Thursday, March 27, 2008
The Grand Mufti on Freedom of Conscience in Islam
Swirling hardly begins to describe the internet chatter about the whole topic of Muslims converting to Christianity. One topic that is discussed alot is whether or not the Grand Mufti of Egypt did state that a Muslim can choose a religion other than Islam?
So here's some information about the man himself and the text of the original essay in its original context.
The man:
Since 2003, Dr. Ali Gomaa has served as the Grand Mufti of the Arab Republic of Egypt, a position of religious authority second only to the Sheikh al-Azhar. As an Egyptian native and one of Islam’s most respected scholars of Islamic law, Dr. Ali Gomaa oversees Dar al-Ifta, Egypt’s highest body for delivering opinions on religious law. Prior to his appointment as Grand Mufti, Dr. Gomaa served as a Professor of Jurisprudence at al-Azhar University, where he specialized in usul al-fiqh, the science of religious law. There, he published over 25 books on various topics in Islam. He has also issued a number fatwas during his tenure on topics ranging from gender equality to democracy. The Grand Mufti sets himself apart from peers by having earned his first academic agree, a B.A. in commerce, from a secular institution. In addition to regular media appearances on Egyptian television, the Grand Mufti has been especially vocal in reaching out to non-Muslim media outlets as a means of promoting Islamic institutions in the non-Muslim world. Western media outlets have heralded Gomaa’s approach to Islam as anti-extremist and aware of modern realities.
The context:
This Washington Post forum - July 21, 2007
The relevant text of the Grand Mufti's essay:
Freedom of Religion in Islam
The essential question before us is can a person who is Muslim choose a religion other than Islam? The answer is yes, they can, because the Quran says, “Unto you your religion, and unto me my religion,” [Quran, 109:6], and, “Whosoever will, let him believe, and whosoever will, let him disbelieve,” [Quran, 18:29], and, “There is no compulsion in religion. The right direction is distinct from error,” [Quran, 2:256].
These verses from the Quran discuss a freedom that God affords all people. But from a religious perspective, the act of abandoning one’s religion is a sin punishable by God on the Day of Judgment. If the case in question is one of merely rejecting faith, then there is no worldly punishment. If, however, the crime of undermining the foundations of the society is added to the sin of apostasy, then the case must be referred to a judicial system whose role is to protect the integrity of the society. Otherwise, the matter is left until the Day of Judgment, and it is not to be dealt with in the life of this world. It is an issue of conscience, and it is between the individual and God. In the life of this world, “There is no compulsion in religion,” in the life of this world, “Unto you your religion and unto me my religion,” and in the life of this world, “He who wills believes and he who wills disbelieves,” while bearing in mind that God will punish this sin on the Day of Judgment, unless it is combined with an attempt to undermine the stability of the society, in which case it is the society that holds them to account, not Islam.
The summary:
So freedom of conscience in this lifetime (It's not illegal) and punishment in the future life (its still a sin).
The caveat: Is this conversion undermining the foundations of the society? If so, it then becomes a matter for the state.
This is very important since it reflects creeping recognition of the rights of individual conscience at some of the highest levels of Islam. Christians in the aftermath of the Reformation also wrestled with the issue of freedom of religion vs."the foundations of society" - because just like many Muslims today, earlier generations of Christians found it difficult to imagine a stable society that was not united religiously.
Of course, there is always the cultural kicker.
Three weeks after the Mufti wrote those words, the International Herald Tribune carried this story of a real life former Muslim in Egypt who was trying to change his religion on his identity card so that his unborn child could be officially raised as a Christian, marry as a Christian, etc. since in Egypt the official religion of the father automatically becomes the religion of the son. (Consider how American assumptions that healthy adults reconsider and re-choose their religious identity, if any, after they are grown - per the Pew Survey - is dramatically at odds with Egyptian practice.)
The problem is that 25 year old Mohammed Hegazy was the first MBB to attempt to change his legal identity in Egypt and a huge storm developed.
An Islamist cleric has vowed to seek Mohammed Hegazy's execution as an apostate, his family has shunned him, and Hegazy raised a storm of controversy when pictures of him posing for journalists with a poster of the Virgin Mary were published in the newspapers.
Hegazy said he received death threats by phone before he went into hiding, in an apartment bare of furniture where he lives with his wife, who is also a convert from Islam and is four months pregnant. He would not say where the apartment was located.
"I know there are fatwas (religious edicts) to shed my blood, but I will not give up and I will not leave the country," Hegazy said.
There is no law on the books in Egypt against converting from Islam to Christianity, but in this case tradition trumps the law. Under a widespread interpretation of Islamic law, converting from Islam is apostasy and is punishable by death — though killings are rare and the state has never ordered or carried out an execution.
Most Muslims who convert usually practice their new religion quietly, seeking to avoid attention, or flee the country to the West. In Egypt, at the very least they face ostracism by their families, but if their conversion becomes known they can receive death threats from militants, or harassment by police, who use laws against "insulting religion" or "disturbing public order" as a pretext to target them.
The overwhelming taboo against conversion has made even trying to get official recognition unthinkable, leaving it unknown if a court would accept it. Christians who become Muslims are able to get their new religion entered on their ID and face little trouble from officials — though they too are usually thrown out by their families.
So much more powerful than the law is entrenched culture and taboo. And interestingly, it doesn't just cut one way, While Christians who become Muslim get little flak from officials, Egyptian Christian families also tend to regard conversion as an unforgivable betrayal and throw the defiant child out.
Cultural norms that transcend law and religion?
Source blog entitled: Intentional Disciples by the Siena Institute.
INTERFAITH ISSUES
invite the secularist scrooges to dinner
By Richelle WisemanDecember 14, 2008
Like clockwork every year around this time, the secular Scrooges emerge across the land, targeting Samaritan's Purse's
Operation Christmas Child program, which operates in some public schools.
Last week, the Nanaimo, B. C., District Teachers' Association filed a grievance with the Nanaimo-Ladysmith school district after receiving complaints from a number of teachers who felt it was inappropriate for a student council at a Nanaimo public school to support Operation Christmas Child. Samaritan's Purse, they note, is an evangelical not-for-profit charity.
This debate has come up in Calgary, and in school districts elsewhere in the country. Yet across North America, churches, corporations, small businesses, grocery chains and individuals have promoted the simple act of filling shoeboxes with pencil crayons, toothbrushes, small toys and T-shirts, to be delivered to children in developing countries.
Last year, almost 700.000 boxes were collected in Canada alone.
Here, secularism reveals itself to be an ideology--a set of beliefs, ironically, almost religious in its anti-religious fervour.
Teachers' groups fear the distribution of shoeboxes to children in developing countries is a covert way to distribute Christian literature or coerce children into listening to a Christian presentation. That is simply untrue.
"There is never any Christian literature in any of the boxes," says Michael Ulrich of Samaritan's Purse. "Where culturally appropriate, we consult with the locals we work with to ask if we may distribute literature, but it is not linked to the boxes. They are distributed regardless of race or religion, as a gift and a sign that someone cares."
Samaritan's Purse is one of many Canadian faith-based charities that work on relief and development projects around the world. In fact, the Canadian government, through the Canadian International Development Agency, partners with a variety of religiously based non-governmental organizations such as: the Aga Khan Foundation, Canadian Foodgrains Bank, Canadian Lutheran World Re-lief, Christian Reformed World Relief Committee, Mennonite Central Committee, Mennonite Economic Development Authority, Presbyterian World Service and Development, World Vision, and the Primate's World Relief and Development Fund. CIDA also helps to fund Samaritan's Purse water sanitation projects around the world.
Since the charge of "proselytizing" is bogus, the fact that Samaritan's Purse is a Christian organization should not in any way exclude public schools from assisting the Operation Christmas Child project.
But secularists have a knee-jerk reaction to the notion of religion and religious values being introduced into public schools, or indeed, the public square. This is a monumentally misguided position.
Secularists believe religion has no place in public life, yet their "belief" in secularism is just one more of those beliefs in the marketplace of ideas. Ironically, many of these same people would agree that Canada is a pluralistic society.
Pluralism invites all belief systems, world views and religions to engage each other in the public square. The secularists' place is next to the Buddhists, agnostics, Zoroastrians, Christians, Muslims, Jews, Sikhs and pagans. Public institutions in Canada, including our governments, schools and hospitals, are places where people of a wide range of beliefs interact and shape policy, curriculum and legislation. They do so using democratic principles, and--that most lauded of Canadian values --tolerance for differences.
In Canada, there has never been the degree of separation of church and state as there is in the United States. As a result, a rich and diverse multicultural and multi-faith country has developed, where religious and cultural groups have played important roles in building our country's institutions.
The pluralist accepts all belief systems and treats them as equals; everyone is welcome at the public table of our diverse society.
The secularists, on the other hand, exclude people of faith. They see themselves as superior because they are neutral. And they contend that religious beliefs are to be held privately, have no relevance, and indeed are dangerous, when brought into the public sphere.
People of faith don't want to exclude secularists. But they do want them to recognize they are but one of many voices.
In pluralistic Canada, we invite secular Scrooges to the dinner table, and hope they eventually adopt the tolerance towards religion they hold so dearly towards other beliefs.
Richelle Wiseman is the executive director of the centre for faith and the Media.
By Richelle WisemanDecember 14, 2008
Like clockwork every year around this time, the secular Scrooges emerge across the land, targeting Samaritan's Purse's
Operation Christmas Child program, which operates in some public schools.
Last week, the Nanaimo, B. C., District Teachers' Association filed a grievance with the Nanaimo-Ladysmith school district after receiving complaints from a number of teachers who felt it was inappropriate for a student council at a Nanaimo public school to support Operation Christmas Child. Samaritan's Purse, they note, is an evangelical not-for-profit charity.
This debate has come up in Calgary, and in school districts elsewhere in the country. Yet across North America, churches, corporations, small businesses, grocery chains and individuals have promoted the simple act of filling shoeboxes with pencil crayons, toothbrushes, small toys and T-shirts, to be delivered to children in developing countries.
Last year, almost 700.000 boxes were collected in Canada alone.
Here, secularism reveals itself to be an ideology--a set of beliefs, ironically, almost religious in its anti-religious fervour.
Teachers' groups fear the distribution of shoeboxes to children in developing countries is a covert way to distribute Christian literature or coerce children into listening to a Christian presentation. That is simply untrue.
"There is never any Christian literature in any of the boxes," says Michael Ulrich of Samaritan's Purse. "Where culturally appropriate, we consult with the locals we work with to ask if we may distribute literature, but it is not linked to the boxes. They are distributed regardless of race or religion, as a gift and a sign that someone cares."
Samaritan's Purse is one of many Canadian faith-based charities that work on relief and development projects around the world. In fact, the Canadian government, through the Canadian International Development Agency, partners with a variety of religiously based non-governmental organizations such as: the Aga Khan Foundation, Canadian Foodgrains Bank, Canadian Lutheran World Re-lief, Christian Reformed World Relief Committee, Mennonite Central Committee, Mennonite Economic Development Authority, Presbyterian World Service and Development, World Vision, and the Primate's World Relief and Development Fund. CIDA also helps to fund Samaritan's Purse water sanitation projects around the world.
Since the charge of "proselytizing" is bogus, the fact that Samaritan's Purse is a Christian organization should not in any way exclude public schools from assisting the Operation Christmas Child project.
But secularists have a knee-jerk reaction to the notion of religion and religious values being introduced into public schools, or indeed, the public square. This is a monumentally misguided position.
Secularists believe religion has no place in public life, yet their "belief" in secularism is just one more of those beliefs in the marketplace of ideas. Ironically, many of these same people would agree that Canada is a pluralistic society.
Pluralism invites all belief systems, world views and religions to engage each other in the public square. The secularists' place is next to the Buddhists, agnostics, Zoroastrians, Christians, Muslims, Jews, Sikhs and pagans. Public institutions in Canada, including our governments, schools and hospitals, are places where people of a wide range of beliefs interact and shape policy, curriculum and legislation. They do so using democratic principles, and--that most lauded of Canadian values --tolerance for differences.
In Canada, there has never been the degree of separation of church and state as there is in the United States. As a result, a rich and diverse multicultural and multi-faith country has developed, where religious and cultural groups have played important roles in building our country's institutions.
The pluralist accepts all belief systems and treats them as equals; everyone is welcome at the public table of our diverse society.
The secularists, on the other hand, exclude people of faith. They see themselves as superior because they are neutral. And they contend that religious beliefs are to be held privately, have no relevance, and indeed are dangerous, when brought into the public sphere.
People of faith don't want to exclude secularists. But they do want them to recognize they are but one of many voices.
In pluralistic Canada, we invite secular Scrooges to the dinner table, and hope they eventually adopt the tolerance towards religion they hold so dearly towards other beliefs.
Richelle Wiseman is the executive director of the centre for faith and the Media.
Basic freedoms challenged by Quebec religious course
December 21, 2008 9:01 AM
An authentic course in comparative religion examines the major faiths as a scholarly exercise and from a neutral vantage point. It is also inevitably an option course, not part of any core curriculum, except perhaps in specialized theological studies, such as in divinity school or for a university degree in religious studies. The mandatory nature of Quebec's new Ethics and Religious Culture course, strongly suggests there's more to this curriculum than an innocent overview of religious pluralism.
Thousands of Quebec parents are rightly furious they cannot have their children opt out of the course, which was introduced into public and private schools last fall. The course examines the major roles Catholicism and Protestantism have played in Quebec and Canadian society, but it places everything else on equal footing with these two predominant faiths, including Wicca and Raelianism--the bizarre cult that was in the news a few years ago when its members erroneously claimed to have cloned a human.The whole thing reeks of a politically correct, value-equal smorgasbord that encourages children to pick and choose from among religions and cults as if making a choice is as trivial as whether to take the tuna sandwich on white or on whole-wheat. The underlying message being sent to malleable children, who are still in the process of having their identities and faiths shaped by their families'religious and cultural milieux, is that all religions and ethics are equal, and without regard for history or parental teachings, you can choose to be anything you like. Be a Catholic or be a Jew. Be a Muslim, follow aboriginal spirituality, practise Wicca, become an animist or join the Raelians --it's all the same.
According to Education, Loisir et Sport Quebec, the course allows children to "explore . . . different ways in which Quebec's religious heritage is present in his/her immediate or broader environment,"and "learn about elements of other religious traditions present in Quebec." That sounds fairly innocuous--except that the underlying agenda has been revealed in comments such as that from one of the course developers who said, "Students must learn to shake up a too-solid identity." Huh? Since when do parents pay taxes and send their kids to school for that?
The curriculum is also intended to "facilitate" students' spirituality and sense of fulfilment. That is unequivocally the role of parents, not the schools. And young children need to be solidly rooted in their own identities--again, the parents'domain--in order to develop a proper perspective on, and appreciation for, the beliefs and identities of others.
If there weren't an insidious agenda at work here to socially engineer children's minds into a politically correct and phoney religious egalitarianism, the course would be optional. Instead, children are being suspended from school because they or their parents have refused to allow them to participate in the course. Granby, Que., teen Jonathan Gagne faces expulsion for boycotting the course, and a legal challenge is underway.The courts need to come down squarely on the side of freedom of conscience and family and parental rights in this one; anything less is an affront to their basic freedoms.
© Copyright (c) The Calgary Herald
December 21, 2008 9:01 AM
An authentic course in comparative religion examines the major faiths as a scholarly exercise and from a neutral vantage point. It is also inevitably an option course, not part of any core curriculum, except perhaps in specialized theological studies, such as in divinity school or for a university degree in religious studies. The mandatory nature of Quebec's new Ethics and Religious Culture course, strongly suggests there's more to this curriculum than an innocent overview of religious pluralism.
Thousands of Quebec parents are rightly furious they cannot have their children opt out of the course, which was introduced into public and private schools last fall. The course examines the major roles Catholicism and Protestantism have played in Quebec and Canadian society, but it places everything else on equal footing with these two predominant faiths, including Wicca and Raelianism--the bizarre cult that was in the news a few years ago when its members erroneously claimed to have cloned a human.The whole thing reeks of a politically correct, value-equal smorgasbord that encourages children to pick and choose from among religions and cults as if making a choice is as trivial as whether to take the tuna sandwich on white or on whole-wheat. The underlying message being sent to malleable children, who are still in the process of having their identities and faiths shaped by their families'religious and cultural milieux, is that all religions and ethics are equal, and without regard for history or parental teachings, you can choose to be anything you like. Be a Catholic or be a Jew. Be a Muslim, follow aboriginal spirituality, practise Wicca, become an animist or join the Raelians --it's all the same.
According to Education, Loisir et Sport Quebec, the course allows children to "explore . . . different ways in which Quebec's religious heritage is present in his/her immediate or broader environment,"and "learn about elements of other religious traditions present in Quebec." That sounds fairly innocuous--except that the underlying agenda has been revealed in comments such as that from one of the course developers who said, "Students must learn to shake up a too-solid identity." Huh? Since when do parents pay taxes and send their kids to school for that?
The curriculum is also intended to "facilitate" students' spirituality and sense of fulfilment. That is unequivocally the role of parents, not the schools. And young children need to be solidly rooted in their own identities--again, the parents'domain--in order to develop a proper perspective on, and appreciation for, the beliefs and identities of others.
If there weren't an insidious agenda at work here to socially engineer children's minds into a politically correct and phoney religious egalitarianism, the course would be optional. Instead, children are being suspended from school because they or their parents have refused to allow them to participate in the course. Granby, Que., teen Jonathan Gagne faces expulsion for boycotting the course, and a legal challenge is underway.The courts need to come down squarely on the side of freedom of conscience and family and parental rights in this one; anything less is an affront to their basic freedoms.
© Copyright (c) The Calgary Herald
December 27, 2008
Op-Ed Columnist
Heaven for the Godless?
By CHARLES M. BLOW
In June, the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life published a controversial survey in which 70 percent of Americans said that they believed religions other than theirs could lead to eternal life.
This threw evangelicals into a tizzy. After all, the Bible makes it clear that heaven is a velvet-roped V.I.P. area reserved for Christians. Jesus said so: “I am the way, the truth and the life: no man cometh unto the Father, but by me.” But the survey suggested that Americans just weren’t buying that.
The evangelicals complained that people must not have understood the question. The respondents couldn’t actually believe what they were saying, could they?
So in August, Pew asked the question again. (They released the results last week.) Sixty-five percent of respondents said — again — that other religions could lead to eternal life. But this time, to clear up any confusion, Pew asked them to specify which religions. The respondents essentially said all of them.
And they didn’t stop there. Nearly half also thought that atheists could go to heaven — dragged there kicking and screaming, no doubt — and most thought that people with no religious faith also could go.
What on earth does this mean?
One very plausible explanation is that Americans just want good things to come to good people, regardless of their faith. As Alan Segal, a professor of religion at Barnard College told me: “We are a multicultural society, and people expect this American life to continue the same way in heaven.” He explained that in our society, we meet so many good people of different faiths that it’s hard for us to imagine God letting them go to hell. In fact, in the most recent survey, Pew asked people what they thought determined whether a person would achieve eternal life. Nearly as many Christians said you could achieve eternal life by just being a good person as said that you had to believe in Jesus.
Also, many Christians apparently view their didactic text as flexible. According to Pew’s August survey, only 39 percent of Christians believe that the Bible is the literal word of God, and 18 percent think that it’s just a book written by men and not the word of God at all. In fact, on the question in the Pew survey about what it would take to achieve eternal life, only 1 percent of Christians said living life in accordance with the Bible.
Now, there remains the possibility that some of those polled may not have understood the implications of their answers. As John Green, a senior fellow at the Pew Forum, said, “The capacity of ignorance to influence survey outcomes should never be underestimated.” But I don’t think that they are ignorant about this most basic tenet of their faith. I think that they are choosing to ignore it ... for goodness sake.
E-mail [email protected]
Op-Ed Columnist
Heaven for the Godless?
By CHARLES M. BLOW
In June, the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life published a controversial survey in which 70 percent of Americans said that they believed religions other than theirs could lead to eternal life.
This threw evangelicals into a tizzy. After all, the Bible makes it clear that heaven is a velvet-roped V.I.P. area reserved for Christians. Jesus said so: “I am the way, the truth and the life: no man cometh unto the Father, but by me.” But the survey suggested that Americans just weren’t buying that.
The evangelicals complained that people must not have understood the question. The respondents couldn’t actually believe what they were saying, could they?
So in August, Pew asked the question again. (They released the results last week.) Sixty-five percent of respondents said — again — that other religions could lead to eternal life. But this time, to clear up any confusion, Pew asked them to specify which religions. The respondents essentially said all of them.
And they didn’t stop there. Nearly half also thought that atheists could go to heaven — dragged there kicking and screaming, no doubt — and most thought that people with no religious faith also could go.
What on earth does this mean?
One very plausible explanation is that Americans just want good things to come to good people, regardless of their faith. As Alan Segal, a professor of religion at Barnard College told me: “We are a multicultural society, and people expect this American life to continue the same way in heaven.” He explained that in our society, we meet so many good people of different faiths that it’s hard for us to imagine God letting them go to hell. In fact, in the most recent survey, Pew asked people what they thought determined whether a person would achieve eternal life. Nearly as many Christians said you could achieve eternal life by just being a good person as said that you had to believe in Jesus.
Also, many Christians apparently view their didactic text as flexible. According to Pew’s August survey, only 39 percent of Christians believe that the Bible is the literal word of God, and 18 percent think that it’s just a book written by men and not the word of God at all. In fact, on the question in the Pew survey about what it would take to achieve eternal life, only 1 percent of Christians said living life in accordance with the Bible.
Now, there remains the possibility that some of those polled may not have understood the implications of their answers. As John Green, a senior fellow at the Pew Forum, said, “The capacity of ignorance to influence survey outcomes should never be underestimated.” But I don’t think that they are ignorant about this most basic tenet of their faith. I think that they are choosing to ignore it ... for goodness sake.
E-mail [email protected]
An interesting book out on Islam-Christianity misunderstanding.
A DEADLY MISUNDERSTANDING
A Congressman's Quest to Bridge The Muslim - Christian Divide
We emerged and stood for a moment, blinking under the glare of the Mideastern sun and chatting with our Israeli security guard, when suddenly a shot rang out.
Mark Siljander
From the Introduction to A Deadly Misunderstanding
An Excerpt from A Deadly Misunderstanding
With its glamorous history, mix of European and Arab influences and liberal, cosmopolitan culture, Beirut had once been known as “the Paris of the Mideast.” But those days were long past. There was no mistaking the street where I stood: we were in the center of a war zone.
It was the fall of 1982. Israeli troops were poised all along the country’s southern border, ready to go in and wipe out the Palestinians who were dug in along that same border and determined to repel the Israelis at any cost. It was a standoff ready to explode at the smallest spark. I had just spent an hour visiting Camille Chamoun, the eighty-two-year-old Christian former president of Lebanon, hoping to get his read on the situation. The conversation had been inconclusive.
Chamoun’s house was located on the Christian side of the barren strip of scorched earth that divided Beirut into its two warring, irreconcilable halves: East and West, Muslim and Christian. The desolate strip of land had been dubbed, with an irony I’m sure nobody intended, the Green Line. I’d never seen anything less fertile, less evocative of life, less green, than this parched place.
We emerged and stood for a moment, blinking under the glare of the Mideastern sun and chatting with our Israeli security guard, when suddenly a shot rang out.
I should have ducked, but instead I froze. This was only my second trip to the Mideast, and I hadn’t yet acquired the war-zone reflexes that would come in the years to follow. Like a carpenter’s calluses or coal miner’s cough, a kind of hair-trigger vigilance comes with the territory, part and parcel of the seasoned diplomat’s trade. In central Africa, you learn how to cope with mosquitoes: in Beirut, you learn how to duck bombs and bullets. But as a freshman congressman just learning the ropes, I was pretty green myself, and I was still staring dumbly at the rubble-strewn streets, looking vaguely for the source of the sound when I was grabbed and yanked roughly to the ground—and a sharp pinnnggg! rang out, tearing a small cloud of dust from the wall just inches from where my head had been. The young Israeli dragged me ten or fifteen feet to a bus, pitched me in, and jerked the door closed. Palestinian snipers were closing in.
With the sound of my heartbeat pumping in my ears, one thought flooded through my racing brain: What the hell am I doing here?
Once the danger passed, I stayed on and surveyed the area for a while, climbing through the rubble, hoping to catch a clear glimpse of the PLO forces on the other side of the Green Line, the Muslim side. At the time, I didn’t realize what a vivid metaphor this effort was for the direction the rest of my life would take.
