Yay, TEAM!

Peter Baker wrote in yesterday’s Washington Post:

President Bush said yesterday that he senses a “Third Awakening” of religious devotion in the United States that has coincided with the nation’s struggle with international terrorists, a war that he depicted as “a confrontation between good and evil.”

Bush told a group of conservative journalists that he notices more open expressions of faith among people he meets during his travels, and he suggested that might signal a broader revival similar to other religious movements in history. Bush noted that some of Abraham Lincoln’s strongest supporters were religious people “who saw life in terms of good and evil” and who believed that slavery was evil. Many of his own supporters, he said, see the current conflict in similar terms.

“A lot of people in America see this as a confrontation between good and evil, including me,” Bush said during a 1 1/2 -hour Oval Office conversation on cultural changes and a battle with terrorists that he sees lasting decades. “There was a stark change between the culture of the ’50s and the ’60s — boom — and I think there’s change happening here,” he added. “It seems to me that there’s a Third Awakening.”

It’s my understanding that the business of dividing the Cosmos up into Good and Evil started with Zoroaster, a guy who (probably) lived sometime between the 18th and 6th centuries BCE in that part of the world we now call Iran. The notion that Good and Evil will duke it out in a final Judgment Day battle, plus most popular beliefs about angels and demons, are Zoroastrian in origin, also. Here’s a pretty good article about Zoroastrian influences on right-wing Christianity, from CounterPunch.

The President’s assumption that “religious devotion” somehow depends on accepting Zoroastrian dualities is, IMO, a tad peculiar. It also reveals a deep and vast ignorance of the spectrum of human philosophies, experiences, and practices that might be considered “religious.” But that’s another post.

As near as I can figure, this view of good-evil duality sees Good and Evil as distinctive forces or powers, and people are said to be “good” or “evil” not because of what they do, but because of which side they root for. I say this because of what Bob Herbert wrote in his column today.

The invasion of Iraq marked the beginning of the change in the American character. During the Cuban missile crisis, when the hawks were hot for bombing — or an invasion — Robert Kennedy counseled against a U.S. first strike. That’s not something the U.S. would do, he said.

Fast-forward 40 years or so and not only does the U.S. launch an unprovoked invasion and occupation of a small nation — Iraq — but it does so in response to an attack inside the U.S. that the small nation had nothing to do with.

Who are we?

Why, we’re the Good team! And we had to go to Iraq to get Saddam Hussein, who was a major player with the Evil team. If the invasion, directly or indirectly, ends up causing as much death or suffering as Saddam did, that’s a mere technicality. In BushWorld, actions or consequences don’t have anything to do with who is Good or who is Evil.

Another example: There was a time, I thought, when there was general agreement among Americans that torture was beyond the pale. But when people are frightened enough, nothing is beyond the pale. And we’re in an era in which the highest leaders in the land stoke — rather than attempt to allay — the fears of ordinary citizens. Islamic terrorists are equated with Nazi Germany. We’re told that we’re in a clash of civilizations.

Clearly, Herbert does not understand the nature of Good or Evil. When you’re playing against Evil, rules and principles are for wimps. And appeasers. It’s OK to do terrible things in the name of defeating Evil. What’s not OK is disloyalty to the Good team.

If, as President Bush says, we’re engaged in “the decisive ideological struggle of the 21st century,” why isn’t the entire nation mobilizing to meet this dire threat?

That’s an excellent question that I wish someone would press Bush to answer. Another question is, how do you win an ideological struggle by military means? Bush’s rhetoric notwithstanding, World War II was not a struggle between ideologies but among nations. Most people chose sides in that conflict based on loyalty to their nations, not to a belief system. Victory was achieved not by changing peoples’ minds but by compelling the enemy nations to surrender.

The president put us on this path away from the better angels of our nature, and he has shown no inclination to turn back. Lately he has touted legislation to try terror suspects in a way that would make a mockery of the American ideals of justice and fairness. To get a sense of just how far out the administration’s approach has been, consider the comments of Brig. Gen. James Walker, the top uniformed lawyer for the Marines. Speaking at a Congressional hearing last week, he said no civilized country denies defendants the right to see the evidence against them. The United States, he said, “should not be the first.”

And Senator Lindsey Graham, a conservative South Carolina Republican who is a former military judge, said, “It would be unacceptable, legally, in my opinion, to give someone the death penalty in a trial where they never heard the evidence against them.”

How weird is it that this possibility could even be considered?

I’ll tell you how weird it is; it’s so weird that the Right Blogosphere isn’t discussing it at all. So far, based on google and technorati searches, I don’t believe anyone’s come up with talking points to support executing someone without producing evidence at trial.

If Bush continues to push this issue, however, team loyalty will inspire expedient frames and phrases eventually. And if the Good Team is doing it, it can’t be Evil.

The character of the U.S. has changed. We’re in danger of being completely ruled by fear. Most Americans have not shared the burden of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Very few Americans are aware, as the Center for Constitutional Rights tells us, that of the hundreds of men held by the U.S. in Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, many ‘have never been charged and will never be charged because there is no evidence justifying their detention.’

Even fewer care.

We could benefit from looking in a mirror, and absorbing the shock of not recognizing what we’ve become.

On the Right, of course, there’s a hazy faith that if someone’s being held at Guantanamo there must be a good reason. However, I have said before, and I still believe, that someday when the full story of Guantanamo is told, a whole lot of Americans are going to be shocked and sickened and want to know why no one spoke out sooner.

And some of us will say, we did speak out. Why didn’t you listen sooner?

I’ve Been Saying This for Years

Amanda and PZ call our attention to the testimony of an evangelical Christian who became opposed to pre-game prayers. He was handed a clue by experience — he attended a high school football game in Hawaii, and the pre-game prayer was Buddhist.

