lunamoth said:
I agree that it is the concrete realities that are meaningful and worth discussion, but I'll have to bow out for lack of sufficient knowledge to discuss them point by point intelligently.
But Deva, I do disagree with your main premise that the Abrahamic faiths have set us up for abusive idealogues, dictators, and other types of absolutist authorities. It is our root human nature, our fallibility, our pride, our weakness in caving in toward picking the golden apple that makes any 'pure' ideology fail in practice.
It is our pride and self-conceit, Deva, that allows us to think that we really can come up with one perfect system that will give justice for all, if only we force it on everyone around us. Even something like communism or socialism, which are based in ideals such as egalitarianism and compassion, are easily corrupted in practice. Are Abrahamic faiths the only source of those ideals?
You can't say that all authoritative, absolutist leanings come from the Abrahamic faiths. What about the dynasties of China and Japan? What about the caste system of India? You can't pin it on the Abrahamic faiths, you can't even pin in on religion in general. You can only pin it on weak human nature, the seduction of power, the very weaknesses that religions seek to counteract. If you want to pin it on religion, you need to go to the foundation and pin it on the virtues, compassion, justice, peace. Religion has no corner of the market of idealism, or self-conceit.
Yes, we can speak in ideals as much as we like but it does not reflect reality. In reality life is messy and if anything is predictible it is that humans are corruptible. The answer to a messy life is a 'messy' govenance, one that is guided by ideals but acknowledges (attempts to deal with) the realities. It's not going to be perfect but if it is flexible it can work toward getting 'more just.' It may not be perfectly just, but if it is transparent it can be held accountable for that injustice.
The accounts of the Bible are not saying that God is going to give some humans mandates to 'take over the world' or some part of it. The accounts of the Bible show that when humans make that mistake to think that they can ignore injustice when they see or create it, there will be consequences. And I don't mean God coming down with his smiting stick, as BB would say. It means just as we see in modern history--those corrupt governments fall and they fall hard, and innocent people are killed. And I am not saying that any country, including the US, is exempt from those consequences. In fact I think we are seeing it ever more strongly in this country. We are Rome.
Now, if you really want to get me going then let's talk about objectivism, which would be a philosphy devoid of religion.
Gotta run!
lunamoth
Hi Luna.
- Finally have some quiet moments to reply to your thoughtful take on the topic.
- Not that I’ve been doing anything interesting, but I have been busy, and then we had a power failure due to high winds on Saturday. We stood around for a while looking at one another, bereft of electricity. Truly we were lost souls! But then we dug out the wind-up radio with built-in flashlight and had hours of entertainment.
- I think the divide here (wide or narrow, depending on your point of view) is between those who read the bible through the eyes of faith, and those, like me, who read it through ordinary eyes. Of course, there’s a wide range of opinion on either side of the divide but I think the divide itself is crucial. Neither side has an easier time of it, but I think you find yourself on one side or the other because that side feels intuitively easier or more self-evident to you, or at least more conformable to common sense.
- So from my side, when you say that these things are rooted in human frailty, I agree, but I extend this frailty to the bible itself, and to the institutions & worldviews that have arisen from it. From my perspective, this is not to demonize this collection of texts, or pretend that here is the source of all evil, but only to dispassionately look at how these texts have influenced our way of thinking, and how they are distinct from other textual traditions.
- So I agree that human beings hardly need the bible to rationalize power & oppression, since as you quite rightly point out these behaviours are ultimately rooted in us (and in our concrete situations) and not in mere texts. My ancestors in northern Europe raped & pillaged with all due diligence long before they discovered the bible, and learned how it could be adopted to their own ends – or worse, how they could invent their own, far more dangerous, ideologies, based on the biblical template.
- The caste system in India is an interesting contrast, which I believe only supports what I’m saying. Here’s a culture diametrically opposed to the Judeo-Christian-Islamic stream, in that before the modern era it had social duties but no social gospel, no sense of an identity between revolution & salvation, little notion of a linear time with a single historical narrative. Instead, they had time as vast cycles, and salvation ultimately based in some form of yoga, all of which arguably encouraged the development, maintenance and stubborn persistence of a caste system. (Just a note: the caste system isn’t as ancient as many think; originally there were merely the four classes, or varnas, roughly, priest/intellectual, warrior/ruler, farmer/trader and worker, common to traditional cultures all over the world, and pretty clearly following on prevailing economic & political conditions. The far more complex caste system as it’s known today developed over centuries in conjunction I would guess with the evolution of the religious culture.)
- So the point is not that there is one bad religious ideology, and that the rest are good or harmless, but that all religious ideologies are human productions (again, to my ordinary eyes), worthy of respect for their thoughts & achievements, but liable each one to its own peculiar benefits & dangers.
- If I were a Dalit in India, I’d be with Ambedkar and rightfully cheesed at traditional Indian culture, and that would be my focus.
- But that’s not where I live. I live in a western cultural sphere where broadly speaking biblical ideology still holds a central place, among the secular as much as the religious. This may be too easy, but when Mr. Bush says you’re either with us or against us, when he talks about the axis of evil, when he divides the world with his compass into precise hemispheres of right & wrong, we can hardly grasp what he’s saying without referring to biblical roots.
- In the bad/grand old days of European colonialism, the white man’s burden, la mission civilisatrice, many missionaries were more than happy to credit Judeo-Christian culture with every achievement of European civilisation. Europe made better shoes, guns, steam engines, economies, and parliaments because it was Christian. Obviously, much more went into the creation of Europe than the gospels, but it’s equally obvious that while the biblical tradition deserves much credit, it logically follows that it deserves some of the blame as well.
