Category Archives: Philosophy of Religions

#67 Which family comes first?

31 Friday Jan 2014

Posted by in Ethics, God, Philosophy of Religions, Religion, Theological Ethics, Theology

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Credit : Marilyn Barbone / Dreamstine Stock Photos

Credit : Marilyn Barbone / Dreamstime Stock Photos

Theistic religions ask us to put God’s law—a higher, universal law that applies to the human family—above the needs of our immediate family. We feel the tug to care for our families more piquantly than we do the tug to care for strangers. Religions ask us to give the same or higher priority to non-family members or to some abstract “humanity.”

This non-natural demand calls on us to take into account the happiness and well-being of people we don’t personally know. We may be called upon to make sacrifices for the sake of these strangers. Many of us resist giving up something we cherish for the sake of some “Other,” even when we understand the logic of doing so. Truth be told, we are much more likely to comply if such a demand is bound up with the power and authority of religion.

Take, for example, Christianity. In the book of Matthew (10:34), Jesus tells his followers: “He who loves father or mother more than Me is not worthy of Me; and he who loves son or daughter more than Me is not worthy of Me. And he who does not take his cross and follow after Me is not worthy of Me.”

The author of the book of Luke (14:26) echoes the passage above. (This is not surprising since Matthew is a source for Luke, along with the book of Mark.) In Luke, Jesus says: “If any man come to me, and hate not his father, and mother, and wife, and children, and brethren, and sisters, yea, and his own life also, he cannot be my disciple.” Jesus tells those who wish to follow him that they must leave their families and make him (God) more important than parents and siblings. Disciples must be ready to take the Cross—meaning that they must be willing to suffer and to sacrifice to do his will. Doing God’s good work, and heeding God’s moral demands must be given highest priority at all times.

Islam also requires attention to the stranger. According to scholar Reza Aslan, author of No god but God, a focus on higher laws was true of Islam from its earliest beginnings. Muhammad, the messenger of God, was a member of the leading tribes of Mecca called the Quraysh. Breaking custom, he rebuked his tribe (his family) because of its unethical practices.

What were these practices? During Muhammad’s childhood, the Ka’ba housed the many gods of Mecca and the many gods of surrounding areas. Members of the Quraysh family controlled access to this site of pilgrimage. During the pilgrimage cycle, people came from near and far to pay homage to their gods. Vendors from the region capitalized on the influx of visitors by bringing merchandise to commercial fairs. A “modest but lucrative trade zone” formed around Mecca. Eventually, the Quraysh realized that they could charge a tax on all goods brought into Mecca. As a result of this tax, they became yet more prosperous and powerful.

The problem, which Muhammad saw clearly, was that this extreme concentration of wealth altered the social and economic balance of the city and destroyed the tribal ethic regulating the interactions between tribes. The rapid rise in revenues collected by a few Meccan families led to rigid social stratification and “swept away [the] tribal ideas” of egalitarianism that previously existed: “No longer was there any concern for the poor and marginalized… The Shayks of Quraysh had become far more interested in maintaining the apparatus of trade than in caring for the dispossessed.”

More interested in wealth and in the affairs of trade than in the lives of their kinsmen, the Quraysh offered no formal protection to the masses. Since neither orphans or widows had “access to any kind of inheritance,” their only means of survival was to “borrow money from the rich at exorbitant interest rates.” This usually led to enormous debt, which “in turn led to crushing poverty, and ultimately, to slavery.” Muhammad, himself an orphan, was all too aware of this possibility. He was spared this fate solely because an uncle, a member of a clan within the tribe of Quraysh, became his guardian.

When Muhammad revealed God’s messages to the Meccans, he “decried the mistreatment and exploitation of the weak and unprotected.” He also demanded help for the underprivileged and the oppressed and argued that “it was the duty of the rich and powerful to take care of them.” God, he said, “had seen the greed and wickedness of the Quraysh, and would tolerate it no longer.”

As Muhammad’s message spread, those who joined his movement not only changed their religious faith to the worship of Allah, they also cut themselves off from their families and their tribes. In essence, they left their homes, the people they loved, the tribe that gave them protection and identity, in order to join a self-created community without standing—Muhammad’s growing group of Companions.

Like Jesus’ followers, the Meccans who adopted Muhammad’s ideas had to choose: remain with their families even though they could no longer abide their loved ones’ religious or moral tenets, or leave their families of origin and give priority to their adopted family and to Allah’s moral demands.

