CLAL Special Features
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Jewish Public Forum Seminar:
“What Is Religion For?”
November 19, 2001
Pre-Seminar
Response
“What Is Religion For?”
By Irwin Kula
For me,
the post-September 11 use of God, here in the United States and in the Islamic world, has
made the traditional belief in an external God and the inevitable stark dualities such a
belief creates between good and evil, between us and them, at best simply irrelevant and
at worst dangerous.
Osama Bin
Laden, George Bush, Jerry Falwell, as well as religious leadership throughout this
country, have each invoked God. Each knows
exactly what the God they invoke wants, which not surprisingly, is precisely the views and
positions they espouse. Ironically, this is
all happening at the same time that America is doing everything possible to ensure that
this war is not seen as a religious war.
This has
made the following challenge absolutely clear to me.
There are two groups of people in our society who, while rejecting the
literalness of conventional religion and the way such religion is used to legitimate
existing social, political, military and economic arrangements, have not actively engaged
in reimagining the role of the religion/the spiritual in America. There are those people, predominantly secular, who
are interested in politics but have trivialized both religion in general and the more
recent consciousness/spiritual movements in this country.
And there are the consciousness/spiritual movement people who have tended to
trivialize politics and become apolitical. In
the political realm this leaves us with religion that either merely affirms the status
quo, telling us we are the good guys (Bush’s religion), or religion that is
fundamentalist and with self-righteous certainty attacks some “other” within our
own society (Falwell’s religion).
It is time
for those interested in politics and those who are part of the consciousness movement to
come together to question conventional forms of religion.
They need to raise the suspicion that those people who define God so
precisely in a way that simply supports or affirms their own views are being highly
self-serving. Both Bush’s God and Osama
Bin Laden’s God do something that all spiritual traditions fight against – their
God buttresses their own individual egos or their tribe’s claims (the narcissism of
the group).
In other
words, it is time for these two groups of people to publicly take on issues of
religion’s role in public life. Will
those interested in politics begin to recognize that politics needs deeper roots and begin
to look to their own interior spiritual lives trusting their experience and getting over
being spooked by religious traditions? Will
the consciousness movement people be able to extend the intuitions of
“enlightenment” into a realpolitik? If
not, it’s Osama Bin Laden’s God against George Bush’s God. No wonder that to many of us it feels like a
Godless world.
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