Thor's Day: Which days are holy?

By Morris Dean

Which day or days do you think are holidays—in the literal sense of holy days?
    My own answer to the question has been settled for a number of years, and has served me well. I'll say more about that in the concluding paragraph.
    Two books nicely epitomize two contrasting ways of answering the question. The first is Yann Martel's 2001 novel, Life of Pi, which I reviewed on Monday. The other is a book mentioned recently in a local newspaper; I'll identify it later. For now, consider the following passage from Life of Pi:

Thor's Day: The tie that binds

By Morris Dean

The English word "religion" derives through Old French from the Latin religiō, whose ultimate origins are obscure, but some modern scholars favor the derivation from ligare (bind, connect), probably from a prefixed re-ligare, i.e., re (again) + ligare, or "to reconnect." [Wikipedia]

Testimony of a nonbeliever

The several dozen statements of nonbelievers collected in Christopher Hitchens's Portable Atheist just keep on being rationally inspirational. Here's an excerpt from the next-to-most recent I've read, by Elizabeth Anderson, the Arthur F. Thurnau Professor and John Rawls Collegiate Professor of Philosophy and Women's Studies at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor:

Surveying the religious booths every year at the Ann Arbor art fair, I am always struck by the fact that they are staffed by people who are convinced of their own revelations and miracles, while most so readily disparage the revelations and miracles of other faiths. To a mainstream Christian, Jew, or Muslim, nothing is more obvious than that the founders and prophets of other religions, such as Joseph Smith, the Rev. Moon, Mary Baker Eddy, and L. Ron Hubbard, are either frauds or delusional, their purported miracles or cures are tricks played upon a credulous audience (or worse, exercises of black magic), their prophecies false, their metaphysics absurd. To me, nothing is more obvious than that the evidence cited on behalf of Christianity, Judaism, and Islam is of exactly the same type and quality as that cited on behalf of such despised religions. Indeed, it is on a par with the evidence for Zeus, Baal, Thor, and other long-abandoned gods, who are now considered ridiculous by nearly everyone. –If God Is Dead, Is Everything Permitted? [no], pp. 345-346 in Hitchens

What's inspirational about Professor Anderson's testimony is that we have reason to hope that religion will fade away eventually. Two problems with this, however: (1) Religion isn't rational and doesn't listen to reason very well. (2) Everyone alive on the planet now, and for some time to come, will die long before religion does.¹
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1. As my friend Ken privately wrote me recently:

   ...when religious institutions begin to fragment and wither. We still need several more centuries for that. [emphasis mine]

   I quote Ken, not because he is my friend, but, like Professor Anderson, he is an astute, critical thinker.
   

Religion is...

One might think, from the item below, that Google is in bed with Sam Hawkins, Christopher Hitchens, Richard Dawkins (and me). Have you ever keyed into a Google search box, for example, "Islam is"? Google helps with possible completions:

In fact, my friend Ken, who sent me the item yesterday as "an early birthday present" (I'm sixty-seven today) says:

I got the "[Religion] is..." graphic from a friend; I didn't do the googling and build the graphic. I doubt that it's genuine. The "now serving cowardliness" conclusion is certainly a tagline that Google would never use. On the other hand, I googled myself after enjoying the graphic and did find some of the listings. My guess is that a creative person did the searches, found some funny hits, and built on them.

    The tagline that Ken refers to makes Google out to be suggesting that people might be too cowardly to type for themselves the possible completions provided. (You know, afraid that God might strike them dead or an Islamic fundamentalist hack off their head to save Allah from lifting his little finger.)
    Would Google never use a tagline like that? Google seems pretty gutsy....
    Photographs of my wife's birthday cherry pie to come later.

What difference can a county line make?

My wife and I are pleased to have found kindred spirits among our new neighbors. They recently put up an Obama for President sign and have offered us a second one that they expect to acquire soon.

One of them is a teacher relatively new to North Carolina, who recently changed school districts (and now teaches in a different North Carolina county). She reports:

It really is shocking how ignorant a lot of people are and scary that McCain/Palin actually seem to have a good shot at winning. I must say how refreshing it is to be working in Chapel Hill now. People seem so much more liberal there. I didn't think I'd notice a difference but I really do, even in school. Several of my students were absent a couple of weeks ago because they were at the Democratic convention—a far cry from my last school, where I had some students tell me that I must be a Democrat because I believe in global warming! I pointed out that global warming is a fact, not an opinion.

