A Synthesis of Sacred and Secular

http://pewforum.org/Politics-and-Elections/Religion-and-Secularism-The-American-Experience.aspx

http://www.secularnewsdaily.com/2010/02/13/religion-and-the-myth-of-coexistence/

This topic is rife with contending sides and positions, so I’ll try to give as balanced a perspective on the two main views on an issue I’ve confronted slightly  in “Religion and Secularism’s Questions and Answers”. This time, I’ll give a short exposition on the two subjects and then detail the two prominent perspectives on their interaction. Religion and secularism’s relationship has been lukewarm at best, though it isn’t necessarily always combative by nature either. There are lay theologians in Christianity, not to mention the “secular” monks who did more worldly things as part of their duties, like the monastics in convents and monasteries who gardened, wrote, etc, as opposed to primarily contemplative behavior. But these days, we seem to have a very contentious environment of the profane and the sacred, the nonbelievers and believers of various stripes. This is especially the case in the U.S., but it isn’t necessarily resolved perfectly in any sense around the world. Japan maintains an interesting blend of secular and sacred, though the more immanent and pantheistic form of religion makes this easier. The transcendent nature of religions more prominent in America makes the separation into spheres much more common and thus the resolution of any conflict becomes either a truce or a retreat of one into its own area in surrender. So, my question is twofold: what are religion and secularism (in the basics) and what is the nature of their relationship?

Religion is much more complex in definition than secularism, since it has existed for longer in history and language, but admittedly has two formulations, one more Western, the other more Eastern, though there is always an overlap, such as Wicca or Sikhism for two examples. As I explained somewhat in “Looking At Eastern Religion From the West”,  Western religion tends to be much more based in sacred scriptures and belief in God or gods. There’s more ambiguity in Western religious studies about nontheistic religions and whether they actually are religions or philosophies. Buddhism, Confucianism and even Daoism in some sense are either pantheistic or nontheistic in some sense regarding the existence of gods and whether they matter. There’s a term formulated by Paul Kurtz, sometimes called the father of secular humanism, made up of three Greek words. The prefix eu, meaning good, the word praxis, meaning practice and Sophia, meaning wisdom. Eupraxophy refers to worldviews and philosophies that are secular in nature and don’t rely on the supernatural in order to advocate being a good person. The three religions enumerated beforehand fit in this classification with some possible qualifications. Religion at its heart could be specified to be that which regards the supernatural as relevant to human life and makes a system of tenets that people are expected to follow. This is, of course, very simplistic, but for the purposes of this discussion I think it suffices to distinguish it from secularism.

There are two kinds of secularism we could discuss when confronting this topic: the first is more political in maintaining a strict separation of some form between church authority and state power, but not always completely keeping it out of the public square. Turkey and France based their form more on laicite, one form of the second very strict and philosophical position on religion in the public and political square. This contrasts a great deal with America’s which is more permissive in a sense of religious expression by private citizens within the public forum without favoring any single religion. Secularism is not a religion, contrary to rumors and accusations from theists, though secular humanism might be considered one. But most secularists are not secular humanists, though all secular humanists are secularists technically. Fundamentally, secularism is some position about religion that desires to keep it at least separate for the most part from policy making and a much more religiously diverse society or is fundamentally opposed to religion’s claims and wishes it to be put in the spotlight and actively criticized for its falsehoods and also reserved to the private sphere it originated in.

Secularism and modernity have done two things for religion in my estimation. First is that religion and beliefs about it have become more private. Believer or not, you are very individualist about it. Secondly, religion has still kept a certain place in the public square in the face of separation on the grounds that as a part of the history of the country, religious expression in public is very much part of the culture and may stay that way for quite a while longer, particularly for political gain as we see with virtually every Republican candidate to one degree or another, as I mentioned in “Conservatives Clamor For Christianity” . Altar calls and other such identifications to a larger group are what make Western people religious, as opposed to in the East, where it’s very much an eclectic and syncretic approach of the culture at large and not so much a matter of affirming particular creeds or such. With the Western method of voluntaristic religious affiliation, there is a strong element of competition between religions and thus they have to constantly change tactics and also allow the existence of their opponents, even if they disagree with them, so as to have opportunities for conversion. There is both a freedom of individual conscience and also communal association with any religion or lack thereof, but still holding what tend to be religious beliefs. The concept of civil religion further complicates the issue of religion’s presence in what is supposed to be a more secular country in the sense of not favoring any religion in its decisions. It is commonly understood to be the sorts of things that have become intrinsic to the American identity, which includes the unconstitutional and divisive motto of the country, “In God We Trust” Religion in America, shared or esoteric, reflects a unique and compelling approach to how it overlaps with secularism as a whole.

The U.S. Constitution almost seems to necessitate that there be a conflict between religious and secular interests by the notion of separation of powers given within it. Not to mention the first amendment creates a sort of ambivalent interaction of the exercise of religion on the one hand and the neutrality of the government towards it on the other. With the historical nature of the U.S. being a country with economic demands of a free market comprising radically diverse people with varying beliefs, there was a necessary development of religious pluralism as well as the secularism that creates a barrier against any one religion or any religion becoming influential for policy making. Christianity, the dominant religion of America, surprisingly has theology within it that allows for more advocacy of separation of church and state than you would think. There’s a basic relationship between the religious and secular communicated through the idea of two kingdoms, one of the world and one of God. Jesus’ saying “Render unto Caesar what is Caesar’s” comes to mind as well as Augustine’s treatise called City of God where he elaborates the differences between the two spheres in the Christian understanding: the profane and the sacred. Of course, there will be flux in the exact nature of this exchange of religious neutrality and religious tolerance, but it actually seems more compelling than what has become the other popular position, especially with the mistakenly titled “New Atheists” like Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens.

Antitheists in particular claim it is questionable as to whether actual tolerance exists in religions, since they are commonly very prescriptive and absolutist in those normative claims about how the world ought to be. Not everyone is this way, but fundamentally, religion takes time to get away from that sort of mindset and there is a likelihood that people cannot completely get away from the tendency to convert people, to influence people in their way of thinking, indignant that others would believe heresies and false spiritual teachings. Thus, true coexistence of the religious and secular, in a sense of non overlapping magisteria similar to science and religion, demands that religion change very sharply and drastically. The kind of tolerance religion in America necessitates is generalized and not anything beyond a bare acceptance of the existence of various competing systems that most believers in any of the exclusivist religions would say are wrong at heart. Religion would have to become much more inclusivist or pluralist in nature. The only other alternative would be to retreat into the churches and make religion a much more private matter, like it was allegedly back in the times of America’s founding fathers. But history may not take that turn any time soon.

Any sort of religious/secular fusion in society will necessitate that religions be propagated more, of course. We should promote a free market of ideas, even those that are delusional. But we should also spread critical thinking about religion and the criticism of it, rejecting the notion in popular culture that religion is sacrosanct and not able to be held to the same standards we hold every other belief to. Once you do this, there is a balancing out of what can be negative traits of religion with the agreement of many religious people that we need to carefully examine out beliefs to hold them consistently and reasonably, even if we disagree. Religion must be willing to not only be in the public square, but also be subject to rigorous criticism which we give to anything else, such as science and politics, and not given a special place. The religious questions should be taken seriously, but they shouldn’t be said to be purely one way or the other. One can accept religion’s existence as a phenomenon without assenting to any beliefs that they have. Atheists can appreciate religious as part of American culture and history, literature, etc, but nevertheless not hold religious views, but more philosophical ones based in reason. The irreverent and the pious may always be at each others’ throats to an extent, but one can hope there could be a better truce arranged in the future between them. Until next time, Namaste and aloha.