Suddenly I caught movement out of the corner of my eye, and the next moment I was staring into the barrel of an Uzi. I had stumbled onto an Israeli lookout post hidden among the rubble and a young Israeli soldier, having no way of knowing who or what I was, was about to blow my head off. Nobody was reading anyone any Miranda rights here—this was war, kill or be killed.
My reflexes were a little sharper this time, and fortunately I had learned a bit of Hebrew since my first trip to the Mideast some months earlier. I knew just enough to shout out, “B’vaka sha, ani esh-congress!” Please, I’m a congressman! The boy’s finger froze on the trigger and he slowly lowered his Uzi.
In a few short hours, I had nearly been killed twice, and whether delivered by a bullet from the Christian side or Muslim side of that deadly Green Line, my death would have been just as final. No matter which side of an armed conflict one supports, both sides are ultimately sponsors of the same end: destruction.
This is not a book about Beirut, but it is a book about a world rift by its own Green Line, split like a macrocosmic Lebanon into two warring, seemingly irreconcilable halves. More particularly, it is about the efforts of one man, clambering about the rubble straddling that pervasive Green Line, to peer over at the other side and see what ground the two sides might possibly share.
This was not the path I set out to follow twenty-five years ago, as a conservative Republican congressman and Evangelical Christian just entering the world of Washington politics. At the time, I believed that Islam was a religion of violence, that the Qur’an preached the destruction of all non-Muslims, and that the Qur’an and Islam were of the devil, as godless as the great evil of communism whose defeat was then the defining purpose of American foreign policy. I believed that Islam and Christianity were contradictory at their core, that the Eastern Islamic and Western Judeo-Christian cultures were irretrievably opposed to one another, and that the only possible solution to this conflict was the conversion of “them” so they would come to think like “us.” My worldview could not have been clearer or simpler—or more myopic.
In the years that followed I was led to question the truth of these axioms. In time, I learned that every one of them was utterly, categorically false. I learned that when we stop buying into our cultures’ prejudices, assumptions, and prevailing habits of thought and begin to investigate the texts of our different holy books in their original languages, conflicts between crucial terms and entire passages that have traditionally been viewed as irreconcilable begin to evaporate.
I learned that the deadly misunderstanding dividing our world today need not do so tomorrow.
What follows in these pages is not some new form of ecumenism or syncretism where Christians, Muslims, or anyone else is expected to give up cherished and long-held beliefs or creeds. It is rather a chronicle of one person’s search for a rich common ground that exists between these faiths and cultures. It has been a constant source of both astonishment and inspiration to find that this common ground is not some far-fetched ideal but is textually sound and eminently practicable. In some extremely delicate and hostile political situations, I’ve seen it work miracles.
Mark D. Siljander
http://www.adeadlymisunderstanding.com/book.php
****
There are interviews with the author in the YouTube at:
http://www.youtube.com/view_play_list?p ... 2E10D74841
A DEADLY MISUNDERSTANDING
A Congressman's Quest to Bridge The Muslim - Christian Divide
We emerged and stood for a moment, blinking under the glare of the Mideastern sun and chatting with our Israeli security guard, when suddenly a shot rang out.
Mark Siljander
From the Introduction to A Deadly Misunderstanding
An Excerpt from A Deadly Misunderstanding
With its glamorous history, mix of European and Arab influences and liberal, cosmopolitan culture, Beirut had once been known as “the Paris of the Mideast.” But those days were long past. There was no mistaking the street where I stood: we were in the center of a war zone.
It was the fall of 1982. Israeli troops were poised all along the country’s southern border, ready to go in and wipe out the Palestinians who were dug in along that same border and determined to repel the Israelis at any cost. It was a standoff ready to explode at the smallest spark. I had just spent an hour visiting Camille Chamoun, the eighty-two-year-old Christian former president of Lebanon, hoping to get his read on the situation. The conversation had been inconclusive.
Chamoun’s house was located on the Christian side of the barren strip of scorched earth that divided Beirut into its two warring, irreconcilable halves: East and West, Muslim and Christian. The desolate strip of land had been dubbed, with an irony I’m sure nobody intended, the Green Line. I’d never seen anything less fertile, less evocative of life, less green, than this parched place.
We emerged and stood for a moment, blinking under the glare of the Mideastern sun and chatting with our Israeli security guard, when suddenly a shot rang out.
I should have ducked, but instead I froze. This was only my second trip to the Mideast, and I hadn’t yet acquired the war-zone reflexes that would come in the years to follow. Like a carpenter’s calluses or coal miner’s cough, a kind of hair-trigger vigilance comes with the territory, part and parcel of the seasoned diplomat’s trade. In central Africa, you learn how to cope with mosquitoes: in Beirut, you learn how to duck bombs and bullets. But as a freshman congressman just learning the ropes, I was pretty green myself, and I was still staring dumbly at the rubble-strewn streets, looking vaguely for the source of the sound when I was grabbed and yanked roughly to the ground—and a sharp pinnnggg! rang out, tearing a small cloud of dust from the wall just inches from where my head had been. The young Israeli dragged me ten or fifteen feet to a bus, pitched me in, and jerked the door closed. Palestinian snipers were closing in.
With the sound of my heartbeat pumping in my ears, one thought flooded through my racing brain: What the hell am I doing here?
Once the danger passed, I stayed on and surveyed the area for a while, climbing through the rubble, hoping to catch a clear glimpse of the PLO forces on the other side of the Green Line, the Muslim side. At the time, I didn’t realize what a vivid metaphor this effort was for the direction the rest of my life would take.
Suddenly I caught movement out of the corner of my eye, and the next moment I was staring into the barrel of an Uzi. I had stumbled onto an Israeli lookout post hidden among the rubble and a young Israeli soldier, having no way of knowing who or what I was, was about to blow my head off. Nobody was reading anyone any Miranda rights here—this was war, kill or be killed.
My reflexes were a little sharper this time, and fortunately I had learned a bit of Hebrew since my first trip to the Mideast some months earlier. I knew just enough to shout out, “B’vaka sha, ani esh-congress!” Please, I’m a congressman! The boy’s finger froze on the trigger and he slowly lowered his Uzi.
In a few short hours, I had nearly been killed twice, and whether delivered by a bullet from the Christian side or Muslim side of that deadly Green Line, my death would have been just as final. No matter which side of an armed conflict one supports, both sides are ultimately sponsors of the same end: destruction.
This is not a book about Beirut, but it is a book about a world rift by its own Green Line, split like a macrocosmic Lebanon into two warring, seemingly irreconcilable halves. More particularly, it is about the efforts of one man, clambering about the rubble straddling that pervasive Green Line, to peer over at the other side and see what ground the two sides might possibly share.
This was not the path I set out to follow twenty-five years ago, as a conservative Republican congressman and Evangelical Christian just entering the world of Washington politics. At the time, I believed that Islam was a religion of violence, that the Qur’an preached the destruction of all non-Muslims, and that the Qur’an and Islam were of the devil, as godless as the great evil of communism whose defeat was then the defining purpose of American foreign policy. I believed that Islam and Christianity were contradictory at their core, that the Eastern Islamic and Western Judeo-Christian cultures were irretrievably opposed to one another, and that the only possible solution to this conflict was the conversion of “them” so they would come to think like “us.” My worldview could not have been clearer or simpler—or more myopic.
In the years that followed I was led to question the truth of these axioms. In time, I learned that every one of them was utterly, categorically false. I learned that when we stop buying into our cultures’ prejudices, assumptions, and prevailing habits of thought and begin to investigate the texts of our different holy books in their original languages, conflicts between crucial terms and entire passages that have traditionally been viewed as irreconcilable begin to evaporate.
I learned that the deadly misunderstanding dividing our world today need not do so tomorrow.
What follows in these pages is not some new form of ecumenism or syncretism where Christians, Muslims, or anyone else is expected to give up cherished and long-held beliefs or creeds. It is rather a chronicle of one person’s search for a rich common ground that exists between these faiths and cultures. It has been a constant source of both astonishment and inspiration to find that this common ground is not some far-fetched ideal but is textually sound and eminently practicable. In some extremely delicate and hostile political situations, I’ve seen it work miracles.
Mark D. Siljander
http://www.adeadlymisunderstanding.com/book.php
****
There are interviews with the author in the YouTube at:
http://www.youtube.com/view_play_list?p ... 2E10D74841
Last edited by kmaherali on Sun Feb 08, 2009 12:58 pm, edited 1 time in total.
More Hindus than Muslims in Some West Bengal Madrassas!
By Sreya Basu
Jan 20, 2009
Kolkata
Contrary to popular belief that madrassas are schools for fundamentalist Islamic teaching, madrassas in West Bengal are attracting an increasing number of Hindu students with their shift in focus from Islamist education to science and technology.
Hindu students now outnumber Muslims in four madrassas of the state.
These include Kasba MM High Madrassa in Uttar Dinajpur district, Ekmukha Safiabad High Madrassa in Cooch Behar district, Orgram Chatuspalli High Madrassa at Burdwan district and Chandrakona Islamia High Madrassa at West Midnapore district.
"The percentage of Hindu students vary from 57 percent to 64 percent in these institutes, which stand out as proof that madrassas (Islamic seminaries) and secularism are not anachronistic," West Bengal Board of Madrassah Education president Sohrab Hussain told IANS.
He said 618 out of the 1,077 students in Kasba, 554 out of 868 students at Orgram, 201 out of 312 at Chandrakona and 290 out of total 480 students at Ekmukha are Hindus.
Denying that madrassas impart only Islamist education, he said the institutes lay more stress on modern subjects.
"It's a misconception that our students only learn Islam-related subjects at madrassas. Time is changing and so are we. Now, we lay more stress on science and technology than religion.
"Already 42 madrassas have computer laboratories; we will increase the number by another 100 labs in 2009. Over 100 madrassas offer vocational training in not only tailoring but even mobile applications technology," Hussain said.
He said an increasing number of Hindu students were choosing madrassas over other schools because they had more credibility.
"Madrassas have been successful in winning the confidence of students and guardians. Mostly first generation learners from backward classes come to study here as they know they won't be looked down upon. Besides, madrassa certificates are at par with other national-level examinations," said Hussain.
There are 506 madrassas in West Bengal and 52 more will come up by the end of 2009. Overall, 17 percent of the students and 11 percent of the teachers in these institutions are non-Muslims.
"All students are treated equally... there is no religious bias in the madrassas. Even the syllabus of the madrassas are no different from the Madhyamik - the state secondary examinations.
"The only difference is our students have to sit for a 100-mark extra paper on Arabic and Islamic studies, which in a way is good for Hindu students too. They can learn a new language at the same time," Hussain said.
Golum Mustafa, headmaster of Kasba madrassa, said all students study and play together irrespective of their religion.
"If anyone asks me why Hindu students study at madrassas, I ask them, 'Why not?' Be it school or madrassa - they are meant for imparting education. There are many Hindu students who passed out from Kasba and are well-established in life," Mustafa said on phone.
Bibhas Chandra Ghorui, a Hindu assistant teacher at Chandrakona, echoed Mustafa.
"There are seven schools within one km of this madrassa. But still people send their wards here, mostly because of affordability. One has to pay Rs.375 at general schools while the fees at the madrassa is only Rs.110.
"As for religious tolerance, if a Muslim student can study Baishnav Padavali - a Hindu religious hymns - then why can't a Hindu student study Islam or Arabic?" Ghorui said on phone.
By Sreya Basu
Jan 20, 2009
Kolkata
Contrary to popular belief that madrassas are schools for fundamentalist Islamic teaching, madrassas in West Bengal are attracting an increasing number of Hindu students with their shift in focus from Islamist education to science and technology.
Hindu students now outnumber Muslims in four madrassas of the state.
These include Kasba MM High Madrassa in Uttar Dinajpur district, Ekmukha Safiabad High Madrassa in Cooch Behar district, Orgram Chatuspalli High Madrassa at Burdwan district and Chandrakona Islamia High Madrassa at West Midnapore district.
"The percentage of Hindu students vary from 57 percent to 64 percent in these institutes, which stand out as proof that madrassas (Islamic seminaries) and secularism are not anachronistic," West Bengal Board of Madrassah Education president Sohrab Hussain told IANS.
He said 618 out of the 1,077 students in Kasba, 554 out of 868 students at Orgram, 201 out of 312 at Chandrakona and 290 out of total 480 students at Ekmukha are Hindus.
Denying that madrassas impart only Islamist education, he said the institutes lay more stress on modern subjects.
"It's a misconception that our students only learn Islam-related subjects at madrassas. Time is changing and so are we. Now, we lay more stress on science and technology than religion.
"Already 42 madrassas have computer laboratories; we will increase the number by another 100 labs in 2009. Over 100 madrassas offer vocational training in not only tailoring but even mobile applications technology," Hussain said.
He said an increasing number of Hindu students were choosing madrassas over other schools because they had more credibility.
"Madrassas have been successful in winning the confidence of students and guardians. Mostly first generation learners from backward classes come to study here as they know they won't be looked down upon. Besides, madrassa certificates are at par with other national-level examinations," said Hussain.
There are 506 madrassas in West Bengal and 52 more will come up by the end of 2009. Overall, 17 percent of the students and 11 percent of the teachers in these institutions are non-Muslims.
"All students are treated equally... there is no religious bias in the madrassas. Even the syllabus of the madrassas are no different from the Madhyamik - the state secondary examinations.
"The only difference is our students have to sit for a 100-mark extra paper on Arabic and Islamic studies, which in a way is good for Hindu students too. They can learn a new language at the same time," Hussain said.
Golum Mustafa, headmaster of Kasba madrassa, said all students study and play together irrespective of their religion.
"If anyone asks me why Hindu students study at madrassas, I ask them, 'Why not?' Be it school or madrassa - they are meant for imparting education. There are many Hindu students who passed out from Kasba and are well-established in life," Mustafa said on phone.
Bibhas Chandra Ghorui, a Hindu assistant teacher at Chandrakona, echoed Mustafa.
"There are seven schools within one km of this madrassa. But still people send their wards here, mostly because of affordability. One has to pay Rs.375 at general schools while the fees at the madrassa is only Rs.110.
"As for religious tolerance, if a Muslim student can study Baishnav Padavali - a Hindu religious hymns - then why can't a Hindu student study Islam or Arabic?" Ghorui said on phone.
At least atheists got mentioned
By Kevin Brooker, For The Calgary HeraldJanuary 26, 2009
People appear very keen for a lot of things to change on the Obama watch. One of those hopes is that Christianity would revert more to a private choice rather than the state religion it often appeared to be under George W. Bush.
With his frequent invocation of Christian principles and things like "faith-based" public expenditures, Bush only amplified the discomfort many people feel about being out of the loop in spiritual matters.
It always seemed rather dissonant in a nation where citizens frequently fight for and win the right, for example, not to be obliged to recite Christian prayer at the start of each school day. But many Americans are loath to accept a non-denominational commons. The separation of church and state may be enshrined in the U. S. Constitution, but look how long it took for that statue of the Ten Commandments to be removed from the Alabama legislature.
Then came Barack Obama's inauguration, though it was hardly a break from the past. By the time the celebrations were over, God and Jesus had been appealed to more often than at a Georgia prayer breakfast.
Still, many observers were heartened that Obama made an overt plea to bring all types of people into his tent when he said in his speech, "We are a nation of Christians and Muslims, Jews and Hindus --and non-believers."
It's a good start, I suppose. On the other hand, that line stood out to me, and not in a good way.
Non-believers?
That's hardly a flattering term when it follows up a grocery list of superstar faiths. Really, just the one catch-all for the Buddhists, atheists and pagans among us?
In one sense the term can even be considered a slur. To call atheists non-believers is to subtly reinforce the malign notion that they don't believe in anything apart from their hedonistic impulses.
In fact, to thoughtful people, being atheist is every bit as much spiritual work as being a Roman Catholic. You just don't see that work being done, is all.
Many atheists, for example, take "do unto others as you would have them do unto you" far more seriously than some Sunday hypocrites. Still others have performed a far-reaching exploration of the religion of others, and though they can't rationally accept that the universe is created by and for some sort of godhead, they nevertheless can accept--and believe in--a whole host of plausible cosmic powers.
I for one believe in the existence of karma, though I conceive of it as a possibly physical or perhaps energetic life force. I thus believe intuition somehow involves the flow of electrons in ways we've yet to fully grasp. I believe animals can know earthquakes are about to hap-pen, just as humans can have a sense of who is in the next room.
These beliefs, I readily acknowledge, are every bit as impossible to prove as the existence of a god in a heaven. Which is just one reason why I wouldn't dream of inflicting my beliefs on anyone else.
And there is another thing atheists allow themselves to believe: that religions, while perhaps founded on benign spiritual principles, can provoke grave consequences when inserted into political affairs. Throughout history most of the world's conflicts seem to have had religious input. The bloodiest battles of our time are being fought by zealous parties which, in the view of non-religious outsiders, have negligible differences separating their faiths.
Thus, though it's still unfortunately steeped in a Christian-first culture, Obama's inclusiveness might yet produce positive results. If all faiths are truly accepted, it will organically lead to a world where one or two faiths are less dominant, even oppressive.
Many observers have noted that the America of Obama's dreams is the multicultural Canada we've been living in for 40 years. If so, I'd like to believe it's the one where Christianity is not automatically presumed.
Kevin BrooKer is a Calgary freelance writer. His Column appears every Monday.
© Copyright (c) The Calgary Herald
By Kevin Brooker, For The Calgary HeraldJanuary 26, 2009
People appear very keen for a lot of things to change on the Obama watch. One of those hopes is that Christianity would revert more to a private choice rather than the state religion it often appeared to be under George W. Bush.
With his frequent invocation of Christian principles and things like "faith-based" public expenditures, Bush only amplified the discomfort many people feel about being out of the loop in spiritual matters.
It always seemed rather dissonant in a nation where citizens frequently fight for and win the right, for example, not to be obliged to recite Christian prayer at the start of each school day. But many Americans are loath to accept a non-denominational commons. The separation of church and state may be enshrined in the U. S. Constitution, but look how long it took for that statue of the Ten Commandments to be removed from the Alabama legislature.
Then came Barack Obama's inauguration, though it was hardly a break from the past. By the time the celebrations were over, God and Jesus had been appealed to more often than at a Georgia prayer breakfast.
Still, many observers were heartened that Obama made an overt plea to bring all types of people into his tent when he said in his speech, "We are a nation of Christians and Muslims, Jews and Hindus --and non-believers."
It's a good start, I suppose. On the other hand, that line stood out to me, and not in a good way.
Non-believers?
That's hardly a flattering term when it follows up a grocery list of superstar faiths. Really, just the one catch-all for the Buddhists, atheists and pagans among us?
In one sense the term can even be considered a slur. To call atheists non-believers is to subtly reinforce the malign notion that they don't believe in anything apart from their hedonistic impulses.
In fact, to thoughtful people, being atheist is every bit as much spiritual work as being a Roman Catholic. You just don't see that work being done, is all.
Many atheists, for example, take "do unto others as you would have them do unto you" far more seriously than some Sunday hypocrites. Still others have performed a far-reaching exploration of the religion of others, and though they can't rationally accept that the universe is created by and for some sort of godhead, they nevertheless can accept--and believe in--a whole host of plausible cosmic powers.
I for one believe in the existence of karma, though I conceive of it as a possibly physical or perhaps energetic life force. I thus believe intuition somehow involves the flow of electrons in ways we've yet to fully grasp. I believe animals can know earthquakes are about to hap-pen, just as humans can have a sense of who is in the next room.
These beliefs, I readily acknowledge, are every bit as impossible to prove as the existence of a god in a heaven. Which is just one reason why I wouldn't dream of inflicting my beliefs on anyone else.
And there is another thing atheists allow themselves to believe: that religions, while perhaps founded on benign spiritual principles, can provoke grave consequences when inserted into political affairs. Throughout history most of the world's conflicts seem to have had religious input. The bloodiest battles of our time are being fought by zealous parties which, in the view of non-religious outsiders, have negligible differences separating their faiths.
Thus, though it's still unfortunately steeped in a Christian-first culture, Obama's inclusiveness might yet produce positive results. If all faiths are truly accepted, it will organically lead to a world where one or two faiths are less dominant, even oppressive.
Many observers have noted that the America of Obama's dreams is the multicultural Canada we've been living in for 40 years. If so, I'd like to believe it's the one where Christianity is not automatically presumed.
Kevin BrooKer is a Calgary freelance writer. His Column appears every Monday.
© Copyright (c) The Calgary Herald
Memories of the Alhambra
words: Dilara Hafiz
Andalusia, Spain’s southernmost province, is not only home to breathtaking scenery and delicious tapas but also to a rich history that is relatively unknown. Since 711-718 when the Umayyads invaded the Iberian Peninsula, Muslim peoples deeply influenced Andalusian culture through their practices, religion, language, and scholarly traditions. It was here that grandeur, artistry, and tolerance were the hallmarks of an 800-year Muslim rule of Andalusia.
Centuries of trade and exchange between Spain and Morocco have muffled the borders that many now envision to be rigid markers of distinct cultures and continents. Geographically speaking, Spain is the closest part of Europe to the African continent. Take the Strait of Gibraltar for example, the narrow waterway which divides Spain and Morocco; the name ‘Gibraltar’ is known to originate from the Arabic phrase Jebel Tariq meaning ‘mountain of Tariq’ and refers to the famous general Tariq ibn-Ziyad who led the Islamic conquest of Spain in 711.
Under Muslim rule, universities were established in Andalusia as peoples of various religious backgrounds, namely Moors and Jews, helped to revive and preserve the Greek disciplines of medicine, philosophy, mathematics, and astronomy. At this time, economic prosperity reigned and Andalusia boasted Cordoba as the largest and richest city in Western Europe. Arabic language, literature, and music also flourished which is why the word ‘troubadour’ is known to have Arabic roots.
In The Ornament of the World: How Muslims, Jews, and Christians Created a Culture of Tolerance in Medieval Spain by Maria Roza Menocal, 13th century Granada is described as ‘one of the Shangri-Las of the West.’ Dr. Menocal, a professor of Spanish and Portuguese at Yale University, ably describes the fruitful intermingling that the three Abrahamic faiths enjoyed during the centuries of largely peaceful interaction in Southern Spain.
Vestiges of this coexistence can be seen everywhere in present day Granada. Tourist shops sell T-shirts emblazoned with Arabic calligraphy next to colorful, hand-painted ceramic platters with a prominent Star of David motif in their centers. Crucifixes hang from every wall and glass rosaries as well as tasbihs can be found decorating the entranceways of these shops. German, French, Spanish, English and Japanese are just a few of the languages to be heard echoing around the stone ramparts of the fortress and amongst the green gardens of the ‘Generalife’ - the summer retreat at Alhambra, and also the second most visited tourist site in Europe.
Visitors to Alhambra can see the stuccoed archways, fountains, reflecting pools, and geometric tile work that are recognizably of Islamic artistic origin. They can also glimpse a bygone age in which economic political and social interactions of the ruling class emphasized tolerance and peaceful coexistence for the greater good of the entire citizenry, be they Muslim, Christian, or Jew.
http://www.elanthemag.com/index.php/sit ... _alhambra/
words: Dilara Hafiz
Andalusia, Spain’s southernmost province, is not only home to breathtaking scenery and delicious tapas but also to a rich history that is relatively unknown. Since 711-718 when the Umayyads invaded the Iberian Peninsula, Muslim peoples deeply influenced Andalusian culture through their practices, religion, language, and scholarly traditions. It was here that grandeur, artistry, and tolerance were the hallmarks of an 800-year Muslim rule of Andalusia.
Centuries of trade and exchange between Spain and Morocco have muffled the borders that many now envision to be rigid markers of distinct cultures and continents. Geographically speaking, Spain is the closest part of Europe to the African continent. Take the Strait of Gibraltar for example, the narrow waterway which divides Spain and Morocco; the name ‘Gibraltar’ is known to originate from the Arabic phrase Jebel Tariq meaning ‘mountain of Tariq’ and refers to the famous general Tariq ibn-Ziyad who led the Islamic conquest of Spain in 711.
Under Muslim rule, universities were established in Andalusia as peoples of various religious backgrounds, namely Moors and Jews, helped to revive and preserve the Greek disciplines of medicine, philosophy, mathematics, and astronomy. At this time, economic prosperity reigned and Andalusia boasted Cordoba as the largest and richest city in Western Europe. Arabic language, literature, and music also flourished which is why the word ‘troubadour’ is known to have Arabic roots.
