Are not Religion & Politics the Same Thing? --William Blake
Even now, in 1848, it certainly looks as though politics were everything; but it will seem that the catastrophe (the Revolution) correponds to us and is the obverse of the Reformation: then everthing pointed to a religious movement and proved to be political; now everything points to a political movement, but will become religious. --Kierkegaard, Journals
The above statement by Blake, as read today, becomes ambiguous and can be interpreted both in a positive and negative sense. As heard through the current phenomenon of the Religious Right, it could suggest that religion is a mask for a political agenda, whose goal is the theocracy of church and state. However, since Blake abhorred "State Religion," he probably meant that religion and politics were the same in the sense of the Imaginative vision and implementation of an ideal world of justice, liberty, brotherhood, and love. He called that world the "New Jerusalem." The above quote, in fact, comes from his poetic epic Jerusalem: "Are not Religion & Politics the Same Thing? Brotherhood is Religion." (J. 57:10)
"The art of Debate is a blood-sport for the scholar, and his words are his weapons."
"The way you argue. He was a force of nature. He’d come at you from all sides until you surrendered." — Shanghai (movie 2010)
"Extraordinary wits trained to preternatural acuteness by the debates." — G. L. Dickinson
This page provides a special place for the on-going conversation/debate in America about the place of "religion" in civic and private life. More specifically, it is a place where the content of programs done on this topic finds a home.
Prophets, in the modern sense of the word, have never existed. . . . Every honest man is a Prophet; he utters his opinion both of private & public matters. . . .
If you account it Wisdom when you are angry to be silent and / Not to show it, I do not account that Wisdom, but Folly. / Every Man's Wisdom is peculiar to his own Individuality. / Always be ready to speak your mind, and a base man will avoid you.
I never made friends but by spiritual gifts, / By severe contentions of friendship & the burning fire of thought.
I will not cease from Mental Fight, / Nor shall my Sword sleep in my hand . . . .
In all his ancient strength to form the golden armour of science / For intellectual War. The war of swords departed now, / The dark Religions are departed & sweet Science reigns.
--William Blake
"Joan of Arc Kisses the Sword of Liberation"
"Well, I'm glad to hear you talk this way, you know I've watched you riding every day and something in me yearns to win such a cold and lonesome heroine."
--Leonard Cohen, 'Joan of Arc'
Religion vs. Reason
This section is dedicated to exploring the current national debate on religion in civil society. This debate, going on since at least the mid-1970s, has currently been amped up by the publication of books challenging the (monotheistic) religions--Judaism, Christianity, Islam--as organized private belief systems and their imposition in America's political life. The atheist / agnostic / rationalist/ humanist position has found a new voice in provocative works by Sam Harris (The End of Faith), Christopher Hitchens (God Is Not Great), and Richard Dawkins (The God Delusion).
This section will reflect the Gypsy Scholar's passionate and long-time engagement with this controversial issue; one that he feels is unique (and complicated) for a spiritually oriented individual, who nonetheless finds more empathy with the anti-religion camp than with the faithful. And in this the Gypsy Scholar finds himself in the same paradoxical position in this "Mental Fight" as his mentor, William Blake, who, although he raved against 19th-century "reason" (what he termed "Newton's sleep"), nonetheless found himself defending his atheist friend Tom Paine (his "common sense") against the religionists of his time, declaring that, although Paine was a non-believer, the infamous atheist was a "better Christian" than his hypocritical religious detractors!
However, truth be told, compared to the limitations of the current debate of "Religion vs. Reason," the Gypsy Scholar's allegiances are more on the side of
Religion vs. "Poetic Genius":
“Are not Religion & Politics the Same Thing? Brotherhood is Religion".
“Political Science . . . is the Science of Sciences.”
"Every Body Knows that no body understands Jesus' 'Philosophy' because we have liars and decievers as priests who are the Hirelings of Kings & Courts who make themselves Every Body & Knowingly propagate Falsehood."
"Christianity is Civil Business Only. There is & can Be No Other to Man: what Else Can Be? Civil is Christianity or Religion or whatever is Humane."
"The King & the Priest must be tied in a tether ..."
"It is the same in Art: by their Works ye shall know them . . . the Knave who is converted to Christianity is still a Knave, but he himself will not know it, tho' Every body else does. Christ comes, as he came at first, to deliver those who were bound under the Knave, not to deliver the Knave."
"The ancient Poets animated all sensible objects with Gods or Geniuses, calling them by the names and adorning them with the properties of woods, rivers, mountains, lakes, cities, nations, and whatever their enlarged & numerous senses could percieve. / And particularly they studied the genius of each city & country, placing it under its mental deity; / Till a system was formed, which some took advantage of, & enslav'd the vulgar by attempting to realize or abstract the mental deities from their objects: thus began Priesthood; / Choosing forms of worship from poetic tales./ And at length they pronounc'd that the Gods had order'd such things. / Thus men forgot that All deities reside in the human breast."
"Of the primevil Priest's assum'd power, / When Eternals spurn'd back his religion / And gave him a place in the north, / Obscure, shadowy, void, solitary. / Eternals! I hear your call gladly./ Dictate swift winged words & fear not / To unfold your dark visions of torment."
"The whole of the New Church is in the Active Life & not in Ceremonies at all. He who is out of the Church & opposes it is no less an Agent of Religion than he who is in it."
Religion vs. The Poetic Imagination ("Poetic Genius")
"When
you call yourself an Indian or a Muslim or a Christian or a European,
or anything else, you are being violent. Do you see why it is violent?
Because you are separating yourself from the rest of mankind. When you
separate yourself by belief, by nationality, by tradition, it breeds
violence. So a man who is seeking to understand violence does not
belong to any country, to any religion, to any political party or
partial system; he is concerned with the total understanding of mankind." (J. Krishnamurti, Freedom from the Known
) Given
that some listeners have inquired as to the Gypsy Scholar's position on
"religion," by way of simple explanation (the more detailed comes from
a reading of these website pages, not to mention listening to the radio program) it's basically that of the "loyal
opposition." This means that the Gypsy Scholar's position is that of
those who believe in the ultimate reality being
spiritual/consciousness, as opposed to the materialist/mechanistic
view, but nevertheless oppose the traditional non-materialist
"religious" view (of the major Western monotheistic religions). As a spiritual outsider,
the Gypsy Scholar finds himself outside (1) both the old- and new-age
religions (the latter merely changing the content but secretly keeping
the structure--spirit vs. nature, sacred vs, profane--of the
traditional religions); (2) both the theists (with
monotheistic/patriarchal concepts of "God") and the atheists (neither
of which has room for his complex metaphysical views). Having said
this, the fact remains that (especially in a God & Flag country
like America) it is exteremly difficult to have a recognizable position
vis-a-vis utlimate beliefs when your position is not even on the radar
of either of the two main opposing camps--the theists and atheists.
("God"? Whose "God"? --Moses'? St.Paul's? Augustine's? Or Jefferson's,
Spinoza's, Einstein's?) This being the case, any explanation of the
Gypsy Scholar's position is, candidly speaking, only for the benefit of
others. (And besides, since, if the Gypsy Scholar has to chose from
among the two camps, the atheists at least are on the side of freedomn
of thought--and, along the way, are clearing the ground of outdated,
oppressive religious dogmas). I mean, how many people would understand
if the Gypsy Scholar said he was an anarchist-pagan animist-gnostic/agnostic?
(It used to be easier to communicate one's position--"I'm not
religious; I'm spiritual"--, but since the new-agers have co-opted
"spiritual" for their own brand of authoritarian, world-denying belief
system, the Gypsy Scholar is now hestitant to say he's "spiritual.")
As to the question the Gypsy Scholar gets from listeners--"What is your problem with religion?"--, here is the short answer:
The Theocrats (since the beginning of empire) have now completely highjacked the only human institution that served the people for both a source of power and a means of escape (if not solace). After thousands of years, what was originally the Poetic Imagination became "Priesthood" and no longer served the spiritual needs (what historians of religion call) the archaic "homo religiosos." From a weapon and solace against authoritarian oppression, it has become a weapon for that oppression.
"The ancient Poets animated all sensible objects with Gods or Geniuses, calling them by the names and adorning them with the properties of woods, rivers, mountains, lakes, cities, nations, and whatever their enlarged & numerous senses could percieve. / And particularly they studied the genius of each city & country, placing it under its mental deity; / Till a system was formed, which some took advantage of, & enslav'd the vulgar by attempting to realize or abstract the mental deities from their objects: thus began Priesthood; / Choosing forms of worship from poetic tales./ And at length they pronounc'd that the Gods had order'd such things. / Thus men forgot that All deities reside in the human breast." (William Blake, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell)
“If you can live in fantasy [in imagination], then you don’t need religion, since with fantasy you can understand that after death, man is reincorporated in the Universe. Once again I will say that it is not important to know whether there is something beyond this life. What counts is having done the right sort of work; if that is right, then everything else will be all right. The Universe, or Nature, is for me what God is for others. It is wrong to think that Nature is an enemy of man, something to be conquered. Rather, we should look upon Nature as a mother, and should peaceably surrender ourselves to it. If we take that attitude, we will simply feel that we are returning to the Universe as all other things do, all animals and plants. We are all just infinitesimal parts of the Whole. It is absurd to rebel; we must deliver ourselves up to the great current. . . .” (Herman Hesse)
William Blake's painting, "The Net of Religion," depicts his view of religion as the primary form of authoritarian control and oppression. In fact, in keeping with the Gypsy Scholar's view of Christianism as a spiritual disease (of the soul), Blake alternatively referred to religion as "the dark net of infection."
"Those who are cast out are All Those who, having no Passions of their own because No Intellect, Have spent their lives in Curbing & Governing other People's by the Various arts of Poverty & Cruelty of all kinds. Wo, Wo, Wo to you Hypocrites" (Blake, A Vision of the last Judgment)
"It can be understood why Blake often used 'religion' as a smear word. The Orc [archetypal revolutionary] in him would 'scatter religion abroad to the four winds as a torn book, & none shall gather the leaves.' The Los [archetypal poet] in him declared: 'their God I will not worship in their Churches, nor King in their Theatres'; he would 'overthrow their cup, their bread, their altar-table, their incense & their oath, their marriage & their baptism, their burial & consecration', for their rituals have lost all meaning and are Antichrist' .... [Blake] thought that they [the Churches] had become corrupted almost past hope. Only the Divine Imagination, operating through the poet, could save them." (Damon, A Blake Dictionary)
Blake also referred to the "Wheel of Religion," meaning the same thing as his picture, "Net of Religion." Blake clearly separated himself from the institutional Christianity of his own day and, for that matter, any other day. (Blake also came to reject the "new-age" religion of his day, as embodied in the Swedenborgean Church.) In fact, according to Blake, Jesus himself died because he strove against the rolling of this Wheel. In a blank-verse introductory poem, Blake goes further than ever in separating Jesus from the "Wheel Of fire" that moves religion in his name:
"I stood among my valleys of the south . / And saw a flame of fire, even as a Wheel / Of fire surrounding all the heavens: it went / From west to east against the current of / Creation and devour'd all things in its loud / Fury & thundering course round heaven & earth / By it the Sun was roll'd into an orb: / By it the Moon faded into a globe, / Travelling thro' the night: for from its dire / And restless fury, Man himself shrunk up / Into a little root a fathom long. / And I asked a Watcher & a Holy-One / Its Name? he answered: It is the Wheel of Religion."
Unfortunately--and ironically--just like the representatives of institutionalized religion subsumed the first visionary ("Jesus the Imagination"), so they have tried to subsume the radical visionary of The Marriage of Heaven and Hell,"whose doctrinal orthodoxy has been proclaimed by assorted divines."
APOLOGIA for the Gypsy Scholar's Defense of Atheism
"There Is No God" This negation must be understood solely to affect a creative Deity. The hypothesis of a pervading Spirit co-eternal with the universe remains unshaken.... In fact, even while admitting the existence of the theological God, and the reality of his so discordant attributes which they impute to him, one can conclude nothing to authorize the conduct or the cult which one is prescribed to render him. Theology is truly the sieve of the Danaides....
However, man has always traveled in this vicious circle; his slothful mind has always made him find it easier to accept the judgment of others. All religious nations are founded solely on authority; all the religions of the world forbid examination and do not want one to reason; authority wants one to believe in God; this God is himself founded only on the authority of a few men who pretend to know him, and to come in his name and announce him on earth. A God made by man undoubtedly has need of man to make himself known to man.
--Shelley, "The Necessity of Atheism," 1811 [In 1813 Shelley reprinted a revised and expanded version of it as one of the notes to his "Queen Mab: A Philosophical Poem." Below is Book VII of this poem, which is a dialogue between "Spirit" and "Fairy."]
FAIRY 'There is no God! Nature confirms the faith his death-groan sealed. Let heaven and earth, let man's revolving race, His ceaseless generations, tell their tale; Let every part depending on the chain That links it to the whole, point to the hand That grasps its term! Let every seed that falls In silent eloquence unfold its store Of argument; infinity within, Infinity without, belie creation; The exterminable spirit it contains Is Nature's only God; but human pride Is skilful to invent most serious names To hide its ignorance. 'The name of God Has fenced about all crime with holiness, Himself the creature of his worshippers, Whose names and attributes and passions change, Seeva, Buddh, Foh, Jehovah, God, or Lord, Even with the human dupes who build his shrines, Still serving o'er the war-polluted world For desolation's watchword; whether hosts Stain his death-blushing chariot-wheels, as on Triumphantly they roll, whilst Brahmins raise A sacred hymn to mingle with the groans; Or countless partners of his power divide His tyranny to weakness; or the smoke Of burning towns, the cries of female helplessness, Unarmed old age, and youth, and infancy, Horribly massacred, ascend to heaven In honor of his name; or, last and worst, Earth groans beneath religion's iron age, And priests dare babble of a God of peace, Even whilst their hands are red with guiltless blood, Murdering the while, uprooting every germ Of truth, exterminating, spoiling all, Making the earth a slaughter-house!
Shelley's "The Necessity of Atheism" contains a Foreword by Henry S. Salt:
"The sequence of his thought on the Subject may be clearly traced in several of his essays. In 'The Necessity of Atheism,' the tract which led to his expulsion from Oxford University, we see Shelley in his youthful mood of open denial and defiance. It has been suggested that the pamphlet was originally intended by its author to be a hoax; but such an explanation entirely misapprehends not only the facts of the case, but the character of Shelley himself. This was long ago pointed out by De Quincey: 'He affronted the armies of Christendom. Had it been possible for him to be jesting, it would not have been noble; but here, even in the most monstrous of his undertakings -- here, as always, he was perfectly sincere and single-minded.' That this is true may be seen not only from the internal evidence of 'The Necessity' itself, but from the fact that the conclusion which, Shelley meant to be drawn, from the dialogue 'A Refutation of Deism,' published in 1814, was that there is no middle course between accepting revealed religion and disbelieving in the existence of a deity -- another way of stating the necessity of atheism.
"Shelley resembled Blake in the contrast of feeling with which he regarded the Christian religion and its founder. For the human character of Christ he could feel the deepest veneration, as may be seen not only from the 'Essay on Christianity,' but from the 'Letter to Lord Ellenborough' (1812), and also from the notes to 'Hellas' and passages in that poem and in 'Prometheus Unbound'; but he held that the spirit of established Christianity was wholly out of harmony with that of Christ, and that a similarity to Christ was one of the qualities most detested by the modern Christian. The dogmas of the Christian faith were always repudiated by him, and there is no warrant whatever in his writings for the strange pretension that, had he lived longer, his objections to Christianity might in some way have been overcome."
