"The Net of Religion"--Blake

Are not Religion & Politics the Same Thing?
--William Blake

Even now, in 1848, it certainly looks as though politics were everything; but it will seem that the catastrophe (the Revolution) correponds to us and is the obverse of the Reformation: then everthing pointed to a religious movement and proved to be political; now everything points to a political movement, but will become religious. --Kierkegaard, Journals

The above statement by Blake, as read today, becomes ambiguous and can be interpreted both in a positive and negative sense. As heard through the current phenomenon of the Religious Right, it could suggest that religion is a mask for a political agenda, whose goal is the theocracy of church and state. However, since Blake abhorred "State Religion," he probably meant that religion and politics were the same in the sense of the Imaginative vision and implementation of an ideal world of justice, liberty, brotherhood, and love. He called that world the "New Jerusalem." The above quote, in fact, comes from his poetic epic Jerusalem: "Are not Religion & Politics the Same Thing? Brotherhood is Religion." (J. 57:10)

Cryano--poet, scholar, wit, swordsman

"The art of Debate is a blood-sport for
the scholar, and his words are his weapons."

This page provides a special place for the on-going conversation/debate in America about the place of "religion" in civic and private life. More specifically, it is a place where the content of programs done on this topic finds a home.

Prophets, in the modern sense of the word, have never existed. . . . Every honest man is a Prophet; he utters his opinion both of private & public matters. . . .

If you account it Wisdom when you are angry to be silent and / Not to show it, I do not account that Wisdom, but Folly. / Every Man's Wisdom is peculiar to his own Individuality. / Always be ready to speak your mind, and a base man will avoid you.

I never made friends but by spiritual gifts, / By severe contentions of friendship & the burning fire of thought.

--William Blake

Religion vs. Reason

This section is dedicated to exploring the current national debate on religion in civil society. This debate, going on since at least the mid-1970s, has currently been amped up by the publication of books challenging the (monotheistic) religions--Judaism, Christianity, Islam--as organized private belief systems and their imposition in America's political life. The atheist / agnostic / rationalist/ humanist position has found a new voice in provocative works by Sam Harris (The End of Faith), Christopher Hitchens (God Is Not Great), and Richard Dawkins (The God Delusion).

This section will reflect the Gypsy Scholar's passionate and long-time engagement with this controversial issue; one that he feels is unique (and complicated) for a spiritually oriented individual, who nonetheless finds more empathy with the anti-religion camp than with the faithful. And in this the Gypsy Scholar finds himself in the same paradoxical position in this "Mental Fight" as his mentor, William Blake, who, although he raved against 19th-century "reason" (what he termed "Newton's sleep"), nonetheless found himself defending his atheist friend Tom Paine (his "common sense") against the religionists of his time, declaring that, although Paine was a non-believer, the infamous atheist was a "better Christian" than his hypocritical religious detractors!

However, truth be told, compared to the limitations of the current debate of "Religion vs. Reason," the Gypsy Scholar's allegiances are more on the side of

Religion vs. "Poetic Genius":

“Are not Religion & Politics the Same Thing? Brotherhood is Religion".

“Political Science . . . is the Science of Sciences.”

"Every Body Knows that no body understands Jesus' 'Philosophy' because we have liars and decievers as priests who are the Hirelings of Kings & Courts who make themselves Every Body & Knowingly propagate Falsehood."

"Christianity is Civil Business Only. There is & can Be No Other to Man: what Else Can Be? Civil is Christianity or Religion or whatever is Humane."

"The King & the Priest must be tied in a tether ..."

"It is the same in Art: by their Works ye shall know them . . . the Knave who is converted to Christianity is still a Knave, but he himself will not know it, tho' Every body else does. Christ comes, as he came at first, to deliver those who were bound under the Knave, not to deliver the Knave."

"The ancient Poets animated all sensible objects with Gods or Geniuses, calling them by the names and adorning them with the properties of woods, rivers, mountains, lakes, cities, nations, and whatever their enlarged & numerous senses could percieve. / And particularly they studied the genius of each city & country, placing it under its mental deity; / Till a system was formed, which some took advantage of, & enslav'd the vulgar by attempting to realize or abstract the mental deities from their objects: thus began Priesthood; / Choosing forms of worship from poetic tales./ And at length they pronounc'd that the Gods had order'd such things. / Thus men forgot that All deities reside in the human breast."

"Of the primevil Priest's assum'd power, / When Eternals spurn'd back his religion / And gave him a place in the north, / Obscure, shadowy, void, solitary. / Eternals! I hear your call gladly./ Dictate swift winged words & fear not / To unfold your dark visions of torment."

"The whole of the New Church is in the Active Life & not in Ceremonies at all. He who is out of the Church & opposes it is no less an Agent of Religion than he who is in it."

Religion vs. The Poetic Imagination ("Poetic Genius")

"When you call yourself an Indian or a Muslim or a Christian or a European, or anything else, you are being violent. Do you see why it is violent? Because you are separating yourself from the rest of mankind. When you separate yourself by belief, by nationality, by tradition, it breeds violence. So a man who is seeking to understand violence does not belong to any country, to any religion, to any political party or partial system; he is concerned with the total understanding of mankind." (J. Krishnamurti, Freedom from the Known )

Given that some listeners have inquired as to the Gypsy Scholar's position on "religion," by way of simple explanation (the more detailed comes from a reading of these website pages, not to mention listening to the radio program) it's basically that of the "loyal opposition." This means that the Gypsy Scholar's position is that of those who believe in the ultimate reality being spiritual/consciousness, as opposed to the materialist/mechanistic view, but nevertheless oppose the traditional non-materialist "religious" view (of the major Western monotheistic religions). As a spiritual outsider, the Gypsy Scholar finds himself outside (1) both the old- and new-age religions (the latter merely changing the content but secretly keeping the structure--spirit vs. nature, sacred vs, profane--of the traditional religions); (2) both the theists (with monotheistic/patriarchal concepts of "God") and the atheists (neither of which has room for his complex metaphysical views). Having said this, the fact remains that (especially in a God & Flag country like America) it is exteremly difficult to have a recognizable position vis-a-vis utlimate beliefs when your position is not even on the radar of either of the two main opposing camps--the theists and atheists. ("God"? Whose "God"? --Moses'? St.Paul's? Augustine's? Or Jefferson's, Spinoza's, Einstein's?) This being the case, any explanation of the Gypsy Scholar's position is, candidly speaking, only for the benefit of others. (And besides, since, if the Gypsy Scholar has to chose from among the two camps, the atheists at least are on the side of freedomn of thought--and, along the way, are clearing the ground of outdated, oppressive religious dogmas). I mean, how many people would understand if the Gypsy Scholar said he was an anarchist-pagan animist-gnostic/agnostic? (It used to be easier to communicate one's position--"I'm not religious; I'm spiritual"--, but since the new-agers have co-opted "spiritual" for their own brand of authoritarian, world-denying belief system, the Gypsy Scholar is now hestitant to say he's "spiritual.")

As to the question the Gypsy Scholar gets from listeners--"What is your problem with religion?"--, here is the short answer:

The Theocrats (since the beginning of empire) have now completely highjacked the only human institution that served the people for both a source of power and a means of escape (if not solace). After thousands of years, what was originally the Poetic Imagination became "Priesthood" and no longer served the spiritual needs (what historians of religion call) the archaic "homo religiosos." From a weapon and solace against authoritarian oppression, it has become a weapon for that oppression.

"The ancient Poets animated all sensible objects with Gods or Geniuses, calling them by the names and adorning them with the properties of woods, rivers, mountains, lakes, cities, nations, and whatever their enlarged & numerous senses could percieve. / And particularly they studied the genius of each city & country, placing it under its mental deity; / Till a system was formed, which some took advantage of, & enslav'd the vulgar by attempting to realize or abstract the mental deities from their objects: thus began Priesthood; / Choosing forms of worship from poetic tales./ And at length they pronounc'd that the Gods had order'd such things. / Thus men forgot that All deities reside in the human breast." (William Blake, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell)

“If you can live in fantasy [in imagination], then you don’t need religion, since with fantasy you can understand that after death, man is reincorporated in the Universe. Once again I will say that it is not important to know whether there is something beyond this life. What counts is having done the right sort of work; if that is right, then everything else will be all right. The Universe, or Nature, is for me what God is for others. It is wrong to think that Nature is an enemy of man, something to be conquered. Rather, we should look upon Nature as a mother, and should peaceably surrender ourselves to it. If we take that attitude, we will simply feel that we are returning to the Universe as all other things do, all animals and plants. We are all just infinitesimal parts of the Whole. It is absurd to rebel; we must deliver ourselves up to the great current. . . .” (Herman Hesse)

William Blake's painting, "The Net of Religion," depicts his view of religion as the primary form of authoritarian control and oppression. In fact, in keeping with the Gypsy Scholar's view of Christianism as a spiritual disease (of the soul), Blake alternatively referred to religion as "the dark net of infection."

"Those who are cast out are All Those who, having no Passions of their own because No Intellect, Have spent their lives in Curbing & Governing other People's by the Various arts of Poverty & Cruelty of all kinds. Wo, Wo, Wo to you Hypocrites" (Blake, A Vision of the last Judgment)

"It can be understood why Blake often used 'religion' as a smear word. The Orc [archetypal revolutionary] in him would 'scatter religion abroad to the four winds as a torn book, & none shall gather the leaves.' The Los [archetypal poet] in him declared: 'their God I will not worship in their Churches, nor King in their Theatres'; he would 'overthrow their cup, their bread, their altar-table, their incense & their oath, their marriage & their baptism, their burial & consecration', for their rituals have lost all meaning and are Antichrist' .... [Blake] thought that they [the Churches] had become corrupted almost past hope. Only the Divine Imagination, operating through the poet, could save them." (Damon, A Blake Dictionary)

Blake also referred to the "Wheel of Religion," meaning the same thing as his picture, "Net of Religion." Blake clearly separated himself from the institutional Christianity of his own day and, for that matter, any other day. (Blake also came to reject the "new-age" religion of his day, as embodied in the Swedenborgean Church.) In fact, according to Blake, Jesus himself died because he strove against the rolling of this Wheel. In a blank-verse introductory poem, Blake goes further than ever in separating Jesus from the "Wheel Of fire" that moves religion in his name:

"I stood among my valleys of the south . / And saw a flame of fire, even as a Wheel / Of fire surrounding all the heavens: it went / From west to east against the current of / Creation and devour'd all things in its loud / Fury & thundering course round heaven & earth / By it the Sun was roll'd into an orb: / By it the Moon faded into a globe, / Travelling thro' the night: for from its dire / And restless fury, Man himself shrunk up / Into a little root a fathom long. / And I asked a Watcher & a Holy-One / Its Name? he answered: It is the Wheel of Religion."

