Baseball/God

My first class of Baseball as a Road to God took place last Tuesday. We talked about the books we read; the discussion lead by James Traub. It was a wonderful discussion but someone (logically) expanded a point I made about the Kinsella book. I was talking about a connection between Gideon’s experience and that of the Indian philosophers who came up with the concept of a release from karma, of moksha.

Because of the cyclical nature of the book and Gideon’s role in the story I said something about how he had been perpetually trapped in a cycle of time travel and experience and that because this time around he was learning more about the game and about Drifting Away he realized that Drifting Away had suffered more than he had. This knowledge led to the breaking of the cycle and showed an evolution of thought surrounding sacred time similar to that of the Indian philosophers and elite.

Someone then took this to the next logical step and said that religion, then, is something that traps people in an ignorant, painful place and that only through knowledge can we escape it. The Catholic in me, simply the religious/spiritual person in me, was very struck by this idea which has been around but which I hadn’t had to grapple with or deal with, especially as something that would lead from something I had said.

It took me the rest of the class to find a way to rebuke this and I didn’t have the opportunity to do so in class. What I figured out was that while it looks like religion can seem to trap people in ignorance it doesn’t. What does, though, is when man uses religion as a means to other ends outside of the spiritual, outside of love and salvation. When someone uses the church as tool to control thoughts or achieve their own goals, for it is only when kept ignorant that people will allow something like that to happen. Neither religion, nor the church, work to perpetuate ignorance except for when man uses it to do so.