Religious Humility

All religions have good in them.

Unfortunately, they can also cause a lot of harm and suffering. History, both ancient and recent, is a witness to this fact.

Like anything else, religion is a mixed bag. It has both light and dark in it. But I don't think the dark is a necessary part of religion. And perhaps by understanding it better, we can avoid becoming part of the dark ourselves.

The Good

Here's some of the good that I see in religion. Religion can give us ...

1. A conduit to a spiritual connection with something greater than ourselves.
2. A social structure that offers us a sense of community and belonging.
3. A philosophical structure for understanding the world, including a sense of our place in it and our duty.
4. A set of ethics, a moral code that enables us to bring light into the world, both for ourselves and for others around us.
5. A sense of purpose in life.

I'm sure there are other benefits we could list, but this seems like a good starting point. So we can get a lot of value from religion, including some very practical (non-spiritual) benefits.

The Bad

So what is the dark side?

I think the dark side of religion is all about arrogance. Arrogance breeds conflict, self-righteousness, insular communities, shaming, shunning, and many other things. Of all of the children of arrogance, conflict is perhaps the darkest. Let's look at these two things a bit closer.

Arrogance - religion can make people so sure of themselves that everyone who disagrees with them is, at best, misguided and, at worst, an enemy of God. This can lead people to think they are special or chosen. While that can have some psychological benefit, it is also quite dangerous. It leads them to draw lines separating themselves from others. Individuals and organizations tend to draw boundaries around themselves. You are then either in or out. You are for us or against us. And once the battle lines are drawn, the conflict begins.

There's no official declaration of war, of course. The conflict begins with subtlety. We speak out against other points of view. We denigrate other people and organizations that disagree with us. We engage in social and psychological warfare. And in extreme cases, we engage in physical violence. We make the Other into the Enemy.

At the root of it all is arrogance. We begin the conflict by believing we know something that others don't. And even if we desire to share that knowledge with them, there is still the potential for us to engage in conflict. Sometimes it's as simple as feeling superior. But it can be much more heinous than that.

Not that all people will engage in conflict, but we're all susceptible to it in some form. And given enough people in a given religious tradition, we're bound to find some in positions of power who are predisposed to fight. In an environment in which faith has become rigid, we're going to have conflict.

Rigidity of faith seems to come about because we codify our creed. We write it down, and it becomes inflexible. Our faith, which probably began as a beautiful, fluid motion, full of life and excitement, begins to fossilize. And in the soil of certainty, nourished by a codified creed, our faith ossifies into a rigid, cold, lifeless structure, giving us no room for further learning or growth.

The Solution

The antidote to arrogance, of course, is humility. And humility is a necessary ingredient of true faith. Faith isn't knowledge. Faith isn't certainty. In fact, it's somewhat the opposite. Faith is powerful because it seeks knowledge, but it's even more powerful because it falls short. At the root of faith is uncertainty. And because we don't know with certainty the things we believe on a spiritual level (or perhaps on any level), we have room to grow, and room to allow others to grow.

This humility is fundamental in good science as well as good religion. And in any discipline that seeks truth. We should always be willing to re-examine our assumptions, test our theories, and discover new truth. In this kind of environment, truth tends to win eventually.

I think individual and organizational humility is the key to avoiding the conflict that gives religion a bad name. Rather than tearing down someone else's faith, perhaps we can each become the change we want to see in the world by dismantling our own arrogance. This is true whether we believe in a Higher Power or not. The lack of such a belief is also a type of faith.

As we introduce humility into our hearts, we will naturally allow each person, including ourselves, the freedom to find their own path. That freedom, devoid of the chains of certainty, leads to a beautiful state of peace, both internally and externally.