A belief system; a tribal/identification system; a security system? (Main Forum)

by Brian Coyne , LINDEN, NSW, Monday, June 11, 2012, 22:39 (374 days ago) @ James

It is plainly obvious that out in society (and even in a community such as ours) there are many different approaches people take to their faith. In the end though they probably just boil down into a few paradigms. Three I can think of are the ones I've mentioned in the subject line: A belief system; a tribal/identification system; a security system. I can think of others, for example, some would see it as a means of putting bread on the table.

In my own case I think my journey has been one of moving from seeing it primarily as a belief system to viewing it as a "way" of navigating life based on the modelling provided by Christ. I admit that for a long time in my life I would have seen it primarily as a belief system — a belief in a set of creeds and a set of laws. I don't any longer. I honestly don't believe Jesus was interested in creeds and he didn't bring us any creeds. He didn't bring us any rule books either. His entire story, if anything, is a manual showing us how to break all the rules and the insight that, to live the moral life, you do have to learn the capacity to break all the rules. I appreciate that perspective which I put forward is idiosyncratic to myself and is not part of the mainstream of anything I was taught. It is a conclusion I have come to through life experience and trying to make sense of this entire "Jesus and Catholic thing" within the context of the peculiarities of my lived life experience, not anyone elses.

One of the problems in looking at things through paradigms is that often individual cases can't be easily categorised into a single box. My father, for example, I would see as one who saw his religion primarily within a tribal or identification context but also mixed in with that were elements that it was a place of security and saying the creed and all the rituals were an important part of the tribal identification.

Two questions that I might throw into the ring of this discussion might be useful. The first is the one of what did Jesus, or Peter, James, St Paul, Magdalene, Phoebe or any of the earliest followers of Jesus, women and men, think it was all about? What did they think Jesus was trying to encourage? Was he trying to set up some social club? Or some political party? Perhaps some sort of religious football team, or sporting code? What would Jesus think of the institution that evolved today — the "Catholic" institution with its divisions between East and West; or the "Christian" institution with its division into over 30,000 cults, denominations and churches?

The other question that I think is important is not backward looking but very much forward looking: what in the dickens are we seeking to achieve by "being Catholic" or "being Christian"? What's the end objective? What do we think all this is meant to lead to?

Brian Coyne
[Editor & Publisher]