Rebirth, Not Reincarnation

http://www.buddhanet.net/funbud10.htm

http://www.buddhanet.net/e-learning/dharmadata/fdd47.htm

http://www.buddhanet.net/e-learning/qanda05.htm

http://www.buddhistsagainstreincarnation.com/

http://www.knowbuddhism.info/2009/01/rebirth-in-buddhism.html

The Buddhist teaching of rebirth is one of what I would say are two of the most highly misunderstood ideas that have propagated through the West in ways that resemble Hinduism much more than Buddhism. Whenever I speak about Buddhism in relation to the subject of the afterlife and such, I use the term rebirth as opposed to reincarnation, since the latter implies that my individual soul is incarnated in a new body, which is not what Buddhism even remotely teaches. Rebirth can apply across my life and subsequent death much more loosely. We can be said to be reborn in a nominal and figurative sense across our lives. Cells die and are replaced, our mind abandons some beliefs for others, building up knowledge, etc. We are reborn metaphorically as we become part of a new community, as we affirm wedding vows or other important events in our lives. And in terms of our death and birth of other entities, there is at the very least a connection that I’ll explain with a few examples.

The idea of virtual rebirth is not so hard for us to accept, since the experience of a radical change in ourselves is commonly described as a rebirth anyway. The Christian idea of being “born again” is explained in a similar fashion. We change into a different person, but are not literally born physically again. The birth is mental, not unlike when I spoke about dependent origination and how we are born and die in a cycle that stems from our minds in “Neither Determinism Nor Destiny” Physical renewal is more subtle in that we don’t recognize it explicitly, but beyond the surface, on the cellular level, we retain very little of our original body in a sense, particularly our skin, but other parts of the body as well. So we could easily recognize that we are reborn in one form or another in every moment, be it our body or our minds as we interact with various conditions and causes/effects.  The difficult part of rebirth comes with any enumeration of an actual form of the phenomenon.

When most people think of rebirth, there is probably an instinctual association with reincarnation, if only because there tend to be a few basic theories about the afterlife, one of them closer to Buddhism in saying that an individual person basically ceases to be when they die, associated often with atheism. This is not to say that the elements of that person’s body in particular are annihilated, but that the idea of mind is interwoven with the body, so that in a sense, any individual person is not reborn as another person, but a new birth generates a new person by the basic psychology that Buddhism describes in our grasping for things and seeking permanence. There is no strict word in Buddhism that translates directly to rebirth. The closest term that expresses the reality in a larger context is bhava, literally meaning “becoming”. We are always in a state of becoming, not a static being affected by the outside but not changing in any way as individuals. This sort of thinking originates from existential thought in particular. We are not thought of as beings that simply exist in a constant state, but are in fact always in constant change and assailed by choices that we must confront and deal with the results of. In that sense, there is not any sort of nihilism that would come from believing that you essentially die, but in a sense you survive on as a flame passed onto another candle, or as a seed resulting from a tree becomes another tree. They aren’t the same, but they aren’t absolutely different either. I’m not saying that there is necessarily a strictly materialistic explanation, but from my experience, the best explanation for what happens after death is something like the circle of life from The Lion King. We are all connected. This doesn’t mean our consciousness survives in nature, ala Mufasa talking in the stars, but simply that we are all interrelated by death and life. Rebirth is, if nothing else, simpler, but also more mysterious in a sense than the more direct issue of what the soul is and how it survives, etc in that afterlife theory. If reincarnation or resurrection is true, it only changes particular things I believe. At the least I’d be obliged to recognize reincarnation if it could be demonstrated. But with the evidence I have before me, the only conclusion I have is that I will cease to be ultimately when I die and something else will be renewed or supported through dependent origination that connects in some sense to my decaying corpse and its elements; worms to birds to plants to another person, for example. Even if I don’t relate to a newborn, I sustain another person regardless, even if it isn’t technically me.

There is a basic truth to rebirth, but nonetheless people will find various reasons to disbelieve it, many of which I would find delusional or otherwise mistaken. We don’t like to see things without a lens, the harsh reality that exists immanently. We like to put some barrier between us and that presence, so we generate ideas of souls and other realms. One could point out to me that native Buddhists tend to believe the six realms spoken of in traditional Buddhist cosmology are as real as ours, but I consider myself a secular Buddhist. Those realms are reflections of the human condition in all its diversity. Some of us live like gods or devas, some of us live in torturous squalor, like is described in the hell realm. Any of the 31 realms (not always, but in some traditions) that are supposedly enumerated in Buddhist cosmology can correspond to some manifestation of a possible human life. It’s not only simpler, but it’s more relevant to what we can immediately observe about human psychology. Call me anthropocentric, but the life of a cat or dog is hardly the same as a human. But we can learn from them no doubt. I might confront that in the future.

Rebirth is a process of change, as I said before, reflected in the mark of impermanence that permeates existence. It is also demonstrative of dissatisfaction and non-self, since we are not fulfilled in believing people will survive their death, seeing that we look forward to more existence instead of accepting whatever might be the case, and we don’t truly have any abiding soul or aspect of our self that survives our death, contrary to any claims about our ability to think proving a soul exists or the long debunked experiment supposedly showing the weight of a soul. Regeneration goes on every moment in a sense with our mental and physical states, and even as we die there is a revival of sorts, albeit it doesn’t involve a soul. When anything is born (more precisely conceived), there is a reconstitution of various elements and when something dies those elements dissipate. The comparison of one’s rebirths to a flame being passed from one candle to the next is not only relevant but popular as a metaphor, since each flame is different and they aren’t identical to each other completely, but only in qualities that they have. Each person shares some properties, but ultimately we each have different experiences that develop various parts of ourselves. Some are more educated, some are more skilled, etc. Reincarnation is transmigration of a soul, rebirth is transformation of basic elements in something more holistic than reductionistic. Each part is not reducible ultimately, though there are elements of truth to that. To understand rebirth you have to see the forest along with the trees but focus on the former, not the latter. There can still be karma and vipaka, which I’ll speak about next week, even without a soul, since karma and vipaka are intertwined not with the person as some unified self, but as an interdependent web of actions and results. Some results can happen later than others and thus a person’s birth can be affected in other ways by karmic seeds bearing fruit. The karma is not something completely outside us that determines rebirth, but our own habits and behaviors as related to karma. If you develop bad habits, you will have a bad rebirth (not technically “you”, but you for the sake of simplicity). If you develop good habits, you can free yourself from rebirth, a cycle compared to a wheel that continues to spin because of your karmic actions. Rebirth is a reality that may only be escapable in our minds and in gaining serenity as opposed to actually transcending reality and achieving liberation from the cycle in some quasi mystical sense, but it is also something that can reflect badly in our minds, so it must be understood properly. I hope I aided in that process somewhat. Until next time, Namaste and aloha.

Why Religion May Never Disappear (Entirely)

http://religion.blogs.cnn.com/2011/05/12/religious-belief-is-human-nature-huge-new-study-claims/

This topic tends towards some polarization, from what I’ve seen, so I’ll try to be as balanced and concise as possible. The ideas of determinism and essentialism always present some controversy anyway, so with that in mind, onto the topic.
When one looks across the world, there isn’t as much evidence of the hypo/thesis of this conglomeration of studies as there might’ve been centuries ago. The idea from all these investigations is that any claim that the world is becoming more secular is mistaken. The reasoning behind this is that there is still a strong presence of religious tendencies across various cultures as different as Japan and America and everything in between. This is ironic, since there was a study suggesting that at least “organized” religion would die out in 9 countries across the world though some might suggest secularization applies to religion as a whole. While the presence of religion in concentrated areas suggests religion exists in some organized fashion, the personal aspects of religion are less clear. If you polled a large sample of each major continent and merely asked if the person considers themselves “religious” then the results might reflect the presence of religiosity in the world more than the less accurate methods such as checking lists at churches of people baptized, both because of potential for lapsed believers that might return and those that have basically abandoned the beliefs of the church entirely. In the first case, the individual might still be religious, but in the other case, the individual may very well not be religious at all in the traditional understandings that involve a belief in the afterlife or deities/agents behind supposedly miraculous events. Studying cultural propensity is one thing, but on a psychological level, this is more difficult to defend.

