Tag: Islam

The Absurdity of Atheism in Maher’s ‘Religulous’

 “Religulous,” a mockumentary, is a two-hour assault on religion. The not-very-subtle message is that to be “religious “is “ridiculous.” The title combines the words.

       Bill Maher, the host, delights in skewering the seeming absurdities in religion: babbling in tongues, silly hats, the manipulation by televangelists. I think Jesus himself would likely laugh or weep over our folly. Religions need people like Maher. He is like the court jester employed by wise medieval kings to point out when people were getting too pompous. 

       Maher also attacks the dangerous side of religion: the holy wars, suicide bombings, anti-science, and potentially self-fulfilling prophecies of nuclear end-times. Maher does religion a service by courageously showing us when it is absurd, mindless, and destructive. He mainly attacks Christianity and Judaism, but also dares to criticize Islam. 

       However, he does religion a disservice by presenting the extremes as the norm. There is a danger the uninformed might think this is all religion is.

       He conveniently leaves out when religious people live according to their true values, have a deep spirituality, found service agencies and hospitals, educate and feed the poor, protest war and injustice, promote the sacredness of life and marriage, and constantly remind us life is more than the unbridled pursuit of money and self-centered pleasure.

       He conveniently leaves out the many profound and very rational Jewish, Christian, and Muslim thinkers: Abraham Heschel, Martin Buber, Reinhold Niebuhr, Paul Tillich, Thomas Aquinas, Avicenna, and Averroes, to name a few.

       He conveniently leaves out the constant progression in religious thinking and that atheists are stuck in a time warp in their criticism. Sure, there were absurd things written in the scriptures 2500 years ago, and God was often portrayed as an angry despot. Sure, there were crusades, and the church condemned Galileo hundreds of years ago. However, most believers today have repented of those ways of thinking and left them far behind. 

       This is where Maher totally misses the mark. The inconvenient truth for him and other atheists is that most people in the mainline synagogues, churches, and mosques are not extremists but moderates who believe in a loving God, are in favour of rationality and science, and are themselves critical when their traditions become absurd and dangerous.

       Maher also conveniently leaves out that atheism itself may be dangerous and absurd. Without religion, people make up false gods, for example, absolute ideologies like capitalism and communism. Maher conveniently leaves out that atheists like Hitler, Stalin, and Mao killed 80 million people in the twentieth century, more than all the religious wars in all of history.

       He conveniently leaves out that it might be more rational to believe there is a Supreme Intelligence behind all the order of the universe than to believe it all just happened by chance. He conveniently leaves out that without God, life might seem ultimately absurd when you are suddenly downsized, become sick, or lose a loved one. He conveniently leaves out that God and religious faith may, in fact, be the only real answers to life’s absurdities and dangers.

       Thank you, atheists, for keeping religion honest and accountable, but please don’t try to convince people that religion is all absurdity and destruction, and please be as self-critical as you ask religious people to be.

Bruce Tallman is a London spiritual director and educator of adults in religion. brucetallman.com

Resolving Religious Conflict: A Path Through Faith Development

 Throughout history, there have been conflicts between Judaism, Christianity, and Islam: pogroms, crusades, and jihads. There have also been conflicts within religions: Orthodox versus Reformed Jews, Catholic versus Protestant Christians, Sunni versus Shiite Muslims. Religious conflicts are often rooted, at least partly, in different stages of faith, and the cure lies in reaching the higher stages.

       In the 1980s and 1990s, Dr. James Fowler of Emory University conducted the first research-based study on how faith develops. Researchers interviewed thousands of believers from all religious traditions and identified six distinct stages of faith.

       Stage One, Imaginative Faith, does not cause conflict as most people pass through it by age seven. Stage Two, Literal Faith, normally extends to about age twelve. However, many adults clearly get stuck here, taking stories like Adam and Eve or Noah’s Ark as literal history rather than as faith stories meant to convey a profound theological message about fall and redemption. Since fundamentalists in any religion consider anyone who has different beliefs to be a heretic, this is fertile ground for conflict.

       Most religious conflict happens between Stages Three and Four. Stage Three, Group Faith, is marked by conformity. The Stage Three motto is: “I believe it because my religious group believes it.” Faith is a simple matter of following group rules. People in Stage Three defend their own in-group, believing “my church is the only true church” or “Islam is the only true faith.” Anyone who disagrees is seen as their mortal enemy.

