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Showing posts with label God. Show all posts
Showing posts with label God. Show all posts

Monday 22 October 2018

On Sabarimala - Why are rational, scientific women upset?


By Girish Menon

“I do not wish to join any club that will accept me as a member” quipped Groucho Marx once. I will pass on this wisdom to women of menstruating age whose efforts to enter Sabarimala have been stopped by their own sisters, male priests and political activists.

In essence the Indian Supreme Court has decided in favour of allowing all women to worship at Sabarimala as failing to do so could be interpreted as discriminatory and in violation of every Indian’s fundamental right to equality guaranteed by the constitution.

The recent violence is testimony to the failure of the Indian state as it could not ensure protection to those women who wished to worship at Sabarimala. This is a replay of Ayodhya 1992 when a mob destroyed the Babri Masjid in violation of court strictures.

I have read reports that those opposed to the Supreme Court verdict in the Sabarimala case have now filed an appeal with the Supreme Court. This is a welcome move and should have been the first step in their protests instead of physically stopping women from entering the temple.

In a democracy the legislature is superior to the courts. So it should have been up to the political activists to pass legislation that suits their political views. However, such legislation will always be of secondary status to the fundamental rights of every Indian which can only be curtailed under special circumstances, if at all.

Tradition

Tradition has been quoted as the main argument to defend the practices of Sabarimala. Leaders of most denominations use this argument to protest against demands for reforms. This argument gains most momentum because of the historical failure to pass a uniform civil code bill that applies to every Indian uniformly.

In the case of Hindus, The Paliyam Satyagraha in Chendamangalam in 1947-48 enabled a break with tradition as lower caste Hindus were hereafter allowed to enter temples. Thus tradition is only a convenient term to fight against reform and modernity.

Uniting all Hindus

The demographic changes in India along with news of rapidly growing Islam and Christianity in many parts of the world give momentum to the BJP argument that ‘Hinduism is in danger’. Under such circumstances can the BJP afford to alienate Hindu women who clamour for the right to worship at Sabarimala?

In the book The Global Minotaur the author Yanis Varoufakis defines the term aporia

        that state of intense puzzlement  in which we find ourselves when our certainties fall to pieces ; when suddenly we get caught in an impasse, at a loss to explain what our eyes can see, our fingers can touch, our ears can hear. At those rare moments, as our reason valiantly struggles to fathom what the senses are reporting, our aporia humbles us and readies the prepared mind for previously unbearable truths.

For Indians the moment of aporia has arrived. Now maybe the best time to introduce the uniform civil code and ban religious conversions. Else the charge of India turning into a ‘Hindu Pakistan’ may become a self fulfilling prophecy.

On the other hand, why would modern, rational women with a scientific bent of mind and a claim that ‘God does not exist’ fight for rights to worship Ayyappa is something that I have found hard to understand.

Monday 17 September 2018

What is your brand of atheism?

Arvind Sharma in The Wire.In

The modern world is nothing if not plural in the number of possible world views it offers in terms of religions, creeds and ideologies. The profusion can be quite perplexing, even bewildering. And atheism too is an important component of the cocktail.

The book under review – John Gray’s Seven Types of Atheism – acts like a ‘guide to the perplexed’ in the modern Western world by bestowing the same kind of critical attention to atheism as theologians do to theism, and historians of religion do to the world religions.






In doing so, it identifies seven types of atheism: (1) new atheism, or an atheism which is simply interested in discrediting religion; (2) ‘secular atheism’, better described as secular humanism, which seeks salvation of the world within the world through progress; (3) ‘scientific atheism’, which turns science into a religion – a category in which the author includes ‘evolutionary humanism, Mesmerism, dialectical materialism, and contemporary transhumanism’; (4) ‘political atheism’, a category in which fall what the author considers to be modern political religions such as Jacobinism, Communism, Nazism and contemporary evangelical liberalism; (5) ‘antitheistic atheism’ or misotheism, the kind of atheism characterized by hatred of God of such people as Marquis de Sade, Dostoevsky’s character Ivan Karamazov (in a famous novel) and William Empson; (6) ‘non-humanistic atheism’, of the kind associated with the positions of George Santayana and Joseph Conrad who rejected the idea of a creator God but did not go on to cultivate benevolence towards humanity, so characteristic of secular atheism; and (7) mystical atheism, associated with the names of Schopenhauer, Spinoza, and the Russian thinker Leo Shestov. The author states his position in relation to these seven types candidly; he is repelled (his word) by the first five but feels drawn to the last two.

The seminal insight of the book, in the Western context, is that according “contemporary atheism is a continuation of monotheism by other means”. The author returns to the point again and again so that this insight enables us to examine both religion and atheism in tandem. It is thus an admirable book on atheism in the Western world and is strewn with nuggets such as:

“Scientific inquiry answers a demand for explanation. The practice of religion expresses a need for meaning…”;

“The human mind is programmed for survival, not truth”;

“Science can never close the gap between fact and value”;

“The fundamental conflict in ethics is not between self-interest and general welfare but between general welfare and desires of the moment”;

“It is not only the assertion that ‘moral’ values must take precedence over all others that has been inherited from Christianity. So has the belief that all human beings must live by the same morality”;

“… beliefs that have depended on falsehood need not themselves be false”;
“Some values may be humanly universal – being tortured or persecuted is bad for all human beings. But universal values do not make a universal morality, for these values often conflict with each other”;

“Liberal societies are not templates of a universal political order but instances of a particular form of life. Yet liberals persist in imagining that only ignorance prevents their gospel from being accepted by all of humankind – a vision inherited from Christianity”;
“Causing others to suffer could produce an excitement far beyond any achieved through mere debauchery”;

“Prayer is no less natural than sex, virtue as much as vice”;

“Continuing progress is possible only in technology and the mechanical arts. Progress in this sense may well accelerate as the quality of civilisation declines”;

“Any prospect of a worthwhile life without illusions might itself be an illusion”;

“If Nietzsche shouted the death of God from the rooftops, Arthur Schopenhauer gave the Deity a quiet burial”;

“The liberated individual entered into a realm where the will is silent”;
“Human life… is purposeless striving… But from another point of view this aimless world is pure play”;

“If the human mind mirrors the cosmos, it may be because they are both fundamentally chaotic”; and so on. 

Its provocative ideas and brilliant summaries notwithstanding, the book is bound by a limitation; its scope is limited to the West. The author does touch on Buddhism and even Sankhya but only as they have implications for the West; he does not cover Asian ideas of atheism alongside the Western. Neither Confucianism nor Daoism are hung up on a creator god and thus seem to demand attention, if atheism is defined as “the idea of the absence of a creator-god”. Similarly, in Hindu theism, the relation between the universe and the ultimate reality is posited as ontological rather than cosmological.

The concept of atheism also needs to be refined further in relation to Indian religions. In this context it is best to speak of the nontheism of Buddhism (which denies a creator god but not gods as such), and the transtheism of Advaita Vedanta (which accepts a God-like reality but denies it the status of the ultimate reality). In fact, the discussion in this book is perhaps better understood if we invoke some other categories related to the idea of God, such as transcendence and immanence. God is understood as transcendent in the Abrahamic traditions. God no doubt creates the universe but also transcends it; in the Hindu traditions, god is considered both transcendent and immanent – God ‘creates’ the universe and transcends it but also pervades it, just as the number seven transcends the number five but also contains it.

The many atheisms described in the book are really cases of denying the transcendence of god as the ultimate reality and identifying ultimate reality with something immanent in the universe. This enables one to see the atheisms of the West in an even broader light than when described as crypto-monotheisms.

One may conclude the discussion of such a heavy topic on a lighter note. Could one not think of something which is best called ‘devout agnosticism’ as a solution to rampant atheism in the West, if atheism is perceived as a problem? Such would be the situation if one prayed to a God, whose existence had been bracketed by one.