Much of this seems to hinge on a centuries old debate: whether humans naturally possess the religious drive or if that drive is developed over time through education and culture; basically the nature/nurture dichotomy. An argument can be presented for humans being essentially religious animals. One might argue from a neurological perspective that our brains are hard wired to seek out God, the so called God-shaped hole thesis one hears many times, myself included. The problem with that thesis is pretty evident, though; it dehumanizes any skeptic, disbeliever or even doubter, since any of those people can be argued to be a deficient human being when one persists in spite of religious believers all around you, even being raised in a religion as many people are in an American culture. Instead of treating us with understanding, believers unintentionally treat us with contempt and pity as if we’re lesser people. Humans being religious by nature doesn’t mean humans should always follow that primal urge; any more than we should follow our animal impulses to rape and pillage.

The other end of the spectrum is equally troubling in saying religion is part of ancient human history; and since we have advanced to a more modern and intellectually sophisticated culture, we should abandon religion entirely. Not to sound like an apologist for religious people; considering I’m not really one of them myself in the sense of believing without hard evidence in something supernatural; but religion does have a place in modern day culture, at least in a sense of studying it as a cultural phenomenon that influences people in their everyday life. This is not to say we should try to apply these religious laws to a religiously diverse populace, but only that we should try to understand religion’s historical influence on people, with obvious examples like whether the U.S. is a Christian nation and the explosion in America of Islamaphobia. If we don’t research religion as an academically pertinent subject, we risk believing in unjustified claims about religion ranging on either end of the spectrum. Believing we are destined to be religious is just as absurd as saying that being religious is equivalent to being mentally insane. Religiosity in the sense of fidelity to your fellow human is hardly a sign of mental illness, is it?
A great deal of our predilection to seeing purpose in life as well as alleged NDEs (Near Death Experiences) that popularize some kind of evidence of the afterlife, can be connected to psychology and neurology respectively. Seeing purpose, as well as patterns, in seemingly random events in life, is a result of two related tendencies humans have in their mental makeup: apophenia and pareidolia. Apophenia, seeing patterns in unrelated phenomena, exists in various religious contexts, such as people believing God protected a church from a tornado or that God protected their home from a tornado while destroying everything else around the house. A simpler example would be people seeing certain events as evidence of answers to their prayers. Pareidolia is more commonly manifest with people seeing sacred images in what are initially random arrangements; like the Virgin Mary in a piece of toast or a pancake.
Any kind of apophenia people manifest, especially in a religious context, is defended on the grounds that it makes people feel secure and comfortable, even if life is by all definitions, random and inconstant. A tornado, fire, or other disaster can strike at any moment, taking people away from us; a twist of fate can make us rich and successful and another can turn all that into failure and throw us into despair. Religion can be said to potentially never go away for the same reason that people will always insist that it is not only in our nature to arrange and pattern the randomness in life, but that it is also beneficial to us. Any endeavors of great academic and public significance involve this sort of thinking; natural and social sciences, history, and even fine arts take what seem like unrelated phenomena and connect them in ways we wouldn’t originally think.

It’s ironic for me, an Aspie, to criticize this kind of thought pattern, when a thesis has been put forward, with a mountain of evidence to justify it, that Aspies are actually more prone to finding patterns than even neurotypical people. I don’t deny that you can say I’m a hypocrite or have misguided attention towards something that I have a stronger potential for. But my experience is not necessarily atypical for Aspies. As I’ve blogged over a year ago in “Aspergers and Atheism” at least one study has suggested that even if Aspies have a greater tendency to see patterns in events or data sets, it doesn’t mean that they see agency in those events. This is an important distinction to set up in a conclusion. People do have a tendency to find patterns in things and this isn’t always a negative trait. The fact that we observe patterns and laws in nature is how we grew to scientific thought. But when you begin to see conscious agency behind everything, such as when a person is “miraculously” healed from cancer or other debilitating illnesses, you not only get into the obvious category of “superstitious” but you go beyond our natural and beneficial tendency to see patterns and consistency as valuable and begin to become fixated on patterns and consistency in order to keep yourself from going insane. I may not be religious in believing that God or any supernatural force is involved in my life, but I am religious in the deeper sense that all humans can be said to have questions about life. I simply don’t take it so seriously that I feel a need to have some overarching answer to everything. Sometimes silence and ignorance are the path to fulfillment and enlightenment. Until next time, Namaste and aloha.

Heaven and Stephen Hawking

http://religion.blogs.cnn.com/2011/05/17/heaven-is-a-fairy-story-scientist-stephen-hawking-says/
http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/2011/may/15/stephen-hawking-interview-there-is-no-heaven

I haven’t read a single book by Stephen Hawking and one might say I’m horrible for laughing at various jokes at his expense on Family Guy, but I remember when he posited a year ago in The Grand Design that we didn’t need God to explain the beginning of this universe, but instead can refer back to the most basic force of gravity. I faintly recall the explanation being something to the effect that gravity initiated the Big Bang itself because of the nature of quantum singularities, etc. I’ve never been one to be able to focus much on mathematics or science, but I can align with Hawking’s naturalistic approach to cosmology. I can respect people’s right to believe that God intervened in the Big Bang in some way or started the processes or abiogenesis or biological evolution, but Stephen Hawking’s declaration is a more explicit rejection of these sorts of partnerships on an intellectual level of religious beliefs and scientific theoretical models. For people to believe these things is their liberty, but to say that it even makes philosophical or scientific sense seems to miss the point that God and heaven by association are not scientific, they are experiential and psychological. People may believe they experience God or have gone to heaven/hell and returned, and I cannot contest their interpretation by personal experience, but one can observe brain chemistry and neurology to see that there are quite impressive processes going on that can conceivably generate these experiences, particularly NDEs (Near Death Experiences). Hawking himself actually said a bit before his famous statement thrown around these days; “heaven…is a fairy tale for people afraid of the dark,” that the brain is likened to a computer that will cease to function when its parts break down. Many people in my own discipline may recoil in disbelief that someone could believe this, feeling that the human mind cannot be compared to something created by humans in a similar way people think humans cannot be compared to God in terms of ethical judgments. But when you start thinking about the complexities of a computer from a basic understanding of its parts and functions as they interact, the human mind is not a far cry from being just as awe inspiring without involving “God,”

When we don’t know everything about something, we’re motivated all the more by our wonder and amazement in our ignorance to remedy that problem by learning as much as we can. Hawking’s claim doesn’t reduce our amazement at the world around us, or even our own minds and the complexity of memory, cognition, emotions and the like; in fact it can make someone tear up at the prospect that we might begin to understand it more. And there’s no arrogance in that pursuit of knowledge any more than any pursuit of new information is somehow trying to take on the position of “God” or asserting oneself as the greatest human being who ever existed. People read way too much into science and come with varying degrees of willful ignorance or outright idiocy about what a scientist pursues. It is not absolute power or knowledge, but simply more and more comprehensive knowledge that we can acquire and use to structure the universe in some way, however limited it might be in reality or history as a whole.

