With Postmodernism in full swing, it almost seems as if new religions are springing up faster than new followers can be made. Especially hot on the market is custom religion – tailored from an eclectic mix to fit your own needs and desires; something deep enough to make you look sophisticated (“spiritual but not religious”), but not enough to affect your life in any meaningful way.
Let’s look at this trend a little deeper. The first problem is that adhering to a custom religion is a sign that the adherent does not grasp the severity of religious choice. Religion encompasses many categories of belief, not the least of which is the existence and nature (or lack thereof) of the divine or supernatural, and any sort of afterlife. Whether or not one arrives at any particular religious conclusion, it is not a consideration to be taken lightly. Custom religion, for the reasons we will soon see, is not a serious answer to what is possibly the most important question in life. In fact, there are only three feasible religious models:
1) Agnosticism is the only purely epistemological conclusion, and inevitably so: with no starting point or frame of reference, we can reach no endpoint, and thus all we can truly know is that we can know nothing.
2) Atheism or Deism. Custom religion is laughable simply because the probability that an individual could hit truth dead on without divine revelation is ridiculous. There are infinite possible religious permutations, but the plausibility of atheism and deism rests in statistical probability: of all possible natures of the divine that could be arrived at without revelation, the two most likely are that it does not exist, and that it does not intervene. To assume any further intervention beyond deism would require…
3) Divine Revelation. If we are to assume that the divine or supernatural exists and affects our world (the only remaining possibility), it would not make sense to make any further assumptions about its nature except what has been revealed by that same divine. In the absence of a logically consistent revealed word, custom religion under scrutiny can only devolve into agnosticism.
Yet though some custom religion is indeed sourceless except for the whims and tastes of the adherent, some comes from pseudo-legitimate sources. What then cannot be trusted as a source of religious truth?
1) Personal Experience without external corroboration is useless. Dreams and visions and experiences happen to everyone, and unless it adheres to an external revealed word (atheism, deism, and agnosticism preclude religious experience), there is nothing to make one experience more valid than another that conflicts with it.
2) Tradition is custom, not truth: it has no divine authority behind it, and basing a religion thereupon is just following someone else’s custom religion. Sadly, the “for America and for Jesus!” crowd – not only them, but the majority of self-identifying Christians, even – is just as guilty of this as the most ardent Odinist, though perhaps not as intentionally so. Christianity has become so ingrained in the West that it has come to play second fiddle to and merge with cultural traditions, giving patriotism and other such trivialities an undeservedly religious bent.
This last list is by no means exhaustive; these are simply the most widespread: banana pudding cannot be trusted as a source of religious truth either, but it would not be worthwhile to include. In conclusion, I would implore anyone reading this to at least take the religious question more seriously. Know what you believe, why you believe it, and be sure it’s logically consistent.
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