I cite this Foreword for two reasons: (1) abstractly, it not only affirms that Shelly was committed to atheism (not changing his mind later), but also affirms that his "atheism" is a Romantic atheism; a negation of a theist "God" but not of an ultimate spiritual reality; (2) personally, it strikes a familiar cord in that the defiant young poet was kicked out of college for his "affronted the armies of Christendom" and, presumably, for earning the ire of his Christian-minded professors (and his ass-kissing fellow students)! As
a grad-student in "Philosophy & Religion," the Gypsy Scholar is
particularly interested in carving out a third position that transcends the hard-and-fast dichotomy of theism/atheism, and, thus, discovering Shelley's "The Necessity of Atheism" was . . . an answer to a prayer! To quote Salt again:
"I regard Shelley's early 'atheism' and later Pantheism, as simply the negative and the affirmative side of the same progressive but harmonious life-creed. In his earlier years his disposition was towards a vehement denial of a theology which he never ceased to detest; in his maturer years he made more frequent reference to the great World Spirit in whom he had from the first believed. He grew wiser in the exercise of his religious faith, but the faith was the same throughout; there, was progression, but no essential change."
[ Henry S. Salt (1851–1939) was an influential English writer and campaigner for social reform and pacifist. He was also well-known as a literary critic, biographer, classical scholar and naturalist, and as the man who introduced Mahatma Gandhi to the influential works of Henry David Thoreau. ]
Once more, as a grad-student of "Philosophy and Religion," the issue of religion and politics has been a deep interest. The Gypsy Scholar has been watching and listening with great interest to the recent debates between those that represent liberal religion and faith vs. the challenging new voices of secular humanism and reason (e. g., Sam Harris, Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens). This first paper is the Gypsy Scholar's response to one of these debates--that of Sam Harris with Reza Aslan. This particular debate has been chosen not because it's any better than others that have taken place, but simply because it has been the most accessible; having been aired on C-SPAN more than once. So with the hope that my listeners had already seen it on TV, and the fact that I had aired it over radio before presenting my response, I decided that my commentary for this debate would be representative of my general views on the topic (though, of course, by no means exhaustive). I post here what I presented over the air. (Unfortunately, the link I had previously posted to the C-SPAN video is no longer operative.)
The Spirit of Romantic Atheism: The Religion of No-Religion
In Eternity, war is intellectual & Urthona rises from ruinous Walls In all his ancient strength to form the golden armour of science For intellectual War. The war of swords departed now, The dark Religions are departed & sweet Science reigns. End of The Dream.
--Blake, The Four Zoas
Imagine there's no heaven It's easy if you try No hell below us Above us only sky Imagine all the people Living for today...
Imagine there's no countries It isn't hard to do Nothing to kill or die for And no religion too Imagine all the people Living life in peace...
You may say I'm a dreamer But I'm not the only one I hope someday you'll join us And the world will be as one --John Lennon, Imagine
I guess I should try to explain my own position in this divisive debate between the religionists and the secular humanists/scientists. One would assume, considering the Gypsy Scholar's background in "Religious Studies" (which is roughly the secular university's equivalent to theological studies in seminary schools), that he, having invested all that energy and interest in the "religious" life of humankind, would logically side more with the liberal theists than with the outright atheists (or agnostics). Oddly enough, this would be a wrong assumption. Or, let's say, it is a narrow one. Not that a person has to take sides in some absolute, dogmatic way. However--to be candid--the Gypsy Scholar's temperamental allegiance falls on the side of the secular humanists (and free-thinkers). For the sake of fairness, though, I should qualify this statement by saying that the Gypsy Scholar's position is more complicated than this would indicate. To explain.
Hypothetically speaking--that is, in the ideal world--the Gypsy Scholar, as a student of religion (and, in his own strange way, a modest seeker after truth on the spiritual path), would naturally find his essential allegiances in the religionist camp. Moreover, given his "Romantic" anti-mechanist world-view (which holds that consciousness is the first principle), the materialist world-view of most secular humanists/scientists would turn him away from their camp. This "Romantic" world-view (a la A. N. Whitehead), with it's "vitalist" (neo-animist) cosmology, is where the Gypsy Scholar and the latter would part company (in an ideal world). However, we don't live in an ideal world where the camps are staked out on a level playing field. No, we live in America (with its European legacy of a "Christian unconscious"), where the last 1500 years of (patriarchal/monotheistic) religio-cultural hegemony has accumulated to produce a citizenry that claims to be the most religious and God-fearing of all nations; where the non-religionists of all stripes (read "non-Christians") have been on the outs with the prevailing world-view, and, thus, have been repressed in many, many ways. ("... our culture then is distinctly lacking in gaiety. Now it seems to me that this attitude rests in two further premises. The first is an idea of God that we inherited from a European Protestant and, to some extent, Catholic and Judaic background. This conception of God as creating the universe for the fulfillment of his purpose is a conception of God quite strangely lacking in either humor or joy. Despite hints to the contrary in the Bible, they haven't made much of an impression on our culture." --Alan Watts.) Their "equal rights" are habitually violated (if not in practice, in spirit) every time a church door opens out on the public arena. The rank but subtle prejudice against the "a-theist" is a regular fact of life in this "one nation under God." And, like many "myths" about America that the young, inquiring mind has come to recognize as such, the so-called "wall of separation of church and state" is, for the most part, a convenient mirage. Indeed, at this particular time (increasingly from the Cold War on) the nascent "Theocracy" that has been in the collective subconscious of this "Christian nation" seems all too ready to realize its Inquisitional nightmare. Meanwhile, fundamentalist (and some liberal) religious ideologues have somehow convinced too many otherwise rational Americans that the social situation vis-a-vis religion is the opposite of what it is in reality: they are now the oppressed, not the oppressor; they are the victims of the encroaching secular barbarians! Enter the new atheist/agnostic critics of religion. (It is
interesting--and enlightening--to witness, now that the
atheists/rationalists/free-thinkers are finally making their voices
heard--since the suppression of the 1950's and 1960's work of atheist
activist Madalyn Murray O'Hair--, all the religionists crying foul, with
their theological panties up in a bunch. All of a sudden they represent the historical minority-victims of the big, bad religion-bashing atheists! But the fact of the matter is that the religionists have never gotten over the effect of the Enlightenment on their agenda; heretofore never being required to rationally defend their position to the skeptics, they have never liked any kind of criticism. Now that the heat is on, these believers must use all manner of holy subterfuge in order to downplay the official nonsense that they pass off as the "Word of God." Yes, they just want to be left alone to believe what they want to believe. "Okay!" reply the non-believers, "as soon as you believers stop imposing your beliefs on the society as a whole.")
Therefore the Sam Harrises, the Richard Dawkinses, and the Chris Hitchenses, of the secular humanist /rationalist camp have the Gypsy Scholar's sympathy--and his sense of civic outrage at what the religionists in America get away with on a daily basis. (Sympathy in the same way that William Blake, staunch critic of mechanical reason--"the single vision of Newton's Sleep"--, nevertheless staunchly defended common-sense reasoner and atheist Tom Paine against his priestly enemies.) Again, while The Gypsy Scholar concedes that the "scientific" world-view leaves much to be desired for a truly new paradigm, it is nonetheless true that the "religious" alternative is the more oppressive and, therefore, more dangerous to human welfare and the planet. Thus he Gypsy Scholar rejects the new-age judgment that "science" is just another kind of dogmatic "religion." Dogmatism not withstanding (yes, there are some scientists who are dogmatic and "scientism" is a problem), it is a gross misuse of language to try to equate to two. For all its faults, the bottom line is that at least with "science" there is an opportunity to change--through reality-testing and debate--the prevailing scientific consensus; not so with "religion"--its world-view is unquestionable and absolute. So let those new-agers who decry the rational-scientific values of the "Enlightenment" as the problem time-travel back to the world of the medieval "sacred canopy" of the Church and experience what that was like, if they want to know real spiritual-intellectual repression on an unimaginable scale to the modern mind. I think they would be changing their tune post hoc ergo propter hoc.
Yes, I said the Gypsy Scholar's position was more complicated by the fact that he can't go along with the latter's scientific materialism/mechanism (and further complicated by the fact that, at least theoretically speaking, that he's no run-of-mill atheist; in point of fact, he's in that no-God's-land of neither theist nor a-theist—nor agnostic). If a term need be invented to explain his in-between position (this higher atheism not defined by its opposite of theism), call it gnostic-agnosticism. (If it seems illogical that the Gypsy Scholar could both be, theologically, a person of transcendental metaphysics and, politically, an atheist--since the religionists have made "God" into a political concept--, he would refer the reader to the Romantic poet Shelley's pamphlet, "The Necessity of Atheism," for which got him expelled from University College, Oxford.) But, no, this doesn't mean the Gypsy Scholar feels that most of our contemporary (liberal) religionists are occupying the high moral ground. I guess the deciding factor for the Gypsy Scholar coming down in favor of the new breed of non-believers is the sorry spectacle of disingenuousness--if not intellectual dishonesty--of those religionists who are supposed to know better than their fundamentalist counterparts. (The irony is, as heard in the debates, that it is the "religionists" who charge their opponents with "disingenuousness." See below, especially on issue of slavery in New Testament: "Annotations on Religion & Reason Debate".)
If there are those who feel that the Gypsy Scholar should change his mind about this, let it be said that he will . . . when the country that he lives in changes its mind; that is, when the following has come about: (1) when the repression and marginalization of atheists/humanists ceases, (2) when the Christian fundamentalists and other christo-fascists cease to dictate socio-political policy (including medicine and education), (3) when the phrase "one nation under God" is removed from our national identity, (4) when a presidential candidate doesn't have to announce to the nation that he or she is a God-fearing believer, (5) when the psychotic notion that "God is on our side" ceases to be used as a justification for imperialist warfare, (6) when America recognizes that a citizen can be moral and still be an atheist (without religion), (7) when new-agers in America figure out that an atheist too can be "spiritual," (8) when the separation of church and state is a reality instead of a useful fiction, (9) when our concept of "God" (what "God"? the god of monotheism, deism, the god of Spinoza, the god of Einstein?) becomes more sophisticated (and less anthropomorphic and monotheistic), and when a concept of "God" can be integrated with the latest scientific view--in nature from the bottom up and not the top down, and (10) when the believers (orthodox and liberal) honestly and fully acknowledge the dark side of their institutional religion without being defensive and in denial when the non-believers attempt to point this out; that is, when the believers don't have to be dragged kicking and screaming to the evils done in the name of religion and do so on their own without pressure from their opponents, because it's the right thing to do as moral people--without excuses, justifications, and counter-attack in the form of psychological projections. When these requirements are meant, the Gypsy Scholar will be able to embrace--as he should--the notion of homo religiosos and concentrate his criticisms of world-views at the secular-scientific. Until then, he will of necessity remain divided; theoretically in the "religious" camp, but politically an atheist. He will have to continue to engage in the Blakean "intellectual war," or, in the words of poet Allen Ginsberg, have to "Stand up against governments, against God--the monotheist domination of consciousness that insists on its own party line." Until then, since the religionists in their fight with the secularists (of all stripes) presume the higher ground (i.e., lay claim to absolute truth in one way or another), the Gypsy Scholar will direct most of his rhetorical energy in standing up for the underdogs in this fight, saving most of his criticism for the religionists (since with presumed higher authority comes the obligation to be held to a higher standard). Indeed, from what the Gypsy Scholar has witnessed in these debates (with Harris, Hawkins, and Hitchens) is that at the very least these dirty little atheists (from whom the religionists “expect holiness”) keep the believers honest--or at least they try.
In other words, the Gypsy Scholar would be of one mind when the third option of world views (mentioned above) came into being; when, that is, "The dark Religions are departed & sweet Science reigns." (Blake)But again, this is a complicated issue. What do we mean by "religion"? Is it opposed to "science"? If the Gypsy Scholar says that he wants to "imagine" a world without "religion", too many of both old- and new-age religion will cry foul. But what if the institutional structure that contained what we have known as "religion" (since the first city-states of the Near East) can no longer hold the new spiritual influx of energy that began to make itself manifest in the Sixties? What, indeed, would it look like to the human mind? The Gypsy Scholar would suggest that it may not be recognizable as "religion." In fact, it may look like its opposite--"secular," literally outside the confines of the sacred. Therefore, with the notion of a (paradoxical) higher atheism, we may be able to "imagine . . . no religion too" (John Lennon), because the highest form of religion (in a post-religious world) just may paradoxically be no religion--a Hegalian negation, integration, and transcendence of "religion." This being the case, it is the Gypsy Scholar's view that both old- and new-age religionists are looking in the wrong place for hope in future salvation. Both religious parties walking on the straight-and-narrow of the spiritual path are missing Blake's "crooked path" on which "genius" walks. But the Gypsy Scholar would take Blake's hand and travel the paths of Hell: "As I was walking among the fires of hell, delighted with the enjoyments of Genius, which to Angels look like torment and insanity ...." (Blake) For both old- and new-age angels, this is the road not taken. This road is that last one they would consider in seeking a new spiritual dispensation. Yet, this via negativa/via contrarius is where it's at, and that is through "the fires of hell;" a radical affirmation of the profane /secular. It is "a quantum step forward by proposing reforms that were not sacralizations, but radical secularizations, in the literal Latin sense of the word, of making something secular by making it belong to the generations outside the temple, outside the priesthood." (W.I. Thompson) To walk this path is contrary--and thus a scandal--to both the old- and new-age path. It requires not holiness, but what one Jungian scholar of religion calls an "instinct for unholiness." (Cf. Blake, who seems to be admonishing the new-agers of our time: "Men are admitted into Heaven not because they have curbed & govern'd their Passions or have no Passions, but because they have Cultivated their Understandings. The Treasures of Heaven are not Negations of Passion, but Realities of Intellect, from which all the Passions Emanate Uncurbed in their Eternal Glory. The Fool shall not enter into Heaven let him be ever so Holy. Holiness is not the Price of Entrance into Heaven. Those who are cast out are All Those who, having no Passions of their own because No Intellect, Have spent their lives in Curbing & Governing other People's by the various arts of Poverty & Cruelty of all kinds.") In case it is argued that my (higher atheism) unholiness perspective is completely anti-religious (because taken too literally), I would cite none other than Bodhidharma, who declared (when asked by the Emperor: “What is the highest meaning of the holy truths?”): “Empty, without holiness.” This is the only meaningful sense of being "religious" for the Gypsy Scholar--the paradoxical Religion of No-religion. Yet, because of our limited view of what is "religious" and what is not (for the most part defined by the dominant religious model and for science by default), this third option isn't even on the table for debate--neither on the altar of old- or new-age religion.
"It is difficult to find terms adequate to express so subtle a conception as that to which the Intellectual Philosophy has conducted us. We are on that verge where words abandon us, and what wonder if we grow dizzy to look down the dark abyss of how little we know!" (Shelley, "The Necessity of Atheism," 1811)
This
is, as best as I can explain it, the Gypsy Scholar's position vis-a-vis
the conflict of religion (faith) and science (reason). (For an extensive exposition on the Gypsy Scholar's thesis of "higher atheism" and the "religion of no-religion," which was only touched upon here, listen for his essay on radio: "Not the Fake New-Age, But the Blake New Age.")
It is thus that the Gypsy Scholar would offer the following few observations for your consideration to help you understand where the Gypsy Scholar is coming from when he says that in this debate of “religion” vs. “reason” he’s of the Loyal Opposition.
“It is better to be an honest atheist than a religious hypocrite.” –Swami Vivekananda.
“It is not because angels are holier than men or devils that makes them angels, but because they do not expect holiness from one.” –William Blake
“He who is out of the Church & opposes it is no less an Agent of Religion than he who is in it….” –William Blake
“If you have a particular faith or religion, that is good. But you can survive without it.” –Dalai Lama
Below
you will find the Gypsy Scholar’s exposé on the kind of
disingenuousness displayed by the defenders of "religion"—from those who project it upon the non-believer camp,
while priding themselves as having, de facto, more morality and truth
than their opponents. They ask us to trust that they have, ipso facto,
the high moral ground. But when it comes to playing down-and-dirty in a
debate, they reveal themselves no better than those they have
pre-judged as lower on the moral/spiritual ladder. If you can say only
one thing in favor of the non-believer camp, it is this: at least they
don’t insult our humanity with sickening pretensions of holiness!--not
to mention that at least they don't claim divine authority for their
beliefs; that they can stand or fall on heir own merits. (This entire
issue of genuine and rigorous intellectual honesty when it come to
matters of [Christian] faith is summed up nicely by one-time
"Christian" theologian and religious historian, Bart Ehrman. See link
at end of paper.)