There are probably also those who accuse the Cambridge professor of being afraid of death and lashing out at everyone who believes in heaven with his hostile statement that everyone who believes in the afterlife is a frightened child who doesn’t know any better. But Hawking has been in a state of potential death for almost 50 years since he was given 3 years to live at 21. He himself says he’s not afraid of death, though he implies he’s accepted it. But like any person on the verge of death in any form, he says we should make the most of the life we have, which I can wholeheartedly agree with. For people to take potshots at a man crippled by a disease that for all knowledge we have of it, should have killed him around when he was my age, is as shameful as criticizing Michael Fox for having Parkinson’s, though again, I’m guilty of laughing at Family Guy’s jokes about him. Not to mention the argument that an atheist doesn’t believe in the afterlife because they’re afraid of death is no more logical than saying theists believe in the afterlife because they’re afraid of death. Any person willing to be a martyr and go to the afterlife is clearly not afraid of death so much as they’re attached to the concept of heaven. I suppose when you invert the analysis that theists could be said to be attached to and clinging to life as they do their own existence one can make a more reasonable claim that they’re in some way afraid of death and use heaven as a buffer to suppress that fear or otherwise remove its threat. But if atheists are truly afraid of death, wouldn’t they do something similar to theists in using technology instead of beliefs in heaven to extend their lives to near immortality, such as through nanomachines or advanced medical treatments? But Stephen Hawking is not in any way unwilling to die when his disease completely destroys his motor nerve functions and stop his brain, thereby stopping his heart as well. In fact, one might say Stephen Hawking is a representative of that tendency in science to be very willing to accept your death and annihilation on some level, similar to Christopher Hitchens, still suffering from throat cancer. Theists don’t seem to be willing to believe that animals have souls because of some false sense of entitlement, as if God only gave them souls.

It’s when you recoil at the thought of death being the final end to a person’s life, only survived by memories, that you seem to be less appreciative of life, since you believe that people will get justice in heaven or hell, in an almost Hindu karmic sense that God will reward good and punish bad in an afterlife. If you believe that when people die they are gone, you can truly mourn their death in some sense. If you merely bewail that they aren’t with you now but will be with you in the future, it’s a pitiable sort of funeral, since you don’t really believe there’s anything to be sad about except that they are no longer physical. But then, the notion of heaven as spiritual seems to go over people’s heads and they think heaven will be as physical as it is now, just improved on some level. Christian metaphysics seem to suggest that the spiritual body of heaven might be better understood as a perfected body, but then that seems to just go along with the fear of death in general. I don’t see why you must believe you go on in order to make yourself feel less affected by someone’s physical death. If you really want to appreciate people’s lives and memorialize their deaths, saying they are gone forever seems the best way to do it, as terrible as it might sound at first. But then, emptiness from a Buddhist perspective has a similar misconception I hope to confront eventually when I run out of stories like this. Until next time, Namaste and aloha.

Religion and Secularism's Questions and Answers

http://www.bigquestionsonline.com/features/against-the-%E2%80%9Canswer-bank%E2%80%9D-theory-of-religion
http://religion.blogs.cnn.com/2011/05/09/college-becomes-nations-first-to-offer-major-in-secularism/
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/05/08/us/08secular.html?_r=1

This time we have an interesting pairing of topics. The first is from an article I found over a month ago and recently decided to comment on, since the bin Laden story and everything preceding it caught my interest and demanded my thoughts more compellingly than this, which is more of a speculative topic. As much as I like reading Stephen Prothero’s blog posts, I still have yet to read his popular book concerning religious literacy in America, let alone his work from 2010 called God Is Not One, which is sitting somewhere in my ever growing library. But this essay he linked to from one of his posts on Belief Blog intrigued me enough to add it to a growing backlog of topics I want to talk about, including one I tend to avoid: evolution/creation/intelligent design and the debate that goes along with it (humanities major before science enthusiast, see.). But onto the actual topic.

When we think of religion, we usually associate it with those who believe they have answers, usually about questions of existential significance: when the world will end, why bad things happen to good people and so on. The group that believes the world is ending May 21, 2011, comes to mind for eschatology. Or Westboro Baptist Church, who asserts that America is being judged daily by a God who likes to play Risk with real human lives just to punish us for accepting homosexuality, as to why soldiers get blown up on a near daily basis. The list could go on forever with any person who flaunts their religiosity as the basis of their worldview. Sarah Palin, Newt Gingrich and other 2012 Republican nominee hopefuls would also be part of this group. Prothero calls this an “answer bank” theory of religion. It’s most popular with religions focused on orthodoxy, or correct teaching. Christianity is notorious for this in the form of accusations of heresy by the Catholic Church towards many thinkers, including Thomas Aquinas in at least one isolated incident, I believe. Origen and Eckhart, on the other hand, are better known by heresiologists (yes, that’s a word), those who study heretics. In Christianity, if you don’t believe the right things about God, Jesus, salvation, etc, more often than not, you’re regarded as heretical, teaching false doctrine or other expressions depending on denomination and level of education. On the other end of the spectrum are people who are more flexible in the long run than their counterparts. The ones I speak of focus on orthopraxy, or correct practice. The common example is Judaism, though from my experience Buddhism can work just as well. But Judaism serves as a more accessible faith for a counterexample to the faith it un/intentionally spawned. The distinction of cultural and religious Jews attests to this, not to mention the “relative” coexistence as I see it from my limited understanding of the Jewish community, excluding Zionists, I suppose. Jews care less about the precise teachings and more on practicing what you preach, though that tendency does exist in Christianity as well. This is where the divisive and confusing nature of studying people’s beliefs comes up.

The importance of religious studies shouldn’t be overstated, but it shouldn’t be underestimated either. When people hear I’m a religion major; or even if they hear my major expressed as religious studies; I guarantee 50% will ask this question first, “Are you going into the ministry/Are you going to be a minister?” It’s ironic that saying you’re a religion major is such a conversation starter, when talking about religion outside of an academic framework, on the other hand, is more often than not a conversation stopper. But religious studies’ value lies with the questions it inspires rather than the answers various writers and traditions pose to those questions, such as you’d find in theology. Many of the faithful would no doubt object to this, on the grounds that they feel more comfortable with having these big questions settled to a certain extent, even if they also admit they have faith in these things. But as I said in an older post of mine entitled “Comfortable Certainty or Chaotic Contentment,” religion is a starting point, not the end of human endeavors. But many religious people, such as Augustine of Hippo (Christian) and Averroes (Muslim), said that religion and philosophy can have a mutual relationship, though I wouldn’t reach the same conclusions they do. Faith seeking understanding is one thing, but balancing it with understanding seeking faith can work in a paradoxical sense in the discipline of religious studies.

Interestingly enough, a college in South California has brought up what may be called the flipside of the coin that religious studies offers in terms of the big questions about life. When you bring up a “secularism” major in a conversation, I imagine people would react with confusion or hostility, depending on their understanding of the term “secularism”. If they view it as the enemy of everything good in the world or a progenitor of the New World Order, either way, they’ve already missed the point. Secularism isn’t perfect; I don’t think anyone would claim that. But it does try to solve questions in terms of substantive issues; whether something is true or not; as opposed to the problem of interpretation in religious studies; let alone its distant parent theology, who sired the notorious bastard child I’ve studied under for years alongside its ancestor.

The growth of secularism intrigued Phil Zuckerman, a sociologist of religion who’s written books and articles on the spread of nonbelief and cultural distance from religion. This was a large part of his desire to start this major as the first of its kind, along with its relevance in a growing secular culture even in America. One can only hope that this spreads across the country, if only to inform people more of atheism, agnosticism, freethought and such. As people begin to understand that irreligious/nonreligious people are not necessarily hostile to religion when they have ceased to believe in God/etc, the relationship between believers and nonbelievers can improve by leaps and bounds. Once you understand why skeptics are slow to believe in such things as the resurrection and auras, you may also begin to see why people choose different belief systems in general, supernatural or natural. Until next time, Namaste and aloha.

