Religion and Spirituality

                     by Dr. Mark Pitstick

I remember going to Sunday school as a child and singing great hymns like “Jesus Loves Me” and “This Is My Father’s World.”  Then we went upstairs for the church service and heard hideous scripture readings about a fearsome God, and lakes of fire for the unbelieving and unrepentant.  Even at that young age, I remember thinking, “Is this the same guy we were singing about downstairs?” 

After studying various spirituality wisdom sources for many years, I can now “read between the lines” and understand religious teachings better. 

To differentiate between religious and spirituality input, the former refers to information from established groups with set doctrines that often date back many centuries or millennia.  At its best, religion provides guidance, support, and loving service to many persons.  At times, however, it impedes newer understandings, controls and restricts its members, and condemns those outside that religion. 

Spirituality, on the other hand, is comprised of less concretized approaches to knowing and serving the Ultimate.  Spiritual traditions are more open and dynamic in their interpretations and principles.  This approach recognizes that all people receive Divine grace and celebrates—not criticizes—differences.  Religious and spiritual orientations are not mutually exclusive and can certainly be synthesized.    

There are over 3000 different religions and denominations; they obviously can’t all be the only true way to salvation.  Regarding valid routes to God, the philosophy ‘truth is one, paths are many’ makes sense to me.  I have studied a wide cross-section of various religious and spiritual viewpoints about afterlife and immortality of the soul.  Every religion has more open or esoteric—as opposed to orthodox—denominations that, in my opinion, offer wiser teachings. 

Significant commonality exists among the various religions of the world.  Each has nuggets of truth immersed within culturally laden prejudices, political influences, and human induced inaccuracies.  Thus, the best understanding of ultimate spiritual truth, it seems to me, arises from sifting through great religions for common threads of wisdom. 

One way to appreciate the commonality among religions is to compare various scriptural passages on the same theme.  Jesus and Lao Tzu: The Parallel Sayings edited by Martin Aronson and Jesus and Buddha: The Parallel Sayings edited by Marcus Borg, Ph.D., demonstrate the strong correlations among these great teachers. 

Consider the common threads among the following quotes about immortality and our interconnectedness with God: 

• Buddhism: “Knowing that this body is like froth, knowing that its nature is that of a mirage, the disciple passes untouched by death.”
• Sikhism: “The Lord is in every heart, and within Him is my home.”

• Christianity: “You are gods.  Those are called gods to whom the word of God was delivered. . . No one who is alive and has faith shall ever die.”
• Hinduism: “Deep within abides another life, not like the life of the senses, escaping sight, unchanging.  This endures when all created things have passed away. . . The individual soul is nothing else in essence than universal soul.”
• Judaism: “The Lord is my shepherd . . . Surely goodness and mercy shall follow me all the days of my life; and I shall dwell in the house of the Lord forever.”

Perhaps the wisest path lies in appreciating both the similarities and differences among religions and spirituality sources.