Looking At Eastern Religion From the West

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/thomas-david-dubois/does-asia-have-religion_b_1031869.html

http://www.1world1way.com/coach/cultures_east_vs_west.html

As someone who has studied and continues to study religion, I find myself getting trapped in the same patterns that the discipline started from, which are decidedly Western and Christian, only one of which I remotely consider myself. The tendency I refer to is considering more Asian or Eastern religions according to the European or Western standard. Buddhism, Confucianism, Shinto, Hinduism, Daoism, Sikhism, Jainism and others all fall under something of an umbrella of systems classified as Dharmic; that is, following a path or adhering to a natural law, which is one common translation of the term dharma in Sanskrit. At least two of the faiths I listed are commonly not even considered religions in academic study: Confucianism and Jainism, mostly because they are centered on human activity instead of the supernatural related to the human. This creates an ambiguity about classification and what you include amongst common lists of 12 for most people involved in the study as a whole. Sometimes Buddhism isn’t even considered, since it’s almost as ambiguous about the relevance of the supernatural. There is also a huge swath of diversity within these religions due to the lack of specificity about a sacred or otherwise central text for the religion itself. There are many examples of relatively important historical texts for a background on any of these faiths: Tripitaka (Three Baskets) for Buddhism, along with the Pali Canon in general, the Vedas for Hinduism, the Dao De Jing and Zhuangzi for Daoism, and the list goes on. But none of those texts are considered absolutely essential for all people associated with those belief systems. All in all, one has to make at least some distinctions between Western and Eastern religion, even though the term is decidedly Western in origin, meaning another term would be required for the kind of precision that would take away the ambiguity that exists in this conversation. But what term would be best?

They very idea of religious studies as an academic discipline originated in Western culture, from a desire to understand religion in more scientific terms. But the basis of what was understood as a religion came from the Abrahamic traditions, which were the most studied at the time, especially Christianity. To believe was to make specific affirmations and to orient to the supernatural. But even with religions that believed explicitly in the supernatural, such as Shinto and Hinduism, there wasn’t the specificity of Christian creeds and so their exotic nature was simplified so as to be more palatable to Western minds. Fundamentally, this created a difficulty with Confucianism, Jainism and Buddhism, since they were more like philosophies and worldviews without the supernatural. So thankfully this exposure to a different manifestation of what we could call the religious impulse of humanity resulted in Western scholars partly recognizing that religion wasn’t limited to a definition that required the supernatural or a sacred text held to be inerrant or infallible. While not everyone has the nuance to see this, it’s at least possible to consider Buddhism and Confucianism as religions in a nominal sense, even though many scholars would contest this on the grounds that you’re stretching the credibility of the term religion to include things that may be better classified outside of that. The term religion itself is subject to some debate in its etymology. On the one hand we have the analysis by Cicero of re-ligare, to re-read or re-examine. This doesn’t possess the more creed based idea of another popular interpretation that religion is derived from the Latin religare, to bind fast. The former suggests a philosophical aspect, whereas the latter has a mystical element in communion with the divine. That aside, the question remains as to the nature of Eastern religion and whether there’s another term that could work in describing it apart from Western religion’s preconceptions and the partly loaded ideas that result.

Since we’ve partly established that religions in the East are either philosophical in nature and thus don’t qualify as well for the Western definition, or are more syncretic and/or eclectic in their approach to the supernatural, the Western ideas about religion are either barely applicable, such as with Hinduism or Sikhism in the connection to the divine, or virtually irrelevant, such as with Buddhism and Jainism that regard the gods as inconsequential to one’s spiritual development. With this in mind, the recognition that there is both a Western and Eastern religion in taking the two popular etymologies into account could complicate things more than if we simplify the discussion to worldviews and approach the subject with the idea that worldviews can have qualities of either side and not require the term religion to describe either of them. The term worldview admittedly creates some difficulties, since it doesn’t preclude the inclusion of various other beliefs that are more non-philosophical in nature, such as politics and the like. But overall it would enable us to present the differences side by side and also admit that there is some overlap. Some worldviews of Western origin might fit Eastern qualities better, such as Wicca. There are also religions that skim the boundary, such as Zoroastrianism, possessing some aspects of Western religion, such as a sacred text, the Avesta, but also reflecting a dualism that isn’t as present in Christianity with God as sovereign, whereas Ahura Mazda is in conflict with Angra Mainyu in a battle of good versus evil. The category overlaps could continue on for a while, but for the moment, we should admit that the classification is imperfect, but effective nonetheless.

