It's All True, And If Not What's It Matter To You?

Religions have always boasted their "Truth", often at expense of violence. I say it's all true, and it's quite a relief.

Religious Pluralism; the salad bar of Spirituality

As far as I can tell the history of humanity is benchmarked by discovery. Our existence notated only with progress, our progression only recognized by the acquisition of some new knowledge. Tool making, fire, the wheel (that seems to be a popular go to), Newton and those damn apples, vaccines, air travel, Einstein's theory of relativity, colored television, lasers, SPACE travel, quasars (yes, quasars!) all mark this tremendous momentum which propels the world from darkness into light, from unknown to known. If we hadn't felt the beating of restless, unquiet hearts this timeline would not exist. The undeniable, inexplicable sense of 'the beyond' urges us towards the unknown, and this restlessness in itself is proof that there is more to existence, no finite ending; an Absolute Future.

Scientists, love-sick over knowledge have observed something astronomers have called an 'event horizon'. The event horizon is the absolute limit of what we can manage to observe just before light gets swallowed up into a black hole, after which no man can say in certainty what follows. John D. Caputo is not an astronomer. He is a brilliant, sometimes infuriatingly meandering, verbose, tangent following, God loving, love loving philosopher. But he too knows of the event horizon.

Caputo claims, "Religion is a pact with the impossible" and "To live religiously is to long with a restless heart for a reality beyond reality, to tremble with the possibility of the impossible."

How does this quote relate to my own above meanderings? Fire was impossible before it was possible. Television was impossible before it was possible. Traveling into the cosmos was most definitely impossible before it was possible. In regards to Caputo's definition of religion I find myself (with no talent within any scientific realm) feeling rather smug that the chasm between science and God is a puddle, nothing more. That the scientists who doggedly chase knowledge and fancy religion as beneath the educated are truly living extensively religious lives.

As fire was the first propellant of humanity, St. Augustine's words seem to ignite Caputo. St. Augustine asked, "What do I love when I love you, my God?" Then Caputo lays down some serious literary dessert, "Whenever we are carried away by love, chasing anything it is truly God we are seeking". He continues on to say that the opposite of a religious person in a loveless person. My first instinct is danger, danger, high-hatted zealous afoot, but I trudged onward into this thoughts. I wince through his literary lashing of those who do not love God. If God is love than we could also say Caputo insults those who do not love Love.

The digression on love is more succinct than much of his text finally collecting his thoughts to sort of say True Love is loving the unlovable, which is impossible until it isn't. The impossible doesn't occur without God. The impossible does not occur without Love.

1 Corinthians 13:4-8 states, amongst other beautiful ideologies, that love rejoices in the truth. Caputo, and everyone with more sense than a wet mop, notes that there exists this prevalent conflict of interpretation throughout world "religions". We walk by faith and not by site. "To follow God is to follow the impossible". So for one religion to claim that they are the One Religion would mean that some revelation of truth was given to them, eradicating the need for faith at all. Faith is the very fuel of religion, across all manner of love edging us towards the hope for the impossible. The small belief that the princess could love the pauper, the dreams known only to ourselves because they are to "unhinged" to share with the cruel, practical world.

So we have all of these words; religion, faith, hope, love, truth.

Caputo has dug away at them, toiling over each as an archeologist would pour over his newly discovered antiquity. He compares the concept of religious truths and a True religion. Truth, he says, is not exclusively possessed. "In "The Confessions" Augustine said that scriptures that may have many meanings so love as all of them are true. That I would also goes for religion. We may and need to have many religions and many sacred scriptures so long as all of them are true".

There can be truth without knowledge, Caputo assures us. So it doesn't matter? No. What matters is that we love because God is love, it matters that we chase the impossible without the certainty that whatever impossibility confronts you when you've followed it far enough is even what you are looking for in the first place. It is my relief in reading this to find that I am not living a life worth zero salt, because I do hope beyond hope and dream beyond circumstance. Caputo has reaffirmed my desire to observe other religions without religious-ethnocentrism, rather embrace each tenant of the foreign as a sacred and precious ounce of truth to my own journey past the event horizon.

How can I conclude what is incapable of conclusion? I suppose I can pay due homage to Caputo for being totally baffling and simultaneously enlightening. I agree with what my incompatible mind can follow. I believe there is a universal truth. I believe that God is love and to be religious is to chase the impossible, because with God, with Love, impossibility means nothing.