The costs of leaving one’s tribe to adopt Allah’s laws were exceedingly high because the tribe was the basic, and only community unit. Each tribe had a Hakam, a trusted, neutral party who acted as arbiter during disputes. His rulings set precedent and, collected together, became the “foundation of a normative legal tradition, or Sunna, that served as the tribe’s legal code.” Each tribe had its own Sunna. Indeed, one tribe’s Sunna did not necessarily match another tribe’s. Because each tribe operated as something of a stand-alone community, outside of his or her own tribe, an individual had “no legal protection, no rights, and no social identity.”

Today, the standard objection against higher moral laws is that such laws fail to account for the special bonds we have with loved ones. But, in the story of Muhammad, we see the impact of focusing uniquely on one’s family members and considering “non-family” members as existing outside of the circle of care.

Muhammad demanded that his followers loosen, if not abandon, their special bonds to loved ones if these loved ones hampered them from attending to individuals with “no legal protection, no rights, and no social identity.” Jesus underscored that becoming his disciple required putting service to God ahead of family ties and required sacrifice—taking up the Cross.

Who constitutes the “neighbor” is contested, both in Christianity and in Islam, though it is easier for Christianity to make a case for a universal notion of neighbor than it is for Islam, which includes only fellow Muslims under the rubric of neighbor.

Stories tied to Jesus and Muhammad highlight the tension between doing what is right and good for those we know and love, and doing what is right and good for those we don’t know or don’t love. These religions call into question our “natural” drive to care for our simple family-unit and demand that we broaden our perspective to include care for those who are not like ourselves.

Because balancing the two sorts of moral demands that make claims on us can be confusing under the best of circumstances, religions like Christianity and Islam (as well as other religions) remind us of the importance of remaining—in spite of obstacles—attentive to our “neighbors.” They also offer, as a result of centuries of reflection, argumentation, and refinement, guidance for how best to navigate unclear situations and negotiate complex and intertwined dilemmas.

Most of the religions (in their best instantiations) remind us unequivocally of the rights that others have on our time, finances, and skills even although we will never meet them and never know their names. The religions remind us that first priority is to be given to the support and care of the poor and oppressed even if this means we must shirk the needs of close family members. Yes, guilt and disappointment and frustration will surely follow such decisions, but this is the kind of sacrifice Jesus and Muhammad asked of their disciples.

Whether we are disciples or Jesus or Muhammad or not, do our world views ask as much from us? If not, they warrant a second look.

Resource: Reza Aslan. No god but God: The Origins, Evolution, and Future of Islam. Updated edition. New York: Random House Trade Paperbacks, 2011.

#51 Society Without God

01 Friday Apr 2011

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The sociologist of religion, Phil Zuckerman, visited the closest thing to Nirvana for those who dream of living in a society without God—Denmark.  Zuckerman’s plan to spend several months in one of the most secular places on the planet was driven by his desire to demonstrate that there’s a link between a general lack of interest in God and the existence of a successful society in which people are happy and help their neighbors.

What did Zuckerman find after living in a typical Danish city and interviewing some 150 Danes and Swedes about their religious views?

  1. 25% believe in a personal God
  2. 10% believe in hell
  3. 7% believe that God the Bible is the literal word of God
  4. 100% identify themselves as Christians

In his book, Zuckerman argues, in part, against scholars of religion who claim that human beings are naturally religious.  Against this assertion, Zuckerman shows that Danes and Swedes do not look to religion or God for answers about the meaning of life and death.

Perhaps more interesting was Zuckerman’s discovery that these questions only rarely crossed the minds of Danes and Swedes.  His contacts simply lacked curiosity about God and about the meaning of life and death.  Indeed, the examples he provided, based on interviews and ordinary day-to-day interactions, reveal that, in Denmark:

  1. Questions about why bad things happen are not central to everyday life
  2. Religion, God, and the meaning of life rarely come up
  3. When asked about the meaning of life, people answered that there is no meaning
  4. When asked what gives them reasons to live, they cited friends and family
  5. When asked about death, they said it was part of life

However, this picture is in tension with several other facts:

  1. The majority of Danes and Swedes pay taxes to the Lutheran Church without complaint
  2. They tend to baptize their children
  3. They get married in Church
  4. They follow the Lutheran teaching of being kind to their neighbors
  5. Tensions exist between the Lutheran population and the growing Muslim population

Zuckerman postulates that, for Danes and Swedes, the religious practices and institutions of the Lutheran Church have become cultural, secular vehicles.  If his assessment is correct, then Denmark’s “cultural” religion—secular Lutheranism—resembles other “cultural” religions such as secular Judaism.

