Separating meaningful faith from exclusivity (I'm right; you're wrong). Why the variety of religions demonstrates our unique tendency to create strategic diversity. And (finally!) my process for replanting a Faith Garden.

A FAITH GARDEN:

Strategic Diversity

Before I could replant my Faith Garden, two items had to be addressed. First up, Religious exclusivity. I couldn’t be the first to ask whether committing to a faith also requires that I believe my framework of meaning is the exclusive truth – the only way to achieve salvation or a purposeful life. That demand for exclusivity really bothered me. If salvation can only be achieved through my Religious system, that means your system must be invalid as a means to salvation. That was a mainstream religious mindset for thousands of years. This notion of exclusivity led people to constantly examine why the other Religion was illegitimate or inferior… It’s like we always told our kids: your self esteem shouldn’t depend on putting others’ down. I was struggling with whether the search for Religion also means a search for the exclusive path to a meaningful life.

I’m sure by this point some of you are thinking, “holy cow, what is wrong with this guy? First he calls socialism and communism Religions, and now he doesn’t believe my Religion is the exclusive truth and path of ultimate meaning.” Well, at least we can all agree my habit of overthinking was making a mess of things!

But I began to think that the Certainty of Uncertainty, the Post-Modern mindset, is creating an opportunity, perhaps even a pivot point in human history, related to the notion of Religious exclusivity. You see, exclusivity and certainty go hand in hand, and the Certainty of Uncertainty means that I can no more prove your Religion to be illegitimate than I can prove my own Religion to be the sole truth. Such efforts are a waste of time. Instead, my energy is better spent examining and justifying my own faith, exploring why and how it resonates for me, since trying to disprove other faiths won’t validate my own. That is exactly what I wanted to do for my Faith Garden; I was determined to start by focusing on, by analyzing, the benefits of Judaism. Even without certainty, I had to ask if Judaism delivers personally meaningful answers to this Choice.

Encouraging each of us to explore whether a Religion delivers meaningful answers to this Choice reflects a revolutionary idea inherent in Judaism: Judaism never intended to be the exclusive path to a meaningful life. I know that sounds very odd for a group with the moniker, the Chosen People. But it actually makes logical and historical sense. Logically, Judaism is committed to the idea of a single creator of all people; a creator of the entire universe we inhabit. It would be odd indeed if only one nation could believe in that creator or could access that universal force. One of my favorite Biblical stories, the tale of the prophet Jonah, demonstrates that Judaism believes the God-Human relationship applies to all of God’s creations. You may remember the plot. Jonah is a Jewish prophet of the one God. He receives prophetic inspiration to warn the non-Jewish metropolis of Ninveh that it will be destroyed unless its citizens stop oppressing each other – cease their interpersonal cruelty. But Jonah refuses to go -- fearing that Ninveh’s citizens will change their ways and avoid destruction. The rest of the tale depicts a fantastic interaction between God and the prophet, with a single theme: a dramatic series of events to help Jonah understand why God loves and cares for all of humanity. Jonah’s experiences make this story a favorite for children’s books: he is saved from drowning by a miraculous whale (which spits him out on shore). He is saved from heat stroke by the sudden growth of a miraculous tree. With each miracle, Jonah personally experiences the love and caring of his Creator. Incredibly, Jonah just doesn’t come around. You can sense the Divine frustration as God finally spells it out for him like a teacher to a young child: saying, do you really believe I shouldn’t care deeply about every person that I’ve created? This is one logical aspect of Religion that is so easily ignored and forgotten.

What’s more, from the historical perspective, the Bible does not claim that the Jews originated monotheism, the worship of the one God. After all, Abraham encounters others in the book of Genesis who were holy-men of a unique and single God. This rejection of exclusivity certainly could explain Judaism’s reluctance to missionize to people of other faiths, as well as its custom of initially discouraging someone who wants to convert into its membership. I will try to tease out the core values of the one God idea in future podcasts, but the critical point for now is that meaning is possible through a diversity of Religions, and that the mere existence or value of those Religions doesn’t negate belief in my Religion.

In this regard, Judaism’s non-exclusivity is consistent with our human ability to produce different frameworks to achieve the same goal. I call this “strategic diversity.” Let me explain: My kids know how much I love sports examples (sorry kids, here comes another one from dad), so let’s take American football as an analogy: the universal goal of every football team is to score more points than the opponent. But the particular means of achieving that goal are incredibly varied and often contradictory. Some teams are defensive-minded, focusing almost exclusively on preventing the other team from scoring points. Others are offensive-minded teams, focusing on scoring as many points as possible. Some teams try to score more points by primarily passing the ball and some by primarily running the ball. These are all different innovations and styles to accomplish the same goal, which is to score more points than the opponent at the end of the game. Because of our gift of consciousness, we have the ability to propose a variety of different interpretations and approaches to the same goal. Judaism believes this is as true in Religion as it is in other fields of human endeavor.

