[Counter-point] "Going Beyond God"
Here is a link to a salon.com article titled "Going Beyond God". I felt the need to post this since my recent posts have given the impression I am anti-religion. I am not anti-religion. I distrust organized religion, but I do not hate the people who have faith or believe in those religions. Do I feel they are misguided? Yes. Do I feel they do not see the whole picture, or choose not to see the whole picture? Yes. Am I wrong? Probably.
I feel that somewhere the organized religions got in the way of the meaning of God/the spirit/nirvana/Tao/The Great Kleenex/Etc. Spirituality became too stratified in doctrine, dogma, procedure, pomp and ceremony, especially the Christian faith of which I am most familiar.
In this interview, Karen Armstrong makes many salient points to which I very much agree, here are some excerpts from the interview:
Well, explain that. What is religion?
Religion is a search for transcendence. But transcendence isn't necessarily sited in an external god, which can be a very unspiritual, unreligious concept. The sages were all extremely concerned with transcendence, with going beyond the self and discovering a realm, a reality, that could not be defined in words. Buddhists talk about nirvana in very much the same terms as monotheists describe God.
That's fascinating. So in Buddhism, which is nontheistic, the message or the experience of nirvana is the same as the Christian God?
The experience is the same. The trouble is that we define our God too closely. In my book "A History of God," I pointed out that the most eminent Jewish, Christian and Muslim theologians all said you couldn't think about God as a simple personality, an external being. It was better to say that God did not exist because our notion of existence was far too limited to apply to God.
You're saying these ancient sages really didn't care about big metaphysical systems. They didn't care about theology.
No, none of them did. And neither did Jesus. Jesus did not spend a great deal of time discoursing about the trinity or original sin or the incarnation, which have preoccupied later Christians. He went around doing good and being compassionate. In the Quran, metaphysical speculation is regarded as self-indulgent guesswork. And it makes people, the Quran says, quarrelsome and stupidly sectarian. You can't prove these things one way or the other, so why quarrel about it? The Taoists said this kind of speculation where people pompously hold forth about their opinions was egotism. And when you're faced with the ineffable and the indescribable, they would say it's belittling to cut it down to size. Sometimes, I think the way monotheists talk about God is unreligious.
Unreligious? Like talk about a personal God?
Yes, people very often talk about him as a kind of acquaintance, whom they can second-guess. People will say God loves that, God wills that, and God despises the other. And very often, the opinions of the deity are made to coincide exactly with those of the speaker.
Yet we certainly see a personal God in various sacred texts. People aren't just making that up.
No, but the great theologians in Judaism, Christianity and Islam say you begin with the idea of a god who is personal. But God transcends personality as God transcends every other human characteristic, such as gender. If we get stuck there, this is very immature. Very often people hear about God at about the same time as they're learning about Santa Claus. And their ideas about Santa Claus mature and change in time, but their idea of God remains infantile.
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I think these questions are tremendously important now because more and more people, especially those with a scientific bent, say we don't need religion anymore. Science has replaced religion. You know, religion used to explain all kinds of things about the world. But science for the most part does that now. And people who are not religious say they can be just as morally upright.
They can. I fully endorse that. I don't think you need to believe in an external god to obey the Golden Rule. In the Axial Age, when people started to concentrate too much on what they're transcending to -- that is, God -- and neglected what they're transcending from -- their greed, pompous egotism, cruelty -- then they lost the plot, religiously. That's why God is a difficult religious concept. I think God is often used by religious people to give egotism a sacred seal of divine approval, rather than to take you beyond the ego.
As for scientists, they can explain a tremendous amount. But they can't talk about meaning so much. If your child dies, or you witness a terrible natural catastrophe such as Hurricane Katrina, you want to have a scientific explanation of it. But that's not all human beings need. We are beings who fall very easily into despair because we're meaning-seeking creatures. And if things don't add up in some way, we can become crippled by our despondency.
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Well, what do you say to the scientists, especially the Darwinists -- Richard Dawkins would be the obvious case -- who are quite angry about religion? They say religion is the root of much evil in the world. Wars are fought and fueled by religion. And now that we're in the 21st century, they say it's time that science replace religion.
