It’s easier to accept society if you think of it as some large separate entity that you’ve convinced yourself you’re not part of. It becomes easier to ignore that woman in church who insults her fellow choir members behind their backs. It becomes easier to sing along with that girl leading worship even if she arrived to church with her “boyfriend”, a married man twice her age. It becomes easier to call your classmate a devout Christian because he goes to church every Sunday even if he has three girlfriends. It becomes so easy to consider cases like these as some fault society is yet to fix. You can partially convince yourself that since they still go to church, there is hope for them and you are in no way involved.
Religion is one of the controversial topics that society sometimes deceives itself into believing it can agree on. A lot of wars have broken out in the name of Allah/God/whatever other deity the instigators believed in. It makes no sense that a few humans decide all by themselves that their religion is superior to the others. If the deity that they worship is the only superior one, wouldn’t he take it upon himself to prove it? What right do a few believers have to claim themselves more devout than others? As far as I’m concerned, self-righteousness is a sin in every religion because it implies that you are in some way on the same level as your deity.
“Religion is flawed but only because man is flawed’’, a cardinal tells Robert Langdon in the movie, Angels and Demons, an adaptation of the novel by Dan Brown. Robert Langdon the main character in both the movie and the book is a renowned scientist/professor/scholar who views religion as just another topic of study. In the story he manages to solve a mystery for the church and save it. He also discovers some shocking truths that had he been a believer surely his faith would have wavered but he is not. Robert Langdon is an atheist but with this experience his stance on spirituality does shift potentially with these events.
. When asked if he believes in God, he starts answering with, “Father I simply believe that religion…; he is interrupted by the Priest who says “I did not ask if you believe what man says about God. I asked if you believed in God.’’ It could have been at this moment that Robert realized that he is simply another man who says things about God. He replies that he is academic. His mind tells him he will never understand God but his heart tells him that he is meant to. “Faith is a gift that I am yet to receive’’, he concludes. No matter what society thinks, religion is one of the things it cannot live without. “Faith is universal. Our specific methods for understanding are arbitrary. Some of us go to Mecca, some of us study
subatomic particles.
In the end we are all just searching for truth, that which is greater than ourselves.”, Dan Brown writes. Humans are nothing if not shells, because we are never content. Every other purpose in life fluctuates in fulfilling our desires. Ernest Hemmingway writes that, “We are all broken, that’s how the light gets in.”
We want something from life even if we do not know what it is. It is the reason people sometimes stare into space thinking about everything and nothing all at once.
It is the reason we read and write books searching for answers in creativity.
It is the reason artists draw and paint.
It is the reason people make music and listen to it.
We are all searching for something.
Robert Langdon seems like a man who desperately wants to pray but a lifetime of gathering evidence and facts to dispute or prove a theory makes it essential that he knows he is in fact speaking to God. He needs faith but he knows that it is not easy to have endless hope in something he cannot understand.
“Our minds sometimes see what our hearts wish were true.” Dan Brown affirms. “We all benefit from a sense of divinity…even if it is only imagined.” There are times when we want something so much it seems essential to our lives. We want with the lingering despair that we may never have it. In times like those we need hope even if it’s in its most innate form if only to hope for a miracle.
We are all searching for something
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