What would make religious law believable, realistic and effective? Is there even such a thing? 

We’re familiar with civil and criminal law. It stipulates errant behavior and supplies corresponding punishments. Mostly, we obey these laws, either because we agree to obey laws crafted in a free society, or because we also agree to the ethics on which they are based, or because we don’t want the trouble of dealing with police and courts. Such law is abstract and concrete. It is also somewhat arbitrary. In England you drive on the left. The rich can’t hide their big money in U.S. banks from taxation, but they can in off shore banks, immune from scrutiny. It’s illegal to kill people, unless it’s legal, as in self-defense, war, and executions. 

Some religious law follows this pattern. Some decide and agree to their truth and it’s morality and decree appropriate and inappropriate behaviors and the resulting rewards and punishments. This works itself out in the afterlife, as in heaven or hell or karmic rebirth and reward, and/or here on earth, as in praise and progress, or as in scorn, shunning, whipping, stoning, torture and execution. These earthly results have often been state policy, in our heritage and in other’s. 

But many often have disagreed, forming new sects and nations to live free of another’s imposition of religious law. This pluralistic approach doesn’t bar some from believing and following their form of religious law, rather, it both allows and bars. Freedom of religion entails freedom from the religion of others. Thus, some can say wearing makeup will send you to hell, but they can’t bar someone from wearing it for the fun of it or even because it is believed to send you to heaven. People can and do agree on religious laws, from families to fellowships to fatherlands. They’re overtly imposed in theocratic societies and organically present in secular ones. But, are they realistic, reliable, actual? Or are they arbitrary, imagined, and assumed? 

Another form of law is natural law. Natural laws cannot be broken, but they can be followed and creatively used. Scientists over the centuries have unpacked the reliable relationships inherent in natural existence. They have discovered the inherent formulas that govern matter and energy in the smallest of places, here, and in far-flung stars. 

That magnetism operates at the inverse of the square is law. No one enforces it but it’s hard to avoid its reality. Ever try to force a large magnet on to its own polarity? The closer you get the one part, the more the other part wards it off. These laws don’t require police; they’re inherent in existence. When we know them we can live in accord with them. Natural law thus can lead to vast understanding and astounding freedoms. 

Is religious law ever like natural law? Are God’s truths so true and real there’s no getting around them? Could such law be measured, tested, known and applied as in the laws of nature? Would they be automatic and inescapable? 

Or is religious law more like civil law, agreed to by experts and traditions, and imposed by councils? Could it be known so well it could be imposed as the fulfillment of that same law, known by the experts and enforced on us in God’s supposed behalf? This latter sense of religious law, which I am not talking about today, is exemplified by the Taliban. That women should not be seen in public, nor participate there for any other than wifely purposes, because some scripture or mulas say so, is not what I mean. That women are taken to soccer stadiums and shot in the head for having committed adultery, is not the sort of law I mean. Law as orders from God, interpreted and meted out by self-proclaimed agents of that supposed law, is not what I mean. Law that comes from scripture, tradition and papal decree, as in the Catholic realm, is not the law I want to consider. Law that claims to know the punishment and reward system of heaven and hell or its earthly counterparts is not what I mean by religious law. 

By religious law I mean something in our interior realm akin to natural law’s presence in the material realm. By religious law I mean the way life works out when we live one way or the other. 

This religious law may be discerned and approximated by humanity’s religions, resulting in social and spiritual success. Some consider such norms as the social/spiritual counterpart of genes. Genes are selected for by a long process of success or failure, the more adaptive, resilient and advantaged going on to replicate themselves, the losers falling out of existence. Ideas could be like that too. They’re memes or idenes, schemes and beliefs that work, or not. Killing, stealing and lying are believed to violate memes or idenes held by most of humanity.

That’s what religious law is for the Buddhists – it’s an understanding of how reality really works. Such law is internal and automatic. It can be violated to our detriment (and usually, to those around us too) or fulfilled to our betterment (and to those around us as well). It is important to realize this latter part. The Buddhists aren’t much into punishment. Rather, they say violating the law leads to non-fulfillment and trouble, while living in accord with it leads to personal and social contentment, good relations and enlightenment. They call such law dharma. 

Buddhist teacher Thich Nhat Han explains the dharma as the way to live that avoids life-wasting diversions such as lying, stealing, killing or in general exploiting. Such activities as these bind us into complications socially and indignity spiritually. We feel less than worthy. We cannot breathe contentedly. We stay attached to some mere thing or feeling instead of dwelling in the condition of freedom and honor. 

