What can you say about the view that religion is pretty inflexible and rigid and will probably never adapt properly due to changing conditions.
I think this will become an increasingly serious problem for many as we head into the future and is something we need to seriously watch out for so that society’s way of living does not adapt to the extent as to further exclude religious people from participating in various activities that would go against their religion or way of life as this would just cause more segregation and segregation is not good within a society.
In short: Yes and no.
Religion delves deep into the root of what it really means to be a human being. In that sense, it has been around for as long as man has been around, and has weathered every storm and every change that has confronted man on his journey through the centuries. It has this persistence because it deals with the internal life, which is remarkably stable throughout time, rather than the external phenomena that surround it. The circumstances of man’s life may be changing, but the struggle he faces as a spirit are the same today as they were yesterday.
In that sense, religion
is inflexible. The Path is the same because the spirit and the struggles are the same. But that inflexibility should not be given a negative connotation, nor should it be seen as a limitation or a weakness. It is merely a fact of existence. We cannot walk on a road in opposite directions simultaneously. No one curses nature because it forbids us from walking east and west at the same time. Similarly, we cannot escape sin while we are simultaneously in the process of entrenching ourselves within it. These actions are mutually exclusive, but that exclusivity is a fact of life, not a decree from some worldly authority.
That being said, I think it’s important to recognize that religion, properly understood, is one of the only flexible and fluid components of our lives. To see this, we first have to understand the nature of the slavery that sin imposes upon us. If you want to see something rigid and inflexible, look at sin. Sin forces man into a bottle, into a fixed, unchanging way of thinking and behaving, so that even if we desire to act differently, we are forced, by the compulsion of the sin that inhabits us, into repeating the same actions, thoughts, and behaviors that have consistently, time and and again, caused suffering for ourselves and others.
If you have any doubt about this, look at your own life–how the thoughts you think are often the same, from day to day. We are stuck, thinking the same stale thoughts we’ve thought before, too many of them ignoble, unjust, and unholy. We continually make the same mistakes, over and over again, falling into the same errors and flawed behaviors, even though we swore last time around, “I’ve learned my lesson. I’m going to change.” Head over to the Family Life forum, look at the trouble caused by pornography, masturbation, fornication. See how people struggle, and struggle, and struggle to fight against these evils, but still find themselves falling into
exactly the same mistakes that they’ve made before.
Sin is inflexible.
Religion is our escape from that. Religion is the tool we use to break the bottle of sin that encapsulates us. It is our freedom, our joy, and our application of it is fluid and free, because the diverse necessities of life require us to adapt how we apply it to our own individual circumstances and experiences. It is not inflexible at all, but like a river that meets a barrier, changes course and cuts through the land at some alternate route in order to carry its life-giving water to those who desire to drink from its depths.