Nylars Round Church

Because hardly anything that appears simple, is simple, a reviewer of Zuckerman’s book, Michal Pagis, raises several thorny questions.  Even hardcore cheerleaders of Denmark’s “society without God” should pause to wonder whether important complexities and tensions remain to be identified.

Many of Pagis’ questions (which appear below) were posed by the intellectually-honest Zuckerman.  Although he attempts to address some of them, he acknowledges that they will require further research to answer:

  1. Are people around the globe less interested in ultimate existential questions than philosophers or religious scholars have long assumed?
  2. What is the connection between secularism and the lack of interest in the meaning of life and death?
  3. How do we explain the fact that novels, poetry, or philosophical texts tackle these questions (and that there is a market for them)?
  4. Why are secular Jews (and other relatively secular Europeans like the French and the Germans) attracted to these questions, but not secular Danes?
  5. Could the long religious monopoly of Lutheranism, and hence the lack of competition among religions have led to a loss of interest in religion among the Danes and Swedes?
  6. Could Denmark’s high degree of social and economic security explain the low interest in religion?
  7. Could the high percentage of independent women and the rise of feminism account for the decline of Christianity in Denmark?
  8. Is it possible that Scandinavian society was never a religious one?

Resource:  Michal Pagis, review of Society Without God:  What the Least Religious Nations Can Tell Us about Contentment by Phil Zuckerman, Journal of the American Academy of Religion 79:1 (March 2011): 264-267.

#38 Multifaith squabble–over love!

31 Saturday Oct 2009

Posted by in God, Philosophy of Religion, Philosophy of Religions, Religion, Theological Ethics, Theology

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If you imagine that multifaith dialogue is easy, this post will change your mind. Continue reading but be warned that you’ll be asked to tease out the intricacies of an argument between the University of Chicago historian, David Nirenberg, a champion of secularism, and His Holiness, Pope Benedict XVI, the champion par excellence of Roman Catholicism.

Ideally, when we enter into a dialogue about religious beliefs, we do so with a genuine desire for authentic conversation.  We attempt to understand, as much as possible, our interlocutor’s point of view especially when we find his or her point of view offensive.  But, in the present case, even a brilliant scholar like Nirenberg, who’s written insightful books about the three Abrahamic religions, loses his patience and calls on His Holiness to stop speaking like a Roman Catholic.

Nirenberg aired his differences with the Pope in a September 23, 2009, article in The New Republic, “Love and Capitalism,” in which he reviewed Benedict’s book-length encyclical, “Caritas in Veritate:  On Integral Human Development in Charity and Truth.”

The problem, for Nirenberg, is not the Pope’s claim to the Truth:  “Popes,” Nirenberg writes, “have the right, indeed the obligation, to teach believers the truth as they are given to perceive it, no matter how controversial.”

No, Nirenberg’s disagreement with the Pope centers around the meaning of the term “caritas,” a word that can be loosely translated into English as “charity” or “love.”

For Roman Catholics, however, caritas doesn’t mean plain old love or sympathy or concern or even charity in the way that most of us might use such words over a glass of beer. Caritas, as used by Roman Catholic theologians, including Benedict, is a technical term with a history that dates back to the 3rd Century Church Father, St. Augustine.

Nirenberg gets the Augustine connection (he quotes Augustine several times), but he doesn’t seem to recognize that Augustine’s usage of caritas has been superseded.  In the 13th Century, the theologian and so-called Angelic Doctor of the Church, St. Thomas Aquinas, redefined caritas.  And Aquinas, it turns out, is the key to an accurate understanding of Benedict’s “Caritas in Veritate.”  Why?  Because since the late 19th century (thanks to Pope Leo XIII), Aquinas’s thought has dominated Roman Catholic theology, including its usage of the technical theological term, caritas.

For Aquinas, caritas is a special virtue—a theological virtue, because human beings are incapable of caritas on their own.  The virtue of caritas requires God’s gracious gift.  It is the most important of the three theological virtues (the other two are hope and faith).  Aquinas taught, and the Pope agrees, that only members of the Roman Catholic Church who participate in its sacramental life may receive God’s gift of the theological virtues, including caritas.

The bottom line, then: if you’re not a Roman Catholic, God will pass you over when it comes to granting caritas.  And without God-granted caritas, you may act in what appears to be a virtuous, loving way, but your actions can never be perfectly virtuous since you, a mere human being, are the source of the virtuous acts.