    Usually, at some point, Group Faith gets shaken up by life’s injustices, conflicting opinions of others, corruption of religious leaders, or new teachings such as those of the Second Vatican Council (1962-1965), which moved many Catholics from Stage Three to Stage Four. Still, some want to revert to the 1950s when the Catholic laity was taught to “pray, pay, and obey.”

       Stage Four, Personal Faith, begins when a person asks, “What do I really believe?” Usually, there are a lot of struggles as the Stage Four individual no longer believes things just because someone else says they should. As many questions arise, the Stage Four person often feels like they are losing their faith, but if they keep the essentials, they are going deeper as they begin to own their faith, not just blindly follow the crowd.

       People in Stage Four may seem dangerous to the faith of those in Stages Two and Three, whereas people in Stage Four may see those in Stages Two and Three as a threat to rationality and civilization. Again, this is fertile ground for religious conflict.

       The solution is to go to Stage Five, Mystical Faith, characterized by the ability to understand another person’s faith from their point of view; and paradox, the ability to simultaneously hold two conflicting points of view. This creates great respect for other traditions. For example, a Stage Five person might think that “Jesus Christ is the only way to God and yet it is quite clear to me that there are also other ways to God. This goes beyond logical reasoning, but I am willing to suspend my judgement about what God thinks about these other traditions while being committed to my own tradition.” 

       Finally, Stage Six, Sacrificial Faith, means that you are willing to fight to defend the foundational human right of religious freedom and even lay down your life to bring reconciliation between people with differing beliefs. This was Gandhi’s faith, who, in attempting to promote peace between Hindus and Muslims in India, paid for it with his life. A Hindu fundamentalist killed him.

       To prevent religious conflict, we need to be aware that differing stages of faith often cause it. We also need to work towards Pope John XXIII’s recommendation: “In essentials unity, in nonessentials liberty, and in all things, charity.” That is, we need to strive for the highest stages where the unfathomable essence of the One God transcends all differences, and we need to be charitable toward those with differing beliefs. After all, God is exceedingly tolerant and loves everyone regardless of their faith stage.

Bruce Tallman is a London spiritual director and educator of adults in religion. brucetallman.com

Spiritual Warriors: Beyond Patriarchy and Pleasure

In medieval royal courts, the joker/jester

was seen as a symbol of Christ –

pricking the balloon of patriarchal pomposity

overturning people’s applecarts

and worldviews –

Christ was and still is the glittering joker

dancing in the dragon’s jaws –

laughing at the precariousness of life

when Eternity is at hand

when we let go of patriarchy

we do not abandon ourselves to evil

we come home to a relational God

who created relational human beings

who enjoy pleasure

but “If we abandon ourselves to pleasure alone

the pleasure principle leads to despair 

since life becomes meaningless” 

– Seneca, Stoic philosopher

we also need to reclaim the warrior archetype 

from the military

we need to fight against the war machine and injustice

for the true warrior is spiritual –

true mystics and prophets are spiritual warriors

Mohammed was a spiritual warrior

and, by the grace of God, a genius of literature –

it is not just the message

but the fusion of poetry and prose

that makes the Quran a masterpiece

Mohammed, like Moses and Jesus

created not just a ‘revival’ but also an ‘awakening’ –

revivals are personal/emotional conversions 

of individuals –

awakenings are cultural revitalizations

that restructure not only social institutions

but also the very purposes and goals 

of civilizations.

THE MAGIC ELIXIR

Tremendous change has happened since the Middle Ages:

Renaissance/Reformation/Enlightenment/Evolution/World Wars –

which makes theologians ask 

“What is modernity?/theology?/Christianity?”

