Religion and philosophy

[mariyaanis]

Do you follow your religion to the core?
Do you think religion changes along with the age of time/ era?

[Harry Marks]

Hi Mariyannis, (welcome to Booktalk)

I don't think I follow my religion to the core, although I am not sure what that means. I am a Christian, and I believe that Jesus taught a kind of salvation by caring for others. But I am not always good at caring for others. I have a lot of selfishness left in me.

On the other hand, I think God loves me as I am and just wants to patiently show me the better way, like a parent helping a child see why it makes sense to be considerate to others. God is reaching out to me, constantly adding to the enlightenment that shows me how it withers me and twists me to be wrapped up in myself, and anxious about the things that might go wrong.

It is quite clear that religion changes with the era. We know that. On the other hand, the real question is whether it should. We Christians often talk about "Progressive Revelation" which means partly that God's intentions were revealed progressively in the past, but also means to many Christians that we continue learning what God has in mind for us.

I take the matter a bit further, and believe that religious precepts and prescriptions should adapt to the era, and should change the world in such a way that the core truth of the religion should become more appropriate to the kind of world people are living in. Democracy was a big change, and was partly in response to impulses religion teaches, but it also made it easier to live the kind of life dedicated to caring that Jesus taught. Universal education has created an economy which relies on education, and that has liberated women's roles and improved the quality of family life.

So, you asked some big questions and I am happy to give you my answer. Others may have things to say about them also.

[Litwitlou]

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An opportunity to say a few things about religion? Irresistible.

For something like 7,000 years, humans have believed in gods. The number of different gods people have faithfully worshiped and sacrificed to, is astounding. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lists_of_deities

Told you it was astounding.

Then along comes the one true God (for Western Civilization) and declares Himself to a small group of chosen people. The chosen held on to God and their religion despite despicable, massive, cruel crimes perpetrated against them again and again. This is courageous and enduring and highly moral.

Or is it? They could have just said, "Meh, one invisible being who torments us constantly on earth while promising pie in the sky is about the same as another."
The grief this would have saved them.

Then came Jesus. His philosophy, as expressed in the Gospels, I find reasonably consistent and quite laudable. Therefore, naturally, they crucified Him. Nevertheless, a single religion based on his life became the predominant system of worship throughout the Western world. That's what the "catholic" means: predominant or all-encompassing. Something like that, I think. Anyway, this religion's authority figures quickly became greedy, lustful, cruel, and just about everything else Jesus was against. This led to one group of Catholics rebelling against other Catholics.. Protestants and Catholics quickly began killing each other and kept it up for, I dunno, maybe 200 years?

Then came Muhammad and the same thing started all over again and continues to this day. So I'll just read the Gospels and try to live my life as Jesus would have liked. The rest of the Bible is a book of horrors to which no decent person, and especially no children, should ever be exposed.

If I ever want to follow a religion, as in an organised system of beliefs along with others who believe as I do, I might try Buddhism. I've never seen or heard of a Buddhist picking up and gun and blowing away a bunch of other Buddhists.
Otherwise, I try to stay as far from organised religion as I can. Does God exist? I hope not. If he does exist He has the morals of an alley cat.

[DWill]

If I ever want to follow a religion, as in an organised system of beliefs along with others who believe as I do, I might try Buddhism. I've never seen or heard of a Buddhist picking up and gun and blowing away a bunch of other Buddhists.
Otherwise, I try to stay as far from organised religion as I can. Does God exist? I hope not. If he does exist He has the morals of an alley cat.

Buddhists in Myanmar are killing Rohingyas, which makes me think of a chapter in God Is Not Great:
"There Is No Eastern Solution." Hitchens didn't let Buddhism and Hinduism off the hook. What we in the West think of as Buddhism is a philosophical distillation of the full religion, as I'm sure you know. Sometimes the problem with religion is said to center on monotheism, but I think Hitchens was correct not to exempt the older polytheistic faiths.

[Litwitlou]

Herman Hesse, Siddhartha,I read it as kid and it was heady stuff then.

[Robert Tulip]

Herman Hesse, Siddhartha,I read it as kid and it was heady stuff then.

Hesse is magnificent. I have just been returning to him after reading most of his great books 35 years ago. This year I have read Siddhartha, Demian and Journey to the East, all for the first time, and finding that he presents an intense enlightened wisdom.

As a German Buddhist, Hesse uniquely captured the zen themes in western mysticism, around the mystery of being. Siddhartha was one of the most popular hippy religious philosophy books in the 1960s, for the way it captures and summarises the problem of integrating existence and reality, placing the disparate confusion of life within the grand unity of the cosmos.