There will necessarily be differences between these two forms of “religion” Western religion is more a matter of affiliation to one specific system or institution (Christianity, Judaism, etc), while Eastern religion is more associated with cultural practices and can be eclectic and syncretic in nature. Western faiths have more commonly associated official texts and creeds, whereas Eastern faiths have a lot of overlap and aren’t so strict in your identification with one and another, since they can harmonize with each other very easily in a sense, as Japan did with Shinto, its native belief system and Buddhism as it came from China, which also did the same thing with its own folk beliefs and Buddhism as it came from India. Even with traditions like Confucianism, Buddhism and Shinto to an extent, the behavior of believers is not the same and neither is the regard of the believers to the supernatural itself as opposed to society in relation to one’s beliefs. The Western idea of religion that we take for granted is derived primarily from an Abrahamic perspective that saw other belief systems as religions according to a very narrow idea of what constitutes religion in terms of beliefs related to the supernatural, which would’ve excluded Confucianism in the strictest sense, but also consider Chinese folk beliefs a religion of sorts unto itself. The more fluid and dynamic nature of Asian religion necessitates that you consider it within its own cultural sphere instead of under the Western lens that can push out many otherwise compelling and important Asian religions, even minority ones like Jainism and folk religions like Bon. The world religions class you take in college may give you a starting point for discussion, but it won’t necessarily present the belief systems as very different from those that many students were raised in. This will mean many of them have presuppositions about what a religion is supposed to be which will subsequently be shattered with the sheer diversity of Hinduism alone, along with Daoism and Shinto. The differences shouldn’t be cause for alarm, but an opportunity to broaden one’s horizons and see that religion is not always how we identify our beliefs, strictly speaking. Until next time, Namaste and aloha.

WDAD: What Do Atheists Do About Religious Norms? Part 1

http://atheism.about.com/od/aboutreligion/p/StudyReligion.htm

http://atheism.about.com/od/christmasholidayseason/p/AtheistsIgnore.htm

http://irregulartimes.com/further6.html

http://atheism.about.com/od/ideasforatheistactivism/a/AffirmSwear.htm

Being an atheist in America is still difficult even after attempts by many prominent nonbelievers over the decades to normalize it as part of modern culture. Madalyn Murray O’Hair comes to mind, as well as Sam Harris and Daniel Dennett. Christopher Hitchens has American citizenship as well, originally from Great Britain, and Richard Dawkins, a British native, also has made strong strides for nonbelievers. American Atheists is one of the most prominent groups to promote atheism as a culture and community that also shares many values with Christian Americans. But there are many persistent preconceptions people have about atheism that cannot be solved with even the prominent ad campaigns American Atheists has done, as I spoke about in “Atheists Patriot Ad Campaign,”  There are so many, in fact, I have to divide this into two parts. This week will be issues of atheists studying religion and whether that is hypocritical, whether atheists can celebrate holidays of a religious origin and whether atheists must swear on the bible in court.

Something I encounter virtually every time I speak about my undergraduate major, religious studies (sometimes phrased as religion), is that if you are studying religion, you’re presumed to have considered going into ministry. The idea that religion has to be studied from the position of a believer always irks me, since it suggests that one cannot really study religion in an academic context of its effect on culture, on people, as philosophy, as literature, etc, without believing that it reflects reality. The default notion historically for studying religion (understood intrinsically as Christianity and Judaism by association) was to minister to people about theology, to be someone people could consult about these sorts of issues. Pastors can serve that purpose, but only in a limited framework, since their primary goal is counseling more than actually educating people overall. I am in no way doing a disservice to religion or even insulting adherents of any particular religion if I study it and reach a conclusion that I personally don’t believe it, but still find it interesting to read about. A good 20% of my personal library is texts about Christianity, primarily theological or apologetic in nature, if only to see what believers present as enumerations of beliefs and defenses thereof. I can finish any of those texts with an improved understanding of Christianity and yet remain an atheist at the end of it. I would say my study of religion actually helped me a great deal in confronting my own beliefs and comparing them with texts presenting other convictions from their individual perspectives. I gained skills to analyze things that benefit me even today and that is nothing for anyone to denigrate by claiming I’m being disingenuous. If that’s the case, then many Christians who do the same thing in their spare time and ultimately conclude they don’t agree with it are basically as guilty, even if they don’t do it academically. They’ve still looked at something they disagree about with a partly discerning eye and come away a more knowledgeable person (I hope).