Unfortunately--and ironically--just like the representatives of institutionalized religion subsumed the first visionary ("Jesus the Imagination"), so they have tried to subsume the radical visionary of The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, "whose doctrinal orthodoxy has been proclaimed by assorted divines."

APOLOGIA
for the Gypsy Scholar's Defense of Atheism

"There Is No God"
This negation must be understood solely to affect a creative Deity. The hypothesis of a pervading Spirit co-eternal with the universe remains unshaken....
In fact, even while admitting the existence of the theological God, and the reality of his so discordant attributes which they impute to him, one can conclude nothing to authorize the conduct or the cult which one is prescribed to render him. Theology is truly the sieve of the Danaides....

However, man has always traveled in this vicious circle; his slothful mind has always made him find it easier to accept the judgment of others. All religious nations are founded solely on authority; all the religions of the world forbid examination and do not want one to reason; authority wants one to believe in God; this God is himself founded only on the authority of a few men who pretend to know him, and to come in his name and announce him on earth. A God made by man undoubtedly has need of man to make himself known to man.

--Shelley, "The Necessity of Atheism," 1811 [In 1813 Shelley reprinted a revised and expanded version of it as one of the notes to his "Queen Mab: A Philosophical Poem." Below is Book VII of this poem, which is a dialogue between "Spirit" and "Fairy."]

FAIRY
'There is no God!
Nature confirms the faith his death-groan sealed.
Let heaven and earth, let man's revolving race,
His ceaseless generations, tell their tale;
Let every part depending on the chain
That links it to the whole, point to the hand
That grasps its term! Let every seed that falls
In silent eloquence unfold its store
Of argument; infinity within,
Infinity without, belie creation;
The exterminable spirit it contains
Is Nature's only God; but human pride
Is skilful to invent most serious names
To hide its ignorance.
'The name of God
Has fenced about all crime with holiness,
Himself the creature of his worshippers,
Whose names and attributes and passions change,
Seeva, Buddh, Foh, Jehovah, God, or Lord,
Even with the human dupes who build his shrines,
Still serving o'er the war-polluted world
For desolation's watchword; whether hosts
Stain his death-blushing chariot-wheels, as on
Triumphantly they roll, whilst Brahmins raise
A sacred hymn to mingle with the groans;
Or countless partners of his power divide
His tyranny to weakness; or the smoke
Of burning towns, the cries of female helplessness,
Unarmed old age, and youth, and infancy,
Horribly massacred, ascend to heaven
In honor of his name; or, last and worst,
Earth groans beneath religion's iron age,
And priests dare babble of a God of peace,
Even whilst their hands are red with guiltless blood,
Murdering the while, uprooting every germ
Of truth, exterminating, spoiling all,
Making the earth a slaughter-house!

Shelley's "The Necessity of Atheism" contains a Foreword by Henry S. Salt:

"The sequence of his thought on the Subject may be clearly traced in several of his essays. In 'The Necessity of Atheism,' the tract which led to his expulsion from Oxford University, we see Shelley in his youthful mood of open denial and defiance. It has been suggested that the pamphlet was originally intended by its author to be a hoax; but such an explanation entirely misapprehends not only the facts of the case, but the character of Shelley himself. This was long ago pointed out by De Quincey: 'He affronted the armies of Christendom. Had it been possible for him to be jesting, it would not have been noble; but here, even in the most monstrous of his undertakings -- here, as always, he was perfectly sincere and single-minded.' That this is true may be seen not only from the internal evidence of 'The Necessity' itself, but from the fact that the conclusion which, Shelley meant to be drawn, from the dialogue 'A Refutation of Deism,' published in 1814, was that there is no middle course between accepting revealed religion and disbelieving in the existence of a deity -- another way of stating the necessity of atheism.

"Shelley resembled Blake in the contrast of feeling with which he regarded the Christian religion and its founder. For the human character of Christ he could feel the deepest veneration, as may be seen not only from the 'Essay on Christianity,' but from the 'Letter to Lord Ellenborough' (1812), and also from the notes to 'Hellas' and passages in that poem and in 'Prometheus Unbound'; but he held that the spirit of established Christianity was wholly out of harmony with that of Christ, and that a similarity to Christ was one of the qualities most detested by the modern Christian. The dogmas of the Christian faith were always repudiated by him, and there is no warrant whatever in his writings for the strange pretension that, had he lived longer, his objections to Christianity might in some way have been overcome."

I cite this Foreword for two reasons: (1) abstractly, it not only affirms that Shelly was committed to atheism (not changing his mind later), but also affirms that his "atheism" is a Romantic atheism; a negation of a theist "God" but not of an ultimate spiritual reality; (2) personally, it strikes a familiar cord in that the defiant young poet was kicked out of college for his "affronted the armies of Christendom" and, presumably, for earning the ire of his Christian-minded professors (and his ass-kissing fellow students)! As a grad-student in "Philosophy & Religion," the Gypsy Scholar is particularly interested in carving out a third position that transcends the hard-and-fast dichotomy of theism/atheism, and, thus, discovering Shelley's "The Necessity of Atheism" was . . . an answer to a prayer! To quote Salt again:

"I regard Shelley's early 'atheism' and later Pantheism, as simply the negative and the affirmative side of the same progressive but harmonious life-creed. In his earlier years his disposition was towards a vehement denial of a theology which he never ceased to detest; in his maturer years he made more frequent reference to the great World Spirit in whom he had from the first believed. He grew wiser in the exercise of his religious faith, but the faith was the same throughout; there, was progression, but no essential change."

[ Henry S. Salt (1851–1939) was an influential English writer and campaigner for social reform and pacifist. He was also well-known as a literary critic, biographer, classical scholar and naturalist, and as the man who introduced Mahatma Gandhi to the influential works of Henry David Thoreau. ]

Once more, as a grad-student of "Philosophy and Religion," the issue of religion and politics has been a deep interest. The Gypsy Scholar has been watching and listening with great interest to the recent debates between those that represent liberal religion and faith vs. the challenging new voices of secular humanism and reason (e. g., Sam Harris, Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens). This first paper is the Gypsy Scholar's response to one of these debates--that of Sam Harris with Reza Aslan. This particular debate has been chosen not because it's any better than others that have taken place, but simply because it has been the most accessible; having been aired on C-SPAN more than once. So with the hope that my listeners had already seen it on TV, and the fact that I had aired it over radio before presenting my response, I decided that my commentary for this debate would be representative of my general views on the topic (though, of course, by no means exhaustive). I post here what I presented over the air. (Unfortunately, the link I had previously posted to the C-SPAN video is no longer operative.)

The Spirit of Romantic Atheism: The Religion of No-Religion

In Eternity, war is intellectual & Urthona rises from ruinous Walls
In all his ancient strength to form the golden armour of science
For intellectual War. The war of swords departed now,
The dark Religions are departed & sweet Science reigns.
End of The Dream.

--Blake, The Four Zoas

Imagine there's no heaven
It's easy if you try
No hell below us
Above us only sky
Imagine all the people
Living for today...

Imagine there's no countries
It isn't hard to do
Nothing to kill or die for
And no religion too
Imagine all the people
Living life in peace...

You may say I'm a dreamer
But I'm not the only one
I hope someday you'll join us
And the world will be as one
--John Lennon, Imagine

I guess I should try to explain my own position in this divisive debate between the religionists and the secular humanists/scientists. One would assume, considering the Gypsy Scholar's background in "Religious Studies" (which is roughly the secular university's equivalent to theological studies in seminary schools), that he, having invested all that energy and interest in the "religious" life of humankind, would logically side more with the liberal theists than with the outright atheists (or agnostics). Oddly enough, this would be a wrong assumption. Or, let's say, it is a narrow one. Not that a person has to take sides in some absolute, dogmatic way. However--to be candid--the Gypsy Scholar's temperamental allegiance falls on the side of the secular humanists (and free-thinkers). For the sake of fairness, though, I should qualify this statement by saying that the Gypsy Scholar's position is more complicated than this would indicate. To explain.

Hypothetically speaking--that is, in the ideal world--the Gypsy Scholar, as a student of religion (and, in his own strange way, a modest seeker after truth on the spiritual path), would naturally find his essential allegiances in the religionist camp. Moreover, given his "Romantic" anti-mechanist world-view (which holds that consciousness is the first principle), the materialist world-view of most secular humanists/scientists would turn him away from their camp. This "Romantic" world-view (a la A. N. Whitehead), with it's "vitalist" (neo-animist) cosmology, is where the Gypsy Scholar and the latter would part company (in an ideal world). However, we don't live in an ideal world where the camps are staked out on a level playing field. No, we live in America (with its European legacy of a "Christian unconscious"), where the last 1500 years of (patriarchal/monotheistic) religio-cultural hegemony has accumulated to produce a citizenry that claims to be the most religious and God-fearing of all nations; where the non-religionists of all stripes (read "non-Christians") have been on the outs with the prevailing world-view, and, thus, have been repressed in many, many ways. ("... our culture then is distinctly lacking in gaiety. Now it seems to me that this attitude rests in two further premises. The first is an idea of God that we inherited from a European Protestant and, to some extent, Catholic and Judaic background. This conception of God as creating the universe for the fulfillment of his purpose is a conception of God quite strangely lacking in either humor or joy. Despite hints to the contrary in the Bible, they haven't made much of an impression on our culture." --Alan Watts.) Their "equal rights" are habitually violated (if not in practice, in spirit) every time a church door opens out on the public arena. The rank but subtle prejudice against the "a-theist" is a regular fact of life in this "one nation under God." And, like many "myths" about America that the young, inquiring mind has come to recognize as such, the so-called "wall of separation of church and state" is, for the most part, a convenient mirage. Indeed, at this particular time (increasingly from the Cold War on) the nascent "Theocracy" that has been in the collective subconscious of this "Christian nation" seems all too ready to realize its Inquisitional nightmare. Meanwhile, fundamentalist (and some liberal) religious ideologues have somehow convinced too many otherwise rational Americans that the social situation vis-a-vis religion is the opposite of what it is in reality: they are now the oppressed, not the oppressor; they are the victims of the encroaching secular barbarians! Enter the new atheist/agnostic critics of religion. (It is interesting--and enlightening--to witness, now that the atheists/rationalists/free-thinkers are finally making their voices heard--since the suppression of the 1950's and 1960's work of atheist activist Madalyn Murray O'Hair--, all the religionists crying foul, with their theological panties up in a bunch. All of a sudden they represent the historical minority-victims of the big, bad religion-bashing atheists! But the fact of the matter is that the religionists have never gotten over the effect of the Enlightenment on their agenda; heretofore never being required to rationally defend their position to the skeptics, they have never liked any kind of criticism. Now that the heat is on, these believers must use all manner of holy subterfuge in order to downplay the official nonsense that they pass off as the "Word of God." Yes, they just want to be left alone to believe what they want to believe. "Okay!" reply the non-believers, "as soon as you believers stop imposing your beliefs on the society as a whole.")