ANNOTATIONS ON THE “RELIGION & REASON” DEBATE FROM ONE OF THE LOYAL OPPOSITION
“The Whole of the New Church is in the Active Life & not in Ceremonies at all.” (William Blake, Annotations To Swedenborg’s Divine Love)
“He [Jesus] scorn’d Earth’s Parents, scorn’d Earth’s God, / And mock’d the one & the other’s Rod; / His Seventy Disciples sent / Against Religion & Government ….” (William Blake The Everlasting Gospel)
In this debate about “religion” I would be expected, given that I’m a student of Religion and Philosophy, to be on the side of “religion” with Reza Aslan. However, with some reservations, the contrary is the case; I’m much more in sympathy with Sam Harris’ anti-religious point of view. Taking this stance in defending the atheist, I find myself in the analogous position of one of my favorite poet-visionaries, William Blake (1757-1827), who, curiously enough, in his Annotations To “An Apology for the Bible …”, defended atheist Tom Paine against the onslaught of Bishop (of London) Watson in their debate. I say “curiously enough” because Blake called himself a “Christian” (whose savior was “Jesus, the Imagination”) and because he also spent a lot of time raving against the reigning principle of “Reason” of his time, calling it mere “Ratio,” which can only judge and compare. Paine, atheist and upholder of Reason, had attacked the Bible, much like Harris today. Thus, it seems to me this present debate of Reason vs. Religion echoes the one between Paine and Watson in Blake’s time. So let the following criticisms by Blake (written on the back of the title page) speak to us as well. [I have listed here some of Blake’s critical annotations made to Watson’s Apology for the Bible, since they could as well, with a change of names, apply to the debate between Aslan (Watson) and Harris (Paine). When I think that Blake’s observations fit the current debate, I will insert them in red.]
“The Perversions of Christ’s words & acts are attack’d by Paine & also the perversions of the Bible; Who dare defend either the Acts of Christ or the Bible Unperverted? But to him who sees this moral pilgrimage in the light that I see it, Duty to his country is the first consideration & safety the last. Read patiently: take up this Book in an idle hour: the consideration of these things is the whole duty of man & the affairs of life & death trifles, sports of time. But these considerations are the business of Eternity.”
____________________________
[The text in light blue is the synopsis of the dialogue from the speakers in the debate. The darker blue is the Gypsy Scholar's commentary.]
“Religion & Reason,” the Sam Harris & Reza Aslan Debate
L. A. Public Library, 1/25/07
Introductory Comments: Curator of the ALOUD series: “No definitive conclusions.” “Is rationality the right standard to invoke in matters of faith? Can faith and reason be reconciled—should they be?”
Actually this attempt to square reason with faith has been a project that has been going on in Western European religious culture since at least Peter Abelard (1079-1142). Once more, it should be pointed out here (because of the current demonization of Islamic culture) that this project of using rational, critical categories and methods to explicate scripture could not have even begun if it were not for the Aristotelian Arabs. It has been observed that Abelard and those like him shared “ the intellectual excitement of the age which undertook to reconcile faith with reason, authority with experience, and the philosophy of Plato and Aristotle with the theology of the Church.” As for this present debate about faith and reason, JK invites them to reconcile their points of view. I judge it impossible. Maybe only God could reconcile them. But since one view holds that God doesn’t exist, then it’s impossible!
• JK: Karen Armstrong: “our religious imagination; to capacity to envision a higher power.” Case for “homo sapiens,” rational or thinking man, is also homo religiosus, religious man or believing man.” (JK: this is a theme we will probably return to again and again.)
Throughout the debate, it seemed to me that the problem in RA and SH coming a little closer together on their views is due to a semantic problem—that is, what we mean by “religion.” In fact, this is a very controversial issue (and has been in recent decades) for students of the history- and philosophy of religion. The failure to address this problem plagues the debate throughout. As an example of one of the consequences of not being more discriminating when the term “religion” is used (in a generic sense) is that of identifying modern religious man with homo-religiosus. The problem with this comparison is that Armstrong’s use of it is rather sloppy. In point of fact, the term homo religiosus was coined in 1928 by Ruldoph Otto (The Idea of the Holy), who is now recognized as one of the pioneers of the phenomenology of religion. It was subsequently made part of the vocabulary of the history of religions by the Mircea Eliade, who studies of “primitive,” or archaic religion (mythology and ritual) have become classics in their field. He defined archaic man as homo religiosus almost in contradistinction to the man of the purely “historical” religions (e.g., Judeo-Christianity). Thus, when RA claims that SH is wrong, because “Religions are not concerned with genuine history but with sacred history,” he is being misleading (at best). Indeed, what distinguishes the monotheistic religions (and it is a distinction which the representatives of these were at pains to make, since they had real “religion” and a real historical savior or prophet while the earlier religions, with their polytheism and cyclical time, just had “mythology”)—from both the earlier ancient religions (of Sumer, Egypt, and Greece) and the archaic, tribal religions—is precisely their concern with “history” (and, as Eliade points out, its irreversibility). No, “sacred history” is, for archaic and ancient man, the history of the gods, the heroes, the ancestors, the immortals.” It is not a term (in the history of religions) that can be applied, willy-nilly, to describing what the “people of the Book” (“religion” as a written creed) are writing about (unless “sacred history” is taken loosely to mean a history of a people that is “sacred” to them). (For the important difference between the conception of time between archaic and modern peoples, see Eliade, The Sacred and the Profane.) Thus, I submit that modern religious man is not homo religiosus, but homo credens—believing man (or even homo credulous).
• RA: “Religions are not concerned with genuine history but with sacred history …. The truths they convey have little to do with historical fact…. The only questions that matter with regard to religion and its mythologies is what do these stories mean. After all, religion is, by definition, interpretation, and by definition all interpretations are valid.” (Next sentence: “… while it is true that all interpretations are valid, some interpretations are more reasonable than others.”) “That is important to note because in many ways it goes to the heart of this discussion.” “False dichotomies created.” “To either believe the Bible is the word of God, or it’s not, is not the best way to think about the role of religion.”
Again, when RA uses the term “mythologies” along with “sacred history,” it is misleading, because it sounds like he’s discussing the pre-monotheistic, pre-historical religions, which were oral traditions that had sacred narratives (“myths”) of the origin of the world (“cosmogonies”) and of the gods, immortals, heroes or ancestors (“theoganies”). The problem here is the contradictory character of RA’s claims—of which he himself has set up by coming out of the starting gate with a definition of religion that put the lie to precisely the kind of “religion” that SH is attacking: “After all, religion is, by definition, interpretation, and by definition all interpretations are valid.” (Next sentence: “… while it is true that all interpretations are valid, some interpretations are more reasonable than others.”) To claim that “religion” is by its very definition, “interpretation” (a definition I would agree with) is a slippery slope to the deconstruction of scripture as sacred. RA calls for “more sophisticated” reading of scripture and speaks of “modernist.” How about “postmodernist”? That’s just where this definition leads—to postmodernist readings that deconstruct the sacred text as such; there is no “word of God,” just “interpretations.” (Careful Reza, there are those who will take you up on this seriously—and you won’t like it!) Therefore, almost everything he later defends (against SH) lands him in contradiction. But RA also qualified this by saying “some interpretations are more reasonable than others.” True, but he leaves out that there are some that are more esoteric/mystical than others. So, for that matter, how about kabbalistic and hermetic interpretations, if were going to talk of sophistication? However, there’s the other side of this glaring contradiction: when you talk in terms of scriptural interpretation as “more reasonable,” you have set yourself up for a standard that invites the kind of reading that Paine got in trouble with the religious authorities for. This “more reasonable” scripture has had its interpreters from Jefferson (The Jefferson Bible) to the “Jesus Seminar” (The Five Gospels), which has not only questioned whether many of Jesus’s sayings are authentic, but also expunged all the miracles out of the New Testament. I seriously doubt that RA would approve of this “more reasonable” scripture! Therefore, I would like to ask of RA, since he claims unequivocally that “all interpretations are valid”: Is the following exegesis on the Bible “more reasonable” or is it “more sophisticated”? “I tell you no virtue can exist without breaking these ten commandments. Jesus was all virtue, and acted from impulse, not from rules.” “Moral Virtues are continual Accusers of Sin & promote Eternal Wars & Dominency over others.” (Blake)
• SH: The point is that so many Christians and Moslems believe these things and not this liberal view of their scriptures. They have “views that are worthy of our denigration.” Views held by those whose decisions affect our lives. “Religion is a strategy built on lies and self-deception.”
SH is right on! I’d like to know who these “most people” are; those that read the Bible in this poetical, allegorical, and symbolical way. And since this country is so heavy to the side of the fundamentalist Christian reading of scripture, I like to know: just where are all these Joseph Campbell-trained readers? But if RA wants a “more sophisticated” reading of the Bible, let me offer this “infernal” reading: “ The Vision of Christ that thou dost see / Is my Vision’s Greatest Enemy . . . Thine is the friend of All Mankind, / Mine speaks in parables to the Blind: / Thine loves the same world that mine hates, / Thy Heaven doors are my Hell Gates. . . / Both read the Bible day & night, / But thou read'st black where I read white.” –Blake, The Everlasting Gospel
• RA: “Multiple means to understand religion or scripture, as there are multiple means to read any piece of literature, or any ideology for that matter.” Accusation of “literalism”—SH reads scripture like any “fundamentalist extremist.” “True test of how one goes about not just reading scripture but understanding scripture is understanding not just the historic context of it, the social context of it, but also recognizing that what you are reading is a description of sacred history [myth]—a description not just of facts and events. Gospel writers not writing—no writing of any scripture is writing what we consider as ‘history.” “They were writing about the description of the numinous experience and encounter with the divine—however that encounter is understood.” “We as intelligent 21st century modernist readers have to have more sophisticated understanding of these scriptures and read them within the sort of poetic, allegorical, and historical context or we should be laughed at too.”
The problem with this argument is, as SH points out, that most believers don’t read scripture this more sophisticated way—especially in America—; they read it literally or legalistically or moralistically. Thus RA describes how “most people” read scripture in idealized way. Who are these “most people”? Are they “most people” in theological seminaries or religious studies departments? The way RA states the problem with SH’s way of reading scripture in historical and social context is very misleading, since the problem is just the opposite; for throughout most of the history of scriptural exegesis the Bible was read without any historical and social context—ungrounded, ahistorical, and absolutist readings. RA has used the deceptive strategy of blaming the critic with just the thing the critic charges the believers with—literalism. Thus it is no accident that at one point RA, in making his case, says: “It wouldn’t be mere sophistry to say . . . .” Oh yes it would!
• RA: Insults: “I write books because I’m an expert in . . . whereas you ….” “Your research tools are okay if you get them from Fox News.” “Unsophisticated view of religion.” “Simplistic ways of thinking.” “Knee-jerk blame” of Koran and religion in general. “Sam’s views are perfectly logical if your research tools are Fox News … no, I mean that seriously!” (Laughter) Thinking about religion “in a vacuum” and “a profound unsophistication.” “In all due respect to your intellectualism ….”
Contrary to RA’s insults, SH not only doesn’t insult in return and remains restrained, but actually complements RA: “Your job is to … and you are better at it than me.” “You are a diplomat.” And speaking of being diplomatic, who is being, throughout the debate, more diplomatic?: SH: “I don’t think we’re as far apart as you believe.” “Reza and I can possibly have a meeting of the minds here.” “Raza and I have more of a commonality in our approach to religion.” Thus, here is an instance, aside from the intellectual content of the debate, when the atheist is not only more restrained, but much more considerate and kinder to his opponent that the religious man, who is supposed to me more moral. So who is actually engaging in what RA calls “knew-jerk blame.”? (Who is the “diplomat” here? Reza Aslan is a Research Associate at USC’s Center on Public Diplomacy.) “I have not the Charity for the Bishop that he pretends to have for Paine. I believe him to be a State trickster. Dishonest Misrepresentation. Priestly Impudence. Contemptible Falsehood & Detraction. . . . Mr. Paine has not extinguish’d & cannot Extinguish, Moral rectitude; he has Extinguish’d Superstition, which took the Place of Moral Rectitude. What has Moral Rectitude to do with Opinions concerning historical fact?”
• RA: “I’m an expert.” “My expertise.”
RA keeps insisting that “I’m an expert!” “I’m an expert.!” Protesting too much? If he is such “an expert in Mid-East affairs, his understanding and sympathies of the Israeli-Palestine issue leave much to be desired. Also his demonization of Central American Catholic “Liberation Theology” as death squads. Who had the death squads? What about the real right-wing death squads so infamous in that region? Those responsible for the murder of Liberation Theologist, Archbishop Romero. This is his example of bad Christianity? There is a certain logic to RA’s erroneous characterization of Liberation Theology. He doesn’t seem to be too sympathetic to any “social” reading of scripture and thus would not like the “social gospel.”
• RA: “It’s the easiest thing in the world to criticize religion—just turn on the TV!” “Intellectually dishonest” about Biblical morality. “To read scriptures in this way is to fundamentally misunderstand the key point of scripture… The easiest thing in the world … to find offensive and despicable in Bible .. and by these example deny the entire history of religion.” “Generalities based on anecdotal evidence.”
The anti-Hollywood argument; that Hollywood movies always put religion in a bad light. (Michael Medved.) Is it that easy? It may be on a pointing out religion’s evils, but is it so easy to get to the heart of the problem with religion and how it operates subliminally in out psyches? Was it easy for Nietzsche? Besides, SH’s critiques by themselves is just the most obvious level. There is another level, and that is how these beliefs get translated into psychological, social and political beliefs (e.g. how religious Ur-concept of monotheism, one God, gets into concepts that make for one truth, one country, one culture—monoculture—all mitigating against diversity. And even if “it is the easiest thing,” could it be because religion has made it easy? Could it be, in other words, that while the secularists/atheists/agnostics challenged the claims of “religion,” it is nonetheless the case that it was the representatives of religion, by their making “God” so puny and provincial—the image of their own ignorant and twisted minds projected on a cosmic scale—that they invited independently-thinking people to overturn Him? For decades now we have heard religionists and other traditionalists bemoaning the terrible decline of “religion”—the loss of belief, values, and, morality—and pointing a waging finger outward at the forces of secularism, the enemies of religion—the unbelievers; atheists, agnostics, secular humanists, the counter-culture, Hollywood, rock music, hip-hop. But I want to ask: Are these the ones ultimately responsible? My answer is that we should look to our religious leaders as responsible for this state of affairs—for the “the death of God.” I say it is precisely the religionists themselves who are responsible for giving “religion” a bad name. Given the absurd, repressive, and destructive belief systems that these men of God have erected and promoted, no wonder that intelligent and inquiring minds of the modern period have rejected these beliefs outright! In support of my outrageous argument here, let me quote the 19th-century poet, painter, visionary “Christian,” William Blake, who proclaimed the death of the Christian God-idol “Nobodaddy” and claimed “Jesus the Imagination” as his savior.
O for a voice like thunder, and a tongue To drown the throat of war! ---When the senses Are shaken, and the soul is driven to madness, Who can stand? When the souls of the oppressed Fight in the troubled air that rages, who can stand? When the whirlwind of fury comes from the Throne of God, when the frowns of his countenance Drive the nations together, who can stand? When Sin claps his broad wings over the battle, And sails rejoicing in the flood of Death; When souls are torn to everlasting fire, And fiends of Hell rejoice upon the slain, O who can stand? O who hath caused this? O who can answer at the throne of God? The Kings and Nobles of the Land have done it! Hear it not, Heaven, thy Ministers have done it! (William Blake)
• RA: The death of God has been going on for a long time and yet people still believe (in spite of such dire pronouncements).”