In The Ornament of the World: How Muslims, Jews, and Christians Created a Culture of Tolerance in Medieval Spain by Maria Roza Menocal, 13th century Granada is described as ‘one of the Shangri-Las of the West.’ Dr. Menocal, a professor of Spanish and Portuguese at Yale University, ably describes the fruitful intermingling that the three Abrahamic faiths enjoyed during the centuries of largely peaceful interaction in Southern Spain.
Vestiges of this coexistence can be seen everywhere in present day Granada. Tourist shops sell T-shirts emblazoned with Arabic calligraphy next to colorful, hand-painted ceramic platters with a prominent Star of David motif in their centers. Crucifixes hang from every wall and glass rosaries as well as tasbihs can be found decorating the entranceways of these shops. German, French, Spanish, English and Japanese are just a few of the languages to be heard echoing around the stone ramparts of the fortress and amongst the green gardens of the ‘Generalife’ - the summer retreat at Alhambra, and also the second most visited tourist site in Europe.
Visitors to Alhambra can see the stuccoed archways, fountains, reflecting pools, and geometric tile work that are recognizably of Islamic artistic origin. They can also glimpse a bygone age in which economic political and social interactions of the ruling class emphasized tolerance and peaceful coexistence for the greater good of the entire citizenry, be they Muslim, Christian, or Jew.
http://www.elanthemag.com/index.php/sit ... _alhambra/
Thursday, February 5th, 2009 at 12:00 am
Obama Announces White House Office of Faith-based and Neighborhood Partnerships
THE WHITE HOUSE
Office of the Press Secretary
_________________________________________________________________
For Immediate Release
February 5, 2009
Obama Announces White House Office of Faith-based and Neighborhood Partnerships
Washington (February 5, 2009) – President Barack Obama today signed an executive order establishing the new White House Office of Faith-Based and Neighborhood Partnerships. The White House Office of Faith-Based and Neighborhood Partnerships will work on behalf of Americans committed to improving their communities, no matter their religious or political beliefs.
"Over the past few days and weeks, there has been much talk about what our government’s role should be during this period of economic emergency. That is as it should be – because there is much that government can and must do to help people in need," said President Obama. "But no matter how much money we invest or how sensibly we design our policies, the change that Americans are looking for will not come from government alone. There is a force for good greater than government. It is an expression of faith, this yearning to give back, this hungering for a purpose larger than our own, that reveals itself not simply in places of worship, but in senior centers and shelters, schools and hospitals, and any place an American decides."
The White House Office for Faith-Based and Neighborhood Partnerships will be a resource for nonprofits and community organizations, both secular and faith based, looking for ways to make a bigger impact in their communities, learn their obligations under the law, cut through red tape, and make the most of what the federal government has to offer.
President Obama appointed Joshua DuBois, a former associate pastor and advisor to the President in his U.S. Senate office and campaign Director of Religious Affairs, to lead this office. "Joshua understands the issues at stake, knows the people involved, and will be able to bring everyone together – from both the secular and faith-based communities, from academia and politics – around our common goals," said President Obama.
The Office of Faith Based and Neighborhood Partnerships will focus on four key priorities, to be carried out by working closely with the President’s Cabinet Secretaries and each of the eleven agency offices for faith-based and neighborhood partnerships:
The Office’s top priority will be making community groups an integral part of our economic recovery and poverty a burden fewer have to bear when recovery is complete.
It will be one voice among several in the administration that will look at how we support women and children, address teenage pregnancy, and reduce the need for abortion.
The Office will strive to support fathers who stand by their families, which involves working to get young men off the streets and into well-paying jobs, and encouraging responsible fatherhood.
Finally, beyond American shores this Office will work with the National Security Council to foster interfaith dialogue with leaders and scholars around the world.
As the priorities of this Office are carried out, it will be done in a way that upholds the Constitution – by ensuring that both existing programs and new proposals are consistent with American laws and values. The separation of church and state is a principle President Obama supports firmly – not only because it protects our democracy, but also because it protects the plurality of America’s religious and civic life. The Executive Order President Obama will sign today strengthens this by adding a new mechanism for the Executive Director of the Office to work through the White House Counsel to seek the advice of the Attorney General on difficult legal and constitutional issues.
The Office of Faith Based and Neighborhood Partnerships will include a new President’s Advisory Council on Faith-Based and Neighborhood Partnerships, composed of religious and secular leaders and scholars from different backgrounds. There will be 25 members of the Council, appointed to 1-year terms.
Members of the Council include:
Judith N. Vredenburgh, President and Chief Executive Officer, Big Brothers / Big Sisters of America
Philadelphia, PA
Rabbi David N. Saperstein, Director & Counsel, Religious Action Center of Reform Judaism, and noted church/state expert
Washington, DC
Dr. Frank S. Page, President emeritus, Southern Baptist Convention
Taylors, SC
Father Larry J. Snyder, President, Catholic Charities USA
Alexandria, VA
Rev. Otis Moss, Jr., Pastor emeritus, Olivet Institutional Baptist Church
Cleveland, OH
Eboo S. Patel, Founder & Executive Director, Interfaith Youth Corps
Chicago, IL
Fred Davie, President, Public / Private Ventures, a secular non-profit intermediary
New York, NY
Dr. William J. Shaw, President, National Baptist Convention, USA
Philadelphia, PA
Melissa Rogers, Director, Wake Forest School of Divinity Center for Religion and Public Affairs and expert on church/state issues
Winston-Salem, NC
Pastor Joel C. Hunter, Senior Pastor, Northland, a Church Distributed
Lakeland, FL
Dr. Arturo Chavez, Ph.D., President & CEO, Mexican American Cultural Center
San Antonio, TX
Rev. Jim Wallis, President & Executive Director, Sojourners
Washington, DC
Bishop Vashti M. McKenzie, Presiding Bishop, 13th Episcopal District, African Methodist Episcopal Church
Knoxville, TN
Diane Baillargeon, President & CEO, Seedco, a secular national operating intermediary
New York, NY
Richard Stearns, President, World Vision
Bellevue, WA
http://www.whitehouse.gov/the_press_off ... tnerships/
Obama Announces White House Office of Faith-based and Neighborhood Partnerships
THE WHITE HOUSE
Office of the Press Secretary
_________________________________________________________________
For Immediate Release
February 5, 2009
Obama Announces White House Office of Faith-based and Neighborhood Partnerships
Washington (February 5, 2009) – President Barack Obama today signed an executive order establishing the new White House Office of Faith-Based and Neighborhood Partnerships. The White House Office of Faith-Based and Neighborhood Partnerships will work on behalf of Americans committed to improving their communities, no matter their religious or political beliefs.
"Over the past few days and weeks, there has been much talk about what our government’s role should be during this period of economic emergency. That is as it should be – because there is much that government can and must do to help people in need," said President Obama. "But no matter how much money we invest or how sensibly we design our policies, the change that Americans are looking for will not come from government alone. There is a force for good greater than government. It is an expression of faith, this yearning to give back, this hungering for a purpose larger than our own, that reveals itself not simply in places of worship, but in senior centers and shelters, schools and hospitals, and any place an American decides."
The White House Office for Faith-Based and Neighborhood Partnerships will be a resource for nonprofits and community organizations, both secular and faith based, looking for ways to make a bigger impact in their communities, learn their obligations under the law, cut through red tape, and make the most of what the federal government has to offer.
President Obama appointed Joshua DuBois, a former associate pastor and advisor to the President in his U.S. Senate office and campaign Director of Religious Affairs, to lead this office. "Joshua understands the issues at stake, knows the people involved, and will be able to bring everyone together – from both the secular and faith-based communities, from academia and politics – around our common goals," said President Obama.
The Office of Faith Based and Neighborhood Partnerships will focus on four key priorities, to be carried out by working closely with the President’s Cabinet Secretaries and each of the eleven agency offices for faith-based and neighborhood partnerships:
The Office’s top priority will be making community groups an integral part of our economic recovery and poverty a burden fewer have to bear when recovery is complete.
It will be one voice among several in the administration that will look at how we support women and children, address teenage pregnancy, and reduce the need for abortion.
The Office will strive to support fathers who stand by their families, which involves working to get young men off the streets and into well-paying jobs, and encouraging responsible fatherhood.
Finally, beyond American shores this Office will work with the National Security Council to foster interfaith dialogue with leaders and scholars around the world.
As the priorities of this Office are carried out, it will be done in a way that upholds the Constitution – by ensuring that both existing programs and new proposals are consistent with American laws and values. The separation of church and state is a principle President Obama supports firmly – not only because it protects our democracy, but also because it protects the plurality of America’s religious and civic life. The Executive Order President Obama will sign today strengthens this by adding a new mechanism for the Executive Director of the Office to work through the White House Counsel to seek the advice of the Attorney General on difficult legal and constitutional issues.
The Office of Faith Based and Neighborhood Partnerships will include a new President’s Advisory Council on Faith-Based and Neighborhood Partnerships, composed of religious and secular leaders and scholars from different backgrounds. There will be 25 members of the Council, appointed to 1-year terms.
Members of the Council include:
Judith N. Vredenburgh, President and Chief Executive Officer, Big Brothers / Big Sisters of America
Philadelphia, PA
Rabbi David N. Saperstein, Director & Counsel, Religious Action Center of Reform Judaism, and noted church/state expert
Washington, DC
Dr. Frank S. Page, President emeritus, Southern Baptist Convention
Taylors, SC
Father Larry J. Snyder, President, Catholic Charities USA
Alexandria, VA
Rev. Otis Moss, Jr., Pastor emeritus, Olivet Institutional Baptist Church
Cleveland, OH
Eboo S. Patel, Founder & Executive Director, Interfaith Youth Corps
Chicago, IL
Fred Davie, President, Public / Private Ventures, a secular non-profit intermediary
New York, NY
Dr. William J. Shaw, President, National Baptist Convention, USA
Philadelphia, PA
Melissa Rogers, Director, Wake Forest School of Divinity Center for Religion and Public Affairs and expert on church/state issues
Winston-Salem, NC
Pastor Joel C. Hunter, Senior Pastor, Northland, a Church Distributed
Lakeland, FL
Dr. Arturo Chavez, Ph.D., President & CEO, Mexican American Cultural Center
San Antonio, TX
Rev. Jim Wallis, President & Executive Director, Sojourners
Washington, DC
Bishop Vashti M. McKenzie, Presiding Bishop, 13th Episcopal District, African Methodist Episcopal Church
Knoxville, TN
Diane Baillargeon, President & CEO, Seedco, a secular national operating intermediary
New York, NY
Richard Stearns, President, World Vision
Bellevue, WA
http://www.whitehouse.gov/the_press_off ... tnerships/
Activists push progressive religious agendas
Social justice, poverty now prime issues
By Jacqueline L. Salmon And Michelle Boorstein, The Washington PostFebruary 8, 2009 8:01 AM
With a president they view as more sympathetic to their causes, progressive religious activists are pushing the new Obama administration for aggressive action on poverty, the environment and social justice issues that would mark a significant shift in the faith agenda that dominated the Bush years.
Many faith groups close to President George W. Bush focused on abortion, stem cell research and same-sex marriage. But now, liberal and centrist evangelicals and other activists say they are getting a voice and trying to turn the debate.
"The last administration showed no interest in talking to a large chunk of the religious community," said Melissa Rogers, director of the Center for Religion and Public Affairs at Wake Forest University in North Carolina.
"We're already seeing change. . . . This administration, so far as I can see, is not making a similar mistake."
The change, however, represents more than a new agenda. It also sets up potential conflicts for President Obama, who has reached out to religious activists across the spectrum. He runs the risk of alienating supporters and detractors alike as his administration attempts a dialogue on a host of issues and begins new policies, such as his decision this month to lift the ban on federal funding to international groups that provide abortions and abortion counselling.
Faith groups praised the administration's outreach during the transition. Between the election and the inauguration, Obama's staff held more than 20 meetings with a diverse mix of religious groups that included main line Protestant organizations such as Lutheran Services in America as well as the Salvation Army, Prison Fellowship and the Council for Christian Colleges and Universities.
Those attending said administration officials were seeking advice on how the new White House can work with faith organizations through Obama's Council for Faith-Based and Neighborhood Partnerships. The meetings also focused on such issues as the environment, AIDS worldwide, Middle East policy, detainee interrogations, criminal justice reform and the economy.
High-level Obama staff members attended the sessions, which were held at the transition headquarters, or participated through teleconference. They included Melody Barnes, director of the Domestic Policy Council; Heather Higginbottom, the council's deputy director; and Michael Strautmanis, Obama's director of intergovernmental relations.
Last week, Obama named Joshua DuBois, a 26-year-old Pentecostal pastor who ran religious outreach for the campaign, to head the White House's new office for faithbased programs, a White House aide said.
DuBois is close to the president, and faith leaders see his ascent as a sign of the importance of their causes to the new administration.
While the progressive groups are emphasizing social justice, many also are urging Obama to help reduce abortions. The fight over the issue has always been complex and is likely to become even more so. While many liberal groups say they want abortions reduced, other anti-abortion groups remain adamant about seeking a prohibition.
Catholic bishops, for example, will find Obama a "mixed bag," said Stephen Schneck, director of the Life Cycle Institute and a professor of politics at Catholic University. While many of the U. S. Conference of Catholic Bishops' positions on social justice align with those of the Obama administration, the bishops' firm opposition to abortion and embryonic stem cell research will put them at odds with the president.
"Clearly for the bishops, first and foremost, are these life issues," Schneck said.
"While they're certainly willing to work with the Obama administration on everything else, for them the key to a long-term relationship with the administration has to revolve around abortion."
Other areas of dispute also are becoming clear. The National Religious Campaign Against Torture praised Obama's decision to close the U. S. military prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, and end harsh interrogation techniques, but criticized his creation of a task force to study whether the CIA should be able to use additional interrogation techniques. "We cannot afford to risk a return to the secret abuses of the past," said a statement from the group, which represents 257 religious organizations.
Many have also expressed concern about Obama's stated desire to reverse the Bush policy of allowing religious groups to hire only people of their own faith in federally funded projects.
When Obama announced his plan for an office for faithbased initiatives, he said that groups receiving federal funding could not discriminate in hiring. Obama officials have been largely vague on this point since. Religious hiring rights are a priority for many religious groups.
And even groups more ideologically aligned with Obama may find themselves squaring off with him as he attempts to balance their competing interests with his agenda in other areas, such as the economy.
Sojourners, a liberal evangelical group, intends to keep the pressure up with a march in April, the Mobilization Against Poverty, that will call on the president to cut the poverty rate in half within 10 years.
The organizations say they are only attempting to help Obama stay on the course he has promised.
Said Sojourners organizer Jim Wallis: "We're trying to help him fulfil his commitment and hold his administration accountable at the same time."
© Copyright (c) The Calgary Herald
Social justice, poverty now prime issues
By Jacqueline L. Salmon And Michelle Boorstein, The Washington PostFebruary 8, 2009 8:01 AM
With a president they view as more sympathetic to their causes, progressive religious activists are pushing the new Obama administration for aggressive action on poverty, the environment and social justice issues that would mark a significant shift in the faith agenda that dominated the Bush years.
Many faith groups close to President George W. Bush focused on abortion, stem cell research and same-sex marriage. But now, liberal and centrist evangelicals and other activists say they are getting a voice and trying to turn the debate.
"The last administration showed no interest in talking to a large chunk of the religious community," said Melissa Rogers, director of the Center for Religion and Public Affairs at Wake Forest University in North Carolina.
"We're already seeing change. . . . This administration, so far as I can see, is not making a similar mistake."
The change, however, represents more than a new agenda. It also sets up potential conflicts for President Obama, who has reached out to religious activists across the spectrum. He runs the risk of alienating supporters and detractors alike as his administration attempts a dialogue on a host of issues and begins new policies, such as his decision this month to lift the ban on federal funding to international groups that provide abortions and abortion counselling.
Faith groups praised the administration's outreach during the transition. Between the election and the inauguration, Obama's staff held more than 20 meetings with a diverse mix of religious groups that included main line Protestant organizations such as Lutheran Services in America as well as the Salvation Army, Prison Fellowship and the Council for Christian Colleges and Universities.
Those attending said administration officials were seeking advice on how the new White House can work with faith organizations through Obama's Council for Faith-Based and Neighborhood Partnerships. The meetings also focused on such issues as the environment, AIDS worldwide, Middle East policy, detainee interrogations, criminal justice reform and the economy.
High-level Obama staff members attended the sessions, which were held at the transition headquarters, or participated through teleconference. They included Melody Barnes, director of the Domestic Policy Council; Heather Higginbottom, the council's deputy director; and Michael Strautmanis, Obama's director of intergovernmental relations.
Last week, Obama named Joshua DuBois, a 26-year-old Pentecostal pastor who ran religious outreach for the campaign, to head the White House's new office for faithbased programs, a White House aide said.
DuBois is close to the president, and faith leaders see his ascent as a sign of the importance of their causes to the new administration.
While the progressive groups are emphasizing social justice, many also are urging Obama to help reduce abortions. The fight over the issue has always been complex and is likely to become even more so. While many liberal groups say they want abortions reduced, other anti-abortion groups remain adamant about seeking a prohibition.
Catholic bishops, for example, will find Obama a "mixed bag," said Stephen Schneck, director of the Life Cycle Institute and a professor of politics at Catholic University. While many of the U. S. Conference of Catholic Bishops' positions on social justice align with those of the Obama administration, the bishops' firm opposition to abortion and embryonic stem cell research will put them at odds with the president.
"Clearly for the bishops, first and foremost, are these life issues," Schneck said.
"While they're certainly willing to work with the Obama administration on everything else, for them the key to a long-term relationship with the administration has to revolve around abortion."
Other areas of dispute also are becoming clear. The National Religious Campaign Against Torture praised Obama's decision to close the U. S. military prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, and end harsh interrogation techniques, but criticized his creation of a task force to study whether the CIA should be able to use additional interrogation techniques. "We cannot afford to risk a return to the secret abuses of the past," said a statement from the group, which represents 257 religious organizations.
Many have also expressed concern about Obama's stated desire to reverse the Bush policy of allowing religious groups to hire only people of their own faith in federally funded projects.
When Obama announced his plan for an office for faithbased initiatives, he said that groups receiving federal funding could not discriminate in hiring. Obama officials have been largely vague on this point since. Religious hiring rights are a priority for many religious groups.
And even groups more ideologically aligned with Obama may find themselves squaring off with him as he attempts to balance their competing interests with his agenda in other areas, such as the economy.
Sojourners, a liberal evangelical group, intends to keep the pressure up with a march in April, the Mobilization Against Poverty, that will call on the president to cut the poverty rate in half within 10 years.
The organizations say they are only attempting to help Obama stay on the course he has promised.
Said Sojourners organizer Jim Wallis: "We're trying to help him fulfil his commitment and hold his administration accountable at the same time."
© Copyright (c) The Calgary Herald
Faith leaders plan to counter atheist ads in Calgary
Billboards will appear on city buses
By Graeme Morton, Calgary HeraldFebruary 19, 2009 8:02 AM
A Muslim leader wants Calgarians of faith to counter an advertising campaign by atheists that questions the existence of God.
Syed Soharwardy said Wednesday he plans to meet with local religious leaders and groups to gather moral support and money to mount an ad campaign on city buses offering a faith-based message.
"In a free society, if the atheists have a right to express their opinion, then people of faith should come forward and speak up," said Soharwardy. "We want to convey positive messages about God; that God is with you.
"This campaign message will not be a particular Muslim, Jewish or Christian point of view. Our concept of God may be a little different, but we all believe in a divine power, a creator -- that's our commonality," Soharwardy said.
Public transit signs reading, "There's probably no God. Now stop worrying and enjoy your life," have run in European and American cities in recent months. The Freethought Association of Canada, a national atheist organization, has raised $43,000 in donations to buy similar ads, including on Calgary Transit buses.
Justin Trottier, Freethought Association president, said the ads made their debut in Toronto last week and will be added to streetcars and subways in the near future. He said requests to run similar ads have been rejected by civic officials in Halifax, Vancouver, Victoria, Kelowna, London, Ont., and Ottawa.
"We wanted Canadians to understand that there is a large demographic of nonbelievers in this country, but I'm pleased that the ads have sparked a wider debate on religion and free speech," said Trottier.
Cliff Erasmus, a local atheist spokesman, said he'll order the ads soon and hopes they'll be on Calgary Transit buses for a four-week run beginning in March.
"If there's a group that's going to run ads countering our message, that's great, let's have the discussion," said Erasmus. "I just hope they are original and don't simply change our wording."
Soharwardy said he wants the faith-based ads to run at the same time as the atheist campaign.
Pastor Brent Trask, president of the Calgary Evangelical Ministerial Association, welcomes the debate on faith, but wonders if the side of publicly funded buses is the best place to conduct it.
"Whether it's Muslims, Hindus or Christians, people who feel passionate about their faith have been expressing that for centuries and should continue to do that," said Trask.
"The Freethought society is welcome to express their position. But I don't think what they are doing raises the need to somehow counterbalance it. Truth is never afraid of diversity. Truth is truth, people will ultimately discover it through dialogue, and we've got the welcome mat out," Trask said.
The United Church of Canada has already weighed into the debate.
It has taken out newspaper ads quoting the atheist message and suggesting, "There's probably a God.Now stop worrying and enjoy your life." It invites people to vote on the two statements on its website, www.wondercafe.ca.
At last count, God's existence was leading 54 to 46 per cent after about 9,200 votes.
[email protected]
© Copyright (c) The Calgary Herald
Billboards will appear on city buses
By Graeme Morton, Calgary HeraldFebruary 19, 2009 8:02 AM
A Muslim leader wants Calgarians of faith to counter an advertising campaign by atheists that questions the existence of God.
Syed Soharwardy said Wednesday he plans to meet with local religious leaders and groups to gather moral support and money to mount an ad campaign on city buses offering a faith-based message.
"In a free society, if the atheists have a right to express their opinion, then people of faith should come forward and speak up," said Soharwardy. "We want to convey positive messages about God; that God is with you.
"This campaign message will not be a particular Muslim, Jewish or Christian point of view. Our concept of God may be a little different, but we all believe in a divine power, a creator -- that's our commonality," Soharwardy said.
Public transit signs reading, "There's probably no God. Now stop worrying and enjoy your life," have run in European and American cities in recent months. The Freethought Association of Canada, a national atheist organization, has raised $43,000 in donations to buy similar ads, including on Calgary Transit buses.
Justin Trottier, Freethought Association president, said the ads made their debut in Toronto last week and will be added to streetcars and subways in the near future. He said requests to run similar ads have been rejected by civic officials in Halifax, Vancouver, Victoria, Kelowna, London, Ont., and Ottawa.
"We wanted Canadians to understand that there is a large demographic of nonbelievers in this country, but I'm pleased that the ads have sparked a wider debate on religion and free speech," said Trottier.
Cliff Erasmus, a local atheist spokesman, said he'll order the ads soon and hopes they'll be on Calgary Transit buses for a four-week run beginning in March.
"If there's a group that's going to run ads countering our message, that's great, let's have the discussion," said Erasmus. "I just hope they are original and don't simply change our wording."
Soharwardy said he wants the faith-based ads to run at the same time as the atheist campaign.
Pastor Brent Trask, president of the Calgary Evangelical Ministerial Association, welcomes the debate on faith, but wonders if the side of publicly funded buses is the best place to conduct it.
"Whether it's Muslims, Hindus or Christians, people who feel passionate about their faith have been expressing that for centuries and should continue to do that," said Trask.
"The Freethought society is welcome to express their position. But I don't think what they are doing raises the need to somehow counterbalance it. Truth is never afraid of diversity. Truth is truth, people will ultimately discover it through dialogue, and we've got the welcome mat out," Trask said.
The United Church of Canada has already weighed into the debate.
It has taken out newspaper ads quoting the atheist message and suggesting, "There's probably a God.Now stop worrying and enjoy your life." It invites people to vote on the two statements on its website, www.wondercafe.ca.
At last count, God's existence was leading 54 to 46 per cent after about 9,200 votes.
[email protected]
© Copyright (c) The Calgary Herald
Muslim students recount personal experiences in Christian environment
By: Desiree Grimes
Posted: 2/26/09
This is the second of a four-part series on religious diversity on campus.