Therefore the Sam Harrises, the Richard Dawkinses, and the Chris Hitchenses, of the secular humanist /rationalist camp have the Gypsy Scholar's sympathy--and his sense of civic outrage at what the religionists in America get away with on a daily basis. (Sympathy in the same way that William Blake, staunch critic of mechanical reason--"the single vision of Newton's Sleep"--, nevertheless staunchly defended common-sense reasoner and atheist Tom Paine against his priestly enemies.) Again, while The Gypsy Scholar concedes that the "scientific" world-view leaves much to be desired for a truly new paradigm, it is nonetheless true that the "religious" alternative is the more oppressive and, therefore, more dangerous to human welfare and the planet. Thus he Gypsy Scholar rejects the new-age judgment that "science" is just another kind of dogmatic "religion." Dogmatism not withstanding (yes, there are some scientists who are dogmatic and "scientism" is a problem), it is a gross misuse of language to try to equate to two. For all its faults, the bottom line is that at least with "science" there is an opportunity to change--through reality-testing and debate--the prevailing scientific consensus; not so with "religion"--its world-view is unquestionable and absolute. So let those new-agers who decry the rational-scientific values of the "Enlightenment" as the problem time-travel back to the world of the medieval "sacred canopy" of the Church and experience what that was like, if they want to know real spiritual-intellectual repression on an unimaginable scale to the modern mind. I think they would be changing their tune post hoc ergo propter hoc.

Yes, I said the Gypsy Scholar's position was more complicated by the fact that he can't go along with the latter's scientific materialism/mechanism (and further complicated by the fact that, at least theoretically speaking, that he's no run-of-mill atheist; in point of fact, he's in that no-God's-land of neither theist nor a-theist—nor agnostic). If a term need be invented to explain his in-between position (this higher atheism not defined by its opposite of theism), call it gnostic-agnosticism. (If it seems illogical that the Gypsy Scholar could both be, theologically, a person of transcendental metaphysics and, politically, an atheist--since the religionists have made "God" into a political concept--, he would refer the reader to the Romantic poet Shelley's pamphlet, "The Necessity of Atheism," for which got him expelled from University College, Oxford.) But, no, this doesn't mean the Gypsy Scholar feels that most of our contemporary (liberal) religionists are occupying the high moral ground. I guess the deciding factor for the Gypsy Scholar coming down in favor of the new breed of non-believers is the sorry spectacle of disingenuousness--if not intellectual dishonesty--of those religionists who are supposed to know better than their fundamentalist counterparts. (The irony is, as heard in the debates, that it is the "religionists" who charge their opponents with "disingenuousness." See below, especially on issue of slavery in New Testament: "Annotations on Religion & Reason Debate".)

If there are those who feel that the Gypsy Scholar should change his mind about this, let it be said that he will . . . when the country that he lives in changes its mind; that is, when the following has come about: (1) when the repression and marginalization of atheists/humanists ceases, (2) when the Christian fundamentalists and other christo-fascists cease to dictate socio-political policy (including medicine and education), (3) when the phrase "one nation under God" is removed from our national identity, (4) when a presidential candidate doesn't have to announce to the nation that he or she is a God-fearing believer, (5) when the psychotic notion that "God is on our side" ceases to be used as a justification for imperialist warfare, (6) when America recognizes that a citizen can be moral and still be an atheist (without religion), (7) when new-agers in America figure out that an atheist too can be "spiritual," (8) when the separation of church and state is a reality instead of a useful fiction, (9) when our concept of "God" (what "God"? the god of monotheism, deism, the god of Spinoza, the god of Einstein?) becomes more sophisticated (and less anthropomorphic and monotheistic), and when a concept of "God" can be integrated with the latest scientific view--in nature from the bottom up and not the top down, and (10) when the believers (orthodox and liberal) honestly and fully acknowledge the dark side of their institutional religion without being defensive and in denial when the non-believers attempt to point this out; that is, when the believers don't have to be dragged kicking and screaming to the evils done in the name of religion and do so on their own without pressure from their opponents, because it's the right thing to do as moral people--without excuses, justifications, and counter-attack in the form of psychological projections. When these requirements are meant, the Gypsy Scholar will be able to embrace--as he should--the notion of homo religiosos and concentrate his criticisms of world-views at the secular-scientific. Until then, he will of necessity remain divided; theoretically in the "religious" camp, but politically an atheist. He will have to continue to engage in the Blakean "intellectual war," or, in the words of poet Allen Ginsberg, have to "Stand up against governments, against God--the monotheist domination of consciousness that insists on its own party line." Until then, since the religionists in their fight with the secularists (of all stripes) presume the higher ground (i.e., lay claim to absolute truth in one way or another), the Gypsy Scholar will direct most of his rhetorical energy in standing up for the underdogs in this fight, saving most of his criticism for the religionists (since with presumed higher authority comes the obligation to be held to a higher standard). Indeed, from what the Gypsy Scholar has witnessed in these debates (with Harris, Hawkins, and Hitchens) is that at the very least these dirty little atheists (from whom the religionists “expect holiness”) keep the believers honest--or at least they try.

In other words, the Gypsy Scholar would be of one mind when the third option of world views (mentioned above) came into being; when, that is, "The dark Religions are departed & sweet Science reigns." (Blake) But again, this is a complicated issue. What do we mean by "religion"? Is it opposed to "science"? If the Gypsy Scholar says that he wants to "imagine" a world without "religion", too many of both old- and new-age religion will cry foul. But what if the institutional structure that contained what we have known as "religion" (since the first city-states of the Near East) can no longer hold the new spiritual influx of energy that began to make itself manifest in the Sixties? What, indeed, would it look like to the human mind? The Gypsy Scholar would suggest that it may not be recognizable as "religion." In fact, it may look like its opposite--"secular," literally outside the confines of the sacred. Therefore, with the notion of a (paradoxical) higher atheism, we may be able to "imagine . . . no religion too" (John Lennon), because the highest form of religion (in a post-religious world) just may paradoxically be no religion--a Hegalian negation, integration, and transcendence of "religion." This being the case, it is the Gypsy Scholar's view that both old- and new-age religionists are looking in the wrong place for hope in future salvation. Both religious parties walking on the straight-and-narrow of the spiritual path are missing Blake's "crooked path" on which "genius" walks. But the Gypsy Scholar would take Blake's hand and travel the paths of Hell: "As I was walking among the fires of hell, delighted with the enjoyments of Genius, which to Angels look like torment and insanity ...." (Blake) For both old- and new-age angels, this is the road not taken. This road is that last one they would consider in seeking a new spiritual dispensation. Yet, this via negativa/via contrarius is where it's at, and that is through "the fires of hell;" a radical affirmation of the profane /secular. It is "a quantum step forward by proposing reforms that were not sacralizations, but radical secularizations, in the literal Latin sense of the word, of making something secular by making it belong to the generations outside the temple, outside the priesthood." (W.I. Thompson) To walk this path is contrary--and thus a scandal--to both the old- and new-age path. It requires not holiness, but what one Jungian scholar of religion calls an "instinct for unholiness." (Cf. Blake, who seems to be admonishing the new-agers of our time: "Men are admitted into Heaven not because they have curbed & govern'd their Passions or have no Passions, but because they have Cultivated their Understandings. The Treasures of Heaven are not Negations of Passion, but Realities of Intellect, from which all the Passions Emanate Uncurbed in their Eternal Glory. The Fool shall not enter into Heaven let him be ever so Holy. Holiness is not the Price of Entrance into Heaven. Those who are cast out are All Those who, having no Passions of their own because No Intellect, Have spent their lives in Curbing & Governing other People's by the various arts of Poverty & Cruelty of all kinds.") In case it is argued that my (higher atheism) unholiness perspective is completely anti-religious (because taken too literally), I would cite none other than Bodhidharma, who declared (when asked by the Emperor: “What is the highest meaning of the holy truths?”): “Empty, without holiness.” This is the only meaningful sense of being "religious" for the Gypsy Scholar--the paradoxical Religion of No-religion. Yet, because of our limited view of what is "religious" and what is not (for the most part defined by the dominant religious model and for science by default), this third option isn't even on the table for debate--neither on the altar of old- or new-age religion.

"It is difficult to find terms adequate to express so subtle a conception as that to which the Intellectual Philosophy has conducted us. We are on that verge where words abandon us, and what wonder if we grow dizzy to look down the dark abyss of how little we know!" (Shelley, "The Necessity of Atheism," 1811)

This is, as best as I can explain it, the Gypsy Scholar's position vis-a-vis the conflict of religion (faith) and science (reason). (For an extensive exposition on the Gypsy Scholar's thesis of "higher atheism" and the "religion of no-religion," which was only touched upon here, listen for his essay on radio: "Not the Fake New-Age, But the Blake New Age.")

It is thus that the Gypsy Scholar would offer the following few observations for your consideration to help you understand where the Gypsy Scholar is coming from when he says that in this debate of “religion” vs. “reason” he’s of the Loyal Opposition.

“It is better to be an honest atheist than a religious hypocrite.” –Swami Vivekananda.

“It is not because angels are holier than men or devils that makes them angels, but because they do not expect holiness from one.” –William Blake

“He who is out of the Church & opposes it is no less an Agent of Religion than he who is in it….” –William Blake

“If you have a particular faith or religion, that is good. But you can survive without it.” –Dalai Lama

Below you will find the Gypsy Scholar’s exposé on the kind of disingenuousness displayed by the defenders of "religion"—from those who project it upon the non-believer camp, while priding themselves as having, de facto, more morality and truth than their opponents. They ask us to trust that they have, ipso facto, the high moral ground. But when it comes to playing down-and-dirty in a debate, they reveal themselves no better than those they have pre-judged as lower on the moral/spiritual ladder. If you can say only one thing in favor of the non-believer camp, it is this: at least they don’t insult our humanity with sickening pretensions of holiness!--not to mention that at least they don't claim divine authority for their beliefs; that they can stand or fall on heir own merits. (This entire issue of genuine and rigorous intellectual honesty when it come to matters of [Christian] faith is summed up nicely by one-time "Christian" theologian and religious historian, Bart Ehrman. See link at end of paper.)

