January 2008

"Religion and Discrimination" (vol. 2, issue 2)

We want, perhaps need, to talk and think about God. But in this we are ultimately frustrated, since the divine exceeds all our approaches. Throughout history various holy men and women have commented that no definitive description about the nature of the divine is possible. This is not to say that one cannot discuss one's religious experience, but only that no amount of words can precisely describe what must remain an "as-if." Kant wrote that the ultimate mystery of being is not a thing, and so the best things cannot be discussed, since they transcend thought. The second best things are misunderstood, since they are the thoughts that refer to that which is beyond thought. The third best are what we actually do discuss and ponder. Religion, from this perspective, is thrice removed from the true life of the divine.

All the world's major religions insist that they alone provide the path to enlightenment or salvation. And so it is understandable that people of faith often feel that "Those who are not with us are against us." It is my intention here to provoke the religious imagination by addressing religious discrimination in light of some ideas important to the fields of comparative philosophy and religion.

Problems of Knowledge

Many of the world's great religious leaders used a special language to carry attentive readers into the realm of sacred art and metaphor. This mythopoetic language necessitates that we recover for ourselves the image-rich language of the soul. Both the Buddha and the Christ used parables to communicate their wisdom; Lao Tzu wrote poetry. The Old Testament notes that God often spoke through the images of dreams. It is as if parables, poetry, dreams, and the sacred arts provide religious seekers a field of reference to the transcendent. Without an ability to read and see through images, sincere people can be manipulated by anyone upon whose readings of sacred writings they depend.

True religion is not and cannot be fundamentalist. As a transcendent reality, God transcends all our forms, thoughts, or categories. No one knows the mind or will of God. Traditional Jews are taught never to say the name God, that is, the Tetragrammaton, the four consonants of the ancient Hebrew name for God, considered too sacred to pronounce. Judaism records its constant struggle to interpret the righteousness required by God. Christianity acknowledges that the followers of Jesus neither understand him nor recognized him after his resurrection.

Eastern traditions also acknowledge the difficulty or even the wisdom of trying to capture the essence of God or ultimate reality in names or descriptions. Tao is a Chinese word meaning the way of ultimate reality, as well as our essential character. Tao exceeds our senses, thoughts, and imaginings, and if we were able to experience it in its fullness, we would not be able to bear the vision. According to Lao Tzu, "The Tao that can be told is not the eternal Tao." Shunyata is a Sanskrit, Buddhist term that suggests the void or emptiness, and refers to ultimate reality in so far as it is a devoid of all discernible characteristics and is apparently incomprehensible to the finite human mind, although not to the spirit. It is the realm of transitory and relative existence. Brahman, a Sanskrit Hindu term, is Universal Spirit, infinitely large and all encompassing, the transcendent ground of the universe. Brahman is silence and cannot be represented in speech. Lying beyond the grasp of pure intellect or even feeling, Brahman's nature can only be known through a direct revelation.

Questions and Quests

Some people think it highly inappropriate to question their religious beliefs. I disagree. It is only from an authentic examination of one's faith that one can effectively enter upon a religious quest. Entering honestly into the questioning process impels the human spirit to seek religious understanding beyond blind faith. Author and poet Clark Strand recommends two ways that we might read the Bible metaphorically and as revealed truth: one, "we are allowed to question everything," and two, "we can't throw anything out." Even if we should hold that tension, history marks well the low tolerance people have for those who question what others highly esteem.

Recall how ancient Athens condemned Socrates to death undermining the moral beliefs of its youths. Socrates did undermine morality, but one of social constraint, uncritical allegiance, and conformity to custom. He replaced it, however, with a morality of aspiration to spiritual perfection. Socrates advised his students to examine all inherited notions and judge for themselves each moral and spiritual question. Socrates argued that the soul, if exercised correctly, could see the Good, but he warned that arduous self-examination through an inquiry of questioning (i.e., philosophy) is required to distinguish the soul's true prompting from the easy appetites of our nature. Thus, for Socrates, questioning could lead one to the true self, a faculty capable of overriding the seeming value of easy desires.

Likewise, the Buddha preached a religion of intense self-seeking. To end the suffering of humanity, the Buddha pointed the way, but he insisted that we ourselves must work out our individual enlightenment. In a time when people relied strictly upon the authority of Brahmins to tell them how to live spiritually, the Buddha said in his farewell address: "Those who, either now or after I am dead, shall rely upon themselves only and not look for assistance to anyone besides themselves, it is they who shall reach the very topmost height."

