a good place to meditate

On my way out of Nashville, I stopped to meditate at a Church of Christ in a small town near the Kentucky border called Clarksville.

They were very gracious and let me use their Chapel. In the hallway they had posts of a number of missionaries to various third world countries and the specific people they were helping to get a better education or home. When I got to the bathroom they had a number of pamphlets called "The truth about...." They were about things like the accuracy of creationism, and faults with evolution. It disappointed me a little. I had seen statistics of the percentage of Americans that don't believe in evolution being very high, but what really diappointed me wasn't that people didn't believe that we evolved. In the end I am far more concerned about people being good, selfless people working to improve themselves than I am at whether they want to understand the structure, history, and intricacies of the natural world.

What disappointed me was that you had obviously well intentioned people spending so much effort fighting extremely well documented and scientifically rigorous evidence. It disappointed me because everything I find respectable and admirable in religion is the humility that it brings. The understanding that there is so much you don't know, that you are powerless in so many ways should bring about a dissolution of attachment and ego. For the most part religion puts forth a set of moral principles, that inspire us to be greater than ourselves, that place faith in us that we are at root pure human beings and that we can manifest these qualities through earnestly dealing with our problems. Good works naturally follow.

But when I saw the little anti-evolution pamphlets, they didn't represent those things in religion. They represented just about the complete opposite. They represented an unwillingness to reevaluate one's assumptions and an obstinate rejection of any evidence to the contrary.

So, I began thinking about why. How did a religion that Jesus based on the refocusing of religion on the essentials of faith, works, and walking on a path to become closer to God get so caught up in a debate trying to disprove the people who spend their lives searching out truth and accuracy in the natural world, who hold themselves to the highest standards of rigor?

The answer, of course, is that if you start to question the accuracy of one part of the Bible, it opens the door to doubt more. When the ultimate guide is a set of consecrated words, if one allows doubt of any of those words it allows for doubt of them all. Also, with most sects of Christianity, the emphasis is so heavy on faith, that doubt is not only a hinderance to being able to focus on God's work, it itself is anathema.

Of course in sects of Christianity that have decided to focus on the parts of the Bible they find compelling, human beings with all their flaws and limited perception are making those calls. What claim to purity do they have before what is annointed as the words of God? But then again, what claim did any of the people who chose what was included and excluded from the Bible have to interpreting God's words?

The biggest problem it seems to cause is that when a person gets into the defensive, argumentative, bigoted frame of mind, they are less likely to grow as people, understand themselves, and become closer to (what a Buddhist perceives as) God. It is that frame of mind that emphasizes the ego, arrogance, and judgment completely counter to what religion is all about.

In the end the problem is rooted in the nature of most Christianity today, where faith is supreme and walking the path of personal development is on equal or lower footing. Such a huge emphasis on faith seems like it will inevitable lead to a great emphasis on convincing yourself and others that you are right at the expense of dedication to working to overcome all the flaws that come with being human.

However, I really do have only the greatest respect for the millions of amazing Christians in the world who take their faith as a way to develop all the good qualities. It seems like an inevitably torturous struggle, though, because you are given a conception of who you are supposed to be, but not a concrete path to get there. All the impure habits have only suppression as the alternative.

Imbued with Christianity

I'm sitting at a cafe in Nashville waiting to meet my second couchsurfing host. The kind of coffee shop whose Berkeley equivalent would be mostly vegan. The decor wreaks of revolutionary spirit. But when you look a little closer you see that the paintings on the wall, though avant guarde, have names like "The Fall of the Lord" and "Jesus Christo."

We are across the street from a small liberal arts college with a focus on the arts. So the clientele is almost exclusively college students. It has been a few hours, and I can think of at least three different conversations on religion--a sermon, or making plans around going to mass.