In that school I was working alongside colleagues (female) who told me with no shame that Ms. Clinton could not be president because she's female and therefore too emotional. Shocking, really, and very sad. I pointed out that Hillary has bigger balls than Bush and maybe what was needed for this country was a little emotion. I felt as though my opinions were frowned upon as I'm just the snooty outsider! It is a refreshing change to be surrounded now by people with some sense.

"Believe" in global warming...as though it's a matter of faith rather than scientific knowledge. Religion is quite a pernicious influence in this country—however more pernicious an influence Islam is in countries where that medieval religion predominates. The women who condemned Hillary Clinton were most likely influenced by the ancient Old Testament emphasis of much of Christianity.

Truce to the preposition war

That the First Amendment calls for a truce is obvious. When it comes to religion (and non-religion), there are many potentially warring factions, for even though there is essentially only one non-religion, there's a big raft of religions. And the first clause (the one that guarantees freedom from religion) doesn't protect just the non-religious (from religion generally); it also protects the followers of the various religions from each other's religion (from religions particularly).

Episcopaleans, for example, are fully as happy as I am not to have to indulge Evangelicals or Jehovah's Witnesses (or anyone else who "reads the Bible literally"). And the really true-believing religionists, of course, are generally happy not to have any truck with those agnostic or (horrors!) even atheistic Unitarians and Episcopaleans. And many Americans, including religious Christians and Jews as well as the non-religious, are a little jumpy right now about Muslims, not least because many of even the most religious-sounding Christians don't really take their religion quite as seriously as really believing Muslims do (probably not even Mitt Romney). (Islam after all means "submission [to God]," and Muslim "one who surrenders [to God].") And, of course, American Muslims are reciprocally a little uneasy living in a country whose current "president" (born-again, no less) talks about crusading in the Middle East. (Muslims who aren't Americans are a little uneasy about that too. Bush of course would remind us—since he no longer has Gonzales to do it—that those Muslims aren't protected by our Constitution....)

So, the first clause protects everybody (who is covered by the Constitution).

Whom does the second clause protect? It says, "Congress shall make no law...prohibiting the free exercise [of religion]." Since the non-religious don't "exercise religion," they have nothing for the second clause to protect. (Their interest in the First Amendment comes back into play in the third and following clauses.) So, the second clause is there to protect the religious, that they may go about "exercising" their religion "freely."

But what does "free exercise" mean? It must, of course, at least exclude actions that nullify the first clause....

Religion X 3.0

Thursday on C-Span I saw part of a speech by Irshad Manji^*, talking about her book The Trouble with Islam Today: A Muslim’s Call for Reform in Her Faith. If I understood her, she holds that Islam is essentially a benign religion, but it has been applied in tyrannous ways by particular individuals or regimes. Her web site suggests examples:

• the inferior treatment of women in Islam [she gave some horrific examples in her speech];
• the Jew-bashing that so many Muslims persistently engage in; and
• the continuing scourge of slavery in countries ruled by Islamic regimes.

Hearing how passionately Manji could criticize Islam "from within" reminded me how little Muslims generally condemn abhorrent acts by other Muslims.

In Wednesday's New York Times, Thomas L. Friedman wrote:

Of course, not all Muslims are terrorists. But it's been widely noted that virtually all suicide terrorists today are Muslims. Angry Norwegians aren't doing this—nor are starving Africans or unemployed Mexicans. Muslims have got to understand that a death cult has taken root in the bosom of their religion, feeding off it like a cancerous tumor.

This cancer is erasing basic norms of civilization. In Iraq, we've seen suicide bombers blow up funerals and schools. In England, seven out of the eight people detained in the latest plot are Muslim doctors or medical students. Doctors plotting mass murder? Could that be? If Muslim leaders don't remove this cancer—and only they can—it will spread, tainting innocent Muslims and poisoning their relations with each other and the world.

Irshad Manji seems to be working hard toward excising the cancer (and placing herself in mortal danger, having received numerous death threats).

