Lent 2020 - Build your own Religion

Lent 2020 - Day 1, Ash Wednesday

This year, for those who follow my blog during Lent (normal blogging resumes after 12 April), I shall be indulging in a thought-experiment entitled Build your own Religion. Again, not for everyone - part of my readership fosters no belief nor interest in the metaphysical, nor in an afterlife nor a supreme deity. And then part of my readership does - but within the confines of an established religion. Finally - my target group for this Lent's blogs - those who are actively engaged in a metaphysical search for meaning. If you are in this group, then I hope the next six and half weeks will take you a little further along that path.

My thought-experiment posits a lack of any organised religions anywhere within human society at any time in human history. Now, the very fact that my initial premise here is so preposterous shows how deeply felt our need for the numinous has always been. That, usually harnessed for purposes of social control, explains immediately why we've had religions for tens of thousands of years, the earliest being little more than rituals associated with burial of the dead, suggesting a belief in an afterlife. Astronomy - observation of the progress of celestial bodies around the heavens - and perhaps a link between their motion and the fate of one's tribe - astrology - has a long history too.

But let's forget that for a moment. Let's imagine no religion, let's assume that there never has been; everything around us is rational. All can be explained, described by equations, defined by laws of physics - there's no mystery, no magic, nothing capable of existing beyond the physical - only that which can be measured and quantified. And yet... and yet you feel, you instinctively feel that there is more, much more than that. Far more than simply a Newtonian universe of cause and effect, consisting of planets moving inexorably around stars, within galaxies that are accelerating away from one another at an ever-faster rate. This feeling is more than just a desire for peace of mind, though that is important. It's more than just being lost in awe and wonder and the beauty of a cloudless night sky. This feeling can take the form of brief glimpses into different, higher, planes of awareness. And those big, nagging questions - where to? What's the purpose, the direction, the goal, the meaning of it all?

So, you have these feelings, these higher-level thoughts and questions - and then what? What to do with them? You want to discuss them with others, but only a few feel the same way as you do - or the time isn't right - and anyway, these thoughts come irregularly, infrequently...? And yet come they do. 

What should you do with them? Ignore them? Or strive to codify them?

How, then, would you begin to create a belief system that encapsulates what you most deeply feel -  in the absence of any such preexisting belief system that's been already been organised for you, passed down to you by your forefathers?

This is what I'd like to consider over the next 46 days. What would be your doctrines, your sacred texts, hymns, rituals, symbols, holy places of veneration, vestments, sacred artwork - what would you incorporate into your own religion? How would your God be represented - what is metaphoric, and what is literal? What would be the central, immutable, tenets - and what could you be persuaded to change - for example, would your God be omnipresent, omniscient and omnipotent?

Not a disc, but a globe

This will be my 29th Lent. The first, very basic one (nothing more than giving up alcohol, confectionery, salt-snacks and salting my meals) took place in 1992. Lents became more demanding as I added extra things to forswear such as caffeine (really tough), fish and dairy (ditto), reaching a zenith in 2008. These years I am focusing more on what I should do as well as what I should give up - so more writing, more exercising. No meat, no alcohol, no fast food, no salt snacks, fizzy drinks, cakes, biscuits, confectionery - but cheese, fish and caffeine will not be off the menu. Ah - no pop, rock or soul music, no jazz - just classical music between now and Easter.


This time four years ago:
God, Creation and the Fine-Tuned Universe

This time five years ago:
The infinitely long path from Zero to One

This time seven years ago:
Images of God

This time eight years ago:
City-centre living, Warsaw-style

This time nine years ago:
Communist plaque on Zygmunt's Column

This time 11 years ago:
Three weeks into Lent