I don't think it will. In the scientific age, we've seen a massive religious revival everywhere but Europe. And some of these people -- not all, by any means -- seem to be secular fundamentalists. They have as bigoted a view of religion as some religious fundamentalists have of secularism. We have too much dogmatism at the moment. Take Richard Dawkins, for example. He did a couple of religious programs that I was fortunate enough to miss. It was a very, very one-sided view.
Well, he hates religion.
Yeah, this is not what the Buddha would call skillful. If you're consumed by hatred -- Freud was rather the same -- then this is souring your personality and clouding your vision. What you need to do is to look appraisingly and calmly on other traditions. Because when you hate religion, it's also very easy to hate the people who practice it.
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Because there are all kinds of inflammatory things that are said. For instance, many passages in both the Bible and the Quran exhort the faithful to kill the infidels. Sam Harris, in his book "The End of Faith," has seven very densely packed pages of nothing but quotations from the Quran with just this message. "God's curse be upon the infidels"; "slay them wherever you find them"; "fighting is obligatory for you, much as you dislike it." And Sam Harris' point is that the Muslim suicide bombings are not the aberration of Islam. They are the message of Islam.
Well, that's simply not true. He's taken parts of those texts and omitted their conclusions, which say fighting is hateful for you. You have to do it if you're attacked, as Mohammed was being attacked at the time when that verse was revealed. But forgiveness is better for you. Peace is better. But when we're living in a violent society, our religion becomes violent, too. Religion gets sucked in and becomes part of the problem. But to isolate these texts as though they expressed the whole of the tradition is very mischievous and dangerous at this time when we are in danger of polarizing people on both sides. And this kind of inflammatory talk, say about Islam, is convincing Muslims all over the world who are not extremists that the West is incurably Islamophobic and will never respect their traditions. I think it's irresponsible at this time.
I think this point needs to be emphasised:
Well, he [Richard Dawkins -ed] hates religion.
Yeah, this is not what the Buddha would call skillful. If you're consumed by hatred -- Freud was rather the same -- then this is souring your personality and clouding your vision. What you need to do is to look appraisingly and calmly on other traditions. Because when you hate religion, it's also very easy to hate the people who practice it.
So readers (if there are any) please never think that I am not without my own form of spirituality, and I apologize if I appear like I am selecting out those of faith for persecution. I am not, and I do not hate you for your beliefs (despite what my passionate reactions may indicate) but I will not stand by while their actions promulgate a doctrine of prejudice, hatred, and oppression. Even if the actions of an individual do not reflect it, the actions of the whole of which they are a part can be damning.
4 comments:
I think your discourse about religion has been dead on. Religion, if I'm allowed to hope, can be a useful tool for enlightening and understanding of ones self and our role in the world. It's intent is pure.
What you're getting at is the manufacturing of Religion(tm). (Not a current phenomenon, though. When has relgion NOT been used to attain other goals?) Simultaneously it's pandering and proselytizing. It gives simple answers which require no thought or soul searching. Coupled with our general decline in wanting to do anything that requires work, Americans just eat it up.
I heard a story recently on MPR about using a focus group to create a modern day religion. They ended up with the fundamental tenet, do what feels good. Their church was more spa than sanctuary. Meaning through manicures. Fulfillment through facials. What a waste.
I'm bothered that 1. someone is willing to use religion to manipulate the masses and 2. the masses have yet to get it. They're so easy to convince. Give them a latte, play them some sanitized rock, tell them they're right, god says, they'll do anything.
I'll take my usual role of devil's advocate.
"I guess my starting point would be 'the brain is responsible for consciousness', and we can be reasonably sure that when that brain ceases to be, when it falls apart and decomposes, that'll be the end of us. From that, quite a lot of things follow, I think especially morally. We are the very privileged owners of a brief spark of consciousness, and we therefore have to take responsibility for it. You cannot rely, as Christians or Muslims do, on a world elsewhere, a paradise to which one can work towards and maybe make sacrafice, and crucially make sacrifices of other people. We have a marvelous gift, when you see it develop in children, this ability to become aware that other people have minds just like your own, and feelings that are just as important as your own, and this gift of empathy seems to me to be the building block of our moral system." - Ian McEwan
I should note that those words were spoken by Mr. McEwan in one of the 'couple of religious programs that I was fortunate enough to miss' that Richard Dawkins did.
