RELS1325 Religious QuestThe QuestRev. Paul Hudec, PhD, MAPS, M.docx

RELS1325 Religious Quest
The Quest
Rev. Paul Hudec, PhD, MAPS, MBA, CKM
This course’s title is Religious Quest and if that is not a
familiar concept or phrase expressed by any current or past
churches or faith communities, let’s explore some familiar
contemporary movie themes that might be helpful for us not
only for this course but for our faith journeys as well. One of
the important points that I mention to all my classes for this
course topic is that there may be more at work here than just
course material. Our discussions and topics within the seven
content weeks of this course may also be formative, i.e. you
may begin an investigation or thought process that may
influence you or may cause a change in your life’s outlook.
With this being expressed, let’s examine two movie themes: the
quest as expressed by Indiana Jones¸ National Treasure and
another as expressed by Star Trek. Something for everyone,
right?
In the Indiana Jones first and third movies, the excitement of
exploring and searching for the Ark of the Covenant as depicted
below or the Cup of Christ can be extremely exciting and
consuming of our interest, activities, and even hopes and
dreams.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GzLZJaAm2hw
We remember these movies as filled will dangers even life
threatening dangers and of rewards or treasures beyond all
valuation. Both of these movies present a quest or search for
physical objects. These objects have some historical or factual

character as well as myth … fanciful, beguiling myth. Indiana
lifts the Ark of the Covenant out of a darkened stone tomb in an
underground chamber and it bursts forth with light, let alone the
splendor and terror when it is opened later.
What a find!
Then Indiana embarks on a lifelong quest of his dad, the search
for the cup of Christ. The event that Jesus and His disciples
had as what Scripture describes as the Last Supper focuses upon
the cup or what might be a bowl and certainly not the jewel
bedecked, gold chalice that most churches use in the Mass
today. Does it give eternal life to anyone who drinks from it?
Choose wisely!
In the first movie of the series, National Treasure, the
Freemasons continue what the Knights Templar start and
eventually uncover the most massive, priceless collection of
treasures from human history by discovering clues that were
hidden and of cryptic nature that only a most clever, well-
educated, and deeply thoughtful person and his group could ever
hope to find. But, does a treasure trove exist or could exist?
Once again, when there’s physical objects of great value
waiting to be discovered or thought to exist and waiting to be
discovered, the quest is on!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9-YMMDloAEM
Now, let’s move to the third and a different type of quest. This
series that initially was launched as a TV series in the 1960s
lasted for three seasons and was cancelled but only for that first
network because what it launched was a following that spanned
more than 50 years and numerous movies and other related

series. The opening monologue that some of you might know
Space... The final frontier...
These are the voyages of the Starship Enterprise.
Its continuing mission:
To explore strange new worlds...
To seek out new life; new civilizations...
To boldly go where no one has gone before!
Star Trek could easily been termed a quest, a multifaceted quest
not for treasures but actually action that reflects who we are as
a species of curious, intelligent, and potentially developing the
best that homo sapiens can be together with other beings.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S6R3MiAv9ac
Most consider this course, RELS1325, to be a required or
fundamental course that introduces many ideas and concepts,
but I would like you to think of this course as an invitation to
explore as many things about humanity as set within a context
of hopes, dreams, visions that extend beyond the physical,

which is where the greatest philosophers and theologians have
presented in their volumes of materials over the centuries.
Archaeology and paleo-anthropology describe early humans as
having burial rituals, myths of the afterlife, gods, and many
wondrous things, so religion as we have it today is built upon
intellectual constructs that are prehistorical and yet are
somehow coded into our genes.
Let’s see what we can discover this Term.
RELS1325 – Religious Quest
Week 1 Lecture
Rev. Paul Hudec, PhD, MAPS, MBA, CKM
Welcome again to this course! I might want to change this from
a “course” to an 8-week group journey. So, the use of the word
course might be a bit of an understatement for many because
this course may actually be a personal or life quest for you and
that religion and a journey or life’s quest is appropriate for all
believers not just ordained or a few chosen ones.
"Why study human religiousness?" It’s a question you may be
asking yourself. One answer might be that it fulfills a
requirement in the core curriculum. But another answer might
be that in this course you will have the opportunity to think
more deeply about what it means to be fundamentally human
and respond to this crazy thing we call living. In the process,
you will have an opportunity to not only grow deeper in your
own faith tradition, but you will have a chance to learn about
how people in other eras responded to the Divine as well as gain
an appreciation for religious traditions quite different from your
own.
Religion can be thought of as an organized human response to
the mystery of life and the desire to be in relationship with
something bigger than ourselves. In acknowledging that there is

