Note: I've said this before, but I feel the need to say it again. I recognize that it would be much better if my work cited more sources to prove my points. I'd love to make this completely professional, but unfortunately, as the stay-at-home mommy of an active three-year-old boy, it's hard enough for me to get something posted once a month as it is. I really hope that someday I'll be able to come back to these posts and add in the missing citations. Thank you for your patience in the meantime. :)
My younger brother recommended Karen Armstrong's A History of God to me a few months ago, so I checked it out from the library and read it. One point the author makes in her book is that anthropomorphic ideas about God are more dangerous than impersonal ideas. When you believe God is a person, you can say “He wants this, He doesn't want that, He hates such-and-such,” and without realizing it, you might be making a religion out of what are really your own (or your family's / society's / culture's) philosophies and phobias – often unfortunately leading to suffering for those who happen to be different from you. (Side note: atheists point to this very same fact to glorify atheism as seldom driving anyone to kill or persecute their neighbor for their beliefs. Doesn't this hint that impersonalism and atheism are nearly synonymous???)
Indeed, Srila
Prabhupada has several times pointed out that what goes by the name
of “religion” in this world is often nothing more than loyalty to
the culture one was born into.
However, is it
truly sound policy to throw something out entirely just because it's
been misused? If we threw out everything that got misused, we'd be
throwing out a heck of a lot of “babies” along with all that
“bathwater.” Instead of just reacting to past bad experience by
avoiding, rejecting, shunning and shutting out all hint of something
that has the potential to be a good idea if done right, isn't it
healthier and more balanced to first of all consider which is truly
the most ideal option, and then support that?
In the
exact same book by Karen Armstrong, the phenomenon of people
not being satisfied with the impersonal conception of God and
gravitating naturally / irresistibly toward the personal conception was
also documented.
Page 83:
“In
both Buddhism and Hinduism there had been a surge of devotion to
exalted beings, such as the Buddha himself or Hindu gods which had
appeared in human form. This kind of personal devotion, known as
bhakti, expressed what
seems to be a perennial human yearning for humanized religion.”
Page 86:
“The
development of bhakti
answered a deep-rooted popular need for some kind of personal
relationship with the ultimate. Having established Brahman as
utterly transcendent, there is a danger that it could become too
rarefied and, like the ancient Sky God, fade from human
consciousness. The evolution of the bodhisattva
ideal in Buddhism and the avatars
of Vishnu seem to represent another stage in religious development
when people insist that the Absolute cannot be less than human.”
I love
that phrase, “deep-rooted popular need.” I love that she chose
the word “need.” When – as here acknowledged even by someone
who seems strongly in favor of an impersonal conception of God –
people in general take to bhakti
like a fish to water, and find the need to add it in later whenever
there's a religious tradition (like Buddhism) that doesn't originally
feature it, how could the perfect religion – one that would both do
no harm, only good, AND
satisfy man's every positive / good / beneficial / healthy hankering,
yearning or need – fail to include a conception of God as a lovable
Person with whom we have the opportunity to enter into relationship?
For many if not most people, I contend that religion would be missing
something vital without that aspect.
In
India, at least, impersonalists are aware of this point, and they
actually respond to it by encouraging the popular devotion to
personal forms of God; but,
their philosophy is that this so-called “bhakti”
is supposed to continue only up to the point at which it is no longer
needed – namely, when the worshipper finally realizes that he and
his beloved Lord are actually one and the same: that he himself, the
soul who has been suffering in this miserable world and battered
about by the laws of nature, is actually the Supreme Lord, and under
the influence of illusion he had just been forgetting it.
Mmm-hmm.
Ooookay. That's why we call them Mayavadis (maya
= illusion, vadi =
theorist): because their philosophy leads to the idea that material
nature and illusion are stronger than God. What kind of God is that,
who can be covered by illusion and forgetfulness, forced to take
birth over and over in so many species of life, and made to suffer
every sort of pain and indignity while in that condition, even to
things like lying passed out in his own throw-up in a gutter as a
drunken bum?!?
“We are ALL God, we just don't know it! God is none other than us!
We simply have to realize it!” Well, if there's no one higher or
greater than us, and we've all got an equal chance of reaching the
top, then how can you call that a belief in God at all?! “There is
no God but ourselves.” Sounds like defiance to me. Can you see
why we would say that their philosophy minimizes, belittles and
offends the Supreme Lord? Sets up human beings as His (tiny, weak,
and absurd) competitors, who want to deny His existence and become
God in His place? Offensive upstarts!
To be continued...
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