Peter Blair's recent response ("Truth and Happiness," May 7) to my column ("A Story to Live By," May 4) highlights important points that have made the orthodox approach to religion untenable. Blair takes issue with my belief that truth is something the individual must discover. Neither a dull atheism that views the universe as a solved equation nor institutional religious orthodoxies can dictate what is true: it is clear that we need to find that out for ourselves.
Blair makes a telling analogy when he compares my criticism of the Bible to a criticism of the theory of gravity: "It seems simply that Buntz is bored with old religions and wants something new. Suppose I were to say I was bored with the theory of gravity and decided to say that instead we are held to the Earth by magnets that were put into us at birth, because I find the latter explanation more interesting."
This is exactly where Blair gets it wrong. We do not apprehend religious truths in the same way we apprehend scientific ones, by taking measurements of the external world. We can only apprehend a religious truth through personal travail -- emotional, private and internal experience. Ultimately, that experience is more real to us than any set of scientific or religious dogma.
The mistake all orthodoxies make is that they create a set of absolute predictions about the way the universe works -- predictions that we have outgrown. The idea that we will be eternally damned for not believing that a carpenter on the shores of Judea 2,000 years ago was the "only" Son of God is one example. Today, we are all sophisticated enough to ask, "Why does God need to have only one son? And why did he only reveal his truth to a group of people in Palestine and not to all humanity, in different ways and forms suited to different times and places?"
We can see the futility in such an understanding, and so we have embraced agnosticism or atheism. My point is that we don't need to.
Blair and atheists like Richard Dawkins have one thing in common: they both insist that we cannot rely on our own inner light to guide us. We must either accept materialism as the last word on human destiny, or we must accept the dictates of a hoary religious scripture or of a church. But there is a third way. The poet William Blake understood this very well.
Blake was not content to simply accept what ministers were saying about God, or what scientists were saying about the predominance of matter over spirit. He relied on his own visionary acumen. Not only did he seek out mystical experience, but he also sought to uncover the poetry hidden in everyday life, to unearth the divine from the mundane. Of course, he read the Bible for deeper meaning and was well-versed in the predominant Protestant tradition of the day, but he refused to blindly accept what others were saying about the Bible or about God.
Blake wrote, "I must create a system, or be enslaved by another man's; I will not reason and compare: my business is to create."
By following his inner light, Blake was not searching for "comfort," as Blair accuses unorthodox romantics of doing. Rather, he was trying to discern the as-it-is-ness of things. He was conducting contemplative experiments with himself -- like Hindus, Taoists and Buddhists have long done -- and using what he called his "poetic genius" to observe the world. The result was not one of "comfort" in the sated sense, but of ecstatic states. He was trying to discover the truth of experience -- what lies beyond the veil of all our dogmas, and all of our preconceived notions about things.
This is the kind of attitude that is sorely lacking in the world today, and it is an attitude fostered neither by atheism, nor by dogmatic religions. Without a rebirth of Blake's romanticism, I fear it's the doldrums for Western Civilization.
I close with a quote from Jesus Christ. However, I am not quoting from the usual Gospels, but from the Gnostic Gospel of Thomas (a text which Harvard's expert on the New Testament, Professor Helmut Koester, has suggested contains passages older than Matthew, Mark, Luke and John).
Christ said, "The Kingdom of God is inside you and outside you. When you know yourselves, then you will be known, and will understand that you are children of the living Father. But if you do not know yourselves, then you live in poverty, and embody poverty."
