It might be contended that existence is not religious. It would be another thing to contend that understanding of existence is not religious. "Existence" must be understood as everything that is known, as well as everything that is not known and perhaps cannot ever be known. As I have tried to relate before, it is not my contention that non-religious people are deluded about their professed lack of belief. Rather, I contend that the profession of belief among religious persons (as assessed by Jesus in the Gospels) is so insubstantial as to deserve all but the outright descriptor of "delusion."
The concern expressed by Jesus about human belief is not nearly so concentrated on the content of belief as upon the virtual non-existence of belief. This concern might be seen as subsumed under Jesus' overarching contention that we do not understand existence itself (and refuse to recognize our ignorance), and therefore we have not even a "natural" base of understanding against which to contrast understanding of that which is "supernatural." Nicodemus, in Jesus' assessment, is not an accomplished natural philosopher who is ignorant of the supernatural--rather, Nicodemus does not even understand earthly things.
And so all human beings are surrounded by an existence that they do not understand. The atheist can look to science and its gains, and the religious person can look to that which he or she counts as wisdom. In either case, the concept of knowledge-horizon presents itself--this is the analog of the belief-content issue that Jesus treats as secondary. None of us understands existence in its entirety. What matters more crucially in the teachings of Jesus is the overarching question of how each of us, religious or not, treats our "knowledge-horizon"--is it something that recedes to the vanishing-point of our imaginations, or is it something that permeates our approach to every moment?
And so, with apologies for my clumsiness and presumption, I will consider the notion of "belief" to be describable in terms of Jesus' teachings--with little but my passing nod above to anyone's contention that they might believe nothing. Jesus seems to begin with the premise that we all believe nothing, and also with the premise that what we call "knowledge" is so insubstantial as to be conceptually twinned with belief--both being described in their lack, and neither being seen as so large as to impinge with consequence upon the other.
The "religion," then, that I will describe hinges on the very basic elements of "knowledge" that we consider so mundane as to be unworthy of mention. We are individuals going through our lives and going through the world. Or are we? What but conceit of "religious" belief makes us decide that we are the same person from moment to moment? Surely we are different each instant, and yet we will consider ourselves--if we are to be called sane--responsible for the actions of a half-second or a half-century before. We have differing and often overlapping modes of thought and consciousness and yet--if we are to be called sane--we call ourselves "individuals." We are surrounded by objects and beings and circumstances that we call understandable because they have been subject to the testing of our experiences, and yet we must admit that we personally subject to our testing a vanishingly small proportion of those elements that comprise the existence we claim to understand.
I have described before the notion that understanding life as a moment-by-moment experience can only be done truly if we will reckon that our personal competing thought-modes comprise, in every necessary substance, uncomfortably-housed, multiple "individuals" trying as it were to cling to the core of a "self" which is beyond our understanding. Indeed, there is nothing strange in this, if we are to reckon responsibly with our limitations of thought. We claim to experience the world, and thereby to understand it, yet our undeniable experiences of self-alienation and self-division we discount as phantasmagorical, even as we credit ourselves with understanding of locales and terrains and continents and worlds that we will never visit.
We claim to know things and to believe things, yet the very substance of most of our claims is belied by our insistence on claims that are neither necessary nor justified. In the realm of religion (which is where, of course, my emphasis is going to lie) this phenomenon of pointless insistence is repeatedly dealt with by Jesus. At the very periphery of the belief-system of Judea, it was to some people of crucial importance whether an ancient High Priest of a story was this man or that. Jesus seems to treat the difference as though it means nothing. Near the very center of the belief-system of Judea, it was to some people of crucial importance whether the Messiah was the descendant of this man or that. Jesus seems to treat the difference as though it means nothing.
This, then, is the crucial issue of Jesus' treatment of both knowledge and belief: We can each choose whether our "world" (the composite of notions we have about existence from which we can extrapolate to the heavenly) is a "world" of settled assertions, or a "world" of surprising epiphanies. Obviously, I will contend that the latter is to be preferred--we must always prepare ourselves for surprises. Moreover, every time we discover something new about ourselves we must reckon that the newness of our self-awareness means that we now live in a new world. We are the new wineskins.
This necessary awareness of the impinging and shifting nature of the true knowledge-horizon is what enlivens our perceptions. It is sad indeed that so many Christians have built up great edifices of assertions--great empires of notions about the certainties and expanses of Christendom--and have counted themselves as soldiers against conjured "powers and principalities," when the real battle for our souls is a ceaseless struggle within ourselves. For these are the selves in which we decide which of our clashing thoughts are not truly ours, and in which we decide what is true or not true within ourselves and around us.
These are the selves that house our demons. Yes, this is the unavoidable application of such a disturbing term--lacing through the Gospels--to our understandings of ourselves. The notion that we can be "clean" and placed above the struggles within ourselves is perhaps the foulest of all misunderstandings about our existence. The churches have never been able to concoct a satisfying commentary on Jesus' description of the evicted entity that returns to a tidied house and--delighting in the refreshed environment--invites in a host of its fellows. The notion of being "clean" and staying "clean" is a notion of a godling's wild conceit. Jesus, on the other hand, has no hesitation in describing the vicissitudes of human attitude as reflecting identity with--or descent from--this or that devil.
Jesus was using terms and concepts that are strange to us--and that would have been of conflicting interpretations even to his contemporaries--but he is pressing toward a crucial and timeless point: our very selves are strange to us. Our very selves are unsettling to us--or should be. Of course, the notion that our very selves should be unsettling to us is a notion that haunts any responsible approach to understanding existence. Alternatively, any conceit of aiming to travel through life having methodically stowed away self-questionings and self-doubts is a conceit that is headed for bad news indeed--at least, that is what the teachings of Jesus say.
Read beyond the Gospels and you will see Christianity establish for itself an empire long before it conquered--and bent to its brutal purposes--the worldly empire of Rome. The empire of Christianity from Acts onward was a conceptual realm in which the conceit of a knowledge-horizon was pressed toward every vanishing-point. The Gospels' world of Jesus, on the other hand, was a realm in which the mysteries of the Kingdom of God could be housed in a mustard seed--and a realm in which the murmurings of an infant could speak to every person's responsibilities and model every person's proper approach to God.
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