but whatever it is, theology is secondary to liberating praxis –

solidarity with the poor must be the center of Christianity –

theology is subordinate to justice –

Jesus, like Buddha, came to liberate 

not speculate

another major development is Technology

which increases our ability to meet every human need

but hypnotizes the Masses into believing 

life is only about meeting economic needs –

we have gained the world 

but lost our souls

long before this, right back in biblical times

Christianity was corrupted by unconscious worldliness –

scholars agree on three “Pauls” in the Christian scriptures: 

the radical/conservative/reactionary Pauls –

Paul probably did not write Colossians and Ephesians –

fake authorship was common throughout the ancient world

and Paul goes from a theology of liberation in Romans/Corinthians

to a theological conservative in Colossians/Ephesians

who in these later books believes Christians can own slaves

for their own economic gain

but the Quran says “The riches and progeny of unbelievers

will profit them nothing when it comes to Allah –

they will inhabit the Fire –

believers put their trust in God”

so being Christian (or Muslim) never ceases to be challenging 

we always get pierced by the horns 

of scientific materialism or world-escaping piety

however modern theologians such as Ileo Delia 

avoid the conservatizing/privatizing/sickening of the Masses

and allow us to drink a magic elixir

made by swirling together central ideas from some august believers:

Merton/Teilhard/Panikkar/and Griffiths

that give us a robust/healthy modern faith.

THE SOFTNESS OF GOD

The mythologist Joseph Campbell’s view of God is hard/

transcendent/anonymous – a God untouched by pain

and life is a horrendous Divine Comedy

in which “all things take place by strife” (Heraclitus).

 

Paul Tillich’s approach to God is theological/psychological

and Raimundo Panikkar’s is interreligious/philosophical –

Panikkar believed in ‘cosmotheandrism’ –

the nondual inter-being of created and divine realities –

both approaches lend themselves to soft compassion.

 

Muslims believe all truth – including Jewish

and Christian truth – was simultaneously present

in Mohammed’s enraptured soul –

critics bewildered by the randomness of the Quranic Suras

try to grasp the Ocean of Prophecy

with the Thimble of Rationality.

 

All of us have five processes simultaneously happening:

cognition (awareness of what is)/

morals (awareness of what should be)/

the full range of emotions/interpersonal relations/

and Maslow’s hierarchy of needs –

plus, according to psychologists

we all think 60,000 thoughts a day –

no wonder we are so complicated/conflicted/full of strife!

 

We work on ourselves in order to help others

and we help others in order to work on ourselves –

to accept the parts of ourselves – our homeless shadows

and inner prostitutes – we have rejected

and this inner work is hard.

 

Among lovers, true love is to shut down your options/

tie the knot/give your all to one person

in a world of infinite choice/infinite insatiability

where everything has its price –

this too is hard

very hard

and requires help from God

who is Infinitely Soft

Infinite Softness/Infinite Tenderness/

Infinite Mercy/Infinite Motherhood.

 

HOW RELIGIONS CAN LIVE IN PEACE

If we want world peace, it is becoming increasingly crucial that Christianity and Islam get along. However, how can any religions get along? Religion, by its very nature, tends to take things to the limit, to globalize its beliefs and absolutize its truths. If my truth is absolutely true, your different truth must not be true.

    This attitude generates conflict not only between religions, but also within religions. For example, Sunnis and Shiites have a long history of conflict in Islam, as do Protestants and Catholics in Christianity.

     One attempt to solve this dilemma is the annual World Day of Prayer wherein the major Christian denominations try to pray together. Another effort is World Religion Day, usually in mid-January, in which the major religions get together and speak their truth about peace.

    However, these approaches, while salutary, do not address the basic problem of how to handle conflicting truth claims. On the one hand, the Koran tells us that Islam is the true faith, Buddhism maintains the Buddha taught the true path, Christianity claims the absolute truth is Jesus Christ is Lord, and Hinduism asserts that Lord Krishna was divine.

    On the other hand, every world religion also teaches wisdom, compassion, prayer, fasting, taking care of the needy, and avoiding evil. Given this, no one can say that every major religion is all wrong or all evil. All of them have at least some truth or goodness in them. So, how do we reconcile all this? There are four basic approaches to truth.

    The first approach is that all religions are equally true and valid. However, this choice has to be rejected when you compare say rabbinic Judaism to Aztec religion with its human sacrifices in order to keep the sun-god rising, or when you compare say Voodoo cults with the sublime theology of Thomas Aquinas.

    The second approach is that no religions are true. This is the stance of the atheist or the person who cannot reconcile all the competing assertions of absolute truth, and therefore decides that all religion must be nonsense.

    However, this choice is not very satisfying either. Religion expresses the deepest insights of the human heart. To say there is no truth in any religion is to leave humanity in a truly hopeless situation.