It could be said that this debate represents the ontological divide that separates those who, on the one hand, feel the “death of God” the believer’s worst nightmare and, on the other hand, those who feel it the best thing that happened since the Big Bang. (Actually, there’s a more complex position: that of the person of faith who understands that the “death of God” is, paradoxically, the rebirth of something greater. (But that may be too “sophisticated” a position for RA to grasp.) I would suggest that perhaps the “death of God” has already occurred when Nietzsche said it did, but most believers are too blind to know what’s going on. Nietzsche was truly prophetic. (RA says he thinks the prophets today are scientists!) But RA, in rebuttal to SH, keeps harping about the need for a more sophisticated approach to religion and scripture. So if RA wants “sophistication,” then let’s get sophisticated, because in order to understand what Nietzsche meant by the “death of God,” a more “sophisticated” and non-literal approach must be taken. (It’s ironic that RA abuses SH for this “literalistic” approach to his sacred cow, religion; yet he himself takes just this literal approach to the supposed anti-religion known as the “death of God.” Like many of his camp, they use Nietzsche as a straw man and seldom ever read him.) In fact, the “death of God” means the death of the entire symbolic cosmos that supported the belief in “God;” it meant, among other things, that religious constructs are obsolete. It meant, in other words, the death of an idol. (The death of the idol Blake called “Nobodday.”) Once more, Nietzsche’s Zarathustra was himself a religious prophet. Therefore, the “God” that was dead was not the “God” in its fullest sense. To quote Nietzsche: “At bottom it is only the moral God that has been overcome.” (Sophistication? Cf. theologians and philosophers of religion who are working out an alternative religious system to replace classical monotheism—“panentheism.”) Again, since RA states that he wants “more sophistication” in approaching these matters and accuses SH of being “profoundly unsophisticated,” the question is: Just who is guilty of “profoundly unsophisticated”?
• RA: On double-standard. “Why don’t we blame science, secularism, and other ideologies by the same standards?” “. . . overlaying religious constructs on nationalistic issues.” “. . . doing exactly what the religious extremists are doing . . . the cosmic conception history.” The cause of conflict, bloodshed, and war in history is not “religion,” but other social ills, like “nationalism” and etc. “You are blaming religion.” RA’s charge of “knee-jerk blame” is complemented by knee-jerk emotional attachment to a belief system that blinds the believer to its actual nature. Indeed, if the charge includes a “double-standard,” then RA certainly is himself guilty, since he defines religion in such a way as to validate it when necessary and yet absolve it of responsibility when necessary. SH had pointed this out in his very first response to RA description of what religion is to believers; i.e., SH being accused of misrepresenting the beliefs of Jews, Christians, and Moslems whenever he criticizes “religion.”
Again RA demonstrates sheer sophistry. (“It wouldn’t be mere sophistry to say . . . .” Oh yes it would!) Perhaps because science and secularism in general do not share, by definition, the same claim to absolute, unchangeable truth. Try as Aslan may to deflect the valid criticisms of religion, this equivocation of religion and science is sheer sophistry. For while there may be some secondary ways that religion and science could be equally held responsible, no amount of verbal slight of hand can alter the fact that they differ essentially in their ontological and epistemological underpinnings. And when its convenient to do so, the religionists are the first to point to the unbridgeable gulf that separates them; after all, God, not man, institutes “religion” and whose Word in scripture (dogma) is infallible and unchanging. “Religion,” as institution is, so to speak, vertical to all other man-made, horizontal institutions. (Cf. the sophistry of the Bishop trying to deflect responsibility away from the sex scandals in the Church. A Roman Catholic Bishop appeared on a TV interview in the wake of the revelations of the sexual misconduct of Catholic priests with young boys. He offered a brilliant piece of sophistry: the Church was actually no different from the rest of the institutions in our society; they all had their share of sexual misconduct in the workplace. Really? I hate to quibble over insignificant details, but what the good Bishop fails to take into consideration is that these other “institutions” are secular and don’t include in their articles of incorporation a dogma on the nature of sex and its place in the great scheme of things, or that the Church itself sees its own institution as ontologically vertical to all other horizontal secular institutions. Thus one is tempted to ask: Could it be that the there is a direct relationship between the sexual misconduct of its priests and the Church’s teaching about sex, in general, and its official policy of celebrate priests, in particular? ) And as far as other ideologies are concerned, if they in fact are guilty of absolute dogmatism and etc. (like Marxist ideology), perhaps it’s because these unconsciously have incorporated structures from religion. Perhaps one good example will suffice to demonstrate what I’m talking about: how Marx unconsciously incorporated Christian eschatology into this vision of the ideal society. As atheist Bertrand Russell pointed out, despite its dogmatic atheism, Marxism is modeled on the Christian messianic view of history. In Marx’s writings the redemptive role of the “just” and the “anointed” in Christian eschatological writings becomes the “proletariat,” whose struggle and sufferings change the world. Thus Marx predicts a final struggle between good and evil—personified, respectively, by the proletariat and capitalists—that is analogous to the beginning of the Millennium. Paradise, in the communist utopia, is a classless society in which work is done by machines and all goods are held in common. Aslan’s protests are part of his main defense against Harris’ critique of religion—the double standard—; that it makes as much sense to fault religion for these social ills than it does science and secular ideologies. My point here is, again, that while this may indeed seem like a double standard on a one to one basis, it is in fact, at another level—that of the unconscious and subliminal—a valid criticism, because these dogmatic beliefs become, after some 2000 years of mental programming, deep-seated structures in the subliminal mind, conditioning even the ideologies of its enemies. (Cf. the Old Testament concept God’s “chosen people” and how this concept gets translated into secular terms in modern empire-building in general, and in the fabric of the American character; its founding and its role in the world.) Aslan wants more “sophistication.” However, to engage this problem at this level would certainly take a deeper, more “sophisticated” analysis of the role religion plays in the formation of science and secular ideologies. (Cf. the notion of the material world as devoid of spirit by religion and dead stuff in science.) About the argument over whether religion is more responsible for bloodshed and war than secular institutions and ideologies, SH replies that he does not think religion is more responsible. However, for the sake of argument, one could make the case that it is. The only reason that secular ideologies seem to be more responsible is that in the time of the reign of Christendom their were fewer populations to kill and the Church didn’t have the advanced technologies of killing that the modern does. Be that as it may and to concede the point to RA, the problem with RA’s argument is that it totally ignores the question of whether, by its own religious ideologies, the Church set the stage—at least ideationally and psychologically —for the conflicts of the modern secular state. (Cf. the argument about the conflict in the Mid-East.) To give one prime example: the responsibility of the writings of the New Testament for “anti-Judaism,” which developed into modern “anti-Semitism.” To the uninformed it appears that “anti-Semitism” is purely a secular creation, having to do with ultra-Nationalism in Nazi Germany (and other countries). But they haven’t looked into the religious roots of this secular phenomenon in early Christianity and in the Middle Ages. From early on the Christian view was that the Jews were responsible for killing Christ, and during the medieval period they were pictured as the very Anti-Christ of the Book of Revelation. (The Protestant Reformation had little effect on curbing these anti-Semitic tendencies of the Catholic Church. Martin Luther himself was a rabid anti-Semite.) Thus during the Crusades (c. 1096), certain Christian princes and noblemen realized that the “infidel” they were fighting against in the east (the Moslems) was in their very midst (the Jew). So in the Rhineland (!) they launched pogroms on entire communities of Jews. In other words (against RA’s claim that religion has nothing to do with this kind of thing), it wouldn’t be too much to say that without Christianity fascist “anti-Semitism” would not have been possible. Therefore RA’s claim that SH is “overlaying religious constructs on nationalistic issues” is wrong in this case, and by extension, many others. It simply appears to be the case that these secular ills are totally outside religion when one is ignorant of the deeper roots of these ills. In recent decades some representatives of the Christianity (Jewish theologians have long been writing about this) have been brave enough to tackle Christian “anti-Semitism” and hold their religion responsible. (See Sidney G. Hall, Christian Anti-Semitism and Paul’s Theology and John Dominic Crossan, Who Killed Jesus: Roots of Anti-Semitism in the Gospel Story of the Death of Jesus. For a scientific study, see Glock and Stark, Christian Beliefs and Anti-Semitism: A scientific study of the ways in which the teachings of Christian churches shape American attitudes toward the Jews.) In this area of the way in which “religion” gets translated into and informs secular ideologies, RA totally ignores not only the subtle aspects I’m pointing out, but the blatant alliance of State and Church in this country (never mind in Islamic ones). “Paine says that Christianity put a stop to improvement, & the bishop has not shewn the contrary.” “. . . State Religion which they call’d God & so were liars as Christ says. That the Jews assumed a right Exclusively to the benefits of God will be a lasting witness against them & the same will it be against Christians.” “All Penal Laws court Traansgression & therefore are cruelty & Murder. . . . The Abomination that maketh desolate, i. e. State Religion, which is the source of all Cruelty.”
• RA: “I don’t understand that irreconcilable dogmas have anything to do with the existence of God or the question of the existence of God. That’s where I’m fundamentally confused by that argument.”
I think RA is confused all right—but not by this argument! It’s about this God’s—this loving Father’s—actions. “To me, who believe the Bible & profess myself a Christian, a defense of the Wickedness of the Israelites in murdering so many thousands under the pretence of a command from God is altogether Abominable & Blasphemous. . . . Christ died as an Unbeliever & if the Bishops had their will so would Paine . . . .”
• RA: Slavery. “No moral quality whatever attached to slavery 3000 years ago.” “To read it in this way is to totally misunderstand the point of scripture.” “We should laugh at literal readings that look at slavery in this way.” “Like rejecting Huck Finn because of the morality of 2000 years ago.” JL: “Paul didn’t worry about slavery because the end of the world was coming soon, and so the moral problem of the institution of slavery would be solved.”
Talking about laughing at different readings of scripture, what would make me laugh, if it weren’t so perverted, is exactly these learned pronouncements in defense of Biblical slavery. Especially absurd and perverted is the twisted logic (is he serious?) of JK; that the “institution of slavery solves itself” because of the prophecy of the “end of the world.” I can’t help but think, wouldn’t it be nice if all our social ills were so conveniently and terminally solved? Speaking of morality, what kind of “morality” is this? Does JK actually believe Paul? Since RA is so sincere about labeling SH as “doing what the religious extremists are doing—reading Bible literally—let’s take him up on it! Isn’t JK and by extension RA) doing exactly what the “religious extremists” (in this country) are doing? Whose “morality” is this? Isn’t it exactly the “morality” that we have witnessed time and time again of the Religious Right? The morality of “the end of times” and “the Rapture”? And the “morality” that gets translated into social policy in this country? Remember Secretary of the Interior, James Watt? We were told that we didn’t have to worry about our environment—the end of the world was imminent and Jesus was coming back. Yes, here, too, the environmental crisis would “solve itself”! So, whose reading is exactly like the “religious extremists”?
About the issue of judging the past by the moral standards of today. This mistake was earned the epithet of “Presentism,” judging the past by the moral standards of today. Okay, but, even so, Jesus was the Christ, the Son of God! We should hold the incarnation of “Christ-consciousness” (which has an eternal range) to a higher standard than that of the average person, who gets cut more slack because his morality is finite, fallible, and conditional, since it evolves with time. Be that as it may, my point here is that this charge of “presentism” just doesn’t stand up to the facts of history. A good example of this charge of “presentism” was brought home to me during the Native American campaign of “500 Hundred years of Resistance” in regard to our Columbus Day celebrations. I had asked the deacon of Grace Cathedral in San Francisco, a liberal priest, about whether it was time for the Catholic Church to formally apologize for the genocide it perpetuated upon the indigenous peoples of the Americas. The response was that this was “presentism.” The problem is that Bartoleme de las Casas, Spanish priest, scholar, historian, and founder of utopian community, was a human rights advocate and activist for native peoples in Columbus’ time. He denounced the practice of slavery. Now, as far as Jesus and Paul are concerned, both RA and JK claim that SH can’t condemn the New Testament for its support of slavery because there was “no moral judgment whatsoever” was attached to the institution in that era of history. However, this view is belied by that fact that ancient man did consider the morality of slavery. First, I want to briefly examine the issue of “slavery” in the ancient world in general, and then in ancient Roman Palestine in particular. In fact, the father of philosophy and founder of a mystical community, Pythagoras, according to his second-century biographer, Iamblichus, “was an opponent of slavery” (On the Pythagorean Way of Life, 33). This is in the 6th-century BCE!, which seems to give good evidence that the ancients did grapple morally with the institution of slavery. Of course, one could reply that this is far in time and place from the Palestine of the New Testament. If the Greek Pythagoras and his world seem far removed from the Palestine of Roman times, let me offer this piece historical biography, becuse this retort is short-circuited by a curious fact in the life of Pythagoras (c. 582-507 BC). It seems that when he was a young seeker after wisdom he took a ship from Egypt, where he was studying, to Israel’s Mt. Carmel, which he climbed in order to contact the Essene sanctuary there. Atop the mountain he received teachings from the Essene Narzarenes. When he came back to the ship the Egyptian sailors planned to sell him into slavery, but were so impressed with his spiritual numinosity that they relented. So there is a connection between the values of the Greek world and the Jewish. Yet, admittedly, this doesn’t necessarily prove anything about the issue of slavery and attitudes toward it in ancient Roman Palestine. However, upon further research, we discover three important facts: (1) The Essene community figures into the world of the New testament, since Jesus is said to have either been influenced by the Essene’s through John the Baptist, or even may have been Essene’s himself; (2) The Essene’s were against slavery; (3) There is a connection between the Essene and the Pythagorian communities.
“The Essenes are mentioned by several ancient writers, including Josephus, Philo, Pliny, and Porphyry. Philo states that the Essenes rejected animal sacrifices, despised wealth and lived communally, did not make oaths, and rejected slavery (‘Every Good Man is Free”), saying “there is not a single slave among them.” Instead of this search for the Essenes in the Dead Sea Scrolls, we should look at the Pythagoreans. While the similarities between the Essenes and the Dead Sea Scrolls community seem to be nebulous and tenuous at best, the similarities between the Essenes and the Pythagoreans are obvious and striking. The followers of Pythagoras, a Greek philosopher of the 6th century BCE, are an easy choice for comparison with the Essenes for two reasons: first, they had so much in common with the Essenes . . . that it would be correct to speak of these latter groups as Jewish Pythagoreans; and secondly, because Josephus states flatly that the Essene lifestyle and the Pythagorean lifestyle were the same (Antiquities 15.10.4). We don’t have to look far to find similarities between the Pythagoras described by Iamblichus and the Essenes described by Josephus, Pliny, Porphyry, and Philo—as well with the Jewish Christians. The neo-Pythagorean Iamblichus in his book On the Pythagorean Way of Life states that: Pythagoras was an opponent of slavery.” [Keith Akers, The Lost Religion of Jesus, 2001]
What we know about slavery is that it was a universal institution throughout ancient times, yet, as SH points out it was never questioned in the Old Testament or New Testament. However, this doesn’t mean that either (as we have seen) the world of Jesus’ time was completely devoid moral conscience about it (as RA and JK would have us believe), or that the ancient world in general never questioned the morality of slavery. In fact, the second person on record (after Pythagoras) to denounce slavery as an evil was the Greek playwright Euripides (c. 480-406 BC), who wrote in his play Hecuba: “That thing of evil, by its nature evil, / Forcing submission from a man to what/ No man should yield to.” The Lives and Opinions of Eminent Philosophers, by Diogenes Laertius, has the following statement from a letter of the Milesian philosopher Anaximenes (c. 585-525 BC) to Pythagoras: “To what purpose should I trouble myself in searching out the secrets of the stars, having death or slavery continually before my eyes?”
Therefore, both the line from Euripides and the letter of the Greek philosopher should warn us that it is not “presentism” (judging the ancient past by our values or morality) to critically ask why Jesus and Paul could not see their way clear to morally condemn the institution of slavery. Given this information about the issue of slavery in the ancient world of the New Testament, we can only wonder about how RA and JK can make their claims and ask: Just who is being “intellectually dishonest”? “I have not the Charity for the Bishop that he pretends to have for Paine. I believe him to be a State trickster. Dishonest Misrepresentation. Priestly Impudence. Contemptible Falsehood & Detraction. . . .” “The Bible or Peculiar Word of God, Exclusive of Conscience or the Word of God Universal, is that Abomination . . . & henceforth every man may converse with God & be a King & Priest in his own house.”
