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This
most eloquent article was submitted by one
of our viewers in response to our May
newsletters challenge entitled,
"Religious Confusion".
from: David Yehudah - Subject: Religious
Confusion
I feel this commentary may belabor the
obvious. The only virtue this essay
has is that it might be useful for focusing
someone's attention on the real
problem (as I see it).
Religious confusion is caused by two things:
the knowledge of choices and
the feeling that one must make a choice.
Small children rarely have
religious confusion. It's not until we reach
an age where we are confronted
by differences that we become confused. And
the more sheltered we are,
the more devastating that knowledge can be.
Even in families where the
parents are of different faiths, we rarely
have this conflict because the
grownups have usually settled on one
religion or the other "for the sake of
the children."
Example: James Cagney, the actor, grew up in
the Williamsburg section of
Brooklyn. He said in an interview a few
years ago that until he was sixteen
years old he thought everyone in the world
was Jewish.
When we were young the instinctive reaction
was to close ranks, divide the
world into 'us' and ----'everybody else.'
They = bad, or wrong, us = good, on
the side of truth and beauty, etc. That
works until we begin to reach out to
the wider world, the one unbound by friends
and relatives. Suddenly the
'others' are seen as people just like us. We
discover there are good Jews,
Moslems, Buddhists, Protestants, Catholics,
etc. that only yesterday were
wicked or stupid or whatever other label we
had put on them. In an open
society such as ours here in the US we may
date someone of a different
faith. Interracial romance is still frowned
upon, but even that taboo is being
lifted in such enlightened places as
Oklahoma and Iowa.
So. We have arrived at an age when
distinctions are blurred. The
unthinkable has become the commonplace, and
what was absolute is now
relative. We have moved from complacent
certitude to confused ambiguity.
If one religion is right, then the rest must
be wrong, for that is how we were
taught as children. Is that the way it has
to be? I don't think so. Certainly
some religions teach theirs is the only path
to salvation, but to me the
premise is absurd on the face of it. I don't
mean we should consider all
faiths as being equal; that way leads to no
faith at all. What I do mean is
that we all have discretion. If we are
religious we say God gave us a
conscience; if not, we say we know right
from wrong. I might add that for us
to admit that while we may believe in one
faith above all others, we admit
we don't know for sure and probably never
will in this lifetime, is to free
ourselves from dogma and cant imposed from
without and allows us to
seek the truth wherever the search leads us.
What we have to recognize is
that no one sect has a corner on truth, or
beauty, or whatever criterion we
require of a religion.
Ultimately it is a question each of us has
to decide alone, for ultimately we
alone are responsible for ourselves. What
person, living or dead, can place limits on
what questions I may ask or what conclusions
I may accept as binding on myself and myself
alone, that neither diminishes another's
faith nor limits his own search for the
truth? Religious confusion is part of the
human condition; we can either control it or
be controlled by it. The choice is ours.
©
2000 all rights reserved. This article was
reprinted by permission from the archives of
<http://www.SpiritualHealing.org>
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