When she walked onto campus, she fell in love with the atmosphere, realizing that when people are close to God they reflect his kindness. This is why senior Madiha Abbasi chose to pursue a degree that will forever testify that she attended Houston Baptist University.
Muslims at a Christian university
"To me, there is little difference between Islam and Christianity, and I would rather be in a Christian environment where people are kind than a non-Christian environment. I was shy at first, but a lot of very devout Christians became my best friends. I never thought that could happen," Abbasi said.
Other Muslim students report similar positive experiences.
Freshman Nida Hassan said she found people on campus to be open and inquisitive out of a desire to learn about her religion. She also thinks it is important for Muslims to learn about the Christian faith.
"If I'm at a Christian university, I might as well grasp as much knowledge as possible. The Community Life and Worship options provide good experiences for Muslim students to see how Christians pray and come together."
Junior Saba Iyoob agreed.
"In the past three years, I have learned so much about everything."
Abbasi said she hopes the University will see that if it allowed religiously and culturally diverse organizations it would help define the University as Christian and take the teachings of Jesus to a higher level.
Muslim students interviewed for this story expressed enthusiasm over the possibility of others learning more about Islam to dispel common misconceptions about their religion.
Basic beliefs of Islam
According to the Encyclopedia of Science and Religion, Islam, which means "peace" or "surrender and submission to God's will," was formed in Arabia in the year A.D. 611 when, according to Muslim tradition, Muhammad of Mecca received a revelation from God. The angel Gabriel, who told Muhammad he had been chosen as the new messenger of God, delivered the revelation. Revelations came to Muhammad over the next 23 years, and these were compiled into the Quran.
"Truly submitting to God is one of the most fundamental things about Islam," senior Farah Mithani said.
To become Muslim, one must profess that there is no god but God, and Muhammad is the messenger of God. Muslims must also believe in six truths, which are God, angels, revealed books, divine messengers, afterlife and divine plans, according to the Encyclopedia of Science and Religion.
Iyoob said the five major pillars of Islam are Shadah, which is faith in the oneness of God and the finality of the prophethood of Muhammad; Salah, which is the establishment of daily prayers; Zakat, which is concern for and almsgiving to the needy; Sawm, which is self-purification through fasting; and Hajj, which is the pilgrimage to Mecca for those who are able.
Muslims believe in five prophets from God: Adam, Abraham, Moses, Jesus and Muhammad.
The Quran
Hassan said the Quran, which is the foundation of Islam, was revealed to the prophet Muhammad, who then revealed it to the world.
"The Quran is the book of guidance," Iyoob said. "It places emphasis on the moral significance of a historical event. Muslims believe the Quran itself is a miracle of Muhammad and the proof of his prophet-hood."
Mithani said that the major difference between the Quran and the Bible is the New Testament. The Quran contains stories that are also in the Old Testament as well as stories of Muhammad and his teachings.
Muslims have a special holding place for the Quran, Hassan said. It is called a kursi, which is Arabic for throne.
"You can carry the Quran around with you, but I wouldn't throw it around like a text book," Mithani said. "It's holy, so you have to respect it."
In addition to the Quran, the establishment of daily prayers known as Salah, is another fundamental practice of Islam.
Prayer in Islam
Hassan said Muslims pray at specific times during the day, three to five times a day depending on which sect they belong to. They pray on a special rug or a clean area if they are not able to go to a Mosque to pray.
Hassan is a Shiite Imami Ismaili Muslim. "We say our prayers, chant hymns and listen to our Imam's teachings. Our Imam, Aga Khan, is a direct descendent of the Prophet Muhammad. On the other hand, Sunni Muslims recite Quran verses in their Mosque."
Mithani, a Shiite Ismaili Muslim, said, "We pray three times a day - once in the morning before sunrise and twice at sunset. We repeat the same prayers, which are taken from the Quran."
Mithani added Muslims also have prayer beads, called Tasbih. They have either 11 or 33 beads on them, which are used to repeat the three prayers "Ya Ali, Ya Muhammad and Ya Allah" 99 times.
"Shiite Ismaili Muslms attend Jamat Khanne, which is similar to Mosque," Mithani said. "The difference is that anyone can enter a mosque, where as one has to be Muslim to enter the prayer hall of Jamat Khanne. The prayer hall opens at 4 a.m., and people come in and take their shoes off to pray and meditate."
Abbasi, a Sunni Muslim, said she prays by lying prostrate facing northeast toward Mecca.
The sects of Islam
The two major sects in Islam are Sunni and Shiite. Shiites believe that Muhammad chose his son-in-law Ali as the next leader of Islam, where Sunni believe that the leadership stopped at Muhammad, Hassan said.
Abbasi said there really are not huge differences between the two sects. It only appears that there is animosity between them because of the war in Iraq.
"I have many Shiite friends," Abbasi said. "It's the same as Baptists and Methodists sitting together."
In addition to clarifying this misconception, the students explained many other misunderstandings about Islam.
Myths about Islam
"We don't believe in a different God," Mithani said. "The name Allah is simply 'God' translated into Arabic."
While Arabic is the language of the Quran and Muslim prayers, not all Muslims are Arabs, and all Arabs are not Muslim, Iyoob said.
It was also reiterated multiple times that all Muslims are not terrorists.
"Violence is not an option for us," Hassan said. "Islam is a religion of peace."
Mithani agreed.
"We have a holy war called Jihad, which is the struggle to do good. It's similar to spiritual warfare in Christianity, but some people misinterpret Jihad to mean real war. I don't consider terrorists true Muslims."
Abbasi said she wished people understood that Islam is not a religion of coercion or force, but that the Quran teaches openness and tolerance of others' beliefs.
Islam and Christianity
Hassan said one of the most basic differences between Islam and Christianity is that Muslims believe in one God without a trinity. This is because Muslims do not attribute human characteristics to God, so he cannot have a son or daughter.
Jesus, called Isa in Islam, is a prophet, but Muslims do not believe he, or any other prophet, was divine.
"The Quran says Jesus was born to the virgin Maryam, and that he was not killed but raised up to heaven alive. Islamic traditions narrate that he will return to Earth near the Day of Judgement to restore justice," Iyoob said.
"I don't believe there is a correct path like Christians do," Mithani said. "We're all submissive to God and seeking heaven. Islam is the right path for me, but everyone has their own path."
If you are Buddhist, Hindu or Jewish and would like your voice to be heard in this series, please contact [email protected].
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
© Copyright 2009 The Collegian - Houston Baptist University
http://media.www.hbucollegian.com/media ... 9829.shtml
By: Desiree Grimes
Posted: 2/26/09
This is the second of a four-part series on religious diversity on campus.
When she walked onto campus, she fell in love with the atmosphere, realizing that when people are close to God they reflect his kindness. This is why senior Madiha Abbasi chose to pursue a degree that will forever testify that she attended Houston Baptist University.
Muslims at a Christian university
"To me, there is little difference between Islam and Christianity, and I would rather be in a Christian environment where people are kind than a non-Christian environment. I was shy at first, but a lot of very devout Christians became my best friends. I never thought that could happen," Abbasi said.
Other Muslim students report similar positive experiences.
Freshman Nida Hassan said she found people on campus to be open and inquisitive out of a desire to learn about her religion. She also thinks it is important for Muslims to learn about the Christian faith.
"If I'm at a Christian university, I might as well grasp as much knowledge as possible. The Community Life and Worship options provide good experiences for Muslim students to see how Christians pray and come together."
Junior Saba Iyoob agreed.
"In the past three years, I have learned so much about everything."
Abbasi said she hopes the University will see that if it allowed religiously and culturally diverse organizations it would help define the University as Christian and take the teachings of Jesus to a higher level.
Muslim students interviewed for this story expressed enthusiasm over the possibility of others learning more about Islam to dispel common misconceptions about their religion.
Basic beliefs of Islam
According to the Encyclopedia of Science and Religion, Islam, which means "peace" or "surrender and submission to God's will," was formed in Arabia in the year A.D. 611 when, according to Muslim tradition, Muhammad of Mecca received a revelation from God. The angel Gabriel, who told Muhammad he had been chosen as the new messenger of God, delivered the revelation. Revelations came to Muhammad over the next 23 years, and these were compiled into the Quran.
"Truly submitting to God is one of the most fundamental things about Islam," senior Farah Mithani said.
To become Muslim, one must profess that there is no god but God, and Muhammad is the messenger of God. Muslims must also believe in six truths, which are God, angels, revealed books, divine messengers, afterlife and divine plans, according to the Encyclopedia of Science and Religion.
Iyoob said the five major pillars of Islam are Shadah, which is faith in the oneness of God and the finality of the prophethood of Muhammad; Salah, which is the establishment of daily prayers; Zakat, which is concern for and almsgiving to the needy; Sawm, which is self-purification through fasting; and Hajj, which is the pilgrimage to Mecca for those who are able.
Muslims believe in five prophets from God: Adam, Abraham, Moses, Jesus and Muhammad.
The Quran
Hassan said the Quran, which is the foundation of Islam, was revealed to the prophet Muhammad, who then revealed it to the world.
"The Quran is the book of guidance," Iyoob said. "It places emphasis on the moral significance of a historical event. Muslims believe the Quran itself is a miracle of Muhammad and the proof of his prophet-hood."
Mithani said that the major difference between the Quran and the Bible is the New Testament. The Quran contains stories that are also in the Old Testament as well as stories of Muhammad and his teachings.
Muslims have a special holding place for the Quran, Hassan said. It is called a kursi, which is Arabic for throne.
"You can carry the Quran around with you, but I wouldn't throw it around like a text book," Mithani said. "It's holy, so you have to respect it."
In addition to the Quran, the establishment of daily prayers known as Salah, is another fundamental practice of Islam.
Prayer in Islam
Hassan said Muslims pray at specific times during the day, three to five times a day depending on which sect they belong to. They pray on a special rug or a clean area if they are not able to go to a Mosque to pray.
Hassan is a Shiite Imami Ismaili Muslim. "We say our prayers, chant hymns and listen to our Imam's teachings. Our Imam, Aga Khan, is a direct descendent of the Prophet Muhammad. On the other hand, Sunni Muslims recite Quran verses in their Mosque."
Mithani, a Shiite Ismaili Muslim, said, "We pray three times a day - once in the morning before sunrise and twice at sunset. We repeat the same prayers, which are taken from the Quran."
Mithani added Muslims also have prayer beads, called Tasbih. They have either 11 or 33 beads on them, which are used to repeat the three prayers "Ya Ali, Ya Muhammad and Ya Allah" 99 times.
"Shiite Ismaili Muslms attend Jamat Khanne, which is similar to Mosque," Mithani said. "The difference is that anyone can enter a mosque, where as one has to be Muslim to enter the prayer hall of Jamat Khanne. The prayer hall opens at 4 a.m., and people come in and take their shoes off to pray and meditate."
Abbasi, a Sunni Muslim, said she prays by lying prostrate facing northeast toward Mecca.
The sects of Islam
The two major sects in Islam are Sunni and Shiite. Shiites believe that Muhammad chose his son-in-law Ali as the next leader of Islam, where Sunni believe that the leadership stopped at Muhammad, Hassan said.
Abbasi said there really are not huge differences between the two sects. It only appears that there is animosity between them because of the war in Iraq.
"I have many Shiite friends," Abbasi said. "It's the same as Baptists and Methodists sitting together."
In addition to clarifying this misconception, the students explained many other misunderstandings about Islam.
Myths about Islam
"We don't believe in a different God," Mithani said. "The name Allah is simply 'God' translated into Arabic."
While Arabic is the language of the Quran and Muslim prayers, not all Muslims are Arabs, and all Arabs are not Muslim, Iyoob said.
It was also reiterated multiple times that all Muslims are not terrorists.
"Violence is not an option for us," Hassan said. "Islam is a religion of peace."
Mithani agreed.
"We have a holy war called Jihad, which is the struggle to do good. It's similar to spiritual warfare in Christianity, but some people misinterpret Jihad to mean real war. I don't consider terrorists true Muslims."
Abbasi said she wished people understood that Islam is not a religion of coercion or force, but that the Quran teaches openness and tolerance of others' beliefs.
Islam and Christianity
Hassan said one of the most basic differences between Islam and Christianity is that Muslims believe in one God without a trinity. This is because Muslims do not attribute human characteristics to God, so he cannot have a son or daughter.
Jesus, called Isa in Islam, is a prophet, but Muslims do not believe he, or any other prophet, was divine.
"The Quran says Jesus was born to the virgin Maryam, and that he was not killed but raised up to heaven alive. Islamic traditions narrate that he will return to Earth near the Day of Judgement to restore justice," Iyoob said.
"I don't believe there is a correct path like Christians do," Mithani said. "We're all submissive to God and seeking heaven. Islam is the right path for me, but everyone has their own path."
If you are Buddhist, Hindu or Jewish and would like your voice to be heard in this series, please contact [email protected].
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
© Copyright 2009 The Collegian - Houston Baptist University
http://media.www.hbucollegian.com/media ... 9829.shtml
Muslim-Catholic Meeting Statement
"A Culture of Peace Should Permeate All Aspects of Life"
ROME, FEB. 26, 2009 (Zenit.org).- Here is the final statement from the
Joint Committee for Dialogue of the Pontifical Council for
Interreligious Dialogue and the Cairo-based Permanent Committee of
al-Azhar for Dialogue Among the Monotheistic Religions. The group had
their annual meeting on Tuesday and Wednesday.
The participants listened to the presentation of the theme "The
Promotion of a Pedagogy and Culture of Peace with Particular Reference
to the Role of Religions" from the point of view of Catholics, by Dr.
Bernard Sabella, and from the Islamic point of view by Cheikh Ali
Shahata.
The discussions took place in a spirit of mutual respect, openness, and
friendship. They were inspired by the conviction of the importance of
good relations between Christians and Muslims and of their specific
contribution to peace in the world.
The participants agreed on the following:
1. Peace and security are much needed in our present world marked by
many conflicts and a feeling of insecurity.
2. Both Christians and Muslims consider peace a gift from God and, at
the same time, the fruit of human endeavor. No true and lasting peace
can be achieved without justice and equality among persons and
communities.
3. Religious leaders, especially Muslims and Christians, have the duty
to promote a culture of peace, each within his respective community,
especially through teaching and preaching.
4. A culture of peace should permeate all aspects of life: religious
formation, education, interpersonal relations and the arts in their
diverse forms. To this end, scholastic books should be revised in order
not to contain material which may offend the religious sentiments of
other believers, at times through the erroneous presentation of dogmas,
morals or history of other religions.
5. The media have a major role and responsibility in the promotion of
positive and respectful relations among the faithful of various
religions.
6. Recognizing the strong link between peace and human rights, special
attention was given to the defense of the dignity of the human person
and his/her rights, especially regarding freedom of conscience and of
religion.
7. Youth, the future of all religions and of humanity itself, need
special care in order to be protected from fanaticism and violence, and
to become peace builders for a better world.
8. Mindful of the suffering endured by the peoples of the Middle East
due to non-resolved conflicts, the participants, in respect of the
competence of the political leaders, ask to make use, through dialogue,
of the resources of international law to solve the problems at stake in
truth and justice.
Grateful to Almighty God for the abundant fruits of this meeting, the
participants agreed to have the next meeting of the Committee in Cairo,
from Tuesday, Feb. 23 to Wednesday, Feb. 24, 2010.
Cheikh Ali Abd al-Baqi Shahata
Head of al-Azhar Delegation
Cardinal Jean-Louis Tauran
Head of the Catholic Delegation
"A Culture of Peace Should Permeate All Aspects of Life"
ROME, FEB. 26, 2009 (Zenit.org).- Here is the final statement from the
Joint Committee for Dialogue of the Pontifical Council for
Interreligious Dialogue and the Cairo-based Permanent Committee of
al-Azhar for Dialogue Among the Monotheistic Religions. The group had
their annual meeting on Tuesday and Wednesday.
The participants listened to the presentation of the theme "The
Promotion of a Pedagogy and Culture of Peace with Particular Reference
to the Role of Religions" from the point of view of Catholics, by Dr.
Bernard Sabella, and from the Islamic point of view by Cheikh Ali
Shahata.
The discussions took place in a spirit of mutual respect, openness, and
friendship. They were inspired by the conviction of the importance of
good relations between Christians and Muslims and of their specific
contribution to peace in the world.
The participants agreed on the following:
1. Peace and security are much needed in our present world marked by
many conflicts and a feeling of insecurity.
2. Both Christians and Muslims consider peace a gift from God and, at
the same time, the fruit of human endeavor. No true and lasting peace
can be achieved without justice and equality among persons and
communities.
3. Religious leaders, especially Muslims and Christians, have the duty
to promote a culture of peace, each within his respective community,
especially through teaching and preaching.
4. A culture of peace should permeate all aspects of life: religious
formation, education, interpersonal relations and the arts in their
diverse forms. To this end, scholastic books should be revised in order
not to contain material which may offend the religious sentiments of
other believers, at times through the erroneous presentation of dogmas,
morals or history of other religions.
5. The media have a major role and responsibility in the promotion of
positive and respectful relations among the faithful of various
religions.
6. Recognizing the strong link between peace and human rights, special
attention was given to the defense of the dignity of the human person
and his/her rights, especially regarding freedom of conscience and of
religion.
7. Youth, the future of all religions and of humanity itself, need
special care in order to be protected from fanaticism and violence, and
to become peace builders for a better world.
8. Mindful of the suffering endured by the peoples of the Middle East
due to non-resolved conflicts, the participants, in respect of the
competence of the political leaders, ask to make use, through dialogue,
of the resources of international law to solve the problems at stake in
truth and justice.
Grateful to Almighty God for the abundant fruits of this meeting, the
participants agreed to have the next meeting of the Committee in Cairo,
from Tuesday, Feb. 23 to Wednesday, Feb. 24, 2010.
Cheikh Ali Abd al-Baqi Shahata
Head of al-Azhar Delegation
Cardinal Jean-Louis Tauran
Head of the Catholic Delegation
Published on National Catholic Reporter (http://ncronline.org)
The connections start here
By Joan Chittister
Created Mar 05, 2009
Swiss flagOne thing is for sure: I never in my life expected to be in an
interfaith meeting like the one that ended in Switzerland Feb. 26. After
all, I grew up in a world in which every religious denomination was
very, very sure of its uniqueness, its absolute monopoly on truth, its
special status, its need to protect itself against heretics and
infidels, against indifferentism and syncretism, against the great and
wild "others." Whoever they might be. And those lines, one did not
cross.
Then World War I and World War II, global business and globalization,
the League of Nations and the United Nations, the G-8, the G-7, the
G-20, and the European Union began to spring up everywhere. Fences came down everywhere. Borders ceased to exist. The world had, indeed, become a village. China was a day trip. Apartheid and genocide and
nuclearization and the loss of the rain forests became local issues.
But not religion. Religion tended to cling to the local turf with all
its claims of total truth and total privilege. There were, after all,
issues yet unresolved. Slavery and the Holocaust, for instance, with all
the theological overtones triggered by each. Or the crusades. Or
colonialism with its inclination to convert Jews, Moslems and Native
Americans at the end of a sword. Divisions along these lines were bitter
and deep, theological and cast in God-talk: a lethal brew.
Nevertheless, the new realities of pluralism were outrunning the
long-time dominance of past religious confines. The religious geography
of the world was seeping across national boundaries just as surely as
had its political and economic counterparts.
Signs of religious bonding began to emerge -- quietly, tentatively --
everywhere. Among others: After a 100 year hiatus, the Parliament of
Religion held its second international gathering, and then its third and
its fourth and now, soon, its fifth. The World Council of Churches
reached out across denominations to organize the Christian world for the
sake of the global community. Vatican II, Roman Catholicism's move into
the 20th century after 400 years of parochial isolation, published a
document on the church's relationship with both Christian and
non-Christian religions that would open dialogue among the faiths for
years to come. And, in 1986, Pope John Paul II's call for a Day of
Prayer in Assisi, Italy, among the leaders of all the great faith
traditions on the planet, gave world religion a human face and its
praying selves a common bond.
All of those, of course, were "official" -- and therefore cautious --
forays into the ecclesiastical world. Fueled by the communication
revolution as surely as the printing press upended religion before it.
However, another impulse was afoot.
Several months ago, TED, a program launched in 1984 for the collection
and pursuit of new ideas in science, business and the arts, gave its
Make A Wish award to Karen Armstrong. (TED stands for Technology,
Entertainment, Design.) Armstrong's wish, after years of religious
scholarship and writing, was that TED would help create a universal
charter for compassion among all the major religions of the world --
Hinduism, Buddhism, Judaism, Christianity and Islam. (See Armstrong's
TED speech [1].)
Then technology -- the value of which we judge as either a new creation
or the end of the world, depending on the day we judge it -- took over.
TED, originally begun to concentrate on new ideas in technology,
education and design, built a Web site that invited people all over the
world, in multiple languages, out of every perspective, to contribute
ideas for the charter and to evaluate these statements for power, impact
and inspirational effect. This may, in fact, be the first example of a
universally created document in the history of the world.
And that's where the meeting in Switzerland came in. Having built a Web
site that gathered the responses of people from all these traditions
from one end of the planet to the other, TED gathered a "Council of
Sages," made up of scholars and religious leaders, to review the ideas
and mold them into their final form.
Never had I seen a mixed council of people like this work on a single
document, together pouring out the ideals dearest to them about the very
foundations of their faiths, in one group. They were Islamic scholars, a
Hindu and a Christian nun, a Christian bishop and an ordained
clergywoman, Jewish rabbis and even a Grand Mufti from Egypt. (See
Council of Sages [2].)
And what happened? At the end of the day, they all discovered that their
separate religions had formed them well. Compassion, they agreed, is the
universal in each of our faiths, the glue meant to hold the world
together.
Compassion, the Council said, is not pity since pity assumes
superiority. Compassion is not an idea, it is an action that lifts the
burden of the other because the other is of us. It is the determination
to end the suffering of the other by spending oneself to do it.
Compassion is fundamental to every faith and more urgently needed now
more than ever. When whole people can be held hostage to robotized
weapons of war and the kinds of "religious commitment" that makes the
slaughter of innocents a holy act, compassion is needed.
But the purpose of the Charter is not to publish one more document. It's
purpose is to create a movement that not only binds humanity together
around the Golden Rule but provides a world-wide antidote to the use of
religion in the justification of violence.
The work is nothing less than the attempt to create a common movement
among Jews, Christians, Muslims, Buddhists and Hindus to delegitimize
the use of religion as a technique of either state or personal violence.
There will be public launch sites named, plaques raised, posters
printed, the signatures of 1,000 major religious leaders gathered, and
people everywhere engaged to be part of one great cry for Compassion.
As TED puts it on the Charter's website:
The Charter will change the tenor of the conversation around religion.
It will be a clarion call to the world.
The Charter will show that the voice of negativity and violence so often
associated with religion is the minority and that the voice of
compassion is the majority.
From where I stand, it's clear that religious people everywhere are
trying to do what their own official leadership has failed to do in both
church and state because what we've been doing, even as religions, is
not working anymore.
If I were you, I'd follow this movement closely. Get a copy of the
charter; distribute it; mount and display the plaque, spread the Web
site; change the world. The change has to start somewhere, and it's
obviously not going to start at the top. That leaves us.
From Where I Stand
Copyright (c) The National Catholic Reporter Publishing Company
115 E. Armour Blvd., Kansas City, MO 64111
(TEL 1-816-531-0538 FAX 1-816-968-2268)
Send comments about this Web site to: webkeeper@... PRIVACY
POLICY ADVERTISING POLICY
The connections start here
By Joan Chittister
Created Mar 05, 2009
Swiss flagOne thing is for sure: I never in my life expected to be in an
interfaith meeting like the one that ended in Switzerland Feb. 26. After
all, I grew up in a world in which every religious denomination was
very, very sure of its uniqueness, its absolute monopoly on truth, its
special status, its need to protect itself against heretics and
infidels, against indifferentism and syncretism, against the great and
wild "others." Whoever they might be. And those lines, one did not
cross.
Then World War I and World War II, global business and globalization,
the League of Nations and the United Nations, the G-8, the G-7, the
G-20, and the European Union began to spring up everywhere. Fences came down everywhere. Borders ceased to exist. The world had, indeed, become a village. China was a day trip. Apartheid and genocide and
nuclearization and the loss of the rain forests became local issues.