    The third approach is black and white religious truth. This is the attitude of “we are saints, you are sinners,” “we have all the answers, you don’t have any,” “only Catholics will be in heaven” or conversely “all Catholics are going to hell.”

    This approach, when taken to its limit can result in self-righteousness and endless division, hatred, and war between religions and within them. Truth as black and white eventually disintegrates when you start to notice the shortcomings and sin in your own community and the virtue in others.

    The fourth approach is degrees of truth. This choice has as its basic premise that there is truth in all the major religions, but some religions are truer than others.

    This choice forces you to really study and weigh where you can honestly find the most truth, rather than just accepting or rejecting everything wholesale. This approach also allows you to be completely committed to your own tradition while at the same time being open to whatever degree of truth you find in other traditions. In fact, everyone could enrich their own tradition with the truths they found in other traditions.

    Catholics could learn a lot about humble service and justice from the Salvation Army, peacemaking and community from Mennonites, preaching and Bible study from Baptists, and joyous worship from Pentecostals. Protestants could learn from Catholics about the riches of the sacraments, contemplative prayer, the saints, and church history.

    Christians in general could learn from non-Christians: love of God’s law from Jews, detachment from Buddhists, a spirit of poverty from Hindus, and zeal for God from Muslims. These traditions could similarly learn a lot about forgiveness from Christians.

    An objection from evangelical Christians might be “If we admit there is truth in all the major religions, why reach out to them with the good news of Jesus Christ?” The answer is simply that, if you believe Christianity to be truer than other religions, you will want to reach out to them with your greater truth. In the process you might learn why they believe they have the greater truth, and so understand each other better. This can only be good.

     In a degrees of truth approach, every person is given the human right of freedom of religion and is free to believe that their religious tradition is truer than other traditions without absolutizing their tradition as the one and only truth.

    “All religions are true” has great tolerance, but no commitment; “no religions are true” has no religious commitment or tolerance; “black and white religious truth” has commitment but no tolerance; only the  “degrees of truth” approach has both the religious commitment and religious tolerance which together can lead to world peace.  

  

Bruce Tallman is a spiritual director and religious educator of adults. btallman@rogers.com

 

WHAT THE POSTMODERN WORLD NEEDS NOW

The most important role for religion in the postmodern world

is to act as a sacred conveyor belt

moving people from myth to reason to trans-reason

that is, to see the limits of reason and transcend it.

 

Today we need to transcend both reason and science.

Buddhism tells you from day one

to find out for yourself what is true –

it encourages constant seeking –

even the teachings of the Buddha

should be questioned and tested.

 

For fundamentalist Muslims there is no need to ask questions

for the Koran has all the answers already –

their Sacred Book in its 114 suras (chapters)

is considered by them to be the final revelation

of the final prophet Mohammed

of the final purpose and will of God for humanity.

 

But mystics/contemplatives/sages of all traditions see

that their viewpoint is just a view from a point –

they have the ability to observe

their own inner dramas and dilemmas

in an egoless way

which is the primary form of “dying to the self”

that Jesus and Buddha lived and taught experientially.

 

Today however, the self reigns supreme

individualism leads to anti-institutionalism

people think institutions like family and marriage

are too restrictive – no one should have a say in how I live

and so people rail against government taxation

meant for the common good

and church is seen as impeding my spiritual growth –

individuals want to create their own self-religion

and free autonomous individuals get infected

by the pandemic of loneliness

which scourges the postmodern world.

 

What the postmodern world needs now

is community/togetherness/love/

sweet love.

A CULTURE OF LIES

 

Liberal Protestant theology has its roots

in Friedrich Schleiermacher who spoke of

the basic goodness of humans/the inevitable progress of culture/

the ethical imperative of love, and played down

sin/the judgment of God/the miracles of Jesus/the Resurrection –

Schleiermacher bought into secular beliefs in his landmark book

On Religion: Speeches to its Cultural Despisers.

 

But Schleiermacher was naïve:

so much of contemporary politics/advertising/sex

violates the Fourth Buddhist Precept of Mindful Speech –

people lie to start wars/get votes/sell products/have sex –

it’s a culture of lies that bows to the Father of Lies –

Schleiermacher should have titled his book

On Religion: Speeches to Cultural Liars.

