Is Rejecting Religion for Spiritualism a Good Thing?

The dictionary defines religion as a cause, principle, or system of beliefs held to with ardor and faith. So what is your objection to a system of beliefs? Progressivism, Marxism, socialism, communism, and spiritualism are all "systems of beliefs." These are all faith-based systems. The only commonality between all these religions is that they have no God to trouble them or offer them guidance. They are all self-centered systems of belief, not God-centered. You get to make up your system of comfortable beliefs, principles and causes.

The ardor and faith of the God-free religions is obvious if you dare challenge their beliefs or (worse yet) defend your own beliefs. They work up all kinds of ardor and with total faith in whatever herd ascribes to their shared beliefs. Don't ask them to go to church, though. A nice peaceful riot or burning a federal building, however, is a wonderful spiritual solidarity building activity. Just don't call it a religion. That implies you might be expected to sit in a pew.

The demonization of "religion" is, in my humble opinion, a strategic tactic of the forces of the dark side. Basically it says forsake the assembling of yourselves together as Christian denominations do and go out and worship in "nature" or assemble yourselves together to "peacefully" protest organized religion because organized religion is a bad thing.

Bad for who?

No question that some members of the would-be leader class have claimed religious authority and abused it for their own purposes. The devil, always a good military strategist, never attacks from just one direction. Even today he attacks conservatives from below and liberals from above.

And by encouraging us to disparage each other and fight interminably he causes the sort of chaos that helps his guerilla campaign against God. He has to make God and God's followers the bad guys. He does this, I believe, by introducing this nebulous spiritualism in which we get to believe we can find our own truth from within ourselves. No objective truths. No firm principles and only one's own self-defined "truth". Be wary. Religions as systems of belief provide us with an external framework. It assumes original sin - that we aren't by nature really good people. Spiritualism assumes we are by nature, good from birth. Well, we aren't. Don't believe that? Try raising a two year-old. Hard to find a more stubborn self-centered creature in all creation. If they weren't so cute, many toddlers would never survive to become adults. Our jobs as parents are to civilize the wee barbarians. In the same manner, God's job is to prepare us for eternity. We need His guidance. We don't carry goodness within ourselves.

That all comes from God and even when we think it comes from our own naval gazing, we find we become better people only by adopting into our lives external principles like the 10 commandments and the principles we learned in Sabbath school. By beholding we become changed. We are saved by Grace, not by sitting on a pole contemplating our own goodness. It doesn't work.

Eliminating "religion" wholesale is a very bad idea. Even the rhetoric of those who would selectively eliminate religious ideas and getting rid of institutions that make me uncomfortable, encourages pride and a haughty spirit. Spiritualism isn't about rapping on walls in the Fox sisters' bedroom in upstate New York. It's about turning inward for truth and rejecting the outward search for God and the assembling of ourselves together for mutual support in becoming better people.

When I took counseling studies in graduate school, I learned that one of the best ways to change our behavior was through studying, positive self-talk and performing ritual acts which challenged our own negative behavior. It struck me how similar much of the behavioral change techniques advocated by psychology were strikingly similar to those practices and rituals in many Christian churches. Apparently, when Jesus set up the Christian church, He knew rather a lot about how the human brain works.

Seek Him and you will find Him if you search for Him with all your heart. Searching for some sort of ultimate truth within your "spirit" is a pathway to what Yoda in Star Wars called the "dark side".

Okay, by now my anti-religionist friends are locked and loaded. You may fire at will.......

© 2024 by Tom King

God''s Mercy to a Partially Tone Deaf Would-Be Musician

I am not a natural musician. My wife, Sheila, has perfect pitch and in high school her band teacher offered to get her a college music scholarship for the oboe, a particularly difficult instrument to play. I envy her. Me? I can barely hold a tune in a fair-sized bucket, but it helped a lot when Bob LeBard, my Valley Grande Academy chorale director, stood me between Dave Dameron and Steve Urich, two strong basses. It took me two years to learn to hear notes well enough to tune my guitar by ear. 

Before that I made use of a principle of physics/acoustics that allowed me to hold down the 5th fret of the sixth string and adjust the fifth string so that it vibrates when you strike the sixth string. Then I'd follow the pattern down to the first string. I could only get the guitar in the neighborhood of in tune. Dave would ask me, "Can't you hear that?" when I played my "tuned" guitar.  I couldn't. I just handed him my guitar. Eventually, I got to where if I struck the fretted sixth and the open 5th string at the same time I could adjust the 5th string till the note didn't warble.
 

God gave me this guitar. When I was first starting out playing guitar I had bought a beautiful solid blonde Mexican guitar from Kim Holdridge for $6. The strings were broken and the nut was missing. I replaced the nut and bought new strings and found I had a most lovely sounding classical guitar. Sadly a couple of summers later someone knocked it off the counter in the camp store and broke the neck. The lovely folk I worked with at Lone Star Camp all chipped in and surprised me with a new Yamaha classical. It died a few years after that in an accident - broken neck again. 

 

At the time, Mickey Thurber played a classical Goya guitar with the AYA team and I always wanted one. I've had two 12 string guitars. One died the same way as the little Mexican. My son lost the other one. I carried my instruments everywhere so it was kind of inevitable that wear and tear would have its toll. I lost 3 banjos one way and another over the years and I'm on my 4th and 5th. David Dameron who lived through a year of listening to me learn the guitar across the hall in the dorm at VGA. He gave me a banjo he had that needed repair. I bought some tools and repaired it not knowing what I was doing. I even straightened up the neck. Before that, I had built a Squared-Eel homemade longneck banjo from a kit my friend Mike Gregory sent me because he felt sorry that I'd lost my last banjo. I was getting good, because I extended the neck to make a longneck out of it. The head was a 2 liter pop bottle I tacked over the frame and shrunk with a hair dryer. Totally cool.

 

My best guitar (the one in the picture above) I found on eBay. It was a Swedish Goya like Mickey's, built in Gothenberg, Sweden before 1972. Some fool had tried to put steel strings on it and ripped off the bridge. I replaced the broken bridge by reading about bridge placement and my little Goya sings as beautifully as my old Mexican. God has been good about keeping me in good musical instruments and I've learned a lot about repairing and building instruments. I'm hoping to build a church dulcimer soon. It's rectangular rather than hourglass or oval shaped. I suspect it has a more low tone.

I've got the tools and I've got the web address of StewMac, a luthier supply place and a membership at Banjohangout.org where the guys love to give out advice if you get stuck. They turned out for me to be kindred spirits, which for banjo players is kind of like when your wife leaves you home alone without competent supervision. 

 

The best part of my musical journey is that I learned you don't have to be a professional musician or be in a band if you're too lazy to practice. I never got very good, but if, like me, you play off and on for 45 years you can follow along with "Awesome God." You can just play well enough to be in the church song service band and Kumbaya for campfires. Learn some chords. Simplify the arrangements. Make yourself a notebook of all the songs you like and do like our ancestor did and sit out on the porch where you won't bother your wife with the perfect pitch. The dogs will howl along with you. It's so special.

 

 

(c) 2024 by Tom King