Another issue that persists even in spite of pretty clear secular manifestations of such things as Christmas and Easter (the two most prominent religious holidays celebrated even by so called religious people who only come into church two times a year) is a prejudice of atheists being supposedly hypocritical in taking part in religious holidays when they don’t believe in God. While Easter may have more explicit connections to God, Christmas is agreed by even theologians and many more fundamentalist Christians to not be historically justified or have any theological relevance to Jesus. Jesus was more than likely born much later or earlier than the winter, especially with cultural considerations of the shepherds in relation to their sheep. The date decided through church practices in the past coincided with Saturnalia, a pagan practice that Christians sought to co-opt and it has remained that way in spite of historians of varying faiths, Christians included, concluding that it is purely a matter of popularity, not dissimilar from All Hallow’s Eve in the Catholic calendar following Halloween chronologically. A certain group of Christians don’t even celebrate either Christmas or Halloween, for instance, suggesting that they have been so intertwined with non Christian religious practices and are not worthy of devotion. There’s also the observation that Jesus never said to observe anything related to his birth, but only related to his alleged resurrection as he spoke to his disciples. Easter is the more contentious of the holidays, since it is agreed upon by all Christians to focus on God and its involvement with the world through Jesus’ Passion, Crucifixion and Resurrection. But, like Christmas and Halloween, there is a way to celebrate Easter without being clothed in reverence to a deity. Merely celebrating spring and new life coming to be through that season seems sufficient to me. I don’t have to get up at the crack of dawn to appreciate spring, since the sunrise will happen every day regardless, as far as I’m concerned. Regardless of the sacred overtones or undertones of any day, it doesn’t exclude atheists from participating in a different, but similar, way. I can get married, but that doesn’t require I pledge my fidelity before God anymore than me getting candy eggs at Easter means I have to believe Jesus came back to life. It is in no way contradictory to celebrate a holiday’s non religious virtues and ideals, since, in all cases, they have already long since been separated by the practice of consumer culture inculcating in us the desire to buy not only candy and presents in convergence with Xmas, Halloween and Easter, but decorations to adorn our house to let others know that we celebrate the holiday. But this in no way establishes (mostly) whether you’re Christian or otherwise. Similarly, I can share time with family and have a good experience, but I don’t need to have extraneous beliefs attached to a special day like Xmas in order to appreciate it. The mere shared experience of happiness and enjoyment is special in itself.

The final question asked (for now) is something actually more easily solved by historical progress. Atheists, from what I recall, were historically not trusted to give oaths, though outspoken atheists didn’t exist prominently until probably 50 years ago or so. But now atheists are trusted to give oaths, albeit technically they are called affirmations in legal terminology. The distinction lies between making a claim without religious sentiment that you will tell the truth and nothing but the truth as opposed to swearing to God, which some Christians would argue contradicts what Jesus says in Matthew 5:37 “Simply let your yes be yes and your no be no,” If atheists can assert that they will tell the truth because it makes sense to and that there will be repercussions if they are found to be lying; while Christians seem to think they have some moral high ground when making an oath to God and also doing it partly because they might be charged with perjury; perhaps the former is simpler than the latter. This is one of those questions that has a simple answer and yet is complicated by a basic lack of education. If you are in a court of law, you have no compulsion to take any religious oath, and if you want to put your hand on a bible and swear to both your god and the court that you won’t lie, I can’t help but chuckle, because it’s unnecessary on its face. Why can’t you just not lie because you don’t want to be lied to? Is it that much of an obsession that you need to tell God you won’t lie in a criminal trial?

Atheists have no problem with a religious culture existing and being practiced by people, but they do not need to be practiced by everyone in that sense and there shouldn’t be any pressure to conform by believers. There are secular manifestations and practices of religious holidays and norms, such as the alternative of affirmation versus swearing on the bible for atheists and the like. Not to mention there’s common ground to be found in sharing time with friends and family that transcends those borders between the believing and the unbelieving. Next week, we’ll confront the norms related to patriotism and also that little superstitious phrase uttered when you sneeze with its own history and irony when saying it to atheists. 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.