something other, bigger, and greater than ourselves, we put
systems, rituals, and traditions into place to try to facilitate a
relationship with that “something.” While science and
mathematics seek to find answers to material problems we
encounter in the universe, religion responds to the mysteries of
the non-material realities of the universe.
If you have not read Meeting Jesus Again for the First Time, by
Marcus Borg, I highly recommend it, especially if you were
raised in the Christian tradition. Borg traces his own religious
beliefs from childhood to adulthood and notes how some of the
things he believed as a child “just because” he was told to or
everyone else did ended up changing over time as he grew up.
However, even though his beliefs changed over time, and he
began to have doubts about some of what he was taught as a
child, his faith became stronger and deeper as he grew into an
adult. Instead of focusing on whether or not something actually
happened the way it was written down in the Bible, he focused
on the overall themes he found in the Bible: being in right
relationship with God; caring for one’s neighbor, etc.
In some ways, this course may be like this for many of you. As
you are made aware of how religion and spirituality evolved
over time, you may have cause to appreciate the traditions of
your own religion as well as those different from your own.
Instead of focusing on the differences of practice or texts, etc.,
you will see how much similarity there is on the deeper level of
relationship, community, and human dignity.
One theory of how religion began is that it developed when pre-
humans evolved into primitive humans and became more self-
aware and aware of forces outside of themselves they could not
explain or control. Survival was apparently the major
preoccupation of primitive peoples. Three things threatened
survival: forces of nature, scarcity of food, and experience of
death. The primitive people concluded that these

experiences were the result of the actions of invisible powers or
spirits that controlled the nature, caused the scarcity of food, or
brought death. Primitive people therefore established rituals,
practices, ceremonies, prayers, songs, and chants to keep the
friendly spirits friendly and to ward off the hostile spirits.
There are several characteristics common to all primitive
religions:
• Belief in spirit-forces or invisible power.
• Distinctive religious activities.
• Concern about death.
• Moral systems (this is right, this is wrong).
• Theology (a system of explanations for religious beliefs and
practices).
• Prophecy.
• Scripture.
• Sacrifice.
• Designated places of worship.
One will often hear that primitive religions, or religions with
sacred stories different from our own religious
tradition, are myths, whereas “our” stories are the literal truth.
It is important to remember that any religion’s ancient stories
that cannot be “proven” can be classified as myths. Myths are
simply stories that explain events or phenomena that to some
extent defy explanation. However, myths are often born out of
genuine religious experiences and result from a combination of
social and personal needs. Within these myths, we may find
revelation, which is meaning expressed in story language. For
example, within the Christian tradition, the story of Adam and
Eve can be thought of as a “myth” because it seeks to explain
the human condition of sin and suffering for disobedience. One
may choose to believe that the story is literally true or not, but
the deeper revelation is the tendency of human beings to make
choices that hurt their relationships with God and with each
other.

What follows are a couple of different takes on what religion is
about. The first is from William Paul Young’s book The Shack.
From The Shack*
p. 207“Religion must use law to empower itself and control the
people needed in order to survive. I give you an ability to
respond and your response is to be free to love and serve in
every situation, and therefore each moment is different and
unique and wonderful. If God simply gave you a responsibility,
He would not have to be with you at all. It would now be a task
to perform, an obligation to be met, and something to fail.”
p. 206 “God is a verb. He is more attuned to verbs than
nouns. Verbs such as confessing, repenting, living, loving,
responding, growing, reaping, changing, sowing, running,
dancing, singing, and so on. Humans have a way for taking a
verb that is alive and full of grace and turning it into a dead
noun or principle that reeks of rules. Nouns exist because there
is a created universe and a physical reality, but if the universe
is only a mass of nouns, it is dead. Unless “I am,” there are no
verbs, and verbs are what make the universe alive.”
p. 237: “If anything matters then everything matters. Because
we are important, everything we do is important. Every time we
forgive, the universe changes; every time we reach out and
touch a heart or a life, the world changes; with every kindness
and service, seen or unseen, God’s purposes are accomplished
and nothing will ever be the same again.”
p. 200: “Religion is about having the right answers, and some
of its answers are right. But God is about the process that takes
us to the living answer, and once you get to him, he will change
you from the inside. There are a lot of smart people who are
able to say a lot of right things from their brains because they
have been told what the right answers are, but they don’t know
God at all. So really, how can their answer be right, even if they
are right? So even though they might be right, they are still