ANNOTATIONS ON THE “RELIGION & REASON” DEBATE
FROM ONE OF THE LOYAL OPPOSITION

“The Whole of the New Church is in the Active Life & not in Ceremonies at all.”
(William Blake, Annotations To Swedenborg’s Divine Love)

“He [Jesus] scorn’d Earth’s Parents, scorn’d Earth’s God, / And mock’d the one & the other’s Rod; /
His Seventy Disciples sent / Against Religion & Government ….”
(William Blake The Everlasting Gospel)

In this debate about “religion” I would be expected, given that I’m a student of Religion and Philosophy, to be on the side of “religion” with Reza Aslan. However, with some reservations, the contrary is the case; I’m much more in sympathy with Sam Harris’ anti-religious point of view. Taking this stance in defending the atheist, I find myself in the analogous position of one of my favorite poet-visionaries, William Blake (1757-1827), who, curiously enough, in his Annotations To “An Apology for the Bible …”, defended atheist Tom Paine against the onslaught of Bishop (of London) Watson in their debate. I say “curiously enough” because Blake called himself a “Christian” (whose savior was “Jesus, the Imagination”) and because he also spent a lot of time raving against the reigning principle of “Reason” of his time, calling it mere “Ratio,” which can only judge and compare. Paine, atheist and upholder of Reason, had attacked the Bible, much like Harris today. Thus, it seems to me this present debate of Reason vs. Religion echoes the one between Paine and Watson in Blake’s time. So let the following criticisms by Blake (written on the back of the title page) speak to us as well. [I have listed here some of Blake’s critical annotations made to Watson’s Apology for the Bible, since they could as well, with a change of names, apply to the debate between Aslan (Watson) and Harris (Paine). When I think that Blake’s observations fit the current debate, I will insert them in red.]

“The Perversions of Christ’s words & acts are attack’d by Paine & also the perversions of the Bible; Who dare defend either the Acts of Christ or the Bible Unperverted? But to him who sees this moral pilgrimage in the light that I see it, Duty to his country is the first consideration & safety the last. Read patiently: take up this Book in an idle hour: the consideration of these things is the whole duty of man & the affairs of life & death trifles, sports of time. But these considerations are the business of Eternity.”

____________________________

[The text in light blue is the synopsis of the dialogue from the speakers in the debate. The darker blue is the Gypsy Scholar's commentary.]

“Religion & Reason,” the Sam Harris & Reza Aslan Debate

L. A. Public Library, 1/25/07

Introductory Comments: Curator of the ALOUD series: “No definitive conclusions.” “Is rationality the right standard to invoke in matters of faith? Can faith and reason be reconciled—should they be?”

Actually this attempt to square reason with faith has been a project that has been going on in Western European religious culture since at least Peter Abelard (1079-1142). Once more, it should be pointed out here (because of the current demonization of Islamic culture) that this project of using rational, critical categories and methods to explicate scripture could not have even begun if it were not for the Aristotelian Arabs. It has been observed that Abelard and those like him shared “ the intellectual excitement of the age which undertook to reconcile faith with reason, authority with experience, and the philosophy of Plato and Aristotle with the theology of the Church.” As for this present debate about faith and reason, JK invites them to reconcile their points of view. I judge it impossible. Maybe only God could reconcile them. But since one view holds that God doesn’t exist, then it’s impossible!

• JK: Karen Armstrong: “our religious imagination; to capacity to envision a higher power.” Case for “homo sapiens,” rational or thinking man, is also homo religiosus, religious man or believing man.” (JK: this is a theme we will probably return to again and again.)

Throughout the debate, it seemed to me that the problem in RA and SH coming a little closer together on their views is due to a semantic problem—that is, what we mean by “religion.” In fact, this is a very controversial issue (and has been in recent decades) for students of the history- and philosophy of religion. The failure to address this problem plagues the debate throughout. As an example of one of the consequences of not being more discriminating when the term “religion” is used (in a generic sense) is that of identifying modern religious man with homo-religiosus. The problem with this comparison is that Armstrong’s use of it is rather sloppy. In point of fact, the term homo religiosus was coined in 1928 by Ruldoph Otto (The Idea of the Holy), who is now recognized as one of the pioneers of the phenomenology of religion. It was subsequently made part of the vocabulary of the history of religions by the Mircea Eliade, who studies of “primitive,” or archaic religion (mythology and ritual) have become classics in their field. He defined archaic man as homo religiosus almost in contradistinction to the man of the purely “historical” religions (e.g., Judeo-Christianity). Thus, when RA claims that SH is wrong, because “Religions are not concerned with genuine history but with sacred history,” he is being misleading (at best). Indeed, what distinguishes the monotheistic religions (and it is a distinction which the representatives of these were at pains to make, since they had real “religion” and a real historical savior or prophet while the earlier religions, with their polytheism and cyclical time, just had “mythology”)—from both the earlier ancient religions (of Sumer, Egypt, and Greece) and the archaic, tribal religions—is precisely their concern with “history” (and, as Eliade points out, its irreversibility). No, “sacred history” is, for archaic and ancient man, the history of the gods, the heroes, the ancestors, the immortals.” It is not a term (in the history of religions) that can be applied, willy-nilly, to describing what the “people of the Book” (“religion” as a written creed) are writing about (unless “sacred history” is taken loosely to mean a history of a people that is “sacred” to them). (For the important difference between the conception of time between archaic and modern peoples, see Eliade, The Sacred and the Profane.) Thus, I submit that modern religious man is not homo religiosus, but homo credens—believing man (or even homo credulous).

• RA: “Religions are not concerned with genuine history but with sacred history …. The truths they convey have little to do with historical fact…. The only questions that matter with regard to religion and its mythologies is what do these stories mean. After all, religion is, by definition, interpretation, and by definition all interpretations are valid.” (Next sentence: “… while it is true that all interpretations are valid, some interpretations are more reasonable than others.”) “That is important to note because in many ways it goes to the heart of this discussion.” “False dichotomies created.” “To either believe the Bible is the word of God, or it’s not, is not the best way to think about the role of religion.”

Again, when RA uses the term “mythologies” along with “sacred history,” it is misleading, because it sounds like he’s discussing the pre-monotheistic, pre-historical religions, which were oral traditions that had sacred narratives (“myths”) of the origin of the world (“cosmogonies”) and of the gods, immortals, heroes or ancestors (“theoganies”). The problem here is the contradictory character of RA’s claims—of which he himself has set up by coming out of the starting gate with a definition of religion that put the lie to precisely the kind of “religion” that SH is attacking: “After all, religion is, by definition, interpretation, and by definition all interpretations are valid.” (Next sentence: “… while it is true that all interpretations are valid, some interpretations are more reasonable than others.”) To claim that “religion” is by its very definition, “interpretation” (a definition I would agree with) is a slippery slope to the deconstruction of scripture as sacred. RA calls for “more sophisticated” reading of scripture and speaks of “modernist.” How about “postmodernist”? That’s just where this definition leads—to postmodernist readings that deconstruct the sacred text as such; there is no “word of God,” just “interpretations.” (Careful Reza, there are those who will take you up on this seriously—and you won’t like it!) Therefore, almost everything he later defends (against SH) lands him in contradiction. But RA also qualified this by saying “some interpretations are more reasonable than others.” True, but he leaves out that there are some that are more esoteric/mystical than others. So, for that matter, how about kabbalistic and hermetic interpretations, if were going to talk of sophistication? However, there’s the other side of this glaring contradiction: when you talk in terms of scriptural interpretation as “more reasonable,” you have set yourself up for a standard that invites the kind of reading that Paine got in trouble with the religious authorities for. This “more reasonable” scripture has had its interpreters from Jefferson (The Jefferson Bible) to the “Jesus Seminar” (The Five Gospels), which has not only questioned whether many of Jesus’s sayings are authentic, but also expunged all the miracles out of the New Testament. I seriously doubt that RA would approve of this “more reasonable” scripture! Therefore, I would like to ask of RA, since he claims unequivocally that “all interpretations are valid”: Is the following exegesis on the Bible “more reasonable” or is it “more sophisticated”? “I tell you no virtue can exist without breaking these ten commandments. Jesus was all virtue, and acted from impulse, not from rules.” “Moral Virtues are continual Accusers of Sin & promote Eternal Wars & Dominency over others.” (Blake)

• SH: The point is that so many Christians and Moslems believe these things and not this liberal view of their scriptures. They have “views that are worthy of our denigration.” Views held by those whose decisions affect our lives. “Religion is a strategy built on lies and self-deception.”

SH is right on! I’d like to know who these “most people” are; those that read the Bible in this poetical, allegorical, and symbolical way. And since this country is so heavy to the side of the fundamentalist Christian reading of scripture, I like to know: just where are all these Joseph Campbell-trained readers? But if RA wants a “more sophisticated” reading of the Bible, let me offer this “infernal” reading: “ The Vision of Christ that thou dost see / Is my Vision’s Greatest Enemy . . . Thine is the friend of All Mankind, / Mine speaks in parables to the Blind: / Thine loves the same world that mine hates, / Thy Heaven doors are my Hell Gates. . . / Both read the Bible day & night, / But thou read'st black where I read white.” –Blake, The Everlasting Gospel

• RA: “Multiple means to understand religion or scripture, as there are multiple means to read any piece of literature, or any ideology for that matter.” Accusation of “literalism”—SH reads scripture like any “fundamentalist extremist.” “True test of how one goes about not just reading scripture but understanding scripture is understanding not just the historic context of it, the social context of it, but also recognizing that what you are reading is a description of sacred history [myth]—a description not just of facts and events. Gospel writers not writing—no writing of any scripture is writing what we consider as ‘history.” “They were writing about the description of the numinous experience and encounter with the divine—however that encounter is understood.” “We as intelligent 21st century modernist readers have to have more sophisticated understanding of these scriptures and read them within the sort of poetic, allegorical, and historical context or we should be laughed at too.”

The problem with this argument is, as SH points out, that most believers don’t read scripture this more sophisticated way—especially in America—; they read it literally or legalistically or moralistically. Thus RA describes how “most people” read scripture in idealized way. Who are these “most people”? Are they “most people” in theological seminaries or religious studies departments? The way RA states the problem with SH’s way of reading scripture in historical and social context is very misleading, since the problem is just the opposite; for throughout most of the history of scriptural exegesis the Bible was read without any historical and social context—ungrounded, ahistorical, and absolutist readings. RA has used the deceptive strategy of blaming the critic with just the thing the critic charges the believers with—literalism. Thus it is no accident that at one point RA, in making his case, says: “It wouldn’t be mere sophistry to say . . . .” Oh yes it would!

• RA: Insults: “I write books because I’m an expert in . . . whereas you ….” “Your research tools are okay if you get them from Fox News.” “Unsophisticated view of religion.” “Simplistic ways of thinking.” “Knee-jerk blame” of Koran and religion in general. “Sam’s views are perfectly logical if your research tools are Fox News … no, I mean that seriously!” (Laughter) Thinking about religion “in a vacuum” and “a profound unsophistication.” “In all due respect to your intellectualism ….”

