Gabfest on Religion?
A friend drew to my attention recently, that the Parliament of Religions (now held every 5 years), will be staged this year in Australia for the first time, from Dec. 3rd – 9th, at the Melboune Convention Exhibition Centre. You can find out more about it >>>HERE.
Someone once observed, most people use religion like a bus — they ride on it only while it’s going their way! It’s clear from the religious conflicts erupting around the world today, that ‘true believers’ have just enough religion to make them hate, but not enough to make them love those adhering to different belief systems or faiths.
Religious externals may have a meaning for the God-inhabited soul; for any others they are not only useless but may actually become snares, deceiving them into a false and perilous sense of security. Experience teaches us that religion that is merely ritual and ceremonial can never satisfy. Neither can we be satisfied by a religion which is merely humanitarian or serviceable to mankind. Man’s craving is for the spiritual.
Every day now, people are straying away from churches, mosques and temples and looking for a direct experience of ‘God’ or the Numenous.
Mohandas Gandhi spoke with insight when he said: “Religion is not what you will get after reading all the scriptures of the world. It is not really what is grasped by the brain. It is a heart grasp.”
When speaking to some young people in India, Gandhi once said: “Let me explain what I understand by religion. It is not the Hindu religion which I certainly prize above all other religions, but the religion that transcends Hinduism, which changes one’s very nature, which binds one indissolubly to the truth within and which ever purifies. It is the permanent element in human nature which counts no cost too great in order to find full expression and which leaves the soul utterly restless until it has found itself, known its Maker, and appreciated the true correspondence between the Maker and itself.”
I’ll let the Quaker saint, Rufus Jones, have the last word on the subject: “True religion,” he said, “is distinguished from all false or lower forms of religion in this, that true religion is always inward and spiritual, is directly initiated within, is independent of form and letter, is concerned solely with the eternal and invisible, and verifies itself by realizing within us our divine essence or nature, with joy, wonder and ceaseless gratitude.
Let us hope that true religion is high on the agenda of the upcoming Parliament of Religions in Melbourne.
