Light at the Crossroads.
This was an after lunch talk given to an assembly of Unitarians at their annual meeting from the pulpit of their Birmingham church.
The story starts at a crossroads towards midnight. It was a place of execution and diversity, with two sets of stocks; one for Muslims and another for Unitarians. From each direction a man approached along the roads and all four stopped, facing each other near a signpost in the dark. They greeted each other and asked where the others were going. Each one said they were going to The City and each one told the others they were going the wrong way. They started to argue, wolves howled, hedgehogs rolled into balls and owls blinked.
While they were arguing, a fifth person entered the scene. A young black man carrying a guitar, a pig’s nose and a candle lantern crafted from a human skull. By this flickering light they saw that all the sign boards pointing in four directions read, “City.”
We all think we know where we are going; what religion is all about. Timothy Fitzgerald of the University of Stirling comments that all prospective students for the study of religion seem to think that they already know the subject. It’s rather like Descartes’ observation that all men believe they have sufficient common sense. However there is more to religion than common sense. One of our shared problems is the way we define what we talk about and study. In defining the religious or social aspects of religion we lose sight of the spiritual. It’s also so easy to become inhumane if we lose contact with our fellow travellers. We can be so tied up in matters of spirituality or doctrine that we forget about living.
Religion should be about man’s relationship with God. And, let me point out here that throughout this talk I am using the inter faith version of God, with a capital G and a question mark in brackets. But all too often this relationship is forgotten, ignored or substituted for dogma, social conformity and politically correct worship. It is little wonder that so many people have taken their knowledge of religion and with their abundance of common sense declared an absolute belief in scientific truth. Yet science can only function as any form of religion when it has mysteries or questions that can’t be answered or answers that don’t fit the theory.
Talbot in his book, “the Holographic Universe” gives support to the idea that our thoughts are stored in the brain as an almost infinite array of holograms and that each brain cell contains all of our memories and capacity for reason. All well and good until the theory is extended to the reality of matter and becomes a variant of the illusory universe school. I question the common sense that believes in illusions because they are ‘scientific’ and denies the existence of the unexplained. Particularly, when the ‘unexplained’ manifests so universally, throughout human experience. I prefer the advice given by an English nobleman in a letter to his son that can be summed up as, believe the universe is an illusion if you wish but make sure to eat well.
Scientific pseudo religions are of course a symptom of man’s need for certainty and this craving for certainty erupts in the study of religions. Scholars like Fitzgerald, Masuzawa and others question whether religion exists and if it does is it a subject for academic study. Their problem is the same as everyone else’s that if you discus religion in terms of one discipline it seems to disappear as a separate subject and become just another part of sociology, psychology, anthropology or history. So, because religion does not fit a particular box it should be thrown away? I don’t think so because if we look to Quantum Mechanics physicists can either measure a sub-atomic particles momentum or identify its location. They cannot do both.
They could just say that sub atomic particles don’t exist but we all know they do. What is happening is that the tools used to observe the same particle in its different functions are not capable of seeing more than one function at a time. The credibility of science is thus saved by Heisenberg and his Improbability Theory.
I am not proposing that particle physics should form the basis of a new religion but I am returning to a point made by Jacob Bronowski, that our most precise knowledge of the universe is inherently very approximate. And if this approximation occurs and is acceptable in the fields of physics and mathematics why should people of religious knowledge feel obliged to meet the criteria of other fields of study. In fact the many forms that religion and the expression of deity take in the world should not be seen as a shortcoming in religion but as the inevitable consequence of each of us using a different set of tools in visualising our relationship with God.
We don’t need to be, borrowing John Hick’s terminology, ptolomeic in our thinking. We don’t need to create epicycles to justify or rationalize our differences but accept them as expressions of what I may not be able to see. I was once working in my darkroom and having finished a test print wrote an adjusted exposure time for the next attempt. However with the white lights off I found that my timings had disappeared. I had used a red biro without considering that it would become invisible in the redness of a safety light. Sometimes we know there is something there even though we can’t see it but we need more than perfect vision to see it. I know from talking with fellow Muslims and reading their books that there are many impressions of God within one faith, not because they are all wrong, although some must be, but because they look for him with different eyes or in different lights. When this multiplicity is multiplied by different faiths and disciplines it is not surprising that some wish to deny religion. It is overwhelming to the senses but we are each granted a small piece of knowledge. The Sufi tradition is to chant Allahu, Allah is, without saying who or what or where Allah but simply recognising the Existent because the knowledge that something is, is not sufficient to know the whole of its being.
So, the young Blackman asked the four travellers who they were. They stopped arguing and told him they were theologians on their way to the city of God. They stood facing the young man and one said, “And who might you be?”
“I’m Robert Johnson.” He replied, “And before yo’all ask, I came to the crossroads expecting to sell my soul to the Devil so that I can be a great musician but I never expected to find four of him.”
Thank you for this opportunity to share a few questions with you which was also my chance to pay a small tribute to one of the great contemporary story-tellers; Ronnie Corbett. So, how else could I leave you, but with; “it’s good afternoon from me, and watch out for Him!”