Scary Future If Religion Dominates

Recently, a relative died.  I’ll call him Jon.  It really doesn’t matter.  I didn’t know him.  His wife was related to my father.  His wife and I, however, have been writing back and forth for years via e-mail.  Her name, for our purposes, is Lisa.  I have never met her.  That doesn’t matter either.

What’s happening to her does – to all of us.

Close to 15 years ago, Lisa wrote to tell me that her daughter, Kim, had decided to convert to Orthodox Judaism.  Kim could have become a member of some other ultra-religious group of any belief system.   The results would have been the same.  However, Jon and Lisa raised her in a more-liberal version of the Jewish faith.

For those who don’t know, Judaism is divided into several different sects extending from conservative to liberal: Orthodox, Reconstruction, Conservative and Reform.  The Orthodox area is divided into more groups, each even more controlling and restrictive than the other, all with rules supposedly commanded by God to ensure believers live a heavenly ordained life.

Traditional Orthodox Rabbi

Kim joined the most Orthodox sect, Aish HaTorah, to the shock of her parents.  Her reasoning was that

the sect firmly believed in the biblical command to be “fruitful and multiply.”  She wanted to get married 

and have children.  The sect promised her a husband and delivered.

After a brief sojourn in New York, the happy couple moved to Israel.  In time, Kim got pregnant.  She was due on a Saturday, the Jewish Sabbath when no work is allowed.  As a result, the husband refused to take Lisa to the hospital where she could give birth without medical concerns.  The parents, visiting their daughter, ignored religious restrictions, bundled Kim into a car and drove her to the hospital.  The husband trotted there. 

The relationship between Jon and Lisa and their daughter have deteriorated across the succeeding 12 years.  Lisa regularly wrote about what craziness her daughter perpetuated when the family – growing at the rate of almost a child a year – came to visit.  Food was never kosher enough; the parents were never religious enough.

When Jon died, Kim and her family did not show up.  Instead, Kim dictated action from Israel.  She didn’t care what her mother wanted.  She simply insisted that the funeral be handled according to her sect’s directions. “This burial was her family’s birthright,” she claimed.

Kim sent letters to invited guests that they were not to exhibit any sign of frivolity.  She dictated the religious ceremony, alienating her grieving mother and brother. At the same time, Kim never contacted her mother to see how she was doing, only to make demands.

Lisa wrote me that the situation was beyond anything she could have imagined: “arcane and inexplicable.”

Frustrated and finding her daughter’s approach incomprehensible, Lisa even went to an Orthodox rabbi “to hear from him whether some of what Kim was saying to me is in fact correct from his scholarly point of view.”  The rabbi said Kim was a bit extreme.

I tell you this story because it needs to be seen as a foreshadowing of the future.  As the world gets more complex and more overwhelming, increasing numbers of people are joining rigid religious sects, surrendering their individuality for the structures of belief.

Orthodox sects of all faiths are showing the largest growth in numbers compared to other levels of religious belief.   Growth in atheism and agnosticism – people who have surrendered the vestiges of superstition amid the realities revealed by science -- is being balanced by overt orthodoxy.  The clash between the two philosophies is inevitable.

To make sure they can demand their views are followed, religious groups are increasingly investing in lobbyists to push their views.  According to the Pew Research Center’s Forum on Religion and Public Life, religious lobbies have jumped 500 percent in number in the last 40 years and are now spending an estimated $390 million a year to influence U.S. domestic and foreign policy.

Representing all major religions and even some smaller ones, although largely Christian – 37 percent of the lobbyists are Catholic or Protestant -- they are mainly interested in filtering a wide arrange of issues through their narrow, pious precepts, including the relationship between church and state; civil rights and liberties for religious and other minorities; bioethics and life issues, including abortion, capital punishment and end-of-life issues; and family/marriage issues, including definition of marriage, domestic violence and fatherhood initiatives.

Mostly, like Kim, they want to be sure their individual beliefs predominate. 

They have high hopes, especially with Republicans catering to their whims.  Historically, every single religious group that has found itself in a dominate position has imposed its religious beliefs on everyone.  That’s true for Jews, Christians, Muslims, Buddhists and more.  Today, for example, Islam broaches no inroads into its realm and has so entwined religion and state as to make them inseparable.

That’s the goal of all fanatics.  It’s a terrifying scenario, being played out now in the Republican Party where presumed presidential candidate Mitt Romney (left) is increasing kowtowing to beliefs of the ultra-religious, ultra-conservative, Christian right. Former candidates Rick Santorum, Rich Perry and Michelle Bachmann embody the religious rights' highest aspirations and everyone else's worst fears.

Lisa has a close up view of what happens when fanaticism succeeds.  The rest of us can see it as a model of what could happen.

