Blogtrek

Religion R vs One Big Mess

Last May (2003) I blogged about the saying "God is a definite integral.", by the Rev. Sarah Voss, minister of the Sioux Falls, SD, Unitarian Universalist Church. Her idea was that God was like the area under a curve and above the x-axis of a Cartesian graph, from one place on the horizontal axis to another. One can approximate the area under the graph by subdividing the interval into a number of subintervals, then drawing rectangles from these to the curve and adding up their areas. The finer the mesh, the closer the area comes to the area under the curve; i.e., to God or the Ultimate. She imagined that each religion was like a subdividing of the interval, and that the closer the area, the finer the mesh, to the ultimate curve, the more like The Reality or God the mesh and the interval was. She then said, take the subdividings representing each religion, one for Christianity, one for Jainism, one for Buddhism, and so forth, and take the union of all their subdividing points and take the sum of areas based on that. That comes much closer to the actual curve than any of the individual meshes or religions does. In mathematics, one takes the limit of these areas, and the result is called the definite integral of the function on the interval. That is where Rev. Voss gets her saying from. She called this combined religion Religion R, and she remarked that her and my faith, Unitarian Universalism, out of all the religions, comes the closest to being Religion R. See her book What Number is God? for details.

However, I read a newsletter a little while ago called Human Kindness Foundation: a Little Good News. In the Christmas 2003 issue, Bo Lozoff wrote "An Impatient Letter from God". In it, God says,

I'm not telling you to abandon your religions. I want you to enjoy your religions, honor them, learn from them, just as you should enjoy, honor, and learn from your parents. But do you walk around telling everyone that your parents are better than theirs? Your religion, like your parents, may always have the most special place in your heart; I don't mind that at all. And I don't want you to combine all the Great Traditions into One Big Mess. Each religion is unique for a reason. Each has a unique style so that people can find the best path for themselves.

He seems to say that Rev. Voss' Religion R is "One Big Mess". The newsletter makes a case for not considering your religion as above the others. But then he says don't try to practice them all. If indeed your own religion is not something special, it follows that you might want to try following some tenets of another religion. But then Bo, as God, says that makes a big mess. So which is it, a big mess or the religion that comes closest to The Way?

I say the difference is this. If you go out and try to practice all the religions, you indeed get a big mess. In fact, you get contradictions all over the place. For example, you revere Jesus as God (Christianity), and you revere Jesus as an important human prophet, but not God (Islam). That is a blatant contradiction. I think that Rev. Voss means take the best of each religion and combine these best beliefs into a Religion R. That can resolve the contradictions. For instance, you then believe in a Christianity that reveres Jesus as a model human, but not a god, or you may believe that everyone has a little bit of God or the divine in them (Wicca). Indeed, to me it seems this Religion R, and to a somewhat lesser extent Unitarian Universalism, does indeed come closer to the Ultimate Reality than any of the individual components does, just like with the areas. It seems to me that Religion R then is the way to go.