Finding Faith In Fickle Fortune

http://religion.blogs.cnn.com/2011/03/14/how-japans-religions-confront-tragedy/
http://www.globalpost.com/dispatch/news/opinion/columnists/110321/japan-tsunami-earthquake-culture
http://religion.blogs.cnn.com/2011/03/20/finding-faith-amid-disaster/
http://religion.blogs.cnn.com/2011/03/16/6-other-calamities-blamed-on-divine-retribution/
http://religion.blogs.cnn.com/2011/03/24/most-americans-think-god-is-in-control-for-better-or-worse/

I thought it’d be appropriate to wait a few weeks before talking on the events that rival the tsunami that hit India a few years back, which I only vaguely remember. The death toll and destruction are unprecedented, especially considering the historical destruction America wreaked on Japan in the final struggles of World War 2. While those attacks had military targets in mind, the earthquake and resulting tsunami had no such intentions as they progressed in a pattern that has no doubt gone on long before Japan was even widely populated. The earthquake was around a 9 on the Richter scale, one of the top 5 strongest earthquakes since that technology has existed. There are those that suggested this was a message from God, either explicitly or implicitly in terms of supposed end times prophecies or simply the proverbial Demiurge exacting its wrath upon impenitent unbelievers, even though Japan does have some Christian population. But that never stopped God before, did it? People have either blamed or even given credit to God for many disasters through history, including the 9/11 terrorist attacks and Hurricane Katrina’s destruction of Louisiana.

Before I rant on that touchy subject, I think it’s pertinent to contemplate how Japan in particular has been persisting in spite of the tens of thousands of lives lost and the wiping away of some villages off the prefectures. This is very much related to two major religious cultures in Japan: the native Shinto religion and Buddhism, transmitted from China. The Shinto tradition can be said to reinforce a communal mindset of the Japanese people as a country of individuals that are also a group. Also, there is an affirmation in Shinto of respecting nature, so in a sense, the Japanese aren’t completely bewildered by the earthquake or the tsunami, since Japan has been a historic site of earthquakes and tsunami. Buddhism is especially relevant to the mourning process still going on for many. Buddhism is said to be the funeral religion in Japan, while Shinto is involved with ritual festivals that occur at various points in life, such as births of children, New Years and cherry blossom viewings. Buddhist shrines will be visited in high numbers as people pay their respects to their family members. There is a strong sense of reverence for one’s ancestors and family, reinforced not only by Buddhism to an extent, but Shinto in another affirmation of the importance of family and the Confucian tradition as it spread to Japan, emphasizing the importance of relationships. One could say that Japan doesn’t consider the ontology of the catastrophes as important, since they are more than willing to admit that it is a purely natural phenomena, plate tectonics and subsequent effects on tides. There is not the concern of why God would do this, or even why the kami, natural spirits of Shinto, would cause this, since the kami are part of nature and so they are not so much inflicting any judgment so much as simply doing what is natural to them, causing great upheavals in nature as nature flows in its flux of increase and decrease, such as with the tectonic plates in the earth’s crust or the shifting of the tides of the ocean. The important thing for the Japanese is one’s response to the catastrophe. With Buddhism in particular there is an emphasis on the impermanence of all things, however constant they may be in the general sense. The acceptance in some sense that the people we love might not be here tomorrow, that we might lose our house, our belongings, are all part of a Buddhist perspective. And the Japanese have reportedly not even had instances of rioting, attesting to this strong influence of Buddhist teaching on transience in the face of great tragedy and suffering from natural disasters such as Japan has had on and off for years (in fact, at least one earthquake every year since 2004 by one record). While Americans might see this general mindset as somehow missing the point, it logically resonates with us, regardless of if we share the Japanese Buddhist faith in any sense or not. People were naturally compelled to send aid to Japan in one form or another, not because they were Buddhist or Christian, but because they were humans seeing fellow human beings suffering from something they had no control over. In this way, the last part of this article will confront the other positions on this, including one from a minority Japanese perspective.

The governor of Tokyo was reported to have said that the tsunami was punishment for Japan’s egoism, but quickly retracted and apologized for that statement. I, for one, don’t see how Japan has been egoistic in the last 60+ years since they suffered great defeat in the end of the 2nd World War at the hands of America’s atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. For the most part, they’ve been relatively tame, from at least my perspective. China, North Korea and the like have been more aggressive towards their neighbors, particularly Taiwan and South Korea respectively. But enough about international politics; a survey from the Public Religion Research Institute found that about a third of Americans believe that God punishes people for the sins of their country, relevant of course to the recent natural calamity in Japan. The survey found that most people did not believe that natural disasters were either a sign from God or punishment/judgment from God of the sins of countries. Almost 40% believed that catastrophes were signs from God, while 29% believed that God sometimes punished countries with natural disasters. And this is a survey of America. Concerning white evangelicals, the poll found that over half of them believed both that God uses natural disasters for signs and for punishment, which is only reflective of a general problem many Christians find in that position, explaining why there is some drift from this extreme position in its varied forms. The poll found people were more than willing to believe God was in control of all things, but they were less than certain about ascribing responsibility to God for everything, such as floods, fires, earthquakes, tsunamis, hurricanes or even something more human in nature, like terrorist attacks. At best, most Christians would either ascribe these to the sinful nature of the world we live in or Satan respectively (since Muslims could be demon possessed according to some Christians, I imagine). This kind of theodicy, explaining the suffering and evil in the world as it relates to an all powerful and benevolent God, is at least better in comparison to believing God actually consciously judges Japan as undeserving of its protection, as if Japan and many Asian countries haven’t been suffering earthquakes and tsunamis for decades and it’s less likely people gave God credit for those. When you start saying God is both in control of and responsible for every event, you start contradicting what I’ve understood to be a crucial part of Christian belief: that every human has freewill to choose good or evil. If you start saying, like the Westboro Baptist Church for the most heinous example, that God is just mad all the time at people for not doing everything the way it wants, then it may very well be affecting your general regard towards people as little more than pawns in a cosmic game of chess, to use a cliché trope. As much as people might be doing charity in the name of God, I would prefer if we started emphasizing that we do charity because we are humans, because we’d like people to do the same for us in return, as Jesus even spoke of in the Gospels. Until next time, Namaste, aloha and Ganbare (Don’t give up!) Japan.

Divine and Human Relationships

http://religion.blogs.cnn.com/2010/11/12/our-take-your-relationship-style-determines-how-you-feel-toward-god/

This article might be shorter, since I was putting it off in hopes of a better story to write on. But in all fairness, this one is still compelling and stabs at the heart of most peoples’ beliefs. The gist of the article goes like so; since we are (allegedly) hardwired to believe in and have a relationship with “God”, the reason why there are people that disbelieve in “God” (such as Christopher Hitchens, his diagnosis with cancer just a way for their authors to sink their teeth into his atheism as relevant) is because their personality style is too negative, either of themselves, of others or both. This already seems too deterministic for my sense, even fatalistic on the part of the authors. If we are inevitably meant to come to “God”, then one has to ask why it is equally defensible to behave ethically towards others because it makes sense as a duty apart from religious convictions, causes the most potential and actual benefit for the greatest number of people or reflects innate virtues we can discern by reason.

One can have a positive regard for oneself and others in relationship style, but also find it less than compelling to extend that sense of relationship to a being that transcends humanity. This is especially so since “God” seems to be little more than an almighty will that either behaves indeterminately by caprice, or as it’s commonly called, grace; or by its own nature, is bound to choose things the most as the First Cause of all things that have free will and volition more than God would ever be able to. The real difficulty with this is that the conclusion of the article is already presuming that everyone already misunderstands God through institutional religion of sorts, supposedly why fewer people self identify as Christian or if they do, they stay clear of association with any church. They advocate seeing God as different from human relationships, resulting in you becoming more comfortable and willing to engage with God. This is all well and good except that it still brings up my objection of fatalism. No matter what relationship type a person might have: ranging from secure in oneself and others, overly secure in oneself and disregarding others, insecure in oneself and overly secure in others or insecure in both self and others, the authors claim that everyone can find a path to God.

