The Religion of Codified Laws
I’ve often said that I am firm believer in the individual or communal religious experience. I do not think I’ve made strong efforts to qualify what that means. One of the defining aspects of an institutional religion is the codification of practices into laws, rituals, acceptable practices, etc. For me, this is one of the great turns offs of organized religion. When you try to codify an ideal or the divine or whatever, it often fails to translate. Laws can become burdensome, legalistic (hard to understand), or, even worse, serve as the antithesis of their spirit.
But I have to wonder–is there something acceptably human in the failure of the attempt to codify the divine ideal? Take the line of thinking: Humans are fallible (let’s assume some kind of personal, divine intention for this), God reveals truth to humans, humans attempt to interpret that truth, the interpretation becomes codified laws, those laws are not perfect–that seems to make some sense to me. Unless of course you choose to believe that divine inspiration is divinely perfect, and then you’re just screwed in explaining how things go wrong and why that is okay.
And how does individual interpretation of revelation factor in? Does the institution have divine inspiration and therefore represent the full and actual culmination of God’s will and desire? If the church is seem something as man made, and therefore fallible, I find my level of acceptance for problems in law and practice much higher. But, again, if the codified laws are divinely inspired, no way. Can the individual decide for him or herself what is right and wrong? How does human fallibility play a role in that interpretation?
Besides the fact that I believe the codified laws found in organized religion can simply be wrong, I also believe that at some point the religion becomes more about the worship of the law than about any kind of relationship with divinity. That, to me, is an ultimate tragedy. I find beauty, wonder, and grace in the world around me. If I were theistic, I would probably try to find divinity in the world, in my relationships with people, in life here and now. I’m sure it is a generalization and highly biased, but I feel like there is so much stagnation when the doctrine of law becomes more important than the doctrine of spirit.
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I think a lot of the damage done by many religions are the explanations that they give for the disconnect between claims of perfect revelation and imperfect implementation. These usually point to the fallibility of humans (and of specific groups or actions of humans).
That said, there are theists who reject codification, and who do find divinity in all the things you mentioned, and unbelievers (like many Jews) who adhere to strict, community-defining codes and practices without seeing any divinity in it. It’s a messy, complex world. Maybe I’ll go fundy and simplify it a bit. :P