Crying for help from such a God in an emergency, is like crying for help in a less dire situation in which one shouts for help without knowing whether there is any one within earshot. Even the communists in Kerala might have found this possibility useful if the torrential rains filled them with the ‘fear of God’.

Monday 2 April 2018

Religion is not simply a set of beliefs. It is also a means of creating a sense of community

Kenan Malik in The Guardian

Dante and Virgil cross the Styx river in Gustave Doré’s interpretation of the poet’s vision of hell


Abandon all hope, ye who enter here. So runs the inscription above the gates of hell in Dante’s Inferno. Through those gates walks Dante with his guide Virgil:

Now sighs, loud wailing, lamentation
Resounded through the starless air,
So that I too began to weep.
Unfamiliar tongues, horrendous accents,
Words of suffering, cries of rage, voices
Loud and faint, the sound of slapping hands…


Inferno is the first part, or canticle, of the Divine Comedy, Dante’s great triptych of journeys through hell, purgatory and heaven. Today, we read it as poetry, even if it is poetry that seems to have been touched by the divine. Seven hundred years ago, it was read as a glimpse of something far more real. Dante’s imaginative recreation of both the physical and the moral universe, and of the interlacing of the two, infused medieval culture and allowed Europeans to understand both their place in the physical architecture of the cosmos and their duties in the moral architecture of Christian society.

So far have we moved today from Dante’s reality that even the pope, if we are to believe the Italian journalist Eugenio Scalfari, no longer acknowledges the existence of hell. Scalfari asked Pope Francis where “bad souls” go after death. Hell, Francis supposedly replied, “doesn’t exist”. “Sinning souls” simply “disappear”.

The Vatican has condemned the article, published in La Repubblica, insisting that the pope was misquoted. Whatever the truth, the controversy nevertheless points up the dilemma in which religion finds itself in the modern world. Religious values are immensely flexible over time. Christian beliefs on many issues have changed enormously in the past two millennia. Yet an institution like the Catholic church can never be truly “modern”.

Christianity, like all monotheistic religions, views human desires and beliefs as unreliable guides to notions of good and bad. Values derive primarily from God, and the authority of the church rests on its claim to be able to interpret the Bible and God’s word. Were the church to modify its teaching to meet the wishes of its flock, the authority of the institution would inevitably weaken. But were it not to do so, a chasm would emerge between official teaching and actual practice. Dante’s hell may be difficult to believe in, but to jettison difficult beliefs is to question the need for religion itself.

A recent pan-European survey by Stephen Bullivant, professor of theology at St Mary’s University in London, showed that in a dozen countries, including Britain, a majority of young people are irreligious. And even those who identify as religious have attitudes increasingly like those of their irreligious neighbours.

A survey of the social attitudes of British believers published in 2013 by Linda Woodhead, professor of sociology of religion at Lancaster University, suggested that two thirds of Catholics accepted abortion of some kind. Half said that they are primarily guided by their own reason, intuition or feelings. Fewer than one in 10 sought guidance from the church or Bible.


Religion is not simply a set of beliefs. It is also a means of creating a sense of community


Meanwhile, Woodward observes,, a minority of believers have marched in the opposite direction. They possess an absolute belief in God, make moral decisions primarily on the basis of religious sources, and are deeply conservative on issues of social morality. The literalism of fundamentalist Muslims and evangelical Christians speaks to a yearning for the restoration of strong identities and moral lines. The sectarianism of fundamentalist religion is reflected also in the political sphere. Witness the rise of tribal politics and of social movements built around excluding the Other.

All this poses a challenge, not just for believers, but for non-believers, too. Religion is not simply a set of beliefs. It is also a means of creating a sense of community, identity and meaning. One reason for the growth of fundamentalism is that all these seem in short supply today. The world appears increasingly trapped between an atomised liberalism, on the one hand, and a sense of community created by fundamentalist religion or reactionary politics, on the other.

In his 1946 book Man’s Search for Meaning, the Austrian psychiatrist Viktor Frankl, who spent three years incarcerated in German concentration camps, meditates on that experience; a meditation on surviving hell.

“This is a profoundly religious book,” suggested the rabbi Howard Kushner in the foreword to the second edition. Frankl’s faith is, however, very different to that embodied in religion. It is a hymn not to a transcendent deity but to the human spirit that, through its own efforts, can transcend the immediacy of its being in the world. Humans, he suggests, find themselves only through creating meaning in the world. Meaning is not something to be discovered through God. It is something that humans create. “Man is ultimately self-determining,” Frankl wrote. “Man does not simply exist but always decides what his existence will be.”

Today, it is that very capacity to “decide what our existence will be” that seems to have ebbed away. For all the material improvements in the world, life feels more precarious for millions of people. They seem to have less control in shaping the direction of their world.

Liberals often laud the Enlightenment as the moment when faith was replaced by reason. The new moral vision was, however, also rooted in faith, though of a different kind – faith that humans were capable of acting rationally and morally without guidance from beyond. It was that faith upon which Frankl drew. It was expressed not just through science and technology but also through politics that helped overthrow tyranny and bring about democracy. That faith, too, has eroded, as have the movements in which it was embodied.

Religion once helped provide meaning and identity through sublimating human agency to God’s will. Not only is it less capable of doing so these days, but when it does so, it often takes sectarian or bigoted forms. Equally, as the optimism that once suffused the humanist impulse has ebbed away, politics, too, is less capable of providing a means through which people can express agency. The politics that today seeks to do this is also often sectarian or bigoted.

“God is dead,” Nietzsche wrote, before adding: “Yet his shadow still looms.” That shadow is in reality our failure to create movements and institutions that can nurture a sense of meaning and belongingness and dignity. Disbelief in God carries little weight without also a faith in ourselves as human beings. Otherwise, we find ourselves in a different kind of hell.

Friday 8 December 2017

The Brexit monomania built on blind faith

Tim Harford in The FT

Image result for salisbury cathedral

For Christmas reading, the British political establishment might pick up something by William Golding, winner of the Nobel Prize for literature in 1983. Lord of the Flies is his most famous work, with its grim suggestion that the line between innocent children and murderers is thin. For an insight into Brexit Britain’s current predicament after a week of chaos, however, I recommend The Spire.

The book is a study of monomania. Dean Jocelin has visions of adding to his cathedral a 400-foot steeple, an expression of human prayers reaching into the heavens. But the intensity of his ambition blinds him to his other duties and threatens both the cathedral and the community around it. As Jocelin himself admits, “at the moment of vision, the eyes see nothing”. 


It is impossible to miss the analogy. The UK is being driven by visionary enthusiasts for Brexit just as surely as Jocelin’s attendants had to bend to his will. Whether their visions are realistic is quite another question. Last summer David Davis, the man charged with delivering Brexit, predicted that the UK would be able to negotiate a free trade area “massively larger than the EU” within two years. That was 17 months ago. Whatever Mr Davis was gazing at back then, it wasn’t reality. 

Then there are those wretched experts, who tell Jocelin that his spire is impossible. The master builder, Roger Mason, confronts him with an inescapable dilemma: if the spire’s structure is too lightweight, the next storm will blow it down; a sturdier structure will warp the cathedral beneath it, or sink into the swamp. 

Jocelin berates him for lack of faith; the dean wants to have his cake and eat it. Nor can evidence dissuade him. When Mason digs into the cathedral’s non-existent foundations, showing Jocelin the soft earth writhing under the weight of the building, the zealot’s faith is strengthened. If the current cathedral stands on foundations of mud, isn’t that proof that miracles are possible? 