Look at our own Christian tradition’s take on sin. Some see sin as breaking some written law and suitable for earthly scorn or worse, or maybe they’ll portray it as earning divine punishment in the hereafter. Others see sin as the typical human mistake of doing that which estranges us from a sense of oneness with our God, which is known within as a presence of something dear but violable. We feel inwardly ashamed. We lose our comfort with the truth. Sin isn’t punished so much in hell as in life. It alienates us from our sense of dignity. We no longer feel worthy in our community. We need to hide from divinity. Life just doesn’t work well. 

Conversely, in both Buddhist and Christian understandings of inner natural religious law there is promise of contentment, wisdom, social betterment, and divine enthrallment. Live just works out well.

Another Buddhist term, ahimsa, means not causing suffering. It takes the "do unto others what you would have them do unto you" seriously and recommends we treat each other kindly, with fairness and compassion. It applies not just to certain people, nor even just people. It applies to any sentient creature, that is, any creature that knows it exists and can feel suffering. To some extent, living involves creating injury and suffering in some creatures. However, many things we do can be guided into avoiding causing suffering, from eating lower on the food chain so as to not finance the confinement, injury and slaughter of sentient animals, to not saying something hurtful to an acquaintance, to not sanctioning the injury of distant peoples. We always have some latitude to move more kindly rather than hurtfully. Living by ahimsa avoids causing suffering and instead acts respectfully, peacefully, and kindly. 

Some excuse their involvement in suffering, thinking all must suffer and I have a right to live at other’s expense, just as they might do to me. We excuse our dietary, social, economic and military injuriousness as if we didn’t have the option to be kinder. But we do. In all involvements in life, we have the option to tend towards the well-being and betterment of the creatures whom our lives impact, or to their exploitation and injury. 

Living by dharma is living so as to avoid injuring others in any ways, as much as is possible, so neither are they injured nor are you lacking a sense of beneficial relatedness. When we injure others we block our access to our own dignity and contentedness. Some may claim to be just fine with living at the injury and expense of others. They say it’s survival of the fittest or they dehumanize others by considering them of an inferior class, race or ideology. They feel glad to win at another’s loss. But their’s is a shallow and brief reward, not the deeper sense of oneness the kind and loving have. 

My teacher, Vasavada, once defined dharma as "doing that which your inner most nature wants to do." This was very different than I had heard up to then. Till then I thought the dharma was the teachings, the rules of the Buddhist perspective. It had to do with the four noble truths and the eight fold path to enlightenment. Vasavada’s interpretation cast it back into the inner you. Are you living your own life or not? Are you living what the highest, most honest inner self would have you do, or not? Following the dharma wasn’t necessarily following the Buddhist formula as knowing who you are and then being that. 

Jesus once said, it is easier to pass a camel through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of heaven. You can’t pass through if you’re stuffed with greed, need, feed, fear, grasping, guilt and gloating. The original city of god wasn’t intended to be built on a festering slum. There is no salvation apart from our relations. 

Some see the rules of capitalism as obeying natural law. Predators exist in nature. Those that can prevail do, even at the expense of others. Whether this is reason or rationalization, I’ve never fully decided. I wonder about a social system built on the assumption of winning and losing, of rewarding those who exploit the best with the most. Can that lead to personal and social satisfaction and betterment? Many assume it does. But they keep pointing to that shining city on the hill with its tall gleaming buildings while conveniently ignoring the slum at its base and the racking of earth’s natural resources to fuel it. Are there religious laws inherent in physical and social nature that exist along with or even superceding the laws of the free market? 

Natural law presents us with a metaphor of law being the basis of freedom. Gravity holds us on the ground. It weighs us down. "Gravity sucks" says the bumper sticker. But the law of gravity accepted and used with other laws also provides us with freedom from gravity. Bernouli’s principle is that a fast moving air stream has less pressure than a stable or slow moving one. Hence, an airplane wing is shaped with a larger surface on the top than the bottom. The air moves faster on the top, creating less pressure, and so is lifted up by the relatively stronger pressure on the bottom. Gravity creates the pressure of air that allows enormous airplanes to be held aloft. By living in harmony with realistic reliable laws we can devise ways to use law to lead to freedom. We use gravity to escape its hold on us. 

But we ourselves exist because of a far vaster, older and more intricate play of natural law in the structure, evolution and functioning of our cosmos, earth and bodies. Natural law works us and we work it. 

Can the dharma help us to fly high and free by using the very bonds that bind us? Is there truth in the golden rule? Is there sense in most religions agreeing that we should not kill, steal and lie? Are there ways to live in accord with this invisible ineffable law in such a way as to not be bound down so much as set free?