Contrary to RA’s insults, SH not only doesn’t insult in return and remains restrained, but actually complements RA: “Your job is to … and you are better at it than me.” “You are a diplomat.” And speaking of being diplomatic, who is being, throughout the debate, more diplomatic?: SH: “I don’t think we’re as far apart as you believe.” “Reza and I can possibly have a meeting of the minds here.” “Raza and I have more of a commonality in our approach to religion.” Thus, here is an instance, aside from the intellectual content of the debate, when the atheist is not only more restrained, but much more considerate and kinder to his opponent that the religious man, who is supposed to me more moral. So who is actually engaging in what RA calls “knew-jerk blame.”? (Who is the “diplomat” here? Reza Aslan is a Research Associate at USC’s Center on Public Diplomacy.) “I have not the Charity for the Bishop that he pretends to have for Paine. I believe him to be a State trickster. Dishonest Misrepresentation. Priestly Impudence. Contemptible Falsehood & Detraction. . . . Mr. Paine has not extinguish’d & cannot Extinguish, Moral rectitude; he has Extinguish’d Superstition, which took the Place of Moral Rectitude. What has Moral Rectitude to do with Opinions concerning historical fact?”

• RA: “I’m an expert.” “My expertise.”

RA keeps insisting that “I’m an expert!” “I’m an expert.!” Protesting too much? If he is such “an expert in Mid-East affairs, his understanding and sympathies of the Israeli-Palestine issue leave much to be desired. Also his demonization of Central American Catholic “Liberation Theology” as death squads. Who had the death squads? What about the real right-wing death squads so infamous in that region? Those responsible for the murder of Liberation Theologist, Archbishop Romero. This is his example of bad Christianity? There is a certain logic to RA’s erroneous characterization of Liberation Theology. He doesn’t seem to be too sympathetic to any “social” reading of scripture and thus would not like the “social gospel.”

• RA: “It’s the easiest thing in the world to criticize religion—just turn on the TV!” “Intellectually dishonest” about Biblical morality. “To read scriptures in this way is to fundamentally misunderstand the key point of scripture… The easiest thing in the world … to find offensive and despicable in Bible .. and by these example deny the entire history of religion.” “Generalities based on anecdotal evidence.”

The anti-Hollywood argument; that Hollywood movies always put religion in a bad light. (Michael Medved.) Is it that easy? It may be on a pointing out religion’s evils, but is it so easy to get to the heart of the problem with religion and how it operates subliminally in out psyches? Was it easy for Nietzsche? Besides, SH’s critiques by themselves is just the most obvious level. There is another level, and that is how these beliefs get translated into psychological, social and political beliefs (e.g. how religious Ur-concept of monotheism, one God, gets into concepts that make for one truth, one country, one culture—monoculture—all mitigating against diversity. And even if “it is the easiest thing,” could it be because religion has made it easy? Could it be, in other words, that while the secularists/atheists/agnostics challenged the claims of “religion,” it is nonetheless the case that it was the representatives of religion, by their making “God” so puny and provincial—the image of their own ignorant and twisted minds projected on a cosmic scale—that they invited independently-thinking people to overturn Him? For decades now we have heard religionists and other traditionalists bemoaning the terrible decline of “religion”—the loss of belief, values, and, morality—and pointing a waging finger outward at the forces of secularism, the enemies of religion—the unbelievers; atheists, agnostics, secular humanists, the counter-culture, Hollywood, rock music, hip-hop. But I want to ask: Are these the ones ultimately responsible? My answer is that we should look to our religious leaders as responsible for this state of affairs—for the “the death of God.” I say it is precisely the religionists themselves who are responsible for giving “religion” a bad name. Given the absurd, repressive, and destructive belief systems that these men of God have erected and promoted, no wonder that intelligent and inquiring minds of the modern period have rejected these beliefs outright! In support of my outrageous argument here, let me quote the 19th-century poet, painter, visionary “Christian,” William Blake, who proclaimed the death of the Christian God-idol “Nobodaddy” and claimed “Jesus the Imagination” as his savior.

O for a voice like thunder, and a tongue
To drown the throat of war! ---When the senses
Are shaken, and the soul is driven to madness,
Who can stand? When the souls of the oppressed
Fight in the troubled air that rages, who can stand?
When the whirlwind of fury comes from the
Throne of God, when the frowns of his countenance
Drive the nations together, who can stand?
When Sin claps his broad wings over the battle,
And sails rejoicing in the flood of Death;
When souls are torn to everlasting fire,
And fiends of Hell rejoice upon the slain,
O who can stand? O who hath caused this?
O who can answer at the throne of God?
The Kings and Nobles of the Land have done it!
Hear it not, Heaven, thy Ministers have done it!
(William Blake)

• RA: The death of God has been going on for a long time and yet people still believe (in spite of such dire pronouncements).”

It could be said that this debate represents the ontological divide that separates those who, on the one hand, feel the “death of God” the believer’s worst nightmare and, on the other hand, those who feel it the best thing that happened since the Big Bang. (Actually, there’s a more complex position: that of the person of faith who understands that the “death of God” is, paradoxically, the rebirth of something greater. (But that may be too “sophisticated” a position for RA to grasp.) I would suggest that perhaps the “death of God” has already occurred when Nietzsche said it did, but most believers are too blind to know what’s going on. Nietzsche was truly prophetic. (RA says he thinks the prophets today are scientists!) But RA, in rebuttal to SH, keeps harping about the need for a more sophisticated approach to religion and scripture. So if RA wants “sophistication,” then let’s get sophisticated, because in order to understand what Nietzsche meant by the “death of God,” a more “sophisticated” and non-literal approach must be taken. (It’s ironic that RA abuses SH for this “literalistic” approach to his sacred cow, religion; yet he himself takes just this literal approach to the supposed anti-religion known as the “death of God.” Like many of his camp, they use Nietzsche as a straw man and seldom ever read him.) In fact, the “death of God” means the death of the entire symbolic cosmos that supported the belief in “God;” it meant, among other things, that religious constructs are obsolete. It meant, in other words, the death of an idol. (The death of the idol Blake called “Nobodday.”) Once more, Nietzsche’s Zarathustra was himself a religious prophet. Therefore, the “God” that was dead was not the “God” in its fullest sense. To quote Nietzsche: “At bottom it is only the moral God that has been overcome.” (Sophistication? Cf. theologians and philosophers of religion who are working out an alternative religious system to replace classical monotheism—“panentheism.”) Again, since RA states that he wants “more sophistication” in approaching these matters and accuses SH of being “profoundly unsophisticated,” the question is: Just who is guilty of “profoundly unsophisticated”?

• RA: On double-standard. “Why don’t we blame science, secularism, and other ideologies by the same standards?” “. . . overlaying religious constructs on nationalistic issues.” “. . . doing exactly what the religious extremists are doing . . . the cosmic conception history.” The cause of conflict, bloodshed, and war in history is not “religion,” but other social ills, like “nationalism” and etc. “You are blaming religion.” RA’s charge of “knee-jerk blame” is complemented by knee-jerk emotional attachment to a belief system that blinds the believer to its actual nature. Indeed, if the charge includes a “double-standard,” then RA certainly is himself guilty, since he defines religion in such a way as to validate it when necessary and yet absolve it of responsibility when necessary. SH had pointed this out in his very first response to RA description of what religion is to believers; i.e., SH being accused of misrepresenting the beliefs of Jews, Christians, and Moslems whenever he criticizes “religion.”