Brexit, of course, is not only possible but almost inevitable. But the promises that have been made cannot be fulfilled any more than Jocelin’s spire could safely be built. We cannot “have access” to the single market (that is, remain in it) while also ending freedom of movement; we cannot leave the customs union without introducing a customs border. The discovery of the week — surprising to nobody who has been paying attention — is that this customs border can be located on neither land nor sea. 

Jocelin ignores the experts. “I thought it would be simple,” he says. “I had to build in faith, against advice. That’s the only way.” And it proves all too easy to ignore those who might restrain him. One faithful priest, “Father Anonymous”, is too boring to notice. In another life, perhaps he would have been an economist. Others, Jocelin remarks sharply, would profit if the project was thwarted. It is true that sometimes the experts have an eye on their own finances. They may nonetheless be right. 

Admittedly, pure determination sometimes finds a way. Monomaniacs change the world, sometimes for the better. One recalls the description of Steve Jobs in his early years at Apple, generating a “reality distortion field” that could redefine what was possible by “sheer mental force”. 

Even The Spire was inspired not by folly, but by a triumph. For more than 15 years Golding was a teacher in the shadow of Salisbury Cathedral, whose 404-foot spire has been the tallest in the country for nearly five centuries. Perhaps long-forgotten experts once warned that it could never be built. 

Whether Brexit eventually turns into something worth admiring will be for future historians to judge. For now, Golding invites us to ponder the cost. Jocelin’s ambition requires an army of builders to deliver it; that army murders an innocent person. 

“Let it be so,” says Jocelin to the heavens. “Cost what you like.” 

The project takes a toll in ways that blinkered Jocelin did not consider and takes too long to notice. Letters from allies go unanswered. Urgent business is postponed. The cathedral starts to die; the congregation leaves. 

Observers of British politics will not find the parallel hard to discern: the centre ground has been hollowed out, the economy is faltering, respect for basic norms of truth-telling are in tatters, and the union itself is under strain. 

Jocelin slowly realises the toll his project is taking on those around him, but since he is doing the work of God, any price must be worth paying. British politicians obey the will not of God, but of the British people as expressed in a referendum. It seems to amount to the same thing. 

In the end, Jocelin is stripped of his job and his dignity. The long-predicted storm comes. Reality asserts itself. The vision, the visionary and the spire itself crack under the strain. 

“I thought I was doing a great work,” Jocelin confesses. “And all I was doing was bringing ruin and breeding hate.” 

And yet the spire does not fall. That is where Golding leaves us: the project cannot go on, but it cannot be undone. Disaster hangs in the air. “Has it fallen yet?” asks the stricken Jocelin. Not yet.

Thursday 26 October 2017

On Militant Atheism - Why the Soviet attempt to stamp out religion failed

Giles Fraser in The Guardian



The Russian revolution had started earlier in February. The tsar had already abdicated. And a provisional bourgeois government had begun to establish itself. But it was the occupation of government buildings in Petrograd, on 25 October 1917, by the Red Guards of the Bolsheviks that marks the beginning of the Communist era proper. And it was from this date that an experiment wholly unprecedented in world history began: the systematic, state-sponsored attempt to eliminate religion. “Militant atheism is not merely incidental or marginal to Communist policy. It is not a side effect, but the central pivot,” wrote Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn. Lenin compared religion to venereal disease.

Within just weeks of the October revolution, the People’s Commissariat for Enlightenment was established to remove all references to religion from school curriculums. In the years that followed, churches and monasteries were destroyed or turned into public toilets. Their land and property was appropriated. Thousands of bishops, monks and clergy were systematically murdered by the security services. Specialist propaganda units were formed, like the League of the Godless. Christian intellectuals were rounded up and sent to camps.

The Soviets had originally believed that when the church had been deprived of its power, religion would quickly wither away. When this did not happen, they redoubled their efforts. In Stalin’s purges of 1936 and 1937 tens of thousands of clergy were rounded up and shot. Under Khrushchev it became illegal to teach religion to your own children. From 1917 to the perestroika period of the 1980s, the more religion persisted, the more the Soviets would seek new and inventive ways to eradicate it. Today the Russian Orthodox churches are packed full. Once the grip of oppression had been released, the faithful returned to church in their millions.

The Soviet experiment manifestly failed. If you want to know why it failed, you could do no better than go along to the British Museum in London next week when the Living with Gods exhibition opens. In collaboration with a BBC Radio 4 series, this exhibition describes some of the myriad ways in which faith expresses itself, using religious objects to examine how people believe rather than what they believe. The first sentence of explanation provided by the British Museum is very telling: “The practice and experience of beliefs are natural to all people.” From prayer flags to a Leeds United kippah, from water jugs to processional chariots, this exhibition tells the story of humanity’s innate and passionate desire to make sense of the world beyond the strictly empirical.

Jill Cook, the exhibition’s curator, remembers going into pre-glasnost churches like Kazan Cathedral in St Petersburg, which had been converted into a museum of atheism. One of the items she has included in the exhibition is a 1989 velvet and silk embroidered image of Christ, for the back of a cope. The person who made this image had no other vestments to work from – they had all been destroyed – other than those she had seen lampooning Christianity in the museum of atheism. What had been a piss-take has been repurposed into a devotional object. Services resumed in Kazan Cathedral in 1992.

The penultimate image of the exhibition is a 1975 poster of a cheeky-looking cosmonaut walking around in space and declaring: “There is no god.” Below him, on Earth, a church is falling over. This was from the period of so-called scientific atheism.


 A poster showing a cosmonaut walking in space and saying: ‘There is no god.’ By Vladimir Menshikow, 1975. Photograph: British Museum

But there is one last exhibit to go. Round the corner, a glass case contains small model boats with burnt matchsticks in them representing people huddled together. And two tiny shirts that had been used as shrouds for drowned children. At the side of them is a small cross, made from the wood of a ship that was wrecked off the Italian island of Lampedusa on 11 October 2013. The ship contained Somali and Eritrean Christian refugees, fleeing poverty and persecution. Francesco Tuccio, the local Lampedusa carpenter, desperately wanted to do something for them, in whatever way he could. So he did all he knew and made them a cross. Just like a famous carpenter before him, I suppose. And what this exhibition demonstrates is that nothing – not decades of propaganda nor state-sponsored terror – will be able to quash that instinct from human life.

Thursday 27 October 2016

Assumptions of Modern Science

by Girish Menon

Modern science is founded on the belief in the Genesis, that nature was created by a law-giving God and so we must be governed by "laws of nature".

Equally important was the belief that human beings are made in the image of God and, as a consequence, can understand these "laws of nature".

What do scientists have to say to that?

I say all scientists are therefore Judeo-Christian in their beliefs.

Saturday 8 August 2015

Friday 1 May 2015

Vicars are employed by God not the Church, says UK court in landmark ruling

Helen Carter in The Independent

A vicar who lost a four-year battle over his right to claim for unfair dismissal has cleared up one question – vicars are not employed by the Church, but called by God.

The Rev Mark Sharpe claimed he was forced out of his role in the Church of England parish of Teme Valley South, in the Diocese of Worcestershire, when locals began a hate campaign against him. He said his dog was poisoned, his car tyres slashed and his mail was tampered with. Mr Sharpe moved to the area with his wife and four children to take up the parish post in 2005, but stepped down four years later, saying he had developed health problems as a result of harassment.

He took his case for unfair dismissal to court, claiming that Church and the Bishop of Worcester should have warned him about the problems the parish was facing, and offered more support in the job. The union Unite backed his case, calling for a landmark legal decision which would see faith leaders “finally awarded basic employment rights”. 

But Court of Appeal judges disagreed. Lady Justice Arden, Lord Justice David and Lord Justice Lewison ruled that, as a man of the cloth, Mr Sharpe was “neither a party to a contract of employment, not a worker” and therefore could not claim for unfair dismissal.