We were frozen in shock and incredulity! What to do? To continue to stand and observe this prayer would represent a betrayal of our own faith and imply the honoring of a pagan deity that was anathema to our beliefs. To sit would be an act of extreme rudeness and disrespect in the eyes of our Japanese hosts and neighbors, who value above all other things deference and respect in their social interactions. I am sorry to say that in the confusion of the moment we chose the easier path and elected to continue to stand in silence so as not to create a scene or ill will among those who were seated nearby.

Wow, that was big of him.

Anyway, over the next few days the writer found out that, because the community was predominantly Buddhist and Shinto (I didn’t say “or” because Japanese often don’t see a need to be exclusively one or the other), the pre-game prayers were ALWAYS either Buddhist or Shinto. The local Baptist minister was not included in the prayer rotation. The evangelical Christian was so freaked out by this he refused to attend any more football games. He continues,

I am a professional, educated and responsible man who is strong in his faith and is quite comfortable debating the social and political issues of the day. Yet when placed in a setting where the majority culture proved hostile to my faith and beliefs, I became paralyzed with indecision and could not act decisively to defend and proclaim my own beliefs. I felt instantly ostracized and viewed myself as a foreigner in my own land.

I like the part about a “majority culture proved hostile to my faith and beliefs.” I’d be very surprise if he experienced any actual hostility from the locals. The Buddha taught his followers to be respectful of other religions, whether one believes in them or not. If you want hostility, try being a non-Christian in the Bible Belt. By “hostility” he seems to mean “we weren’t allowed to dominate everybody else,” not “people shunned me or reacted angrily to me because of my faith,” the latter being what “hostility” means to me.

In fact, if he and his family had quietly sat down and silently said a Christian prayer instead, I doubt anyone would have minded.

On the other hand — the writer doesn’t say what sect of Buddhism was involved, which is a detail I would find interesting. He says the residents of the community are mostly ethnic Japanese or Chinese, which leaves a lot of possibilities. Most likely the priests were some variety of Pure Land and they chanted the Nembutsu to invoke the Amitabha Buddha. Or, they may have been from a Nichiren sect, in which case they would have chanted the Gongyo (that’s the chant recited by Angela Bassett as Tina Turner in “What’s Love Got to Do With It”) to invoke the Gohonzon, which I sort of understand but don’t have the energy or inclination to explain. Or, the priests might have been Tendai or Zen (awesome web site, btw), in which case the priests might have chanted the Heart Sutra. Or, they might have been from one of several other sects.

And within Pure Land and Nichiren and Tendai and Zen there are various rival sects and subsects, several of which are on speaking terms only intermittently. They’re a minority, but I have met self-identified Buddhists who will not take part in other Buddhists’ practices.

Growing up in the Bible Belt, I came to appreciate that there were Christians, and then there were other Christians. The Born-Agains didn’t think infant Baptism counted, meaning Lutherans were damned, as were those who were A-millenial instead of pre-millenial or post-millenial. Catholics were widely regarded as Satan-worshippers, and Jews might as well have come from Mars.

Amanda comments:

What I find interesting about this is that the guy still seems to whole-heartedly buy into the lie that there’s some kind of generic “Judeo-Christian” prayer that would satisfy a crowd that’s nothing but Jews, Catholics, and Protestants of all sorts of stripes. But the truth of the matter is the only reason the theocrats of these various religions are in an uneasy alliance is because the leadership (who is mostly Protestant at this point, the Dennis Pragers and Rick Santorums of the world aside–but the Pragers and Santorums out there are still a troubling indicator that there are Jews and Catholics who trust that they aren’t next on the official oppression checklist) is keeping their attention trained on other enemies, like atheists and “pagans”. What I find interesting is they are able to quash their significant differences with each other and demonstrate tolerance in their public alliance, but they can’t quite wrap their minds around extending that tolerance out to the atheists and “pagans” out there. Except this guy, who had a jarring experience that woke him up.

Well, he doesn’t seem so much “tolerant” of the “pagans” than he is afraid he again might be exposed to awful things like robed Asian persons chanting in foreign languages (the horror!), so he’s willing to call a truce and allow public schools to be secular. He’s still clearly repulsed and afraid of “paganism,” which is not very tolerant of him.

However, public schools or other agents of government should not be fostering religious practice, and I agree with the evangelical that he shouldn’t be coerced to show respect to an alien religion. And if he’s willing to reciprocate, when we’re good.

The Middle Way

I got up this morning determined to find something political to blog about, because I’ve spent most of the last couple of days first writing and then defending the religion post at Unclaimed Territory. By last night, after repeating the same couple of simple points for the five hundredth time, I had a throbbing headache and was veering perilously close to the “kiss my ass” stage of Rogerian argument.

The most frustrating part of the effort was that a great many people did not base their criticisms of the post on what I actually wrote. I don’t mind — well, maybe I mind a little, but only in an ego-attached way — those who expressed disagreement with something I did write. But a large part of the criticisms were from people who assumed what I must think and attacked me for opinions I do not have.

For example, a couple of self-described atheists attacked me for being anti-atheism and opposed to the separation of church and state. In fact, I have on occasion chided the religious for their intolerance of atheism. (I wish I could say I have defended atheism a lot, but the fact is most religious people don’t exactly, um, respect my opinions, either. I don’t belong to the majority tribe.) And there’s no other civil liberties issue that I care more passionately about, on a personal level, than protecting the separation of church and state.