This leads to what is ironically a point of contention between those that advocate religious tolerance and pluralism and those that insist that only their path has the fullest truth. This notion which is as old as Hinduism, manifests in the phrase “Truth is one, the sages speak of it by many names,” Many contend that this is strong relativism, saying that every religion is equally valid. But just because I accept that Christianity has validity and compelling teachings to some people is not to say that I think that they are equally true in every aspect, especially in my personal convictions. There are no doubt personality types that are more disposed to believe in Dharmic religions that are focused on the here and now and those that are more liable to believe in what I term a teleocentric worldview.

However much Christians value creation (environment and animals) as befits being given dominion over animals and the earth with an obligation not to abuse what God gave them out of its love, their worldview still seems overly future based from my years as a religion major. I would study some form of theology in virtually any class, even in my philosophy minor, encountering Kierkegaard’s fideism alongside Aquinas’ more balanced method of rationality and revelation as complements. The prospect of a heavenly reward has never struck me as especially appealing, even assuming I had never heard of Nietzsche noting “in heaven all the interesting people are missing,” I had already thought many times about my future in the metaphysical sense. Would I want to live forever, would I want to never “suffer” in my corporeality, never need to practice and discipline myself in training in the martial arts, a pastime I enjoyed for many years and am compelled to begin anew? My answer to all these questions was a resounding no.

So maybe it is personality and relationship type that affects how one relates to God. And by association, the authors may have some tweaking to do in the relationship styles. Or at the very least, they may have to accept that those people with the Anxious or Fearful styles may not ever come to believe that they need a relationship with God to feel content and fulfilled. The “tweaking” I suggest is actually allowing for other combinations of regard towards both oneself and others. There is indeed the excessive or deficient regard for oneself as combined with similar overflow or lack of empathy towards others. That already gives us four types right there.

What about those who have something of a moderated sense towards themselves and others? What if, instead, these are improved relationship types and not the types that are the initial template for how we interact with people as we mature from youth? In this case, perhaps there is some merit to this idea, but one would have to extend it to one’s disposition towards particular forms of religiosity; Dharmic, Abrahamic, eclectic, syncretic, Right Hand, Left Hand, or any number of other possibilities. So while in one sense I can find common ground with these Christians that a magnanimous pity for Hitchens as he claims that he will most likely not convert at his deathbed, I would ask them to broaden their scope beyond just what makes their faith seem appealing to others. At the very least, they should concentrate on making religiosity in relationship seem appealing. Until next time, Namaste and aloha.

Religion: Comfort in Certainty or Contentment in Chaos?

http://religion.blogs.cnn.com/2010/11/01/prominent-jerusalem-rabbi-warns-of-religions-limits/
http://religion.blogs.cnn.com/2010/11/04/my-take-why-i-changed-from-faith-to-being/

Since there haven’t been huge events in the world that have had relevance to present society, I thought it better to consider religion and faith in general for once this week instead of specific incidents that connect to their study.

David Hartman, a well known Orthodox rabbi and philosopher, starts his CNN Belief Blog interview by noting what is probably the first thing most people view religion as; something to comfort them, to make them see the possibility of hope in a world that is intrinsically chaotic, unpredictable and varied in the satisfaction we gain in it. But Hartman cautions against this view, noting that religion shouldn’t be seen as a way to bind oneself to something in order to make the proverbial roller coaster of life seem more bearable. Religion may in some way have this function, as a method of therapy and catharsis, a cleansing of the mind and a reorientation of our perspective. But it shouldn’t be seen as a way to transcend life and go beyond suffering and the reality that we experience every day. Religion is not acquiring ultimate answers to give people, because otherwise, life would be perfect. If we just got a solution to the problem of people suffering loss of friends and family, life wouldn’t be in the state it is, with people in some cases becoming so fixated on the afterlife that they eschew any value to life as we know it. Not everyone is a Gnostic in that radical dualism of the spirit and flesh. But even a belief system where we think we have some ultimate revelation about how the world will end is still going a step beyond what it ought to be. Any religion that steps into the human realm and speaks to them as if they’re some messenger of God with just the right answers has turned its followers, laity and clergy alike, into puppets of self delusion. Hartman brings up the example of kids suffering with cancer. Religion doesn’t solve these problems, science does, over time. Religion heals wounds over time as well, albeit those of a more subtle nature. To Rabbi Hartman, religion is that system which enables us to persevere in the face of absurdity, of the uncertain. I would go a step further and say that this system shouldn’t be called religion, but instead something of a fusion of religion and philosophy. By this, I mean that this system, whatever one might want to call it, should involve both principles of ethics and practice following from them. Paul Kurtz, a philosopher called the “father of secular humanism” coined the term eupraxophy, which describes a system that focuses more on ethical behavior than what he called the “transcendental temptation”; what I understand to be similar to what Rabbi Hartman spoke about. We can’t live life thinking we have all the answers, no matter how much we’ve experienced in our own lives. A child could present more genuine ethics in a funeral situation or any such disaster than someone even my grandparents’ age. In a child innocently understanding that when someone is crying, they are upset, they would also consider it appropriate to console the person in a way that may involve words, but may simply involve a touch of the hand. That kind of comfort is something any person can appreciate, even if they also know that it will pass away. Knowing people will pass away is not cause for holding a belief that eventually people won’t pass away. It seems more prudent to focus on behaving well and cultivating good habits of ethics presently instead of hoping for some future where all our problems have been solved. As Hartman said, “I prefer a religion that gives me the strength to live with the unpredictable world rather than denying it,”

Continuing with the line of thought about the terms we use to describe such a system that appears in varied forms, without or with God. Some call it religion, others a relationship; some prefer to call it philosophy, discovering wisdom and fulfillment in life. There’s also belief system or worldview that express a more comprehensive idea, but are also very extensive and intimidating to people who want a basic way to express what their practice of virtue is. And of course there’s the term eupraxophy which is still very much unknown in common parlance. Even the term faith seems too limited, since not every person focuses on their faith in something in the sense that many have come to use the word. To have faith in something nowadays seems to be persisting in a conviction even when there is evidence or experience to the contrary. People who advocate this kind of faith also don’t seem to want a fellow believer to ever backslide or revert to their old ways, or distance themselves from the beliefs they were raised with. I can’t genuinely seem to name any names, not even a particular cousin who has generally harsh criticism of “liberalism” but is also quite liberal with his advice and doesn’t seem to know when to hold his tongue and listen to someone else talk, like a younger cousin of mine in college, not as concerned in his youth about his salvation so much as his education. The generation gap could be accused as the culprit in this case, but it seems like it may be something more along the lines of differences of personality. There are those that are more prone to being fixated on conservation of the past and future without realizing that in many cases, what is done in the present reflects both one’s past and future; the past in what you have learned and grown through before and the future in what you might do and how you might confront the unknown. And there are those that are potentially too invested in the present to the exclusion of considerations of the past or the future; ignoring past mistakes or not considering the consequences of their actions that will happen. A balance needs to be found or at least some moderation of either side. We admittedly need people that are more motivated by either rational or emotional considerations, and even those that contain aspects of both; like a philosopher of religion, considering religion, a discipline intertwined with people’s hopes and fears, through philosophy, more rigorous and structured, though aligned with religion nonetheless in seeking happiness through reason’s lens. Krista Tippet, host of the radio show now titled On Being reflects something of this sentiment. If we are to make a genuine pursuit of understanding what we have in common, we have to at least loosen our grip on, if not let go as reified ideas, those terms like faith and reason and consider them in a more general context before automatically reducing them to our particular contexts in life. Myself, as a child raised Christian, becoming a teen Deist and then finally concluding after college as more of a Buddhist; I am just one person of many that can be observed and approached in, and approach others with, the spirit of hospitality and tolerance. Not gullibility and naivete, mind you, but a deep trust alongside discretion honed over time and experience. Until next time, Namaste and aloha.

