Between fall and spring semester, I took a class on sacred spaces and journeyed from Washington D.C. and Baltimore, learning about nine religions. We visited a Hindu temple, an Orthodox Jewish synagogue, a Roman Catholic basilica, a Sikh gurdwara, a Muslim learning center, a Baptist church, a Greek Orthodox church, a Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints and finally a Cambodian Buddhist temple. All were within about an hour away from Johns Hopkins University.
Growing up, I never had a religion. My maternal grandfather had actually been a Protestant priest of Winfield Reformed Church, the first Taiwanese church in North America, and so my mother grew up Protestant. My father technically grew up absorbing some of his father’s Buddhist principles and some of his mother’s knowledge on Christianity. But as for me, I grew up without any knowledge of religion.
Out of chance, I never had any friends who practiced religion, either. Instead, I always heard snide comments on how religion is made up of fairy tales and science is the actual truth.
But the thing is, religion and science don’t necessarily compete with each other. In fact, in some ways, religion and science are the means to accomplish the same end –– to find something bigger than ourselves. Science just goes about proving it in a much more solid fashion. Since technology has advanced, it allows us to explore the unknown in different ways from the past, but nonetheless both religion and science are driven by the insatiable human desire for a higher knowledge. We knew that the sun existed long before we knew the size, the material, and the physics of it. Science doesn’t disprove religion. It quantifies it.
Science sort of details the “what.” Religion tries to figure out how to solve the “what.” Both are discovering and coping with the sheer, unthinkable vastness of the universe.
I’ve been generalizing my thoughts, grouping all the religions into one. I’m going to adopt the Hindu observation for now that all religions have the same goal in mind, separated only in differences between cultural and societal experiences (aka different religions are several different ways of getting to the same goal, which in this case is comprehending and accepting the infinite). All have the same tenets of compassion and faith in order to achieve understanding and eternal peace. Buddhism’s Eightfold Path, the Abrahamic Ten Commandments, Hinduism’s Vedas, the Sikh’s Guru Ganth Sahib...all which will lead to nirvana, Heaven, moksha, or mukti, all the same idea under different names.
Although I learned so much during the week about everything from the symbolism of the six spires on top of the Latter Day Saints’ Temple, to the three bow offering ritual of the Cambodian Buddhists, this was the most important thing I learned -- that science and faith don’t disprove one another, and that all the religions are more similar than they seem at first glance. I still haven't found my own religion, maybe, but I've learned that that's okay, and that we're all interconnected through something bigger no matter what.
