There’s a great moment from The Simpsons – back when it was still a good show – in which an athlete is talking about how Ned Flanders (the uber-religious neighbor of Our Favorite Family) helped him out. He says, “My life was partying every night. But then Ned and his Bible group showed me I can have more.”
And Homer, listening to this, sighs, “Professional athletes…always wanting more.”
Now that’s funny for a lot of different reasons. It’s funny on the surface for Homer’s innocent misunderstanding of what the speaker means by “more” – mixed with a piece of traditional wisdom recycled from Homer’s brain – but it’s also funny because Homer has inadvertently pointed out an attitude that underlies some practices of religion: if embracing the world and enjoying it is beneficial to me, then embracing religion is
even more beneficial to me.
It’s like that poster above who says something like, “I used to seek out parties and getting drunk and girls and being cool…and now I seek out god.” In that situation, nothing really fundamental has changed: you’re still running around and searching for something outside of you to
make you feel better. You’ve just substituted god for some tangible comfort.
Fundamentally, everything that people do is for the benefit of the self. Even the most “selfless” acts really boil down to your desire to do them – or your desire to obey a perceived obligation to do them – in expectation of some result, if only the result of feeling good about yourself and getting to think about how oh so holy and humble and selfless you are.
Now what I say above isn’t confined specifically to religious people. Non-religious people also do “selfless” things for selfish reasons. And non-religious people too substitute non-material things (“I’m going to improve myself!” or “I’m going to dedicate myself to a cause!”) for material things, all in an effort to feel better.
The wiser folks eventually realize that chasing things outside of yourself will never really bring you satisfaction, and that’s the whole purpose of meditation, which I just made a really long post about elsewhere on this site. Essentially, the point of meditation is to drop all of those desires and to just sit and to be, as you are.
Anyway, the thing about religion – and this is what people usually mean when they say that religion is “egocentric” – is that in a lot of cases, it seems like the religion 1) offers fantasy rewards for “selfless” behavior and 2) allows humans to project a self-image into the cosmos and call it “god.”
Point (1) above should be pretty clear to most readers, so I’ll address point (2) briefly. In a lot of cases, it seems like the god that people worship is a giant version of their ego-ideal, built up from the values they’ve internalized from culture and tradition and that they see as desirable.
For example, a lot of people are taught from a young age that it’s good to forgive people and that god is all-forgiving, so they take the thought “I should be a forgiving person” and project it onto the universe in the form of an omnipotent being that forgives everyone who asks. God, in this scenario, is a word for the qualities that the believer would like to have, which the believer has deluded himself are somehow absolute and applicable for everyone, not just him.
It works the other way, too. People who hate gays and have been taught that it’s somehow “wrong” to be gay can push that hate off on to an imaginary divine source. “Oh, I don’t hate gays – those are just god’s rules…”
If you read the thread I just posted on Zen meditation, you’ll see that one of the goals of meditation is to shut up your mind – for just a little while – and prevent it from telling you stories. Religion of this variety is one gigantic, egotistical story that gets in the way of clearly seeing reality for what it is.
