My March to Agnosticism - Post Birthday Reflection or Two Friday, 19 November 2010

 My March to Agnosticism - Post Birthday Reflection or Two

by Mustafah Dhada on Friday, 19 November 2010 at 15:52

 

18 November 2010

 

I spent a bit of time yesterday on my birthday and tried to get to grips with the unknown. I began questioning the validity of dogmatic credence, (holy trinity, transubstantiation, God as the rationally unprovable) near the end of my monastic existence in my early twenties. I was then fasting every Monday and Thursday. The month of Ramadan followed by abstinence during Lent complemented my devotional life in seclusion. My diet was Spartan, and the rigors of prayers, followed by studies of holy books sharpened acuity. 

 

It was only a matter of time before I began turning the Cartesian knife inwards – a sort of spiritual hara-kari. What was livable to others proved soul-searingly painful to me. How could holy men accommodate duplicity in pursuit of the pure spirit?  Predatory sexuality was a case in point. While I was successful in warding off such approaches, others were less fortunate. 

 

Another example of duplicity was the compromise of principles of life in God to accommodate the needs of convenience. Many would rather compromise for that purpose than do so to strengthen a mission-critical aspect of monastic life. The example that springs to mind here was accepting donors whose coffers were ethically ill-gained.   We all marshal our respective life's mission statements from a combination of lived-in experiences and reflections by others, oral or written. That is how we weave our tapestry of values and that is how we engage responses to crises. 

 

In other words, we are a result of two things: how we have processed what we lived; and, how we relate ourselves when compared to self-reflections by others. 

 

I was fortunate to push the boundaries of self-doubt early – and that proved to be my downfall, so to speak. Rather than accept things as they were, I sought rubric integrity for my divine cube.  Behavioral transgressions by my mentors and unblemished idols served as points of departure for me to think about, so as to push for consistency in all that we did. Soon it proved to be an obsession. One-by-one the mind deconstructed the carefully laid out systemic pillars that governed my life in divine seclusion. Before you knew it, God entered the scene. By then I had concluded that life behind four walls designed for males was not for me. 

 

In effect, I was not built for a life long sauna in Godly vapors. Such a house was incarceration – just that! A slammer encasing God in falsity, enslaving the Holy Spirit beyond the contagion of secular life. In a way, such a viewpoint said it all. I then concluded God is dead within devotional walls unless It/He/She could live amidst mankind, un-preached but heard by all, and seamlessly, and then unaided by proselytizing men-and-women-of-cloth. It was time to leave the walls! 

 

You pretty soon realized that leaving the wall did not leave your formative past behind. Outside, I was still hounded by similar emerging inconsistencies between what we professed (from our respective churches within) and what we did. What turned the worms (to misquote Claudius) was my decade long investigations of massacres. 

 

In short, the experiences from the field validated one thing – religions were critical culture-leptic-and-culture-centric media to convey divinity. In an increasingly globalized economy, air travel, advances in communication, and awareness of the diversity of lifestyles and cultures, it is difficult to see the future of religions. Yes, they do play and will continue to play a role – that of recidivism. They will also act as defensive tools with which fragile cultures can combat net-driven cultural internationalism, intrusions, and forced insertions driven from the outside by populism and popular consumption. 

 

The fragility of such cultures truly stems from the way in which they self-define social homogeneity through repulsive rejections and exclusions. Witness, Iran, and or Saudi Arabia! It is difficult to see there the future of religion as forces setting souls on fire to worship God with liberating impunity as it were. 

 

I believe we are poised for the emergence of a supra-religious spirituality in which the doubting of the existence of God is admissible. Such a stance I believe will not and does not negate the essence of "goodness" in humans. And that is where I stand today on my birthday when I say I am an agnostic. I stand today, negating divinity on the basis of pure Cartesian certainty; while accepting the possibility of such an existence using Pauperian logic of scientific reasoning. Equally, I think supra-religious spirituality that transcends the cultural matrices of faiths is truly the only move forward for mankind or for those in need of tapping what Jung called the "collective unconscious". 

 

Such spirituality would in effect be as much Christological as Talmudic and Fiqh-centric/Islamic. Indeed, there is a long tradition in the latter faith, to accept, embrace, and operationalize at the spiritual level, the cannon of other faiths. There, I have said my piece! I now look forward to heading towards the portal for the anointed sixties.