I was both fascinated and frustrated by the commenters who assumed I am Christian even though I explicitly said I am not. Obviously, something in their heads caused the adjective religious to override “not a Christian.” Several complained that I didn’t understand how dangerous religion is, even after my rhetoric about “warring religious whackjobs” and “a genuine threat to civilization on this planet.” Others were dismissive of the post because I didn’t address their pet religious agendas. In some of those cases I actually agreed with the agendas, but they were way outside the scope of the points I was trying to make in the post.

And then, of course, my defenses of the post pushed buttons, too. Although I hadn’t wanted to write about my personal religious adventures, when one commenter complained that he didn’t understand what religion I followed, I provided a simple explanation as devoid of proselytizing as I could make it. Then another commenter complained because I was making “religious declarations.” I wrote that not all Christians are James Dobson zealots and was called a “Christian apologist.” When I expressed alarm at the dangers posed by James Dobson zealots I was told I was bashing religion.

I suppose now I’ll be told I’m whining.

If there’s one point that was driven home to me, it’s that some (adj., a portion or an unspecified number or quantity of a whole or group: He likes some modern sculpture but not all) on the Left really do harbor a palpable hostility toward religion per se. I know this is not true of the entire Left, but until this weekend I would have said the hard-core religion haters were a minority and not representative of the Left. I still think they’re a minority. Probably. But they’re sure as hell a big and assertive minority, and representative of something.

Bloggers before me have hit the same flame wall. This post by Steve Waldman at Washington Monthly discussing hostility to religion on the part of some liberals drew complaints that he was spreading GP talking points, interspersed with comments that were hostile to religion.

I’d like to clarify that I did not make a request for tolerance of religion because I’m worried about the rightie mythos that “The Left” hates religion. You know that righties are going to claim “The Left” hates religion as long as they can find even one leftie who hates religion. This doesn’t have anything to do with their concern for religion; they’re just looking for reasons to hate lefties. One stumbles onto rightie bloggers who admit they aren’t religious themselves but who still beat lefties over the head with the “they hate religion” meme. Libertarians tend to be unreligious, yet the Right thought the Libs were just peachy until the Libs turned against George W. Bush.

On the other hand, many UT commenters who denied there is a liberal bias against religion would, in the next paragraph, make some knee-jerk, narrow-minded comment about religion. I’d find you some examples except that I’m afraid to go to UT today. By now they’ve probably got me pegged as a paid agent of Jerry Falwell.

In an ideal America, voters wouldn’t care about a political candidate’s religious proclivities. Well, unless those proclivities involved human sacrifice or a belief that URLs are coded messages from another galaxy, in which case some concern might be warranted. But a vast body of empirical evidence shows us that just because a politician says he’s found Jesus doesn’t mean he can find his ass with both hands. And I doubt, sincerely, there’s even a slight statistical correlation between public declarations of faith and private virtue. Even Jesus told his followers that displays of devotion do not constitute quality assurance. (See, for example, Matthew 7:15-23.)

But many Americans live a culture that combines a crass religiosity with jingoism and nativism and several varieties of bigotry, simmered together in a toxic, psuedo-fascist soup. And appeals to reason, tolerance, social betterment, prosperity, or good government do not get soup-dwellers to the polls nearly as well as waving the Bible and promising to uphold God’s Law. (God’s Law being a nasty, repressive business that no god worthy of respect would have any part of.)

This culture has existed in one form or another throughout American history. However, in my lifetime I’ve seen it get worse. The marriage of the GOP and the Christian Right, combined with the power of mass media, has made it both more powerful and more widespread.

The power of the Christian Right has hurt the Dems, no question. Political pundits tell Dems they have to get “more religious” to appeal to Christian voters if they’re going to win the White House in 2008. Maybe, but there are good ways to do that, and there are stupid ways to do that. The stupid way is for candidates who are uncomfortable with Bible Belt culture to try to “fit in” by talking about Jesus. Even if the Jesus talk is sincere, the politician will still transmit the message “I’m an alien to your world” in a thousand subtle ways. Trust me on that.

The smart way, IMO, is to enlist the help of native religious moderates to persuade other religious moderates that it’s OK to vote Democratic.. See, for example, “When Would Jesus Bolt?” by Amy Sullivan in the April 2006 Washington Monthly. Even better, right now the Dems should be searching for presentable and articulate liberal evangelicals (not an oxymoron, believe it or not), to take guest bobblehead gigs on political talk shows. The public face of Christianity doesn’t have to be a right-wing one.

As I said, the hard-core Right is a lost cause, but they aren’t the only voters in red states.

We must break the grip of the Christian Right’s political power, but the way to do that is not for secularists to wage war against religion. The way to do that is for the non-religious, and the religious who want to maintain religious liberty, to make common cause against the theocrats.

I’d like more religious Americans to understand that a “secular society” is not hostile to religion. Rather, a secular society is one in which citizens are free to explore many religious paths, or none, without coercion or interference from government. It is a society in which religion can remain free of the corruption of worldly political power and flourish according to its merits.

Maybe someday we’ll see a society in which an atheist can be elected President of the United States. Well, I don’t expect it to happen in my lifetime, but eventually.

And in the far distant future, maybe secularists will stop spouting knee-jerk, narrow-minded views about how all religious people are knee-jerkers with narrow minds. Needless to say, I’m not holding my breath on that one.

[Cross-posted to The American Street because I lack the nerve to post it on Unclaimed Territory. I’m not into martyrdom.]

It’s Cold Out There

I’m guest-posting at Unclaimed Territory, and this morning I posted a merged and condensed version of my last two religion posts. Which pissed off a lot of people who clearly didn’t read what I wrote. They just saw the word “religion” and went ballistic.

I may not have as many readers as Glenn, but y’all are way smarter.

Update: Speaking of religion, these people are just plain twisted.