In his encyclical, Benedict claims that only Roman Catholicism offers the possibility of the kind of universal fraternity necessary for authentic community. But he’s following Aquinas here; only Roman Catholicism offers a path to God-given love (caritas), and God-given love (caritas) is required for universal fraternity.  Only with God-given love are we able to love God first (as the first proper object of our love), and then, and only then, out of love for God, are we able to love God’s creatures—i.e. other human beings.

A bit more familiarity with Aquinas’ thought (called Thomism, another technical term!) is necessary to understand the Pope’s encyclical.  Aquinas (unlike Augustine) has a high anthropology.  According to him, there are some capacities all persons enjoy, whether they are Roman Catholic or not.  For example, he maintained that every person is born with the ability to reason.  Thanks to our natural reason, we can come together and solve problems.

With this brief primer on Thomism, we could have anticipated what Benedict did, in fact, say in his encyclical:  “Reason, by itself, is capable of grasping the equality between men and of giving stability to their civic coexistence, but it cannot establish fraternity.  This originates in a transcendent vocation from God the Father, who loved us first, teaching us through the Son what fraternal charity is.”

Like every good book reviewer, Nirenberg is tasked with picking a fight over some point and so he chooses this one:  “The problem is that Benedict is claiming to offer general answers to global questions that affect people of every faith (and sometimes of no faith), while at the same time insisting that the only possible answer to those questions is Catholicism.  Such a suggestion might be a plausible prescription for global peace and development in a Catholic world, but the world is not Catholic.”

But Benedict offers general answers to global questions that affect people of every faith (including some of no faith) because he believes (following Aquinas) that every human being has reason.  And because we’re blessed with reason, Benedict can issue a global call for us to work together to address global problems.  However (still following Aquinas), fraternal charity, which grows out of caritas or God-given love, is only available to Roman Catholics.  If the rest of the world wants to co-exist in fraternal charity, it must convert and join the Roman Catholic Church.

For Benedict to discuss the global crisis in purely secular terms would be to act without love (in the ordinary sense of that word).  Would it be loving of Benedict to choose silence over sharing with the non-Catholic part of the world the fact (as he perceives it) that there is only one path to fraternal charity?

Nirenberg, however, wants Benedict to set his Roman Catholicism aside and offer global answers “taught in a way that seeks to transcend the boundaries of the traditions that produced them.”  What if Benedict made an analogous demand of Nirenberg?  He’d insist Nirenberg leave his secular commitments aside and offer teachings “taught in a way that seeks” to reflect the Roman Catholic tradition!

Which man has the more loving approach?

At the very least, Benedict engages in authentic multi-faith dialogue.  He doesn’t pretend to set aside his convictions—as if he could!—rather, he shows the full set of cards he’s holding in one hand and extends the other hand in greeting.  We may, like Nirenberg, not like the cards he’s holding, but we can appreciate the fact that he’s showing us what he’s got.

One of the goals of an authentic conversation about religion is to try to understand our conversation partner’s point of view.  For this we must set aside our own religious commitments and adopt a willingness to interpret (i.e. make familiar the unfamiliar) what he or she shares with us.  Nirenberg was tasked with interpreting the Pope’s latest encyclical.  Unfortunately, conversing with an author via his or her book does not offer the possibility of a back-and-forth dialogue.  If he and the Pope had had the opportunity to get together at the local bar and talk over a glass of beer, Nirenberg could simply have asked, “Exactly what do you mean, Your Holiness, by caritas?”  The two could have had a brief discussion about their differing definitions of love.  Then they could have moved on to discuss something more important—the Pope’s central concern of his encyclical—how to solve our global problems.

References:  David Nirenberg, “Love and Capitalism,” The New Republic 240, no. 4868 (23 September 2009): 39-42; Waldo Beach and H. R. Niebuhr, eds, Christian Ethics:  Sources of the Living Tradition, 2nd ed. (New York:  The Ronald Press Company, 1973).

#34 Blah blah blah: help or hindrance?

25 Friday Sep 2009

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SilencedIt’s common wisdom that religion is NEVER, EVER a topic of polite conversation.  Talking about religious views supposedly leads to arguments, so if one wishes to avoid the risk of a friendship-ending conflict, one should keep mum.  We are trained at near Pavlovian levels;  if our interlocutor has the bad grace to bring up religion, we either find an excuse to leave, switch to a different topic, or fall back on the conversation-stopper “let’s just agree to disagree.”