 

According to Buddhism:

a Bodhisattva is not contained in the world –

rather she contains the world

and holds it in her jewelled hands.

 

According to Islam:

Mohammed supernaturally received fragments of the Koran

in a trance between 610CE and his death in 622CE –

he was illiterate so he simply recited what Allah taught.

 

According to Christianity:

doctrine saves no one

salvation comes from an existential confession

that for you, personally, “Jesus Christ is Lord!”

Christianity based on doctrine alone is dead –

Christians must be involved

in the suffering of the world.

 

To this end Jesus criticized the cultured men of religion –

the Pharisees – for their hypocrisy

and then attacked the cultured men of affairs –

the Sadducees – for their oppression of the poor –

Jesus wanted the leaders to model a spiritual kingdom

whereas the Pharisees and Sadducees

modelled the kingdom of Rome

a culture of lies just like our own.

LIFE IS A GOOD TEACHER

Life is a good teacher and a good friend

because it is always in transition

and therefore open-ended and non-aggressive.

The astronomer’s telescope, through Copernicus

pushed over God’s throne –

the stable center of planet Earth.

Religion was not ready for this shift

from Earth as Center of All

to the Universe as Center.

If each star in the Milky Way Galaxy was a grain of sand

you would need a colossal dump truck

to contain the two hundred billion stars.

Western religion has been challenged

by science and other world religions

particularly the power of Islam.

Certain themes run through the Qur’an

and create strong motives of desire and fear:

the power and glory of God/the terrors of the Fire/

the joys of Paradise.

In Buddhism and Christianity, the sutras and gospels

are not the living teachings of Buddha and Christ –

the living teaching can only be had

by living/practicing/acting upon what was taught –

then you do not just believe the teachings

you know them to be true.

Then living unlimited love/

meaningful human work/interreligious dialogue

help all things evolve to the fullness

of the Universal Christ

as the Lamb or the G.O.A.T. –

the Greatest Of All Time –

the Center of the Universe.

THE LIMITS OF REASON

In religion, only non-dual seers are the experts

the only ones who can hold contrary/opposites together.

One non-dual seer was Augustine

who perceived that God is

merciful yet just

ancient yet new

hidden yet present.

There is an ambiance of

light/peace/wisdom

around great sages –

even when they are not present

their life and words show us the way.

Similar to Augustine

the author of the Cloud of Unknowing

was not anti-intellectual

but believed reason is limited:

God cannot be known by thought –

only by love.

Reason by itself alone would give us

God as a loveless clock-maker

who winds up the universe like a toy

and lets it run on its own till it runs out

in which case all revelation/ scripture/prophecy

are irrelevant.

The ‘dialectic of progress’ is ongoing

gains and losses – one era sees and solves

the problems of the previous era

but then has its own problems

but there is a net gain

and therefore a direction to evolution.

God is the direction.

If rational people equate holiness

with perfection – for this is what reason dictates –

these ‘perfect people’ would not see

their shadow, and project it onto others.

The more shadow is repressed

the more it grows, becomes autonomous

and dangerous.

If you haven’t worked through

your personal complexes then repressed conflict

between say, sex and religion, prevents you

from getting to the transcendental level.

We need to feel the fear

and make it our companion, not our enemy.

Beyond the shadow

Vedanta Hinduism warns:

If you think your Higher Self is God

and you are not your body

you won’t get out of the way

of a charging elephant –

you will be crushed.

It is important to know your place.

In Islam, beneath Allah

are three created intelligences:

angels made of light

jinn (spirits) made of fire

humans made of dust.

Many jinn have accepted the True Faith

and are good. The bad jinn

work with the fallen angels

particularly Iblis, chief of the fallen angels.

In countering the chief of the fallen angels, Satan

Jesus tried to move everyone to the good

to wake us up

out of our hypnotic cultural trance/collective sleepwalking

by countercultural actions/teachings/parables –

tools for turning the status quo upside down.

Jesus was often abrasive with hypocrites –

his crucifixion was not without cause

nor was it just personal –

it holds global/cosmic implications

which we usually overlook

just as we overlook our present global/cosmic disaster.

The crucifixion of Christ and of the planet

always need serious theological reflection:

the mission of Christianity and all religions now must be

to save the world

from climate change.