Defending Jesus

Jesus didn’t ask me to defend him, but sometimes I do anyway. He gets picked on so.

Today’s potshots come from Barry Seidman, who describes himself as a humanist and secularist. In response to recent advances by the Christian Left, Seidman writes that he’s happy the Christian Left is “joining the good fight against Christo-fascists like Jerry Falwell, Pat Robertson, Tim LaHaye and President Bush.” However,

… the coupling of religion and politics is as dangerous for the left as it is for the right, because absolutism, authoritative supernaturalism and the actual tenets of the Abrahamic religious texts can never be reconciled with democracy and freedom.

In my experience religious liberals tend to respect the principle of separation of church and state, so it’s not clear to me what worries Mr. Seidman. I infer he thinks religious people will always try to impose their doctrines on others and thus cannot be trusted in politics, liberal or not.

Seidman bases much of his opinion on a book by Hector Avalos titled Fighting Words: The Origin of Religious Violence. Avalos is an anthropologist and biblical scholar who teaches at Iowa State University. I have not read this book, but Avalos states his basic thesis in this interview:

In Fighting Words Avalos looks at the role religion has historically played and continues to play in violence in the three main Abrahamic religions (Judaism, Christianity and Islam).

“Most religious violence is the result of real or perceived scarce resources,” he said. “When people believe that there is not enough of something valued, they may fight to acquire it or to maintain it. When religion causes violence, it does so because it has created new scarce resources.”

Fighting Words focuses on four scarce resources that can be created by religious beliefs – inscripturation (sacred scriptures), sacred space, group privilege and salvation. The book shows examples of how each of these can be seen as scarce resources that have precipitated violence in Judaism, Christianity and Islam.

The “scarce resource” of inscripturation can look at religions who say that God communicates to us in only one text (the Koran or Bible for example) and access to God is available only through the one text the religion believes in.

This explanation seems thin to me. I am inclined to think most religious violence occurs when religion (any religion) becomes tribalistic or gets mixed into struggles for political power. As I said I haven’t read the book, and perhaps Avalos makes a good case. But the “Abrahamic religion” thing bothers me. One, we’re back in the same old trap of defining religion as monotheism, when most of the world’s religions are not, in fact, monotheistic. And as I sort of argued here, even within the monotheistic religions the occasional genius or mystic has broken out of the God box — Spinoza comes to mind.

It has long seemed to me that there are two basic ways to approach religion — legalistic (or dogmatic) or mystical. All three of the major monotheistic religions — Judaism, Christianity, and Islam — have mystical traditions as well as legalistic ones. It is true that the legalistic and dogmatic approach is far more common. The dominant sects of all monotheisms tend to treat scripture as law and assume that theological and moral questions can be answered by referring scriptural statute.

On the other hand, most other religions (there are exceptions) more often take a mystical approach and treat sacred texts as guides to truth, not truth itself.

His Holiness the Dalai Lama was once asked what he would do if science disproved something written in a sutra. He said that he would revise the sutra. Westerners sometimes don’t know how to take this, but even the Buddha told his followers they shouldn’t accept anything he taught them on faith. Believing the sutras is not the point of the sutras, any more than believing in science is the point of science.

Christianity may be the most dogmatic major religion on the planet. (Judaism is much less dogmatic, and I don’t know enough about Islam to judge.) In most denominations the follower is presented with an elaborate belief system and told he must accept these beliefs absolutely; doubt often is considered weakness. Since the West is overwhelmingly Christian, even the nonreligious assume this must be what religion is all about. But it can be argued that Christianity’s emphasis on literal and rigid belief in doctrines is an aberration among religions and is not even true of all schools of Christianity.

Further, the notion that a Christian must accept the entire Bible without question is not as rigidly a given as Seidman and, apparently, Avalos believe. I have had lovely discussions with liberal Christians who understand the Bible was written by people with limitations and prejudices, and that ideas about God have evolved over time. They can even accept historical evidence that the Gospels were not, in fact, written by Apostles but by second- and third-generation followers who didn’t know Jesus personally. Once you accept that Jesus’s teachings may have been imperfectly recorded in the Gospels, then disregarding the parts that seem out of whack or are of questionable provenance (e.g., most of the Gospel of John) is not “cherry picking,” but critical thinking. (See also the Jesus Seminar.)

Seidman writes,

Even apart from his discussion of religious-created scarcities, Avalos uses a close reading of the Bible to reject the view that Christianity essentially espouses love and peace. He argues that in Romans 12:14 we do not really see an example of Christians loving their enemies at all, though this section is often cited by Christians for this very reason. The section begins, sure enough, “Bless those who persecute you; bless and do not curse them.” But what most liberal Christians then ignore is the rest of the section, “If your enemies are hungry, feed them; if they are thirsty, give them something to drink; for by doing this you will heap burning coals on their heads” (Romans 12:20). Heaping burning coals on their heads? Avalos suggests that read as a whole, the commandment to be nice is a way to build up the potential for violence against an enemy. The nicer one is to one’s enemies, the more they will deserve the violence done to them in the end.

To which a liberal Christian would say that the book of Romans was written by Paul, and reflects Paul’s understanding, which may not have been the way Jesus saw things. Look instead at Matthew 5:43-48, which possibly had a eyewitness account as a source:

Ye have heard that it hath been said, Thou shalt love thy neighbour, and hate thine enemy. But I say unto you, Love your enemies, bless them that curse you, do good to them that hate you, and pray for them which despitefully use you, and persecute you; That ye may be the children of your Father which is in heaven: for he maketh his sun to rise on the evil and on the good, and sendeth rain on the just and on the unjust. For if ye love them which love you, what reward have ye? do not even the publicans the same? And if ye salute your brethren only, what do ye more than others? do not even the publicans so? Be ye therefore perfect, even as your Father which is in heaven is perfect.