The Rt Rev John Inge, the Bishop of Worcester, said he was “delighted” with the decision to recognise that faith leaders served a divine boss, rather than one of the flesh.

“To become employees, clergy would lose the freedoms which are at the heart of the Church’s ministry and this is not something that they want to give up,” he said. “It is regrettable that Unite fails to understand the context in which parish clergy exercise their ministry whilst the Church seeks to uphold the freedoms enjoyed by its clergy.”

It is not the first time Mr Sharpe has taken legal action against employers. He previously lodged a successful case against the Ministry of Defence after being exposed to hardcore pornography while acting as a chaplain to servicemen travelling on warships.

The Navy admitted sexual harassment but denied discrimination on grounds of religious affiliation.

Tuesday 3 February 2015

Can Sufism save Sind?

Suleman Akhtar in The Dawn

Sindh is under attack. The land of Shah Latif bleeds again. The seven queens of Shah Latif’s Shah Jo Risalo – Marui, Sassui, Noori, Sorath, Lilan, Sohni, and Momal – have put on black cloaks and they mourn. The troubles and tribulations are not new for the queens.

After the sack of Delhi, Nadir Shah (Shah of Iran), invaded Sindh and imprisoned the then Sindhi ruler Noor Mohammad Kalhoro in Umarkot fort. Shah Latif captured it in the yearning of Marui for her beloved land when she was locked up in the same Umarkot fort.

If looking to my native land
with longing I expire;
My body carry home, that I
may rest in desert-stand;
My bones if Malir reach, at end,
though dead, I'll live again.
(Sur Marui, XXVIII, Shah Jo Risalo)

The attack on the central Imambargah in Shikarpur is as ominous in many ways as it is horrendous and tragic.

The Sufi ethos of Sindh has long been cherished as the panacea for burgeoning extremism in Pakistan. Sufism has been projected lately as an effective alternative to rising fundamentalism in Muslim societies not only by the Pakistani liberal intelligentsia but also by some Western think-tanks and NGOs.

But the question is, how effective as an ideology can Sufism be in its role in contemporary societies?

To begin with, Sufism is not a monolithic ideology.

There are several strains within Sufism that are in total opposition to each other, thus culminating into totally opposite worldviews. The most important of them is chasm between Wahdat al-Wajud (unity of existence) and Wahdat al-Shahud (unity of phenomenon).

The former professes that there is only One real being not separated from His creation, and thus God runs through everything. While Wahdat al-Shahud holds that God is separated from His creation.

 While the distinction between the two might seem purely polemical, it actually leads to two entirely opposite logical conclusions.

Wahdat al-Wajud sees God running through everything. Thus apparent differences between different religions and school of thoughts vanish at once. In diversity, there lies a unity thus paving way to acceptance of any creed, irrespective of its religious foundations.

Ibn al-Arbi was the first to lay the theoretical foundations of Wahdat al-Wajud and introduce it to the Muslim world.

On the other hand, the Wahdat al-Shahud school of thought was developed and propagated by Sheikh Ahmad Sirhindi, who rose to counter the secular excesses of Akbar. He pronounced Ibn al-Arbi as Kafir and went on deconstructing what he deemed as heresies.

Wahdat al-Shahud in its sociopolitical context leads to separation and confrontation. The staunch anti-Hindu and anti-Shia views of Ahmed Sirhindi are just a logical consequence of this school of thought. Ahmed Sirhindi is one of the few Sufis mentioned in Pakistani textbooks.

Historically, Sufis in today’s Pakistan have belonged to four Sufi orders: Qadriah, Chishtiah, Suharwardiah, and Naqshbandiah.

It is also interesting to note that not all of these Sufi orders have been historically anti-establishment.

While Sufis who belonged to the Chishtiah and Qadriah orders always kept a distance from emperors in Delhi and kept voicing for the people, the Suharwardia order has always been close to the power centres. Bahauddin Zikria of the Suharwardiah order enjoyed close relations with the Darbar and after that leaders of this order have always sided with the ruler (either Mughals or British) against the will of the people.

 Sufism in the subcontinent in general and Sindh in particular, emerged and evolved as a formidable opposition to the King and Mullah/Pundit nexus. Not only did it give voice to the voiceless victims of religious fanaticism, but also challenged the established political order.

To quote Marx it was ‘the soul of soulless conditions’.

A case-in-point is Shah Inayat of Jhok Sharif, who led a popular peasant revolt in Sindh and was executed afterwards. Shah Latif wrote a nameless eulogy of Shah Inayat in Shah Jo Risalo.

However, the socio-political conditions that gave rise to Sufism in the subcontinent are not present anymore. The resurrection of Sufism as a potent resistance ideology is difficult if not impossible. Sufis emerged from ashes of civilizational mysticism, independent of organised religion and political powers.

Today, however, the so-called centres of Sufism known as Khanqahs are an integral part of both the contemporary political elite and the all-powerful clergy. On intellectual front self-proclaimed proponents of contemporary Sufism – Qudratullah Shahab, Ashfaq Ahmad, Mumtaz Mufti, et al – have been a part of state apparatus and ideology in one form or another.

Sufism is necessarily a humanist and universal ideology. It is next to impossible to confine it to the boundaries of modern nation states and ideological states in particular, which thrive on an exclusivist ideology.

Mansoor al-Hallaj travelled extensively throughout Sindh. His famous proclamation Ana ‘al Haq (I am the truth) is an echo of Aham Brahmasmi (I am the infinite reality) of the Upanishads. There are striking similarities between the Hindu Advaita and Muslim Wahdat al-Wajud. These ideologies complement each other and lose their essence in isolation.

Punjab has been a centre of The Bhakti Movement – one of the most humanist spiritual movements that ever happened on this side of Suez – but all the humanist teachings of the movement could not avert the genocide of millions of Punjabis during the tragic events of the Partition.

The most time-tested peace ideology of Buddhism could not keep the Buddhists from killing Muslims in Burma.

Such are the cruel realities of modern times that can overshadow the viability of any spiritual movement.

Sufism in Sindh exists today as a way of life and not an ideology.

It is an inseparable part of how people live their daily lives. In Pakistan, however, to live a daily life has come to be an act of resistance itself.

Sindh bleeds today and mourns for its people and culture that are under attack. Bhit Shah reverberates with an aggrieved but helpless voice:

O brother dyer! Dye my clothes black,
I mourn for those who never did return.
(Sur Kedaro, III, Shah Jo Risalo)

Wednesday 17 December 2014

Best quotations from The Simpsons

1. “Marriage is like a coffin and each kid is another nail”

2. “It takes two to lie: one to lie and one to listen”

3.  Bart: "Grandpa, why don't you tell a story?"
     Lisa: "Yeah Grandpa, you lived a long and interesting life."
     Grandpa: "That's a lie and you know it"

4. Marge: "Homer, is this the way you pictured married life?"
    Homer: "Yeah, pretty much, except we drove round in a van solving mysteries"

5. Homer: "We're proud of you, Boy.
    Bart: "Thanks Dad. Part of this d-minus belongs to God"

6. "Life is just one crushing defeat after another until you just wish Flanders was dead"

7. "You tried your best and you failed miserably. The lesson is: Never try”

8. “If you pray to the wrong god, you might just make the right one madder and madder”

9. "When I look at people I don't see colours; I just see crackpot religions"

10 "Weaseling out of things is important to learn. It’s what separates us from the animals         … except the weasel"

11 Marge: "It's Patty who chose a life of celibacy. Selma had celibacy thrust upon her"

12 Vendor: "Hot dogs, get your hot dogs!"
    Homer: "I'll take one"
    Marge: "What, do you follow my husband around to sell him hot dogs?"
    Vendor: "Lady, he's putting my kids through college."

