The 'Reason is Everything' Delusion

John has been reading 'The God Delusion' by Richard Dawkins. I'm looking forward to reading it when he finishes, if he ever does; he tends to read about four pages a night.

I was half listening last night when he was watching a youtube video featuring Dawkins lecturing and reading from the book. This morning he was talking about the book, and one of the things he said was that, instead of church or religion per se, all we really need is a moral compass.

If that's Dawkins' main point--or if all he has to tell us is that religion is illogical, irrational, and not fact-based and, in fact, has caused tremendous pain and harm over the centuries--then he's missed the boat. I'll reserve judgment, of course, until I've read his book. But if Dawkins hasn't read and digested Joseph Campbell, then I don't expect that he'll hit on the real issues.

Humans are spiritual beings. I have memories from a very young age, of feeling that God was all around me, and in everything. My teens were a constant struggle to find and understand meaning and method in the universe. When I was 18, I could no longer accept the condemnation of all my Jewish, or Buddhist, or agnostic friends to eternal hell, and declared myself a devout non-Christian. It was a short step from that to what I thought of as total atheism.

The fact is, I did not want a divinity like that to exist, or to be my supreme principle. When I found paganism, I felt like I'd come home.

But I don't want to go into all that. My point is just to say that criticism of religion based on its historical connection with terrible crimes, or its lack of basis in fact, miss the point. Most members of organized religions are conveniently able to ignore their faith's checkered history. More important, what arguments decrying religion's irrationality miss is that reason is only half of the human apprehension of the universe and our place in it.

The other half is our intuitive experience of something called 'mystery', for lack of a better term. Human beings have the ability to experience things that are unprovable and irrational, such as paradox. The unrest inside us that comes from gnosis, a very strong conviction that, for example, death and life, joy and pain, love and hate, are the same things, make us yearn for a place or situation where we can entertain these inexplicable and unprovable ideas and feelings in safety and relative comfort, and, moreover, to absolutely celebrate them! Of course, it's critical that we allow others to celebrate in their own ways; to visualize the divine in their own ways; to walk their paths in their own ways. But religion is not irrelevant, and I don't believe it ever will be.

May