Again RA demonstrates sheer sophistry. (“It wouldn’t be mere sophistry to say . . . .” Oh yes it would!) Perhaps because science and secularism in general do not share, by definition, the same claim to absolute, unchangeable truth. Try as Aslan may to deflect the valid criticisms of religion, this equivocation of religion and science is sheer sophistry. For while there may be some secondary ways that religion and science could be equally held responsible, no amount of verbal slight of hand can alter the fact that they differ essentially in their ontological and epistemological underpinnings. And when its convenient to do so, the religionists are the first to point to the unbridgeable gulf that separates them; after all, God, not man, institutes “religion” and whose Word in scripture (dogma) is infallible and unchanging. “Religion,” as institution is, so to speak, vertical to all other man-made, horizontal institutions. (Cf. the sophistry of the Bishop trying to deflect responsibility away from the sex scandals in the Church. A Roman Catholic Bishop appeared on a TV interview in the wake of the revelations of the sexual misconduct of Catholic priests with young boys. He offered a brilliant piece of sophistry: the Church was actually no different from the rest of the institutions in our society; they all had their share of sexual misconduct in the workplace. Really? I hate to quibble over insignificant details, but what the good Bishop fails to take into consideration is that these other “institutions” are secular and don’t include in their articles of incorporation a dogma on the nature of sex and its place in the great scheme of things, or that the Church itself sees its own institution as ontologically vertical to all other horizontal secular institutions. Thus one is tempted to ask: Could it be that the there is a direct relationship between the sexual misconduct of its priests and the Church’s teaching about sex, in general, and its official policy of celebrate priests, in particular? ) And as far as other ideologies are concerned, if they in fact are guilty of absolute dogmatism and etc. (like Marxist ideology), perhaps it’s because these unconsciously have incorporated structures from religion. Perhaps one good example will suffice to demonstrate what I’m talking about: how Marx unconsciously incorporated Christian eschatology into this vision of the ideal society. As atheist Bertrand Russell pointed out, despite its dogmatic atheism, Marxism is modeled on the Christian messianic view of history. In Marx’s writings the redemptive role of the “just” and the “anointed” in Christian eschatological writings becomes the “proletariat,” whose struggle and sufferings change the world. Thus Marx predicts a final struggle between good and evil—personified, respectively, by the proletariat and capitalists—that is analogous to the beginning of the Millennium. Paradise, in the communist utopia, is a classless society in which work is done by machines and all goods are held in common. Aslan’s protests are part of his main defense against Harris’ critique of religion—the double standard—; that it makes as much sense to fault religion for these social ills than it does science and secular ideologies. My point here is, again, that while this may indeed seem like a double standard on a one to one basis, it is in fact, at another level—that of the unconscious and subliminal—a valid criticism, because these dogmatic beliefs become, after some 2000 years of mental programming, deep-seated structures in the subliminal mind, conditioning even the ideologies of its enemies. (Cf. the Old Testament concept God’s “chosen people” and how this concept gets translated into secular terms in modern empire-building in general, and in the fabric of the American character; its founding and its role in the world.) Aslan wants more “sophistication.” However, to engage this problem at this level would certainly take a deeper, more “sophisticated” analysis of the role religion plays in the formation of science and secular ideologies. (Cf. the notion of the material world as devoid of spirit by religion and dead stuff in science.) About the argument over whether religion is more responsible for bloodshed and war than secular institutions and ideologies, SH replies that he does not think religion is more responsible. However, for the sake of argument, one could make the case that it is. The only reason that secular ideologies seem to be more responsible is that in the time of the reign of Christendom their were fewer populations to kill and the Church didn’t have the advanced technologies of killing that the modern does. Be that as it may and to concede the point to RA, the problem with RA’s argument is that it totally ignores the question of whether, by its own religious ideologies, the Church set the stage—at least ideationally and psychologically —for the conflicts of the modern secular state. (Cf. the argument about the conflict in the Mid-East.) To give one prime example: the responsibility of the writings of the New Testament for “anti-Judaism,” which developed into modern “anti-Semitism.” To the uninformed it appears that “anti-Semitism” is purely a secular creation, having to do with ultra-Nationalism in Nazi Germany (and other countries). But they haven’t looked into the religious roots of this secular phenomenon in early Christianity and in the Middle Ages. From early on the Christian view was that the Jews were responsible for killing Christ, and during the medieval period they were pictured as the very Anti-Christ of the Book of Revelation. (The Protestant Reformation had little effect on curbing these anti-Semitic tendencies of the Catholic Church. Martin Luther himself was a rabid anti-Semite.) Thus during the Crusades (c. 1096), certain Christian princes and noblemen realized that the “infidel” they were fighting against in the east (the Moslems) was in their very midst (the Jew). So in the Rhineland (!) they launched pogroms on entire communities of Jews. In other words (against RA’s claim that religion has nothing to do with this kind of thing), it wouldn’t be too much to say that without Christianity fascist “anti-Semitism” would not have been possible. Therefore RA’s claim that SH is “overlaying religious constructs on nationalistic issues” is wrong in this case, and by extension, many others. It simply appears to be the case that these secular ills are totally outside religion when one is ignorant of the deeper roots of these ills. In recent decades some representatives of the Christianity (Jewish theologians have long been writing about this) have been brave enough to tackle Christian “anti-Semitism” and hold their religion responsible. (See Sidney G. Hall, Christian Anti-Semitism and Paul’s Theology and John Dominic Crossan, Who Killed Jesus: Roots of Anti-Semitism in the Gospel Story of the Death of Jesus. For a scientific study, see Glock and Stark, Christian Beliefs and Anti-Semitism: A scientific study of the ways in which the teachings of Christian churches shape American attitudes toward the Jews.) In this area of the way in which “religion” gets translated into and informs secular ideologies, RA totally ignores not only the subtle aspects I’m pointing out, but the blatant alliance of State and Church in this country (never mind in Islamic ones). “Paine says that Christianity put a stop to improvement, & the bishop has not shewn the contrary.” “. . . State Religion which they call’d God & so were liars as Christ says. That the Jews assumed a right Exclusively to the benefits of God will be a lasting witness against them & the same will it be against Christians.” “All Penal Laws court Traansgression & therefore are cruelty & Murder. . . . The Abomination that maketh desolate, i. e. State Religion, which is the source of all Cruelty.”

• RA: “I don’t understand that irreconcilable dogmas have anything to do with the existence of God or the question of the existence of God. That’s where I’m fundamentally confused by that argument.”

I think RA is confused all right—but not by this argument! It’s about this God’s—this loving Father’s—actions. “To me, who believe the Bible & profess myself a Christian, a defense of the Wickedness of the Israelites in murdering so many thousands under the pretence of a command from God is altogether Abominable & Blasphemous. . . . Christ died as an Unbeliever & if the Bishops had their will so would Paine . . . .”

• RA: Slavery. “No moral quality whatever attached to slavery 3000 years ago.” “To read it in this way is to totally misunderstand the point of scripture.” “We should laugh at literal readings that look at slavery in this way.” “Like rejecting Huck Finn because of the morality of 2000 years ago.” JL: “Paul didn’t worry about slavery because the end of the world was coming soon, and so the moral problem of the institution of slavery would be solved.”

Talking about laughing at different readings of scripture, what would make me laugh, if it weren’t so perverted, is exactly these learned pronouncements in defense of Biblical slavery. Especially absurd and perverted is the twisted logic (is he serious?) of JK; that the “institution of slavery solves itself” because of the prophecy of the “end of the world.” I can’t help but think, wouldn’t it be nice if all our social ills were so conveniently and terminally solved? Speaking of morality, what kind of “morality” is this? Does JK actually believe Paul? Since RA is so sincere about labeling SH as “doing what the religious extremists are doing—reading Bible literally—let’s take him up on it! Isn’t JK and by extension RA) doing exactly what the “religious extremists” (in this country) are doing? Whose “morality” is this? Isn’t it exactly the “morality” that we have witnessed time and time again of the Religious Right? The morality of “the end of times” and “the Rapture”? And the “morality” that gets translated into social policy in this country? Remember Secretary of the Interior, James Watt? We were told that we didn’t have to worry about our environment—the end of the world was imminent and Jesus was coming back. Yes, here, too, the environmental crisis would “solve itself”! So, whose reading is exactly like the “religious extremists”?

About the issue of judging the past by the moral standards of today. This mistake was earned the epithet of “Presentism,” judging the past by the moral standards of today. Okay, but, even so, Jesus was the Christ, the Son of God! We should hold the incarnation of “Christ-consciousness” (which has an eternal range) to a higher standard than that of the average person, who gets cut more slack because his morality is finite, fallible, and conditional, since it evolves with time. Be that as it may, my point here is that this charge of “presentism” just doesn’t stand up to the facts of history. A good example of this charge of “presentism” was brought home to me during the Native American campaign of “500 Hundred years of Resistance” in regard to our Columbus Day celebrations. I had asked the deacon of Grace Cathedral in San Francisco, a liberal priest, about whether it was time for the Catholic Church to formally apologize for the genocide it perpetuated upon the indigenous peoples of the Americas. The response was that this was “presentism.” The problem is that Bartoleme de las Casas, Spanish priest, scholar, historian, and founder of utopian community, was a human rights advocate and activist for native peoples in Columbus’ time. He denounced the practice of slavery. Now, as far as Jesus and Paul are concerned, both RA and JK claim that SH can’t condemn the New Testament for its support of slavery because there was “no moral judgment whatsoever” was attached to the institution in that era of history. However, this view is belied by that fact that ancient man did consider the morality of slavery. First, I want to briefly examine the issue of “slavery” in the ancient world in general, and then in ancient Roman Palestine in particular. In fact, the father of philosophy and founder of a mystical community, Pythagoras, according to his second-century biographer, Iamblichus, “was an opponent of slavery” (On the Pythagorean Way of Life, 33). This is in the 6th-century BCE!, which seems to give good evidence that the ancients did grapple morally with the institution of slavery. Of course, one could reply that this is far in time and place from the Palestine of the New Testament. If the Greek Pythagoras and his world seem far removed from the Palestine of Roman times, let me offer this piece historical biography, becuse this retort is short-circuited by a curious fact in the life of Pythagoras (c. 582-507 BC). It seems that when he was a young seeker after wisdom he took a ship from Egypt, where he was studying, to Israel’s Mt. Carmel, which he climbed in order to contact the Essene sanctuary there. Atop the mountain he received teachings from the Essene Narzarenes. When he came back to the ship the Egyptian sailors planned to sell him into slavery, but were so impressed with his spiritual numinosity that they relented. So there is a connection between the values of the Greek world and the Jewish. Yet, admittedly, this doesn’t necessarily prove anything about the issue of slavery and attitudes toward it in ancient Roman Palestine. However, upon further research, we discover three important facts: (1) The Essene community figures into the world of the New testament, since Jesus is said to have either been influenced by the Essene’s through John the Baptist, or even may have been Essene’s himself; (2) The Essene’s were against slavery; (3) There is a connection between the Essene and the Pythagorian communities.

“The Essenes are mentioned by several ancient writers, including Josephus, Philo, Pliny, and Porphyry. Philo states that the Essenes rejected animal sacrifices, despised wealth and lived communally, did not make oaths, and rejected slavery (‘Every Good Man is Free”), saying “there is not a single slave among them.” Instead of this search for the Essenes in the Dead Sea Scrolls, we should look at the Pythagoreans. While the similarities between the Essenes and the Dead Sea Scrolls community seem to be nebulous and tenuous at best, the similarities between the Essenes and the Pythagoreans are obvious and striking. The followers of Pythagoras, a Greek philosopher of the 6th century BCE, are an easy choice for comparison with the Essenes for two reasons: first, they had so much in common with the Essenes . . . that it would be correct to speak of these latter groups as Jewish Pythagoreans; and secondly, because Josephus states flatly that the Essene lifestyle and the Pythagorean lifestyle were the same (Antiquities 15.10.4). We don’t have to look far to find similarities between the Pythagoras described by Iamblichus and the Essenes described by Josephus, Pliny, Porphyry, and Philo—as well with the Jewish Christians. The neo-Pythagorean Iamblichus in his book On the Pythagorean Way of Life states that: Pythagoras was an opponent of slavery.” [Keith Akers, The Lost Religion of Jesus, 2001]

What we know about slavery is that it was a universal institution throughout ancient times, yet, as SH points out it was never questioned in the Old Testament or New Testament. However, this doesn’t mean that either (as we have seen) the world of Jesus’ time was completely devoid moral conscience about it (as RA and JK would have us believe), or that the ancient world in general never questioned the morality of slavery. In fact, the second person on record (after Pythagoras) to denounce slavery as an evil was the Greek playwright Euripides (c. 480-406 BC), who wrote in his play Hecuba: “That thing of evil, by its nature evil, / Forcing submission from a man to what/ No man should yield to.” The Lives and Opinions of Eminent Philosophers, by Diogenes Laertius, has the following statement from a letter of the Milesian philosopher Anaximenes (c. 585-525 BC) to Pythagoras: “To what purpose should I trouble myself in searching out the secrets of the stars, having death or slavery continually before my eyes?”

Therefore, both the line from Euripides and the letter of the Greek philosopher should warn us that it is not “presentism” (judging the ancient past by our values or morality) to critically ask why Jesus and Paul could not see their way clear to morally condemn the institution of slavery. Given this information about the issue of slavery in the ancient world of the New Testament, we can only wonder about how RA and JK can make their claims and ask: Just who is being “intellectually dishonest”? “I have not the Charity for the Bishop that he pretends to have for Paine. I believe him to be a State trickster. Dishonest Misrepresentation. Priestly Impudence. Contemptible Falsehood & Detraction. . . .” “The Bible or Peculiar Word of God, Exclusive of Conscience or the Word of God Universal, is that Abomination . . . & henceforth every man may converse with God & be a King & Priest in his own house.”

