Religious Beliefs/Values Paper

informal 1-2 page, single-spaced document that answers the fundamental questions in life from the religious perspective, such as:

What is the meaning of life? 

What is the purpose of life? 

How do I relate to others?

What is religion and its role in our lives?

See the attached file for the sample title page as well as other questions you might want to address.

Religion / Values Belief Paper

This first assignment is an informal 1-2 page, single-spaced document that answers the fundamental questions in life from the religious perspective, such as:

· What is the meaning of life?

· What is the purpose of life within this religious context?

· How do I relate to others?

You may create your narrative in answering this question or approach it as a series of questions, such as:

· Who is important in my life? Why?

· What is the role of religion in my life?

· Do you believe in God and describe your relationship with God.

See the following sample title page.

(Title)

(student name)

University of the Incarnate Word

Author Note

(student name), University of the Incarnate Word

Prepared for course (course number), (course name)

Professor Paul Hudec, and submitted (date).

Correspondence regarding this article should be directed to (student name)

E-mail: (student email address)

RELS1325 – Religious Quest

Week 1 Lecture

Rev. Paul Hudec, PhD, MAPS, MBA, CKM

Welcome again to this course! I might want to change this from a “course” to an 8-week group journey. So, the use of the word course might be a bit of an understatement for many because this course may actually be a personal or life quest for you and that religion and a journey or life’s quest is appropriate for all believers not just ordained or a few chosen ones.

“Why study human religiousness?”

 

It’s a question you may be asking yourself.  One answer might be that it fulfills a requirement in the core curriculum. But another answer might be that in this course you will have the opportunity to think more deeply about what it means to be fundamentally human and respond to this crazy thing we call living. In the process, you will have an opportunity to not only grow deeper in your own faith tradition, but you will have a chance to learn about how people in other eras responded to the Divine as well as gain an appreciation for religious traditions quite different from your own.

 

Religion can be thought of as an organized human response to the mystery of life and the desire to be in relationship with something bigger than ourselves. In acknowledging that there is something other, bigger, and greater than ourselves, we put systems, rituals, and traditions into place to try to facilitate a relationship with that “something.” While science and mathematics seek to find answers to material problems we encounter in the universe, religion responds to the mysteries of the non-material realities of the universe.

 

If you have not read Meeting Jesus Again for the First Time, by Marcus Borg, I highly recommend it, especially if you were raised in the Christian tradition. Borg traces his own religious beliefs from childhood to adulthood and notes how some of the things he believed as a child “just because” he was told to or everyone else did ended up changing over time as he grew up. However, even though his beliefs changed over time, and he began to have doubts about some of what he was taught as a child, his faith became stronger and deeper as he grew into an adult. Instead of focusing on whether or not something actually happened the way it was written down in the Bible, he focused on the overall themes he found in the Bible: being in right relationship with God; caring for one’s neighbor, etc.  

 

In some ways, this course may be like this for many of you. As you are made aware of how religion and spirituality evolved over time, you may have cause to appreciate the traditions of your own religion as well as those different from your own. Instead of focusing on the differences of practice or texts, etc., you will see how much similarity there is on the deeper level of relationship, community, and human dignity.

 

One theory of how religion began is that it developed when pre-humans evolved into primitive humans and became more self-aware and aware of forces outside of themselves they could not explain or control.  Survival was apparently the major preoccupation of primitive peoples.  Three things threatened survival: forces of nature, scarcity of food, and experience of death.  The primitive people concluded that these experiences were the result of the actions of invisible powers or spirits that controlled the nature, caused the scarcity of food, or brought death.  Primitive people therefore established rituals, practices, ceremonies, prayers, songs, and chants to keep the friendly spirits friendly and to ward off the hostile spirits. 

 

There are several characteristics common to all primitive religions:

• Belief in spirit-forces or invisible power.

• Distinctive religious activities.

• Concern about death.

• Moral systems (this is right, this is wrong).

• Theology (a system of explanations for religious beliefs and practices).

• Prophecy.

• Scripture.

• Sacrifice.

• Designated places of worship.

 

One will often hear that primitive religions, or religions with sacred stories different from our own religious tradition, are myths, whereas “our” stories are the literal truth. It is important to remember that any religion’s ancient stories that cannot be “proven” can be classified as myths. Myths are simply stories that explain events or phenomena that to some extent defy explanation. However, myths are often born out of genuine religious experiences and result from a combination of social and personal needs.  Within these myths, we may find revelation, which is meaning expressed in story language.  For example, within the Christian tradition, the story of Adam and Eve can be thought of as a “myth” because it seeks to explain the human condition of sin and suffering for disobedience. One may choose to believe that the story is literally true or not, but the deeper revelation is the tendency of human beings to make choices that hurt their relationships with God and with each other.