wrong.”
p. 205: “Those who are afraid of freedom are those who cannot
trust us to live in them. Trying to keep the Law is actually a
declaration of independence, a way of keeping control. Law
grants you the power to judge others and feel superior to them.
You believe you are living to a higher standard than those you
judge. Enforcing rules is a vain attempt to create certainty out
of uncertainty. And contrary to what we might thing, God has a
great fondness for uncertainty. Rules cannot bring freedom;
they have only the power to accuse.”
* Note: A little bit about The Shack (from Amazon.com):
Mackenzie Allen Philips' youngest daughter, Missy, has been
abducted during a family vacation and evidence that she may
have been brutally murdered is found in an abandoned shack
deep in the Oregon wilderness. Four years later in the midst of
his Great Sadness, Mack receives a suspicious note, apparently
from God, inviting him back to that shack for a weekend.
Against his better judgment he arrives at the shack on a wintry
afternoon and walks back into his darkest nightmare. What he
finds there will change Mack's world forever. In a world where
religion seems to grow increasingly irrelevant The
Shack wrestles with the timeless question, "Where is God in a
world so filled with unspeakable pain?"
The second reading is from Roger Scruton and is entitled
“Better off without religion?”
“What is meant by ‘religion,’ and what kind of thing are
‘we’? As I see it, religion involves three different, but related,
phenomena: ritual, membership and belief. A religion includes
words, gestures and ceremonies, which must be repeated
exactly, and which define a core experience of the sacred. This
experience is strange sediment in human consciousness; it might
have an evolutionary cause, but the cause does not tell us what
it means. A religion also defines a community. The rituals of

religion are shared; and those who participate in them are drawn
into another kind of relationship with their neighbors than those
that prevail in the world of 'getting and spending'. People
hunger for this kind of membership, and the power of religion
resides in its ability to provide it. In the rituals of a religion all
worldly differences are overcome: the Sultan bows in
submission beside his subjects, and the good-natured fool takes
communion beside the crook who cheated him. The ritual shines
on both of them from a place beyond their ordinary experience,
and includes them in a community whose home is in some way
not of this world. Finally, religion involves belief. It is natural
for someone, taken up in those rituals and in the community that
they create, to believe that they point beyond this world,
towards the realm that we now call 'transcendental'. The Greeks
situated this realm at the top of Mount Olympus. Their
philosophers, however, were inclined to think of it as outside
space and time — and that is the idea that prevailed.
Anthropologists view the belief in gods as a late development,
by no means inevitably connected with the real core of religion,
which they find in ritual and membership.
And this is surely plausible. There are plenty of religions in
which the belief in gods is a hazy and skeptical afterthought,
and for which the ritual and the community are far more
important than any theological doctrine. The religion of ancient
China was like this; so too, in many respects, was the religion
of Rome. On the other hand, belief in supernatural beings, who
take an interest in us and have the power to protect us, makes
sense of the rituals that we share. The rituals are now seen as
actions done for their sake. Sacred things become symbols of
the 'real presence'; the religious community begins to see itself
as engaged in a common enterprise of salvation, in which it
benefits from supernatural powers and divine protection. I am
not speaking of Christianity only: Apuleius gives a beautiful
description of the phenomenon I am referring to in The Golden
Ass, in which the long-suffering hero finally enters the fold of a

religious community, dedicated to the worship of Isis. Mozart
describes something similar in The Magic Flute.
Suppose someone were to say that we would be better off
without love. After all, love often leads to disaster: the love of
Helen for Paris, for instance, which led to the Trojan War. Love
brings with it jealousy, possessiveness, obsession and grief.
People can love the wrong things and the wrong people. They
can go astray through love as through hatred.
Most people would respond to that argument in the following
way. Whatever the disasters that love may cause, they would
suggest, love, judged in it and without regard to contingencies,
is a human good — perhaps the greatest of human goods. The
important thing is to learn to love rightly and in the right frame
of mind. The disasters, if they come, come as accidents and not
by necessity. That is the response that should be made on behalf
of religion, too. Of course religion can lead to disasters, like the
Thirty Years War. Of course people can believe in false gods
and attach themselves to evil rituals. Of course religious belief
can exercise a stultifying effect on the intelligence, the
imagination and the humanity of those who subscribe to it. But
none of those possibilities implies that there is not a proper
development of the religious urge, in which people learn to
worship the right things in the right way.
We seek for the causes of things; but we also seek for their
meaning. We have moral values, aesthetic tastes, yearnings and
aspirations which, for want of a better word, we call 'spiritual'.
Such things are not irrational, even if we find it difficult to
provide a logical or scientific foundation for them. Indeed, it is
only a rational being who experiences the world in this way, in
terms of meanings, values, tastes and aspirations, and who feels,
as a result, the tension between his life and his ideals. This
tension is what religious people call 'original sin'.
To defend such a response, however, we must know what kind