I submit that to love others requires not wishing to heap burning coals on their heads, the authority of St. Paul notwithstanding. Seidman snorts at Christians who “cherry pick,” then does some pretty selective cherry-picking himself.

Whatever Jesus was about got buried pretty quickly under the interpretations of lesser teachers and dogmas that arose in the centuries after his death. The Doctrine of Trinity itself didn’t become the central doctrine of the church until the 4th century; many biblical scholars doubt very much that Jesus saw himself as God. (As a Jew, he might have been appalled at the idea.) And although most Christians don’t question doctrine, there are some who find their true spiritual quest in digging through the doctrinal minutia of the ages to get closer to the authentic Jesus.

Dogmatism and mysticism struggled with each other throughout Christian history. Great Christian mystics like Teresa of Avila and John of the Cross lived in the shadow of the Inquisition. Dogmatism prevailed, but mysticism didn’t die altogether. And in a time when the light of science makes dogma seem absurd to thinking people, some Christians are working to restore the mystical traditions to their former place of respectability. Even though I ducked out of that struggle to take up the Buddhist path instead, I heartily wish them well.

My point here is that secularists like Mr. Seidman should not prejudge the religious and assume we’re all enslaved by ancient superstitions or even believe in God. Clearly, Mr. Seidman has a narrow and limited understanding of what religion is.

Thomas Jefferson said “it does me no injury for my neighbor to say there are twenty gods or no God. It neither picks my pocket nor breaks my leg.” Likewise, Mr. Seidman need not concern himself with the religious views of others who aren’t concerning themselves with the secularist views of Mr. Seidman. Instead of worrying that the Christian Left will contaminate democracy, I recommend that he, like Jefferson, swear “eternal hostility against every form of tyranny over the mind of man.” That’s the enemy of us all, religious or not.

Old-Time Religions

If you have access to Salon, I recommend the interview of Karen Armstrong by Steve Paulson. In particular I recommend the interview to those of you who hate religion, although I believe you’d enjoy it if you don’t hate religion.

Armstrong is a former nun-turned-agnostic and religious historian who has written some excellent books, including A History of God, The Battle for God: A History of Fundamentalism, and a lovely biography of the Buddha.

In this interview Armstrong makes several points near and dear to me. One point is that religion isn’t primarily about belief in some Big Daddy God. Nor is it about miracles or belief in an afterlife or in supernatural beings, like angels. The problem is that westerners, and no doubt Americans in particular, cling to a very narrow and mostly infantile definition of religion that focuses on belief in a Big Daddy God, heaven, miracles, etc. So most of us in the West think that’s what religion is. That, and the fact that the world seems infested with warring religious whackjobs, makes religion easy to hate. I understand that.

But the problem isn’t with religion. The problem is that, somehow, we’ve allowed religion to be defined by the stupid and the warped, resulting in stupid and warped religion at war with all things rational and humane.

At the same time, Armstrong argues, hatred of religion is a pathology. She says that some people who hate religion are “secular fundamentalists. They have as bigoted a view of religion as some religious fundamentalists have of secularism.” I can relate to that, but I think many people in western culture have been exposed only to the most ignorant, dogmatic, low-level kinds of religion, and have no clue religion can be any other way. Some commenters to Mahablog will write that all religion is superstition or even mental illness, which saddens me.

How do good religions go bad? Armstrong’s newest book, The Great Transformation: The Beginning of Our Religious Traditions, looks at the Axial Age, 900 to 200 BCE, during which the world’s great religious traditions developed, independently of each other, in four regions of the world — Confucianism and Taoism in China; Hinduism (I would have narrowed that to Vedanta), Buddhism, Jainism in India; monotheism in Israel; and philosophical rationalism in Greece.

Armstrong says,

Without any collusion, they all came up with a remarkably similar solution to the spiritual ills of humanity. Before the Axial Age, religions had been very different. They had been based largely on external rituals which gave people intimations of greatness. But there was no disciplined introspection before the Axial Age. The Axial sages discovered the inner world. And religions became much more spiritualized because humanity had taken a leap forward. People were creating much larger empires and kingdoms than ever before. A market economy was in its very early stages. That meant the old, rather parochial visions were no longer adequate. And these regions were torn apart by an unprecedented crescendo of violence. In every single case, the catalyst for religious change had been a revulsion against violence.

First of all, they all insisted that you must give up and abandon your ego. The sages said the root cause of suffering lay in our desperate concern with self, which often needs to destroy others in order to preserve itself. And so they insisted that if we stepped outside the ego, then we would encounter what we call brahman or God, Nirvana or the Dao.

But by “god” the sages didn’t necessarily mean a big daddy in the sky:

In my book “A History of God,” I pointed out that the most eminent Jewish, Christian and Muslim theologians all said you couldn’t think about God as a simple personality, an external being. It was better to say that God did not exist because our notion of existence was far too limited to apply to God.

“God” in this sense is not a person or spirit. “God” might represent the ground of being, for example. But if religion isn’t about worshipping gods, what is it? Armstrong says,

Religion is a search for transcendence. But transcendence isn’t necessarily sited in an external god, which can be a very unspiritual, unreligious concept. The sages were all extremely concerned with transcendence, with going beyond the self and discovering a realm, a reality, that could not be defined in words.

