When Dogmas Forget Life

Throughout my years of research and my encounters with different peoples, cultures, and spiritual traditions, I came to understand that human beings have sought to explain the sacred in many ways. They built temples, wrote books, and created ceremonies to answer the questions that have accompanied them since the beginning: Who are we? Where do we come from? What place do we occupy in the universe?

Yet somewhere along that path, many religions began to concern themselves more with defining God than with protecting life.

People argued over who possessed the truth and who could speak in the name of the divine. Dogmas and hierarchies were established. Boundaries were drawn between believers and unbelievers, the pure and the impure, the chosen and the condemned.

Meanwhile, nature was gradually left outside.

Animals were regarded as inferior beings, created to serve us. Forests became resources; rivers became channels of production; mountains lost their spirit and were reduced to deposits of minerals. Humanity placed itself at the summit of creation and began to behave as though everything belonged to us.

Many religions spoke of salvation, but few asked who would save the Earth from us.

We built temples to worship the Creator while destroying creation. We offered prayers for life while accepting the suffering of millions of animals. We spoke of compassion within sacred spaces, yet outside them we continued to cut down forests, pollute rivers, and expel the peoples who had protected them for generations.

This contradiction appears whenever a belief becomes more important than the life it was meant to honour.

Dogma offers security. It tells us what we should believe and spares us the vertigo of uncertainty. But it can also imprison thought, turn doubt into guilt, and surrender our conscience to those who claim to possess definitive answers.

When an authority believes it knows the whole truth, it stops listening. When it considers itself chosen by God, it may ultimately place itself above others. And when an institution protects its power before protecting the vulnerable, the sacred becomes an instrument of domination.

This does not mean denying the value of religions. Within them, we find profound teachings, beauty, memory, and human beings who devoted their lives to serving others.

The problem is not belief.

The problem begins when belief ceases to help us understand life and instead seeks to govern it from above.

Jesus of Nazareth did not speak from a palace. He walked among the sick, the poor, women, and those who had been excluded. He knew fear, sorrow, and abandonment. When he asked, “My God, why have you forsaken me?”, he reached the depths of human suffering.

But reaching the depths does not mean failing.

Jesus did not fail. Failure would have meant abandoning the vulnerable in order to draw closer to the powerful. It would have meant remaining silent to preserve his life or renouncing his convictions in exchange for security. He did neither. Those in power succeeded in executing his body, but they could not break his conscience. He departed with pain and unanswered questions, but also with dignity.

Over time, his figure became surrounded by dogmas, wealth, and hierarchies. The man who challenged power was ultimately used to legitimise it. The teacher who walked without possessions was represented in temples covered in gold. His message of compassion was invoked during conquests, persecutions, and wars.

But his teaching does not belong exclusively to any institution. It remains alive whenever someone defends the vulnerable, shares without expecting a reward, or preserves their dignity in the face of those who seek to subjugate them.

In the spiritual traditions of the Andes and the Amazon, I encountered another way of approaching the sacred. There, nature is not merely a setting surrounding the human being. It is presence, memory, connection, and community. The mountain, the river, the forest, the animal, and the ancestors are all part of the same web of relationships.

These worldviews should not be idealised either. Every society has conflicts, abuses, and contradictions. A wise person, a healer, or an Indigenous authority can also make mistakes or use their position to dominate others. No culture is perfect, and no tradition should be exempt from critical reflection.

Yet ancestral peoples preserved an understanding that modernity has gradually lost: human beings are not alone, nor do they necessarily stand at the summit of existence.

We depend on water, air, plants, animals, and beings so small that we can barely see them. Our life is not an individual possession, but the result of countless relationships.

For this reason, a spirituality that ignores nature is incomplete. A religion that speaks of love while accepting cruelty towards animals needs to examine its conscience. A doctrine that promises another world while allowing the destruction of this one has forgotten the ground on which it was born.

At Wallawisa, we do not seek to create a new religion or replace one dogma with another. Nor do we claim to possess definitive answers. Our search is born from the meeting of experience, ancestral memory, nature, and the questions that remain open.

No tradition possesses the whole truth. Every people has contemplated one part of the mystery through its own history and territory. Perhaps truth is not enclosed within a book, a temple, or a doctrine, but scattered throughout the many forms of existence.

Every spiritual teaching should be recognised by its fruits: how it treats the vulnerable, how much power it concentrates, how much freedom it allows, what place it grants to women, how it regards other peoples, and what relationship it maintains with animals and the Earth.

The sacred should not separate us from life, but return us to it with a more awakened consciousness.

Perhaps God, the spirits, or whatever each people recognises as mystery do not need us to defend them with dogmas. Perhaps it is the forests, the rivers, the animals, and the forgotten human beings who need to be defended.

For no faith can be considered complete while it ignores any part of life.

Carlos Alberto Arana Altamirano

Founder of Wallawisa