But not religion. Religion tended to cling to the local turf with all
its claims of total truth and total privilege. There were, after all,
issues yet unresolved. Slavery and the Holocaust, for instance, with all
the theological overtones triggered by each. Or the crusades. Or
colonialism with its inclination to convert Jews, Moslems and Native
Americans at the end of a sword. Divisions along these lines were bitter
and deep, theological and cast in God-talk: a lethal brew.
Nevertheless, the new realities of pluralism were outrunning the
long-time dominance of past religious confines. The religious geography
of the world was seeping across national boundaries just as surely as
had its political and economic counterparts.
Signs of religious bonding began to emerge -- quietly, tentatively --
everywhere. Among others: After a 100 year hiatus, the Parliament of
Religion held its second international gathering, and then its third and
its fourth and now, soon, its fifth. The World Council of Churches
reached out across denominations to organize the Christian world for the
sake of the global community. Vatican II, Roman Catholicism's move into
the 20th century after 400 years of parochial isolation, published a
document on the church's relationship with both Christian and
non-Christian religions that would open dialogue among the faiths for
years to come. And, in 1986, Pope John Paul II's call for a Day of
Prayer in Assisi, Italy, among the leaders of all the great faith
traditions on the planet, gave world religion a human face and its
praying selves a common bond.
All of those, of course, were "official" -- and therefore cautious --
forays into the ecclesiastical world. Fueled by the communication
revolution as surely as the printing press upended religion before it.
However, another impulse was afoot.
Several months ago, TED, a program launched in 1984 for the collection
and pursuit of new ideas in science, business and the arts, gave its
Make A Wish award to Karen Armstrong. (TED stands for Technology,
Entertainment, Design.) Armstrong's wish, after years of religious
scholarship and writing, was that TED would help create a universal
charter for compassion among all the major religions of the world --
Hinduism, Buddhism, Judaism, Christianity and Islam. (See Armstrong's
TED speech [1].)
Then technology -- the value of which we judge as either a new creation
or the end of the world, depending on the day we judge it -- took over.
TED, originally begun to concentrate on new ideas in technology,
education and design, built a Web site that invited people all over the
world, in multiple languages, out of every perspective, to contribute
ideas for the charter and to evaluate these statements for power, impact
and inspirational effect. This may, in fact, be the first example of a
universally created document in the history of the world.
And that's where the meeting in Switzerland came in. Having built a Web
site that gathered the responses of people from all these traditions
from one end of the planet to the other, TED gathered a "Council of
Sages," made up of scholars and religious leaders, to review the ideas
and mold them into their final form.
Never had I seen a mixed council of people like this work on a single
document, together pouring out the ideals dearest to them about the very
foundations of their faiths, in one group. They were Islamic scholars, a
Hindu and a Christian nun, a Christian bishop and an ordained
clergywoman, Jewish rabbis and even a Grand Mufti from Egypt. (See
Council of Sages [2].)
And what happened? At the end of the day, they all discovered that their
separate religions had formed them well. Compassion, they agreed, is the
universal in each of our faiths, the glue meant to hold the world
together.
Compassion, the Council said, is not pity since pity assumes
superiority. Compassion is not an idea, it is an action that lifts the
burden of the other because the other is of us. It is the determination
to end the suffering of the other by spending oneself to do it.
Compassion is fundamental to every faith and more urgently needed now
more than ever. When whole people can be held hostage to robotized
weapons of war and the kinds of "religious commitment" that makes the
slaughter of innocents a holy act, compassion is needed.
But the purpose of the Charter is not to publish one more document. It's
purpose is to create a movement that not only binds humanity together
around the Golden Rule but provides a world-wide antidote to the use of
religion in the justification of violence.
The work is nothing less than the attempt to create a common movement
among Jews, Christians, Muslims, Buddhists and Hindus to delegitimize
the use of religion as a technique of either state or personal violence.
There will be public launch sites named, plaques raised, posters
printed, the signatures of 1,000 major religious leaders gathered, and
people everywhere engaged to be part of one great cry for Compassion.
As TED puts it on the Charter's website:
The Charter will change the tenor of the conversation around religion.
It will be a clarion call to the world.
The Charter will show that the voice of negativity and violence so often
associated with religion is the minority and that the voice of
compassion is the majority.
From where I stand, it's clear that religious people everywhere are
trying to do what their own official leadership has failed to do in both
church and state because what we've been doing, even as religions, is
not working anymore.
If I were you, I'd follow this movement closely. Get a copy of the
charter; distribute it; mount and display the plaque, spread the Web
site; change the world. The change has to start somewhere, and it's
obviously not going to start at the top. That leaves us.
From Where I Stand
Copyright (c) The National Catholic Reporter Publishing Company
115 E. Armour Blvd., Kansas City, MO 64111
(TEL 1-816-531-0538 FAX 1-816-968-2268)
Send comments about this Web site to: webkeeper@... PRIVACY
POLICY ADVERTISING POLICY
Religious heads to hold own summit during G8
TheStar.com - Canada - Religious heads to hold own summit during G8
Politicians attending meeting in Muskoka will get push to aid the poor, environment
March 19, 2009
Stuart laidlaw
faith and ethics reporter
When the world's most powerful government leaders gather in cottage country next year to discuss how to get the global economy back on track, religious leaders from around the world will be on hand to push them to remember the poor and the environment.
"How can the G8 ignore it if all these voices are speaking together," asks Rev. Karen Hamilton, general secretary of the Canadian Council of Churches.
The Council of Churches is organizing what promises to be the biggest ever such gathering of religious leaders from around the world in a counter-conference to coincide with the annual G8 political leaders' conference planned for the Deerhurst Resort near Huntsville.
Hamilton says there will be top representatives from all the world's major faiths at the counter-conference, including South Africa's Desmond Tutu and the Aga Khan. She has also been told the Dalai Lama hopes to attend, which she says will give the meeting added clout with the political leaders.
Her group launches its countdown to the June 25-27 summit tonight with a public lecture by University of Toronto economist John Kirton at the Noor Cultural Centre on Wynford Dr. Word of the event has been spread by the centre through its network of churches, synagogues, mosques and temples.
Kirton, a world-recognized expert on the Group of Eight, says that while the group of the world's top industrialized nations has promised many times to address the needs of the poor, it has only a 47 per cent success rate in fulfilling its own promises for action.
"They just need to be held to account," says Kirton, an active member in the Anglican Church.
Left to themselves, the G8 leaders have fallen badly behind their promises to address the needs of the world's poor, he says.
Kirton points to promises made at successive summits to fight AIDS and polio in developing countries, for example, while funding for treatment programs has been cut and the diseases are once again on the rise. The same can be said for promises on global warming, hunger and numerous other issues, he says.
And with the financial crisis deepening around the world, Kirton warns, political leaders will be tempted to further cut their help for the sick and poor in developing countries. He has not, however, given up on the G8 leaders just yet.
"They really want to (live up to their commitments), they are not lying to their people," says Kirton. And that, he says, is where faith leaders can play a key role.
"We know faith-based leaders can push the G8 to go further," he says.
Unlike black-clad protesters who battle police outside the gates of each G8 meeting, it's harder for political leaders to ignore the admonitions of the world's religious leaders.
The religious counter-summit will be held at the University of Winnipeg, where school president Lloyd Axworthy, a former federal Liberal cabinet member, has donated the use of his campus.
That's a long way from Huntsville, Hamilton admits, but says that with all the security at such meetings, there is no way the religious leaders could meet at Deerhurst as well.
She is expecting more than 100 religious leaders, plus their staff and followers, to attend. It will be the largest ever such event, and open to anybody who wants to attend.
The first faith-groups meeting to be held alongside the G8 was in 2005, and organizers have typically spent only a matter of months getting ready. Hamilton and her team have been laying the groundwork since last summer when the Deerhurst resort in Muskoka was announced as the 2010 venue.
Kirton said such long preparation time will give the event added sway with the political leaders, adding the G8 tends to most respect groups that show a long-term commitment to organizing summit-related events.
Hamilton hopes that will translate into the first face-to-face meeting between political and religious leaders during the Muskoka G8.
http://www.thestar.com/printArticle/604652
****
'God cares for everyone,' new billboards tell transit riders
By Graeme Morton, Calgary HeraldMarch 19, 2009 3:03 AM
The debate over the existence of a supreme being will ramp up next week when 10 pro-God advertisements appear in response to atheist messages already running on Calgary Transit.
Calgary Muslim leader Syed Soharwardy, who has been leading the faith-based campaign, said the ads will start running on eight buses and twoC-Trains Monday.
They feature the slogan, "God cares for everyone . . . even for those who say He doesn't exist."
Soharwardy said he has raised about $12,000 from local Christians and Muslims, including a $6,000 cheque from an anonymous donor, to pay for the ads, which will run for four weeks.
The ads sponsored by the Freethought Association of Canada say, "There's probably no God. Now stop worrying and enjoy your life." They've been running on city buses since March 9.
"We all believe in freedom of expression, and we recognize the atheists' right to their point of view," said Soharwardy.
"But we think their campaign sends a misleading message. It says that if you believe in God, you don't enjoy life, and nothing could be further from the truth."
Soharwardy said people of faith draw strength and joy from their belief in God, particularly in uncertain times such as the current economic recession. "We have a responsibility to share what we believe is the truth with the public."
The new ads invite readers to visit the campaign's website, www.godexists.ca, to add their comments to the debate.
Cliff Erasmus, executive director of the Calgary Centre for Inquiry, an atheist group, said he welcomes hearing from the other side of the debate.
"I'm glad they feel they can counter our position," said Erasmus. "But it still comes back to the fact that they've been advertising religion for 2,500 years now. They obviously feel threatened by our message."
Calgary is the second Canadian city, following Toronto, where the atheist ads have been running on public transit. A number of other cities have not permitted the campaign.
Erasmus said he hasn't heard a lot of reaction to the atheist ads.
"It has certainly died down from the hoopla when they were first announced," he said. "I think people are seeing them, saying 'hmmm, that's cool,' and then getting on with their busy lives."
Ron Collins, spokesman for Calgary Transit, said they have received "some complaints" about the atheist ad campaign.
[email protected]
© Copyright (c) The Calgary Herald
TheStar.com - Canada - Religious heads to hold own summit during G8
Politicians attending meeting in Muskoka will get push to aid the poor, environment
March 19, 2009
Stuart laidlaw
faith and ethics reporter
When the world's most powerful government leaders gather in cottage country next year to discuss how to get the global economy back on track, religious leaders from around the world will be on hand to push them to remember the poor and the environment.
"How can the G8 ignore it if all these voices are speaking together," asks Rev. Karen Hamilton, general secretary of the Canadian Council of Churches.
The Council of Churches is organizing what promises to be the biggest ever such gathering of religious leaders from around the world in a counter-conference to coincide with the annual G8 political leaders' conference planned for the Deerhurst Resort near Huntsville.
Hamilton says there will be top representatives from all the world's major faiths at the counter-conference, including South Africa's Desmond Tutu and the Aga Khan. She has also been told the Dalai Lama hopes to attend, which she says will give the meeting added clout with the political leaders.
Her group launches its countdown to the June 25-27 summit tonight with a public lecture by University of Toronto economist John Kirton at the Noor Cultural Centre on Wynford Dr. Word of the event has been spread by the centre through its network of churches, synagogues, mosques and temples.
Kirton, a world-recognized expert on the Group of Eight, says that while the group of the world's top industrialized nations has promised many times to address the needs of the poor, it has only a 47 per cent success rate in fulfilling its own promises for action.
"They just need to be held to account," says Kirton, an active member in the Anglican Church.
Left to themselves, the G8 leaders have fallen badly behind their promises to address the needs of the world's poor, he says.
Kirton points to promises made at successive summits to fight AIDS and polio in developing countries, for example, while funding for treatment programs has been cut and the diseases are once again on the rise. The same can be said for promises on global warming, hunger and numerous other issues, he says.
And with the financial crisis deepening around the world, Kirton warns, political leaders will be tempted to further cut their help for the sick and poor in developing countries. He has not, however, given up on the G8 leaders just yet.
"They really want to (live up to their commitments), they are not lying to their people," says Kirton. And that, he says, is where faith leaders can play a key role.
"We know faith-based leaders can push the G8 to go further," he says.
Unlike black-clad protesters who battle police outside the gates of each G8 meeting, it's harder for political leaders to ignore the admonitions of the world's religious leaders.
The religious counter-summit will be held at the University of Winnipeg, where school president Lloyd Axworthy, a former federal Liberal cabinet member, has donated the use of his campus.
That's a long way from Huntsville, Hamilton admits, but says that with all the security at such meetings, there is no way the religious leaders could meet at Deerhurst as well.
She is expecting more than 100 religious leaders, plus their staff and followers, to attend. It will be the largest ever such event, and open to anybody who wants to attend.
The first faith-groups meeting to be held alongside the G8 was in 2005, and organizers have typically spent only a matter of months getting ready. Hamilton and her team have been laying the groundwork since last summer when the Deerhurst resort in Muskoka was announced as the 2010 venue.
Kirton said such long preparation time will give the event added sway with the political leaders, adding the G8 tends to most respect groups that show a long-term commitment to organizing summit-related events.
Hamilton hopes that will translate into the first face-to-face meeting between political and religious leaders during the Muskoka G8.
http://www.thestar.com/printArticle/604652
****
'God cares for everyone,' new billboards tell transit riders
By Graeme Morton, Calgary HeraldMarch 19, 2009 3:03 AM
The debate over the existence of a supreme being will ramp up next week when 10 pro-God advertisements appear in response to atheist messages already running on Calgary Transit.
Calgary Muslim leader Syed Soharwardy, who has been leading the faith-based campaign, said the ads will start running on eight buses and twoC-Trains Monday.
They feature the slogan, "God cares for everyone . . . even for those who say He doesn't exist."
Soharwardy said he has raised about $12,000 from local Christians and Muslims, including a $6,000 cheque from an anonymous donor, to pay for the ads, which will run for four weeks.
The ads sponsored by the Freethought Association of Canada say, "There's probably no God. Now stop worrying and enjoy your life." They've been running on city buses since March 9.
"We all believe in freedom of expression, and we recognize the atheists' right to their point of view," said Soharwardy.
"But we think their campaign sends a misleading message. It says that if you believe in God, you don't enjoy life, and nothing could be further from the truth."
Soharwardy said people of faith draw strength and joy from their belief in God, particularly in uncertain times such as the current economic recession. "We have a responsibility to share what we believe is the truth with the public."
The new ads invite readers to visit the campaign's website, www.godexists.ca, to add their comments to the debate.
Cliff Erasmus, executive director of the Calgary Centre for Inquiry, an atheist group, said he welcomes hearing from the other side of the debate.
"I'm glad they feel they can counter our position," said Erasmus. "But it still comes back to the fact that they've been advertising religion for 2,500 years now. They obviously feel threatened by our message."
Calgary is the second Canadian city, following Toronto, where the atheist ads have been running on public transit. A number of other cities have not permitted the campaign.
Erasmus said he hasn't heard a lot of reaction to the atheist ads.
"It has certainly died down from the hoopla when they were first announced," he said. "I think people are seeing them, saying 'hmmm, that's cool,' and then getting on with their busy lives."
Ron Collins, spokesman for Calgary Transit, said they have received "some complaints" about the atheist ad campaign.
[email protected]
© Copyright (c) The Calgary Herald
Author says secular world not a threat to religion's future
By Graeme Morton, Calgary Herald
March 21, 2009
It's not the easy, breezy read you'd take on your next beach vacation.
But few recent books are more important to those interested in spiritual issues than Charles Taylor's epic A Secular Age, according to Douglas Shantz, the chair of Christian thought at the University of Calgary.
Shantz examined Taylor's massive, 874-page study of religion's role in our secular era during last week's Iwaasa Lecture on Urban Theology, which drew a large crowd to Foothills Alliance Church.
"Taylor denies the popular idea that it is inevitable that religion will disappear as secularization increases around the world," Shantz said. "He suggests that, in reality, a religious 'nova effect' is taking place, that religion is remarkably adaptive and is expressing itself in all kinds of new forms, rather than diminishing."
Taylor, a 77-year-old Canadian philosopher and former McGill University professor, has legions of fans around the world. Shantz says part of Taylor's attraction is that his works are read by academics and the public alike.
However, Shantz cautions that A Secular Age will stretch the intellect, not to mention the patience, of many readers.
"It's a massive, meandering, intimidating book that examines the last 500 years of Christian life," says Shantz. "But I liked the way Taylor says to the reader, 'This is the world we have, this is the Christianity we have, now run with it.' "
Shantz notes Taylor is a practising Roman Catholic who talks about religion from an experiential, not theoretical stance.
"In the 1500s, Taylor says faith was much more of an 'enchanted' practice, where there was mystery deeply ingrained in it. Today, faith for a lot of people is chiefly a mental practice," says Shantz.
Taylor also notes the growing phenomenon of "minimal religion," where an individual will say "I'm a Christian, but don't try to put me into a denomination and don't try to get me inside a church."
Shantz calls A Secular Age a positive force for people of faith, despite the upheavals and uncertainty facing organized religion.
"Taylor says in modern society, people are hungry to find some outlet for the desire for fullness in their lives," says Shantz.
"He says it's a wonderful time in history, when people of faith shouldn't be on the defensive or feel guilty. But he also cautions Christians not be smug, to be better listeners to others with different views, to welcome variety, not feel threatened by it."
Taylor's interests have stretched far beyond the academic world. He ran a number of times for the NDP in federal elections, including an unsuccessful race against a young Liberal candidate named Pierre Trudeau in a Montreal riding in 1965.
[email protected]
© Copyright (c) The Calgary Herald
By Graeme Morton, Calgary Herald
March 21, 2009
It's not the easy, breezy read you'd take on your next beach vacation.
But few recent books are more important to those interested in spiritual issues than Charles Taylor's epic A Secular Age, according to Douglas Shantz, the chair of Christian thought at the University of Calgary.
Shantz examined Taylor's massive, 874-page study of religion's role in our secular era during last week's Iwaasa Lecture on Urban Theology, which drew a large crowd to Foothills Alliance Church.
"Taylor denies the popular idea that it is inevitable that religion will disappear as secularization increases around the world," Shantz said. "He suggests that, in reality, a religious 'nova effect' is taking place, that religion is remarkably adaptive and is expressing itself in all kinds of new forms, rather than diminishing."
Taylor, a 77-year-old Canadian philosopher and former McGill University professor, has legions of fans around the world. Shantz says part of Taylor's attraction is that his works are read by academics and the public alike.
However, Shantz cautions that A Secular Age will stretch the intellect, not to mention the patience, of many readers.
"It's a massive, meandering, intimidating book that examines the last 500 years of Christian life," says Shantz. "But I liked the way Taylor says to the reader, 'This is the world we have, this is the Christianity we have, now run with it.' "
Shantz notes Taylor is a practising Roman Catholic who talks about religion from an experiential, not theoretical stance.
"In the 1500s, Taylor says faith was much more of an 'enchanted' practice, where there was mystery deeply ingrained in it. Today, faith for a lot of people is chiefly a mental practice," says Shantz.
Taylor also notes the growing phenomenon of "minimal religion," where an individual will say "I'm a Christian, but don't try to put me into a denomination and don't try to get me inside a church."
Shantz calls A Secular Age a positive force for people of faith, despite the upheavals and uncertainty facing organized religion.
"Taylor says in modern society, people are hungry to find some outlet for the desire for fullness in their lives," says Shantz.
"He says it's a wonderful time in history, when people of faith shouldn't be on the defensive or feel guilty. But he also cautions Christians not be smug, to be better listeners to others with different views, to welcome variety, not feel threatened by it."
Taylor's interests have stretched far beyond the academic world. He ran a number of times for the NDP in federal elections, including an unsuccessful race against a young Liberal candidate named Pierre Trudeau in a Montreal riding in 1965.
[email protected]
© Copyright (c) The Calgary Herald
Ex-British PM Blair focuses on religious harmony
Canwest News ServiceApril 25, 2009 7:30 AM
Tony Blair's new mission in life is noble, but hardly modest.
Through his Tony Blair Faith Foundation, he hopes to bring understanding between the world's religions and therein see the harmony that will help solve war, the ailing global economy and epidemics, such as malaria.
The former British prime minister brought his quest to the swank Canadian Club in Toronto on Friday, speaking to about 400 of the city's elite at the Royal York Hotel.
He reminded his audience all situations now are basically global, and it was extraordinary the way "what happened in the American subprime mortgage market has significance to people in the remotest parts of the U. K., Europe and elsewhere," and that the world is in a fragile state.
"We live in a world where, like it or not, globalization is shrinking it and pushing it together. The issue is, does religious faith and do issues over culture pull the world back apart?"
Blair said he is often asked why he turned his attention to religious harmony.
"We know as political leaders . . . that unless we can create a situation in which people of different cultures and faiths can live together peacefully . . . then it's going to be hard to resolve those questions of conflict and security that confront us."
© Copyright (c) The Calgary Herald
Canwest News ServiceApril 25, 2009 7:30 AM
Tony Blair's new mission in life is noble, but hardly modest.
Through his Tony Blair Faith Foundation, he hopes to bring understanding between the world's religions and therein see the harmony that will help solve war, the ailing global economy and epidemics, such as malaria.
The former British prime minister brought his quest to the swank Canadian Club in Toronto on Friday, speaking to about 400 of the city's elite at the Royal York Hotel.
He reminded his audience all situations now are basically global, and it was extraordinary the way "what happened in the American subprime mortgage market has significance to people in the remotest parts of the U. K., Europe and elsewhere," and that the world is in a fragile state.
"We live in a world where, like it or not, globalization is shrinking it and pushing it together. The issue is, does religious faith and do issues over culture pull the world back apart?"
Blair said he is often asked why he turned his attention to religious harmony.
"We know as political leaders . . . that unless we can create a situation in which people of different cultures and faiths can live together peacefully . . . then it's going to be hard to resolve those questions of conflict and security that confront us."
© Copyright (c) The Calgary Herald
Milia Islam-Majeed is a woman who walks the walk
By Zeyad Maasarani, IFN Staff Reporter
After years of representing her religion on an individual level, it didn’t take long for Milia Islam-Majeed to realize that religious studies was her calling in life.Islam-Majeed grew up in the Midwest where she learned to practice and convey her religion in an environment oblivious to her faith tradition. A renowned expert on theology and world religions, Islam-Majeed currently serves as the executive director of the South Coast Interfaith Council and is the first Muslim to hold the position.She obtained her undergraduate degree in World Religions and Psychology from Westminster College in Missouri and thereafter moved to Boston for her graduate work. She is a 2004 graduate of Harvard Divinity School where she earned her Masters in Theological Studies of World Religions.Before becoming the executive director of SCIC, Islam-Majeed served as the program manager of the Islamic Society of North America’s Leadership Development Center in Plainfield, Indiana.In her tenure at ISNA, she participated in more than 20 interfaith discussions, forums and programs through faith based organizations, academic institutions, governmental agencies as well as the general community.Since becoming the executive director of SCIC, Islam-Majeed has spearheaded numerous efforts for community outreach and unity amongst all traditions. Her colleagues praise her dedication, which is demonstrated by her track record and ambitious agenda.
IFN: What do you hope to achieve as head of the SCIC?
Milia Islam-Majeed: I think “faith” and how it navigates one’s life – or lack thereof – is fascinating. As the executive director of the South Coast Interfaith Council, I hope to illuminate the power of faith in the lives of everyday people. I want to provide a space where people can speak about their faith traditions and what it means to them. My goals include working on projects and programs together with people of different faiths in order to illustrate our common humanity. I want us to know what it means to be a Christian, Jew, Muslim, Buddhist, Baha’i and to learn from one another. Above all, I want everyone to see the point of commonality we all share amidst all the diversity and build on that so that we can live in this pluralistic society as a collective community that is characterized by respect of one another; a kind of respect that stems out of truly trying to understand “the other.”
IFN: What was the first project you spearheaded? What is the project most dear to you?
MIM: The first major project I spearheaded was in graduate school. I was the co-chair of Harvard’s 2002 Islam in America Conference. I worked with an amazing committee comprised of fellow graduate students and together we organized a two-day conference with over 20 renowned speakers entitled “Facing New Challenges and Building Solutions.” It was particularly important to have that conference because at that time there was a lot of talk about Islam’s role in the Middle East and other places in the world, but there was very little attention paid to the presence of the Islamic faith in America, including in academia. This conference aimed to give the study of Islam in America academic credibility as well as educate the American people about who Muslims in America truly were, not just who they thought we were based on a negative media portrayal.
