DIY Religion 1

This is an open source project. This will probably turn into a book, but it’s not the kind of thing where I have a full-blown image running around in my head. It would be really nice if I could get some comments as we go along.

Religion is a human response to spiritual apprehension. It is rightly the effort of the flesh to answer the calling of something far higher. We call it religion when it becomes organized enough to form a regular effort, something which at least seems consistent on the human level. It includes things like symbolic rituals and some form of instruction (as a means to advancement from where you are to where you want to be). If it becomes something shared between two or more folks, we could call it “organized religion” — the qualifier indicates it’s not just one person working on their own. What most people mean when they talk about “religion” is “institutional religion,” which is a distinct political entity with a power structure that reflects social expectations. Most people imagine institutional religion is supposed to affect society, but that’s seldom the case. It almost invariably works the other way. This is the sort of religion justly decried by folks who see it used to oppress.

On purely human terms, major changes in human life come with democratization. We might call those changes “advances,” but that’s not always justified. Mostly they are changes that offer people a wider choice in certain things, and that’s typically not so bad, but it doesn’t mean everyone is going to make good from it. We can discuss how, for example, eating meat on a regular basis was democratized late in the Middle Ages, and how it changed the life of peasants. What you make of it depends on how you view eating meat, but we cannot ignore the radical change it offered to folks who seldom saw it on their table for several generations.

So it was with the printing press, voting, transportation, etc. Democratized technology is a lot easier to discuss, but democratized choices in human social behavior is a lot harder to trace out. More challenging is that a lot of physical changes have large overlapping social changes, which is rather the whole point. When people have more choices of any sort at all, it both complicates life and makes it generally more pleasant. It should seem rather odd to us that religion has always been one of the most tightly controlled items in human awareness.

The logic, of course, was always some claimed mandate from whichever deity was being served. The social context always had a lot to do with it. The point for us right here and now is the relative democracy of so very many other things in life that brings our broad human awareness to the cusp of changing again. It’s only fitting and proper that this brings with it what was actually the most ancient freedom of all: freedom of religion. You’ll recognize that phrase was enshrined in the US Constitution, but it worked out rather poorly in the sense that it became freedom for leaders of institutional religion to keep their own flocks together as political pressure groups, however indirect that pressure may have been. You simply cannot separate religion from politics until you change the fundamental assumptions about what religion is supposed to do. As long as it is institutional in nature, it remains political.

Warning to the secularist: Just because you don’t organize into a recognized religious practice doesn’t mean you aren’t organized into a pressure group with a distinct political presence arising from a religious viewpoint. Rejecting the validity of all spiritual apprehension is a statement about spirituality in itself. The apprehension of a spiritual element to human existence is the default; the world will not permit you to rewrite that. Secularism cannot ever be the default. The burden is upon secularists to defend their innovation against the vast weight of ongoing human spiritual awareness from ancient times. You’ll notice religion hasn’t somehow died by your compelling logic, so regardless of the supposed purity of your reasoning, the human default is to be religious. To demand a change to that is a moral and religious position in itself.

From where I sit, it seems rather obvious we are on the cusp of another social revolution of sorts. Whether Western Civilization actually dies or not is immaterial; the humans under her care will be absorbed by a competing type of organizational principle of human existence — ubiquitous electronic networking. The democratization of the devices and services behind this is relentless and seems to touch a very real human longing, if not answer it outright. Once a person becomes fully adapted to the network as a primary social field of interaction, it affects everything else in their awareness. Thus, I refer to the Networked Civilization as an entirely different thing from Western Civilization, even though the former arises directly from the latter. Human awareness at large is morphing in a very significant way, and the very fact of how disruptive it is to all the previous power structures indicates a truly significant departure.

While the mere existence of communication does not a society make, the means of communication does give a particular essence to whatever society forms from the natural human tendency to associate. It’s nothing new to report that science has found a hard-wired neural function in the human constitution that shows us utterly dependent on some level of social interaction, and that losing that inherent sense of longing for human company is abnormal, even sickness. Denying we are fundamentally social creatures is comical in a pitiful way. But while we might have various restraints about doing so, the mere possibility of contacting any other human anywhere in human space in real time, and under virtually any circumstance in which we find ourselves, does make a radical difference in how we think. This is the ultimate democratization on the human plane.

We really need a new way to do religion. Not in the sense of destroying all the old structures currently in place; they’ll die on their own if such is their fate. Rather, it needs some effort to address how religion could and should answer a real human need from within this new and alien context. If everything humans do in other realms of endeavor can now be transferred through the Net in mere seconds to any other human anywhere, religion as a human endeavor will come along simply as a product of human nature.

True to the nature of this beast, there is absolutely no way to extend current religious power structures into the Network Age, any more than any other power structure. People will drag their religion along for a time, but it will offer diminishing returns on the costs. The scariest thing for those currently engaged in religious power structures is that their theology itself is inherently part of the religious expression, not fundamental to religion itself. When I suggest that Christian Systematic Theology is merely an artifact of human organization, not somehow divine in itself, people get really upset. This merely reflects the limitations of their Western biases, because they can’t imagine religion does not issue from theology. They conflate religion with their particular expression of religion. Theology is part and parcel to the power structure, folks. Remove one and the other goes with it. Witness the way religious institutions quickly dissolve when you soften the theological boundaries. All the labels persist with the facilities and the budget, but the money and people quickly disperse. You can drag networking into your church organization, but you can’t drag your church organization very far into the network before it ceases to exist.

So we are left with that spiritual apprehension and it needs a religion that is viable on the network. That’s where DIY religion comes into the picture.

Clarification: There is no attempt to make this distinctly Christian. This is whole thing is more an academic exercise on the human level. While recognizing the spiritual impulse behind religion, this is more about religion itself.