There is a Christian dimension in Siddhartha, with Hesse depicting a meeting with the Buddha in which Siddhartha rejects the idea of following a guru, in favour of seeking his own path. That leads him through the deluded suffering of worldly attachments and temptations, back to an eventual humble vision of how his simple life reflects the whole of eternity, the river of time where all is one.

[Harry Marks]

What we in the West think of as Buddhism is a philosophical distillation of the full religion, as I'm sure you know. Sometimes the problem with religion is said to center on monotheism, but I think Hitchens was correct not to exempt the older polytheistic faiths.

Thanks for bringing up the Buddhist and Hindu oppressions. I was thinking of Myanmar, but also of Sri Lanka. Skeptics are surely correct that conversion of a people to a way of belief has never removed the violence and domination that characterized the struggle for power in the world.

To take the question in a slightly different direction, I am suspecting that the main problem of religion these days is that it cannot change fast enough. The world's economy and culture have quite literally been revolutionized in the last century and a half, but one does not simply take a cultural system that communicates values in terms of the supernatural and change it into a philosophy of virtue and the Oversoul. With science a cornerstone of modern society, the "anti-science" of supernatural beliefs will inevitably be in conflict with it.

I believe mainline Protestant Christianity has done about as good a job as can be done, obviously. With Christian feminism and the new emphasis on community ("new" as of about 35 years ago) the institution no longer orients itself toward supernatural authority and commandments to live right. But it is still nowhere near fully adapted to the mythopoetic requirements of modern life (many of which are the same as those of ancient life, of course.)

[Harry Marks]

Hesse is magnificent.

... he presents an intense enlightened wisdom.

As a German Buddhist, Hesse uniquely captured the zen themes in western mysticism, around the mystery of being. Siddhartha was one of the most popular hippy religious philosophy books in the 1960s, for the way it captures and summarises the problem of integrating existence and reality, placing the disparate confusion of life within the grand unity of the cosmos.

I also loved Siddhartha in my hippie days (note spelling, though Wikipedia says "hippy" is okay, and no self-respecting hippie would deign to care about something so conformist and obsessive as proper spelling). I am following Fr. Richard Rohr, whose Center for Action and Contemplation is making a real effort to translate non-dualism and contemplation into Christian frameworks and help people in the West see the long history of contemplative Christianity that reached many of the same conclusions and experienced many of the same life-changes.

That leads him through the deluded suffering of worldly attachments and temptations, back to an eventual humble vision of how his simple life reflects the whole of eternity, the river of time where all is one.

The real action in religion these days is to combine such non-dualist insight and practice with action to elevate the common life. I put real hope in a message from Lee Wyatt in "The Incredible Shrinking Gospel" about re-orienting Christianity from a focus on sin to a focus on vocation ("calling" but also "hospitality" in Christian tradition.) Wyatt is not particularly from a contemplative background, but he has put his finger on a way of "doing Christianity" that is not caught up in the tangle of managing sin that so many get bogged down in, and not incidentally is much more compatible with mystical and contemplative insight.

Edit to add:
http://www.patheos.com/blogs/mercynotsa ... lt-ridden/

[Robert Tulip]

translate non-dualism and contemplation into Christian frameworks

I think that insight of the unity of all things is actually the original core of Christian philosophy. This core has been corrupted by dualistic thinking, with conventional theology wrongly imagining an ontological difference between heaven and earth, spirit and flesh, eternity and time. Each of these supposed distinctions at the heart of supernatural dogma involves a problem of delusion, with pervasive false beliefs. Heaven is not spatial, but rather a vision of perfect cosmic order, as the ideal that earth could come to reflect. Spirit is not disembodied, but relates to matter as concept relates to thing. Eternity does not primarily mean lasting for ever, but rather is the unchanging quality of ideas in logic, physics and ethics, a quality that stands outside time, and yet is present within time.

That leads him through the deluded suffering of worldly attachments and temptations, back to an eventual humble vision of how his simple life reflects the whole of eternity, the river of time where all is one.

The real action in religion these days is to combine such non-dualist insight and practice with action to elevate the common life.

Such an integrated vision is a messianic ideal. The insight of the unity of all is a contemplative divine vision of God, whereas bringing this transfigured understanding down from the mountain of the sun to the plain of the earth confronts the resistance of the world. Jesus Christ is the archetypal model of pure integrity in bringing an absolute vision of truth into engagement with politics, told in the story of cross and resurrection.

