Reply to "The Decline of Religion in the West?"

This is a huge, huge topic, and it has really been the basis for a lot of what we've kept bringing up on this blog, often reflected through the creation and consumption of various forms of art. I will continue on with my sort of gritted-teeth, pained hopefulness that all of the corroded ways of society and technology will eventually overtake our human limits to a fault of their own (as I believe it has already started to), which is when we will physically be forced to rediscover what reaches something deeper for us and returns us to what makes us human.

That can't make sense in anyone's head but mine I realize, so I'll try to explain it. Religion in the West has been taking blow after blow from science and technology (with the exception of jumbo-tron Jesuses coming to a Super Church near you) through the centuries, with this most recent century taking it to a whole new level. While I basically take the side of dastardly, nitpicking, and insatiable science in battles against religion over topics like evolution and the afterlife, I recognize, as Edward mentions above, the ultimate gifts and spiritual benefits that organized religion offers a society beyond the distracting zealots, perversion, and battles with Science.

Although my anti-religion phases of life probably never reached the depths of some angsty, authority-hating teens growing up, I did basically hold in contempt anything having to do with the institution of religion, meaning the churches, the meetings, and the mass-oriented nature of religion for quite some time. And I still am severely creeped out by a large portion of what that consists of, but at least now, I feel like I've also come to appreciate the subtler, more powerful benefits of religion, which in the end, have very little to do with the specific words being said, the structure the meeting is held in, or the various controversies that may be related to the institution at hand. These benefits of course, I attribute to the only truly important part of religion in my mind, faith. Faith within an individual is what I took from my experience with religion as a kid. It’s what I found in my friends, in my family, and anything worth loving in life. It just has taken me a while to realize and admit to the power it can have (for good) when applied to a crowd larger than one person.

As is the case with any big crowd situation, there is fear and discomfort for those on the outside. Anyone entering such a group must shed the personal apprehension and nagging voices inside one’s head in order to actually embrace and feel the power at hand. In other words, it's defined nicely by the painfully overused phrase at various camps, “leave your cool at the door.” Once people cross that line and let go of their inhibitions, much can appreciated and much can be achieved. Of course this lends itself to another too-many-times-repeated and recently exhausted-by-the-Spiderman-franchise phrase, “with great power comes great responsibility”. The truth of the matter is, just as an individual yearns for that spiritual foundation to help provide guidance in life, the group needs a spiritual foundation to remind the individuals that support is out there, that humanity is out there.

I think that society is hurting right now, and has been for some time. Basically, since America’s been able to progress at the rate it has since WWII, there has been more free time, more over-protection, more laziness, and annoying generations popping up (ourselves included FO SHO). As much as I wanted to think that authority figures were just lame and too much a representation of “the Man” while growing up, I’ve realized, with the great help of our younger brother/sister generation, that the 90s bred some of the biggest sarcastic and spoiled jackasses that I’ve seen (again, myself not so innocent here). The problem I see now, though, is not so much the secularization and disappearance of our grandma’s religion, but the failure of the spiritual base to keep up. It’s painful to think of the majority of the our generation’s voices being the idiots that post senseless rants about Justin Bieber on Youtube, but I certainly don’t want us to turn into a stuffy tight-ass who nitpicks every little thing out of order with the great history and culture of human history. Money and technology have overridden our senses, destroyed our shock-value, and created hyper- and increasingly soulless-human beings, all wrapped up in the attitude of being too cool to care, too cool to make a living.

The question is, how do we move forward? If people are increasingly secular because we simply don’t care to believe the tall tales of religion or want to listen to a preacher, how do we scrap the Adam and Eve but keep the golden rule? How do we lose the guilt and damnation but keep the community? Like one of my more favorite theories of the universe’s course of expanding and condensing cyclically forever, I feel like we’re bound to go the same way. Our technology works faster than our brains can effectively use it, so eventually we’ll start caring more about how smart we are in what we do with it, rather than how smart it is when we use it simply to waste time. I believe (and hope to all the Gods out there that I’m right) that we will return to something more genuine, but we will figure out a way to do it without going back to the 1950s when even the milk and cookies were racist. We have to win back the minds and hearts of our generation with our abilities as artists, philanthropists, scientists and spiritual leaders alike, not blind marketers of pulpy, unoriginal, hi-tech mush and bullshit.

I think at a certain point the internet’s universality will work against itself and people will end up counting on what’s physically around them to get them through the day (gchat be damned! bwahahaha). To use music for an example, because so much more is available now from all over the world, it can become overwhelming very quickly. Consequently, you might end up caring more about bands that you can physically see and experience, just as you might with your friends you experience on a daily basis, despite the fact that you could theoretically spend the whole day skypeing with friends continents away (even that would be hard though because of the time difference). Hopefully, all this will come full circle and we will find a way to return to something sincere, something spiritual, while progressing forward into something new and of our own. Until then, I’ll just have to keep scratching at the (don’t say it, don’t say the title!) demons in my britches.