• RA: Religion and literature. Condemning Bible for its immorality. His analogy of Huck Finn with the Bible; “We wouldn’t condemn all literature because the novel used the word niggar.” (SH interjects: “I’m not rejecting in terms of literature.”)
The problem with this specious analogy is the unacknowledged difference that makes all the difference in the world between secular literature and sacred scripture is that people are not fighting wars and killing each other over whose a better writer, Dickens or Hemmingway. Besides, this analogy begs the question as to the idea of “Bible as literature.” (Opening commentator’s remarks about “everything is interpretation.”) Bible first interpreted by an exegesis using the tools and methods of literary criticism. Watch out what analogies you make—you don’t want to go there! Perhaps the Bible and the Koran can survive their privileged status in modernism, but in postmodernist literary criticism there are no sacred texts per se; that is, no text that can claim to be the unmediated Word of God, since they are all written by all-too-human authors. Again, as pointed out in the debate: “everything is interpretation.” So who is being “disingenuous”?
• RA sees SH’s view of the role of religion/Islam—as essentially a religious problem—in world conflicts as “simplistic,” as a “fundamentalist, literalist” reading of scripture by the light of today’s morality.
But it is anything but simplistic to see how religion sets up the intellectual atmosphere, the entire social context, and language used in otherwise geo-political conflict. And how religion justifies—no, sanctifies—the atrocities committed.
• RA: “Religion is just the language” these political extremists use to express their economic and other interests. On the other hand “religion” is so much a part of history that you can’t have or write about history without it. Religion is also “a language” that describes the mysterious “transcendent experience.” “The writers of the Bible are not writing history” as we know it today’ they are “writing about a numinous experience.”
This view wants it both ways: on the one hand, “religion” is everything about history—you can’t separate the study of history from the study of religion; on the other, “religion” is reduced to merely a “language,” either for political grievances or to phenomenologically describe the “transcendent/numinous experience.” Here, in using the term “numinous,” RA is using the language not of mainstream theology, but the technical vocabulary of the disciple of the history- and phenomenology of religion. It was coined (as far as I’m aware) in Rudolph Otto’s classical study, The Idea of the Holy (1928). Suffice to say, in contradiction to RA’s claim, few believing Christians would recognize this description for what the Bible is describing. Moreover, the main problem with this claim is that “the numinous” (like the term, “homo religiosus”) was coined to describe a very different kind of religious world-view; that of archaic man, who didn’t have “religion” (in the Axial age sense and in our modern sense of revealed scripture as creed) as much as he had “mythology” (which expressed and embodied, through ritual, “an original ontology and cosmogony”). Indeed, it was precisely on this issue of “mythology” that the historical religion of Judeo-Christianity carved out its superior niche in the ancient world. Other sects had mythology,” whereas they had the real thing—“religion” (i.e. their savior god was a real, historical person not a creature of myth like Dionysus, Attis, Adonis, Mithras, etc.). For RA to make such a claim goes against the distinction upon which Christianity made itself superior to all other sects in the ancient world. Therefore, like RA’s dubious claims about scriptural religion’s overriding concern with “sacred history” (which is another concept better suited to the cosmogonies of archaic man and the theoganies of ancient man than to the creedal “religions”—monotheist Judaism, Christianity, Islam—that identify with linear history), these comparisons are misleading, sounding more like he’s teaching a class in the history- or phenomenology of archaic religion than debating the actual issues involved with our current religious situation and its history. (I will leave it to the reader to decide, since RA is so concerned about this fault, whether he himself is being “intellectually dishonest” or merely “disingenuous.”) Therefore, we have to ask what it means for the writers of the New Testament to be “writing about this transcendent experience.” How are they “writing about” it and why? If the writers of the New Testament, especially Paul, were in fact only interested in describing this “transcendent experience” (Paul’s conversion experience on the road to Damascus), it was only to shore up their claim to the one and only truth of their savior, the Christ. Indeed, if it be the “numinous,” then it only served the miracle-mongering that proved the “our god is better than your god” claim; i.e, it won over new converts (which conversion project religious historian Ramsey MacMullen describes the Christians carried on like “a shoot out at Dodge City”). Thus, if we are going to call this “transcendent experience” in the New Testament a “description,” then I say its not a “description” in a phenomenological sense but rather a “description” in a polemical sense. The other problem with this claim is that it smacks of something the Church of Rome always held suspect and thus repressed—mysticism. You were not supposed to go around seeking this “transcendent experience;” it was enough that the divine was mediated through the sacraments of the Church. The mystical experience was dangerous because you could get the notion that you didn’t need the mediating priesthood; that, in fact, you were “one with God.” (Since RA represents the Islamic faith, it should be mentioned that just this mysticism led to the torture and crucifixion in 922 of al-Hallaj, the Persian-Sufi teacher and poet, who claimed just this.) With this in mind, I will, again, leave it up to the reader to decide if RA is being outright “intellectually dishonest,” or merely “disingenuous.”
• JL: “Christianity, unlike Islam, has gone through a reformation which has tempered its excesses.”
I Agree with RA here. SH needs to be more even handed in his condemnation of all three religions to an equal extent. However, to be equally critical, when SH accuses Islam of becoming a “death cult,” this should also be applied to Christianity, but not in the sense that SH meant it. It could be argued (and Nietzsche did argue it) that Christianity is a death cult (Nietzsche claimed Christianity was in love with death; was “anti-life”) in the sense of mistaking eternal life for the stasis of death. This is tied together with its primary symbol, the Cross of the Crucified Christ. Because of its preoccupation with suffering and death, theologians, like Mary Daly, have pointed out the essential “masochistic” nature of that tortured symbol. (Actually, the Cross wasn’t the first symbol of the religion but became that; the first symbol was a fish.) Now that we have seen the logical outcome of this symbol stated graphically by Mel Gibson’s The Passion of the Christ, what further evidence do we need to see Christianity’s death-wish? That being said, one has to agree with the criticism from RA and JK. I would say that SH’s strong suit is not the nature of the crisis in the Mid-East, nor the particulars of the players involved. One has to be particularly cautious not to appear to be buying into the current American demonization of all things Arab and Islam (as if these two things necessarily were one). That being said, I don’t think SH has any particular prejudice against Islamic religion over the other monotheistic faiths. I think he is coming out of a certain ignorance about the issues involved. However, as I stated before, for that matter, judging by RA’s counter-assessments, he could also use some education—like about what’s going on in the conflicts in Palestine and Iraq. (See, Robert Fisk, The Great War for Civilisation: The Conquest of the Middle East.) Yet, the difference is that SH isn’t constantly pounding his chest about his “expertise.”
• JL: Newton and Bible. Scientific mind can co-exist with mystical mind. SH: “partitioned mind.”
Newton and the Bible. Okay. But how about Newton and the Alchemical text? Here, I trust that both RA and SH have no room in their respective world-views for the Newton who wrote both the Principia Mathematica and the “Hunting of the Green Lyon.”
• SH: “We have moderation and liberalism in religion today because of hundreds of years of religion’s collision with modernity and so understand Bible differently.”
This is an important point. One aspect of it deserves comment. The upholders of “religion” in our time cry foul whenever anyone like SH levels incisive criticism at their sacred cow, labeling it “bashing religion/Christianity.” Some of the more sophistically clever even claim that those who engage in attacking religion do so because its now “cool” to be anti-religious. But the truth is that given the many centuries of Christian political and cultural hegemony in the West, the religionists are not accustomed to hear criticism and, thus, engage in knee-jerk defense of their right to impose their religious views on the rest of us. As far as being “cool” to be anti-religious, it wasn’t “cool” for those that stood courageously up to the imposition of the Christian religion (from both the orthodox and liberal camps) on secular Americans in their public institutions. Witness what happened to atheist activist Madalyn Murray O’Hare in the 1950s and 60s. As SH indicates, the atheists seem to be the last unacknowledged repressed minority I America. In other words, if the Christian looks more moderate or reasonable now, it didn’t change out of the goodness of its religious heart, because it saw the wisdom of changing its outmoded and repressive views—no, it was dragged kicking and screaming into the modern world; forced to change when people became more educated. And you can bet your life that (as SH said we no longer do) we’d still be burning heretics at the stake, if the Church had its way. “Christ died as an Unbeliever & if the Bishops had their will so would Paine . . . .”
To conclude my analysis of the issues raised in this debate on “Religion and Reason,” I end the same way as I began; that is, with the candid and terse observations from the “Christian,” William Blake on that earlier debate on the same subject.
“Paine has not attacked Christianity. Watson has defended the Antichrist.”
“Paine is either a devil or an Inspired man. Men who give themselves to their Energetic Genius in the manner that Paine does are no Examiners. If they are not determinately wrong they must be Right or the Bible is false . . . . The man who pretends to be a modest enquirer into the truth of a self-evident thing is a Knave. . . .”
“The trifles which the Bishop [RA] has combated in the following Letters are such as do nothing against Paine’s [SH’s] Arguments, none of which the Bishop [RA] has dared to Consider. One, for instance, which is that the books of the Bible were never believ’d willingly by any nation & that none but designing Villains ever pretended to believe—That the Bible is all a State Trick, thro’ which tho’ the People at all times could see, they never had the power to throw off. Another Argument is that all the Commentators on the Bible are Dishonest Designing Knaves, who in the hopes of a good living adopt the State religion; this he has shewn with great force, which calls upon His Opponent [RA] loudly for an answer. . . .”
[Written on last page of the “An Apology for the Bible”] “It appears to me Now that Tom Paine [SH] is a better Christian [Moslem] than the Bishop [RA]. I have read this Book with attention & find that the Bishop [RA] has only hurt Paine’s [SH’s] heel while Paine [SH] has broken his head. The Bishop [RA] has not answered one of Paine’s [SH’s] grand objections.”
Appendix
HOMO RELIGIOSUS: Man, the religious animal.
Man as homo sapiens, the rational animal, or man as homo religiosus, the religious animal.
Crucial to an understanding of Eliade's The Sacred and the Profane are three categories: the Sacred (which is a transcendent referent such as the gods, God, or Nirvana), hierophany (which is the breakthrough of the sacred into human experience, i.e. a revelation), and homo religiosus (the being par excellence prepared to appreciate such a breakthrough). One of Eliade's aims is to acquaint readers with the idea of the numinous, a concept provided in Rudolf Otto's The Idea of the Holy. The numinous experience is that experience of the Sacred which is particular to religious human beings (homo religiosus) in that it is experientially overwhelming, encompassing the mysterium tremendum et fascinans, both the awesomely fearful and the enthrallingly captivating aspects of the Holy, or, the Wholly Other . In expanding and expounding the phenomenological dimensions of the Sacred, Eliade points out that the Sacred appears in human experience as a crucial point of orientation at the same time it provides access to the ontological reality which is its source and for which homo religiosus thirsts. According to Eliade, homo religiosus thirsts for being. In terms of space, the Sacred delineates the demarcation between sacred and profane and thus locates the axis mundi as center. Thus temples and teepees, homes and hearths become sacralized for homo religiosus. Numerous examples of the consecration of sacred space illustrate the importance of cosmogony as a paradigmatic model for practically every creative endeavor. Such cosmogonic activities as were done "in the beginning" (in illo tempore) are recapitulated periodically in ritual and myth to sustain and renew the world, hence, not only does space become sacred, but time as well. The festival, such as New Year's Celebration, has a way of tapping into primordial time and harnessing the forces of creation into re-creation, dipping into chaos and re-emerging with new order. "Symbolically man became contemporary with the cosmogony, he was present at the creation of the world," (p 79) and/or periodically contemporary with the gods. Thus, homo religiosus can insure the life of animals, plants, crops, culture... Myth as the repetition and imitation of divine models allows homo religiosus to (1) remain in the sacred, "hence in reality;" and, (2) sanctify the world. "It is not without interest to note that [homo religiosus] assumes a humanity that has a transhuman, transcendent model (p99)." "For our purpose, what demands emphasis is the fact that religious man sought to imitate, and believed that he was imitating, his gods even when he allowed himself to be led into acts that verged on madness, depravity, and crime (p 104)."
This is so because Homo Religiosus always views the world as revealing a sacred modality. "Every cosmic fragment is transparent; its own mode of existence shows a particular structure of being, and hence of the sacred," since, for homo religiosus "sacrality is a full manifestation of being (p138)." Cosmic sacrality is thus primordial and yet ever-present in its distant revelation and ongoing revelatory capacity.
In turning to issues of "Human Existence and Sanctified Life" Eliade points out that in the contemporary world "religion as a form of life and Weltanschauung is represented by Christianity (p164)." A factor which can limit one's understanding of the total gamut of religious expression and expressivity available within the mental universe of homo religiosus. Indeed, to have studied the great classical religions and the high-religions of other cultures is of some advantage, but other data need to be considered far beyond that. "To gain a broader religious perspective, it is more useful to become familiar with the folklore of European peoples; in their beliefs and customs, their attitude toward life and death, many archaic religious situations are still recognizable." This is so because many of the religious expressions of rural peasant Christians in these European countrysides have incorporated a primordial, ahistorical Christianity that preserves a cosmic religion from pre-historic times not readily seen in the more urbanized Christianities of the secular cities. But beyond this there is the "primitive" world of "nomadic herdsmen, of totemistic hunters, of peoples still at the stage of gathering and small-game hunting (p164)" for whom the world exist in total sacrality, and for whom every aspect of existence reflects a sacred connection. "This is why, beginning at a certain stage of culture, man conceives of himself as a microcosm. He forms part of the god's creation; in other words, he finds in himself the same sanctity that he recognizes in the cosmos. It follows that his life is homologized to cosmic life; as a divine work, this cosmos becomes the paradigmatic image of human existence (p165)." "Openness to the world enables religious man to know himself in knowing the world--and this knowledge is precious to him because it is religious, because it pertains to being (p167)." There are a vast number of homologies between humans and the universe, "for example, the homology between the eye and the sun, or of the two eyes to sun and moon, of the cranium to the full moon, or again, of breath to the winds, of bones to stones, of hair to grass, and so on (pp168-169)." Homo Religiosus lives in an open cosmos and is in turn open to the world. "This means (a) that he is in communication with the gods; (b) that he shares in the sanctity of the world. That religious man can live only in an open world, we saw when we analyzed the structure of sacred space; man desires to dwell at a center...His dwelling is a microcosm; and so too is his body. The homology house-body-cosmos presents itself very early (p172)." "It can come about that in a noncosmic religion, such as that of India after Buddhism, the opening to the higher plane no longer represents passage from the human to the superhuman condition, but instead expresses transcendence, abolition of the cosmos, absolute freedom. There is an immense difference between the philosophical meaning of the Buddha's broken egg or the roof shattered by the Arhats and the archaic symbolism of passage from earth to heaven along the axis mundi or through the smoke hole. Yet the fact remains that, among symbols capable of expressing ontological breakthrough and transcendence, both Indian philosophy and Indian mysticism chose this primordial image of shattering the roof. This means that passing beyond the human condition finds figural expression in the destruction of the 'house,' that is, of the personal cosmos that one has chosen to inhabit (pp177-178)." It thus represents the abolition of conditions of mental and physical habitation and habituation, in other words, historical conditioning of any sort, in short, all situations. "As for the Christianity of the industrial societies and especially the Christianity of intellectuals, it has long since lost the cosmic values that it still possessed in the Middle Ages. We must add that this does not necessarily imply that urban Christianity is deteriorated or inferior, but only that the religious sense of urban populations is gravely impoverished (pp178-179)."
Rites of passage such as birth, puberty, initiation, marriage, and death reflect deeply significant transitions in human modes of being that have not entirely vanished from the cultural experiences of modern humans. Though we desacralized the world and secularized our modes of thought many vestiges, camouflages, and substitutes retain a bit of the heritage from whence they originated. The "dream factory" of cinema, for example, "takes over and employs countless mythical motifs--the fight between hero and monster, initiatory combats and ordeals, paradigmatic figures and images (the maiden, the hero, the paradisal landscape, hell, and so on). Even reading includes a mythological function, not only because it replaces the recitation of myths in archaic societies and the oral literature that still lives in the rural communities of Europe, but particularly because, through reading, the modern man succeeds in obtaining an 'escape from time' comparable to the 'emergence from time' effected by myths (p205)." Other examples are found in intellectual movements such as Existentialism, Marxism, and psychoanalysis.