Long-time religious historian Bill Lazarus regularly writes about religion and religious history.  He also speaks at various religious organizations throughout Florida.  You can reach him at www.williamplazarus.com.  He is the author of the famed Unauthorized Biography of Nostradamus; The Last Testament of Simon Peter; The Gospel Truth: Where Did the Gospel Writers Get Their Information; Noel: The Lore and Tradition of Christmas Carols; and Dummies Guide to Comparative Religion.  His books are available on Amazon.com, Kindle, bookstores and via various publishers.  He can also be followed on Twitter.

All Religions Are the Same

Based on my religious history classes, most people don’t know much about other religions.  In some cases, people are arrogantly convinced their belief is the only correct one, so they won’t bother with someone else’s faith.  Or they have been told about another religion, but didn’t understand or like what they heard. 

Yet, in our ever-tightening world, knowledge about religion is extremely important both because of cross-cultural connections, communication and world harmony.  Religion plays such an integral part in human lives, ignoring it or pretending there’s only one “true faith” guarantees animosity and discord.

The biggest problem is overcoming the distortion and outright lies told about other people’s beliefs.  That’s not done on the academic level or even in scholarly books produced by one religion that deals with another.  For example, the Catholic Encyclopedia does a very good job of explaining Judaism.

On the other hand, not much of that filters back to the general public.  There are several reasons for that.

One is ego.  Everyone wants to believe their religion is correction.  As a result, their ego is tied up in the faith.  If someone else demonstrates a flaw in the faith, a believer becomes protective.  He is not shielding the religion; he is putting up a wall to protect himself.

Another is power.  Religions essentially are claiming to have the ear of the divine.  This harkens back to the beginning of religion, which started as magic.   When incantations didn’t work well, they were replaced with prayer and ritual in an effort to gain divine favor.  If one religion succeeds at something while another fails – such as the biblical account when the prophet Elijah (left) gets a water-soaked altar to burn when the priests of Baal fail – then the religion is “proving” it has God’s support.

That’s power.

That’s also why people spend so much time fixating on omens.  They are the “secret” signs from God that hint at correctness.  The Puritans saw financial success, for example, as “proof” of God’s backing.  Bankruptcy, of course, meant the person must have sinned.

To enhance the odds of staying in God’s good graces, religious figures resort to a variety of strategies, including:

Condemning anyone who leaves the faith.

Demanding financial support to make sure there’s a fiscal tie.

Imagining reward and punishment in an imaginary afterlife for members to scare congregants into staying.

Distorting and lying.

The last choice is by far the most successful.  Christians got off to a good start on that one.  In the New Testament, John the Baptist is described as saying he was not the real messiah; Jesus was.  Why?  John the Baptist (right) was a real person who garnered multiple followers and was worshiped after his death.  The early Church had to counter his influence and did so by putting denigrating words in his mouth. 

The same thing happened to the apostles, who were described as ignorant and basically blind to Jesus.  Why?  The early Church shunned the original followers of Jesus, who had their own organization and instead followed the teachings of Paul, the self-proclaimed apostle who admitted to disagreements with the original “pillars” of the faith.

Every religion happily distorts the faith of rivals to its own benefit.  Christians see Jews as money oriented, ignoring the reality that Church leaders for centuries banned Jews from virtually any form of employment except as moneylenders.  Naturally, Jews focused on money.  What choice did they have?  The list of such distortions could be virtually endless.

That’s one reason I teach classes in religious history.  People need to understand that all religions are seeking a path to the divine.  People everywhere regardless of faith share the same attributes: puzzled by our presence, by the meaning of life, seeking for answers via a variety of avenues.  The pathways bear different names, were developed through their own histories and offer their own rituals and conventions.  

However, in all the important ways, none is “better;” none is worse.  They are all the same.

Long-time religious historian Bill Lazarus regularly writes about religion and religious history.  He also speaks at various religious organizations throughout Florida.  You can reach him at www.williamplazarus.com.  He is the author of the famed Unauthorized Biography of Nostradamus; The Last Testament of Simon Peter; The Gospel Truth: Where Did the Gospel Writers Get Their Information; Noel: The Lore and Tradition of Christmas Carols; and Dummies Guide to Comparative Religion.  His books are available on Amazon.com, Kindle, bookstores and via various publishers.  He can also be followed on Twitter.

An Answer for Near-Death Experiences

What happens when you die?

The answer depends on who you ask. A pious religious person is sure heaven awaits.  There, the sainted soul will see relatives and friends who proceeded them. In essence, the soul survives.  For religious Hindus and Buddhists, they simply return to Earth en route to eventually exiting the wheel of life.  Some achieve nirvana, a oneness with the universe, while others get to make up for the things they did in a previous existence.