 

What follows are a couple of different takes on what religion is about. The first is from William Paul Young’s book The Shack.

 

From The Shack* 

p. 207 “Religion must use law to empower itself and control the people needed in order to survive. I give you an ability to respond and your response is to be free to love and serve in every situation, and therefore each moment is different and unique and wonderful.  If God simply gave you a responsibility, He would not have to be with you at all.  It would now be a task to perform, an obligation to be met, and something to fail.”

p. 206 “God is a verb.  He is more attuned to verbs than nouns.  Verbs such as confessing, repenting, living, loving, responding, growing, reaping, changing, sowing, running, dancing, singing, and so on.  Humans have a way for taking a verb that is alive and full of grace and turning it into a dead noun or principle that reeks of rules.  Nouns exist because there is a created universe and a physical reality, but if the universe is only a mass of nouns, it is dead.  Unless “I am,” there are no verbs, and verbs are what make the universe alive.”

p. 237:  “If anything matters then everything matters.  Because we are important, everything we do is important.  Every time we forgive, the universe changes; every time we reach out and touch a heart or a life, the world changes; with every kindness and service, seen or unseen, God’s purposes are accomplished and nothing will ever be the same again.”

p. 200:  “Religion is about having the right answers, and some of its answers are right.  But God is about the process that takes us to the living answer, and once you get to him, he will change you from the inside.  There are a lot of smart people who are able to say a lot of right things from their brains because they have been told what the right answers are, but they don’t know God at all. So really, how can their answer be right, even if they are right?  So even though they might be right, they are still wrong.”

p. 205:  “Those who are afraid of freedom are those who cannot trust us to live in them.  Trying to keep the Law is actually a declaration of independence, a way of keeping control.  Law grants you the power to judge others and feel superior to them.  You believe you are living to a higher standard than those you judge.  Enforcing rules is a vain attempt to create certainty out of uncertainty.  And contrary to what we might thing, God has a great fondness for uncertainty.  Rules cannot bring freedom; they have only the power to accuse.”

 

* Note: A little bit about The Shack (from Amazon.com): Mackenzie Allen Philips’ youngest daughter, Missy, has been abducted during a family vacation and evidence that she may have been brutally murdered is found in an abandoned shack deep in the Oregon wilderness. Four years later in the midst of his Great Sadness, Mack receives a suspicious note, apparently from God, inviting him back to that shack for a weekend. Against his better judgment he arrives at the shack on a wintry afternoon and walks back into his darkest nightmare. What he finds there will change Mack’s world forever. In a world where religion seems to grow increasingly irrelevant The Shack wrestles with the timeless question, “Where is God in a world so filled with unspeakable pain?”

 

The second reading is from Roger Scruton and is entitled “Better off without religion?”

 

“What is meant by ‘religion,’ and what kind of thing are ‘we’? As I see it, religion involves three different, but related, phenomena: ritual, membership and belief. A religion includes words, gestures and ceremonies, which must be repeated exactly, and which define a core experience of the sacred. This experience is strange sediment in human consciousness; it might have an evolutionary cause, but the cause does not tell us what it means. A religion also defines a community. The rituals of religion are shared; and those who participate in them are drawn into another kind of relationship with their neighbors than those that prevail in the world of ‘getting and spending’. People hunger for this kind of membership, and the power of religion resides in its ability to provide it. In the rituals of a religion all worldly differences are overcome: the Sultan bows in submission beside his subjects, and the good-natured fool takes communion beside the crook who cheated him. The ritual shines on both of them from a place beyond their ordinary experience, and includes them in a community whose home is in some way not of this world. Finally, religion involves belief. It is natural for someone, taken up in those rituals and in the community that they create, to believe that they point beyond this world, towards the realm that we now call ‘transcendental’. The Greeks situated this realm at the top of Mount Olympus. Their philosophers, however, were inclined to think of it as outside space and time — and that is the idea that prevailed. Anthropologists view the belief in gods as a late development, by no means inevitably connected with the real core of religion, which they find in ritual and membership.

