Divine Dialogues: The Theory of Religion
I am an academic by trade, even though I am doing my very best to distance myself from it (distancing that is mainly limited by my need of money and the generosity of academic hourly rates). Hence, in my navigations of wombat holes, I take a decidedly academic approach. There is already plenty of wanton speculation and bold hypothesising in these realms; one must do their best to not compound the situation.
That said, I do have my own personal views, which I can’t help but share at times, and this denial of personal opinion was one of the things that pushed me away from academic writing. So I try to weave these opinions in transparently and constructively, rather than simply out of self-gratification or aggrandisement. I try to make it interesting and entertaining, because obviously — and creative, because this is my main creative outlet. I also believe in the power of stories, and so I try to tell my story where I think it can be illustrative. I also like important sounding and arguably unnecessary words. You may have noticed.
When I first started going down the wombat hole, I tried to stick with fairly conventional source material. Yes, some of the authors were pretty out there in their theories, but they came to these theories in reasonable ways: typically, to employ academic speak, through heavy reliance on secondary sources (i.e. synthesising the work of other writers), occasionally through compiling the testimonies of primary sources (i.e. direct contact with ‘Insiders’), before being garnished by their own dot connecting. I listened to a lot of podcasts, but these were mainly as access points to look into the work of the guests in more detail, and also for entertainment purposes.
But then things got a bit more complicated. I was, at this time, exploring the concept of religion quite robustly, including in my personal spiritual journey. Religion as a concept fascinated me, and this fascination grew as it became clear that religion plays a central (and complicated) role in some of the most significant conspiracies in our lifetime, most notably 9/11 (file that one for later).
I realised quickly that the worlds of conspiracy and religion are inextricably linked, and one cannot understand one without the other. So I had to understand religion, not from my own personal and subjective experiences, but through the horribly constricted and logical process of academic thought that I has been trying to escape from. Here is my best attempt at a summary of the theory of religion, presented, in true academic style, in 1000 words +-10%.
I started with looking at religious texts themselves, because these are the sources of our religious thought.
I had to stop and ask myself a fairly fundamental academic question: what actually were these sources? As above, academic sources come in two broad types: ‘primary’ sources that contain a new set of data, usually derived directly from people through methods like surveys and interviews; and ‘secondary’ sources that collect and synthesise multiple primary sources.
Religious texts then are essentially secondary sources that recorded and interpreted a very special type of primary material: that gained from individuals in direct contact with the supernatural, unseen world (or so they believed, at least). They were, if we accept this phenomenon as valid, documents of divine dialogues: instances of inter-dimensional interviews, if you like.
For an (albeit recovering) academic, this is unstable ground. The veracity and reliability of this material rests on some speculative and unprovable social belief that the source of this information (let’s call them the ‘interviewee’), its translation by the ‘interviewer’, its recording and subsequent chain of custody, and finally its publication (typically including multiple language translations along the way) were essentially infallible.
This is, of course, how texts such as the Bible are treated by many: parsed, scoured and dissected for their hidden spiritual messages to within an inch of their lives, undertaken within a quarantined intellectual apparatus that refuses to hold the text to any kind of conventional standard of reliability. Why? Basically: because God says so.
Things got more interesting when I began to delve into a whole new world of information: channeled material.
When you get to the apex of the conspiracy world (or the bottom of it, however you want to look at it) you find that channeling is everywhere. Many if not most of the influential voices in this world claim to receive much of their information directly from spiritual sources existing in a different realm than ours. Not all, but a select few, even have come to have something resembling a religious following.
This is, needless to say, a no go for many people of a particular spiritual background. For the Abrahamic religious tradition, there is only one method for divine discourse, and that is through God’s chosen messengers. It is an exclusive club. The rest of us spiritual plebs must rely on the fragmented records of these half divine, half earthly souls. Anything else is cutting corners, and likely means conversing with those tricksy, troublesome evil spirits.
But really? Is there actually a fundamental difference between a religious revelation and channeled information?
That is a good question (thanks), and one that I can’t answer conclusively. But, from a purely rational perspective, the basics are really the same. Both are received by individuals that have reached some degree of enlightenment, or perhaps receptivity, in that they are able to pick up divine signals. Some of these individuals, we are to believe, have essentially gained the same station as the highest in the spiritual world.
From that basic commonality, things get murky very quickly. If one is to believe in the supernatural realm (and I do, based on weight of evidence, not because I have any direct experience of it), then one must also believe that there are both positive and negative spirits. Both, yes, but (happily) that the positive outnumber the negative. The Bible is clear enough about this, as is any optimistic outlook on the nature of life and existence. If we take the view that only religious revelation comes from the good guys, and all other channellings are from negative spirits, this would seem vastly disproportionate to the good/bad composition of this realm.
It really doesn’t seem fair. Why would good spirits (that includes you, God) sit back and let the devious ones do all the speaking, aside from sporadic and dramatic cameos?
It really doesn’t make sense. What makes more sense is that all these divine dialogues are essentially the same: primarily positive conversations with varying degrees of negative information somehow creeping in. Maybe some do end up becoming more negative than positive.
On what basis can we make sense of this positive/negative split for each instance of revealed information? Well, it is one of the basic tenets of channeled information that the purity of the received information (i.e. whether it is received from entities of either a positive orientation, negative orientation or some slippery combination of both) depends on the purity of the receiver.
The premise of a religion and its claimed spiritual authenticity is thus entirely dependent on the moral station of its revealer. For a revelation to be infallible, its revealer (here in the material world) must also be infallible. A religion hangs together on these two pillars; if either starts to crumble, so do the edifices of the religion.
How do we judge the moral station of the revealer? Really, we have to take people’s word for it: the revealer themselves and those who lived in their time. Not to mention that we then have to assume these stories have remained authentic throughout this passing of time, whether it be several centuries or dozens of centuries ago.
And really, we have to assume that their moral station is substantially greater than everyone of these channellers who have been revealing new information in recent times, many of whom seem like lovely human beings.
That's a lot of assumptions. Can we believe in something that guides our thinking to such an extent if we have no way of proving it?
I’m certainly not here to say infallibility doesn’t exist, because each person must decide that for themselves: plus, conclusive and objective statements of any kind become difficult when we are working off the basis that none of us are perfect.
Similarly, one doesn’t have to believe in channeling—at least as a positive source of divine dialogues. But then how can one still say they believe in religion, to truly believe it as a source of infallible information? With a truly logic-defying leap of faith, of course.
Religion does come down to faith: faith in some sort of divinity within the world that is separate from the corruptions of humanity. The particular view of divinity that religion offers — infallibility of the revealer and in the preservation of their message — provides the pivot of the expression of faith in many people’s lives. We all need to live a faith-based life, and it’s up to each of us to work out where we place our faith, and just how far our faith will stretch.