Nobel peace prize recipient and author Elie Wiesel wrote eloquently about the value of questioning one's inherited faith. In his autobiographical novel Night, Wiesel's young protagonist Elie is told by his master, Moshe, "Man raises himself toward God by the questions he asks Him. Man questions God, and God answers. But we don't understand his answers because they come from the depths of the soul, and they stay there until death. You will find the true answers, Eliezer, only within yourself!" Elie comes to know that in matters of God the true religious seeker is necessarily drawn away from blind certainty into eternal time, where questions and answers become one.

Faith and Doubt

While it is true that many of us seek the peace of certainty regarding our faith, it is also true that such certainty is present behind the "If you are not with us, you're against us" mentality of religious discrimination. Having a true human faith in the divine means we live with uncertainty. Faith and doubt do not necessarily contradict each other. Reflecting upon the alliance of belief and uncertainty, Flannery O'Connor wrote in Mysteries and Manners that "...there is no suffering greater than what is caused by the doubts of those who want to believe. I know what torment this is, but I can only see it, in myself anyway, as the process by which faith is deepened. What people don't realize is how much religion costs. They think faith is a big electric blanket, when of course it is the cross." Christian theologian Paul Tillich argued in Biblical Religion and the Search for Ultimate Reality that "Faith is the continuous tension between itself and the doubt within itself." This doubt inherent in any true faith distinguishes faith from logical evidence, scientific probability, and unquestioning authoritarianism. According to Tillich, faith "does not remove the 'No' of doubt and the anxiety of doubt; it does not build a castle of doubt-free security -- only a neurotically distorted faith does that -- but it takes the 'No' of doubt and the anxiety of insecurity into itself." Certainty can be a major obstacle to religious understanding. If we are certain about our religious positions, there is no reason for our creative spirit to learn more beyond an unquestioning acceptance. Without the doubt required of true faith, religion, even ours, may become an expedient means for coercing others to do what we think God wants. For most of us, I dare say, this fellowship of faith and doubt must seem like a contradiction. More to the point, it is an important paradox of the soul. A classic fourteenth century Christian meditation text makes this point: "God is to be found in darkness and the cloud of Unknowing."

Failing to discern that our religious forms and practices are but useful tools or conduits to the God-experience, we unwittingly attach ourselves to illusions, the source of all suffering, according to Buddhism. And so the Zen master warns the student : "If you meet the Buddha on the road, kill him!" According to Zen tradition, "killing" the Buddha means destroying the illusion that anything not grounded in the soul could be our master. From this perspective, religion, philosophy, and nationalism may all be idols of worship. In the Bhagavad-Gita, Lord Krishna advises the warrior-prince Arjuna, "Better to fail living out one's own dharma (i.e. sacred duty or essential character), than succeed at living someone else's." The 12th century Tibetan Buddhist poet-saint Milarepa wisely said: "Buddha cannot be found by searching, so contemplate your own mind." You may recall that Jesus, as recorded in the Gospel of Thomas, similarly remarked, "The Kingdom of God is within."

Frederick Spiegelberg, an influential figure in the transmission of Eastern psychology and religion to the West in the twentieth century, maintained that the highest form of religion is to transcend religion. He refers to this as the "Religion of No-Religion," or atheism in the name of God. This bold statement refers to the realization that ordinary life and consciousness is what the Hindus call sat - chit - ananda. This Sanskrit term means that being (sat) is mind (chit), and that the true nature of mind is divine pleasure, bliss (ananda). This is to say, there is something wonderful, something truly divine in simply being mindful. Life is mundane yet sacred, and as we are alive to the present moment, we seek the religious profanely. Similarly, theologian and social critic, William Stringfellow who died in 1980 asserted, "Being holy...does not mean being exceptionally religious or being religious at all; it means being liberated from religiosity and religious pietism of any sort; it does not mean being morally better, it means being exemplary; it does not mean being godly, but being more human." If we Americans could but detach ourselves from both the absolute certainty associated with religious conservatives who embrace a Christian fundamentalism that promotes a conformity to the dominant class and promises its followers an eternal community for themselves and the relativism of the secular liberals who, by abandoning public morality in favor of personal choice and private gratification, are blind to cultures that hold universal values and collective aspirations, we might somehow avoid the absolutism of both groups that fuels religious discrimination.

