saved by renouncing his sins and not just his sins but his identification with himself as an earthly human being. The earthly human being can never get to heaven. This needs to be understood. You only get to heaven, which is to say fulfil your divine purpose and destiny, by transferring the focus of your being from the earthly self to the spiritual soul. If you don't know what this means you are a materialist whatever your beliefs.
God is not a humanitarian. At least, not in the sense we normally understand the meaning of this word. That is because although he loves the whole human being there is a hierarchical dimension to this love and he loves the soul more than the body. This is not to discount the body but to put things in perspective. It is good to feed and heal the body but not at the expense of the soul and if the focus on the body is used to obscure the reality and prior claim of the soul then you are not acting in a godly fashion. It is hard to escape the sense that in recent times the humanitarian impulse, in itself a true and noble impulse, has been twisted and is being used to advance an attack on deeper spiritual values.
10 comments:
Its ultimately based on a liberal misreading of Jesus out of context of the rest of the Bible. Jesus went around healing the sick. Ok, sure, but he did it honestly for what can be called "selfish" reasons from a modern perspective, i.e. he did it to prove he was the Messiah not because he was addicted to altruism. That is what they miss. Because they are reading it without any comprehension of the rest of the Bible. Certainly they've never bothered with Ecclesiastes. But even this "selfish" reason of healing the sick merely to prove himself to be the Messiah, from the perspective of the whole point of the New Testament that as Messiah he dies for our sins and can save from hell anyone who believes he is the Messiah, loses its selfishness.
And then, you know, once he proved himself to be the Messiah by the final proof of the resurrection, he could have just stayed rather than going off to heaven to await a second coming. He could have stayed and lived forever healing everyone and singing kumbayah. But he didn't. Because he is not addicted to altruism and neither should we be. Afterall, it only makes one into a busybody, and Paul wrote somewhere that we should mind our own business and not be busybodies in other men's business. (1 Thessalonians 4:11, 2 Thessalonians 3:11, 1 Timothy 5:13)
Yes, it should be obvious to anyone who thinks for a few moments that Jesus healed some people but not everybody and he fed the 5000 that one time but not every day.
@William - And the intended healing of Jesus was spiritual - the physical healing was a means to that spiritual end. Which was why it was mostly those with-faith (or who were likely to develop faith as a consequence of healing) who were healed. Or healing was done in a situation when the audience observing the healing were expected to develop faith as a consequence of what they saw and how Jesus interpreted it. But always the spiritual was primary.
Precisely Bruce. All the miracles whether of healing or anything else were intended to point to heaven not earth.
William, what are your thoughts on the pagans and the fundamental change in the human being after Christ? Pagans had many beliefs, among them the integration of a perfected unity of body and soul almost echoed in the Latter Day Saints yet approaching an impersonality of "this or that body."
I'm not quite sure what you mean. Tolken. There were many different sorts of pagans with different beliefs. But, broadly speaking, I would say that Christ opened up the way to heaven and union with God whereas before the after death path led to various heavens and hells which were all within the bounds of creation or else to Nirvana and extinction of the self. Jesus showed the way to the true marriage of spirit and matter with divinization of the self rather than its loss the end goal. So, basically, by his incarnation and death he redeemed matter.
Thank you William. When speaking of the pagan, it is unavoidable to misrepresent everything that has come before because humanity has undergone social changes which have diminished older sense faculties of the mind. Doing as the Bible warns against, modern "neospiritual" paganism is based entirely upon images and impressions. Yet, the greatest of the traditions emphasize the one goal of realizing the body-mind-self and the soul-self as one. The Bible using the commands of "I AM" and "As Above So Below" are the same powers afforded to the ancients in their lived reality of the union of the celestial with the terrestrial, and the corporeal with the spiritual.
I ought to finally read the Old Testament. I can't say what has put me off this long time. Bless Us.
You have argued that "Earth is a School," and suffering is obviously one of the most important teaching methods this school employs. Folly is corrected by pain--unless, that is, a misguided humanitarian completely anesthetizes the fool, and thereby completely negates the correction. I'm not ignoring the reality of pure evil, by which I mean unjustified suffering by the truly innocent, but the School that is Earth has taught me that pure evil and true innocence are rare. The vast majority of the physical and spiritual pain I have suffered was salutary correction of folly. The pain was not the problem. I was the problem. And when I with God's grace changed myself, the pain went away.
I think you do God's work when you insist that "spirituality" in not all harp music in the clouds. There is nothing spiritual about taking pity on a suffering fool and doing everything one can to negate the lesson that the School that is Earth is trying to teach him. A spiritual man would not give a hangover remedy to a friend who is suffering a hangover. His spirituality would allow him to look beyond the carnal hangover and see that it is a salutary correction to drunkenness, and that should be allowed to have its full nauseous, throbbing, humiliating effect.
I will not hazard an analysis of the specific case of the Russo-Ukrainian war, but will say that there is collective as well as individual folly. Foolish nations suffer, and unwise alleviation of their suffering simply allows them to persist in their folly. And nations are like individuals insofar as purely evil and truely innocent nations are very rare.
Excellent points, JM. Obviously one can't turn a blind eye to human suffering but one also must have the wisdom to see that worldly suffering can be a means of spiritual growth. Who said being a human being was a simple matter? It requires some proper thought, and unbridled compassion is often just self-indulgence, cruel as that might sound to the sentimentalist.
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