The Supreme Court's Status Quo Broken?

http://religion.blogs.cnn.com/2010/05/19/do-6-catholics-3-jews-9-protestants/?hpt=C1

Stephen Prothero is an author I’d only heard about through his book Religious Literary: What Every American Needs to Know and Doesn’t, which notes the irony of our country’s high religiosity and advocacy of “Christian values” and yet the common ignorance of basic knowledge of the Bible. Now that he’s a contributor on CNN’s Belief Blog, I will follow him in his future posts. His commentary focuses on the imbalance that has occurred with the new support of Elena Kagan by President Obama. With Paul Stevens leaving the Justices and being the last Protestant to stay in the Supreme Court since the numbers started dwindling, Kagan’s presence would make 3 Jews alongside the 6 Catholics that have persisted. Many might complain on the grounds that the commonly Protestant presence of justices in the Supreme Court has now disappeared completely. Even with the Congress at 55% Protestant, their lack of representation in the judicial system disappoints many, no doubt.

But Prothero, along with scholar Nora Rubel, argues that the Protestant influence in America will persist, even with the range of Justices in the Supreme Court now skewed between Judaism and more traditional Catholic Christianity. The crux of this idea falls on the idea that Protestantism has influenced Catholicism and Judaism in America to an extent many may not recognize, including the obvious presence of almost universally Protestant presidents in the White House (excluding John F. Kennedy primarily). But the most important of these influences from the Reformation on Catholic and Jewish thinking today is the recognition of religion as a personal decision, the communal influence incidental to the person choosing a faith and the practice of the religion not as important as the adherence to creeds (which I would dispute as a student of religious studies myself, but that’s for another day). William James, a thinker I am thinking of studying deeper in grad school in the future, put forth the definition that fuels this idea of religion as a primarily individual decision and area of consideration; "the feelings, acts, and experiences of individual men in their solitude, so far as they apprehend themselves to stand in relation to whatever they may consider the divine.” With this in mind, the psychological aspects of religion are of primary concern, not the social or political potential one’s religious beliefs would have within those spheres of consideration. As little meaning as I may find in many of the Protestant teachings, if this decidedly individualistic bent is any indication of Protestant theology, it is certainly part of our heritage that I can appreciate nonetheless. Until next time, Namaste and Aloha.

And on an unrelated note, I will not be blogging as much as I used to, having a 35 hour work week. Hopefully I can work on a movie review occasionally on the weekends. Tomorrow, I’ll be updating my poetry for the last time until more comes from my imagination.

The Military and the Cross

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/us_fort_carson_cross
Even though I’ve already put in my two cents on the recent scandal with the National Day of Prayer, I found this short article this morning and thought I’d do a quick commentary on it. A symbol at an army hospital, Evans Army Community Hospital, at Fort Carson in Colorado Springs is being appealed to be removed since not only is the emblem a cross with a pointed base (allegedly used by Christian pilgrims to mark a camp site) but the phrase in Latin translates to “For God and humanity”. The representative Lt. Col. Steve Wollman argues that the symbol has been accepted by the army since 1969 and that references to doctors serving God and humanity go back to Hippocrates, the originator of the Hippocratic Oath used unofficially by many doctors today. The problem with that argument is that the original text swears to Apollo, Asclepius and Panacea among other Greek deities. Ancient Greeks weren’t disposed to swearing to one creator God in their times, so noting that medical pledges to gods in the ancient times were common practice doesn’t mean that it should be the case now, especially with the religious diversity of the army that is recognized today.

I imagine the reason this symbol has even persisted as long as it has is due in part to the Latin itself, which not many people are especially fluent in or able to read well enough to translate the explicit Abrahamic reference to god with a capital G. Not to mention they could’ve written it off with the pointed base of the cross differing enough from Christian crosses to be considered neutral. According to Mikey Weinstein, president of the Military Religious Freedom Foundation, the association of the cross image with Middle Age Christianity and the Crusade mentality of spreading the faith across the world would send a negative message to Muslims and even soldiers associated with the hospital; that message being that the U.S. army is waging some Christian war on terror and more explicitly, Islam in the Middle East. And at least half of the people that lodged the complaint anonymously (because they didn’t want their superiors to know about it, making me that much less inclined to associate with the military at all; thanks conscientious objector status) were Protestant or Catholic, so to say this is some attack on Christianity by non Christians is an absurd argument. All in all, I can’t see why the group can’t use another symbol. Especially since it occurs to me that the military is not exactly one to accept standing out a great deal, valuing conformity to tradition and authority over needless self expression. To say the army wants robots for soldiers is another topic in itself, but changing the symbol shouldn’t be a large change. Using the symbol of the Red Cross would be a better choice in my eyes, however religious in nature it may initially appear. Anyway, until my next article, Namaste and Aloha.

Church, State and Prayer

http://www.cnn.com/2010/POLITICS/04/25/obama.graham/index.html?hpt=T2

http://www.newsweek.com/id/236904

The last issue I even blogged on with the President in detail was Obama meeting with Tenzin Gyatso, the 14th Dalai Lama, who has taken time off from his travels. In more recent news, President Obama met with church icon (get it?) Billy Graham. I’m amazed Graham’s still alive, but I suppose he is the lesser of two evils with Pat Robertson still alive. He and President Obama, along with his son, the more controversial Franklin Graham, spoke on various issues of faith in the presidency. Billy Graham has been well known for being the so called “pastor to the presidents”, having counseled at least 12 other presidents in his lifetime, which is a monumental achievement. However little meaning I may find in the message he preaches, I do admire his devotion to the passion he found in his life. The two discussed also their love of golf (what man in his 50s and above doesn’t love golf a bit?) and Chicago (Obama’s alma mater and a place where Billy Graham started some radio broadcasting). Graham Sr. gave the president two bibles, after which the two men prayed for each other and left for other important ventures. Graham’s son, Franklin, had been recently uninvited to speak at the Pentagon for the upcoming National Day of Prayer (which I’ll talk a little more about in relation to the second article by Jon Meacham), because he was a tad insensitive to Muslim issues. He spoke on CNN that true Islam is apparently all the extreme use of shariah law, including beating your wife because you suspect her of adultery. He tried to save his hide from the rebound of the insult to more moderate Muslims, but evidently it didn’t work in his favor, since he was basically denied his “commission”. He said he had Muslim friends, but that he didn’t like how Islam was practiced in the predominately Muslim world in the Middle East as he has been there in the past.

Of course, this isn’t the only controversy or issue of interest; Obama praying with Billy Graham and son is more something people would find positive things from. The striking down of the National Day of Prayer as unconstitutional, however, has been met with opposition by Obama’s administration. To advertise an acquaintance’s blog I occasionally read (http://indefenseoftheconstitution.blogspot.com) he argues that the 1st Amendment does not extend to government involvement with religious practices, prayer being the one that was argued by Barbara Crabb to be something the government should not have a say on. While I respectfully disagree, I can see how the issue might be of importance as he is a strong Christian believer, while I am not anything Christian except in lineage of sorts (raised Christian that is). The alleged wording on the National Day of Prayer is a suggestion, a voluntary choice. But even if this is so and prayer is not being forced, which according to Mr. Luna would violate the separation of church and state in terms of establishment, there is a compelling argument that church and state’s separation should extend to the explicitly religious behaviors, including prayer. While giving a moment of silence is one thing, giving an open moment of prayer does seem to suggest more explicitly the advocacy of pleading to a personal deity to answer some humble request. If the government, according to the establishment clause, should pass no law respecting an establishment of religion, one can interpret it to extend to passing a law that says that people “may pray to God”. There is a border where religion is granted its freedom to practice (in any way that does not violate other Constitutional standards of free speech and religious practice by association, such as libel/slander and the like) and the state does not overstep its bounds to legislate laws about religious practice in any way, shape or form or restrict religious practice beyond reason. Suggesting that the government have a say about the religious practice of prayer does appear to cross the border we give religion as an individual and communal practice of believers.