I'll have to say, I disagreed with several of the statements Armstrong made. Her depiction of all the world's religions as essentially the same, or after the same thing, is a strong Universalist harmonizing impulse, one common among greatly spiritual people, but one that I think is incorrect. The world's religions are not all the same. The goals, paths, and ideas of the world's religions are not all the same. Buddhism is not the same as Islam. Nirvana is not Heaven. While they may have some commonalities, they are not the same.
I appreciate her understanding that the (at least partial) abandonment of ego as a method of peaceable life, but ego loss and the understanding and empathy that flow from that are not limited to religious practice.
The transcendental impulse is one of the strongest in humanity. This is why religion has such a pull on people. This is why even I, a strong rationalist and agnostic can find something interesting in the writings of Emerson, and why Taoist philosophy comes off as very wise. But the desire for meaning and transcendence, the feeling that there is more to this life than just the brief moment we have, our limited faculties, our crude flesh, is a problematic one. For one thing, people's overwhelming compulsion for a sense of transcendence has all too often lead them to disregard reality, evidence, and reason, in the blind hope that pretty stories and compelling fictions will give them some relief from the burdens of the sapient mind (its darker currents include lonliness, feelings of insignificance, disconnectedness, and the realization of our impermanence). I'm all for the search for truth, and the enrichment of the mind to have a greater, broader, more robust, and more humane understanding of this life, but it is one which is fraught with the potential for self-deception and delusive thinking, especially when one surrenders to institutional traditions without a critical eye. It is the exceptionalism of religious belief to examination and criticism in our culture that vex me. For me, nothing is sacred in the sense that it should be beyond question, or examination, or even rejection if it is false. Also, that really, really wanting something to be true does not make it so. Still, a more mature and rational approach to the nearly universal 'dark-night-of-the-soul' needs to be addressed.
Her objections to theology are interesting. It is not spiritual or transcendent thought to which I object, it is the dangerous and all too often deadly dogmas of religion, and of the Abrahamic traditions in particular. The Eastern traditions have been much more mature in their approach, generally. To quote Sam Harris, one of the other people Armstrong criticizes:
"It's not that you could not possibly form a death cult out of the principles of Tibetan Buddhism. In fact, to some degree, Zen Buddhism informed the world view of the Kamikaze pilots during World War II. But you would have to work very hard to bend the core principles of Buddhism into this kind of orgy of violence. You don't have to work so hard as a Muslim.
And it would be impossible as a Jain, this religion of India that has some ten million subscribers, I think—the core of their religion is nonviolence. No matter how deranged you will get by your doctrine as a Jain, you will get less and less violent. The really religious Jains cover their mouths with cheesecloth so they don't inhale a bug."
I wholeheartedly agree with her assessment that getting stuck on the anthropomorphic details of what you think God is like is infantile.
I like that she can accept that secularists do not need religious inspiration to be morally upright. She then goes on to say that: " If your child dies, or you witness a terrible natural catastrophe such as Hurricane Katrina, you want to have a scientific explanation of it. But that's not all human beings need. We are beings who fall very easily into despair because we're meaning-seeking creatures. And if things don't add up in some way, we can become crippled by our despondency." Of course science cannot give comfort in this kind of thing, but to think that religion is needed here is not right to me. Each of us has a core of humanity, and there is a sense of compassion, or tenderness, or understanding of our shared experience that allows us to be supportive and compassionate in the face of terrible things. While religious belief can give comfort in this regard, it is also sometimes quite hurtful, or just mean. When someone says "God had a reason for your child to die." my stomach just churns. Science alone is not enough to reject religion, but as an agnostic, I'd like to think that diligently exploring and observing and testing the world with help of the scientific method, coupled with compassion and humanitarianism might be. Obviously the bulk of the world disagrees with me on this one.
I'm not ready to swear off myth, but there is finding some value in stories and ideas, and then there is beginning to believe that those fictions are literally true, often to the point where they begin to contradict reality as a pervasive worldview.