 

And this is surely plausible. There are plenty of religions in which the belief in gods is a hazy and skeptical afterthought, and for which the ritual and the community are far more important than any theological doctrine. The religion of ancient China was like this; so too, in many respects, was the religion of Rome. On the other hand, belief in supernatural beings, who take an interest in us and have the power to protect us, makes sense of the rituals that we share. The rituals are now seen as actions done for their sake. Sacred things become symbols of the ‘real presence’; the religious community begins to see itself as engaged in a common enterprise of salvation, in which it benefits from supernatural powers and divine protection. I am not speaking of Christianity only: Apuleius gives a beautiful description of the phenomenon I am referring to in The Golden Ass, in which the long-suffering hero finally enters the fold of a religious community, dedicated to the worship of Isis. Mozart describes something similar in The Magic Flute.

 

Suppose someone were to say that we would be better off without love. After all, love often leads to disaster: the love of Helen for Paris, for instance, which led to the Trojan War. Love brings with it jealousy, possessiveness, obsession and grief. People can love the wrong things and the wrong people. They can go astray through love as through hatred.

 

Most people would respond to that argument in the following way. Whatever the disasters that love may cause, they would suggest, love, judged in it and without regard to contingencies, is a human good — perhaps the greatest of human goods. The important thing is to learn to love rightly and in the right frame of mind. The disasters, if they come, come as accidents and not by necessity. That is the response that should be made on behalf of religion, too. Of course religion can lead to disasters, like the Thirty Years War. Of course people can believe in false gods and attach themselves to evil rituals. Of course religious belief can exercise a stultifying effect on the intelligence, the imagination and the humanity of those who subscribe to it. But none of those possibilities implies that there is not a proper development of the religious urge, in which people learn to worship the right things in the right way.

 

We seek for the causes of things; but we also seek for their meaning. We have moral values, aesthetic tastes, yearnings and aspirations which, for want of a better word, we call ‘spiritual’. Such things are not irrational, even if we find it difficult to provide a logical or scientific foundation for them. Indeed, it is only a rational being who experiences the world in this way, in terms of meanings, values, tastes and aspirations, and who feels, as a result, the tension between his life and his ideals. This tension is what religious people call ‘original sin’.

To defend such a response, however, we must know what kind of thing ‘we’ are. This, it seems to me, is the place where a little philosophy is called for. What part of our nature draws us to religion, and what is needed if that part is to be rightly guided? Dawkins tells us that religion belongs to habits of mind that are pre-rational. As he sees it, religion is a survival of the magical attitude to reality upon which we ought to have turned our backs at the Enlightenment. It seems to me that this expresses too narrow a view of rationality. Science, math and logic are not the only spheres in which our reason shows itself. We seek for the causes of things; but we also seek for their meaning. We have moral values, aesthetic tastes, yearnings and aspirations which, for want of a better word, we call ‘spiritual’. Such things are not irrational, even if we find it difficult to provide a logical or scientific foundation for them. Indeed, it is only a rational being who experiences the world in this way, in terms of meanings, values, tastes and aspirations, and who feels, as a result, the tension between his life and his ideals. This tension is what religious people call ‘original sin’. Again, there is nothing irrational in it: on the contrary, not to feel it is to be only half alive to the human condition. People who do not convey to us, in whatever way, an awareness of their shortcomings do not attract our sympathy. They are not, really, of our kind.

 

Is it not plausible to think that it is precisely this aspiration that is a side of people that draws them to religion? As rational beings we cannot be satisfied with causal explanations only. The question ‘why?’ has, for us, another meaning — not what is the cause, but what is the reason? For what end does this or that exist? And if you say ‘for no end’, does that not simply raise the question all over again?

 

Unlike Dawkins I have never believed that the theory of evolution has shown that the search for reasons, rather than causes, is a chimera. As rational beings we look for meanings, connections, harmonies and symmetries: we want the world to make sense to us, and to answer our questions not merely in the way the laws of nature answer the enquiries of a scientist, but in the way the laws of harmony answer the aspirations of the musician. Our reason over-reaches the bounds of science, and this is not a deficiency in our reason but a deficiency in science. Moreover, as rational beings we make an absolute distinction between right and wrong, good and evil, virtue and vice, and we found our lives on the belief that some things are intrinsically worthwhile, and to be pursued for their own sake — not pleasure only, but love, duty, virtue and kindness. We cannot mount a deductive or a scientific argument in favor of those values. But we condemn those who condemn them, and believe that reason is on our side.