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Finally, theologians talk about Homo religiosus, the religious humanoid, which aims to be spiritual and to act in a meaningful way. Homo sapiens is at her best when involved in a spiritual enterprise. Many scientists think the metaphor of Homo religiosus unscientific and irrelevant. But history, cross-cultural studies, and anthropological paleontology indicate that with the rise of Homo sapiens there have been no groups or societies that did not have a religion and a story of their origin that would place them into creation and in a special and unique spot.
However, religion seems to be rooted into our system even deeper than we think. Our fellow primates sometimes have their own ritualistic behaviors. Jane Goodall, the eminent and first female primate expert, has a unique way of looking at our closest relatives. Unlike many of her contemporaries, she embraces similarities between them and us. I once heard her talk about a rain dance in a chimp tribe in which male chimps perform a dancelike ritual before a thunderstorm. I don't know if I would go as far as she does and call that behavior spiritual. But I certainly do agree with her findings, which seem to suggest that the phenomenon of ritualistic behavior has been in our primate species for a long time.
The concept of Homo religiosus is also supported by brain studies. Neurologists have discovered that a special part of the brain is connected to religious experiences. When people pray, this part of the brain is particularly active and if, in turn, the neurons in this part are artificially stimulated, the subject reports a religious experience. Other researchers have discovered brain changes that occur whenever meditations and prayers are performed. These brain changes helped the subjects to function better; they were relieved from a feeling of stress and could concentrate better.
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LECTURE TWO: Homo religiosus: “WHAT IS ‘RELIGIOUS-NESS’” AND RELIGIOUS CONSCIOUSNESS, AS FUNCTIONS OF ORIENTATION
But when we say that God [underscore mine] is the object of religious experience, we must realize that “God” is frequently an extremely indefinite concept which does not completely coincide with what we ourselves usually understand by it. Religious experience, in other terms, is concerned with a “Somewhat”. But this assertion often means no more than that this “Somewhat” is merely a vague “something”; and in order that man may be able to make more significant statements about this “Somewhat”, it must force itself upon him, must oppose itself to him as being Something Other [underscore mine]. Thus, the first affirmation we can make about the Object of Religion is that it is a “highly exceptional and extremely impressive “Other” [underscore mine]. Subjectively, again, the initial state of man’s mind is amazement; and as Soderblom has remarked, this is true not only for philosophy but equally for religion. As yet, it must further be observed, we are in no way concerned with the supernatural or the transcendent: we can speak of “God” in merely a figurative sense; but there arises and persists an experience which connects or unites itself to the “Other” that thus obtrudes. Theory, and even the slightest degree of generalization, are still far remote; man remains quite content with the purely practical recognition that this Object is a departure from all that is usual and familiar; and this again is the consequence of the Power [underscore mine] it generates. The most primitive belief, then, is absolutely empirical; as regards primitive religious experience, therefore, and even a large proportion of that of antiquity, we must in this respect accustom ourselves to interpret the supernatural element in the conception of God by the simple notion of an “Other”, of something foreign and highly unusual, and at the same time the consciousness of absolute dependence, so well known to ourselves, by a indefinite and generalized feeling of remoteness .
(Van der Leeuw, Gerardus. Religion in Essence and Manifestation, Tr. by J.E. Turner. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1986, 23-24.)
Despite its importance for an understanding of the religious phenomenon, we shall not here discuss the problem of “hominization.” It is sufficient to recall that the vertical posture already marks a transcending of the condition typical of the primates. Uprightness cannot be maintained except in a state of wakefulness. It is because of man’s vertical posture that space is organized in a structure inaccessible to the prehominians: in four horizontal directions radiating from an “up”-“down” central axis. In other words, space can be organized around the human body as extending forward, backward, to right, to left, upward, and downward. It is from this original and originating experience—feeling oneself “thrown” into the middle of an apparently limitless, unknown, and threatening extensioin—that the different methods of orientatio [underscore mine] are developed; for it is impossible to survive for any length of time in the vertigo brought on by disorientation. This experience of space oriented around a “center” explains the importance of the paradigmatic divisions and distributions of territories, agglomerations, and habitations and their cosmological symbolism…
(Eliade, Mircea. A History of Religious Ideas: Vol. I From the Stone Age to the Eleusinian Mysteries. Tr. by Willard R. Trask. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1978. 3.)
Returning to the fundamental theme of the “What” of religious studies as such, “World Religions” as a specific subset of religious studies, and more specifically, returning to the “What is ‘religious-ness’?” formula as a catalyst or re-agent for propelling us forward through this line of inquiry/examination, we need to attempt to make some substantive assertions about the data set, the subject matter, for examination in this course. Essentially, what IS “religious-ness,” as such, that we can call this or that specific phenomenon (e.g. this or that behavior—prayer or meditation; this or that rite/ritual or ceremony—the Native American sweat-lodge ceremony or the Judaic bat mitzvah; this or that oral story—the African Traditional Dogon Creation Story or the koans of Zen or Ch’an Buddhism; this or that written text—the Analects of Confucius or the Muslim/Islamicate Q’uran; this or that person—a pious Methodist or devoted wiccan) “religious”? A substantive answer to this fundamental more philosophical question will provide us with a classificatory or taxonomical framework universally descriptive of all historical, contemporary, and yet-to-be manifested phenomena that are categorizable as “religious.” An attempt at such a substantive answer is very ambitious and fraught with challenges; however, a substantive assertion is essential for grasping the scope of that which is covered in a more general fashion through this more survey-format course or that which is covered more specifically in any line of inquiry identifiable as a function of “religious studies.”
Again, even in contemplating the “What” of religious studies—the “What is ‘Religious-ness’” puzzle or conundrum—one must be perpetually wary of the reductive or reductionistic tendency. Thus, as in any specific application of the scientific method, once one makes a hypothesis, one must rigorously try to demonstrate exceptions to the hypothesis in order to re-shape the scope of the hypothesis in the service of rendering the hypothesis universally and accurately descriptive of all that the hypothesis purports to describe.
In addressing the “What” of religious studies puzzle/conundrum, it is most useful to follow the cairns or trail markers of those who have embarked upon this line of inquiry before. Three of the more historically recent or proximate “trail blazers” from the phenomenological school of religious studies are the German theologian and comparative religions scholar Rudolf Otto, the Dutch theologian and comparative religions scholar Gerardus van der Leeuw (cited above), and the Romanian-born comparative religions scholar Mircea Eliade (also cited above). It is from some of the seminal assertions made by these scholars that we can begin to approximate a substantive response to the fundamental “What is ‘religious-ness’…question. What one must conclude from the phenomenological approach to answering the “What is ‘religious-ness’…” puzzle is that all phenomena that are categorizable or classifiable as “religious” must in some manner be functions of Homo sapiens being primarily oriented by, through, and towards a Somewhat (in van der Leeuw’s terms or parlance), a Something Other (again, in van der Leeuw’s approximations), the numinous (a term derived from the Latin numen, meaning “God” or “Divinity,” implemented by Rudolf Otto to connote that which is “Wholly Other”), or an extra-ordinary eruption of power (dunamis, in Greek, from which the English word “dynamic” and “dynamism” are derived, or kratos in Greek, also connoting power) into the empirical or observable field of human consciousness. Therefore, anything that is classifiable as “religious” (whether in history or in the contemporary world) must be a function of a kind of intentional orientation by, through, and towards a Somewhat, a Something Other, the numinous, or an extra-ordinary eruption of power into the empirical world—the “here and now” field—of Homo sapiens (remember Michael Novak’s assertion that the word “religion” comes from the Latin “Re-ligio,” connoting “to tie, fasten, or bind”—being oriented is essentially being tied to or bound to some axis or center that provides balance). That which is religious is that which is in some primary or derivative way a function of this fundamental orientation—what Mircea Eliade calls a “method of orientatio” that renders our species not only classifiable as Homo sapiens (the “thinking or sapient hominid”) but also Homo religiosus (the “religious hominid”).
Otto, van der Leeuw, and Eliade, in turn, assert that any phenomenon classifiable as “religious” must be correlated with primary experiences of power: essentially the eruption of the power that is the Somewhat, the Something Other, or the numinous/Wholly Other into the empirical field or life-world of human being. Eliade classifies this kind of eruption of the Somewhat/Something Other into the empirical field, a kratophany (a Greek term meaning “the revelation or manifestation of power”). When the Somewhat/Something Other/numinous erupts into the empirical field of human consciousness, human being as Homo sapiens is transformed into Homo religiosus, that is, the hominid who is oriented by, through, and towards some more primary eruption of power into the “here and now” field… some kratophany.
When the Somewhat/Something Other/numinous erupts into the empirical field, not only is this an eruption of power but it is also simultaneously an incidence of the Holy (the English term holy is derivative from the German term Heil or Heilig, again connoting power that is extra-ordinary and Something Other or “Wholly Other”). Eliade asserts that a primary kratophany is not only a manifestation of the powerful in the empirical domain of human being but also simultaneously a manifestation of the holy: a hierophany in Eliade’s terminology or parlance (throughout his books and journal articles, Eliade refers to a hierophany/kratophany interface that is fundamental to any derivative phenomenon that is classifiable as “religious”). Thus, inherent in any phenomenon that is classifiable as “religious” is this fundamental quality of power-relatedness (in the “Introductory Overview” of their textbook, Lewis Hopfe and Mark R. Woodward refer to this kind of hypothesis concerning the “What is ‘religious-ness’” puzzle as indicative of an approach to religious studies classifiable as dynamism; however, I believe that the phenomenological assertions about the primary power-orientation that is religious-ness, espoused by Otto, van der Leeuw, and Eliade, are far more complex and descriptively accurate than the rather reductive dynamism designation implies—in calling the phenomenologists like Otto, van der Leeuw, and Eliade proponents of dynamism in their approach to religious studies, thus implying that this approach to religious studies is reductive, the critics themselves have become reductive!).
As acculturated to a significant degree in the phenomenological approach to religious studies, I tend to concur with the fundamental approximations of Otto, van der Leeuw, and Eliade: any phenomenon that is classifiable as “religious” must be at least be derivatively a function of some more primary orientation to a Somewhat/Something Other/numinous/wholly Other that erupts into the empirical field of Homo sapiens in what can be called the hierophany/kratophany interface. One of the most cited examples of this provenient hierophany/kratophany dynamic, generative of a whole historical and contemporary range of phenomena classifiable as “religious” (albeit a cited example recognizable primarily to those acculturated to some degree in the root gestalten of the Abrahamic religions: Judaism, Christianity, and Islam) is the sacred written or textual account of the figure Moses encountering the Wholly Other designated “Yahweh” or YHWH on Mt. Sinai or Horeb, which constitutes a primary, normative, framing element in the Hebrew and Judeo-Christian Bibles. The Book of Exodus from The Jerusalem Bible (a particular English translation of the Judeo-Christian Bible or canonical/authoritative sacred text), relays the account of Moses’ hierophanic/kratophanic experience as follows:
Moses was looking after the flock of Jethro, his father-in-law, priest of Midian. He led his flock to the far side of the wilderness and came to Horeb, the mountain of God. There the angel of Yahweh appeared to him in the shape of a flame of fire, coming from the middle of a bush. Moses looked; there was a bush blazing but it was not being burned up. ‘I must go and look at this strange sight,’ Moses said ‘and see why the bush is not burned.’ Now Yahweh saw him go forward to look, and God called to him from the middle of the bush. ‘Moses, Moses!’ he said. ‘Here I am’ he answered. ‘Come no nearer’ he said. ‘Take off your shoes, for the place on which you stand is holy ground. I am the God of our father,’ he said ‘the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac and the God of Jacob.’ At this Moses covered his face, afraid to look at God. (Exodus 3:1-6)
Through the text, one can deduce the fundamental hierophany/kratophany formula alluded to by Otto and van der Leeuw and directly identified by Eliade. This text is but one specific manifestation or example of an isomorphic pattern evidenced in an expansive range of phenomena (historical as well as contemporary) that are classifiable as “religious.” Again, in some primary or derivative fashion, that which is classifiable as “religious” entails that which is a function of a fundamental orientation to—a being bound to and paying attention to—a Somewhat/Something Other/numinous/wholly Other. Thus, this isomorphic pattern (a pattern of similarity evidenced in a range of apparently different or disparate phenomena) is universally descriptive of all that is classifiable or categorizable as “religious.”
In his classic phenomenological study called The Idea of the Holy: An Inquiry into the Non-Rational Factor in the Idea of the Divine and Its Relation to the Rational, published first in 1928, Rudolf Otto introduces the idea of the numinous as a term connoting that which is “Wholly Other” or holy. Moreover, Otto explores the domain of the human experience of this numinous or “Wholly Other”—the experience that renders Homo sapiens also classifiable as Homo religiosus. Otto indicates that when Homo sapiens understands herself/himself as Homo religiosus, through some kind of primary or derivative experience of the numinous or the “Wholly Other,” Homo sapiens becomes religiously conscious or exhibits a kind of consciousness that must be called “religious.” Otto asserts that the experience of the numinous, the “Wholly Other,” the holy, is an experience of mystery (mysterium in Latin): a mystery that is tremendous, fascinating, majestic, and evocative of a religious fear (all these adjectives are used by Otto in their more Latin, cognate senses). The classificatory term “religious,” then, as a term connoting orientation that is a function of a primary or derivative experience of the numinous/holy, must include human agency: a religious consciousness on the part of Homo religiosus. Any phenomenon that is classifiable as “religious” must entail some human response to a primary or derivative experience of the Somewhat/Something Other/the numinous/the wholly Other”/the holy for human beings. That which is religious is that which in some primary or secondary way entails human agency or response: orientation or orientatio is, after all, a human response…a human consciousness…
The “binding” and “paying attention to” concepts of orientation (traceable through an etymological or word-origin examination of the term “religion”) become recurrently paramount or crucial in prehending (grasping) the psychological—the non-rational and rational—content and the actual behavioral dynamics indicative of religious “consciousness”: in his classic book/monograph called The Sacred and the Profane: The Nature of Religion (Tr. by Willard R. Trask. Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, Publishers, 1959), Mircea Eliade stresses the dynamic centrality of orientation in terms of religious “consciousness,” stating, “…for nothing can begin, nothing can be done, without previous orientation—and any orientation implies acquiring a fixed point. It is for this reason that religious man has always sought to fix his abode at the ‘center of the world’” (22). Remember, also, that Eliade stresses that Homo sapiental consciousness itself is most primarily and originarily a function of orientation around the axes of bipedal uprightness in the world: again, Eliade states in A History of Religious Ideas,Vol. I… that, “It is from this original and originating experience—feeling oneself ‘thrown’ into the middle of an apparently limitless, unknown, and threatening extension—that the different methods of orientation are developed; for it is impossible to survive for any length of time in the vertigo brought on by disorientation” (3). That which is classifiable as “religious” or religious “consciousness” itself begins and is sustained through binding, intentional orientation; however, a most crucial question emerges when we grasp the dynamic model or thought paradigm of orientation as our crux in this line of inquiry called “religious studies” or “World Religions”—orientation by, through, and towards WHAT!?
So far, we have encountered the conveniently amorphous terms like “Somewhat,” “Something Other,” “the numinous,” “the “wholly Other,” or “the holy,” to provide the reference points in relation to the “religion as orientation” assertion; however, we are now at another crossroads of sorts in addressing the “What is ‘religious-ness’” puzzle, which demands that we trace and isolate a kind of reference point for the intentional, binding orientation designated “religious consciousness”—in a sense, that which is classifiable as “religious” represents primarily or derivatively an orientation by, through, and towards WHAT!? According to van der Leeuw, this is a question concerning the Object of religion or religiosity.
