Brad Warner's Hardcore Zen: Faith No More

In his recent Suicide Girls column Richard Patrick talked about religious authority. He said, “Many years ago, peasants were stealing from each other and murderers were running rampant throughout the world. To deal with the mayhem, rulers came to the conclusion that putting the fear of God in the masses would keep them in line. Organized religion started as a way for those in power to get what they needed from the people.”

That’s pretty close. And it’s not entirely untrue. But there’s more to it than that. It wasn’t just that the rulers — the upper classes, the fat cats in power — who got together in a dark room somewhere, smoked some cigars and made a decision to create religion in order to control the rest of us. The development of religion was the work of the internal “ruler” we all carry with us wherever we go — that little voice in every one of us, whether peasant or king, that wants order and longs for control.

That internal ruler drives us to seek external rulers, to seek God outside of ourselves. We have rulers and authority figures because we want to be ruled. Religion is a product of something all human beings have in common — the desire to live in an orderly place. We cannot live together unless we have some sort of governor to keep the peace. Religion serves that purpose, among others.

Well, sometimes it serves that purpose, anyway. But, as we all know, religion often goes in terrible directions and becomes a force of destruction. It makes people fly planes into office buildings. It makes them vote against peoples’ rights to choose who they can marry. Governments and other institutions intended to maintain harmony and keep peace among groups of people living together also go wrong in similar ways.

If you think about it, it would seem that the governor we need to keep societal peace and order doesn’t really have to be an outside entity like a king or a pope or even God up in heaven. We all have the potential to govern ourselves. But human beings rarely live up to their own potential in any area. Why would we expect large groups of them to be able to live up to their potential not to be assholes to each other? This is why I love the idea of anarchy but would be the first person high tailing it as fast as he could out of any country that declared its intention to do away with its government and police force. We seek external power to govern us because we intuitively know our own shortcomings even if we won’t admit to them.

Unfortunately the real God, if he exists, isn’t available to rule us. Maybe he’s too intelligent to run for office. Or maybe he’s just got too much other stuff on his plate. In any case, we’re forced to seek a human substitute. In the old days we used to pretend the person we chose to rule us had a direct line to God and could tell us what he wanted us to do. Lots of people still believe that. But most of us don’t. In fact, I don’t even believe that most of the people who say they believe in humans who speak for God really believe it.

Belief in what people tell you God thinks is called “faith.” Dominance and submission play a big part in how faith works. We all have a side to our personality that longs to be submissive. Religion is a good outlet for this because it offers us a socially permissible way to be subs to the ultimate dom. Sometimes followers of religious authority figures are so into that submissive head-space of the worshipful servant they will believe and do absolutely anything just so long as it means they can keep their subservient position. It also means that they can keep deferring responsibility for their own conduct onto their master. This never works, by the way. No matter how hard you try and avoid it, the universe will always make you take responsibility for what you do. To say you’ve lost faith in your religion or its appointed spokesperson means you’re no longer able to be a submissive to them. Generally I count loss of faith as a positive thing.

Of course, personal responsibility is just one area that religion gets into. Religion goes beyond merely governing people and keeping the peace among them. It attempts to answer the deeper questions of what it means to be human, it tries to discover the origins of the universe itself. But we don’t need to look to anyone outside ourselves for these answers anymore than we need someone outside our selves to take responsibility for our actions. In fact, no one else’s answer to those deep questions will ever satisfy you. Just like its ultimately impossible to defer responsibility for the things you do, it’s also impossible to accept the “big answers” given to you by someone else.

Yet in the commonly accepted religious scheme of things we’re supposed to have faith in what our religious authorities tell us. And more than that, we’re supposed to have faith in our religious authorities themselves.

That kind of faith will always fail us, no matter how hard we try to make it work. Faith that is directed outward, away from ourselves is like a fire hose pointed away from the fire.

Of course, there are other meanings to the word faith and not everything people call faith is altogether negative. But when it comes to the subject of having faith in religious authority figures, you can always count me out.

When you feel disappointment in a person you deemed Great because she or he does not meet your expectations, this is a good thing. That kind of disappointment is a better teacher than the person you were looking to for answers. It points your faith back where it should be aimed, at yourself.

Brad Warner is the author of Hardcore Zen and Sit Down and Shut Up!. He maintains a blog about Buddhist stuff and a MySpace page too. If you're in Southern California and you want to try some Zazen for yourself, he has a group that meets every Saturday in Santa Monica.

Buy the new CD by his band Zero Defex at CD Baby now!

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