Jon Meacham’s argument in particular, leans on the religious call for prudence in regards to the government and its sanction of religion. Long before Thomas Jefferson, there were others (Puritan thinkers of some stripe or another) that argued that religion and state should stay separate because they are in decidedly different spheres. Religion has its own structure of authority and loyalty to God, while the state has its own authority structure and loyalties to the people it governs. It is similar to Jesus’ call in Matthew 22:21, to “Render unto Caesar the things which are Caesar’s, and unto God the things that are God’s”. In this way, I am not advocating, nor is Jon Meacham, a complete isolation of the two. State officials cannot help in their rendering of their government duties to sometimes reflect on their regard to the divine in some form or fashion. Barack Obama recently prayed for the 29 victims of the mining disaster in West Virginia, the Justices perform their duties according to particular religious beliefs, Antonin Scalia coming to mind, and even the Supreme Court opens with a prayer (which may be rendered by many different chaplains of different faiths, such as Hindus, at least once to my memory). The involvement of religion in the lives of representatives should not be denied or suppressed, but the role of religion in their lives should be restricted within reason to the extent that they neither legislate laws supporting any explicitly religious practice, nor limit the legitimate practice of religion in the private lives of the citizens of the country. If anything, this ruling may go either way, but Jon Meacham’s concluding dilemma raises a good consideration of at least two outcomes of the appeal, “the choice between a government-sanctioned religious moment and the perpetuation of a culture in which religion can take its own stand, free from the corruptions of the world”. So religion can either be independent and yet related to federal issues, in the sense of a civil religious culture, or it can be intertwined with government, leaving a gap open to potential theocratic justifications. Which would you choose? Until next time, Namaste and Aloha.

Who Cares What Jesus Would Do?

http://abcnews.go.com/GMA/Spirituality/father-edward-beck-asks-cares-jesus/story?id=10319427

Having heard much in the news in the last few weeks regarding the Catholic Church confronting the sex abuse scandals as well as seeing the many prominent tragedies or issues that plague the world at large, the common phrase popular in the 90s (though I would think it went as far back as the 60s; not sure on that) What Would Jesus Do? (hereafter abbreviated as WWJD) still resonates with many people. But this article really puts the idea in perspective and points out a fatal flaw within it. The gist is that we’re putting Jesus on a pedestal and using all his actions as the standard to which we must reach. And even if you’re not Christian, you can appreciate the radical nature of Jesus’ behavior and seek to emulate it. He reformed culture, he got people to follow him and preach his ideas in one way or another, not to mention he stood up to authority that had taken itself too seriously or insisted on powers beyond what were allocated to it (Pharisees and the Roman army respectively) But if you take what is supposed to be God incarnate in the Christian vision and make that the standard to live up to, you’re inevitably bound to fail at it, or appear so self righteous that you alienate all those around you by behaving as if you’re superior just because you’re celibate.

By all means you can ask “What Would Jesus Advise You To Do?” since this affirms his authority, Christian or otherwise, as a teacher, but does not suggest that his standard of excellence is what we should hold ourselves to; no more than every martial artist should hold Bruce Lee as their goal to reach. In both cases, we’re talking about men that were the best of the best in what they did, albeit Bruce Lee never made alleged claims to deity. But like Jesus, he took his practice and lifestyle very seriously and taught it as best he could to others in hopes that they might follow the ideals and practices that he had used in his lifetime. To try to take either teacher and make their life’s example as the be all and end all of what you should seek to do is not only dangerous in that it borders on a personality cult, but like a personality cult, it saps you of your individuality and self expression. You can emulate Jesus in that you forgive others that do you wrong, while also pointing out to them that it wasn’t exactly right of them to do whatever they did to you. But to react exactly like Jesus is not only predictable, but it stifles any notion that you’re supposed to be you and not Jesus. As the author, Edward L. Beck, notes, Jesus “was never married, never a parent, never a woman and never fell victim to sinfulness as the rest of us do,” With his lack of complete accessibility to every human, people should take his more universal ethical teachings to heart instead of thinking they can perfectly emulate him through less than expected methods or being notoriously nonconformist to the point where you are conforming to a standard of nonconformity. Until next time, Namaste and Aloha.

The Meaning(s) of Easter

http://www.barna.org/barna-update/article/13-culture/356-most-americans-consider-easter-a-religious-holiday-but-fewer-correctly-identify-its-meaning

After going to an Easter sunrise service (staying up the entire night so as not to get 2-3 hours of sleep and be grumpy about it) and hearing the pastor note a study from the Barna Group about how people regard Easter, I thought I’d look into it. After a cursory glance, I took a well deserved nap. And after analyzing it in more detail, I am somewhat disappointed as to how they use their relatively small sampling (a little over 1000 people) to suggest that everyone in the U.S. is ignorant about Easter’s meaning in the Christian context. Some of the answers they gave seem to be there just to make the evangelicals and born again Christians feel superior that they know the “true” meaning of Easter. Some people suggest it is reflective of welcoming the spring or of Passover (which are both true in terms of meaning you can derive from the holiday). Some of the answers are admittedly more concerned with “consumer culture” as it’s termed or the general togetherness the holiday brings. None of these are necessarily the incorrect meaning unless you view the Christian answer as the only true one, which is one of my issues with such groups using studies to justify their status quo or lack thereof.

There’s also their distinction between seeing Easter as a religious holiday and of seeing the “true” meaning of Easter in the alleged resurrection of Jesus. How are these different except in the specificity; that is, assuming there has to be one meaning only? It’s not as if they’re complaining overall; they seem to have a concern about people in my age category and their progressively “secular” thinking making them forget that Easter is even a religious holiday. But the very way they phrase the distinction of the groups that are mistaken about Easter and the minority that affirms the specific things they want to hear troubles me; as if being an evangelical or a born again Christian is not affirming a religious position or should be the majority position. The Barna Group seems more concerned about groups affirming that Easter is both a religious holiday and focused on Jesus’ resurrection. Although even that is observed in the statistics (however suspect they are) to be questionable since less than half of all the age demographics affirm that Jesus’ resurrection is the meaning of Easter, meaning any group affirming exactly what the Barna Group thinks is right are in the minority of what is a miniscule representation of the 300 million+ people in the U.S..

The issue they’re not seeing is that people are not educated enough about Christianity or Easter in the first place to really know what the Christian meaning is in the context of what is commonly their native religion. This issue is not uncommon, especially with a book by Stephen Prothero coming to mind: Religious Literacy: What Every American Needs to Know--And Doesn’t. He notes that America is one of the least religiously literate nations in the world; however advanced we may be in other areas of consideration, such as military. With this in mind, I don’t see the Barna Group’s concern as surprising, but I do see their positive conclusion about people’s willingness to invite people to Easter services as the least of their concerns. The groups willing to follow through with their likelihood to invite friends to Easter services were 31% of their 1000 people, suggesting that even if all 300+ people did what they said they’d do, the increase in congregations would be a paltry sum in the dwindling numbers of active churchgoers. If they really want to improve the status of their religion’s popularity or accessibility to today’s people, then they should adjust the way they communicate to them. However objectionable it may be, I can’t imagine it’s that hard to emphasize the miraculous nature of your founder’s return from the dead even to today’s people, however “secular” they may be. It’s a matter of focusing on the meaningfulness derived from the story itself. The historical or scientific credulity, it would seem to me, is secondary to convincing people that the story of the Jewish rabbi returning to life as a pseudo vampire and saving their souls is something they can derive meaning and purpose from. After all, you’re taking the story on faith primarily, are you not? Until next time, Namaste and Aloha.