 

All those facts about the human condition dispose us to look for the places where we can stand, as it were, at the window of our empirical world and gaze out towards the transcendental — the places from which light from that other sphere floods over us. There is nothing irrational in looking for these places, or in the thought that we find them by locating what are sacred — sacred words, sacred texts, and sacred rituals. And by looking for the sacred we are also constructing a community, so that the meanings and values that we find are shared with others. A religious community is not a scientific community. It contains idiocy, prejudice, ignorance and stupidity in all the proportions that these are displayed by mankind as a whole. But that is its great virtue: it can draw people, whatever their talents and intellectual powers, into a shared apprehension of their condition. It can teach humility and justice, and remind the one with power, knowledge, wealth or artistic talent, that he is the equal of the one beside him in the moment of worship, however ignorant, weak or sinful that person might be.

Now I don’t deny that there are wrong ways of pursuing this religious quest. Those, for whom faith is a call to arms, and religion a blanket justification for violence against the unbeliever, are a threat to all of us. But although they make the most noise, they are not the most numerous among religious people. For most people religion is what it has always been — a cultivation of piety, humility in the face of creation, and an attempt to live according to a shared moral code. Piety, humility and morality are all things that we are rapidly losing. I would suggest that we would do better to keep them, and to study how they might be directed to the right objects and in the right way.

RELS1325 Religious Quest

The Quest

Rev. Paul Hudec, PhD, MAPS, MBA, CKM

This course’s title is Religious Quest and if that is not a familiar concept or phrase expressed by any current or past churches or faith communities, let’s explore some familiar contemporary movie themes that might be helpful for us not only for this course but for our faith journeys as well. One of the important points that I mention to all my classes for this course topic is that there may be more at work here than just course material. Our discussions and topics within the seven content weeks of this course may also be formative, i.e. you may begin an investigation or thought process that may influence you or may cause a change in your life’s outlook. With this being expressed, let’s examine two movie themes: the quest as expressed by Indiana Jones¸ National Treasure and another as expressed by Star Trek. Something for everyone, right?

In the Indiana Jones first and third movies, the excitement of exploring and searching for the Ark of the Covenant as depicted below or the Cup of Christ can be extremely exciting and consuming of our interest, activities, and even hopes and dreams.

We remember these movies as filled will dangers even life threatening dangers and of rewards or treasures beyond all valuation. Both of these movies present a quest or search for physical objects. These objects have some historical or factual character as well as myth … fanciful, beguiling myth. Indiana lifts the Ark of the Covenant out of a darkened stone tomb in an underground chamber and it bursts forth with light, let alone the splendor and terror when it is opened later.

What a find!

Then Indiana embarks on a lifelong quest of his dad, the search for the cup of Christ. The event that Jesus and His disciples had as what Scripture describes as the Last Supper focuses upon the cup or what might be a bowl and certainly not the jewel bedecked, gold chalice that most churches use in the Mass today. Does it give eternal life to anyone who drinks from it?

Choose wisely!

In the first movie of the series, National Treasure, the Freemasons continue what the Knights Templar start and eventually uncover the most massive, priceless collection of treasures from human history by discovering clues that were hidden and of cryptic nature that only a most clever, well-educated, and deeply thoughtful person and his group could ever hope to find. But, does a treasure trove exist or could exist?

Once again, when there’s physical objects of great value waiting to be discovered or thought to exist and waiting to be discovered, the quest is on!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9-YMMDloAEM

Now, let’s move to the third and a different type of quest. This series that initially was launched as a TV series in the 1960s lasted for three seasons and was cancelled but only for that first network because what it launched was a following that spanned more than 50 years and numerous movies and other related series. The opening monologue that some of you might know

Space… The final frontier…

These are the voyages of the Starship Enterprise.

Its continuing mission:

To explore strange new worlds…

To seek out new life; new civilizations…

To boldly go where no one has gone before!

Star Trek could easily been termed a quest, a multifaceted quest not for treasures but actually action that reflects who we are as a species of curious, intelligent, and potentially developing the best that homo sapiens can be together with other beings.

Most consider this course, RELS1325, to be a required or fundamental course that introduces many ideas and concepts, but I would like you to think of this course as an invitation to explore as many things about humanity as set within a context of hopes, dreams, visions that extend beyond the physical, which is where the greatest philosophers and theologians have presented in their volumes of materials over the centuries.

Archaeology and paleo-anthropology describe early humans as having burial rituals, myths of the afterlife, gods, and many wondrous things, so religion as we have it today is built upon intellectual constructs that are prehistorical and yet are somehow coded into our genes.

Let’s see what we can discover this Term.