I put real hope in a message from Lee Wyatt in "The Incredible Shrinking Gospel" about re-orienting Christianity from a focus on sin to a focus on vocation ("calling" but also "hospitality" in Christian tradition.) Wyatt is not particularly from a contemplative background, but he has put his finger on a way of "doing Christianity" that is not caught up in the tangle of managing sin that so many get bogged down in, and not incidentally is much more compatible with mystical and contemplative insight.

Seeing the call of God as a core theme in religion is a good way to open the big story, the message at planetary scale. And rather than the personal issues you mention that tend to be the conventional focus of faith, the planetary message is about apocalypse and transformation. The challenge therefore is to see how a coherent story sits beneath the rubble of Christendom, concealed in symbolic code within the Bible, completely compatible with and relevant to scientific knowledge, as an urgent call to turn from a wide and easy path of planetary destruction to a narrow and hard way of what has traditionally been known as salvation, but is better understood as evolutionary survival.

[Harry Marks]

I think that insight of the unity of all things is actually the original core of Christian philosophy. This core has been corrupted by dualistic thinking, with conventional theology wrongly imagining an ontological difference between heaven and earth, spirit and flesh, eternity and time.

I know we have different views on this. I don't think philosophy is a good way to characterize early Christianity. Two factors are strong marks of distinction for the (actually very diverse) early movement: koinonia love feasts, linked strongly to the eucharist, and "the Holy Spirit" including, in some cases, glossolalia. Paul's "spirit vs. flesh" contrast was not very philosophical at all, though it was no doubt influenced by Stoicism and Platonism common across the Hellenistic and Roman worlds.

Some non-dualism is visible in the teachings of Jesus, but I rather think those were matters of direct insight rather than philosophy. I think Jesus, like St. Francis and many others, just "saw" that the internal antagonism over righteousness and purity was obscuring the light of mercy and caring.

Each of these supposed distinctions at the heart of supernatural dogma involves a problem of delusion, with pervasive false beliefs. Heaven is not spatial, but rather a vision of perfect cosmic order, as the ideal that earth could come to reflect. Spirit is not disembodied, but relates to matter as concept relates to thing. Eternity does not primarily mean lasting for ever, but rather is the unchanging quality of ideas in logic, physics and ethics, a quality that stands outside time, and yet is present within time.

Yes, I think that is a good way to see the usefulness of non-dualism, or one might just as well say its beauty, since relating to its "usefulness" imposes the deepest dualism of all, which is the distinction between subject and object. I also think you have usefully touched on the inherent dualism in supernatural notions, since they generally claim that something "out there" will do the spirit's work "in here." I might reformulate your analogy with spirit a little, but basically what you say seems to me to capture the important insight. Likewise I appreciated the statements about vision (or, we often say, "Logos" - the Word) and resistance to earthly implementation.

I put real hope in a message ... re-orienting Christianity from a focus on sin to a focus on vocation ("calling" but also "hospitality" in Christian tradition.) Wyatt ... has put his finger on a way of "doing Christianity" that is not caught up in the tangle of managing sin.

Seeing the call of God as a core theme in religion is a good way to open the big story, the message at planetary scale. And rather than the personal issues you mention that tend to be the conventional focus of faith, the planetary message is about apocalypse and transformation. The challenge therefore is to see how a coherent story sits beneath the rubble of Christendom, concealed in symbolic code within the Bible, completely compatible with and relevant to scientific knowledge, as an urgent call to turn from a wide and easy path of planetary destruction to a narrow and hard way of what has traditionally been known as salvation, but is better understood as evolutionary survival.

Well, I would be hard pressed to think of planetary survival without some sort of emergent resolve to put caring first. Apocalypse and transformation is one possible track for that, but I don't think it is the only one available, or even the one with the strongest connection to the spiritual truths in the religious outlook.

We have been through one "apocalypse and transformation" on the environment, and it simply required that we give up on notions of market perfection in which anything one did for commercial reasons was ipso facto innocent. Getting past the emotional solipsism of "what's good for my treasury is good for society" is only the very lowest stratum of the call of God.

To me vocation is a deep and intrinsically resonant window onto many other Christian concepts: salvation, the Kingdom, living by the Spirit, shalom, the body of Christ, the true vine, sanctification, and more. It is good to feel a part of a great salvation process: "thy Kingdom come." But it is more tangible and vivid to be connected to specific work that connects us in turn to the process of transforming the world.