Many people never grow up. They stay all their lives with a passionate need for external authority and guidance, pretending not to trust their own judgment, willy-nilly, that there exists some authority greater that their own. The fervent fundamentalist—whether Protestant or Catholic, Jew or Moslem—is closed to reason and even communication for fear of losing the security of childish dependence. He would suffer extreme emotional heebie jeebies if he didn’t have the feeling that there was some external and infallible guide in which he could trust absolutely and without which his very identity would dissolve.
Faith is an openness and trusting attitude to truth and reality, whatever it may turn out to be. This is a risky and adventurous state of mind.
Belief, in the religious sense, is the opposite of faith—because it is a fervent wishing or hope, a compulsive clinging to the idea that the universe is arranged and governed in such and such a way. Belief is holding to a rock; faith is learning how to swim—and this whole universe swims in boundless space.
No actions, or abstentions from actions, are of moral import unless undertaken voluntarily.
Concern over the historical truth of the Bible is relatively modern, whether in the form of fundamentalism or of scientific research.
When the Bible was translated and widely distributed as a result of the invention of printing, it fell into the hands of people who, like the Jesus freaks of today, were simply uneducated and who, as the depressed classes of Europe, eventually swarmed over to America.
Some people have the peculiar ability to divide their minds into watertight compartments, being critical and rational in matters of science but credulous as children when it comes to religion.
The religion of the literally understood Bible is chauvinistic and militant. It is on the march to conquer the world and to establish itself as the one and only true belief.
When one considers the architecture and ritual of churches, whether Catholic or Protestant, it is obvious—until most recent times—that they are based on royal or judicial courts. A monarch who rules by force sits in the central court of his donjon with his back to the wall, flanked by guards, and those who come to petition him for justice or to offer tribute must kneel or prostrate themselves—simply because these are difficult positions from which to start a fight. Such monarchs are, of course, frightened of their subjects and constantly on the anxious alert for rebellion. Is this an appropriate image for the inconceivable energy that underlies the universe?
The altarthrone in Catholic churches is occupied by the image of God in the form of one crucified as a common thief, but he hangs there as our leader in subjection to the Almighty Father, King of the universe, propitiating Him for those who have broken His not always reasonable laws.
If you picture the universe as a monarchy, how can you believe that a republic is the best form of government, and so be a loyal citizen of the United States?
The Bible is a dangerous book, though by no means an evil one. It depends, largely, on how you read it—with what prejudices and with what intellectual background. Regarded as sacred and authoritative, such a complex collection of histories, legends, allegories and images becomes a monstrous Rorschach blot in which you can picture almost anything you want to discover—just as one can see cities and mountains in the clouds or faces in the fire.
There is not a scrap of evidence that Jesus was familiar with any other religious tradition than that of the Hebrew Scriptures or that he knew anything of the civilizations of India, China, or Peru. Under these circumstances, he was faced with the virtually impossible problem of expressing himself in the peculiar religious language and imagery of his local culture. For it is obvious to any student of the psychology of religion that what he needed to express was the relatively common change of consciousness known as mystical experience—the vivid and overwhelming sensation that your own being is one with eternal and ultimate reality.
The Gospel, or “good news,” that Jesus was trying to convey, despite the limitations of his tradition, was that we are all sons of God.
Although the books of the Bible might have been “plain words for plain people” in the days of Isaiah and Jesus, an uneducated and uninformed person who reads them today, and takes them as the literal Word of God, will become a blind and confused bigot.
What is to be done about the existence of millions of such dangerous people in the world? Obviously, they must not be censored or suppressed by their own methods. Even though it is impossible to persuade or argue with them in a reasonable way, it is just possible that they can be wooed and enchanted by a more attractive style of religion, which will show them that their unbending “faith” in their Bibles is simply an inverse expression of doubt and terror—a frantic whistling in the dark.
This is the basic act of faith—of being unreservedly open and vulnerable to what is true and real.
Both science and mysticism (which might be called religion as experienced rather than religion as written) are based on the experimental attitude of looking directly at what is, of attending to life itself instead of trying to glean it from a book.
Science arises from mysticism, because both the mystic and the scientist are types of people who want to know directly, for themselves, rather than to be told what to believe.
You cannot at once idolize the Bible and embody the spirit of Jesus. He twitted the Pharisees as today he would twit the fundamentalists: “You search the Scriptures daily, for in them you think you have life.” The religion of Jesus was to trust life, both as he felt it in himself and as he saw it around him.
The alternative to mutual trust, which is indeed a risky gamble, is the security of the police state.