In the criticisms of Richard Dawkins, well, I've found Richard Dawkins to be a reasoned and sensible thinker who, along with Sam Harris, has some of the most cogent and legitimate critiques of religion that have been printed since Bertrand Russell. I invite those who might disagree with me to read their works and decide for yourself. In no way do Richard Dawkins or Sam Harris hate the people who practice religions, and neither do I. What I object to is the blind adherence to dogmas which have little or no grounding in reality, and the use of those dogmas to commit harm against our fellow man. Don't hate the playa, hate the game.
Her comment that the Bible has more violence in it than the Quran is correct, something Sam Harris himself indicated. I question the continuing affection for the heavily edited ancient scriptures of the Abrahamic traditions. The primitive and violent spiritual writings of iron age farmers is religious enlightenment in only the most simplistic, childish, and niche ways.
As Ian McEwan went on: "..and if you have a sacred text that tells you how the world began, or what the relationship is between this sky-god and you, it does curtail your curiosity, it cuts off a source of wonder, the loveliness of the world in its wonderousness..."
If you want to understand the universe and the mind of the potential creator of that universe, a scientific background might serve one better. Strange action at a distance, mathematic symmetries, these thing are more relevent to me than internal debates over human-written parables. Their myths can have some meaning, but to fixate on them, to take them as literal and not as symbolic is dangerous. Reality is those things that do not disappear after you quit believing in them. We're all teapot atheists, as Russell migh have put it, and I don't see very many believers in Poseidon or Zeus anymore, so the polarized debate of Chrisitan God (including internal Catholic vs. Protestant editions) vs. Muslim God is just a recipie for Holy Wars. Fixating on the dogmas is just the fight between two sides of a debate rational people were ready to move past long ago.
I guess the point I'd like to make is that I wish more people could reject some of the nonsense of religious practice and try to find a more reasonable approach, I just wonder if this approach that Armstrong is taking is sufficient. So much of modern religion is a surrender of reason to blind faith, to wishful thinking, to easy answers. This is not a healthy path to be on, especially given the ease of which people are manipulated into hurting others in the name of their beliefs. Their intentions are good, the intent is pure, as celesathene says. But the road to hell (or more likely, holy war) is paved with good intentions. Our lives are enriched by religious belief, but our lives are also in danger from good-meaning adherents using dogma and faith as the excuse to commit atrocity, or on a smaller scale to inflict dangerous and often deadly policies in the name of morality.
As should be evident from today's media outlets, being cogent and reasonable is not equivalent to being fair. Armstrong's point about the fine line that divides hating religion from hating the religious is generally underappreciated. I feel that the works of both Dawkins and Harris have crossed this line quite freely. While I have a lot of respect for both of them, and in fact agree with many views they advocate, I am deeply uncomfortable with reasoning that allows one to value or respect one group of people above another. All people, irrespective of religious faith (or lack thereof), are capable of violence. To judge adherents of a particular faith as illogical, untrustworthy, or more violent than others is dangerously close to using your favored reading of a text to justify bigotry. I found this interview with Armstrong compelling because of the respect it displayed for religious and the non/semireligious- while at the same time making culturally relevant points, such as emphasizing the dangers of literal text interpretation and condemning the actions taken in the name of assorted faiths (ie, "Holy Wars").
The role of religion in the political sphere is generally used as a justification for examination of individual religions and their assorted texts. For such discussions to amount to more than intellectual onanism, everyone, especially thinkers such as Dawkins and Harris, must begin from a place of deep respect- not just for the power of reason or for selected favorite traditions, but also for traditions we may find distasteful, uncomfortable, incomprehensible. That may mean treating some other individuals with more respect than you recieve for your faith; however, unless we are willing to start on this ground, we should expect no fair treatment, for we have provided none.
Her take on our knowledge of God and our tendency to make it a person one is interesting. But personally I think she misses the point in some respect. God needs to be made less that what God really is for us to have any sort of relationship (be it close personal, admiration or even fear) to that God. Belief in a God you cannot know is like being aware of some physics formula (like E=MC2) that you don’t at all understand and that has no influence on your life. When she talks about great religious thinkers saying that we can know nothing about God she is right but she stops too soon in that discussion. The mystics and theologians that have taken the apophatic approach (which is the approach that starts from assuming that God is too great and too different for us to know anything about) have been the ones who have taught us some of the most important and interesting things about God. That stance is really one that starts by acknowledging our inability to know everything (or even anything fore sure), a very humble beginning, and then sets out to find what we can know in part or provisionally. Even Plato had this idea: we can never know the forms fully but we need to strive for knowledge of them. In both cases—the forms and God—the point is to be humble about what you know, not to deny any sort of knowledge.