• RA: Religion and literature. Condemning Bible for its immorality. His analogy of Huck Finn with the Bible; “We wouldn’t condemn all literature because the novel used the word niggar.” (SH interjects: “I’m not rejecting in terms of literature.”)

The problem with this specious analogy is the unacknowledged difference that makes all the difference in the world between secular literature and sacred scripture is that people are not fighting wars and killing each other over whose a better writer, Dickens or Hemmingway. Besides, this analogy begs the question as to the idea of “Bible as literature.” (Opening commentator’s remarks about “everything is interpretation.”) Bible first interpreted by an exegesis using the tools and methods of literary criticism. Watch out what analogies you make—you don’t want to go there! Perhaps the Bible and the Koran can survive their privileged status in modernism, but in postmodernist literary criticism there are no sacred texts per se; that is, no text that can claim to be the unmediated Word of God, since they are all written by all-too-human authors. Again, as pointed out in the debate: “everything is interpretation.” So who is being “disingenuous”?

• RA sees SH’s view of the role of religion/Islam—as essentially a religious problem—in world conflicts as “simplistic,” as a “fundamentalist, literalist” reading of scripture by the light of today’s morality.

But it is anything but simplistic to see how religion sets up the intellectual atmosphere, the entire social context, and language used in otherwise geo-political conflict. And how religion justifies—no, sanctifies—the atrocities committed.

• RA: “Religion is just the language” these political extremists use to express their economic and other interests. On the other hand “religion” is so much a part of history that you can’t have or write about history without it. Religion is also “a language” that describes the mysterious “transcendent experience.” “The writers of the Bible are not writing history” as we know it today’ they are “writing about a numinous experience.”

This view wants it both ways: on the one hand, “religion” is everything about history—you can’t separate the study of history from the study of religion; on the other, “religion” is reduced to merely a “language,” either for political grievances or to phenomenologically describe the “transcendent/numinous experience.” Here, in using the term “numinous,” RA is using the language not of mainstream theology, but the technical vocabulary of the disciple of the history- and phenomenology of religion. It was coined (as far as I’m aware) in Rudolph Otto’s classical study, The Idea of the Holy (1928). Suffice to say, in contradiction to RA’s claim, few believing Christians would recognize this description for what the Bible is describing. Moreover, the main problem with this claim is that “the numinous” (like the term, “homo religiosus”) was coined to describe a very different kind of religious world-view; that of archaic man, who didn’t have “religion” (in the Axial age sense and in our modern sense of revealed scripture as creed) as much as he had “mythology” (which expressed and embodied, through ritual, “an original ontology and cosmogony”). Indeed, it was precisely on this issue of “mythology” that the historical religion of Judeo-Christianity carved out its superior niche in the ancient world. Other sects had mythology,” whereas they had the real thing—“religion” (i.e. their savior god was a real, historical person not a creature of myth like Dionysus, Attis, Adonis, Mithras, etc.). For RA to make such a claim goes against the distinction upon which Christianity made itself superior to all other sects in the ancient world. Therefore, like RA’s dubious claims about scriptural religion’s overriding concern with “sacred history” (which is another concept better suited to the cosmogonies of archaic man and the theoganies of ancient man than to the creedal “religions”—monotheist Judaism, Christianity, Islam—that identify with linear history), these comparisons are misleading, sounding more like he’s teaching a class in the history- or phenomenology of archaic religion than debating the actual issues involved with our current religious situation and its history. (I will leave it to the reader to decide, since RA is so concerned about this fault, whether he himself is being “intellectually dishonest” or merely “disingenuous.”) Therefore, we have to ask what it means for the writers of the New Testament to be “writing about this transcendent experience.” How are they “writing about” it and why? If the writers of the New Testament, especially Paul, were in fact only interested in describing this “transcendent experience” (Paul’s conversion experience on the road to Damascus), it was only to shore up their claim to the one and only truth of their savior, the Christ. Indeed, if it be the “numinous,” then it only served the miracle-mongering that proved the “our god is better than your god” claim; i.e, it won over new converts (which conversion project religious historian Ramsey MacMullen describes the Christians carried on like “a shoot out at Dodge City”). Thus, if we are going to call this “transcendent experience” in the New Testament a “description,” then I say its not a “description” in a phenomenological sense but rather a “description” in a polemical sense. The other problem with this claim is that it smacks of something the Church of Rome always held suspect and thus repressed—mysticism. You were not supposed to go around seeking this “transcendent experience;” it was enough that the divine was mediated through the sacraments of the Church. The mystical experience was dangerous because you could get the notion that you didn’t need the mediating priesthood; that, in fact, you were “one with God.” (Since RA represents the Islamic faith, it should be mentioned that just this mysticism led to the torture and crucifixion in 922 of al-Hallaj, the Persian-Sufi teacher and poet, who claimed just this.) With this in mind, I will, again, leave it up to the reader to decide if RA is being outright “intellectually dishonest,” or merely “disingenuous.”

• JL: “Christianity, unlike Islam, has gone through a reformation which has tempered its excesses.”

I Agree with RA here. SH needs to be more even handed in his condemnation of all three religions to an equal extent. However, to be equally critical, when SH accuses Islam of becoming a “death cult,” this should also be applied to Christianity, but not in the sense that SH meant it. It could be argued (and Nietzsche did argue it) that Christianity is a death cult (Nietzsche claimed Christianity was in love with death; was “anti-life”) in the sense of mistaking eternal life for the stasis of death. This is tied together with its primary symbol, the Cross of the Crucified Christ. Because of its preoccupation with suffering and death, theologians, like Mary Daly, have pointed out the essential “masochistic” nature of that tortured symbol. (Actually, the Cross wasn’t the first symbol of the religion but became that; the first symbol was a fish.) Now that we have seen the logical outcome of this symbol stated graphically by Mel Gibson’s The Passion of the Christ, what further evidence do we need to see Christianity’s death-wish? That being said, one has to agree with the criticism from RA and JK. I would say that SH’s strong suit is not the nature of the crisis in the Mid-East, nor the particulars of the players involved. One has to be particularly cautious not to appear to be buying into the current American demonization of all things Arab and Islam (as if these two things necessarily were one). That being said, I don’t think SH has any particular prejudice against Islamic religion over the other monotheistic faiths. I think he is coming out of a certain ignorance about the issues involved. However, as I stated before, for that matter, judging by RA’s counter-assessments, he could also use some education—like about what’s going on in the conflicts in Palestine and Iraq. (See, Robert Fisk, The Great War for Civilisation: The Conquest of the Middle East.) Yet, the difference is that SH isn’t constantly pounding his chest about his “expertise.”

• JL: Newton and Bible. Scientific mind can co-exist with mystical mind. SH: “partitioned mind.”

Newton and the Bible. Okay. But how about Newton and the Alchemical text? Here, I trust that both RA and SH have no room in their respective world-views for the Newton who wrote both the Principia Mathematica and the “Hunting of the Green Lyon.”

• SH: “We have moderation and liberalism in religion today because of hundreds of years of religion’s collision with modernity and so understand Bible differently.”

This is an important point. One aspect of it deserves comment. The upholders of “religion” in our time cry foul whenever anyone like SH levels incisive criticism at their sacred cow, labeling it “bashing religion/Christianity.” Some of the more sophistically clever even claim that those who engage in attacking religion do so because its now “cool” to be anti-religious. But the truth is that given the many centuries of Christian political and cultural hegemony in the West, the religionists are not accustomed to hear criticism and, thus, engage in knee-jerk defense of their right to impose their religious views on the rest of us. As far as being “cool” to be anti-religious, it wasn’t “cool” for those that stood courageously up to the imposition of the Christian religion (from both the orthodox and liberal camps) on secular Americans in their public institutions. Witness what happened to atheist activist Madalyn Murray O’Hare in the 1950s and 60s. As SH indicates, the atheists seem to be the last unacknowledged repressed minority I America. In other words, if the Christian looks more moderate or reasonable now, it didn’t change out of the goodness of its religious heart, because it saw the wisdom of changing its outmoded and repressive views—no, it was dragged kicking and screaming into the modern world; forced to change when people became more educated. And you can bet your life that (as SH said we no longer do) we’d still be burning heretics at the stake, if the Church had its way. “Christ died as an Unbeliever & if the Bishops had their will so would Paine . . . .”

_________________________________________________________________

To conclude my analysis of the issues raised in this debate on “Religion and Reason,” I end the same way as I began; that is, with the candid and terse observations from the “Christian,” William Blake on that earlier debate on the same subject.

“Paine has not attacked Christianity. Watson has defended the Antichrist.”

“Paine is either a devil or an Inspired man. Men who give themselves to their Energetic Genius in the manner that Paine does are no Examiners. If they are not determinately wrong they must be Right or the Bible is false . . . . The man who pretends to be a modest enquirer into the truth of a self-evident thing is a Knave. . . .”

“The trifles which the Bishop [RA] has combated in the following Letters are such as do nothing against Paine’s [SH’s] Arguments, none of which the Bishop [RA] has dared to Consider. One, for instance, which is that the books of the Bible were never believ’d willingly by any nation & that none but designing Villains ever pretended to believe—That the Bible is all a State Trick, thro’ which tho’ the People at all times could see, they never had the power to throw off. Another Argument is that all the Commentators on the Bible are Dishonest Designing Knaves, who in the hopes of a good living adopt the State religion; this he has shewn with great force, which calls upon His Opponent [RA] loudly for an answer. . . .”

[Written on last page of the “An Apology for the Bible”]
“It appears to me Now that Tom Paine [SH] is a better Christian [Moslem] than the Bishop [RA]. I have read this Book with attention & find that the Bishop [RA] has only hurt Paine’s [SH’s] heel while Paine [SH] has broken his head. The Bishop [RA] has not answered one of Paine’s [SH’s] grand objections.”

Appendix

HOMO RELIGIOSUS: Man, the religious animal.

Man as homo sapiens, the rational animal, or man as homo religiosus, the religious animal.

