Modernizing faith

Modernizing faith

(Herman Tiu Laurel / DieHard III / The Daily Tribune / 01-12-2015 MON)

 

Last December, at a round table discussion on Philippine-China issues for a visiting professor from Yonsei University held at the Ricardo Leung Center for Chinese Studies at the Ateneo de Manila, one comment arose: “The number of mainland Chinese Catholics is growing.”  My reaction: “Do we want to see China become an economic backwater like Catholic-dominated Latin American countries or like the Philippines in Asia?”

 

That said, the basic conditions of human existence and ethical and moral behavior is indeed a gnawing need of all peoples.  Even the atheistic communist leadership of China understands this.

 

In 1980, supreme leader Deng Xiaoping enunciated the “socialist spiritual civilization” (reemphasized by Jiang Zemin in the 1990s), an ideological drive to reflect the improving material conditions of society in social transformation, raising political consciousness and morality to mitigate “nihilism, commercialism, hedonism and consumerism… in the course of modernization.”

 

It is estimated that mainland China has 100 million Christians today and projections about its growth are hyped by Western media, even though it can decline as well with further economic advances as in most parts of the world.

 

A mainland Chinese cousin, whom I and another Chinese-Filipino cousin had the pleasure of entertaining, recently visited the Philippines.  When the subject of religion came up, this cousin of ours declared himself a Christian (without distinguishing between Catholic and non-Catholic).  This, he said, is because Christianity promises an afterlife if he behaves.  My other cousin interjected: Isn’t Christianity (lumped with Catholicism) called “tsia kaw” (Hokkien for “eating religion”) because Christian missionaries offered food for conversion at a time when “old China” was plagued with famine?

 

According to Albert Einstein, “If people are good only because they fear punishment, and hope for reward, then we are a sorry lot indeed.”

 

I am, at 64 years of age this year, at the pre-departure as seniors would like to joke; but I felt more terror about the problem of death in my youth.  As an acolyte serving mass, I remember squeezing out tears to show piety.  But in light of my rational mind, I have come to terms with what Einstein once said: “The religion of the future will be a cosmic religion.  It should transcend personal God and avoid dogma and theology.  Covering both the natural and the spiritual, it should be based on a religious sense arising from the experience of all things natural and spiritual as a meaningful unity.”

 

The distance from faith in the Black Nazarene and Jesuit anthropologist Teilhard de Chardin’s effort to reconcile his Catholic faith with scientific experience (an irreconcilable contradiction that led him to be near excommunication) was what started me toward seeking spiritual truth in scientific insight.  There I discovered that we can find solace and our basis for a moral structure and spiritual optimism.

 

Max Planck, the father of quantum physics, held that “All matter originates and exists only by virtue of a force which brings the particle of an atom to vibration and holds this most minute solar system of the atom together.  We must assume behind this force the existence of a conscious and intelligent mind.  This mind is the matrix of all matter.”

 

But that mind isn’t in the form of a brain that humans conceive but a “cosmic brain” that is formed by the stuff that makes up the universe, including each and every human being and living thing.

 

As such, three modern scientific insights led me to my “religion” today: Quantum mechanics and its “spooky actions” such as quantum entanglement; “biocentrism” where the universe is an unfolding consciousness and our human consciousness participating in creating it; and the theory of the “morphogenetic universe” where all living things and human individuals are in a “field” (visualize iron filings forming fields around a bar magnet) and our decisions and actions are retained in the “field” as specie lessons for all time.  From these scientific insights I conclude that elements that constitute “me” are indestructible and my moral acts have permanent consequences in the “field.”

 

But the all-important question to 99.9 percent of human beings is “What happens after death?”  Do I go on living as “I,” in heaven or hell; do I exist no longer as “I” with eternal life around dozens of virgins?  My answer: “Did you exist when you were conceived in the womb and before the world molded your personhood?”

 

As there was no “person” then, why should there be an afterlife?  Nonetheless, the force that gave life is still there and that is what or who we really are, waiting to be reborn.  That’s Buddhism’s view and ideal (which Einstein says is closest to that cosmic religion)--to be and act as one before one became an “ego.”

 

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