A poll came out a few years ago suggesting that Squamish was Canada’s “most non-religious town.” How was such a curious factoid about credulity determined?
In a Squamish Chief article about a 2011 Statistics Canada report, it was noted, “55 per cent of Squamish residents checked the box for no religious affiliation.”
That was good news for many who are convinced religious belief is largely an impediment to humanity’s overall well-being.
Despite the trend, religion will most likely continue to thrill believers and vex the incredulous. As they say, “old habits die hard.” And religion is one heck of an old habit, especially in regions where there is deep political and economic turmoil.
It all began not long after homo sapiens stopped dragging their knuckles off the ground. Religion was set in motion when the spark of cognitive awareness – self-consciousness – made the human subspecies unique in the animal kingdom. The downside was that our primogenitors were without an inkling of the way the world worked.
Staggering about, invoking the gods sufficiently explained the stars, our sun, eclipses and climatic weather patterns. Also why we got sick, and how to comfort ourselves while surrounded by death and misery. Ritual brought order and meaning to our tribe, as did the priests and moral codes.
So here we are, thousands of years later, except that science now explains most of what religion, in the past, tried to make intelligible.
Despite science’s success in describing the world – and universe – we have a ways to go before shaking ourselves free of what has been humanity’s most powerful explanatory narrative.
Lacking current stats, I’m not sure where Squamishers are now with their interest in traditional religion. It’s interesting though, in the original article about the 2011 Statistics Canada report, one of the nuns thought that, while organized religion was on the decline, there was still a real interest in “spirituality.”
Given that I have a doctorate in theology, I hate to pull rank on a nun. Yet the good sister only confuses the issue: Spirituality can no more be disassociated from religion (“organized” or not), than numbers can be from counting.
Today we only glibly make the separation because organized religion has been on the decline over the past few decades. As a result, people who are uncomfortable with religion think they can disassociate it from their lingering predilection for transcendental, esoteric and cryptic explanations about the world.
As a result, we often hear people making the (quite annoying) comment, “Well, I’m not religious, but I’m spiritual!”
Trouble is, this leftover “spirituality” is an unfortunate fetish for some sort of deities, earth-mothers, energies, auras, notions of immortality (viz., reincarnation), astrology, clairvoyance, speaking to the dead, karma and, of course, “spiritual leaders.”
In short: “Woo-woo.”
Deepak Chopra is a good example, as he’s a verbose, over-imaginative proponent of, so-called, “quantum healing.” With no scholarly background in physics, why not? A qualified, academic background never stopped the frontier snake-oil charlatans. It still doesn’t.
It’s not that organized religion was particularly healthy for humanity. But these days, the main deficit of non-traditional woo-woo is its continued fascination with the cryptic and the obscure. That’s unfortunate, because, scientifically speaking, we live in exciting times.
The various disciplines in science, like neurology, physics, astronomy and the evolutionary sciences are opening vistas that push our imaginations to limits almost unfathomable. All open to everyone’s investigation and scrutiny.
The short of it? Who needs woo-woo, traditional or new-agey, when the real world can blow your mind?
