Religion Is Not The Problem

At a post Flight from Death screening Q&A session in Canada several months ago an audience member asked an intriguing question about the "u-turn" the film takes at the end. I tanked when attempting my answer, as I often do, so I wanted to spend a few minutes briefly addressing it here.

The "u-turn", as he called it, referred to the film positing that religion was the problem at the heart of the world's conflicts and how by its conclusion, the film seemed to contradict itself by offering a mildly religious prescription to the problem.

Religion is not the problem and not necessarily any sort of prescription to the problem either - at least as far as the film is concerned.

There are individuals of all faiths and non-faiths who have done "evil" in the name of their beliefs. Some blow up federal buildings, some fly planes into tall buildings, others go on shooting sprees. Clearly, religious belief cannot be singled out as "the problem". What is consistent among these sort of apocalyptic acts of violence is the perpetrators' death grip on their beliefs, leaving no room for the possibilty that their worldview can co-exist among other worldviews. While the fundamentalist and perverted ideologies alluded to above may certainly be a part of the problem in those specific cases, I believe the problem overall is not ideology itself necessarily, but our relationship with ideology.

It's analagous to agoraphobia. When the walls that separate us from the rest of the world begin to define everything about us, we cannot, often out of fear, and will not, see past them. If we are to live constructively together we have to step outside, where the world does not revolve around us, and immerse ourselves in the real world which is made up of all sorts of contradictions before we can fully appreciate and understand our own ideas about how we should live and what to believe.

As Socrates might say, accept the possibility that you are wrong or that others have something to teach you, and maybe someday we'll actually learn what it even means to be "right".

As for Sam Keen's closing about hope, it certainly feels religious but one doesn't have to be religious to appreciate being alive and to appreciate the mysterious force that brings us into (and out of) existence. With so much darkness and hopelessness in the world, it helps me to remember that it's better to be in the world rather than NOT in it.