Trivia, Dogma and Ego

Contributor: Kyle Smeby

My family had an affinity for trivia, nothing excessive, but it wasn't uncommon for my dad to randomly ask a question that might not have had much to do with anything that was going on at the moment and my brothers and I would rack our brains to answer before the others did. We didn't watch Jeopardy religiously but if it was on when we were home we enjoyed it. My older brother and I were active members of our high school knowledge-bowl teams (basically, Jeopardy for kids). While I was on that team I even read several books on Greek/Roman mythology for the sole purpose of answering the many questions on that topic (the fact that they were mythology books may become important later).

As I grew older I would discover the general populous' disdain for trivia, usually preceding the word with, "useless" or useless trivia. I tried to resist the idea at first but there was no denying it, facts are useless. But it was also obvious that was an oversimplification. Math would give us the clearest examples of this.

Q: What is Pi to 5 decimal places?

A: 3.14159

Pi is a completely useless fact by itself. But it becomes critical if you want to calculate the circumference of a circle. To do that you need another number, the diameter of the circle, to arrive at your answer. It's the relationship between these two facts that make them useful. I think this can be extrapolated to, just about, everything. It is only in the relationship between two or more facts that we can appreciate their meaning.

This seemed like an incredible revelation to me, but others seemed less impressed and a quick search on Google shows that many people, a lot smarter and better funded than me, have written on the subject. But nonetheless this appealed to my middle-child sensibilities and I proceeded to apply it to everything I could. Which lead to a resurgence in my spirituality.

There was a time in high school when I was very into my religion (ELCA Lutheran). I was head usher at my church, attending young-adult Christian fellowship retreats, and on several occasions even considered attending seminary after graduation. But this enthusiasm would eventually fail as I kept looking at the trivia of my religion, the facts, and being unable to make the connections between them myself. Helpful teachers and clergy could try and explain them to me but something about it wasn't clicking. It always felt like I was on the outside looking in, or on the verge of something big that I couldn't wrap my mind around so, ultimately, other interests prevailed.

It wasn't until I started looking at religion, or more appropriately, religions from various sources that I could start making the kinds of connections that interested me. Listen to the fundamentalists, the quiet believers, and the detractors of the various religions and I could start to put together a more whole picture of what makes up faith. Add to that historical and anthropological knowledge of the cultures these religions exist in and you're swimming in enough facts and trivia to make all kinds of connections--and people do. This provided a new set of challenges. As an example, let's go back those books on mythology I referenced earlier.

It turns out that those fun bits of trivia that are Zeus and Hercules aren't funny old stories but the remnants of a bygone religion. At one time millions of people listened to those stories and believed them to be true, they saw evidence of the existence of the gods everywhere they looked. Some of history's greatest thinkers sacrificed animals to these gods to cure their ailments (Socrates) and to celebrate their scientific discoveries (Pythagoras). Today people read these stories and laugh at the idea of a bunch of "gods" living on top of a mountain hurling lightning bolts and looking to make mischief wherever possible. At the same time many of these people believe in equally illogical things like miracles, resurrection, reincarnation, afterlives, etc. But any religion can be boiled down to a series of statements that sound ridiculous. Here's a popular one circulating the Internet today:

Christians believe that a cosmic Jewish zombie who was his own father can make you live forever if you symbolically eat his flesh and drink his blood and telepathically tell him you accept him as your master, so he can remove an evil force from your soul that is present in all humans because a woman made from a rib was convinced by a talking snake to eat fruit from a magic tree.

Makes perfect sense really.

This is the problem with looking at religion through the "facts and their relationships" model. Religious facts aren't based on the same thing as scientific facts. They're based on faith, and at this point each individual has to choose between literal interpretations of their religious facts or metaphorical interpretations.

In The Power of Myth comparative mythology expert Joseph Campbell compares religious metaphors to computer software when he says, "If a person is really involved in a religion and really building his life on it, he better stay with the software that he has got. But a chap like myself who likes to play with the software--well, I can run around, but I probably will never have an experience [as deep or] comparable to that of a saint... [but I wouldn't trade the experiences I've had for the world]" (The PBS Book transcript differs from the broadcast).

This was a fascinating revelation to me. There might be an intellectual path to enlightenment for those of us too stubborn to wedge ourselves into the confines of a single dogma. Maybe not as profound as the Buddhist monks chanting in their monasteries or the nuns clutching their rosaries but a fulfilling experience none the less.

I've never been able to accept that God would give us freewill, the capacity for thought and other intellectual pursuits if we weren't intended to use them. The trick lies in not succumbing to our own ego or vanity when determining what we are going to believe. This is the strength of organized religion in that it provides a framework that requires you to turn your ego over to their doctrines thus freeing you to find God. The drawback comes when those that claim to be followers of one religion use it as a pedestal for their own ego declaring themselves to be unequivocally right because, they believe, their religion gives them the right.

Similarly those freethinking, spiritually minded people are just as likely to be misled by some disinformation or jump to their own errant conclusion and run the risk of creating a spiritual island to strand themselves on. Although when so stuck they are able to free themselves if, and when, they see and accept their mistake.

Benjamin Franklin was a firm believer in crafting one's own theology. At three different times in his life he tried to codify his beliefs by putting them on paper. The first attempt he rejected almost as soon as he printed it and he tried to destroy the copies. The next two he held closer to but he continued modifying his beliefs all his life based on this premise, "A man must have a good deal of vanity who believes, and a good deal of boldness who affirms, that all the doctrines he holds are true, and all he rejects are false."

Franklin believed that once an individual believed himself unequivocally "in the right" his energies tended to focus on the enforcement his beliefs rather than his own spiritual growth. Or as he put it, "I think vital Religion has always suffered, when Orthodoxy is more regarded than Virtue."

There has often been an antagonism between those people that call themselves "religious" and those that call themselves "spiritual." But as long as the individuals that fall into these two camps are genuinely trying to find God and not looking for a means to fortify a sense of self-righteousness there really is no reason for any antagonism to exist. Further I think a broad range of ideas is a benefit rather than a hindrance to faith. In nature an ecosystem demands diversity to survive the fluctuations of time. As humans have increased in their knowledge of the workings of nature over time even orthodox religions have changed their interpretations of scripture. It's freedom to interpret and discover new knowledge that will bring us closer to God--not lead us astray.