I feel every project I have done is important to me and it would be difficult to identify one that is most important. These are dynamic times we are living in and the projects I have spearheaded are a reflection of the times, thus each one was, and is, different from the other. Nonetheless, one thing I hope to illustrate through the projects I work on is the importance of unity – respecting humanity amidst the differences that are existent between us. I hope that the projects that I have worked on and continue to work on show that we have much to learn about one another and the more we learn the more we see that, at the end of the day, we are all more alike than we are different.
IFN: As the first non-Christian to head the SCIC, what kind of dynamic do you think you bring to the table because of your religion?
MIM: By nature, I have always been an optimist. However, at the same time I am also cognizant of the reality that’s existent around us. First and foremost, I think it speaks volumes of the interfaith community here in southern California. As human beings, we aspire to the ideals of truly looking beyond stereotypes and acting in accordance to that – but to be a part of a community that truly illustrates that is an honor. I know no community is perfect and certainly there is always room to grow. Nonetheless, I am humbled and extremely grateful for the trust the community has placed in me and for this opportunity to serve them.
That said, I know that there are still stereotypes that exist about Muslims in general and Muslim women in particular, especially those who practice the hijab (head covering). So certainly, there are double takes sometimes as I walk up to a podium to deliver a speech or visit other faith congregations to introduce myself as well as the work of SCIC. But I feel truly privileged to be in a position by which I can dispel any stereotypes by merely doing my job and being who I am – by providing a real human face to counter the negative images that may exist in the minds of people. Everyday holds a new adventure and opportunity and I look forward to doing my part in dispelling any negative perceptions of Muslims by doing my job to the best of my ability.
IFN: How would you characterize your experience of growing up as a Muslim the Midwest in a town with few Muslims and little knowledge of Islam?
MIM: It was challenging, but something not impossible because of the support system that my family provided. First and foremost, I will always be eternally grateful to God for truly being there every step of the way. I will also forever be indebted to my family, especially my parents Fatema and Matiul Islam, for inculcating in me the love of God and religion from a very young age. I think, ultimately, a sense and practice of faith has to start and be cultivated in the home. That is not to say that it wasn’t difficult during my adolescent years, because it was. However, I think the experience of growing up as such a minority also forced me to interact with people who weren’t “like us.” As such, some of the greatest friendships I developed were with people of other faith traditions. Everything happens for a reason … perhaps it is precisely because of my childhood experiences interacting with people of other faiths that prepared me to be in this position today.
IFN: Many Muslim-American women feel they combat a stigma of oppression and ignorance. As a Muslim-American woman who has achieved great feats and has developed as a leader in the community, what would you advise young Muslim women dreaming of following in your footsteps?
MIM: I would tell them that there is nothing that they cannot do by being a practicing Muslim – whether they chose to wear the scarf or not. Religion in no way limits you. For me personally, it has provided me with a strong foundation for which I will forever be grateful. We as Muslim women should not espouse a defeatist attitude or an inferiority complex. Often times, it's our own perceptions of what we think the others see us as that work against us – it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. Be proud of your Islamic heritage; know that it’s a gift and a source of empowerment. Use that source of empowerment to make a difference in the world for the betterment of all others around you – regardless of what religion they are. We must show through our actions that we are not oppressed or inferior than our brothers in faith. Rather we have to demonstrate through our actions that Islam is a religion that cares about humanity at large and that the ideologies embedded in the Islamic tradition are our motivating factor to truly make a positive impact in the lives of others.
IFN: When you were a Program Manager with ISNA you facilitated leadership training seminars. What do you think leaders of the Muslim-American community could have learned from your seminars? What do you think they can do better?
MIM: I think one of the greatest challenges we face is the process of integration within the greater societal paradigm we live in. Integration does not mean we lose our Islamic-ness, but rather we incorporate it within the cultural context we have here without compromising the core Islamic beliefs and principles. Certainly, there are ills that we must stay away from, but this society we live in also has a great deal to offer us. Thus we must not live in segregated communities, but rather have a sense of ownership of the society we live in by being participating members. We must be more involved. We must have more social service workers, community organizers, journalists, and people in the local governments. I whole-heartedly believe that it is in this country that we can show the beauty of what Islam truly is by being engaging citizens.
Another challenge we face – from my experiences within the Muslim communities in America – is that of religious leadership. I think we have some amazing individuals who are unbelievably versed in the Islamic sciences, however they know little about this cultural context we live in. As such, there is a gap that is created and that is hurtful to the Muslim communities. I feel it is imperative that we have religious leaders who are not only versed in the Islamic sciences, but that they are also able to lead and show the community how to apply those Islamic sciences and principles within this cultural context. We are a growing community, so I am confident we are moving in the right direction when it comes to this, but it still remains a challenge today.
IFN: You directed the "Meet the Author" program with ISNA. What was your most notable experience?
MIM: Having the opportunity to work with Dr. Robert Fisk was probably my most notable experience. I think he is a remarkable man and there is so much the world can learn from him. That and also being able to work with some of my personal role models in academia such as Dr. Sherman Jackson, Dr. Umar Faruq Abdullah and Dr. Muneer Fareed. I think these are some of the individuals who have contributed significantly to Islamic scholarship, particularly to scholarship pertaining to Islam in America and it was such an enriching experience to be able to work with them.
IFN: You received a Master's of Theological Studies from Harvard Divinity School. Were you satisfied with the way Islam and Muslims are scholastically and academically portrayed? What can non-Muslim American institutions/authors do to better understand and teach Islam?
MIM: It’s always a bit challenging studying Islam in western academia, although I must say we have more and more individuals engaged in this task and, nowadays, there are more younger professors who have themselves been through the system, which really helps. I was very satisfied with the resources that were available at Harvard. What I didn’t learn in the classroom I was able to obtain through the library collection there as well as the many amazing people I was honored to meet and learn from. I think we, as Muslims, have to a play a more proactive role in writing our own history. I did feel that was missing in academia. In regards to what non-Muslims can do better to understand Muslims – interact with them on a personal level and understand that we are not monolithic people. We represent all cultures and ethnicities and that is both enriching and challenging. As non-Muslims I think its important to understand that often times a culture paints the religion, rather than the religion coloring the culture. I think to gain a deep understanding of Muslims both a basic understanding of the faith as well as personal interaction is a must.
IFN: As a Muslim women immersed in interfaith, who meets leaders from all faith communities, what have you done to strengthen the place of Muslims at the interfaith table? What needs to be done?
MIM: In my position, it’s important that I provide room for others to speak. However, I also think that at times actions speak louder than words. So I hope that my mere presence there as an organizer and facilitator of interfaith dialogues and projects illustrate that Muslims play a vital role in strengthening communities of faiths here in America.
I do hope that Muslims take a more proactive role in being a part of the interfaith community. I think if we expect non-Muslims to take the time to understand who we are, then we must extend the same courtesy to them. Certainly, we have come far as a community and I hope we continue to be more engaging in the interfaith world. By doing this, we show that we are not a faith that is only concerned about our own people, but that we feel that we must also understand our neighbors who espouse different beliefs. I feel that by being more engaged in interfaith work, we show others that we are an effective, and positive, member in the larger family of faiths here in America.
http://www.infocusnews.net/content/view/34425/1031/
By Zeyad Maasarani, IFN Staff Reporter
After years of representing her religion on an individual level, it didn’t take long for Milia Islam-Majeed to realize that religious studies was her calling in life.Islam-Majeed grew up in the Midwest where she learned to practice and convey her religion in an environment oblivious to her faith tradition. A renowned expert on theology and world religions, Islam-Majeed currently serves as the executive director of the South Coast Interfaith Council and is the first Muslim to hold the position.She obtained her undergraduate degree in World Religions and Psychology from Westminster College in Missouri and thereafter moved to Boston for her graduate work. She is a 2004 graduate of Harvard Divinity School where she earned her Masters in Theological Studies of World Religions.Before becoming the executive director of SCIC, Islam-Majeed served as the program manager of the Islamic Society of North America’s Leadership Development Center in Plainfield, Indiana.In her tenure at ISNA, she participated in more than 20 interfaith discussions, forums and programs through faith based organizations, academic institutions, governmental agencies as well as the general community.Since becoming the executive director of SCIC, Islam-Majeed has spearheaded numerous efforts for community outreach and unity amongst all traditions. Her colleagues praise her dedication, which is demonstrated by her track record and ambitious agenda.
IFN: What do you hope to achieve as head of the SCIC?
Milia Islam-Majeed: I think “faith” and how it navigates one’s life – or lack thereof – is fascinating. As the executive director of the South Coast Interfaith Council, I hope to illuminate the power of faith in the lives of everyday people. I want to provide a space where people can speak about their faith traditions and what it means to them. My goals include working on projects and programs together with people of different faiths in order to illustrate our common humanity. I want us to know what it means to be a Christian, Jew, Muslim, Buddhist, Baha’i and to learn from one another. Above all, I want everyone to see the point of commonality we all share amidst all the diversity and build on that so that we can live in this pluralistic society as a collective community that is characterized by respect of one another; a kind of respect that stems out of truly trying to understand “the other.”
IFN: What was the first project you spearheaded? What is the project most dear to you?
MIM: The first major project I spearheaded was in graduate school. I was the co-chair of Harvard’s 2002 Islam in America Conference. I worked with an amazing committee comprised of fellow graduate students and together we organized a two-day conference with over 20 renowned speakers entitled “Facing New Challenges and Building Solutions.” It was particularly important to have that conference because at that time there was a lot of talk about Islam’s role in the Middle East and other places in the world, but there was very little attention paid to the presence of the Islamic faith in America, including in academia. This conference aimed to give the study of Islam in America academic credibility as well as educate the American people about who Muslims in America truly were, not just who they thought we were based on a negative media portrayal.
I feel every project I have done is important to me and it would be difficult to identify one that is most important. These are dynamic times we are living in and the projects I have spearheaded are a reflection of the times, thus each one was, and is, different from the other. Nonetheless, one thing I hope to illustrate through the projects I work on is the importance of unity – respecting humanity amidst the differences that are existent between us. I hope that the projects that I have worked on and continue to work on show that we have much to learn about one another and the more we learn the more we see that, at the end of the day, we are all more alike than we are different.
IFN: As the first non-Christian to head the SCIC, what kind of dynamic do you think you bring to the table because of your religion?
MIM: By nature, I have always been an optimist. However, at the same time I am also cognizant of the reality that’s existent around us. First and foremost, I think it speaks volumes of the interfaith community here in southern California. As human beings, we aspire to the ideals of truly looking beyond stereotypes and acting in accordance to that – but to be a part of a community that truly illustrates that is an honor. I know no community is perfect and certainly there is always room to grow. Nonetheless, I am humbled and extremely grateful for the trust the community has placed in me and for this opportunity to serve them.
That said, I know that there are still stereotypes that exist about Muslims in general and Muslim women in particular, especially those who practice the hijab (head covering). So certainly, there are double takes sometimes as I walk up to a podium to deliver a speech or visit other faith congregations to introduce myself as well as the work of SCIC. But I feel truly privileged to be in a position by which I can dispel any stereotypes by merely doing my job and being who I am – by providing a real human face to counter the negative images that may exist in the minds of people. Everyday holds a new adventure and opportunity and I look forward to doing my part in dispelling any negative perceptions of Muslims by doing my job to the best of my ability.
IFN: How would you characterize your experience of growing up as a Muslim the Midwest in a town with few Muslims and little knowledge of Islam?
MIM: It was challenging, but something not impossible because of the support system that my family provided. First and foremost, I will always be eternally grateful to God for truly being there every step of the way. I will also forever be indebted to my family, especially my parents Fatema and Matiul Islam, for inculcating in me the love of God and religion from a very young age. I think, ultimately, a sense and practice of faith has to start and be cultivated in the home. That is not to say that it wasn’t difficult during my adolescent years, because it was. However, I think the experience of growing up as such a minority also forced me to interact with people who weren’t “like us.” As such, some of the greatest friendships I developed were with people of other faith traditions. Everything happens for a reason … perhaps it is precisely because of my childhood experiences interacting with people of other faiths that prepared me to be in this position today.
IFN: Many Muslim-American women feel they combat a stigma of oppression and ignorance. As a Muslim-American woman who has achieved great feats and has developed as a leader in the community, what would you advise young Muslim women dreaming of following in your footsteps?
MIM: I would tell them that there is nothing that they cannot do by being a practicing Muslim – whether they chose to wear the scarf or not. Religion in no way limits you. For me personally, it has provided me with a strong foundation for which I will forever be grateful. We as Muslim women should not espouse a defeatist attitude or an inferiority complex. Often times, it's our own perceptions of what we think the others see us as that work against us – it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. Be proud of your Islamic heritage; know that it’s a gift and a source of empowerment. Use that source of empowerment to make a difference in the world for the betterment of all others around you – regardless of what religion they are. We must show through our actions that we are not oppressed or inferior than our brothers in faith. Rather we have to demonstrate through our actions that Islam is a religion that cares about humanity at large and that the ideologies embedded in the Islamic tradition are our motivating factor to truly make a positive impact in the lives of others.
IFN: When you were a Program Manager with ISNA you facilitated leadership training seminars. What do you think leaders of the Muslim-American community could have learned from your seminars? What do you think they can do better?
MIM: I think one of the greatest challenges we face is the process of integration within the greater societal paradigm we live in. Integration does not mean we lose our Islamic-ness, but rather we incorporate it within the cultural context we have here without compromising the core Islamic beliefs and principles. Certainly, there are ills that we must stay away from, but this society we live in also has a great deal to offer us. Thus we must not live in segregated communities, but rather have a sense of ownership of the society we live in by being participating members. We must be more involved. We must have more social service workers, community organizers, journalists, and people in the local governments. I whole-heartedly believe that it is in this country that we can show the beauty of what Islam truly is by being engaging citizens.
Another challenge we face – from my experiences within the Muslim communities in America – is that of religious leadership. I think we have some amazing individuals who are unbelievably versed in the Islamic sciences, however they know little about this cultural context we live in. As such, there is a gap that is created and that is hurtful to the Muslim communities. I feel it is imperative that we have religious leaders who are not only versed in the Islamic sciences, but that they are also able to lead and show the community how to apply those Islamic sciences and principles within this cultural context. We are a growing community, so I am confident we are moving in the right direction when it comes to this, but it still remains a challenge today.
IFN: You directed the "Meet the Author" program with ISNA. What was your most notable experience?
MIM: Having the opportunity to work with Dr. Robert Fisk was probably my most notable experience. I think he is a remarkable man and there is so much the world can learn from him. That and also being able to work with some of my personal role models in academia such as Dr. Sherman Jackson, Dr. Umar Faruq Abdullah and Dr. Muneer Fareed. I think these are some of the individuals who have contributed significantly to Islamic scholarship, particularly to scholarship pertaining to Islam in America and it was such an enriching experience to be able to work with them.
IFN: You received a Master's of Theological Studies from Harvard Divinity School. Were you satisfied with the way Islam and Muslims are scholastically and academically portrayed? What can non-Muslim American institutions/authors do to better understand and teach Islam?
MIM: It’s always a bit challenging studying Islam in western academia, although I must say we have more and more individuals engaged in this task and, nowadays, there are more younger professors who have themselves been through the system, which really helps. I was very satisfied with the resources that were available at Harvard. What I didn’t learn in the classroom I was able to obtain through the library collection there as well as the many amazing people I was honored to meet and learn from. I think we, as Muslims, have to a play a more proactive role in writing our own history. I did feel that was missing in academia. In regards to what non-Muslims can do better to understand Muslims – interact with them on a personal level and understand that we are not monolithic people. We represent all cultures and ethnicities and that is both enriching and challenging. As non-Muslims I think its important to understand that often times a culture paints the religion, rather than the religion coloring the culture. I think to gain a deep understanding of Muslims both a basic understanding of the faith as well as personal interaction is a must.
IFN: As a Muslim women immersed in interfaith, who meets leaders from all faith communities, what have you done to strengthen the place of Muslims at the interfaith table? What needs to be done?
MIM: In my position, it’s important that I provide room for others to speak. However, I also think that at times actions speak louder than words. So I hope that my mere presence there as an organizer and facilitator of interfaith dialogues and projects illustrate that Muslims play a vital role in strengthening communities of faiths here in America.
I do hope that Muslims take a more proactive role in being a part of the interfaith community. I think if we expect non-Muslims to take the time to understand who we are, then we must extend the same courtesy to them. Certainly, we have come far as a community and I hope we continue to be more engaging in the interfaith world. By doing this, we show that we are not a faith that is only concerned about our own people, but that we feel that we must also understand our neighbors who espouse different beliefs. I feel that by being more engaged in interfaith work, we show others that we are an effective, and positive, member in the larger family of faiths here in America.
http://www.infocusnews.net/content/view/34425/1031/
May 6, 2009
Op-Ed Contributor
Can the Pope Bring the Peace?
By JOHN L. ALLEN Jr.
SYMBOLIC gestures are the tools of any leader’s trade, but nowhere do they spell the difference between life and death quite like the Middle East. For example, the visit in 2000 by Ariel Sharon, the former Israeli prime minister, to Temple Mount in Jerusalem, the site of two Islamic shrines, helped set off the second intifada.
Thus when Pope Benedict XVI visits Jordan, Israel and the Palestinian territories starting on Friday, the world may be excused for holding its breath. In his four years on the job, this pope has not always demonstrated a deft symbolic touch. If he simply manages to get back to Rome without starting a war, some might declare the trip a success.
Yet Benedict can, and should, do much more. Granted, the pope is not a politician, and this trip is more a pilgrimage than a diplomatic mission. Nonetheless, Benedict can make a unique contribution to the peace process at a moment when it obviously needs the help.
The reason for this is that popes enjoy a tremendous advantage over Western politicians in engaging the Middle East. This is the realm of “theopolitics,” where religious convictions always shape policy choices. A pope can engage those convictions in a way that secular trouble-shooters like former Senator George Mitchell, President Obama’s envoy to the Middle East, never could.
To be sure, Benedict doesn’t have the same reputation as a healer that his predecessor, John Paul II, had. The late pope was seen as a friend of both Jews and Muslims, while Benedict has had problems with both faiths. Diplomatically speaking, however, that’s far preferable to being perceived as a nemesis to one or the other. Even Benedict’s recent run of bad press in the West stemming from his comments on condoms and AIDS has an upside. It may make him a more sympathetic figure for devout Jews and Muslims, who know what it’s like to be on the wrong side of Western secular taboos.
If he plays his cards right, Benedict could move things forward in four ways.
First, the pope can emphasize that the “two-state solution” to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict reflects a global moral consensus. He arrives at a moment of growing despair, after the new Israeli government seemed to cast doubt on its commitment to Palestinian statehood. Wielding the bully pulpit of the papacy, Benedict can stress that respecting the natural right of Palestinians to sovereignty isn’t about statecraft but about justice.
Yes, while in Israel Benedict will have to mend fences after his controversial decision in January to lift the excommunication of a Holocaust-denying bishop. He should not allow damage control, however, to blur his message about the urgency of a just peace.
Second, Benedict can insist that the Palestinians reject extremist elements within their leadership — an application of his broader push for a reformed Islam that respects both faith and reason. On that front, the pope has momentum. Since he angered Muslims in 2006 by citing a Byzantine emperor with nasty things to say about Muhammad, Benedict has improved his pitch, suggesting that Christianity and Islam ought to be natural allies against forms of secularism hostile to religion. Last month, for example, the Vatican signed a memorandum of understanding with the Arab League.
Benedict can now spend some of that capital, pressing Palestinians to embrace religious freedom, and Israel’s right to exist, as the price of admission to any Christian-Muslim partnership.
Third, Benedict can energize support for Christians in the Holy Land, who are poised on the brink of extinction. During the British mandate in Palestine, Christians were around 20 percent of the population; today they’re under 2 percent because of tremendous emigration.
Historically, Arab Christians have promoted a pluralistic vision of society, standing between resurgent Islamic fundamentalism and ultranationalist strains in Judaism. If they disappear, prospects for peace become dimmer. The pope must assure these believers that global Christianity will not abandon them.
Fourth, Benedict can advance the end game of the peace process by urging the leaders he meets with to bring Iran on board in all regional discussions. The Vatican has been holding talks with Iran’s Islamic Culture and Relations Organization, a government-affiliated body, for two decades. Moreover, Roman Catholicism and Shiite Islam, which dominates Iran, have a natural affinity: a strong clerical hierarchy, popular devotions and saintly intercessors, and a core theology of martyrdom. Benedict could open the door, leaving it up to the Iranians to walk through.
In the Middle East, religion is either part of the problem or part of the solution. The drama of the pope’s voyage comes down to which way he nudges things along.
John L. Allen Jr. is the senior correspondent of The National Catholic Reporter.
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/06/opini ... nted=print
Op-Ed Contributor
Can the Pope Bring the Peace?
By JOHN L. ALLEN Jr.
SYMBOLIC gestures are the tools of any leader’s trade, but nowhere do they spell the difference between life and death quite like the Middle East. For example, the visit in 2000 by Ariel Sharon, the former Israeli prime minister, to Temple Mount in Jerusalem, the site of two Islamic shrines, helped set off the second intifada.
Thus when Pope Benedict XVI visits Jordan, Israel and the Palestinian territories starting on Friday, the world may be excused for holding its breath. In his four years on the job, this pope has not always demonstrated a deft symbolic touch. If he simply manages to get back to Rome without starting a war, some might declare the trip a success.
Yet Benedict can, and should, do much more. Granted, the pope is not a politician, and this trip is more a pilgrimage than a diplomatic mission. Nonetheless, Benedict can make a unique contribution to the peace process at a moment when it obviously needs the help.
The reason for this is that popes enjoy a tremendous advantage over Western politicians in engaging the Middle East. This is the realm of “theopolitics,” where religious convictions always shape policy choices. A pope can engage those convictions in a way that secular trouble-shooters like former Senator George Mitchell, President Obama’s envoy to the Middle East, never could.
To be sure, Benedict doesn’t have the same reputation as a healer that his predecessor, John Paul II, had. The late pope was seen as a friend of both Jews and Muslims, while Benedict has had problems with both faiths. Diplomatically speaking, however, that’s far preferable to being perceived as a nemesis to one or the other. Even Benedict’s recent run of bad press in the West stemming from his comments on condoms and AIDS has an upside. It may make him a more sympathetic figure for devout Jews and Muslims, who know what it’s like to be on the wrong side of Western secular taboos.
If he plays his cards right, Benedict could move things forward in four ways.
First, the pope can emphasize that the “two-state solution” to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict reflects a global moral consensus. He arrives at a moment of growing despair, after the new Israeli government seemed to cast doubt on its commitment to Palestinian statehood. Wielding the bully pulpit of the papacy, Benedict can stress that respecting the natural right of Palestinians to sovereignty isn’t about statecraft but about justice.
Yes, while in Israel Benedict will have to mend fences after his controversial decision in January to lift the excommunication of a Holocaust-denying bishop. He should not allow damage control, however, to blur his message about the urgency of a just peace.
Second, Benedict can insist that the Palestinians reject extremist elements within their leadership — an application of his broader push for a reformed Islam that respects both faith and reason. On that front, the pope has momentum. Since he angered Muslims in 2006 by citing a Byzantine emperor with nasty things to say about Muhammad, Benedict has improved his pitch, suggesting that Christianity and Islam ought to be natural allies against forms of secularism hostile to religion. Last month, for example, the Vatican signed a memorandum of understanding with the Arab League.
Benedict can now spend some of that capital, pressing Palestinians to embrace religious freedom, and Israel’s right to exist, as the price of admission to any Christian-Muslim partnership.
Third, Benedict can energize support for Christians in the Holy Land, who are poised on the brink of extinction. During the British mandate in Palestine, Christians were around 20 percent of the population; today they’re under 2 percent because of tremendous emigration.
Historically, Arab Christians have promoted a pluralistic vision of society, standing between resurgent Islamic fundamentalism and ultranationalist strains in Judaism. If they disappear, prospects for peace become dimmer. The pope must assure these believers that global Christianity will not abandon them.
Fourth, Benedict can advance the end game of the peace process by urging the leaders he meets with to bring Iran on board in all regional discussions. The Vatican has been holding talks with Iran’s Islamic Culture and Relations Organization, a government-affiliated body, for two decades. Moreover, Roman Catholicism and Shiite Islam, which dominates Iran, have a natural affinity: a strong clerical hierarchy, popular devotions and saintly intercessors, and a core theology of martyrdom. Benedict could open the door, leaving it up to the Iranians to walk through.
