“The fact that religions throughout the ages have spoken in images, metaphors, and paradoxes means that there are no other ways of understanding the truth they refer to,” Niels Bohr, the founder of quantum, wrote about the self-reality in which we live our human lives, as he distinguished it from the direct reality of the universe. But for all that religions have done to propel us through the uncertainty of time, space, and existence, to give us a sense of agency and a sense of morality, they have given rise to the most violent conflicts in the history of our species – the most dangerous self-correction we call war.
Long before he considered the meaning of God in his vision The Picture of the Sowerthe new ones Octavia Butler (June 22, 1947–February 24, 2006) considered the dangers of organized religion in a 1980 speech included in Octavia E. Butler: The Last Interview and Other Interviews (public library).
Looking at the reality of what happens when we die, he points out:
My mother is very religious so I understand the attitude that these are the last days. But, let's face it, no matter where we have been in history, anyone who has been has lived in the last days… theirs. When each of us dies the world ends with us.
[…]
The kind of religion I see now is not loving and it scares me. We need to grow it.
A century after Mark Twain admonished how religion is used to justify injustice, he adds:
Religion has played such a large role in people's lives throughout human history. Somehow, I wish we could grow it; I think this time it does a lot of damage. However, I am sure that if we grow, we will find more reasons to kill and persecute each other. I wish we were able to rely on moral systems that didn't include the Big Cop in the sky.
A better way to relate, Butler intimated, can be found in the natural sciences. Influenced by evolutionist Lynn Margulis's pioneering work on symbiosis, she points out:
[Lynn Margulis] he was not talking about people. You talk a lot about microorganisms, but anyway, it's true, I think with humans and certain animals and microorganisms, on many levels, we end up being strengthened by what we join, or what joins us, and what we fight against.
There is something beautiful in reframing religion as this interdependence, rooted not in our ideology but in our biology. This, perhaps, is what prompted Butler to write almost twenty years later: “To shape God, shape Self.”
Train poetic naturalist Alan Lightman on the spirituality of a scientist and the great naturalist John Muir, writing a century before him, on nature as religion, then revisit Octavia Butler on how we become who we are and her advice on writing.