Which is a waste, because the imagined conversation between Tillich and Anderson in Post #33 helped identify some of the strengths and weaknesses of Anderson’s empirical theology.

Given the importance of religion in all of our lives (atheists are as impacted by religion as anyone else), shouldn’t we engage this topic at every opportunity?  Doing so would require the conversation partners to be honest about their views, including their concerns and disagreements.  Because how can common ground be discovered (if any is to be had) unless differences are acknowledged?

The Jewish theologian, Martin Buber, in an address delivered at a conference of Christian missionary societies in 1930, did not subscribe to the self-censorship practiced by so many liberal religionists and theologians then and today.  He broached, with frankness but also with hope, the subjects of what Christians and Jews have in common and of where they cannot agree.

This a slightly adapted version of what Buber said to the missionaries (Buber’s words are in italics):

What do Christians and Jews have in common?  To put it in the most concrete way, Jews and Christians have a book and an expectation. The book they have in common is called the Tanakh by Jews and the Old Testament by Christians.

It is the sanctuary itself for Jews but only the antechamber for Christians who walk through it on the way to a different sanctuary—the New Testament.  Still, it is a place they have in common, and in it they may listen together to the voice which speaks in it. They can labor together digging for the speech that is buried there, liberating the living word that is imprisoned.

They also share an expectation for a different reality.  The expectation of Jews is for a coming of what has not yet been. The expectation of Christians is for the second coming.  Their fortunes took separate directions in the pre-Messianic era.  Since then, the Jew is incomprehensible to the Christian; he is the stiff-necked one who refuses to see that God came in the person of Jesus to inaugurate a new and redeemed history.  The Christian is equally incomprehensible to the Jew; he is the presumptuous one who asserts redemption as an accomplished fact in a world which is unredeemed.

This schism, no human power can bridge.  But it does not preclude harmonious cooperation in watching for the oneness coming from God.  Although they expect a different oneness, they can wait together for that which is to come, and in those moments, pave the road for it in joint effort.

— End of adapted excerpt —

Some reading Buber’s words today would find that he simply named the obvious schism between Judaism and Christianity.  Others might have preferred that he had used gentler terms than “stiff-necked” or “presumptious,” or resorted to more round-about language, or not mentioned the schism at all.  Were Buber’s remarks inflammatory?  The missionaries to whom he spoke had no illusion about the abyss separating the two faith-traditions.  And Buber, having demonstrated his willingness to discuss that abyss, could be taken seriously when he explored what the Jewish and Christian communities could hope accomplish in “harmonious cooperation.”  Having openly discussed their differences, when he described his vision of the work they could undertake together, his vision seemed a genuine possibility and mutual enrichment seemed plausible.

So here’s a plea to set aside the old adage of “be polite; don’t talk about religion.”  Whether you’re an atheist talking to a theist or vice-versa, or a Lutheran talking to a Roman Catholic or vice-versa, or a process theologian talking to an Orthodox theologian, or pick-your- group talking to someone from pick-another-group, try to have an authentic conversation.

If you wish to be authentic, you’ll name the schism.  Then you just might have a shot at a more interesting dialogue—the one about harmonious cooperation.

HNFFT:  If you reacted negatively to Buber’s comments, how would you have broached the differences between Jews and Christians?  If you’d have chosen to say nothing at all about them, do you think it’s possible to have an authentic conversation without mentioning disagreements?

Reference:  The address, delivered by Martin Buber to a conference of Christian missionary societies in 1930, is quoted in Samuel Bergman’s Faith and Reason:  An Introduction to Modern Jewish Thought, trans. and ed. by Alfred Jospe (Washington, D.C.:  B’nai B’rith Hillel Foundations, 1961), 96.

#23 Generalized religiousness and the American dream

22 Friday May 2009

Posted by in Ethics, God, Philosophy of Religions, Religion, Religious Philosophy, Theological Ethics, Theology

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dreamstimefree_2776077In a recent New York Times editorial, Ross Douthat, describes religious trends in 21st century America as neither shifting towards the extreme of unbelief or the extreme of fundamentalism.  Instead, religious trends are shifting toward a “generalized ‘religiousness’ detached from the claims of any specific faith tradition.”  While growing numbers of Americans are abandoning organized religion (Douthat bases this claim on recent polling data), we are, by and large, not opting for atheism. 

Stay-at-home religionists are actively seeking and building eclectic and high-personalized theologies “with traditional religion’s dogmas and moral requirements shorn away.” 

