In February 2008, Karen Armstrong, a most prolific writer in the area of religion, did an interview with a German writer that appeared in the magazine, Islamica. I have copied a Q&A that I find fascinating.
Too often it seems that religious people are not necessarily more compassionate, more tolerant, more peaceful or more spiritual than others. America, for example, is a very religious country, and at the same time it is the most unequal socially and economically. What does this say about the purpose of religion?
The world religions all insist that the one, single test of any type of religiosity is that it must issue in practical compassion. They have nearly all developed a version of the Golden Rule: “Do not do to others what you would not have done to you.” This demands that we look into our own hearts, discover what it is that gives us pain and then refuse, under any circumstances, to inflict that pain on anybody else. Compassion demands that we “feel with” the other; that we dethrone ourselves from the centre of our world and put another there. This is the bedrock message of the Qur’an, of the New Testament (“I can have faith that moves mountains,” says St. Paul, “but if I lack charity it profits me nothing.”). Rabbi Hillel, the older contemporary of Jesus, defined the Golden Rule as the essence of Judaism: everything else, he said, was “commentary.” We have exactly the same teaching in Confucianism, Daoism, Hinduism and Buddhism. I have tried to show this in one of my most recent books, The Great Transformation.
The traditions all insist that it is not enough simply to show compassion to your own group. You must have what the Chinese call jian ai, concern for everybody. Or as Jewish law puts it: “Honour the stranger.” “Love your enemies,” said Jesus: if you simply love your own kind, this is purely self-interest and a form of group egotism. The traditions also insist that it is the daily, hourly practice of compassion -not the adoption of the correct “beliefs” or the correct sexuality- that will bring us into the presence of what is called God, Nirvana, Brahman or the Dao. Religion is thus inseparable from altruism.
So why aren’t religious people compassionate? What does that say about them? Compassion is not a popular virtue. Many religious people prefer to be right rather than compassionate. They don’t want to give up their egos. They want religion to give them a little mild uplift once a week so that they can return to their ordinary selfish lives, unscathed by the demands of their tradition. Religion is hard work; not many people do it well. But are secularists any better? Many secularists would subscribe to the compassionate ideal but are just as selfish as religious people. The failure of religious people to be compassionate doesn’t tell us something about religion, but about human nature. Religion is a method: you have to put it into practice to discover its truth. But, unfortunately, not many people do.
Much of the "new" critique of religion by the 'neo-atheists' like Harris and Dawkins centers on the harm that they see has been done in the name of religion or has been caused by religion. Perhaps, though, they miss the real point. It is not the failure of the religions and the religious teaching that should be emphasized, but the failure of human beings to live in the way that the religions teach. What do you think?
Wednesday, July 23, 2008
What fails ... religion or human beings?
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3 comments:
Charity is an individual responsibility, often guided by religion, and must be done voluntarily. Robin Hood is not charitable when he steals money from the Sheriff of Nottingham and them gives it to the poor, and this does not make the Sheriff charitable either! The US government can not make citizens charitable coercion or by redistributing their incomes, but it can disrupt the markets and incentives that have given us the opportunity to be the most charitable nation on earth.
America strives for individual freedom, but does not guarantee outcomes, and even so, most people throughout the world would opt to immigrate to America if given the chance.
The keys to success in America are simple and are available to all who are able to exercise the smallest measure of self control, with strength derived from their faith. Graduate from high school, get married, stay married, become a parent only as a married adult, obey the law, and work hard at the best job you can find, and in America you are virtually guaranteed of a standard of living far better than most other humans on the planet.
Once you have achieved this simple recipe for success, you will have an even greater obligation to be charitable, but you will also be responsible for deciding how much to contribute to those who have failed to live by these simple rules, and how much to give to those who have never really had the opportunity.
One of my favourite religious and Catholic authors is Hans Kung; a well known German priest but 'silenced' theologian. He is currently Professor of Ecumenical Theology at the University of Tubingen and President of the Global Ethic Foundation. A prolific writer perhaps best or more popularly known for his controversial book 'The Catholic Church: A Short History. Several days ago I purchased another one of his books called 'Why I am Still a Christian'. In this brief but great personal story he deals precisely with your (and mine) specific questions and concerns. Get it if you can and let me know on my blog (http://whenreligionfails.blogspot.com/) what you think of it.
THE GOD THAT DID NOT FAIL:
HOW RELIGION BUILT AND SUSTAINS THE WEST,
by ROBERT ROYAL,
Encounter, 280 pages, $25.95
The past three hundred years of enlightened intellectual attempts to write God out of the human story have been disastrous. As a strictly anthropological and sociological fact, homo sapiens is homo religioso. And only if the West rediscovers its true history will we be able to move beyond the limits of our current postmodern myopia. Or so argues Robert Royal, president of the Faith and Reason Institute, in his new book The God that Did Not Fail. To meet the challenges posed by Islam successfully and to provide a compelling foundation for human rights, democratic governance, and market economies, contemporary thinkers need to move beyond supposedly neutral scientific reasoning to the religiously informed rationality that history tells us is our normal state. Royal’s work is a welcome contribution to this end. With nuance and balance, Royal recovers our forgotten past with a deeply learned yet highly readable account of the historical sources that contributed to the making of the West. Royal starts with the ancient worlds of Greeks, Romans, Jews, and Christians. On he leads the reader through medieval disputations and Renaissance rediscoveries, and down through modernity’s various reformations, counter-reformations, enlightenments, and revolutions-the sources of our atheistic discontents and our postmodern present. In the end, the complexity of the human condition and of man’s reflection of his own place within the cosmos is readily apparent, a complexity that the art, literature, philosophy, and theology of prior ages wrestled with in great depth-and that modern man seeks to explain away by appeals to “pure reason,” genetics, and evolutionary biology. Religion isn’t going away any time soon-it’s a natural feature of our humanity-and modern intellectuals would do well to develop and support well-reasoned religion, rather than scorn it as mere superstition unworthy of public consideration. Robert Royal has provided us with a handy guide to prior ages of just such reflection.
Ryan T. Anderson
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