This strategic diversity of religions has created a remarkable cycle, that usually goes like this: values and ideas are first introduced by a single Religion. Some of these values or ideas then spread to other communities. Of course, many of these values fail to gain traction in other communities and simply fall away. But some really resonate with people and catch fire across cultures. Those are the ideas that become widespread, universal values. And here’s the cool part: after spreading from a particular group to society at large, these values then get incorporated back into a variety of different Religions, in each case, with their own unique spin and narrative. The best example of this is what we call “Western Culture.” I would estimate that 90% of the values of Western Culture are shared by most Christians, Jews, Muslims and Secular Humanists, alike. I began to realize that the values introduced by the Bible became absorbed into Western Culture and now form the universal human rights that justified such ideas as the Nuremburg Trials, the UN Human Rights Commission and the notion of Crimes Against Humanity. And this also explains why the West has been pitted against Communism since the early nineteen hundreds: unlike the variety of Religions and nations comprising Western Culture, Communism maintains a different set of core values, where the individual is always expendable for the good of the collective. And where the good of the collective is always determined by only a few individuals. My examination of Judaism and its unique understanding of Strategic Diversity resolved the exclusivity problem for me. That’s why I’m not pushing the exclusive truth of any single Religion in this podcast; instead, the truth I am pushing is that we each need a meaningful Religion to thrive in life.

Ok. So I had eliminated the need to disprove other Religions. But one more issue remained before I could begin replanting my Faith Garden. As you would expect from a classic “overthinker”, I wanted to create a process for this undertaking. The broad goals of my replanting were clear enough: I would look back at the Religion’s origins, examining the foundational texts and narratives – its founders and disciples, to understand how the Religion views my place and role in the world. Does that vision resonate with and inspire me? I would also look forward, examining the Religion’s promise of a meaningful and fulfilling future. I would look at its track record for delivering on its promises and vision in the real world.

But I still needed to formulate a process for replanting my Faith Garden. Surprisingly, I found direction for this endeavor from a thinker who lived hundreds of years ago. The great Jewish personality, commonly known simply as Maimonides, or the Rambam in Hebrew, created this assessment model hundreds of years before the enlightenment. Maimonides felt perplexed or puzzled by the conflict between a literal reading of the Bible and his personal experiences, especially his studies of science. He wrote a book called The Guide for the Perplexed so that others facing similar doubts could still achieve a rich and compelling understanding of Judaism. Acknowledging that we humans will never understand the true nature of a Divine Creator, Maimonides shifted to something more tangible and accessible: namely, how the Bible and its corresponding Jewish oral law provide a road map towards a personally meaningful future. He examined Judaism’s core values. Its big ideas. And he explored whether those core values – translated into a way of life, provide an effective system for living your best life.

Returning to a process for making my personal Choice in the Post-Modern era, I used the Maimonides model to refine my replanting into three key questions:

First, do I find the core values of a Religion enriching and meaningful? Would living those values make for the best version of me and my family, and by extrapolation, the best community?

Next, does the Religion contain an infrastructure that will help me achieve the Religion’s goals and ensure the transmission of the Religion’s values to future generations?

And finally, is there a Religious subgroup whose members succeeded in living the values of that Religion?

Speaking of religious subgroups, let’s end with a quick thought about them. Armed with this 3-step process for replanting, I needed to select a single framework of meaning to consider and examine. As described in the last podcast, conflicting interpretations lead to the creation of Religious subgroups. You want subgroups? Take Christianity as an example: over time, Christianity has spawned the Catholic Church, Eastern Orthodox Church, Protestants, Lutherans, Methodists, Mennonites, Episcopalians, Evangelicals, Presbyterians, Anglicans, Baptists, Anabaptists, Pentecostals, Mormons, Seventh Day Adventist, Christian Science, Jesuits, Quakers and countless others. And most of these subgroups have further sub-subgroups with their own distinctive beliefs and rituals. This phenomenon of subgroups exists in all Religions, and the distinctions between these groups can be profound. The existence of such a diversity and variety of subgroups didn’t make my search for a framework of meaning impossible; but I would have to be more precise in identifying the specific sub-group to be examined. For example, if I wanted to examine Reform Judaism, I may find that, for me, it has abandoned too much of the infrastructure and ritual essential to Judaism’s purpose and transmission; or if I wanted to examine Ultra-Orthodox Judaism, I may dislike its more radical ideas of submission and isolation which diminish my gift of consciousness and autonomy.

With this perspective and process in mind, I set out to analyze the characteristics of a modern and yet traditional Judaism. The truth is, this same analysis could be applied when considering any other Religion as well. But for my Faith Garden, would a modern Orthodox Judaism provide me with the meaning and sense of purpose that resonate within my soul? What are Judaism’s big ideas? Its core values. It was time to start the replanting process.