In the Middle East, religion is either part of the problem or part of the solution. The drama of the pope’s voyage comes down to which way he nudges things along.
John L. Allen Jr. is the senior correspondent of The National Catholic Reporter.
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/06/opini ... nted=print
Pope's Jordan tour fails to heal rift with Muslims
RICHARD SPENCER
THE TELEGRAPH
AMMAN
Pope Benedict XVIs attempts to heal a rift between the Vatican and Islam appeared to have fallen on stony ground Saturday after he failed to make key compromises during his tour of the Middle East.
The Pope appealed for an end to divisions and violence between Muslims and Christians during an unprecedented speech at a mosque, part of a tour that was billed as an act of reconciliation with the Muslim woi Id.
But he did not give the apology demanded by many Muslim leaders for remarks three years ago in which he quoted a medieval text describing the Prophet Muhammad's legacy as "evil and inhuman."
Nor did he make any symbolic gestures of unity, such as praying with his Muslim hosts.
He did not even remove his shoes as he entered the prayer hall of the King Hussein Mosque in the Jordanian capital Amman.
Sheik Hamza Mansour, a Muslim Brotherhood member of the Jordanian parliament, said the Pope had aggravated his previous offence. The Brotherhood has boycotted the visit, saying the Pope's previous "clarifications" about the 2006 comments were not enough.
The Pope's tour of Jordan, Israel and the West Bank has met with ambivalence from both Muslims and Jews. Even some Palestinian Christians have said he should not be visiting Israel so soon after the invasion of Gaza.
The Pope's host was Prince Ghazi, a cousin of King Abdullah and his principal religious adviser. He leads the Common Word group of Muslim leaders who seek to find common religious ground with Christianity.
As the Pope looked on impassively, he referred directly to the "hurt" the 2006 comments had caused to Muslims.
He added: "Muslims especially appreciated the clarification by the Vatican that what was said in the Regensburg lecture did not reflect Your Holiness's own opinion."
In 2001 Pope John Paul made a gesture shown around the Muslim world when he stopped to pray in the Umayyed Mosque in Damascus. Pope Benedict by contrast did not pray in the mosque Saturday. His spokesman, Father Federico Lombardi, said he had paused for a moment of silent meditation, but had not "prayed in a Christian sense."
Fr. Lombardi also said that the visiting party had been prepared to remove their shoes, as is customary when entering a mosque's prayer hall, but their hosts had laid down a mat and did not ask them to.
The Pope holds amass for Jordan's Christian community today, before travelling to Israel on Monday.
Khalil Mazraawi, AFP-Getty Images Pope Benedict XVI neither offered apology nor prayed Saturday at Amman's King Hussein Mosque.
Published in todays Calgary Herald
RICHARD SPENCER
THE TELEGRAPH
AMMAN
Pope Benedict XVIs attempts to heal a rift between the Vatican and Islam appeared to have fallen on stony ground Saturday after he failed to make key compromises during his tour of the Middle East.
The Pope appealed for an end to divisions and violence between Muslims and Christians during an unprecedented speech at a mosque, part of a tour that was billed as an act of reconciliation with the Muslim woi Id.
But he did not give the apology demanded by many Muslim leaders for remarks three years ago in which he quoted a medieval text describing the Prophet Muhammad's legacy as "evil and inhuman."
Nor did he make any symbolic gestures of unity, such as praying with his Muslim hosts.
He did not even remove his shoes as he entered the prayer hall of the King Hussein Mosque in the Jordanian capital Amman.
Sheik Hamza Mansour, a Muslim Brotherhood member of the Jordanian parliament, said the Pope had aggravated his previous offence. The Brotherhood has boycotted the visit, saying the Pope's previous "clarifications" about the 2006 comments were not enough.
The Pope's tour of Jordan, Israel and the West Bank has met with ambivalence from both Muslims and Jews. Even some Palestinian Christians have said he should not be visiting Israel so soon after the invasion of Gaza.
The Pope's host was Prince Ghazi, a cousin of King Abdullah and his principal religious adviser. He leads the Common Word group of Muslim leaders who seek to find common religious ground with Christianity.
As the Pope looked on impassively, he referred directly to the "hurt" the 2006 comments had caused to Muslims.
He added: "Muslims especially appreciated the clarification by the Vatican that what was said in the Regensburg lecture did not reflect Your Holiness's own opinion."
In 2001 Pope John Paul made a gesture shown around the Muslim world when he stopped to pray in the Umayyed Mosque in Damascus. Pope Benedict by contrast did not pray in the mosque Saturday. His spokesman, Father Federico Lombardi, said he had paused for a moment of silent meditation, but had not "prayed in a Christian sense."
Fr. Lombardi also said that the visiting party had been prepared to remove their shoes, as is customary when entering a mosque's prayer hall, but their hosts had laid down a mat and did not ask them to.
The Pope holds amass for Jordan's Christian community today, before travelling to Israel on Monday.
Khalil Mazraawi, AFP-Getty Images Pope Benedict XVI neither offered apology nor prayed Saturday at Amman's King Hussein Mosque.
Published in todays Calgary Herald
Obama Speaking to the Whole World
President Obama is making his long-awaited speech to the Muslim world tomorrow morning in Cairo. Everyone is talking about what message he should send to the Muslim world. But the truth is, it isn't just citizens of Muslim majority countries that will be tuning in.
Obama will be addressing the 930 million Hindus in India, and the 5 million Jews in Israel, and the 38 million Catholics in Spain, and the 500,000 Muslims in his own city of Chicago.
Tomorrow, Obama does more than discuss how the United States will relate to the Muslim world. He sets the precedent for how diverse peoples and nations should interact in the 21st century. I have no doubt that Cairo was chosen as the stage for this message because of its history of religious pluralism, a history it shares with America and with Islam.
Take for instance the Fatimid dynasty, which ruled from Cairo from the 10th to the 12th century. This dynasty was known for its pluralistic nature of rule, demonstrating religious tolerance for other sects of Islam, Jews, and Coptic and Maltese Christians. In 975, the Fatimid dynasty, ruled by Shi'a Muslims, also established what is now widely considered the global center of Sunni Islamic scholarship - the famous Al-Azhar University.
Or consider the 1893 World's Parliament of Religions in Chicago, at the close of which Charles Bonney declared: "Henceforth the religions of the world will make war, not on each other, but on the giant evils that afflict mankind."
I hope that President Obama points to examples of religious pluralism like these to highlight the potential the future holds - and then talks about how we can get there together.
In the past few months, Obama has made interfaith cooperation an international priority and has stated that service constitutes the common ground between the world's diverse religious communities. The speech in Egypt is an opportunity to affirm this message and layout a strategy which presents concrete commitments to interfaith cooperation through service.
Obama should pay particular attention to the commitments made by young people - the leaders who will define religious identity by building bridges, rather than barriers or bombs:
- the city-wide initiatives creating real partnerships between diverse religious communities in New Orleans, Philadelphia, and the Twin Cities;
- the international exchanges between Americans and Muslim communities around the world which train religiously diverse young leaders in the vision, knowledge base and skill set they need to run interfaith service projects;
- the 30 Faiths Act Fellows dedicating a year of their lives to work together and raise awareness about the devastating effects of malaria in Africa.
Let us hope that these are the stories President Obama tells tomorrow morning. Because we know that the whole world is listening, and the soul of a generation is at stake.
For more commentary on Obama's speech to the Muslim World, go to the Saban Center at Brookings' Project on U.S. Relations with the Islamic World
By Eboo Patel | June 3, 2009; 10:38 AM ET | Category: Interfaith Issues , Religion & Leadership , Religion & Politics , Religious Conflict , The Faith Divide , Theology
http://newsweek.washingtonpost.com/onfa ... cairo.html
President Obama is making his long-awaited speech to the Muslim world tomorrow morning in Cairo. Everyone is talking about what message he should send to the Muslim world. But the truth is, it isn't just citizens of Muslim majority countries that will be tuning in.
Obama will be addressing the 930 million Hindus in India, and the 5 million Jews in Israel, and the 38 million Catholics in Spain, and the 500,000 Muslims in his own city of Chicago.
Tomorrow, Obama does more than discuss how the United States will relate to the Muslim world. He sets the precedent for how diverse peoples and nations should interact in the 21st century. I have no doubt that Cairo was chosen as the stage for this message because of its history of religious pluralism, a history it shares with America and with Islam.
Take for instance the Fatimid dynasty, which ruled from Cairo from the 10th to the 12th century. This dynasty was known for its pluralistic nature of rule, demonstrating religious tolerance for other sects of Islam, Jews, and Coptic and Maltese Christians. In 975, the Fatimid dynasty, ruled by Shi'a Muslims, also established what is now widely considered the global center of Sunni Islamic scholarship - the famous Al-Azhar University.
Or consider the 1893 World's Parliament of Religions in Chicago, at the close of which Charles Bonney declared: "Henceforth the religions of the world will make war, not on each other, but on the giant evils that afflict mankind."
I hope that President Obama points to examples of religious pluralism like these to highlight the potential the future holds - and then talks about how we can get there together.
In the past few months, Obama has made interfaith cooperation an international priority and has stated that service constitutes the common ground between the world's diverse religious communities. The speech in Egypt is an opportunity to affirm this message and layout a strategy which presents concrete commitments to interfaith cooperation through service.
Obama should pay particular attention to the commitments made by young people - the leaders who will define religious identity by building bridges, rather than barriers or bombs:
- the city-wide initiatives creating real partnerships between diverse religious communities in New Orleans, Philadelphia, and the Twin Cities;
- the international exchanges between Americans and Muslim communities around the world which train religiously diverse young leaders in the vision, knowledge base and skill set they need to run interfaith service projects;
- the 30 Faiths Act Fellows dedicating a year of their lives to work together and raise awareness about the devastating effects of malaria in Africa.
Let us hope that these are the stories President Obama tells tomorrow morning. Because we know that the whole world is listening, and the soul of a generation is at stake.
For more commentary on Obama's speech to the Muslim World, go to the Saban Center at Brookings' Project on U.S. Relations with the Islamic World
By Eboo Patel | June 3, 2009; 10:38 AM ET | Category: Interfaith Issues , Religion & Leadership , Religion & Politics , Religious Conflict , The Faith Divide , Theology
http://newsweek.washingtonpost.com/onfa ... cairo.html
Pitting religion against spirituality
By Douglas Todd, Canwest News Service
August 29, 2009
"Many people are already aware of the difference between spirituality and religion. They realize that having a belief system -- a set of thoughts that you regard as the absolute truth--does not make you spiritual no matter what the nature of those beliefs is."
That's the influential opinion of one of the world's most famous living spiritual teachers. Vancouver-based Eckhart Tolle, promoted by Oprah Winfrey, has sold millions of copies of his books. His repeated message is "religion" is bad (oppressive) and "spirituality" is good (liberating).
As Tolle writes in his latest mega-seller, A New Earth: Awakening to Life's Purpose, religious people are convinced "unless you believe exactly as they do, you are wrong in their eyes, and in the not-too-distant past, they would have felt justified in killing you for that. And some still do, even now."
Tolle is promoting what is fast becoming conventional wisdom in the Western world: "Religion" is institutional, almost always authoritarian. "Religion" is equated with the
Crusades, terrorism and judgmental U. S. televangelists. "Religion," in the mind of Tolle and those who read his books, is rigid and divisive and absolute.
This same anti-religion message is being advanced by spiritual authors such as Neale Donald Walsch and a host of other New Age teachers. To them "religion" is "fundamentalism." In contrast, Tolle prefers the term "spiritual," which he describes as "the transformation of consciousness" --to a state of "awakening."
In line with Tolle, many people in Canada, now find it necessary to tell anyone who cares to listen: "I'm not religious, but I'm spiritual."
Much of it has to do with shifting definitions. What, after all, is "spiritual?" What is "religious?"
The Oxford Dictionary defines "religion" as "the belief in and worship of a superhuman power, esp. a personal God or gods." Oxford adds that religion is "a particular system of faith and worship." Most interesting is that the Latin root of "religion" is "to bind together." Even though I quibble with this Oxford definition, I accept it's relatively straightforward compared to the ever-evolving meanings of the amazingly popular and vague word, "spiritual."
Philosopher Ken Wilber is highly aware of the problems that occur when people don't nail down what they mean by "spiritual." He cites several usages. One common understanding of "spiritual" is that it's a state of consciousness, such as those achieved through meditation. Another definition of "spiritual" refers to embodying an attitude, like love or wisdom.
A third use of "spiritual" restricts it to higher states of consciousness or maturity. I'll add a fourth definition of "spiritual"--how a person finds ultimate meaning.
Although it's hard to tell with Tolle, he seems to basically define "spiritual" in line with Wilber's first definition --as a state of mind, as the state of being detached from one's ego.
Now that we've fleshed out the terms, religious and spiritual, let's get down to the big question:which is better? Spiritual or religious?
If you define "religion" as Tolle and Walsch do---as rigidly institutional, fundamentalist and self-righteous --you would have to opt for "spiritual." After all, personal "transformation" seems more authentic than this harsh, top-down religion.
But if you keep in mind the dictionary definition of "religion"--that it's a "system of faith" that may serve to "bind together" humans with each other, the world and a transcendent reality -- the rivalry between the two becomes not so clear cut.
Is it not possible to be "spiritual," to practise inner transformation, at the same time one is "religious," that is, working to bond with a higher power and wider community through shared beliefs?
Sociologist Robert Bellah writes that making a sharp distinction between religion and spirituality creates a false dichotomy. And that's what Tolle does.
Bellah helpfully broadens the definition of religion to, "the many ways humans have sought to find meaning, to make sense of their lives."
I find Bellah's definition compelling since it can include religions that posit no God or gods, such as forms of Buddhism. It's also close to the definition I tend to use most for "spiritual." And, in many ways, the definitions are interchangeable.
© Copyright (c) The Calgary Herald
http://www.calgaryherald.com/story_prin ... 1&sponsor=
By Douglas Todd, Canwest News Service
August 29, 2009
"Many people are already aware of the difference between spirituality and religion. They realize that having a belief system -- a set of thoughts that you regard as the absolute truth--does not make you spiritual no matter what the nature of those beliefs is."
That's the influential opinion of one of the world's most famous living spiritual teachers. Vancouver-based Eckhart Tolle, promoted by Oprah Winfrey, has sold millions of copies of his books. His repeated message is "religion" is bad (oppressive) and "spirituality" is good (liberating).
As Tolle writes in his latest mega-seller, A New Earth: Awakening to Life's Purpose, religious people are convinced "unless you believe exactly as they do, you are wrong in their eyes, and in the not-too-distant past, they would have felt justified in killing you for that. And some still do, even now."
Tolle is promoting what is fast becoming conventional wisdom in the Western world: "Religion" is institutional, almost always authoritarian. "Religion" is equated with the
Crusades, terrorism and judgmental U. S. televangelists. "Religion," in the mind of Tolle and those who read his books, is rigid and divisive and absolute.
This same anti-religion message is being advanced by spiritual authors such as Neale Donald Walsch and a host of other New Age teachers. To them "religion" is "fundamentalism." In contrast, Tolle prefers the term "spiritual," which he describes as "the transformation of consciousness" --to a state of "awakening."
In line with Tolle, many people in Canada, now find it necessary to tell anyone who cares to listen: "I'm not religious, but I'm spiritual."
Much of it has to do with shifting definitions. What, after all, is "spiritual?" What is "religious?"
The Oxford Dictionary defines "religion" as "the belief in and worship of a superhuman power, esp. a personal God or gods." Oxford adds that religion is "a particular system of faith and worship." Most interesting is that the Latin root of "religion" is "to bind together." Even though I quibble with this Oxford definition, I accept it's relatively straightforward compared to the ever-evolving meanings of the amazingly popular and vague word, "spiritual."
Philosopher Ken Wilber is highly aware of the problems that occur when people don't nail down what they mean by "spiritual." He cites several usages. One common understanding of "spiritual" is that it's a state of consciousness, such as those achieved through meditation. Another definition of "spiritual" refers to embodying an attitude, like love or wisdom.
A third use of "spiritual" restricts it to higher states of consciousness or maturity. I'll add a fourth definition of "spiritual"--how a person finds ultimate meaning.
Although it's hard to tell with Tolle, he seems to basically define "spiritual" in line with Wilber's first definition --as a state of mind, as the state of being detached from one's ego.
Now that we've fleshed out the terms, religious and spiritual, let's get down to the big question:which is better? Spiritual or religious?
If you define "religion" as Tolle and Walsch do---as rigidly institutional, fundamentalist and self-righteous --you would have to opt for "spiritual." After all, personal "transformation" seems more authentic than this harsh, top-down religion.
But if you keep in mind the dictionary definition of "religion"--that it's a "system of faith" that may serve to "bind together" humans with each other, the world and a transcendent reality -- the rivalry between the two becomes not so clear cut.
Is it not possible to be "spiritual," to practise inner transformation, at the same time one is "religious," that is, working to bond with a higher power and wider community through shared beliefs?
Sociologist Robert Bellah writes that making a sharp distinction between religion and spirituality creates a false dichotomy. And that's what Tolle does.
Bellah helpfully broadens the definition of religion to, "the many ways humans have sought to find meaning, to make sense of their lives."
I find Bellah's definition compelling since it can include religions that posit no God or gods, such as forms of Buddhism. It's also close to the definition I tend to use most for "spiritual." And, in many ways, the definitions are interchangeable.
© Copyright (c) The Calgary Herald
http://www.calgaryherald.com/story_prin ... 1&sponsor=
Editorial: Interfaith dialogue
2 October 2009
The interfaith dialogue initiated by Custodian of the Two Holy Mosques King Abdullah has developed a great deal since the first meeting in Makkah in June last year. The two-day meeting in Geneva which concluded on Thursday was the fourth so far. Organized by the Muslim World League, it was not of the same order as last year’s Madrid conference or the special session on the subject at the UN in New York. There were no major leaders from any faith group in attendance, or any politicians cheering from the wings. It was largely a gathering of scholars and those already involved in the still very young science of dialogue.
But that was right. If dialogue is to work, it has to cease being the preserve of the religious high and mighty. Indeed it has to move out of gilded halls and conference centers and into the community, into the places where ordinary people are to be found — the workplace, the home, places of worship such as the mosque, the church, the synagogue, the temple — and, perhaps, most important, the school. As several participants at the Geneva conference noted, people learn to mistrust those of other faiths when very young, often at school. But if schools are part of the problem, they can be part of the solution. Teaching children to respect other faiths and people of other faiths would have great effect. Not just teaching: Imagine if children at a school in London were involved in the same project — a project on the environment, say — as children at schools in Riyadh or Islamabad or Delhi; they would begin to see each other as partners, not as possible enemies.
There is a mountain to climb. A great deal of lip service is paid to dialogue by leaders from all faiths who in reality fear it or do not understand its importance in a world that has become a global village. They are afraid of losing control of their faithful. But dialogue is not about conversion. It is about respect — people of differing faiths respecting each other, finding common ground and thereby living with each other in harmony and working for the well-being of humanity. There is also defensiveness, not unnatural given the suspicions of the past; even at Geneva, there were a few who confused dialogue with debate, trying to present points showing the merits of their faith and falling into the trap of comparing the teachings of their faith with the less than perfect practices of others. Dialogue is not easy. But it is vital if the world is not to sink into a destructive clash of civilizations that the bigots and the terrorists hope to bring about, foolishly imagining that they will win. In such a clash, we will all be losers. There will be a place for gatherings of religious leaders championing dialogue for some time to come. It is still in its infancy. It needs constant endorsement from the top. The Geneva meeting, however, was more about discussing where it goes next. That shows progress. The next stage must be to have dialogue meetings in every country, every city and promote dialogue in schools. It may seem a tall order. But the world’s peace depends on it.
http://www.arabnews.com/?page=7§ion ... =10&y=2009
2 October 2009
The interfaith dialogue initiated by Custodian of the Two Holy Mosques King Abdullah has developed a great deal since the first meeting in Makkah in June last year. The two-day meeting in Geneva which concluded on Thursday was the fourth so far. Organized by the Muslim World League, it was not of the same order as last year’s Madrid conference or the special session on the subject at the UN in New York. There were no major leaders from any faith group in attendance, or any politicians cheering from the wings. It was largely a gathering of scholars and those already involved in the still very young science of dialogue.
But that was right. If dialogue is to work, it has to cease being the preserve of the religious high and mighty. Indeed it has to move out of gilded halls and conference centers and into the community, into the places where ordinary people are to be found — the workplace, the home, places of worship such as the mosque, the church, the synagogue, the temple — and, perhaps, most important, the school. As several participants at the Geneva conference noted, people learn to mistrust those of other faiths when very young, often at school. But if schools are part of the problem, they can be part of the solution. Teaching children to respect other faiths and people of other faiths would have great effect. Not just teaching: Imagine if children at a school in London were involved in the same project — a project on the environment, say — as children at schools in Riyadh or Islamabad or Delhi; they would begin to see each other as partners, not as possible enemies.
There is a mountain to climb. A great deal of lip service is paid to dialogue by leaders from all faiths who in reality fear it or do not understand its importance in a world that has become a global village. They are afraid of losing control of their faithful. But dialogue is not about conversion. It is about respect — people of differing faiths respecting each other, finding common ground and thereby living with each other in harmony and working for the well-being of humanity. There is also defensiveness, not unnatural given the suspicions of the past; even at Geneva, there were a few who confused dialogue with debate, trying to present points showing the merits of their faith and falling into the trap of comparing the teachings of their faith with the less than perfect practices of others. Dialogue is not easy. But it is vital if the world is not to sink into a destructive clash of civilizations that the bigots and the terrorists hope to bring about, foolishly imagining that they will win. In such a clash, we will all be losers. There will be a place for gatherings of religious leaders championing dialogue for some time to come. It is still in its infancy. It needs constant endorsement from the top. The Geneva meeting, however, was more about discussing where it goes next. That shows progress. The next stage must be to have dialogue meetings in every country, every city and promote dialogue in schools. It may seem a tall order. But the world’s peace depends on it.
http://www.arabnews.com/?page=7§ion ... =10&y=2009
Religious illiteracy creates cultural barrier
By Graeme Hamilton, Canwest News Service
October 10, 2009
The Baitun nur Mosque, which opened in July 2008, is just one symbol of religious diversity in Calgary. There is growing recognition among experts that religious illiteracy creates barriers between cultures.
Photograph by: Herald Archive, Reuters, Canwest News ServiceHalf of U. S. high-school seniors surveyed recently thought Sodom and Gomorrah were a married couple.
A McGill University professor's reference to the patience of Job drew blank stares from students in his religion course. An art history teacher in France found children were mystified by the "strange bird" (a dove representing the Holy Ghost) common in Renaissance paintings.
Until recently, such confusion was little more than fodder for faculty-room jokes, evidence of the increasing secularism of western societies. But educators attending a conference at McGill University last week heard there is growing recognition in Europe and North America that religious illiteracy creates serious barriers between cultures.
"There exists a widespread illiteracy about religion that spans the globe," said Diane Moore, a professor at Harvard Divinity School. "The most significant consequence is that it fuels antagonism and hinders respect for pluralism, peaceful coexistence and co-operative endeavours."
Quebec, which last year introduced a mandatory ethics and religious culture course to replace Christian denominational classes, was held up as a leader in an effort to improve children's religious literacy. The Quebec class covers all major world religions and is taught throughout primary and secondary school.
Spencer Boudreau, a professor of education at McGill, said he was struck by how little his students knew about religion. (He was the one who had to explain the biblical story of Job.)
"It became more and more evident to me, the lack of knowledge -- not only of other religions but of their own tradition," he said in an interview.
"I'm saying, how can you understand Canada, how can you understand Quebec, without some of this background knowledge?"
Ignorance of other religions was on display in Quebec in the recent debate over the "reasonable accommodation" of religious minorities and the move by the town of Herouxville, Que., to enact a code that amounted to a caricature of non-Christian religious practices. For example, the code informed new arrivals to the village that stoning of women was not allowed and that pork was a common menu item.
"What happened in Herouxville, I was embarrassed as a Quebecer," Boudreau said. "And it's not just Quebec that would think like that."
He said Canadians have to learn to live alongside newcomers for whom religion is central to their identity.
"We're going to survive as a country by bringing in people from different religions, and many times that is how they define themselves," he said. "Whether you think it's a good thing or it's a bad thing, it's there, and you have to be respectful."