I wonder why not many Muslims are heard on this. Do they imagine that just because these suicide terrorists (and those who run them) are Muslims it doesn't follow that they are in any way acting in the name of Islam? Just statistically there would seem to be some critical Islamic correlation. Are Muslims afraid to condemn what I call religious tyranny within their communities because they feel that in doing so they would be perceived as apologizing for Islam itself? Muslims seem to love their religion assertively, if not aggressively. Perhaps they don't think it needs to be apologized for? One of the tenets of Islam, as I understand it, is that it offers God's final and finest word to mankind. To Muslims, Muhammad was God's Final Messenger, after all. Or, as Friedman cleverly puts it:

Two trends are at work [in the Muslim failure to condemn atrocities committed by Muslims]: humiliation and atomization. Islam's self-identity is that it is the most perfect and complete expression of God's monotheistic message, and the Koran is God's last and most perfect word. To put it another way, young Muslims are raised on the view that Islam is God 3.0. Christianity is God 2.0. Judaism is God 1.0. And Hinduism and all others are God 0.0.

One of the factors driving Muslim males, particularly educated ones, into these acts of extreme, expressive violence is that while they were taught that they have the most perfect and complete operating system, every day they're confronted with the reality that people living by God 2.0, God 1.0, and God 0.0 are generally living much more prosperously, powerfully, and democratically than those living under Islam. This creates a real dissonance and humiliation. How could this be? Who did this to us? The Crusaders! The Jews! The West! It can never be something that they failed to learn, adapt to, or build. This humiliation produces a lashing out.

I'm willing to accept, pending my continuing reading of the Qur'an, that Islam is, at its core, benign, even actively benevolent—as I'm willing to accept the same of Christianity and Judaism.

The trouble, it seems to me, is that when a particular religion, however fine in its pure form, is put into practice, it rarely remains pure. Depending on the purity of heart of the practitioner, the religion is subject to all manner of abuses (such as in the three areas Manji lists for Islam). Vile men intent on owning women as property are not likely to practice Islam benignly.

Or as the novelist David Lodge adduces in Paradise News, speaking of the mainland Christians who decimated the Hawaiian islanders:

We got talking [Bernard writes in his journal of his champagne conversation with the woman who knocked his father down with her car] about the permissive sexual mores of the ancient Polynesians, which Yolande described as "the kind of sexual Utopia we were all pursuing in the sixties—free love and nudity and communal childrearing. Only with them it wasn't a pose, they really lived it. Until the haoles came along with their hang ups and bibles and diseases." The sailors gave the beautiful amorous women of Hawaii the pox, and the missionaries made them wear muu-muus even in the sea so they sat about in damp clothes and caught cold. In seventy years the population of the island declined from 300,000 to 50,000.... [Well, decimation more than eight times over! p. 186]

Insofar as practitioners of any religion—call it "Religion X"—say that they are only doing what Religion X commands its true followers to do, Religion X even in its pure, presumably benign form sooner or later gets a lot of bad raps. People who don't follow Religion X might be tempted to write it off as an "evil religion" (as Sam Harris, for example, writes off Islam in The End of Faith: Religion, Terror, and the Future of Reason). And the more or less benign followers of Religion X are put in the position of appearing to criticize it if they come out against the perverse acts of those who use it malignantly. But perhaps they must come out, if they are to preserve the core goodness of their religion and avoid an ugly backlash among non-followers who would condemn the whole religion for its tyrannous misuses.
_________________
I had never heard of Ms. Manji before, but I was impressed by her articulate speech, as I am by this information about her on her web site:

[She] travels the globe to lecture about the liberal reformation of Islam. Her audiences include Amnesty International, the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, the United Nations Press Corps, the Democratic Muslims of Denmark, the National Committee on American Foreign Policy, the International Women’s Forum, the Swedish Defense Research Agency, the Pentagon, the Jean Jacques Rousseau Institute, and universities from Cambridge to the President Clinton School of Public Service.

Once again

If I am right that freedom is the seminal contradiction that makes "all things possible," we have a fundamentally new way of interpreting the works of Sam Harris (The End of Faith) and Christopher Hitchens (God Is Not Great, which I am currently reading). And a new way of interpreting scripture and the works of devout Hebrews, Christians, Muslims, and anyone else who writes about "God." More about that tomorrow.

But am I right about freedom? No one has challenged me on the point, but I suppose it could be because no one has understood me, or those who think they have understood me may simply think me insane.

In case I'm not being understood (and to give those who tend to think me insane more information on which to judge), let me try to explain it. The problem might be that my idea is simpler than they have supposed.