The mystical traditions of most religions are about disciplining oneself to transcend “I” and directly experience beingness outside of space and time. Some neurobiologists suggest that some of the older meditation practices — which are nothing like “transcendental meditation” or the relaxation techniques that pass for meditation these days — cause some parts of the frontal and temporal lobes of the brain to shut down so that the seeker experiences being without the boundaries of “I” and the passage of linear time. However it happens, through this experience the mystic’s perception of self and other, life and death, time and space, etc., changes. With the guidance of a skilled teacher or guru, the mystic becomes more at peace with himself, and he develops more selfless compassion for others.

The problem with mysticism is that it’s a ton of work. So over the years religions developed myths and rituals as learning aids. The myths may have begun as guides to the ineffable, not meant to be taken literally. But over time myths become beliefs and harden into dogma, and the ineffable ground of being is given a personality and parameters, and it becomes Big Daddy God.

IMO religion that defines itself by doctrine and ritual is not religion at all, but a cheap substitute thereof.

A theme that runs through several of Armstrong’s books is that, before the modern era, people didn’t take scripture literally. Even though fundamentalists think “old-time religion” means taking every word of the Bible literally, in fact this rigid literalism is a newfangled thing that arose in the past couple of centuries or so.

Well, faith is not a matter of believing things. That’s again a modern Western notion. It’s only been current since the 18th century. Believing things is neither here nor there, despite what some religious people say and what some secularists say. That is a very eccentric religious position, current really only in the Western Christian world. You don’t have it much in Judaism, for example. …

… I think we’ve become rather stupid in our scientific age about religion. If you’d presented some of these literalistic readings of the Bible to people in the pre-modern age, they would have found it rather obtuse. They’d have found it incomprehensible that people really believe the first chapter of Genesis is an account of the origins of life.

A mystic might say that Genesis is a parable about the development of human consciousness, for example. Adam and Eve become self-aware, and after that come shame, greed, and other unpleasant things they weren’t aware of before. The original moral might have been that the cure for shame, greed, etc. is to transcend ego.

Armstrong says that scripture should be read like poetry. “It’s an attempt to express the inexpressible.” She also makes the interesting point that science sometimes uses mythological language — e.g., “Big Bang,” “black hole” — for realities that dangle just outside the scope of most human cognition. “I think some scientists are writing a new kind of religious discourse, teaching us to pit ourselves against the dark world of uncreated reality and pushing us back to the mysterious.”

Armstrong goes on to call belief in an afterlife a “red herring” (the Buddha said pretty much the same thing in one of the early sutras). Also,

Sometimes, I think the way monotheists talk about God is unreligious. … people very often talk about him as a kind of acquaintance, whom they can second-guess. People will say God loves that, God wills that, and God despises the other. And very often, the opinions of the deity are made to coincide exactly with those of the speaker. … God transcends personality as God transcends every other human characteristic, such as gender. If we get stuck there, this is very immature. Very often people hear about God at about the same time as they’re learning about Santa Claus. And their ideas about Santa Claus mature and change in time, but their idea of God remains infantile.

One of the things I came to appreciate about Buddhism is the attitude that all teaching is provisional. The student may be taught myths or doctrines or initiated into some esoteric practice, but always it is understood that the lessons are like rungs in a ladder; to get to the next rung you have to leave the old one. In some religions belief in a god or gods is such a provisional step. But monotheists too often get stuck at Santa Claus God level, and even the churches have forgotten what comes after believing in Santa Claus God. And limited, fearful people who feel threatened by the modern world have twisted religious beliefs into something hard and ugly. Instead of practicing religion as a guide to transcendence, they’ve reverted to primitive, tribal forms of religion to protect themselves from whatever it is they are afraid of.

In the 1930s, Albert Einstein wrote that religions seem to have three levels. Level one is religion practiced to assuage fear; believers perform rituals and pray to imaginary gods to protect them. At level two, people form a social or moral concept of God. “This is the God of Providence,” Einstein wrote, “who protects, disposes, rewards, and punishes; the God who, according to the limits of the believer’s outlook, loves and cherishes the life of the tribe or of the human race, or even or life itself; the comforter in sorrow and unsatisfied longing; he who preserves the souls of the dead.”

But there is a third stage, with “no anthropomorphic conception of God corresponding to it.” Einstein called it a “religious feeling” — I think he might have bumped into the limits of language, as that sounds pretty lame — but he continues,

The individual feels the futility of human desires and aims and the sublimity and marvelous order which reveal themselves both in nature and in the world of thought. Individual existence impresses him as a sort of prison and he wants to experience the universe as a single significant whole. The beginnings of cosmic religious feeling already appear at an early stage of development, e.g., in many of the Psalms of David and in some of the Prophets. Buddhism, as we have learned especially from the wonderful writings of Schopenhauer, contains a much stronger element of this.

The religious geniuses of all ages have been distinguished by this kind of religious feeling, which knows no dogma and no God conceived in man’s image; so that there can be no church whose central teachings are based on it. Hence it is precisely among the heretics of every age that we find men who were filled with this highest kind of religious feeling and were in many cases regarded by their contemporaries as atheists, sometimes also as saints. Looked at in this light, men like Democritus, Francis of Assisi, and Spinoza are closely akin to one another.

How can cosmic religious feeling be communicated from one person to another, if it can give rise to no definite notion of a God and no theology? In my view, it is the most important function of art and science to awaken this feeling and keep it alive in those who are receptive to it.

Einstein goes on to argue that those who have dedicated their lives to scientific inquiry are “the only profoundly religious people” in this materialistic age. And, truly, there is no reason for science and religion to be at odds with each other. It’s not religion, but the fear, ignorance, and superstition that passes for religion, that’s the problem.

Religion v. Religion

For the past several years conventional wisdom has said that Republicans/conservatives were “more religious” than Democrats/liberals. A report from the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press released late in 2003 seemed to back this up. The Pew poll used three questions to measure “religious”; 81 percent of self-identified conservatives scored three out of three, whereas only 54 percent of self-identified liberals hit the religious trifecta.

