MORFORD: Does your religion dance?

San Francisco Chronicle ^ | 11/9/7 | Mark Morford

[SmithL]

Behold, the most dangerous issue facing modern faith: Its inability to evolve, nakedly -

It's a topic that jumped up like a stunned ferret from God's own hot plate three separate times recently — indicating, I think, that I'd better pay some sort of attention to it — the topic being the obvious but still desperately under-discussed idea that perhaps the most dangerous problem facing man in this modern age of radical technology and dazzling scientific conundrum and otherworldly raspberry vodka and ever-expanding notions of love and sex and human interconnection is the sad and treacherous fact that, well, religion and belief as we know them in America are, by and large, far too horribly stuck, limited, fixed in time and place and stiff karmic cement.

Put another way: We as a culture just might be suffering a slow, painful death by spiritual stagnation, by ideological stasis, by cosmic rigor mortis. It has become painfully, lethally obvious in the age of George W. Bush and authoritarian groupthink that our major religious systems and foundations don't know how to move. They don't learn, adjust, evolve, see things anew. They don't know how to dance. And what's more, this little problem might just be the death of us all.

[editor-surveyor]

Yes, it can be, depending on when, where, and why it’s being done.

I’ve never been big on dancing either, but I often played and sang in a dance band, and enjoyed it too.

[Sherman Logan]

I wish someone would explain to me the point of a self-invented “religion.”

If religion is to have any meaning, surely it is because it is something outside of and bigger than yourself around which you build your life.