Each one of us has a worldview, and, furthermore, I think each of us has a spiritual worldview. At some level, every worldview is a spiritual stance. True, in the case of many people the spiritual stance they take is couched in negative terms, as in "I don't believe in any of that spiritual claptrap that other people waste their time pursuing. Nor do I believe in God or religion."
But what these people don't do, when you ask them about their religion or spiritual life, is say, "I really haven't given it any thought." They say instead, "I don't have a religion, and don't much care to." Which means they have thought about it and opted for atheism, agnosticism, or what some people call "apatheism," which is an intentional apathy toward religion.
Apatheists may or may not believe in God. When asked why they are apathetic about religion, apatheists may just tell you they think religion teaches the wrong values: intolerance, bigotry, even hatred.
Or, their response may be more nuanced — see "Let It Be" by Jonathan Rauch in the May 2003 Atlantic Monthly. Rauch calls apatheism "nothing less than a major civilizational advance." He says it is "the product of a determined cultural effort to discipline the religious mindset, and often of an equally determined personal effort to master the spiritual passions. It is not a lapse. It is an achievement."
The world needs "people who feel at ease with religion even if they are irreligious; people who may themselves be members of religious communities, but who are neither controlled by godly passions nor concerned about the (nonviolent, noncoercive) religious beliefs of others." It needs them to offset the countervailing "fanatical religiosity (al Qaeda) and tyrannical secularism (China)" that today imperils world peace and harmony.
This is, I claim, a spiritual stance. So is atheism. So is agnosticism. So is secular humanism. If a practitioner of any of these irreligious positions were forced by a cruel dictator to act contrary to its dictates, the person would die a spiritual death.
If a devout Catholic were forced repeatedly to desecrate a crucifix, spiritual death would ensue. If a devout atheist were forced over and over to kiss a rosary, again the expected result would be his or her inward death.
On the other hand, our inner beings can survive being forced to do stuff that does not immediately contradict our spiritual stance, whatever that stance happens to be. If I am an observant Jew but don't normally keep kosher, being forced by my oppressor to eat pork is spiritually survivable. Being forced to spit on the Torah daily might not be.
Our spiritual stance is crucial to us, whether or not we're pious or atheistic, observant or apatheistic. We'd die inside if we were forced repeatedly an flagrantly to go against our spiritual stance.
So, where do our spiritual stances come from? Why is this person an apatheist and that person a pious Baptist? Why is one Muslim a fundamentalist and another a modernist? Why do some Catholics consider a politician who supports a woman's right to choose an abortion to have sacrificed his eligibility to receive communion, while other Catholics vigorously oppose such politicization of the sacrament?
To be sure, most or all of us can defend our spiritual stance with rational arguments that tend to make some sense. But the arguments tend to make best sense to those who share the same core beliefs. To those whose core beliefs are slightly different, the arguments fall flat.
For instance, it is one of my core beliefs that women should be in control of their own fertility, take charge of their own reproductive lives. Unsurprisingly, I'm radically opposed to the doctrine that an embryo has a human soul from the moment of conception on, for then abortion would be murder. But abortion opponents equally unsurprisingly believe in "early hominization," the doctrine that a just-fertilized human egg cell has a soul.
Even deeper core beliefs are often at work. One of mine is that the true nature of womanhood is not as represented in the Bible and in Judeo-Christian tradition. Her fertility is not the sacred possession of (depending on her particular life situation) her husband, her father, her brothers, or her God. That axiom affects my spiritual stance as to the true nature of manhood, heterosexual sex, marriage, procreation, homosexuality, birth control, and on down the line.
Thus the question for me becomes, why do I feel so committed to a spiritual stance that depends on a belief that so fundamentally flies in the face of the outlook of my Church?
The answer has to do with sex.
Speaking as a lifelong, dyed-in-the-wool sexual repressive, I have become a true believer, at the bottom of my "stack" of deep core beliefs, that what represses the sex drive is wrong.
And my Judeo-Christian religion definitely represses the sex drive.