13 "How is education supposed to make me feel smarter? Besides, every time I learn something new, it pushes some old stuff out of my brain. Remember when I took that home winemaking course, and I forgot how to drive?"

14 "Lisa, you've got the brains and talent to go as far as you want, and when you do I'll be right there to borrow money.”

15 “I'm not normally a praying man, but if you're up there, please save me, Superman!”

16 “Son, if you really want something in this life, you have to work for it. Now quiet! They're about to announce the lottery numbers.”

17 “What’s the point of going out? We’re just gonna wind up back home anyway.”

18 "Cheating is the gift man gives himself."

19 "Books are useless! I only ever read one book, To Kill A Mockingbird, and it gave me absolutely no insight on how to kill mockingbirds!"

20 "It's not easy to juggle a pregnant wife and a troubled child, but somehow I managed to fit in eight hours of TV a day."

21 "To alcohol! The cause of, and solution to, all of life's problems."

22 "Oh, loneliness and cheeseburgers are a dangerous mix."

23  Moe: "Homer, lighten up! You're making Happy Hour bitterly ironic."

24 "I don't get mad, I get stabby"

25 "I've been called ugly, pug ugly, fugly, pug fugly, but never ugly ugly."

26 "There's only one fat guy that brings us presents and his name ain't Santa".
      Bart Simpson, son of Father Homer Christmas.

27 "Last night's Itchy & Scratchy was, without a doubt, the worst episode ever. Rest assured I was on the internet within minutes registering my disgust throughout the world."

28 "When will I learn? The answers to life’s problems aren’t at the bottom of a bottle, they’re on TV!"

 

Wednesday 29 October 2014

Pope Francis declares evolution and Big Bang theory are right and God isn’t ‘a magician with a magic wand’

Adam Withnall,The Independent 

The theories of evolution and the Big Bang are real and God is not "a magician with a magic wand," Pope Francis has declared.

----Also watch

The Science Delusion

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Speaking at the Pontifical Academy of Sciences, the pope made comments which experts said put an end to the "pseudo theories" of creationism and intelligent design that some argue were encouraged by his predecessor, Benedict XVI.

Francis explained that both scientific theories were not incompatible with the existence of a creator — arguing instead that they "require it".

"When we read about Creation in Genesis, we run the risk of imagining God was a magician, with a magic wand able to do everything. But that is not so," Francis said.

He added: "He created human beings and let them develop according to the internal laws that he gave to each one so they would reach their fulfilment.

"The Big Bang, which today we hold to be the origin of the world, does not contradict the intervention of the divine creator but, rather, requires it.

"Evolution in nature is not inconsistent with the notion of creation, because evolution requires the creation of beings that evolve."

The Catholic Church has long had a reputation for being antiscience — most famously when Galileo faced the inquisition and was forced to retract his "heretic" theory that Earth revolved around Sun.




An artist's concept of evolution of man. (Getty Images photo)

But Pope Francis's comments were more in keeping with the progressive work of Pope Pius XII, who opened the door to the idea of evolution and actively welcomed the Big Bang theory. In 1996, John Paul II went further and suggested evolution was "more than a hypothesis" and "effectively proven fact".

Yet more recently, Benedict XVI and his close advisers have apparently endorsed the idea that intelligent design underpins evolution — the idea that natural selection on its own is insufficient to explain the complexity of the world. In 2005, his close associate Cardinal Schoenborn wrote an article saying "evolution in the sense of common ancestry might be true, but evolution in the neo-Darwinian sense — an unguided, unplanned process — is not".

Giovanni Bignami, a professor and president of Italy's National Institute for Astrophysics, told the Italian news agency Adnkronos: "The pope's statement is significant. We are the direct descendants from the Big Bang that created the universe. Evolution came from creation."


This Nasa illustration shows how astronomers believe the universe developed from the 'Big Bang' 13.7 billion years ago to today. They know very little about the Dark Ages from 380,000 to about 800 million years after the Big Bang, but are trying to find out. (Via Getty Images)

Giulio Giorello, professor of the philosophy of science at Milan's University degli Studi, told reporters that he believed Francis was "trying to reduce the emotion of dispute or presumed disputes" with science.

Despite the huge gulf in theological stance between his tenure and that of his predecessor, Francis praised Benedict XVI as he unveiled a bronze bust of him at the academy's headquarters in the Vatican Gardens.

"No one could ever say of him that study and science made him and his love for God and his neighbour wither," Francis said, according to a translation by Catholic News Service.

"On the contrary, knowledge, wisdom and prayer enlarged his heart and his spirit. Let us thank God for the gift that he gave the church and the world with the existence and the pontificate of Pope Benedict."


The Catholic Church has long had a reputation for being antiscience — most famously when Galileo faced the inquisition and was forced to retract his "heretic" theory that the Earth revolved around the Sun. (Getty Images photo)

Sunday 17 November 2013

Sachin mania: it's about religion


Ahmer Naqvi in Cricinfo

Tendulkar: a cult figure if ever there was one  © Associated Press
Enlarge

Sachin Tendulkar has finally retired. As I type this, there are a fair few letting out sighs of relief, because the sheer hype and hoopla surrounding his farewell Test series has left many feeling distinctly uncomfortable. The cynical nature of the BCCI's scheduling, the hyper-opportunism displayed by politicians and corporations, and the general hysteria of the crowds has left many decrying the spectacle as slightly unnerving.
As a Pakistani, I have been relatively immune to Sachin's appeal for most of my life. It was only in my more mature years that I came to support any Indian players at all. Even then, it was the likes of Rahul Dravid and perhaps Yuvraj Singh and MS Dhoni whom I admired, rather than Tendulkar.
Yet over the past few days, the backlash against the Sachin celebration has left me intrigued. Why were certain opinion-makers so visibly aghast at the treatment being accorded Sachin? Why were the sights of delirious crowds being countered with stats showing Sachin to be the 29th best batsman of all time?
The answer lies in an area that many people find to be naive at best and disastrous at worst. It is an area that carries significant political influence, and is always, always an incendiary topic to bring up. The answer lies in religion.
In Europe, and much of the developed world, historically, religion has been the cause of brutal and terrifying political battles over the centuries, which determined not just who ruled but also the intellectual world-view underpinning those governments. Consequently, speaking of religion in Western society can often invoke memories of violence and persecution, and can even be seen to be a resistance to progressive ideas.
In South Asia, religion has been and continues to be a major driver of violence and conflict. In a region that is one of the world's most diverse ethnically, religion often shows up as a fault line in a bewildering array of instances. Yet at the same time, religion (believe it or not) is also the reason why such distinct peoples have managed to live together for thousands of years. The idea of syncretism, which, broadly speaking, refers to the fusion of seemingly contradictory beliefs, is central to life in South Asia.
The prime example of such syncretism is found at festivals or melas held to commemorate the lives of famous saints. From Kabul to Chittagong, these are a ubiquitous feature of the subcontinent, and are attended by pilgrims from near and far. Most importantly, they witness an annihilation of conventional identities. So a saint from one religion has devotees from various faiths. You can have a Muslim saint whose shrine is visited by Hindus, Christians, Sikhs, and others.
It is impossible to distil and explain these practices in a few lines, but to put it simply, the reason such practices exist is because people believe that a truly holy person transcends conventional religious differences. Thus the revered saint becomes a pathway to a more immediate and direct bond with the divine - in a relationship that not only exists outside the regularly prescribed rituals, but is one that is only made possible due to the exalted life and efforts of the saint.
I think this is the context one needs to view Sachin's farewell in.
I am not taking the popular sentiment of calling him "god" and trying to run away with it, and I doubt many people consciously and spiritually see him as a saint on par with the rest. But the sentiment that underlines his retirement and the rapture he is generating cannot be seen as mere sycophancy, commercial exploitation, or celebrity-fuelled hysteria. Undoubtedly, all of these things play a part in this festival, but they are not what it is limited to.
When people ask why all this is being done for one person, or why Dravid, Sourav Ganguly and VVS Laxman didn't get such farewells, or why the FTP is being disrupted for one man, they are asking valid questions but ones that are irrelevant to this context. The debate about who was great and who wasn't ends here with the people. Because ultimately, this celebration is not for Sachin, it is for his devotees.
It is for the people who turned to him as a symbol of hope, as a symbol of perseverance. It is for the people who refused to give up because their Sachin hadn't. It is for the people who believed they could break barriers and limitations because Sachin had shown them it could be done. It is for the people who know that it is time to let go of someone they relied upon for their smiles and the unburdening of their sorrows.
Perhaps all this hype and obsession makes "cricket" fans feel uncomfortable. Perhaps there are fans despairing at this cult-like behaviour. Perhaps there are those who feel that all this undermines Sachin's own credibility. To all of them, I paraphrase the patron saint of cricket writers, Hazrat CLR James, when I say: "What do they know of Sachin, who only Sachin know?"