Crucial to an understanding of Eliade's The Sacred and the Profane are three categories: the Sacred (which is a transcendent referent such as the gods, God, or Nirvana), hierophany (which is the breakthrough of the sacred into human experience, i.e. a revelation), and homo religiosus (the being par excellence prepared to appreciate such a breakthrough). One of Eliade's aims is to acquaint readers with the idea of the numinous, a concept provided in Rudolf Otto's The Idea of the Holy. The numinous experience is that experience of the Sacred which is particular to religious human beings (homo religiosus) in that it is experientially overwhelming, encompassing the mysterium tremendum et fascinans, both the awesomely fearful and the enthrallingly captivating aspects of the Holy, or, the Wholly Other . In expanding and expounding the phenomenological dimensions of the Sacred, Eliade points out that the Sacred appears in human experience as a crucial point of orientation at the same time it provides access to the ontological reality which is its source and for which homo religiosus thirsts. According to Eliade, homo religiosus thirsts for being. In terms of space, the Sacred delineates the demarcation between sacred and profane and thus locates the axis mundi as center. Thus temples and teepees, homes and hearths become sacralized for homo religiosus. Numerous examples of the consecration of sacred space illustrate the importance of cosmogony as a paradigmatic model for practically every creative endeavor. Such cosmogonic activities as were done "in the beginning" (in illo tempore) are recapitulated periodically in ritual and myth to sustain and renew the world, hence, not only does space become sacred, but time as well. The festival, such as New Year's Celebration, has a way of tapping into primordial time and harnessing the forces of creation into re-creation, dipping into chaos and re-emerging with new order. "Symbolically man became contemporary with the cosmogony, he was present at the creation of the world," (p 79) and/or periodically contemporary with the gods. Thus, homo religiosus can insure the life of animals, plants, crops, culture... Myth as the repetition and imitation of divine models allows homo religiosus to (1) remain in the sacred, "hence in reality;" and, (2) sanctify the world. "It is not without interest to note that [homo religiosus] assumes a humanity that has a transhuman, transcendent model (p99)." "For our purpose, what demands emphasis is the fact that religious man sought to imitate, and believed that he was imitating, his gods even when he allowed himself to be led into acts that verged on madness, depravity, and crime (p 104)."

This is so because Homo Religiosus always views the world as revealing a sacred modality. "Every cosmic fragment is transparent; its own mode of existence shows a particular structure of being, and hence of the sacred," since, for homo religiosus "sacrality is a full manifestation of being (p138)." Cosmic sacrality is thus primordial and yet ever-present in its distant revelation and ongoing revelatory capacity.

In turning to issues of "Human Existence and Sanctified Life" Eliade points out that in the contemporary world "religion as a form of life and Weltanschauung is represented by Christianity (p164)." A factor which can limit one's understanding of the total gamut of religious expression and expressivity available within the mental universe of homo religiosus. Indeed, to have studied the great classical religions and the high-religions of other cultures is of some advantage, but other data need to be considered far beyond that. "To gain a broader religious perspective, it is more useful to become familiar with the folklore of European peoples; in their beliefs and customs, their attitude toward life and death, many archaic religious situations are still recognizable." This is so because many of the religious expressions of rural peasant Christians in these European countrysides have incorporated a primordial, ahistorical Christianity that preserves a cosmic religion from pre-historic times not readily seen in the more urbanized Christianities of the secular cities. But beyond this there is the "primitive" world of "nomadic herdsmen, of totemistic hunters, of peoples still at the stage of gathering and small-game hunting (p164)" for whom the world exist in total sacrality, and for whom every aspect of existence reflects a sacred connection. "This is why, beginning at a certain stage of culture, man conceives of himself as a microcosm. He forms part of the god's creation; in other words, he finds in himself the same sanctity that he recognizes in the cosmos. It follows that his life is homologized to cosmic life; as a divine work, this cosmos becomes the paradigmatic image of human existence (p165)." "Openness to the world enables religious man to know himself in knowing the world--and this knowledge is precious to him because it is religious, because it pertains to being (p167)." There are a vast number of homologies between humans and the universe, "for example, the homology between the eye and the sun, or of the two eyes to sun and moon, of the cranium to the full moon, or again, of breath to the winds, of bones to stones, of hair to grass, and so on (pp168-169)." Homo Religiosus lives in an open cosmos and is in turn open to the world. "This means (a) that he is in communication with the gods; (b) that he shares in the sanctity of the world. That religious man can live only in an open world, we saw when we analyzed the structure of sacred space; man desires to dwell at a center...His dwelling is a microcosm; and so too is his body. The homology house-body-cosmos presents itself very early (p172)." "It can come about that in a noncosmic religion, such as that of India after Buddhism, the opening to the higher plane no longer represents passage from the human to the superhuman condition, but instead expresses transcendence, abolition of the cosmos, absolute freedom. There is an immense difference between the philosophical meaning of the Buddha's broken egg or the roof shattered by the Arhats and the archaic symbolism of passage from earth to heaven along the axis mundi or through the smoke hole. Yet the fact remains that, among symbols capable of expressing ontological breakthrough and transcendence, both Indian philosophy and Indian mysticism chose this primordial image of shattering the roof. This means that passing beyond the human condition finds figural expression in the destruction of the 'house,' that is, of the personal cosmos that one has chosen to inhabit (pp177-178)." It thus represents the abolition of conditions of mental and physical habitation and habituation, in other words, historical conditioning of any sort, in short, all situations. "As for the Christianity of the industrial societies and especially the Christianity of intellectuals, it has long since lost the cosmic values that it still possessed in the Middle Ages. We must add that this does not necessarily imply that urban Christianity is deteriorated or inferior, but only that the religious sense of urban populations is gravely impoverished (pp178-179)."

Rites of passage such as birth, puberty, initiation, marriage, and death reflect deeply significant transitions in human modes of being that have not entirely vanished from the cultural experiences of modern humans. Though we desacralized the world and secularized our modes of thought many vestiges, camouflages, and substitutes retain a bit of the heritage from whence they originated. The "dream factory" of cinema, for example, "takes over and employs countless mythical motifs--the fight between hero and monster, initiatory combats and ordeals, paradigmatic figures and images (the maiden, the hero, the paradisal landscape, hell, and so on). Even reading includes a mythological function, not only because it replaces the recitation of myths in archaic societies and the oral literature that still lives in the rural communities of Europe, but particularly because, through reading, the modern man succeeds in obtaining an 'escape from time' comparable to the 'emergence from time' effected by myths (p205)." Other examples are found in intellectual movements such as Existentialism, Marxism, and psychoanalysis.

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Finally, theologians talk about Homo religiosus, the religious humanoid, which aims to be spiritual and to act in a meaningful way. Homo sapiens is at her best when involved in a spiritual enterprise. Many scientists think the metaphor of Homo religiosus unscientific and irrelevant. But history, cross-cultural studies, and anthropological paleontology indicate that with the rise of Homo sapiens there have been no groups or societies that did not have a religion and a story of their origin that would place them into creation and in a special and unique spot.

However, religion seems to be rooted into our system even deeper than we think. Our fellow primates sometimes have their own ritualistic behaviors. Jane Goodall, the eminent and first female primate expert, has a unique way of looking at our closest relatives. Unlike many of her contemporaries, she embraces similarities between them and us. I once heard her talk about a rain dance in a chimp tribe in which male chimps perform a dancelike ritual before a thunderstorm. I don't know if I would go as far as she does and call that behavior spiritual. But I certainly do agree with her findings, which seem to suggest that the phenomenon of ritualistic behavior has been in our primate species for a long time.

The concept of Homo religiosus is also supported by brain studies. Neurologists have discovered that a special part of the brain is connected to religious experiences. When people pray, this part of the brain is particularly active and if, in turn, the neurons in this part are artificially stimulated, the subject reports a religious experience. Other researchers have discovered brain changes that occur whenever meditations and prayers are performed. These brain changes helped the subjects to function better; they were relieved from a feeling of stress and could concentrate better.

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LECTURE TWO: Homo religiosus: “WHAT IS ‘RELIGIOUS-NESS’” AND RELIGIOUS CONSCIOUSNESS, AS FUNCTIONS OF ORIENTATION

But when we say that God [underscore mine] is the object of religious experience, we must realize that “God” is frequently an extremely indefinite concept which does not completely coincide with what we ourselves usually understand by it. Religious experience, in other terms, is concerned with a “Somewhat”. But this assertion often means no more than that this “Somewhat” is merely a vague “something”; and in order that man may be able to make more significant statements about this “Somewhat”, it must force itself upon him, must oppose itself to him as being Something Other [underscore mine]. Thus, the first affirmation we can make about the Object of Religion is that it is a “highly exceptional and extremely impressive “Other” [underscore mine]. Subjectively, again, the initial state of man’s mind is amazement; and as Soderblom has remarked, this is true not only for philosophy but equally for religion. As yet, it must further be observed, we are in no way concerned with the supernatural or the transcendent: we can speak of “God” in merely a figurative sense; but there arises and persists an experience which connects or unites itself to the “Other” that thus obtrudes. Theory, and even the slightest degree of generalization, are still far remote; man remains quite content with the purely practical recognition that this Object is a departure from all that is usual and familiar; and this again is the consequence of the Power [underscore mine] it generates. The most primitive belief, then, is absolutely empirical; as regards primitive religious experience, therefore, and even a large proportion of that of antiquity, we must in this respect accustom ourselves to interpret the supernatural element in the conception of God by the simple notion of an “Other”, of something foreign and highly unusual, and at the same time the consciousness of absolute dependence, so well known to ourselves, by a indefinite and generalized feeling of remoteness .

(Van der Leeuw, Gerardus. Religion in Essence and Manifestation, Tr. by J.E. Turner. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1986, 23-24.)

Despite its importance for an understanding of the religious phenomenon, we shall not here discuss the problem of “hominization.” It is sufficient to recall that the vertical posture already marks a transcending of the condition typical of the primates. Uprightness cannot be maintained except in a state of wakefulness. It is because of man’s vertical posture that space is organized in a structure inaccessible to the prehominians: in four horizontal directions radiating from an “up”-“down” central axis. In other words, space can be organized around the human body as extending forward, backward, to right, to left, upward, and downward. It is from this original and originating experience—feeling oneself “thrown” into the middle of an apparently limitless, unknown, and threatening extensioin—that the different methods of orientatio [underscore mine] are developed; for it is impossible to survive for any length of time in the vertigo brought on by disorientation. This experience of space oriented around a “center” explains the importance of the paradigmatic divisions and distributions of territories, agglomerations, and habitations and their cosmological symbolism…

(Eliade, Mircea. A History of Religious Ideas: Vol. I From the Stone Age to the Eleusinian Mysteries. Tr. by Willard R. Trask. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1978. 3.)

Returning to the fundamental theme of the “What” of religious studies as such, “World Religions” as a specific subset of religious studies, and more specifically, returning to the “What is ‘religious-ness’?” formula as a catalyst or re-agent for propelling us forward through this line of inquiry/examination, we need to attempt to make some substantive assertions about the data set, the subject matter, for examination in this course. Essentially, what IS “religious-ness,” as such, that we can call this or that specific phenomenon (e.g. this or that behavior—prayer or meditation; this or that rite/ritual or ceremony—the Native American s

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