Pause here, please.  Douthat himself pauses on the part about “moral requirements shorn away.”  It should give us pause too. 

Yes, build-your-own-theology-types are shearing moral requirements from their generalized religiousness.  But they are not alone.  Americans affiliated with specific faith traditions, whether liberal or conservative, seem to be following the same trend.  Douthat complains that religious people of all stripes are showing a distinct preference for a God “who’s too busy validating their particular version of the American Dream to raise a peep about, say, how much money they’re making or how many times they’ve been married.” 

Hmmm.  Not sure what Douthat means here because large incomes and numerous divorces aren’t necessarily moral no-nos. Most likely he’s wagging his finger at Americans whose God doesn’t raise a peep at HOW they make their money or HOW they spend it (see Post #22 “How good are we without God?”).  He’s probably wagging his finger at Americans whose God doesn’t raise a peep even when children are involved in a divorce.

Christians, Douthat says (and here, his meaning is quite clear), are drawn to “a Jesus who’s a thoroughly modern sort of messiah—sexy, worldly, and Goddess-worshipping, with a wife and kids, a house in the Galilean suburbs, and no delusions about his own divinity.” 

Hyperbolic language and claims aside, does Douthat have a point? 

Okay, so polls show that generalized-religiousness Americans are shearing moral requirements from religious ones.  But why are we doing so?

One answer:  we’re done with religions or Gods that ask us to reflect on the harm we may have caused.  These religions or Gods have too often made us feel like we’re bad people and we deserve to go to hell.

Another answer:  many of us are quasi-universalists–any God worthy of that name loves us and is simply too good to condemn us.  We’ve removed God from the judge’s bench in the sky.  The all-about-love God, the one to whom we’re willing to pray, no longer sits in judgment of us.  God loves us, unconditionally.  

And since God loves us, unconditionally, God loves us regardless of how much money we earn (or how we made it and what we do with it) or how many times we’ve been married (even if our kids end up with exponentially-more-difficult lives).

So, is the unconditional-love God really the kind of God we want?  Even a liberal Jewish theologian like Martin Buber, who made a principled decision not to attend worship services, imagined that the soul, after death, would be reunited with God (or not) based on the quality of our deeds.  The Enlightenment philosopher, Immanuel Kant, no lover of worship services, imagined the afterlife as an opportunity to encounter more situations requiring moral choices; in this way we would get all the time we needed to hone our willingness to do the right thing for the right reasons. 

What would Buber or Kant think of a “thoroughly modern” God who is “too busy validating” our particular version of the American dream to care about our moral decisions?

And you, what do you think?  Are you troubled by the current trend to triage moral requirements from religiousness (whether yours is a generalized religiousness or a specific-faith-tradition religiousness)?

Next week’s post will take up this issue again and explore the creative approach of the mystical theologian, Julian of Norwich.

References:   Ross Douthat, “Dan Brown’s America” in The New York Times online edition,18 May 2009.

#15 The battle of the gods

22 Sunday Mar 2009

Posted by in God, Philosophy of Religions, Religion

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dreamstime_1568537We expect monotheists, who believe themselves to be worshipping the one and only true God, to have difficulty accomodating gods or even conflicting views about God. 

Although David Hume (1711-1776) has sometimes been derided as an armchair-anthropologist, he was one of the wisest observers of human behavior and of religion.  When discussing monotheism in his book, The Natural History of Religion, he lucidly noted that when “one sole object of devotion is acknowledged, the worship of other deities is regarded as absurd and impious…as no one can conceive, that the same being should be pleased with different and opposite rites and principles; the several sects fall naturally into animosity, and mutually discharge on each other that sacred zeal and rancour, the most furious and implacable of all human passions.”

And what about polytheists?  Are they less likely to perpetrate violence on those with other gods?  By virtue of its multiple gods, polytheism can, in principle, incorporate or absorb other gods without stripping them of their attributes.  In Hume’s opinion, “the intolerance of almost all religions, which have maintained the unity of God, is as remarkable as the contrary principle of polytheists.”  His view matches the romantic views of contemporary Westerners who often believe that non-monotheistic faiths are, par excellence, inclusive and hence, non-violent.  But are they?

History mostly supports Hume’s conclusion.  Take the Hindu state of Gujarat in India, for instance.  During its cosmopolitan trading history of some 5,000 years, it assimilated the religions of those who settled on its shores. 