Wednesday 16 October 2013

Oprah is wrong. Atheists can experience wonder and awe

Those who believe in God do not have a monopoly over possession of that magnificent sense of the sublime

Frank Furedi in The Independent

In one sense Oprah Winfrey was absolutely right when she lectured the humanist swimmer Diana Nyad about the inconsistency of the outlook of atheism with a sense of awe. For Oprah, a woman of faith, the sense of wonder and awe are inextricably intertwined with religion and God.
Indeed since the emergence of the Judeo-Christian tradition, awe is the mandatory reaction that the true believer is required to have towards God. From this perspective the sense awe and wonder is bounded and regulated through the medium of religious doctrine. In contrast, those of us who believe that it was not God but humans who are the real creators are unlikely to stand in awe of this allegedly omnipotent figure.
Although in the 21st century the term awe and awesome are used colloquially to connote amazement and admiration historically these words communicated feelings of powerlessness, fear and dread. The Oxford English Dictionary tells us, that awe means ‘immediate and active fear; terror, dread’. The OED explains that from its original reference to the Divine Being it has acquired a variety of different meanings, such as ‘dread mingled with veneration’ and ‘reverential or respectful fear’. All these meanings signal one important idea which that ‘fearing’ and ‘dreading’ are inherently positive attributes to be encouraged.
The religious affirmation of fear and dread of a higher being is indeed alien to the humanist view of the world. But does that mean that Oprah is right and that atheists cannot wonder and awe? Not at all. Those who believe in God do not have a monopoly over possession of that magnificent sense of the sublime that catches us unaware in the face of the truly mysterious. Atheists and humanist experience wonder and awe in ways that sometimes resembles but often differs from the way that the religious people respond to the unknown.
We all have the capacity and the spiritual resources to experience the mysteries of life and the unexpected events that excite our imagination through a sense of wonder. Those who stand in awe of God internalise their sense of wonder through the medium of their religious doctrine. Their response can possess powerful and intense emotions. But the way they wonder is bounded by their religious beliefs and their conception of God.  In a sense this experience of spiritual sensibility is both guided and ultimately dictated by doctrine and belief. Historically those religious people who dared to go beyond these limits risked being denounced as heretical mystics.
In contrast to the way that religion does wonder, atheists and humanists possess a potential for experiencing in a way that is totally unbounded. Humanists do not stand in awe of the mysteries of God but truly wonder at the unknown. Through the resources of the human imagination (humanities) and of the sciences the thinking atheist realises that every solution creates a demand for new answers.  That’s what makes our wonder so special. Instead of dreading and fearing, it empowers us to set out on the quest to discover and understand.
Experience shows that the capacity to wonder is a truly human one. Toddlers and young children do not need God to wonder at the mysterious world that surrounds them. At a very early stage in their life they express their sense of astonishment and wonder without effort or a hint of embarrassment. Thankfully most of us continue to be motivated and inspired by the mysteries of life.
One final point. There are of course some new atheists who insist on living in a spiritual-free world. From their deterministic perspective everything is explained by neuro-science or our genes. But what drives them away from wonder is not their atheism but their inability to engage with uncertainty. In that respect they are surprisingly similar to those who embrace religious dogma to spare themselves the responsibility of engaging with the mysteries that confront us in everyday life.

Wednesday 18 September 2013

What is Religion

Part 1: civil religion and the state

The 'God' of American civil religion supplies a way for society to judge itself from a standpoint exterior to power
The recent death of Robert Bellah made me reread his classic essay on American civil religion, which first appeared in 1967 and this, in turn, sparked a series' worth of questions on what religion is. Bellah believed, as I have come to do, that a society without religion is impossible. This claim will strike quite a lot of readers as wholly absurd, as ridiculous as supposing that Earth goes round the sun when any fool can see the sun crossing the heavens several times at least in any English summer. So I think it's worth examining and defending at some length.
The first requirement, if you are going to do this, is to break all notions of religion as being something essentially like Christianity or any of the other monotheisms of today. To talk about "religion" as if the perfect form was modern Christianity is like talking about biology as if the perfect mammal was homo sapiens.
Bellah was a sociologist and to some extent an anthropologist too. He knew very well that there have been innumerable different forms of religion, and that counter-examples can be found for everything that is supposed to be distinctively religious. You don't need priests, holy books, or doctrines. You don't even need myths. All these are things which, once established, are hard to be rid of, because they reflect and help to constitute increasingly complex models of social organisation which will tend to replace more simple ones. But none of them are essential to a religion.
At the same time, it's important not to go too far in the other direction, and to suppose that every social activity, and every movement of the inner life, can be described as in some sense religious.
Bellah himself started off in the 70s with a long and complicated definition and ended up with a very simple and powerful one. This came in part from the early 20th-century philosopher George Santayana, who wrote that having a religion meant having "another world to live in – whether we expect ever to pass wholly over into it or not".
What Bellah added to this was the point that the world of everyday, from which religion promises to deliver us, is not more real, or less constructed than the one we access through religious practices. Everyday life may involve different kinds of cognition, but the world we see through its mechanisms is just as much the product of wish fulfilment as heaven might be. Only the appetites being satisfied in there are different.
And living entirely in the daily life world of those narrow appetites and immediate problems to solve is literally intolerable. No one can manage it all the time. He doesn't mean by this that religion speaks to our higher or more unselfish instincts. It needs to be taken for granted in these arguments that some forms of religion are almost entirely malign and lead to horror. But religion is also, importantly, selfless. Its atrocities derive from a higher cause. They offer the hope that things will be different.
How does this map on to his idea of an American civic religion, distinct from Christianity? Perhaps the most important point of his essay, easily overlooked, is that there has been from the very beginning of the Republic, he says, an American civil irreligion competing with the civil religion as a narrative and a general theory of the state and its people. Again, it is a characteristic of this thought that there are struggles rather than simplicities.
The struggle between civil religion and civil irreligion is also one between republicanism and liberalism as these were understood in the late 18th century. Republicanism, certainly as it was understood in the 18th century, depends utterly on religion, because a republic is built and maintained by its citizens in their interactions with each other. They have to subordinate themselves quite deliberately to a vision of a common good, and they must see this as fulfilling their own natures. That, very simply, is the task of religion. This is the spirit that he sees infuses the Declaration of Independence.
Against this is the competing tradition of liberalism, more fully developed in the constitution. Liberalism (in this sense) has no need of God because it trusts that the self-interest of the citizens will lead them to the best possible outcome: "the state is a purely neutral legal mechanism without purposes or values. Its sole function is to protect the rights of individuals, that is, to protect freedom." Such a state is, he thinks, an absurd impossibility, which could never exist (non-existence does not of course much diminish its power over our imaginations).
States and societies must have a way to judge themselves from some standpoint exterior to power. It is not enough for religion to give us access to another world: we must be able to contemplate our everyday world and judge it by the standards of the one we reach. And this judgment is what the "God" of American civil religion supplies. This God is clearly distinct from the Christian one, and still more the Jewish one. Rather he is the being who rescues, or who might sometimes rescue, America from the evil angels of its nature.
Whatever else you think of his ideas, this task is pressing today.
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Part 2: why football doesn't measure up