Are humans free? If we are, it means that we may act contrary to the causes that otherwise determine our actions and cause us to act in ways that are, in principle, predictable. That is, if we are free, then our actions are not completely determined. The fabric of causality has a tear in it. If we live in a cause-effect world, then when we exercise our freedom we perform a miracle.

But if we aren't free—if there are no miracles (as strict scientists contend), then...who's writing this? You might as well go have a beer or a cup of tea.

I'm not claiming that human freedom is the seminal contradiction of the Cosmos. Men and women are terrestrial beings—creatures of the Earth. It would be "God's" freedom that is the seminal contradiction that makes "all things possible" and makes it prudent for us to "believe all things" (rather than hold on to a particular dogma, especially one that might prompt us to stone to death or blow up people who believe otherwise).

Grave second thoughts...

Hardly twenty-four hours after posting my proposal of "a new, consolidated Abrahamic religion," and I've already been wondering, What was I thinking? Even the Baptists can't get together over their own set of core tenets. How are Jews and Christians and Muslims generally going to do so?

People splinter into religious groups. That's what people do.

My momentary vision of a "consolidated religion" was likely motivated by a desire "to find a way to improve society and relations with those we share the world with," as the blogger puts it who goes by the handle "Scary Monster" (though the person is a mild-mannered school teacher). Or motivated by my 1960s, Beatles desire to find a way for currently unreconciled groups to "come together now, love one another right now"...? Pie in the sky.

And what made me think that anyone would sign up for "a consolidated religion"?! That's about as naive a hope as the one I had as an adolescent, that all we need to do to gain another person's agreement is to "reason together" about the facts. That empty hope rested on the false assumption that everyone can see the facts the same way. Alas, disagreement goes much, much deeper, to the assumptions, values, agendas that powerfully control how we perceive the world (and the "facts") in the first place.

The desire or need for individuals to "apprehend themselves [as standing] in relation to whatever they may consider the divine" (as William James wrote) will have to be each individual's project and struggle. I momentarily lost sight of that, which has been as core a belief of mine as regards religion as I have. I think I must have been drunk to imagine that I could "will to believe...a set of encompassing [Abrahamic] tenets"...me who only recently decided to give up wavering between believing and not believing [in] the special divinity of Jesus Christ, coming down as not believing it! And me who eschews dogma, the very thing that "encompassing tenets" would surely amount to!

What a short-lived fantasy it seems to have been, my proposal of a consolidated, Abrahamic religion! What a suspect proposal to have spent words on!

The only part of the post that I think really sticks, for me personally, is James's idea that our own subconscious is the "hither side" of the "more" that is God.

Oh, terrestial/celestial muse,
inspire me, please,
to think on spiritual matters clearly,
without jargonese,

Show me how to find my way
and, if I find it, what to say.

A new, consolidated Abrahamic religion?

I have taken a few days to think, away from writing about my spiritual journey, hoping at some point to write a more or less comprehensive "credo" here. I expect, still, to do that. But I've come to realize that such a statement will be the accretion of less comprehensive writings along the way...so I might as well let those relative fragments continue to come out.

Maliha wrote something the other day (in a comment on her post, "Black and White Truth," which she says she wrote partly as a result of her dialogue with me) that has resonated with me since. She wrote, "Belief in a certain religion is a willing choice that a person has to make."

One reason this has resonated with me, I'm sure, is that in my reading of R.W.B. Lewis's biography of the James family (The James: A Family Narrative), I've been struck powerfully by philosopher William James's psychology of the will, and also by his writings, first as the Gifford Lectures at the University of Edinburgh in 1901-02, which he worked into his masterpiece book, The Varieties of Religious Experience. For example:

Religion, therefore, as I now ask you arbitrarily to take it, shall mean for us the feelings, acts, and experiences of individual men [and women] in their solitude, so far as they apprehend themselves to stand in relation to whatever they may consider the divine [James's own emphasis].

And what in religions is called "God" (or "Allah" or whatever), William James identified as "a more":

Let me then propose, as an hypothesis, that whatever it may be on its farther side, the "more" with which in religious experience we feel ourselves connected is on its hither side the subconscious continuation of our conscious life.

Readers familiar with some of my earlier thinking may appreciate the power with which this strikes me. And they probably know about my use of a muse. Well, of course, and as I understand, that muse is my "subconscious." But by calling it a muse as though it were an independent entity I acknowledge that in some sense it transcends me, certainly transcends my consciousness.