But on September 27, 2002, 58 Hindu train passengers died after Muslims set their train on fire during a stop in Gujarat.  This intra-Indian violence was perpetrated by Muslim monotheists on Hindu polytheists.  Given that Islam acknowledges only one object of devotion, the world might not have been surprised (except for its cruelty) at such monotheistic-polytheistic enmity. 

Except that the supposedly tolerant polytheists were not to be outdone violence-wise.  As the province’s Hindu chief minister intoned (quoting Newton’s third law):  “Every action has an equal and opposite reaction.”  According to Robert Kaplan, Hindu mobs quickly organized.  The day after the train fire, they attacked the Muslim quarters in Ahmedabab (the city where Ghandi established his ashram) and in other cities.  Hindu men “raped Muslim women, before pouring kerosene down their throats and the throats of their children, then setting them all on fire.  Muslim men were forced to watch the ritualistic killings before they, too, were put to death.  More than 400 women were raped; 2,000 people, overwhelmingly Muslim, [were] murdered; and 200,000 more [were] made homeless throughout the state.”

And there’s more.  Martin Marty reported how, in 2008, Hindu militants forced Christians living in the eastern state of Orissa, to deny their faith, flee or die.    

We could, of course, argue that religion has oft-times been harnessed to serve various political and nationalistic agendas.  Then again, we could, just as easily, counter-argue the reverse—namely, that religion has oft-times harnessed political and nationalistic institutions to crush resistant, competing religions and assert its hegemony. 

Let’s ask, instead, whether polytheism can co-exist with monotheism.  By its very nature, monotheism recognizes only one God, and its God is jealous of all other gods.  Clearly a my-way-or-the-highway kind of God won’t share the road with other gods.  But what happens when a monotheistic God refuses to join a polytheism’s pantheon?  We need only recall how it came to pass that the Jews were exiled from the land of Palestine in the 1st century CE.  Their God refused to leave his bachelor pad in heaven for the gods’ group-living arrangement on Mt. Olympus.  

The so-called ‘New Atheists’ would no doubt propose that India eliminate all religions whether theistic or polytheistic.  Get rid of God and gods, and the Federation of no-God will surely be (finally and permanently) established on earth, bringing with it peace, justice and prosperity for all.  Okay.  Fine.  But what should India do as it waits for the New Atheists’ armchair-proselytizing to begin bearing fruit?  

A crassly utilitarian yearning for order may be key to peace in India.  The threat of déjà-vu anarchy, the memory of partition’s chaos and destruction, could entice cooler heads to prevail.  After all, without domestic tranquility, the blessings of prosperity remain out of reach for Hindus and Muslims alike.  Let’s hope the battle of the gods finally becomes a thing of the past. 

References:  David Hume, The Natural History of Religion, New York:  MacMillan Publishing Company, 1992), 39-41; Robert D. Kaplan, “India’s New Face,’ in The Atlantic, April 2009, vol. 303, no. 3, 74-81, Martin Marty, “Monotheism, Polytheism and Violence,” in Sightings, October 20, 2008, bi-weekly subscription e-newsletter available through the Martin Marty Center of the University of Chicago. 

#12 God without clothes: what would s/he look like?

26 Thursday Feb 2009

Posted by in God, Philosophy of Religions, Prayer, Religion, Religious Philosophy, Theology

≈ 4 Comments

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Is God unknowable, beyond the possibility of the human mind to comprehend? There are plenty of good reasons to be intentional about keeping God abstract.  To preserve the one God as a word of appeal for every person, regardless of whether that person is male or female, is most easily achieved by denying that God has either male or female characteristics.  Even so, if we’re honest, we usually find ways to give that concept some human-like characteristics.  We, human beings, prefer gods that look, talk, feel, and think like us.  Because if God doesn’t have something in common with us, exactly how are we supposed to relate to God?

In technical-speak, we anthropomorphize God—we give God human characteristics.  When we want a personal relationship with a personal God, our god will have something in common with us.  Christianity’s god-man, Jesus, offers the possibility of such a connection.  So does polytheism’s many gods.  If we’re female, we might find it more comfortable to talk to, or pray to, a god we visualize as female.  Or if we’re feminists (male or female), we might consider females to be superior to males and God will be female.  Or maybe we simply prefer a god who is mother-like, with all of the stereotypical attributes of the perfectly matronly-matron:  you know, warm, unconditionally loving, benevolent, concerned, tender, soft, gentle, etc.  Imagine a female god who’s like the mother we have (or wish we had) but even better—mother-gods never, ever get crabby! 