Some Tibet Buddhist sects are so sure in reincarnation that they seek a new leader from young children thought to contain the spirit of a late leader.  In some documented cases, children born into the Hindu faith have correctly described previous lives.  That’s not unique to India.  I had a Ohio friend, Robert, who moved to Cincinnati to live near his mother from a previous life.  I think he was trying to escape some debts, but he certainly seemed serious.

Previous lives have shown up under hypnosis.  I once interview a woman under hypnosis who went back into a previous life as a English woman of the mid-1800s.  I was able to ask her questions, and she failed to use proper English terms on several occasions.  

On the other hand, several documented regressions have found astonishing accuracy as well as complete failures. In one famous case, a nun from the late 20^th century recalled being a wild cowboy in Sacramento (right) in the mid-1800s.  Since newspapers exist from that era, her facts were checked.  They were completely wrong.  In another case, a woman described a massacre in Kent, England and accurately detailed the site, a church that, unbeknownst to everyone, had been remodeled in the 1700s.  Her description matched the old version perfectly.

Those beliefs are countered by others who are sure there is nothing awaiting the dearly departed.

The question has been debated as long as man has existed.  Early humans buried their dead with implements and food, items necessary in an afterlife.  The Egyptians did the same thing.  Ancient Chinese sometimes killed retainers so a late emperor could still have servants in the next world.

Paul wrestled with the question.  Would an aged, sickly person stay in that condition when resurrected or get a new, young, healthy body? He lived in an era when Romans and Greeks thought the dead wandered as shadows, looking as when they died.

These days the focus is on near-death experiences (NDE) where individuals who are revived describe what happened while unconscious.  The experiences vary.

That’s the problem.  For everyone who sees a bright light and are greeted by a loved one, many more recall nothing.  Some NDE survivors describe floating above their inert body.  Others do not.

There’s no correlation to piety.  Religious people aren’t granted a view of heaven any more than atheists are.  It seems random.

It may be.

A professor of neurology and the University of Kentucky believes he’s come up with a scientific explanation.  Kevin Nelson has been studying NDE’s for three decades and has developed a logical explanation for the experiences and why they are not consistent.

Some people, he noted, undergo rapid eye movement (REM) while awake although the condition typically occurs while sleeping.  We all dream during the REM phase of sleep.  If awake, then we would have hallucinations.  In his study of 55 people claiming to have had a NDE, Nelson found that 60 percent previously had episodes of REM intrusion.

“Instead of passing directly between the REM state and wakefulness, the brains of those with a near- death experience are more likely to blend the two states into one another,” he explained in an on-line story.  “In the borderland, paralysis, lights, hallucinations and dreaming can come to us. During a crisis such as a cardiac arrest, the borderland could explain much of what we know as the near-death experience.”

The other aspects of NDEs, such as bright lights and dead relatives, occur when blood flow to the brain is reduced in a crisis.  That doesn’t affect the brain as much as the retina, the membrane in the back of the eye.  “When the retina fails, darkness ensues, and it fails from the outside inwards, producing the characteristic tunnel vision,” Nelson said.

That also explains the sense of floating.  “The area of the brain associated with out-of-body experiences, the temporoparietal region, is right next to the area that is responsible for our sensation of motion,” Nelson noted.

The euphoric feelings many NDE survivors describe is built into our system.  During moments of extreme crisis, the body releases endorphins that provide a sense of relaxation and well-being.  That’s why trauma victims usually feel no pain at first.

Scientific investigation only goes so far.  One NDE survivor commented that “you can put a rational explanation for the experiences of people like me, but that would be missing the point. To us, they are real and they have a profound effect on you and the way you live your life afterwards. It took away any fear I might have had of dying, and I think it made me a better person. You can call them hallucinations if you want, but they are our reality.”

Nelson accepted that.  “I was determined that someone based in neuroscience should try to explain the nature of spiritual experience, not explain it away,” he said.  “I would argue that isn’t incompatible with people believing in God if they want to.  After all, who’s to say that these mechanisms weren’t created by God in the first place precisely to provide comfort just when we might need it most — as we approach death?”

Long-time religious historian Bill Lazarus regularly writes about religion and religious history.  He also speaks at various religious organizations throughout Florida.  You can reach him at www.williamplazarus.com.  He is the author of the famed Unauthorized Biography of Nostradamus; The Last Testament of Simon Peter; The Gospel Truth: Where Did the Gospel Writers Get Their Information; Noel: The Lore and Tradition of Christmas Carols; and Dummies Guide to Comparative Religion.  His books are available on Amazon.com, Kindle, bookstores and via various publishers.  He can also be followed on Twitter.