As a learning community rooted firmly in a Western context—that is, a context shaped by the history of Western ideas—we must acknowledge that Judeo-Christian gestalten and their derivative classificatory schemas and terms have informed our own sensibilities either latently or directly. Thus, we are prone to evoke the name or word “God”—the at once English and Judeo-Christian-related term for the Somewhat/Something Other/numinous/wholly Other/holy. However, with a modicum or degree of introspection, we realize that the term “God” is much too imprecise, has much too specialized of a linguistic, semantic, and cultural pedigree, to be a universally descriptive term for that connoted by the more universal terms, such as “Somewhat” “Something Other”… “numinous”… “Holy”… The word “God” is descriptive and transformationally powerful in its utterance within the Judeo-Christian cultus or even in a world shaped by the Western intellectual tradition; however, the word is not the most descriptively encompassing, most generalizable, most universal term for that which Homo religiosus has oriented itself by, through, and towards both throughout history and in the contemporary world. As Van der Leeuw asserts (as memorialized in the cited material at the beginning of this lecture), “But when we say that God is the object of religious experience, we must realize that “God” is frequently an extremely indefinite concept which does not completely coincide with what we ourselves usually understand it.” The word “God” bears an entire genealogy or “archaeological” matrix of subtexts and/or nuances, traceable along sometimes visible, sometimes invisible or abandoned, lineages of usage, in multivalent cultural contexts (the term “God” is akin to the Islamic-Arabic “Allah”, the Ancient Semitic “El,” the Native American-Algonquian “Manitou”); therefore, for our more trans-historical, trans-cultural religious studies agenda, we need to isolate a more significantly and conceptually encompassing term to designate and describe, in a focused manner, the sacred, the holy—the orienting axis.
Van der Leeuw, in his own trans-historical, trans-cultural agenda, attempts to isolate a more broadly universal, more encompassing designation, which most inclusively encapsulates and re-presents all the essential qualities and attributes of the Somewhat/Something Other/numinous/wholly Other/holy, as evidenced in the entire range of historical and contemporary phenomena classifiable as “religious”: the essential term mana (a term of Melanesian/Oceanic—Southwest Pacific—cultural derivation). For van der Leeuw, the term Mana is the most generalizable, most underivative (that is, not further reducible to any more primary category), most universally descriptive, most essential term and correlated notion for re-presenting in language that which is implied in the more general terms “Somewhat,” “Something Other”… In Religion in Essence and Manifestation, van der Leeuw asserts that the term Mana is a “Melanesian name for the Infinite,” which connotes, “Influence, Strength, Fame, Majesty, Intelligence, Authority, Deity, Capability, extraordinary Power: whatever is successful, strong, plenteous: to reverence, be capable, to adore and to prophesy” (24). Therefore, the idea of Mana becomes a most adequate catch-all category for Van der Leeuw in terms of isolating a “common denominator” in all the historical and contemporary modes of orientation and their correlate phenomena classifiable as “religious.” Beyond the variety of phenomena classifiable as “religious” is mana; beyond all human behaviors and practices that are classifiable as “religious” is mana; beyond the names—the onomastics—of religious signification (the English word “God” with its roots in Old Teutonic; the Semitic “El”; the Native American-Algonquian “Manitou”) is mana. Therefore, when one understands that all which is classifiable as religious is a function of some primary or derivative orientation by, through, and towards a Somewhat/Something Other/numinous/wholly Other/holy, according to van der Leeuw, one can concretize or focus more tangibly the more abstract terms for the “object” of orientation through the term “mana”: for van der Leeuw, this is the essential answer to the “orientation towards what?” puzzle, mentioned above. As Van der Leeuw asserts, “Power is authenticated (or verified) empirically: in all cases whenever anything unusual or great, effective or successful is manifested, people speak of mana” (25). For van der Leeuw, then, all that is classifiable as religious—every interior psychological/spiritual orientation and every exteriorized “product” or expression of the interior psychological/spiritual orientation—involves some kind of primary or derivative interface with mana.
In Van der Leeuw’s understanding of the “What is ‘religious-ness’” puzzle, the origins, legacy, and tenacious persistence of religious consciousness, experience, and expression/re-presentation/signification, sustained by Homo religiosus, can be accurately described as entailing apprehensions of (to “apprehend” means “to grasp”) and responses to mana. Homo religiosus (again, the hominid that is religious) is born of and sustained through the attitudes and posturings of amazement at, fear of, or awe towards the presence of mana:
To this Power, in conclusion, man’s reaction is amazement (scheu), and in some extreme cases, fear. Marett employs the fine terms “awe”; and this attitude is characterized by Power being regarded, not indeed as supernatural, but as extraordinary, or some markedly unusual type, while objects and persons endowed with this potency, have the essential nature of their own which we will call “sacred” (van der Leeuw 28).
The sacred and correlate consciousness/notion of the sacred, then, originate and emerge when persons become oriented by, through, and towards the Somewhat/Something Other/numinous/wholly Other/holy—describable robustly through the term “mana”—and, thus, become conscious of all aspects of their interior psychological/spiritual and exterior/experiential life-worlds as governed by the religious orientation. Again, every phenomenon that can be classified as “religious” somehow recapitulates or resonates the essential mana-oriented-ness: an oriented-ness that essentially defines the life-worlds of Homo religiosus in terms of “sacred” or, as in some cases, “not sacred” (Eliade uses the term “profane”) domains.
The Somewhat/Something Other/numinous/wholly Other/holy, graspable most accurately through the term and correlate notion of mana, for van der Leeuw, is the most essential, most fundamental, most underivative axis around which Homo religosus has oriented herself/himself. Van der Leeuw maintains that mana is primarily an undifferentiated “field”: a unitary presence, which when it erupts in localization (in terms of the space field), in temporalization (in terms of the time field), or is differentiated into the empirical or observable field, becomes and sustains as the axis or center point orienting both the cosmological sense in Homo religious (the experienced, perceived, and rationalized order of the world that becomes measurable through the exteriorized-externalized “product” of Homo religiosus) and the correlate internal psychology (the experienced, perceived, and rationalized interior “world” or microcosm of the human psyche that participates in the larger cosmology). Therefore, Van der Leeuw postulates that at its most essential level or base, every phenomenon that is classifiable as “religious”—that is the externally or exteriorily quantifiable expression of more fundamental interior orientation—affirms a monotheistic, or more appropriately, monistic (unitary)—essence. The localizations of mana—the sacred world order or orientation (cosmology), and even psychology (the microcosmic “world order” of the human mind) all originate, extend from, and persist through the unified and homogeneous essence of a vital “field”…mana.
Finally, then, as derivable from van der Leeuw’s normative assertions (assertions that have profound impact on and import for religious studies, but nevertheless, must not be hastily accepted as absolutely accurate without continual scrutiny and analysis), any phenomenon that can be classifiable as “religious”—any measurable or quantifiable historical or contemporary “product” of Homo religious—is the direct, differentiated localization or temporalization of the universal dynamic “field” of mana. Mana (a concretization of the more unspeakable or ineffable mysteries correlated with the abstract terms “Somewhat,” “Something Other,” “numinous,” “wholly Other,” “holy”) is the undifferentiated, homogeneous, universal “field” which Homo religiosus is always ultimately and intentionally oriented by, through, and towards. Therefore, all designations approximating the fullness of the essential Somewhat/Something Other/numinous/wholly Other/holy—the Chinese notion of the Tao or Way; the Egyptian principle Ma’at, connoting “mutual complimentarity”; the Judeo-Christian notion of Jesus the Christ as the logos or “Word of God”; all specific names of or designations for the numinous—God, Manitou, El, Allah, Olorun, Atman and Brahman, bhutatathata; all religious “products,” re-presentations, significations, or encodings (words, inscriptions, gestures, icons, religious cosmologies, religious psychologies, art, and architectures); all attitudes of the sacred or sacramental…are functions of the undifferentiated, unitary “field” that can best be uttered or spoken through the term Mana. Therefore, based upon this more phenomenological approach to resolving the “What is ‘religious-ness’” puzzle (an approach that is de facto scientific in that it always demands auto-correction in the service of deriving more accurately descriptive hypotheses), the solution to the puzzle is a complex, yet simple, one: every phenomenon that is classifiable as “religious” is in some primary or derivative way a function of some fundamental orientation by, through, and toward a Somewhat/Something Other/numinous/ wholly Other/holy, identifiable through the more specialized term mana, which orders through consecration all aspects of the experienced, perceived, and rationalized world for Homo religiosus: a fundamental orientation that itself is always a function of some primary or derivative hierophany/kratophany experience intrinsic to or inherent in religious consciousness as such.
_______________________________________________
HOMO CREDENS
Christian Smith (Moral, Believing Animals), a sociologist at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
"Believing Animals" is the title of the author's second chapter. Herein, he establishes that since human beings can not access any absolute truth, we must be believing animals. Without an absolute reference point or perspective, we would be lost and therefore must believe in a world view in order to interpret, act, and live. Referring to mankind as Homo credens, Smith says, "We are all necessarily trusting, believing animals, creatures who must and do place our faith in beliefs that cannot themselves be verified except by means established by the beliefs themselves (Smith's italics). Smith quotes Augustine of Hippo: "I believe that I may understand."
The Gypsy Scholar's Loyal Opposition Argument against the "Spiritual Politics" Camp
“It is better to be an honest atheist than a religious hypocrite.” –Swami Vivekananda
It
is my argument that the current project of “injecting spirituality into
[left] politics” is, as opposed to its adherent’s claims, fraught with
problems that need to be addressed. However, no one yet has, as far as
I can make out, really started a dialogue about this. So let me kick it
off with these objections—not from the side of the traditional left in
this country, but, since I consider myself a spiritually inclined, from
the side of what could be called the Loyal Opposition.
Many of
the problems that complicate a smooth and simple transition from the
old politics bereft of spiritual values to the “new politics” seem to
me to stem from the tendency of (lets call them) “spiritual activists”
(who throw their hats into the socio-political ring and sound off on
current affairs) to assume, just because one is an expert (an adept) in
things spiritual (and may even claim “enlightenment” or a degree of it)
that one is, ipso facto, eminently qualified for the position
of commentator or consultant on world events; their opinion carrying
more weight presumably because of their spiritual position. Here I’m
not saying that representative ”new-age” persons shouldn’t have an
opinion and speak out—certainly everyone has that right (and maybe
obligation). My criticism has to do with the tacit assumption that
their socio-political observations should be readily accepted just
because they carry the mantle of holiness or esoteric spiritual
knowledge. No, I’m not saying that political knowledge can’t follow
spiritual knowledge; I’m saying that it doesn’t necessarily follow. In other words, what I’m suggesting is that just
because one is spiritual, perhaps even so-called “enlightened,” doesn’t
by that fact mean that they have some secret inside track on things
political. Indeed, as has been the case too many times in modern
history, these spiritual (or religious) people are hopelessly naïve,
and sometimes dangerously so. In my opinion, I don’t care how
spiritual and/or enlightened you are, if you are factually un- or mis-
or disinformed by the corporate news media, you are in no position to
tell the rest of us how it is in the world of politics.
There
have been a series of books written to chart the course of what some
have called “the new politics,” which means the politics based on
religious or spiritual values. Most notably, Rabbi Michael Lerner’s The Politics of Meaning and Left Hand of God: Healing America's Political and Spiritual Crisis and Reverand Jim Wallis’ The Soul of Politics: Beyond the Religious Right and Secular Left.
I have critiqued these books at length on my radio program, and will
only mention a few of the questions raised. Addressing Lerner’s
argument, one wants to ask: Since when did the “Religious Left” get to
pretend that “meaning” is the hegemonic domain of organized religion?
How does it manage to ignore, first of all, Luther's theological
revolution, which not only resulted in critical Biblical exegesis, but
eventually, because of its “individualizing” tendencies, resulted in
continental philosophical modernism (Kant) and in religious and
philosophical existentialism (Kierkegaard), which held that “meaning”
is something we humans must create (the burden of our existential
freedom)? Furthermore, this begs another question: Since when does the
“Religious Left” get to equate “meaning” with organized religion—and
only of Western, monotheistic, patriarchal religion at that? What about
non-Western, non-theistic religion? What about pantheistic and
postmodern panentheistic religion? Or what about neo-archaic shamanic
religion, neo-goddess, and neo-pagan religion? And, for that mater,
what about mystico-poetic individual mythologies, or syncretic personal
belief systems? Therefore, if the “Religious Left” now, in desperate
reaction to the success of the Religious/Christian Right, hurries to
the aid of organized religion’s (predominately Judeo-Christian in this
country) monopoly on “meaning” in an effort to inject moral/spiritual
values into politics, then what does this do to the already breached
wall of the separation of church and state? What is the guarantee that
the “Religious Left,” rushing headlong into the “moral values” game,
will not repeat, in their own way, the theological subversions of our
secular order already committed by the “Religious Right”? Where does
religious dogma end and political ideology begin? Of course all this
talk of the traditional Left being bereft of “spiritual values,” or (as
Prof. George Lakoff has charged the traditional Left after the last two
lost presidential elections) that it doesn’t have, like the Right,
religious values enough to know how to win over the American
electorate—all this is highly debatable. For instance, one could argue,
contra Lakoff, that the traditional Left has indeed communicated “moral
values” in it’s anti-war and social justice stance. Of course, the
problem unaddressed in all this new talk of “injecting spirituality
into politics” is that the traditional paradigm of Western religion,
with its ontological separation of sacred vs. secular (notice Wallis’
troubling call to move “beyond the secular”) categorically denies any
“spirituality” to the humanistic or atheist ethos. (In case there are those who can't understand how I could attribute any "spiritual" dimension to atheism, I will give the case of the Romantic poet Shelley as a prime example. He writes a tract entitled "The Necessity of Atheism," yet his Neo-Platonic metapyshics clearly recognizes a spiritual world.) Again, I’m not
arguing against the need to have “a more spiritual politics” per se, but to the problems involved in such a project, especially in a country that has, ever since the Puritans landed, always had a theocratic fantasy
in its political unconscious; and in a modern state that has eroded the
wall of separation of church and state and had a history of repression
against the rights of atheists or non-believers.
Thus, among
other things, I’m cautioning that we not invert the true reality of
exactly who has been the victim and who has been the oppressor. Van
Jones, President of the Oakland-based Ella Baker Center for Human
Rights, is a case in point. Recently, on a KPFA radio broadcast, Jones
took to task what he called “secular fundamentalists” of the Left, who
put down religion. Of course, being a professed Christian, we know that
he’s echoing the complaint of the Christian Right, who label any
criticism of the history and practice of so-called Christianity as
“Christian bashing.” Admittedly, there are those few who are as
ideologically dogmatic about their irreligion as the religious
fundamentalists. However, this is an exception to the rule. Jones’
tortured rhetoric misuses the terms of the debate between the
religionists/theists and the rationalists/atheists. What is
particularly disturbing about this is that we now have to hear a
left-wing activist mindlessly mimic the Orwellian backlash rhetoric of
the Christian Right. For shame! This kind of irresponsible assertion
only makes sense if you ignore the lager context of the history of
religion in the West and its opponents. Without this historical and
social context, “secular fundamentalists” turns reality on its head. In
other words, the victims of the conspiracy of church-state, by some
rhetorical slight of hand, are turned into the oppressors.
To
return to the issue of what could be called new-age politics, this turn
to the political by new-age masters, holy men, spiritual teachers and
practitioners, and the like (like the “socially engaged Buddhists”) is
justified by the perceived need to “bring spiritual values into the
political arena.” While this is undoubtedly a worthy and much-needed
cause to rally behind (given the gulf that has existed between the
mystics and the politicos), my problem is the assumption that there is
a one-to-one, perfect translation of principles from the spiritual
world to the socio-political. One can detect considerable distortion as
their vision passes over from one realm to the other. This translation
from spiritual to socio-political knowledge is highly problematic, a
fact that seems lost on many who desire to “bring spiritual values in
to the political arena” and create “a new politics.” The problem is
twofold: (1) The “new-age” spiritual teacher or religious
representative as political theorist and commentator is, except for a
precious few (e.g. Thom Hartmann), as uniformed (especially on what’s
behind current events and how they play out) as the average American
citizen (sometimes a little more informed, but oftentimes less because
the preoccupation with interior world has caused him or her to ignore
goings on in the socio-political world). (2) This means that she or he
has little knowledge of the real history of their country, nor, more
importantly, do they have a rigorous political analysis of how the
power structure and its economic system really operates. Thus, when
commenting on the pervasive and nagging problems of the world, they
reduce it to a simple moral problem, the answer to such being a human
virtue; thus, the problem of warfare is not enough “love,” or the
problem of the runaway accumulation of wealth in the elite class is due
to “greed,” and so on and so forth. This is not a political analysis,
since it leaves the vital categories of class, race, and power out of
the equation.