The most blinding and obvious deficiency of football as a religion is that it lacks any kind of theology – and excludes many women
England fans
'For a lot of people the fate of their football team does affect them the way that God's good opinion is supposed to do.' Photograph: Carl Recine/Action Images
A perfectly reasonable question to ask of people like me, who define "religion" in a way that plays down theology, is why something like football should not be a religion. After all, it involves collective emotion, quasi-mystical experiences of loss of selfhood in a higher purpose, even if that is only to crush those bastards from the visiting team. IfNick Hornby's Fever Pitch is to be believed, it is also a way of coming to terms with the disappointments and tragedies of life. Going to a match with your estranged father has something of the effect that taking communion together is meant to have for Christians.
If you do a Google news search, in the months of an English winter, for terms like "miracle", or "messiah" many results will turn out to be about football matches. For a lot of people the fate of their football team does affect them the way that God's good opinion is supposed to do. All kinds of mental illness and unhappiness diminish when their team does well, and increase when it does badly. And then there is the Bill Shankly quote, that football isn't a matter of life or death, it's much more important than that: this, in itself, is a wonderful definition of the ambitions of religious truth – that it should be more important than life or death.
And yet football very clearly isn't a proper religion. And the reasons why cast some light on what religions are, or must be.
I should perhaps add here that I am completely unsympathetic to the game. I have only been to one serious football match (a north London derby) in my life, when I was accompanying a police patrol. We sat on the touchline, and came away with our shoulders coated with spittle because the people behind us were howling out their feelings without any inhibitions. I will watch football sometimes on screens because the movement is so completely meaningless. I suppose this is a vague equivalent to the homoerotic pleasures of liturgical traditionalists.
But I absolutely lack something which is obviously a deep part of the engagement of real football fans – the ability to suspend disbelief so that I feel I am in some way present on the pitch myself. The sale of replica shirts that is such an important part of the economics of modern football clearly depends on the idea that you take on some of the virtue of the player whose number you wear. That's clearly one of the mechanisms that makes up religions. But it's not enough on its own.
And this is important. Religions aren't made from specially "religious" behaviour or thoughts, but from ordinary patterns of thought and behaviour which are assembled in particular ways.
The most blinding and obvious deficiency of football as a religion is that it lacks any kind of theology. There is in fact an absurd public rhetoric embraced by Fifa about brotherhood but no one takes it seriously. Although theology is the least important part of any religious system, and the one which alters most in response to changes either in public ritual or in private emotion, it is needed as a way to make sense – to the participants – of what is going on.
I'm inclined to think that it is a further disadvantage that football matches have results. It really doesn't matter what football managers say in public compared to what their players do. Compare this to American civil religion, which could be identified, and analysed by Robert Bellah because he had texts to work with. He was able to point out, and to analyse, the implicit theologies of American public rhetoric, and the kinds of things that presidents said when they wanted to unite their country around a common purpose. If you were to do that to the speeches made by football managers, the results would be less rewarding. The Gettysburg Address was rather more than a half-time pep talk in the American civil war.
But all this is really rather theoretical. The real reason why football could never function as a religion is blindingly obvious – which is why we are blind to it. Many women find it boring and incomprehensible.
For the most part "serious" men's football is an escape from all the problems entailed by the existence of another sex. This has its charms, but it won't do at all for a religion, which has to offer sense and meaning and hope to the whole of life. If religions were only expressions of willed stupidity, willed escapism, and orgies of communal feeling, then, yes, football might be a religion. But since it isn't, there must be more to religions than that.
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part 3: the role of the ritual

Robert Bellah argues that religion is underpinned and preceded by ritual – but that does not make all ritual religious
Mother and daughter watch the sun set
'Acts such as staring at the sunset might be a root of some of our perceptions of the world as ineffable and infinitely valuable.' Photograph: David Bigwood / Alamy
If you treat religion as a natural phenomenon, as Robert Bellah did, two things follow. The first is that what we observe will not have clear or logical boundaries. This means that what constitutes a religion is really quite hard to specify even if it is fairly easy to recognise. The second point is that any of the social phenomena or psychological phenomena we are interested in will have a history. In some aspects this will be an evolutionary history. What we have will have developed from earlier forms, and the capacities we use will have evolved from earlier ones.
This is most obvious in the case of language. It's reasonable to say that there could be no religion without a language – reasonable, but hardly inarguable. A great many of the experiences we think of as quintessentially religious come without language, mystical ones in particular. (I know it is perfectly possible for an atheist to have mystical experiences and to shape their life around them while denying them any theological explanation. So it would clearly be wrong to say that mystical experiences enforce any particular religious position. That's not the point.)
Nonetheless, even wordless religious experiences are embedded in language. Animals without language might have proto-religious experiences, but these are clearly not the same as those which a linguistically competent human has. The primatologist Sue Savage-Rumbaugh once described to me a line of chimpanzees staring in apparent bliss at a sunset – something which might be a root of some of our perceptions of the world as ineffable and infinitely valuable. But the chimpanzees will never tell stories about it, and never try to embed the experience in a web of explicit meanings. Both of those things must form part of any religious experience.
So the emergence of language must have preceded the emergence of religion. Bellah, however, moved towards the view that ritual preceded both, and made both possible. This is a very large claim for ritual. It is made in compressed form in the big bookReligion in Human Evolution, and in an earlier, more spacious way in the paper Durkheim and Ritual, reprinted in the Robert Bellah reader.
Essentially, he argues that shared attention directed through repetitive and stereotyped actions is the essence of ritual, and that it is also at the root of all human learning, including the transactions between a mother and her baby. This makes a lot of sense when you consider the extraordinarily ritualised proto-language that we use when communicating with babies. When practised between two people, ritual and play give rise to love, whether sexual, parental, or simply between friends. When practised in larger groups, ritual and play give us religion and language.
This is a very compressed version of the argument. I have for instance entirely left out his speculations on the importance of music in the process, although they are also relevant to language acquisition, as anyone who talks to toddlers will tell you. But it carries the minimum we need to understand his approach to the question of what religion is.
Talking about the importance of ritual in this way is frequently attacked as a way to defend the relevance of religion in a world where it is (or merely ought to be) irrelevant. It looks like special pleading. Passages such as this: "Since ritual, for Durkheim, is primarily about the sacred in a sense in which the religious and the social are almost interchangeable, subsequent work … might be seen as disclosing an element of the sacred, and thus of the religious, at the very basis of social action of any kind," lend strength to the suspicion that this is just a way to make sociologists look as if they had the key to all mythologies, something no other scientists, of course, would ever do.
But the suspicion is importantly misplaced. To show that the earliest religions arise from the same processes as the ritual capabilities which make us distinctively human, is not an argument that everything which subsequently evolved using those capabilities must be religious.
The sense in which Bellah's claim seems to me really important, as well as quite right, is that it undercuts the idea that there is a special "religious" mode of irrationality – a mind virus, if you will – that could be eradicated and leave the rest of our humanity intact and purified. On the contrary, if you could remove the roots of religion, you remove the roots of humanity, too. Ritual and narrative are the basic ways by which we learn what it is to be human, and I don't think it's grotesque imperialism to regard arguments about which rituals and narratives are truly religious ones – whether or not their conclusions are atheistic.
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part 4: divinity, God and 'real' religion