We need to know something about God if we are to believe in one at all. We need to know and debate about metaphysics because these are things that provide the foundations to our lives and our world. Without an implied religion or metaphysics (sometimes they are one and the same, sometimes they are interchangeable and sometimes they are totally incompatible) we cannot survive in the chaotic and incomprehensible world which we find ourselves in. Our everyday lives are based more on our beliefs and what we think we know (in terms of metaphysics and religion) than they are on the physical world. To not debate and think about these things make us slaves to strict tradition, rhetoric and the way things appear to be. Metaphysics and religion are the ways to change the world.
I agree that most people’s vision of God is very infantile, but most people are not willing to explore and risk enough to get beyond that. Exploring God involves risk and change that penetrates to a persons very core and digs at the nothingness below the deepest foundations of our worldview. When the point is to get ahead (or at least not fall behind in a world that is moving so fast) and to make progress such inquiry is almost demonized because it inhibits outwards progress and achievements. Any sort of meaningful spiritual exercises and inquiry, taken on honestly and wholly, runs the risk of changing you so fundamentally that it will disrupt your life—and the more people that do it the more disruptive it is to the society as a whole. In short: individual searching is, in many ways, divisive to a unified society that can produce economically, or even intellectually.
I am a big fan of the Catholic Church and the Orthodox Churches (Armenia by experience and Russian via theological texts). A big part of this is because of the traditions that they carry, the history that they contain. Steps need to be taken to insure that individuals are given room to move and explore within these traditions without the threat of persecution or excommunication. Now that the world is getting smaller thanks to technology it is harder for people to get away with being slightly deviant, being open and honest about that, and at the same time avoiding negative attention from the often conservative hierarchy. I have no problem with the leaders of the church being conservative the problem is when they try to micro-manage the priests and followers. Conservatism is what keeps the tradition long and deep, and it keeps crazy fads from hijacking the church—look at some of the nutty things that came out of early Calvinism and other protestant sects that ditched tradition in favor of going back to scripture alone. Tradition plays a big part in keeping the faith rooted and grounded. Sometimes the tradition gets in the way of progress or openness, but at least tradition can be modified and worked with. It will take decades for the Catholic Church to officially accept homosexuality and birth control, they have a lot of theology, philosophy and habit to work through before they can accept these things without turning their back on a rich and valuable tradition that makes up at least a third of what they are. Let the official church and its leaders work through that struggle at their own pace—but prod them a bit to make sure they don’t become reactionary and go backwards. At the same time they need to let the people deviate as long as they do so with reflection and a clear conscience.
Why did I get into that here? Because I think that is a big part of what a healthy religion and faith is made up of: a tradition and leadership that charts the course for a long voyage, followers that are steeped in that tradition but are free to explore. Individual faith needs a community to support it, challenge it and provide it with a tradition and historical context to be a part of.
A book on religion that I highly recommend is Gianni Vattimo’s ‘Belief’. He is an Italian philosopher who was a member of the EU parliament (sat on the committee that drafted the constitution I believe), a Catholic, openly gay and a frequent contributor to Italian news papers like La Stampa. The book requires a passing knowledge of modern philosophy (mostly Nietzsche and a bit of Heidegger) but is relatively easy to follow. It is about his personal vision of Catholicism and how faith can fit into the modern world. The Italian title translated literally means “Belief in Belief” which is very thought provoking isn’t it? He also did a book with Richard Rorty called “The Future of Religion” but that one seems to be more technical, less personal and less accessible.
GeistX, I know you are not an anti-spiritual crusader. You only have to look at your name to know that you have something going on in the spiritual world. I am just always afraid of over zealous secularists… Religion, all sorts, need to be given equal footing in society in relation to science and all other types of seeing the world and being in the world. I always fear that religion is seen as second because it is based on faith, when science and secularism are exulted.
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