How Did Faith and a Belief In God become about Money and Power?
Religions have evolved through oral traditions, the spoken word and telling of traditions and practices that become a common belief or guiding principle or truth. Much of this must have been based on common sense and the need to develop some degree of order and authority as bands of people grew into tribes and eventually regional and/or ethnic groups and nation-states and political states.
Some of these trends were a mixture of secular power and religion, others divided power and authority between the secular and the religious leaders, and variations of each. Imagining trying to make sense of the natural calamities that afflicted the people of prehistory and to maintain and rebuild out of chaos and devastation must have credited the Gods with all manner of ills and anger towards the people that must somehow be explained and set aright.
Eventual we have the word, the oral traditions and practices, set to written form and in some traditions, the written word, as was the case with the oral traditions in most cases, became the divinely inspired word of God and the religious basis for the authority and power priests and such held over the people. Fast forward over time to the seeming conflict between State and Religion for moral and legal authority over the people.
This leads me to my point of interest, my question, how did the basic teachings of our gods become so heavily oriented toward the accumulation of power and judgement, and especially to the obligation to pay the tithes, fund the church?
I ask myself, what does the Torah and the Prophets teach and inspire in us; what do the words and life of Jesus teach and inspire us? They ask of us that we do what is fundamentally contrary to our own self-interest, contrary to the selfish hierarchy of human needs. Our Faiths at their core ask us to treat others as we would want to be treated. Expanding on that simple tasking, we are asked to help one another, to be generous and provide hospitality, to share our good fortune and wealth, to aid and protect those weaker and in need.
It is easy to see how the powerful secular leaders and religious leaders would use Church teachings and interpret the "divinely inspired words" to call upon the faithful to pay for God's favor and to bend their wills to the authority of the priests and its leadership, such as the Pope, or suffer a loss of the heavenly reward. I choose to see the core teaching, the Golden Rule, to be what God would have us do to honor the gift and responsibility that having a consciousness, a living awareness, the ability to reason and create in our own right. This Earth, this life, those living things that share this moral coil, "the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune" that populate our lives and challenge us to survive and share at the same time, this is Heaven. God, all the Gods, stand by and expect us to cherish the life we have and honor the rights and beliefs of our fellow humans and all life on the planet and somehow work together, against natural selfish interests and greed/ambition, to sustain this heaven our Earth and somehow make it a better world for those who have less and are suffering. Tall order, much harder than just adhering to the Ten Commandments.
Comments
Post a Comment