I’ve been complaining about the Pew poll since it was released. Pew’s questions for determining who is religious were (1) belief in the power of prayer, (2) belief in a final Day of Judgment, and (3) belief beyond doubt in the existence of God. These criteria reflect an understanding of “religious” common to the People of the Book — Jews, Christians, Muslims. But if you are, for example, Hindu or Buddhist, according to the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press you are not religious at all.

Considering that His Holiness the Dalai Lama would possibly score zero for three on the Pew religion test (no better than one out of three, I’m sure), I submit there’s a flaw in the test.

The question about a final Day of Judgment seems especially problematic. Many conservative, evangelical denominations are essentially eschatological sects keenly focused on preparation for the End Times, which they expect any minute now. But liberal Christians are more likely to think the fire-and-brimstone stuff in Revelations is just a metaphor for something. (Exactly what is a matter of opinion. I’ve heard it argued that Revelations was not a prediction of the End of the World but of the fall of the Roman Empire.)

The older Christian denominations mostly teach that there will be a Second Coming of Christ. However, they also take the view that no mere human can predict when this will happen. So while one should always be prepared, don’t quit your day job. My understanding is that there are diverse views on the End Times within Judaism and Islam as well. Some religious people don’t spin their wheels over Judgment Day all that much, even if they believe there’s going to be one.

One major distinction between conservative and liberal Christians (and, I suspect, conservative and liberal Jews also) is that liberals are more likely to consider scripture to be metaphorical rather than literal. This may tie back to the psychological makeup of people prone to conservatism — conservatives don’t like ambiguity and are more likely than liberals to be dogmatic. I postulate that people who are drawn to conservative religion are also more likely to adopt a conservative political view. Both religious and political conservatives tend to be more rigidly dogmatic, more deferential to authority, and to see the world in black and white terms. Political and religious liberals, on the other hand, tend to be less judgmental, more tolerant of ambiguity, and more fluid in their beliefs.

Thus, a test of “religiousness” based on adherence to doctrine will be skewed in favor of conservatives. But adherence to doctrine and religious devotion are not the same thing. Some religions place a higher value on religious practice and on the spiritual journey than on blind faith in a belief system. It’s not what you believe, but what you do, that matters.

I bring this up because of an article in today’s New York Times, “Religious Liberals Gain New Visibility” by Caryle Murphy and Alan Cooperman. If you are as old as I am you remember a time when religious liberals were visible and politically active, but for the past twenty or so years conservatives have pretty much taken over the religion franchise and obtained a copyright on Jesus. But, say Murphy and Cooperman, “religious liberals across a wide swath of denominations are engaged today in their most intensive bout of political organizing and alliance-building since the civil rights and anti-Vietnam War movements of the 1960s, according to scholars, politicians and clergy members.”

Rightie blogger reactions to this article are dismissive. The Left is hostile to religion, they say. “The more Democrats try to appeal to religious voters, the more they’ll alienate a big chunk of their base,” says one. This guy may have a point, sort of. I think it would be a huge mistake for Dems to copy the crass religiosity of the Right in order to win the evangelical vote.

Those alien to Bible Belt culture (Howard Dean, I’m talking to you) often can’t talk about religion without visible squeamishness. This has nothing to do with lack of devotion, however. Many genuinely religious people are uncomfortable talking about their religious experiences for the same reason they’re uncomfortable talking about their sexual experiences — some things are too personal and intimate to flaunt in public. And I say, if that’s how you feel, honor that.

For some, religion is a kind of tribal identity, and their religious talk is a code to let others know they are one of your people. But that same rhetoric will alienate those who recognize the tribe doesn’t include them. This is, I think, where a lot of the Left’s so-called hostility to religion comes from. Most of the time it’s not religion lefties are hostile to, but the exclusionary implication of much religious talk — if you aren’t one of us we don’t like you and you’re going to hell. It’s a tad off-putting.

I will be very surprised if the religious Left makes the same kind of alliance with the Dems that the religious Right made with Republicans. I suspect the religious Left is less interested in electing Democrats than in taking religion back from the fundies. They may be very happy to work with Dems on certain issues, but I don’t see the religious Left becoming an auxiliary of the Democratic Party. Or vice versa. And that’s OK; only the most rigidly conservative seem to think everyone has to join the same tribe.

Speaking of tribes — according to Frank Rich, the marriage between the Christian Right and the Republican Party may be on the rocks.

Politicians, particularly but not exclusively in the Karl Rove camp, seem to believe that voters of “faith” are suckers who can be lured into the big tent and then abandoned once their votes and campaign cash have been pocketed by the party for secular profit.

Nowhere is this game more naked than in the Jack Abramoff scandal: the felonious Washington lobbyist engaged his pal Ralph Reed, the former leader of the Christian Coalition, to shepherd Christian conservative leaders like James Dobson, Gary Bauer and the Rev. Donald Wildmon and their flocks into ostensibly “anti-gambling” letter-writing campaigns. They were all duped: in reality these campaigns were engineered to support Mr. Abramoff’s Indian casino clients by attacking competing casinos. While that scam may be the most venal exploitation of “faith” voters by Washington operatives, it’s all too typical. This history repeats itself every political cycle: the conservative religious base turns out for its party and soon finds itself betrayed. The right’s leaders are already threatening to stay home this election year because all they got for their support of Republicans in the previous election year was a lousy Bush-Cheney T-shirt. Actually, they also got two Supreme Court justices, but their wish list was far longer. Dr. Dobson, the child psychologist who invented Focus on the Family, set the tone with a tantrum on Fox, whining that Republicans were “ignoring those that put them in office” and warning of “some trouble down the road” if they didn’t hop-to.