So powerful is the urge to imagine God as female that Jewish rabbis, in spite of Judaism’s resistance to anthropomorphizing God, sometimes used the name Shekhinah for God in the Talmud.  Shekhinah is a feminine form of the Hebrew root-word meaning “to dwell” and so, the name Shekhinah denotes “God’s indwelling presence.”  After the exile of Jews from the Holy Land and the destruction of Jerusalem’s Temple in 70 CE, the rabbis taught that the Shekhinah shared the people’s suffering and grieved with them.   As for Christians, during the Middle Ages, they turned to the Virgin Mary in ever greater numbers, looking for comfort and solace during a time when Church doctrine made Christ less of a concerned intercessor and more of a retributive judge.  Mary continues to play an important role; for some Catholics she’s almost a fourth person in the godhead.

But the burning question remains—if we insist that God is radically unitary, do we resist the urge to anthropomorphize God or do we decide we’re okay with God having male or female attributes? 

If we really must anthropomorphize, then we can have our cake and eat it too by following the lead of the Talmudic rabbis.  They recommend qualifying our metaphors for God with the phrase:  “if it were really possible [to say such a thing]”.  We would then talk about how God is like a mother “if it were really possible to say such a thing.”  Granted, this phrase gets clunky, especially when praying.  Or we could follow the approach of the 6th century Christian theologian known as Pseudo-Dionysius, and adopt the habit of negating any positive, or concrete, thing we say about God.  How does that work exactly?  Like this:  “God is a mother and isn’t a mother. Such a linguistic device indicates how God is not only beyond motherhood but God is also beyond non-motherhood; God transcends all predicates.

Whether God is male or female or neither (if it is really possible to say that God is either male or female), may God bless you (if it is really possible to say that God blesses).  

Reference:  Louis Jacob, “God:  God in Postbiblical Judaism,” in Encyclopedia of Religion, 2nd ed., 3547-3552 (New York: Macmillan Reference USA, 2004), 3548. 

#11 What’s in a name? God, G-d, G*d

19 Thursday Feb 2009

Posted by in God, Philosophy of Religions, Prayer, Religion, Theology

≈ 12 Comments

dreamstime_64650281A quick glance at a few different faith traditions shows just how many ways there are to speak about the divine.  For example, some traditional Jews won’t say the word God because they believe that it is too holy to pronounce. One is forbidden from making any representations of God—even in speech.  When reading the Bible out loud, one is to replace the Hebrew word for G-d with the word Adonai, meaning Lord.

Sister Nancy Corcoran, a Catholic nun, argues against using the word, Lord, although it is a common word in Christian prayer as well as Jewish prayer.  For her, the term Lord does make a representation—of a male God (notice, though, how the adjective “male” had to appear in front of the word, God, to indicate God had a gender).  Sister Corcoran is an advocate of the name for God developed by Elisabeth Schussler Fiorenza, a Professor of Divinity at Harvard University Divinity School.  Taking a similar approach to that of Orthodox Jews, “Schussler Fiorenza prefers the spelling G*d because it suggests that, as humans, our ideas of and names for God are ambiguous and inadequate.  It also allows for a God without male or female characteristics.” 

How does Fiorenza pronounce the word G*d?  This word looks as un-pronounce-able as the symbol used as a name for three years by the musician Prince.  Unclear also are the reasons why, for Fiorenza, the word God necessarily suggests male or female characteristics.  Certainly, many theologians and philosophers throughout the ages have not associated male or female characteristics with this word (like Fiorenza, they’ve also argued that our ideas of God are ambiguous and inadequate but, unlike her, they did not argue we should abandon the word).  Okay, sure, the Bible refers to God as Him, but today, pronouns are often eliminated by sensitive theologians and philosophers (even if this sometimes results in awkward sentences).  Take, for example, the sentence:  “God wants you to love others as much as you love yourself or God’s Self.” 

Just like we use the single word, actor, to refer to either a female (formerly known as an actress) or a male actor, the single word, god, can refer to a female god, a male god, a god without gender, a god with both genders, etc. (in the last two cases, the analogy with the word, actor, fails!).  Unlike the word, Goddess, which does imply gender, the word, God, does not.  Thanks to its plasticity, it is the superior choice.  So why mess with it?

HNFFT (Her Nakedness’ Food for Thought):  What do you call God?  Does it imply has a gender?  Can it serve as the word of appeal for anyone, male or female?

References:  Nancy Corcoran.  A Multifaith Guide to Creating Personal Prayer in Your Life (Woodstock, VT:  Skylight Paths, 2007), 119.