Having said that right out loud, I might possibly be expected next to go into a long dissertation justifying my saying it. That would take more time than I have. Rather, I'm just going to mention briefly some of the things I feel go along with the proposition that my Judeo-Christian religion gets sex wrong. My idea is that if you go along with me on any or all of these, you may want to think about agreeing with me that Judeo-Christian religion is too sexually repressive.
One of my main arguments is that our culture today is schizophrenic about sex. We uphold chastity, monogamy, heterosexuality, and fidelity, and we readily castigate anyone who doesn't practice all the above, and gets in trouble for it — unless they're film stars or celebrities, in which case we eat up all their exploits and gossip about them endlessly. We lap up raunchy, crude TV shows and movies like they're going out of style, while we discipline our teenage kids if they emulate them. We claim to aspire to higher things, but there never seems to be time for them — yet there's plenty of time for getting those tummy tucks and boob jobs that increase our sexual allure.
Why I think our religion promotes all that schizophrenia about sex, and why it matters to me (independently of whether I am objectively correct about it or not), I learn from the theory of the unconscious that Swiss psychologist Carl Jung had.
Jung extended Freud by discovering in the unconscious certain preexisting images which he called archetypes. Images that occur in our dreams, visions, myths, and religions — not to mention our popular culture — make the archetypes visible. For example, when there is a fish symbol in mythology or religion, it expresses an archetype. The underlying content picks up on the fish's ability to survive in water, thus thwarting death. Hence the fish as a Christian symbol.
Some archetypes are yet more abstract. One of the most abstract is "wholeness," which expresses itself in images such as a circle or a cross. A circle represents entirety. A cross divides a circle into four quadrants, à la the four points of the compass or the four corners of the earth. Four seems to be the number that crops up in dreams when we are trying to symbolize wholeness.
There is an archetype for the number four, in fact, which ties in with the archetype Jung pointed to most often: the Self. The Self, to Jung, "signifies the coherent whole, unified consciousness and unconscious of a person," according to this Wikipedia article.
Unless and until the psyche becomes fully "individuated" or "self-actualized," the Self does not function as it should as the center of consciousness. Rather, it remains largely unconscious, while the conscious ego functions as the center. This is the experience most people have and continue to have throughout life.
Not only is the archetype of the Self unconscious. So, too, are a great many other archetypes that presumably would function at a more consciously accessible level if self-actualization occurred.
Bringing all the unconscious archetypes, including the Self, to consciousness is threatening to the ego's status quo, for many reasons. One reason is that full integration of the psyche implies a reunification of potent opposites: light/dark, masculine/feminine, good/evil, etc.
The second terms exist in the unconscious as the Jungian "shadow" of the first terms, which the ego is proud to trumpet as belonging exclusively to it. (That the feminine is the "dark side" or "shadow side" of masculinity may simply reveal Jung's sexism, or it may reveal something deep about the human soul.)
In Jung's Treatment of Christianity: The Psychotherapy of a Religious Tradition, Murray Stein shows how Christianity, in Jung's view, has difficulty integrating the shadow into its image of God, Christ, and man. This is why its God-image is a Trinity, based on the archetype for three, rather than a quaternity, enshrining the archetype for four.But the soul ultimately wants four-ness, not three-ness. The shadow side, "dark," "evil," and "feminine," must be reconciled with the light/good/masculine side.
For me personally, this seems to augur a reunion with my libido. Now, libido is a vexed term, since Freud and Jung seemed to identify it with the sex drive per se and then go on to say that all of our creative energies are at base libido. I'm thinking of it now in that former sense: the urge to have sex.
In that sense, libido is one of three categories of "lower" drives that spirituality at first seems to abandon as dross or slag. We hear of the soul or spirit leaving the body behind, along with its baser needs: eating and elimination; sex; aggression. These three, to the extent that they can each overwhelm us with pleasure, tend to get relegated to the Jungian shadow or the Freudian id, at least as far as our spiritual lives are concerned.
Of the three, the one that is most relegated to the shadow side, in my case, is the sex urge or libido.
Which I think explains why, in my search for integration, wholeness, and self, I have hit upon the Jungian "one-sidedness" of the Church's views on sex as Exhibit #1.
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