As I wrote here, Republicans face an agenda impasse. For years they’ve been making promises to social and religious conservatives to get their votes. This was grand as long as Democrats controlled at least part of the federal government so that the Republicans didn’t have to keep those promises. But now they don’t have an excuse, and appeasing the base will mean alienating the large majority of Americans who are not homophobic and misogynistic knuckle-draggers.

Unfortunately, some among the Dems aren’t learning the right lessons from the Republican experience. Rich continues,

The Democrats’ chairman, Howard Dean, who proved his faith-based bona fides in the 2004 primary season by citing Job as his favorite book in the New Testament, went on the Pat Robertson TV network this month and yanked his party’s position on same-sex marriage to the right. (He apologized for his “misstatement” once off the air.)

Not to be left behind, Senator Clinton gave a speech last week knocking young people for thinking “work is a four-letter word” and for having TV’s in their rooms, home Internet access and, worst of all, that ultimate instrument of the devil, iPods. “I hope that we start thinking some very old-fashioned thoughts,” she said.

Dear Lord, how can smart people be so stupid?

Update: See also Pastor Dan.

Misguided

The case of the Christian convert under threat of execution in Afghanistan may be putting more cracks in the Bush base. For background, see Pamela Constable in today’s Washington Post:

The case of an Afghan man who could be prosecuted and even put to death for converting to Christianity has unleashed a blizzard of condemnation from the West this week and exposed a conflict in values between Afghanistan, a conservative Muslim country, and the foreign countries that have helped defend and rebuild it in the four years since the fall of the Taliban.

The case of Abdul Rahman, a longtime Christian convert who lived in Germany for years and was arrested last month in Kabul, has also highlighted the volatile debate within Afghanistan over the proper role of Islam in Afghan law and public policy as the country struggles to develop a democracy.

My understanding is that Rahman is not in trouble for being Christian, but for converting from Islam. I dimly remember hearing (in a seminar I attended years ago) that under traditional Sharia law, converting from Islam is punishable by death. It may be that the Afghan constitution doesn’t mind if people who have never been Muslims practice a religion other than Islam.

According to Constable, it appears at the moment that Rahman is unlikely to be tried or executed. However, at the New York Times Abdul Waheed Wafa writes that the judge in the case has vowed to resist international pressure when he makes his decision.

There’s no question that the execution of Rahman would be an atrocity. It would also likely stir up more anti-Islamic feeling in Europe and cause the Christian Right to re-evaluate our military adventures in the Middle East, which would be a disaster for the Bush Administration. I take it from the Wafa article that Condoleezza Rice is pulling every string she can pull to set Rahman free.

Word that the Afghani government — the one that the U.S. fought to establish — could execute someone for converting to Christianity hit the American religious Right like a ton of Bibles. Constable writes at WaPo:

Tony Perkins, president of the Family Research Council, complained in a letter to Bush and Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice: “How can we congratulate ourselves for liberating Afghanistan from the rule of jihadists only to be ruled by radical Islamists who kill Christians? . . . Americans will not give their blood and treasure to prop up new Islamic fundamentalist regimes.”

Hasn’t someone explained to Mr. Perkins that that’s exactly what we’re doing in Iraq?

Wafa writes at the Times, “In the United States this week, Christian talk shows and advocacy groups rallied their supporters, who flooded the White House and the Afghanistan Embassy with complaints.”

Initial reaction from the Bush Administration was tepid, writes Constable:

On Tuesday, a State Department spokesman urged the Afghan government to “conduct any legal proceedings in a transparent and fair manner.” R. Nicholas Burns, the undersecretary of state for political affairs, said that the Afghan constitution “affords freedom of religion to all Afghans” and that the U.S. government hoped for a “satisfactory result” of the case.

However, Judd at Think Progress says the United States Commission on International Religious Freedom repeatedly tried to warn the Bushies that the Afghan constitution amounted to “Taliban Lite.” The Bushies ignored them, until now. (Nobody could have anticipated that Afghan judges would adhere to Sharia law, even though the Afghan constitution says they can.)

Rightie bloggers are, of course, all a-twitter. “Where is the outrage from the Left?” says this one.

Oh, I dunno … maybe in the same place as the outrage from the Right on the death of Dilawar the cab driver.

But another had some pointed words for Republicans —

Also, I’d like to make a quick suggestion to Republicans: get on top of this story now. Not just because you should be anyway–obviously, it’s the right thing to do–but also because this story has the makings of another Dubai Ports World scandal written all over it. Fool me once. That’s all I have to say.

In other Christian news — you may remember Tom Fox, the Christian peace activist who was killed while being held hostage in Iraq. Today U.S. and British Thursday freed three more Christian peace activists.

You’d think the righties would be pleased that three Christians have been saved. Guess again.

The Christian peace activists are not “good” Christians because they don’t support the war (be sure to read the comments to the linked blog post, too. Verily I say unto thee, unless thou shalt support George W. Bush and the Iraq War, and vote Republican, thou shalt not be admitted into the Kingdom of Heaven.).

Here’s my favorite blog post on the subject:

One would think that the military that saved these people would recieve a huge thank you, but their press release doesn’t even mention the rescue. They do take the time for mentioning how much they love the enemy however.

    Today, in the face of this joyful news, our faith compels us to love our enemies even when they have committed acts which caused great hardship to our friends and sorrow to their families.

That in itself can be viewed as an admiral conviction to their faith, even if misguided …

Got that? Jesus’s teachings are misguided.

Update: See also the Green Knight.