Can you have a religion not based around the Abrahamic idea of a God who could, if he wished, behave like a mafia boss?
Mass Meditation in Central Bangkok, Thailand - 20 Jan 2010
Thai men take part in a mass meditation ceremony. Photograph: Sipa Press/Rex Features
One of the most unnerving passages in Robert Bellah's Religion in Human Evolution is the section where he examines the central Jewish and Christian idea of a covenant with God. He traces it back to the treaties imposed by the remarkably brutal Assyrian empire on the nations it subjugated.
Some of the treaties have been preserved, so that it is possible to compare the language with that of the Bible. It turns out that the language in which God addresses Israel is almost identical to the language with which the Assyrians address the rulers they have suffered to remain in the states they would otherwise devastate. The nearest modern analogy would perhaps be for some tiny Baltic state like Estonia to model its understanding of God on Stalin. In both cases, there is a fundamental asymmetry of power: the weaker party is bound and compelled to obedience and even to love. The stronger party is entirely untrammelled.
"In both Assyrian and Israelite versions of the vassal covenant the subordinate must keep the stipulations of the treaty or face the most disastrous consequences: in Israel God, in Assyria the gods, will inflict leprosy, blindness, violent death, rape, and invasion by 'a nation you have not known' if the subordinate is disloyal."
Two questions arise from this. The first is whether this isn't just a really powerful argument for atheism – it looks as if the central idea of God's chosen people has nothing to do with revelation and is more a kind of wish-fulfilment arising from an abusive relationship. There is a counter-argument sketched out in Bellah's book, which I don't want to go into here because to enter into it would move away from the central question of what a religion is.
That demands that we ask the second question – whether there could be religions that were not based around the Abrahamic idea of a God who could, if he wished, behave like a mafia boss: the being Blake called "Old Nobodaddy".
I am writing this at a meeting of the British Society for the Philosophy of Religion, which has been discussing atheisms. The plural is important, because one of the arguments here is that both religion and atheism are socially constituted. If you complicate the definition of religion, you also constitute the definitions of atheism, yet both complications are forced on us by the variety and inventiveness of human societies.
It is almost universally true that what counts as religion in one society at one time will be atheistic in another, and vice versa. Both Socrates and the early Christians were persecuted as atheists, yet its obvious that both lived in a world filled with spirits. Equally, most people are atheists with regard to most gods.
Even strict naturalists will claim to have transcendent experiences. Some will claim this with peculiar fervour, as if they wanted to show that atheists lost nothing by abandoning God. So it's perfectly possible, even if uncommon, to be a strict naturalist and Buddhist (I think Susan Blackmore would qualify as an example) and, clearly, Buddhism is generally classed as a religion.
So let's sharpen the question to whether it is possible to have a conception of the divine that does not involve any kind of personal God, or God having any kind of personal relationship with the believer.
Such a set of beliefs would be largely inarticulate. There might be a kind of intellectual superstructure – as there is in Buddhism – but a worked-out theology would be unnecessary especially if the main structure of religious participation was built around rituals and practices rather than creeds. In some forms of eastern religion, the only words required of a believer are mantras that are quite deliberately meaningless, or rapidly become so with repetition.
This does seem to me to be an almost entirely depersonalised picture of something otherworldly, whether we call it the divine, the transcendent, or the ultimately real. Whatever it is called it triumphantly fulfils Bellah's criterion that religion should show us another world and allow us to criticise and better understand this one from the other's perspective.
Of course, much of Buddhism isn't like this. You might argue that the deracinated Buddhism of western intellectuals isn't a real religion just as some antitheists argue that the beliefs of philosophically sophisticated Christian theologians aren't "real" Christianity. But I don't think this argument holds for a religion like Buddhism, which has no founding covenant. It can't be wrong to defy the intentions of a non-existent God. But it can be a very religious act.
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How are religions born?

What is religion, part 5: In the systems we know about, either folk beliefs coalesce or a charismatic founder emerges
Members of the Spanish Legion in Malaga carry a statue of Christ during a holy week procession.
Spanish soldiers in Malaga carry a statue of Christ during a holy week procession. Photograph: Jorge Guerrero/AFP/Getty Images
Since they are historical entities, religions are born and die. I'll think about their death some other time. But how do they emerge, and from what? This isn't a question with a single answer, although there are a couple of popular stories about the process left over from the 19th century.
It's widely believed, for example, either that religions must have a charismatic founder, a prophet figure, or that they are more or less self-conscious frauds perpetrated by a priestly class against the common people. This second version is clearly a secularised version of the Protestant history of the Reformation, and makes very little sense as a general theory. Obviously there have been examples of both types of religion formation. It's possible that Mormonism combines both, since a charismatic founder managed to create a social structure with huge rewards for the priesthood. But there are too many exceptions for these rules to be generally valid.
Robert Bellah's account of the emergence of religion might be said to break off just at the point when it becomes easy to talk about the emergence and existence of particular religions, distinguished clearly from other forms of social activity. The very earliest religions are, in Bellah's telling, indistinguishable from culture. He follows Emile Durkheim and most anthropologists in seeing "religion" as an intensification of ritual first of all. The things that everyone in the tribe does together, and the stories they tell together become their religion – or at least what anthropologists could study and classify as religion.
It's not at all clear that the people studied by anthropologists would understand this distinction. They certainly don't understand it theologically. There is a good attack on these kinds of misunderstandings in Pascal Boyer's book The Naturalness of Religious Ideas, in which he points out that most anthropological accounts of "primitive beliefs" refer to something that does not actually exist: "They [are not] thoughts that occur to actual people; they describe thoughts that people might entertain, in the anthropologist's view, if they wanted to make sense of what they actually do and say."
Bellah, with his stress on ritual and on the embodiment of beliefs in wider systems of meaning, avoids this pitfall. You make sense of what you do and say by acting on it, and embodying it in a larger narrative, not by extracting it into a system.
Yet systems do emerge, and they form a large part of what we now think of as religion. Although some form of healing ritual, and healing specialist, seems to have been among the very earliest precursors of religion, and of priesthood, the emergence of any kind of "religion" organisationally distinct from the rest of culture depends at the very least on agriculture, which provides enough of a surplus in fixed settlements.
It seems certain that religions, like other social forms, evolve: that is to say they arise from modifications of earlier forms. The trouble for historical inquiry is simply that without written records we simply have to guess what happened. With written records, we need no longer guess, but can be authoritatively misled. Two excellent accounts of this process are Tom Holland's book In the Shadow of the Sword, about the invention of Islam, and Jim Macdonald's blogpost on the emergence of the Bible as fan fiction.
In those religious systems we know about, there seem to be two processes under way. The first is a kind of coalescence of folk beliefs and practices into something more or less organised and more or less useful to the state. Shinto looks like that, and Hinduism. You could make a case that American Protestantism, which has increasingly less to do with historic, Orthodox Christianity, is heading in the other direction.
Then there are the religions that can be traced back to a single charismatic founder – most obviously Christianity and Islam, but also Sikhism and Mormonism, to name two modern successes.
In all these cases, there is considerable doubt about the relation of the teacher to the teaching subsequently encoded in their name (as with Marx and Marxism), but it does seem that the idea of the perfect teacher helps to spread teachings. The best illustration of that is Judaism, which seems to have been a coalescence or codification – with considerable distortions – of a folk religion recollected in exile, but which was codified around the almost entirely invented figure of Moses.
It seems intuitively obvious that in the modern world, where people must make a self-conscious choice of religion or belief system, a charismatic founder figure who can say "follow me" is necessary. But like many things intuitively obvious, this is wrong. Even today, the most interesting religious movements are those that coalesce without a single founder or a body of organised doctrine – Rastafarianism is a small example, charismatic Christianity a much more important one. There are still religions being born that will change the world.