- Of course, the bible has no shortage of enemies who will give it not just some but all the blame. But ironically they often blast away from within an ideological framework modelled on the bible. Marx called religion the opiate of the people. His followers returned to the kitchen to cook up analogous drugs, the methadones of Marxism.
- In other words, I think the enemies of the bible really go nowhere because the problem is not ultimately in the bible but in ideology itself (here defined as the dynamic rationalisation of power). As I’ve said elsewhere, because of the special conditions of its production, the bible to me can be said to be the mother of ideology, but maybe a better metaphor is Pandora’s box; once the secret of ideological thinking is let out, it’s not going back in, and it takes on its own life.
- Ideology is a brain disease, Abbie Hoffman said. Maybe it’s more like a chronic, incurable condition.
- So my position is against, or in tension with, ideology, which you may say is an impossible position, like a dog chasing its own tail (tale). Or you may say I’m tilting at windmills, especially in these forums.
- But here’s the whole point. I’m not pretending we can escape biblical ideology, or that we can invent something wholly other. I’m only saying that because we’re all soaking in it and can’t escape it, we better understand what it is, and that means beyond the best case scenario, beyond the ideals of what we think our religious beliefs should mean, and toward a thorough understanding of what our religious beliefs have meant, and how they have worked in fusion with concrete conditions and other strains of thought.
- And here’s where we bridge the divide I mentioned at the beginning. We may be on opposite sides in methods of reading, but we’re on the same side in the biblical sphere; we inhabit the same narrative; history has for us a similar shape; we have a similar preoccupation with questions of justice, with a social gospel, however defined – but this list could be extended; in short, despite the so-called hot button issues, and all the complexities of individual application, we inhabit the same moral universe, and that universe has been crucially shaped by the bible.
- So I would say that the bible remains indispensable on both sides, and again it comes down to the method of reading.
- But here I should make a further distinction. When I say I read with ordinary eyes, I don’t mean to say I read purely with the eyes of the rationalist. When I call the bible a human, fallible document, I don’t mean to deny the reality of what it points to. I only mean to place it within the context of other human, fallible documents, from other traditions, which point to the same reality.
(- Here I guess I’m using the word “ordinary” in the Zen sense.)
- And when we come to reading the bible, it’s easy to point to two contrasting approaches. The first, from the side of faith, sees the bible as a master narrative, unified from beginning to end, so that every word must fit, must be justified according to some method of interpretation.
- The second, from the ordinary side, sees the bible in evolutionary terms, as a collection of writings produced over centuries and edited & re-edited numerous times, and showing a progression from primitive, tribal, ethnocentric roots to more sophisticated and more exalted conceptions.
- From the faith point of view, everything was there from the beginning, in seed form. The Indian Vedic tradition is identical in that regard. For the faithful, everything was already there from the earliest chants, and was only elaborated in the later commentaries, speculations & epics. From the ordinary point of view, Indian tradition shows a considerable evolution from the Brahmanical crib notes of the Vedas to the fully devotional cults of the middle ages.
- From the ordinary point of view, the bible can be seen as analogous to the evolution of the human brain. People talk of three stages of that evolution: the reptilian, the mammalian and the cortical, i.e., the merely reactive, the emotional, and the cognitive aspects of the human mind.
- Of course, this is just a simplification, not to be taken too seriously, but it seems to me that the bible as an instrument can fall into these various uses. At its best, when taken in its most evolved, sophisticated sense, and drawing on its deep emotional power, it’s close to that great force for good we ideally want it to be. But the reptilian, the tribal, the ethnocentric, the xenophobic, the paranoid is always there, forever available.
- When some Muslim demonstrators call for the death & decapitation of journalists for the “crime” of publishing a cartoon, when they burn down embassies for the same reason, when Pat Robertson, who claims to follow Jesus, advises assassination, the reptile is plainly on view. (That is not to say of course that there aren’t many practical economic & political factors that make people susceptible to the reptile in the first place.)
- Here is precisely the dangerous irrationality that produces atheists, hyper-rationalists, nihilists and sceptics who sadly believe in nothing. Here is why so many are tempted to do away with the idea of religion altogether.
- As you know, I’m a pluralist, and one who believes that the great traditions are not futile; that they do point to deep things, and that these deep things are by definition not rational. I think the only way these deep things can be safely handled, and the reptile kept in his glass case, is through the pluralist ideal.
- The pluralist ideal is the “messy” state of affairs you mentioned. Three cheers for messiness. It’s messiness that all ideologues, from fundamentalists to Stalinists fear the most.
- It’s my fond belief that a genuine pluralism, genuinely cognizant of the deeper truths, will save religious institutions, not destroy them, and help them carry on their historical missions even more effectively than they have in the past.
- Anyway, I guess I must always end on a pluralism rant – a bit reptilian, no?
- I’m sorry if I’ve been a little indirect here in answer to your post, but I felt I had to in order to make myself understood. If I’ve failed it’s no doubt my fault, and not yours.
(- On Objectivism, if you’re taking about the cult of Ayn Rand, you won’t get any argument from me. I read the Fountainhead as a teenager and was naturally much impressed with Howard Rourke (sp?), his quest for authenticity, his lonely struggle against mediocrity, against the incomprehension of the crowd, etc. – for a teenager what was not to like? But then I read her paranoid little novella, Anthem, with the hero behind barbed wire on a hilltop (if I remember correctly), and then some of her essays, and I thought, huh? Is that what she’s saying? Now, you may know, you can go to a Web site and stream classroom lessons in Objectivism, and in fact her cult is bigger than ever. She obviously has a constituency and so is worth opposing in the pluralist spirit, but I find her unreadable and her whole thought world creepy & depressing, so I would leave that opposition to stronger souls. Like you, I don’t even want to get started on this...)
All the best. Michael.
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