October 2007
"Holism, Modernism, and Postmodernism" (vol. 2, issue 1)

Where does holism fit in the current discussion among postmodern scholars relative to the idea of universal values, truth, or reality? Is holism a form of postmodern theory and practice or a force counter to it? Is holism a form of modernist thought or an advance on it? Before we can answer those questions, we need to distinguish between modernism and postmodernism. The single greatest distinction here can be found in their different conceptualizations of truth and knowledge. Modernists retained the notion of an objective and pure reality existing prior to human experience. They held to the universality of reason and progress on behalf of the enlightenment of humanity and sought true universal values across borders of time, space, and culture.

Postmodern deconstruction scholars have altered the Enlightenment notion of truth as beyond critique. They maintain a notion of truth as a social agreement within various traditions. In an attempt to include the many viewpoints and voices previously isolated or ignored by modernism, postmodern thinkers reject the modernist hierarchy of truths and certainties, favoring difference and multiplicity of equally valid perspectives. This perspective is variously referred to as multiculturalism, diversity, pluralism, or heteronomy. Enlightenment reason is replaced by postmodern reason, a pragmatic, socially learned process for individual and collective action.

It is helpful here to discuss two discrete but related brands of the postmodern project. Lacking a singular definition of postmodernism, scholars isolate two separate forms of postmodernism: constructive postmodernism and deconstructive postmodernism. A characteristic of the two postmodernisms is their bond and their disjunction in one. The bond lies in their mutual efforts to respond to the challenges of cultural renewal. I will address the disjunction below. It is my contention that our holistic theory and practice must be a form of constructive postmodernism. But what is meant by the term?

David Ray Griffin coined the term constructive postmodernism. For Griffin, constructive postmodernists seek to transcend and include aspects of the modern worldview by constructing "a new unity of scientific, ethical, aesthetic and religious intuitions." The critique of modernism championed by Griffin and other constructive postmodernists (as opposed to deconstructive postmodernists) is not as radical as to preclude development of a new worldview of wholeness consisting of the revision of some modernist beliefs and practices, such as the privileging of abstract reason above other cognitive modalities. Constructive postmodernists endeavor to salvage what is most worthwhile in modernist notions of truth, rationality, selfhood, and historical meaning, integrating them with revisions of premodern values, including spirit and a conscious natural world.

Therein lays the aforementioned disjunction between constructive and deconstructive postmodernism. Seeking to avoid radical individualism and relativism, constructive postmodernists place significant import upon intersubjectivity, cooperation, and elements of the perennial philosophies of the premodern worldview. Constructive postmodernists typically look to Alfred North Whitehead's "process" cosmology as the source of their unequivocal rejection of the mechanistic worldview of modernity and their primary inspiration concerning the project of interdependent wholeness of multiple perspectives. Whitehead's process orientation moves away from mechanistic dualism and determinism toward synthesis, interdependence, and dialogue.

Deconstruction scholars seek the disestablishment of all traditional centers of power and authority, positing a notion of multiple "truths." They seek to indicate that philosophical texts do not mean what they appear to mean, do not mean what the author intended, and in fact possess no discernible meaning at all. Deconstruction, aims at showing how the attempt by traditional philosophers to use language in such a way as to get beyond language so as to arrive at some translinguistic, transcultural, transhistorical inevitably fails.

To answer the questions raised earlier about holism's relationship to modernism and postmodernism, let us note that insofar as our holism posits a fundamental unity of the universe and seeks out meaning, it is related to modernism. However, in its attempt to move beyond modernist hierarchy and absolutism by honoring multiplicity and difference, holism is part of postmodernism. Holism prizes intuition through contemplation and subjectivity as means of realizing value from that interconnectedness, and so it is a force counter to the strict rationalism of modernism. It seeks the relationship between our higher self and Spirit. It attempts to restore the link between ethics and behavior through engagement, relatedness, and cooperation. So as it posits the interdependence of life, seeks a new unity of humanity and nature inclusive of scientific, ethical, aesthetic, and religious intuitions rejected by deconstructionists, and values human wholeness through an education of multiculturalism and multiple intelligences, holism is a constructive form of postmodernism.