of thing 'we' are. This, it seems to me, is the place where a little
philosophy is called for. What part of our nature draws us to
religion, and what is needed if that part is to be rightly guided?
Dawkins tells us that religion belongs to habits of mind that are
pre-rational. As he sees it, religion is a survival of the magical
attitude to reality upon which we ought to have turned our backs
at the Enlightenment. It seems to me that this expresses too
narrow a view of rationality. Science, math and logic are not the
only spheres in which our reason shows itself. We seek for the
causes of things; but we also seek for their meaning. We have
moral values, aesthetic tastes, yearnings and aspirations which,
for want of a better word, we call 'spiritual'. Such things are not
irrational, even if we find it difficult to provide a logical or
scientific foundation for them. Indeed, it is only a rational being
who experiences the world in this way, in terms of meanings,
values, tastes and aspirations, and who feels, as a result, the
tension between his life and his ideals. This tension is what
religious people call 'original sin'. Again, there is nothing
irrational in it: on the contrary, not to feel it is to be only half
alive to the human condition. People who do not convey to us,
in whatever way, an awareness of their shortcomings do not
attract our sympathy. They are not, really, of our kind.
Is it not plausible to think that it is precisely this aspiration that
is a side of people that draws them to religion? As rational
beings we cannot be satisfied with causal explanations only.
The question 'why?' has, for us, another meaning — not what is
the cause, but what is the reason? For what end does this or that
exist? And if you say 'for no end', does that not simply raise the
question all over again?
Unlike Dawkins I have never believed that the theory of
evolution has shown that the search for reasons, rather than
causes, is a chimera. As rational beings we look for meanings,
connections, harmonies and symmetries: we want the world to
make sense to us, and to answer our questions not merely in the

way the laws of nature answer the enquiries of a scientist, but in
the way the laws of harmony answer the aspirations of the
musician. Our reason over-reaches the bounds of science, and
this is not a deficiency in our reason but a deficiency in science.
Moreover, as rational beings we make an absolute distinction
between right and wrong, good and evil, virtue and vice, and we
found our lives on the belief that some things are intrinsically
worthwhile, and to be pursued for their own sake — not
pleasure only, but love, duty, virtue and kindness. We cannot
mount a deductive or a scientific argument in favor of those
values. But we condemn those who condemn them, and believe
that reason is on our side.
All those facts about the human condition dispose us to look for
the places where we can stand, as it were, at the window of our
empirical world and gaze out towards the transcendental — the
places from which light from that other sphere floods over us.
There is nothing irrational in looking for these places, or in the
thought that we find them by locating what are sacred — sacred
words, sacred texts, and sacred rituals. And by looking for the
sacred we are also constructing a community, so that the
meanings and values that we find are shared with others. A
religious community is not a scientific community. It contains
idiocy, prejudice, ignorance and stupidity in all the proportions
that these are displayed by mankind as a whole. But that is its
great virtue: it can draw people, whatever their talents and
intellectual powers, into a shared apprehension of their
condition. It can teach humility and justice, and remind the one
with power, knowledge, wealth or artistic talent, that he is the
equal of the one beside him in the moment of worship, however
ignorant, weak or sinful that person might be.
Now I don’t deny that there are wrong ways of pursuing this
religious quest. Those, for whom faith is a call to arms, and
religion a blanket justification for violence against the
unbeliever, are a threat to all of us. But although they make the
most noise, they are not the most numerous among religious

people. For most people religion is what it has always been — a
cultivation of piety, humility in the face of creation, and an
attempt to live according to a shared moral code. Piety, humility
and morality are all things that we are rapidly losing. I would
suggest that we would do better to keep them, and to study how
they might be directed to the right objects and in the right way.
Religion / Values Belief Paper
This first assignment is an informal 1-2 page, single-spaced
document that answers the fundamental questions in life from
the religious perspective, such as:
· What is the meaning of life?
· What is the purpose of life within this religious context?
· How do I relate to others?
You may create your narrative in answering this question or
approach it as a series of questions, such as:
· Who is important in my life? Why?
· What is the role of religion in my life?
· Do you believe in God and describe your relationship with
God.
https://www.ted.com/talks/michael_shermer_why_people_believ
e_weird_things?language=en
See the following sample title page.
(Title)
(student name)
University of the Incarnate Word

Author Note
(student name), University of the Incarnate Word
Prepared for course (course number), (course name)
Professor Paul Hudec, and submitted (date).
Correspondence regarding this article should be directed to
(student name)
E-mail: (student email address)

RELS1325 Religious QuestThe QuestRev. Paul Hudec, PhD, MAPS, M.docx

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RELS1325 Religious QuestThe QuestRev. Paul Hudec, PhD, MAPS, M.docx