Therefore, while “new-age” representatives are
undeniably privy to special knowledge—even wisdom— concerning the
interior, spiritual world, this is seriously compromised and even
obfuscated by plain socio-political ignorance, even though they are
sincere and well-meaning. As one critic of the various aspects of the
new-age movement has written: “The personal subsumes the political,
with dire consequences for both politics and personality development.”
One
can witness, not only in the observations of “new-age” swamis, lamas,
masters, teachers, theologians, priests, rabbis, etc. but also in
consciousness researchers, scholars of religion and philosophy, and
writers of popular metaphysics, the repeated tendency to seriously
misread and misinterpret national and world affairs (except, of course,
in the most obvious political misdeeds, like the current U.S. invasion
of a sovereign foreign country). This fundamental error has a
complicated source, but simply put it seems to me to have to do with
superficial information on current events, the moral reductionism
already alluded to, plus the generalizing application of spiritual
principles to social-political contexts where they don’t apply on a
one-to-one basis. Given the uninformed activism of many spiritual
seekers (like Marianne Williamson), the rest of us may well wonder if
the world is any better off now that new-age quietists have become so
vocally “political” than when (in pre-1990) they prided themselves on
being “apolitical.” (In the mid-80s, I was told, during a bookshop
lecture Q & A, by representatives of Williamson’s crypto-Christian Course In Miracles
group that getting involved with politics is “a diversion from the path
to God.” Yet, Williamson has lately come to Santa Cruz to
sanctimoniously chastise us for our past; i.e., being “too stoned” to
participate in political change! It seems that the hope for social
change in new-age circles relies on moving from know-nothing
spirituality to know-nothing politics.) I realize that my criticism may
sound rather vague without some substantiation, so I will offer a few
specific examples of representatives from each group of new-age
representatives, both domestic and from the East.
(1) Witness,
for instance, the sad spectacle of His Holiness, the Dalai Lama, who
deserves our respect and veneration, making unaware anti-gay comments
in a speech of some years ago in San Francisco and having to be
“enlightened” by the Act-Up activists about the nature of
discrimination against their sexual preference. (2) Admittedly, this
socio-political ignorance is improving from a decade ago, but witness
how easily Rabbi Michael Lerner’s The Politics of Meaning,
which is also designed to insert spiritual values in to the political
arena, was co-opted by the Clinton administration. (3) Take, for
instance, how Marianne Williamson’s book on America (Healing the Soul of America: Reclaiming Our Voices as Spiritual Citizens) so poorly measures up in its socio-political analysis with a comparable book from a leftist analysis; Toward An American Revolution by
Jerry Fresia. (4) Take, for instance, the Buddhist scholar/monk Robert
Thurman, who has done such a great service to our understanding of
Tibetan Buddhism for our time. Yet Thurman himself has been criticized
by another prominent scholar of South Asian religions, Donald Lopez,
for his “ahistorical” view of Tibet in particular and a socially naive
“new-age” view in general, which suppresses Tibet’s sometimes violent
history and romanticizes the country. (5) Take, for instance, the carte blanche
promotion of “human kindness” as a universal panacea by many new-age
thinkers. I have long questioned this when it comes down to the wider
circle of political relations beyond the personal ones. But it wasn’t
until none other than the great Prof. of religion, Huston Smith,
questioned this that I could hope for a sympathetic ear in the new-age
community: “Similarly today, social ethics having emerged as a new
human responsibility, if religion defaults on this responsibility it
will lose the relevance it has thus far enjoyed. Personal kindness is
no longer enough. Institutions affect human well-being no less than do
interpersonal; relationships. This being so, enlightened compassion
calls for social responsibility as much as for face-to-face good will.
. . . We now acknowledge our partial responsibility for them [social
institutions]. We have reached the point in history where we see that
to be indifferent to social institutions is to be indifferent to human
life.” Yes, the atheist politicos— “those dirty little leftists”—can
justifiably be faulted for a lack of higher spiritual values and
greater vision, but at least they have a firm grasp of socio-political
dynamics and, therefore, have a much better track record at
interpreting world events in their proper perspective. (6) A spokesman
for Socially Engaged Buddhists claimed on radio recently that the
activist community were wrong in thinking that there are any enemies
“out there;” that according to the Buddhist view “all our enemies are
in our heads.” This is, at best, only a half-truth. Buddhist writer
Diana Macy: “This is new-age solipsism!” (7) And, finally, the tendency
for spiritual activists (primarily the socially engaged Buddhists) to
preach tolerance and compassion to the victims of political and social
injustice. (Case in point: Mother Tersea, that sacred cow of many
new-agers, going to India after the toxic gas release from the Union
Carbide plant in Bhopal, which killed approximately 3,800 people and
several thousand suffering permanent and partial disabilities. She
exhorted them to be patient and forgive the corporation.) William
Blake—a spiritual activist if there ever was one— back in the 19th
century lambasted those to preach such: “It is an easy thing to preach
patience to the afflicted / But it is not so with me.”
Re-Vision Radio's Communicative Rationality: “the unforced force of the better argument”
Habermas: Undistorted Communication & Communicative Rationality
Jurgen
Habermas (German philosopher and sociologist in the tradition of
critical theory and American pragmatism), building on Marcuse's work in
Marxist social theory, identifies one of three fundamental human
interests (labor, communication, emancipation) as a deep-seated desire
to communicate with other humans; dialogic communication, whereby we
become selves through our interactions with other selves. Moreover,
according to Habermas, in order for the human race to survive we need
all three primary interests, and thus he believes that we need to be
able to communicate with one another more freely. This “undistorted communication”
moves us in the direction of emancipation and, conversely, what keeps
us from emancipation, according to Habermas, is what he calls “distorted communication,” which is in Marxist terminology, ideology
(i. e., ruling ideas that reflect the interests of the ruling classes).
“Undistorted communication” must meet the five conditions that Habermas
puts forward: (1) symmetry condition, (2) sincerity condition, (3)
ideal speech condition, (4) sincere condition, and (5) moral condition.
As opposed to the current situation of public discourse, whereby
arguments are defined and judged, a priori, according to the dictates
of the dominant ideology (of both state and church), “undistorted
communication” would make a free society possible in which the only
force a free individual must recognize is “the unforced force of the better argument.”
(Cf. this ideal with Milton’s in 1644: “And though all the winds of
doctrine were let loose to play upon the earth, so Truth be in the
field, we do injuriously by licensing and prohibiting to misdoubt her
strength. Let her and Falsehood grapple; who ever knew Truth put to the
worse in a free and open encounter?” Areopagitica) In other
words, in an “ideal speech situation” all participatory arguments would
have equal access in the democratic marketplace of ideas and the best
argument would win, because in “undistorted communication” there can
only be equal participants in egalitarian dialogue. (This idea of
“communicative rationality” undistorted by power is itself inherently
revolutionary, and can be exemplified by the archetypal revolutionary,
Satan, in Milton’s Paradise Lost, who has experienced the full
effect of reason distorted by power: “What shall be right: fardest from
Him is best, / Whom reason hath equalled, force hath made supreme /
Above his equals.”) Habermas' social theory advances the goals of human
emancipation, while maintaining an inclusive universalist moral
framework. This framework rests on the argument called universal
pragmatics; that all speech acts have an inherent telos (Greek
word for "purpose" or "goal")—the goal of mutual understanding, and
that human beings possess the communicative competence to bring about
such understanding. (Habermas built the framework out of the speech-act
philosophy.) Therefore, Habermas' project for human emancipation holds
out hope that the self can be rescued from the one-sided development of
modernity through solidarity and communicative reason.
Here
Habermas was perhaps one of the last important defenders of
rationalism; the kind of non-instrumental (non-Cartesian) rationalism
that attempts to save the positive contributions of modernity
(beginning with the Enlightenment), while recognizing its distortions
and pathologies. It must be emphasized that this is a bold position to
take, given the 20th-century exposure of all that went wrong with
(instrumental) “reason,” leading to the greater devaluation of the
Enlightenment's faith “universal reason.” To try to defend “reason” in
any form in a postmodern intellectual milieu is a valiant project, but
Habermas does try to defend “reason” in a limited form by marking off a
sphere of “undistorted communication” that can serve as basis for what
he terms “communicative rationality.” (Communicative
rationality or communicative reason distinguishes itself from the
rationalist tradition by locating rationality in structures of
interpersonal linguistic communication rather than in the structure of
either the cosmos or the knowing subject.) This is, of course, very
problematic, nonetheless the trick Habermas is trying to pull off is
not to give up on “reason” but to disentangle it from its distorted and
debased forms and their consequent barbaric actions. In this attempt he
carries forward the traditions of Kant and the Enlightenment and of
democratic socialism through his emphasis on the potential for
transforming the world and arriving at a more humane, just, and
egalitarian society through the realization of the human potential for
reason, in part through discourse ethics. While Habermas concedes that
the Enlightenment is an "unfinished project," he argues it should be
corrected and complemented, not discarded. In this edgy position,
Habermas is definitely not only outside the traditional rationalist
camp, but also outside its opposite camp—the new-age one, which
attempts to solve the distortions of Enlightenment/scientific reason by
simply over-compensating at the other end of the spectrum; that is, by
throwing out reason altogether as a means of human emancipation. The
new-age movement, at least in its dominant 1980's ideology, would have
us scrap “reason” altogether. Thus, the person who is too “judgmental”
or “critical” (“left-brained,” is, ironically, unenlightened. However,
the excesses of hyper-rationality (or mechanical reason) not
withstanding, the Enlightenment legacy is not so easily escaped, even
by its new-age critics. Indeed, the Enlightenment is not so easily
shrugged off with a new-age heart. Even its Marxist social critics (of
“Western ideology”), like Horkheimer and Adorno, did not go so far as
to advocate junking it. The plain fact is that its critics—both
postmodern and new-age—are blind to their own historical situation; i.
e., the irony that they can take an anti-Enlightenment position
precisely because of the Enlightenment. (Where do they get their own
skepticism? How do they justify their opposition? Indeed, this revolt
against “reason” in the name of irrationality rests precisely on the
Enlightenment’s temperament for human equality and diversity, its ideal
of self-questioning and self-determination, its resistance to arbitrary
power.) To put it a little differently, they fail to adequately
appreciate the revolutionary change in world-view and values that the
Enlightenment represented; the overthrow of the authoritarian and
intellectually repressive Church hegemony of the Middle Ages. Failure
to appreciate the positive aspects of the Enlightenment towards human
development and emancipation by promoting the idea that it was a wrong
turn in human history, if carried out as a project to reverse the
claims of “reason” on our human destiny (as the new-agers would like),
would only usher in, because of the previous history (the hegemony of
the Church), what's waiting in the backstage of modernist history—fascism. This
is why Habermas is important. He believes that human beings can move
toward emancipation through genuine critical thinking and reasoned
argument (i. e., “communicative rationality”), provided the standard of
“undistorted communication” is met. Perhaps in a Californian milieu of
new-age sensibilities (which tend to discourage open, critical
discourse in favor of a new form of quietism and mystification), the
acerbic observation of 60’s cultural historian Todd Gitlin is relevant
here:
“We don't need resurrection [or enlightenment], we need sensible conversation.”
ARE THE CHRONICLES OF NARNIA CHRISTIAN BOOKS?
Clearly, C. S. Lewis was a Christian. Also, it is obvious that he intended The Chronicles of Narnia to reflect Christian themes and ideas. Despite this, he himself did not consider the books to be Christian per se. As some have already pointed out TheChronicles are not technically allegorical. In fact, Lewis himself, like his friend Tolkien, did not care for allegory. Having met at Oxford, Tolkien was perhaps his closest friend and colleague, although their relationship cooled later in their lives. They were both members of the informal literary discussion group known as the Inklings. It is apparent; however, that some did slip into his books. The most obvious example is Aslan who represents a Christlike figure. As already noted by others, this is not a strictly one to one relationship. I should note at this point that Lewis was an Anglican in mid 20th century Britain. He was not, by modern American standards, in any way a fundamentalist. His views were nuanced and scholarly, and today in America they would be seen as liberal (though in his time and place they were considered conservative). He did not believe in bullying people into Christianity but gently leading them to Christ through example. His intent then was to use the fairy tale as a didactic device to teach young people in particular the values he believed were Christian. Lewis had, in fact, been an atheist since his mother’s death and was brought back to Christianity by Tolkien, who was a Catholic and had for a long time been extremely bothered by what he perceived as Lewis's Anti-Catholicism. It is somewhat ironic then that he became a much more fervent promoter of Christianity than Tolkien and odder still that they would both write literature that greatly inspired a neo-pagan revival during the 1960s cultural revolution that would last until today. I return now to the question of whether The Chronicles of Narnia are, in fact, “Christian” books. In a word, no—neither by intent or allegory. But this is not the end of the story, for lurking in Lewis’s subconscious we find a passionate pagan that is revealed through a closer reading of the books. First, there is the obvious: he stuffed his fairy tale with characters from Greco-Roman mythology, and also from Celtic and Norse pre-Christian traditions. Deeper still, an animistic spirit thrives in The Chronicles as the trees, stars and rivers are revealed to be sentient beings. Other deities are referred to, from the river god who destroys a bridge that binds his waters, to the slumbering god of time as he lies in the underworld waiting to be released at the end of Narnia. Nor should we forget the strong feminine presence that shines through the patriarchal shackles of C. S. Lewis’s intellect, as represented by Lucy, Jill, and Polly. They are in most respects the moral center of the books and closest to Aslan. Furthermore, they easily overshadow the negative representations of women such as the White Witch, the Green Witch, and poor Susan, who seems to get a bum rap. When we get to The Magician’s Nephew and, especially, The Last Battle, we find the traces of Eastern religious doctrines, notably Hinduism and Buddhism. For example, the wood between the worlds has a remarkably Buddhist flavor. And in the world of Charn we get a sense of deep time that is strikingly Hindu. But it is in The Last Battle that the Hindu/Buddhist strain of thought leaps off the page in the form of the god Tash, who strongly resembles Shiva the Destroyer. Aslan himself points out to a prince of Calormen that though he worshipped Tash he was in fact a follower of Aslan all along. Perhaps in the same way as the god Krishna is an “avatara” of the supreme god Vishnu in the Hindu pantheon. In fact, it is interesting to note, given Aslan is the central character in the stories, that one of the early incarnations of Vishnu (“The Great Protector”) was the lion-headed god Narasimha. This is more than suggestive of the Hindu notion that the Creator and the Destroyer are ultimately different aspects of the same being, which is a function of Hindu monism, the highest level of polytheism. And, finally, in the New Narnia after the destruction of Old Narnia, reality is revealed as multi-dimensional. As Lewis himself describes it “like layers of an onion” or like a many faceted jewel that infinitely reflects itself. As the Narnians race “further up and further in,” they reach the Garden which contains yet another Narnia even further up and further in. This continues until they see laid out not just another Narnia but also beyond to our own world and another England further up and further in … whew … exhausting and exhilarating—and existentially Buddhist. I rest my case. In closing, yes there are Christian themes in The Chronicles of Narnia, but they are a pagan-influenced Christianity that reveals not just the hidden yearning of C. S. Lewis but, as the continuing popularity of the books attest to, a hidden longing in all of us for magic—the magical world-view of animism—and enlightenment; a chance to reach Nirvana and see the veil of the world pulled back for all of us to see the utmost realm, or, if you will, the Void which contains all realities within, i. e., not “Christian” in a sense that most Christians today would recognize or acknowledge.