Anyway, the nub of all this is the notion that we are all, through our consciousness and our subconsciousness, directly linked to...God/Allah/what you will call it. This isn't a new notion for me, but a rediscovered old notion, so that I am experiencing a rebirth of religious understanding or belief. (I mentioned something akin to this earlier in a comment to Victor on my post "Monday Musings.")

Maliha's remark about will encourages me to be reminded that I can simply will to believe this again.

And Friday I listened to a podcast from Yale University on reconciliation between Christianity and Islam. I was struck perhaps most of all by the realization (or another reminder, actually, for I already knew this) that Judaism, Christianity, and Islam are all Abrahamic religions. One speaker emphasized how important it is today for there to be dialogue among individuals who really believe their religion (whichever of the three it is), not among politicians who say they represent the religions....

But what I got from the podcast, personally, was the vision that a set of encompassing tenets could be shaped to define a single religion for Jews and Christians and Muslims to congregate within. I was thrilled to think that I could will to believe such a set of tenets. Jews would somehow have to reconcile with Jesus Christ, and Christians would somehow have to reconcile with Muhammad. Muslims seem to have already pretty much reconciled with Moses et alia and Christ (if I understand Islam aright).

Please let me know, if you would, what you think about the notion of a consolidated Abrahamic religion.

Please take my religion survey

A friend of mine told a friend of hers who used to be Muslim of my interest in Sam Harris. He read my posts on Harris, especially the ones discussing what Harris says about Islam in The End of Faith: Religion, Terror, and the Future of Reason. (You can call up all of my posts that have the Sam Harris label by clicking on that label at the bottom of this post.) As a result, he wants to meet me, and I've agreed to join my friend and him for lunch.

In thinking about what a former Muslim might ask me, I've begun to think of what I might ask him. And in doing that, I've found myself thinking of questions I might ask other people, such as a cousin whose father (like my mother) was very religious and regularly attended an Assembly of God church. I've always suspected that this cousin isn't what you'd call particularly "religious." But I don't really know, and I'd sort of like to find out before it's too late. After all, it has been many years since we were teenage cousins together (and even rode in the same car to that Assembly of God church).

That's sort of where this survey comes from. If you'd be so kind as to take it and give your answers publicly (as it were), I'd appreciate it. (If you're not familiar with how to make a comment, click on "Comments" below.):

1. Religiously, how would you describe or classify yourself? (not religious, Christian, Muslim, Judaic, other: _________)
2. Whatever you answered, what is it about you that leads you to say that?
3. If you answered Christian, how much, if any, do your religious beliefs influence how you vote?
4. If you answered Muslim, do you approve of martyrdom "in defense of Islam"?
5. If you answered Judaic, how do you feel about Israel's policies toward the Palestinians?
6. Anything else you'd like to say by way of your "religious statement"?

In fairness, I'll answer these questions myself:

1. Religiously, how would you describe or classify yourself?

   agnostic Christian

2. Whatever you answered, what is it about you that leads you to say that?

   While I'm uncertain as to whether God exists and do not believe that Jesus was the "son of God" in a way different from how you or I might be "a child of God," I have been raised in the Christian tradition, and I more or less try to imitate Christ's example of love and doing unto others.

3. If you answered Christian, how much, if any, do your religious beliefs influence how you vote?

   Surprisingly (to myself), I'd say quite a bit, but in the "liberal way" of influencing me to vote "for the common good." To me, Jesus was a champion of social justice.

4. If you answered Muslim, do you approve of martyrdom "in defense of Islam"?

   not applicable

5. If you answered Judaic, how do you feel about Israel's policies toward the Palestinians?

   not applicable

6. Anything else you'd like to say by way of your "religious statement"?

   I once gave an impromptu sermon in an Episcopal church in San Jose, California. In the couple of minutes I had to prepare, I "called on the Holy Spirit" to come to my aid, and I spontaneously chose as my text the passage from the Book of Exodus in which the burning bush says unto Moses to tell the people that he's been talking with "I AM THAT I AM." In the short sermon that I then delivered I said that God is as God is, and God is going to be that way regardless of what you or I believe God is. Either or both of us could be wrong. I said that, in that sense, it doesn't matter what we believe about God.
   
   I'd add now that God is, OR IS NOT, as God is, OR IS NOT, and what we believe doesn't affect it one way or another. So let's not fight over it.