Robert Jackson, a professor of religious education at the University of Warwick in the United Kingdom, said the 9/11 terrorist attacks served as a wake-up call for Europe.
"It has propelled the discussion of religion into the public sphere," he said. "We can no longer say that discussion about religion does not belong in the public sphere, and of course part of the public sphere is public education." One result, he said, was a 2007 Council of Europe report containing guiding principles for teaching about religion.
Moore, of Harvard, said religious content should be incorporated throughout the curriculum and not restricted to a single course.
"Religion permeates all dimensions of human life," she said. She identified a wide range of problems caused by a lack of religious understanding, including anti-Semitism and the equation of Islam with violence and terrorism. She said it also leads to the portrayal of religion as "obsolete, irrational and oppressive."
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By Graeme Hamilton, Canwest News Service
October 10, 2009
The Baitun nur Mosque, which opened in July 2008, is just one symbol of religious diversity in Calgary. There is growing recognition among experts that religious illiteracy creates barriers between cultures.
Photograph by: Herald Archive, Reuters, Canwest News ServiceHalf of U. S. high-school seniors surveyed recently thought Sodom and Gomorrah were a married couple.
A McGill University professor's reference to the patience of Job drew blank stares from students in his religion course. An art history teacher in France found children were mystified by the "strange bird" (a dove representing the Holy Ghost) common in Renaissance paintings.
Until recently, such confusion was little more than fodder for faculty-room jokes, evidence of the increasing secularism of western societies. But educators attending a conference at McGill University last week heard there is growing recognition in Europe and North America that religious illiteracy creates serious barriers between cultures.
"There exists a widespread illiteracy about religion that spans the globe," said Diane Moore, a professor at Harvard Divinity School. "The most significant consequence is that it fuels antagonism and hinders respect for pluralism, peaceful coexistence and co-operative endeavours."
Quebec, which last year introduced a mandatory ethics and religious culture course to replace Christian denominational classes, was held up as a leader in an effort to improve children's religious literacy. The Quebec class covers all major world religions and is taught throughout primary and secondary school.
Spencer Boudreau, a professor of education at McGill, said he was struck by how little his students knew about religion. (He was the one who had to explain the biblical story of Job.)
"It became more and more evident to me, the lack of knowledge -- not only of other religions but of their own tradition," he said in an interview.
"I'm saying, how can you understand Canada, how can you understand Quebec, without some of this background knowledge?"
Ignorance of other religions was on display in Quebec in the recent debate over the "reasonable accommodation" of religious minorities and the move by the town of Herouxville, Que., to enact a code that amounted to a caricature of non-Christian religious practices. For example, the code informed new arrivals to the village that stoning of women was not allowed and that pork was a common menu item.
"What happened in Herouxville, I was embarrassed as a Quebecer," Boudreau said. "And it's not just Quebec that would think like that."
He said Canadians have to learn to live alongside newcomers for whom religion is central to their identity.
"We're going to survive as a country by bringing in people from different religions, and many times that is how they define themselves," he said. "Whether you think it's a good thing or it's a bad thing, it's there, and you have to be respectful."
Robert Jackson, a professor of religious education at the University of Warwick in the United Kingdom, said the 9/11 terrorist attacks served as a wake-up call for Europe.
"It has propelled the discussion of religion into the public sphere," he said. "We can no longer say that discussion about religion does not belong in the public sphere, and of course part of the public sphere is public education." One result, he said, was a 2007 Council of Europe report containing guiding principles for teaching about religion.
Moore, of Harvard, said religious content should be incorporated throughout the curriculum and not restricted to a single course.
"Religion permeates all dimensions of human life," she said. She identified a wide range of problems caused by a lack of religious understanding, including anti-Semitism and the equation of Islam with violence and terrorism. She said it also leads to the portrayal of religion as "obsolete, irrational and oppressive."
© Copyright (c) The Calgary Herald
http://www.calgaryherald.com/story_prin ... 9&sponsor=
Parliament of the World's Religions
In less than two months, the largest international interfaith gathering will convene in Melbourne, Australia. "Make a World of Difference: Hearing each other, Healing the earth," is the theme of the Parliament of World's Religions, taking place December 3-9, 2009. Information about how to participate, including schedules, program, and speaker details, is now available at http://www.parliamentofreligions.org
In less than two months, the largest international interfaith gathering will convene in Melbourne, Australia. "Make a World of Difference: Hearing each other, Healing the earth," is the theme of the Parliament of World's Religions, taking place December 3-9, 2009. Information about how to participate, including schedules, program, and speaker details, is now available at http://www.parliamentofreligions.org
Similarities Between Hinduism and Islam
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The Charter for Compassion Launched
The Charter for Compassion is the result of Karen Armstrong’s 2008 TED Prize wish and made possible by the generous support of the Fetzer Institute. It will be unveiled to the world on November 12, 2009.
Why a Charter for Compassion?
The Charter of Compassion is a cooperative effort to restore not only compassionate thinking but, more importantly, compassionate action to the center of religious, moral and political life. Compassion is the principled determination to put ourselves in the shoes of the other, and lies at the heart of all religious and ethical systems. One of the most urgent tasks of our generation is to build a global community where men and women of all races, nations and ideologies can live together in peace. In our globalized world, everybody has become our neighbor, and the Golden Rule has become an urgent necessity.
The Charter, crafted by people all over the world and drafted by a multi-fath, multi-national council of thinkers and leaders, seeks to change the conversation so that compassion becomes a key word in public and private discourse, making it clear that any ideology that breeds hatred or contempt ~ be it religious or secular ~ has failed the test of our time. It is not simply a statement of principle; it is above all a summons to creative, practical and sustained action to meet the political, moral, religious, social and cultural problems of our time.
We invite each of you to adopt the charter as your own, to make a lifelong commitment to live with compassion..
http://charterforcompassion.org/about
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Hear what Ali Asani has to say about the Charter
Video
http://charterforcompassion.org/learn/c ... ali-asani/
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With the launch of the Charter for Compassion, it's the TED Blog's pleasure to unveil Karen Armstrong's responses to the top 10 questions asked and voted on by the TED and Reddit community. (See all the questions users asked.) She covers the nature of compassion, the history of the conflict in the Middle East, and tough questions such as these:
•Religion seems to cause racism, extremism -- why not get rid of it?
•What's the point of a God that doesn't intervene?
•Why not discard religion and just teach the Golden Rule?
A Q&A that rewards deep reading. Enjoy!
Capitol62 asks: It seems that the nexus of modern religious conflict is in the Middle East. If that is correct, for your ideas about bringing faiths together with compassion and understanding to be successful you will need a strong commitment from religious leaders there. I was wondering if you've made any progress getting the Charter for Compassion together and how it has been received by Muslim leaders in the Middle East.
Actually the Middle East conflict is secular in origin. It began as a conventional political dispute about a land. Zionism was originally a rebellion against religious Judaism and the PLO Charter was essentially secularist. But because the conflict was allowed to fester without a resolution, religion got sucked into the escalating cycle of violence and became part of the problem. Violence and warfare affect everything that we do: they affect our dreams, aspirations, fantasies, relationships -- and our religion. Most of the religiously-articulated terrorism that troubles us today arose in regions where an originally secular armed conflict has become chronic. It is patently the case in Afghanistan. The root of the problem is political and unless there is a just, political solution to these problems in the Middle East, no amount of inter-faith understanding will be effective.
But you are right that the Middle East conflict is a "nexus." It has become a symbolic issue which stands for more than itself in the three monotheisms of Judaism, Christianity and Islam. For many Muslims, the plight of the Palestinians has become emblematic of the apparent defeat of their religious, cultural and political aspirations in the modern period; the State of Israel has inspired most Jewish fundamentalist movements -- some passionately for the secular state of Israel and others vehemently either against it or adopting a deliberate and defiant neutrality towards it; and the State of Israel also figures prominently in the End Time scenario of the Christian Right in the United States.
All this has certainly muddied the waters, because once a conflict becomes sacralised, issues become absolute and compromise is far ore difficult.
But by no means all Jews, Christians or Muslims adopt these extreme positions. Many are eager, even desperate to achieve a peaceful solution in the Middle East and these are the voices that we need to amplify. On our Council of Conscience, we have a Palestinian peace activist and the Grand Mufti of Egypt, one of the most senior clerics in the Middle East. As I write this, we are reaching out to political and religious leaders in the Gulf States. But there can be no quick fix. Decades of warfare and destruction have made people on all sides suspicious and wary. The political problems remain; they are formidable and until a solution is found that satisfies all parties, there is no hope of either a secular or a religious settlement. The Golden Rule could certainly be a useful yardstick: if we always treated others as we expect to be treated ourselves, many of the heinous actions that are the cause of such suffering to people on both sides of this conflict would be impossible. If we would not like to suffer dispossession and exile, suicide bombing, oppression and terrorism, we should not inflict these on others. But alas, that is not the way politicians think. And when violence has become endemic, some religious people will, not surprisingly, become fearful, angry and, losing hope in the possibility of a conventional political settlement, some will turn to extremism. Charismatic individuals can work wonders. It is a pity that there is no politician or religious leader on either side of this conflict of the moral and spiritual stature of Gandhi, Mandela and Tutu.
renderedit asks: Why did the Buddha teach that the existence of God (that is, whether God exists or not) is irrelevant?
Before we get to the Buddha, I want to describe a spiritual exercise that developed in India in the 10th century BCE, four hundred years before his lifetime and which is a model of authentic religious discourse. Other traditions have developed their own versions of this sacred contest and the principle it embodies underlies the Buddha's apparent insouciance about the ultimate reality.
It was called the Brahmodya Competition and its aim was to find a verbal formula that defined the Brahman, the ultimate reality that lies beyond the gods and is indefinable because it is the inmost essence of all things, the force that pulls the disparate parts of the universe together. First, the Brahmin priests would go out into the jungle to make a retreat. They fasted and practised breathing exercises that induced a different form of consciousness. This is an important point. You cannot talk about God, Brahman, Nirvana or Dao in the same way as you might discuss a business deal or argue an academic point. You have to put yourself into the receptive frame of mind that is similar to the way we listen to music or poetry.
After their retreat, the priests returned to the compound to begin the competition. The challenger issued his own elliptical and paradoxical description of the Brahman, one that embodied all his learning and insight. Then his opponents had to respond, building on the challenger's formula and taking the description a step further. But the winner was the priest who reduced everybody to silence -- and in that silence the Brahman was present. It was not present in the brilliant verbal conundrums but in the stunning realization of the impotence of speech.
Other traditions have called this transcendence God, Nirvana, or Dao and have also insisted that it lies beyond the reach of words. It is not easy for us to appreciate this reticence. We are used to getting instant information at the click of a mouse and can feel frustrated by the experience of unknowing. We talk, I think, far too glibly about God, asking "him" (ridiculous pronoun!) to bless our nation, save our queen, and support our side in a war or an election, even though our opponents must also be the objects of God's concern. We have domesticated God's transcendence. We often learn about God at about the same time as we are learning about Santa Claus; but our ideas about Santa Claus change, mature and become more nuanced, whereas our ideas of God can remain at a rather infantile level.
This experience of numinous unknowing seems to be part of the way we human beings experience. It lay at the heart of the Socratic dialogue, which can be seen as a rational version of the Brahmodya: it did not conclude with one of the participants defeating the arguments of the others but in a profound realization of the profundity of human ignorance. When he contemplated the indeterminate universe of modern physics, Einstein said: "To know that what is impenetrable to us really exists, manifesting itself to us as the highest wisdom and the most radiant beauty which our dull faculties can comprehend only in their most primitive forms -- this knowledge, this feeling is at the centre of all true religiousness." This is the kind of knowing that we derive from poetry -- it can take a lifetime for a complex poem to declare its full meaning to us. Music also, a highly rational art intimately related into mathematics, segues naturally into transcendence. Good theology is also an attempt to express the inexpressible. A modern theologian has described theological discourse as speech that segues into silence. At the end of the symphony, when the last notes die away, there is often a pregnant, eloquent beat of silence before the applause begins. Instead of giving us precise information about God, theology -- at its best -- should hold us in that beat of silence -- just as the Brahmodya did.
In the past some of the most influential Jewish, Christian and Muslim theologians, such as Maimonides, Aquinas and Ibn Sina, made it clear that it was very difficult to speak about God, because when we confront the ultimate, we are at the end of what words or thoughts can do. They insisted that we really do not know what we mean when we say that God is "good," "wise" or "intelligent;" they devised spiritual exercises, like the Brahmodya, that made us realize the inadequacy of all God-talk. Some pointed out that we could not even say that God "existed," because our concept of existence was too limited. Some even preferred to call God "Nothing" because God was not another being.
So, if we cannot know what God is, what is the point of religion? The traditions have found that, even though God is not a metaphysical fact that we can know in the same way as we know the beings of our experience, we can gain some intimation of the divine by means of disciplined spiritual exercises -- like the Brahmodya Competition -- and a compassionate lifestyle. All the traditions have discovered that the chief obstacle to this insight and enlightenment is egotism -- selfishness, greed, envy, self-preoccupation and our engrained tendency to make ourselves the centre of the universe. Yoga, for example, was a systematic dismantling of ego and an attempt to remove the "I" from our thinking. In compassion, which all the traditions say brings us into relation with the transcendence we seek, we learn to dethrone ourselves from the centre of our world and put another there.
That is why the Buddha always refused to define the ultimate. He had a monk, who was a philosopher manqué. Neglecting his yoga and ethical practice, he kept pestering the Buddha about such questions as the existence of God and the creation of the world. The Buddha told him that he was like a man who had been shot with a poisoned arrow but refused to have any medical treatment until he had discovered the name of his assailant and what village he came from: he would die before he received this perfectly useless information. One could, the Buddha said, spend many pleasant hours discussing these fascinating topics but this would distract a monk from his main objective: "Because, my disciples, they will not help you, they are not useful in the quest for holiness; they do not lead to peace and to the direct knowledge of Nirvana."
In the oriental traditions, especially in India and China, the emphasis is not on what we are transcending to (God, Nirvana, Brahman, Dao) but on what we must transcend from, tamping out the "unhelpful states of mind" arising from egotism that hold us back from the perception of this transcendent reality that we can glimpse, but never rationally define.
blackstar9000 asks: What one aspect of religion would you say is least understood by the general population, how can it be addressed, and what do you think would be the result if more people understood it?
I think that the Western world -- and particularly, perhaps, the Western Christian world -- has lost sight of the fact that religion is a practical rather than a notional discipline. It is not a question of thinking or "believing" things but of behaving consistently in a way that changes you at a profound level. This is one of the principal themes of my book The Case for God. Religious knowledge has to be acquired by dedicated practice -- like driving, swimming or cooking. You cannot learn dancing or gymnastics by reading a book. You have to devote hours and years of time to practising this skill; you do not necessarily understand how your body achieves these amazing feats, but if you persevere you may learn to move with an unearthly grace and reveal a physical potential that is impossible for an untrained body.
The myths of religion are essentially programmes for action. Many of the most ancient myths are overtly about the gods but are actually about humanity. These stories about gods descending into the underworld and fighting with monsters were not meant to be factual or historical; they were telling you how to enter into the labyrinthine world of the psyche and fight your own demons. Unless a myth is put into practice, it remains as opaque and abstract as a musical score, which is impenetrable to most of us until it is "incarnated" instrumentally. It is only when you apply it practically to your own life -- either ritually or ethically -- that it reveals its truth, in rather the same way as the instructions of a board game, which seem incomprehensible, complicated and boring until you pick up the dice and begin to play when everything falls into place. Such a myth is not providing us with factual information about the universe but telling you something profoundly true about our humanity, the way our minds and hearts work, and how we can live more richly and intensely, beyond the reach of fear, hatred, and envy.
This is very clear in Buddhism, Confucianism, Judaism and Islam, which are all essentially religions of practice and have little or no obligatory dogma. The "five pillars" of Islam, for example, are activities (pilgrimage, almsgiving, fasting) rather than doctrines requiring belief. But it was also true of such Christian doctrines as Trinity (originally a meditative exercise) and Incarnation (a call to lay aside the ego; see Philippians 2:1-11). A myth has been defined as something that -- in some sense -- happened once but which also happens all the time. It is only when you activate a myth, making it a reality in your own life, that you recognize its truth.
We lost this understanding of religion during the early modern period, when our conception of truth, became more notional, mythos was discredited, and practical knowledge downgraded. At this time, the English word belief changed its meaning: beliven used to mean "love, loyalty, commitment, engagement;" it was related to the German liebe ("beloved") and the Latin libido ("desire"). Only in the late 17th century did it come to mean: "an intellectual acceptance of a somewhat dubious proposition." In the New Testament, when Jesus was asking for "faith" (Greek: pistis, "trust, involvement, commitment") he was not asking for a credulous acceptance of a set of doctrines. He was calling for action, seeking disciples who would give what they had to the poor, live rough, behave compassionately even to social outcasts, and devote their lives to the coming Kingdom when rich and poor, weak and powerful would live together in harmony. When the early Christians recited "creeds" they were not expressing "belief" so much as making this kind of commitment; the Latin credo derives from cor do: "I give my heart."
By making "belief" in the modern sense so essential to religion, we have distorted our understanding of faith and placed far too much emphasis on doctrinal orthodoxy. Nobody, after all, can have the last word on what we call "God." We now call religious people "believers" as though accepting certain dogmas was the most important thing that they did. People like the rabbis, the fathers of the church, the Buddha, the sages of the Upanishads and Confucius would have found this very strange, because the teachings of religion make no sense until and unless they are translated into action.
Today we often think that before we start living a religious life we have first to accept the creedal doctrines and that before one can have any comprehension of the loyalty and trust of faith, one must first force one's mind to accept a host of incomprehensible doctrines. But this is to put the cart before the horse. First you change your behaviour -- and only then do you begin to understand the truth that lies behind the dogma.
In his famous prayer, St Anselm, the 11th century archbishop of Canterbury, says: credo ut intelligam, which is usually translated: "I believe in order that I may understand." As a child, I always thought this meant that first I had to force my mind to "believe" the articles of the creed and then, as a reward, God would give me understanding. But Anselm's words are more accurately translated: "I involve/commit myself in order that I may understand." It is only when you involve yourself in the ritual and ethical practices of religion that you achieve understanding. That is why Anselm goes on to say: "And unless I so involve myself, I will not understand."
The person who asked me this question also asked a series of questions about the Golden Rule ("Do not do to others what you would not like them to do to you" or "Always treat all others as you would wish to be treated yourself"). Why the emphasis on the Golden Rule? Why is it universal? Does it tell us anything substantial about religion, since it is also fundamental to secular ideologies? Because religion is essentially a practical activity, religious people are very pragmatic. They do not usually adopt an ideology because it sounds good but because it has been found to work. When people have practised the Golden Rule "all day and every day" as Confucius (the first person to formulate it in the sixth century BCE) prescribed, you find that you lay aside the ego, because the Golden Rule requires you to overcome selfishness and put yourself, consistently, kindly, and intelligently, all day and every day, in somebody else's shoes.
People have discovered that if they practice the Golden Rule faithfully, it slowly, incrementally, changes them. They achieve what the Greeks called ekstasis, which is not an exotic trance but a disciplined, habitual "stepping outside" of the prism of selfishness. This practice is fundamental to the enlightenment that we call God, Nirvana, Brahman or Dao. As a dancer reveals the full potential of the human body, people find that living beyond the confines of self helps them to cultivate new capacities of mind and heart; they discover a transcendent peace within themselves, which enables them to live serenely and creatively in the midst of the suffering that is an ineradicable part of the human condition. The Golden Rule is the basis of religion and morality because this is the way our humanity works; this tells us something profoundly true about the human condition.
But it is no use either "believing" or "dis-believing" in the efficacy of the Golden Rule. You only discover its truth and effectiveness if you put it into practice "all day and every day."
Read the rest of Karen Armstrong's answers, after the jump >>
(Continued)
rakv1971 asks: What is the role of God in a world where neuroscience is peeling away at the subjective?
I am afraid I am not up at the cutting edge of neuroscience, so I am not sure what you mean by "peeling away at the subjective?" Do you mean that our subjective impressions are unreliable representations of objective reality? If so, the mystics and sages of religion, especially in the eastern traditions, have long been aware of this. They have all insisted that the ultimate (God, Nirvana, Brahman, Dao) lies beyond our normal psycho-mental states. You could not think about Brahman; nor could you experience God emotionally. For the sages of the Upanishads (c. 7th century BCE), In the seventh century BCE, Yajnavalkya, one of the great teachers in the Upanishads, the Brahman is identical with the innermost core (atman) of each human being, but it lay far deeper than our normal thoughts, sensations and experiences:
You can't see the Seer who does the seeing; you can't hear the Hearer who does the hearing; you can't think with the Thinker who does the thinking; you can't perceive the Perceiver who does the Perceiving.
In the same way, the Buddha emphasized the ephemeral nature of our perceptions: to achieve enlightenment one had to go deeper. And until the fourteenth century, when a fervid emotional piety began to surface in Europe, most of the Christian masters of the spiritual life insisted that you could not feel God any more than you could know what God is. "Blessed is he who is without sensations during prayer," said Evagrius of Pontus, one of the monks who lived a contemplative life in the Egyptian desert.
In the past, the most thoughtful spiritual advisers in all the major traditions have distrusted visions, exotic feelings or heavenly voices; they claimed that they were the product of a fevered imagination and a distraction from the transcendence we seek. Buddhists say that this type of experience is like so much electronic "noise," a natural effect of the yogic disciplines, which have little significance in themselves. They certainly have no supernatural origin. Many of the meditative exercises developed in the traditions were designed precisely to wean people away from this type of emotional excess. To cultivate extraordinary feelings and sensations and luxuriate in a warm glow meant that the contemplative or yogin would remain trapped in the ego that s/he was supposed to transcend. Once religious experience is equated with fervid enthusiasm, people are in danger of losing touch with the psychological rhythms and realities of the interior life.
sweetbldnjesus asks: What do you think accounts for today's strong disconnect between logos and mythos?
In most premodern cultures, there were two generally recognized ways of thinking, speaking and acquiring knowledge. The Greeks called them mythos and logos. Both were essential and neither was considered superior to the other; they were not in conflict but complementary. Each had its own sphere of competence and it was considered unwise to mix the two. Logos ("reason") was the pragmatic mode of thought that enabled people to function effectively in the world, so it had to correspond accurately to external reality. Logos was essential to the survival of our species, but it had its limitations. It could not assuage human grief or find ultimate meaning in life's struggles. For that people have turned to mythos, which focused on the more elusive, puzzling and tragic aspects of the human predicament that lay outside the remit of logos.
Human beings are meaning-seeking creatures. We fall very easily into despair if we do not find some significance in our lives. Myth helps us to achieve this. If your child dies or you witness a terrible natural disaster, you want a scientific, rational explanation but you also need help in coping with the turbulence of your grief and despair. Science can diagnose your cancer and can even cure it; but it cannot assuage the disappointment, terror and dismay that come with the diagnosis, nor can it help you to die well. That is the role of myth. But a myth was not just a pretty story that provided you with a facile answer to the problems of mortality, pain, and sorrow. It was, as I said above, a programme for action. It could put you in the correct psychological or spiritual posture, but it was up to you to do the hard spiritual and psychological work with yourself and take the next step, making the "truth" of the myth a reality in your own life.
The modern disjunction between mythos and logos was one of the effects of the 17th century scientific revolution in the West. At this time, logos began to achieve such spectacular results that myth became discredited. So much so that in popular parlance today a "myth" often simply refers to something that is not true. If accused of a peccadillo in his past life, a politician is likely to say "It is a myth"; i.e., it didn't happen. During the modern period in the West, the scientific methodology of logos was widely regarded as the only reliable means of attaining truth and this would make religion difficult, if not impossible. As theologians began to adopt the criteria of science, the mythoi of Christianity were interpreted as empirically, rationally and historically verifiable and forced into a style of thinking that was alien to it. Philosophers and scientists could no longer see the point of ritual, so religious knowledge became theoretical rather than practical. Because we started to read our scriptures as though they were factual logos, we lost the art of interpreting the old stories of gods walking the earth, dead men rising from tombs or seas parting miraculously. We also began to understand such concepts as faith, revelation, myth and mystery in ways that would have been very surprising to our ancestors.
This questioner also asks: If so much evil has been perpetuated in the name of religion, is it not better to avoid organized religion altogether?
There is no denying that terrible things have been done in the name of religion. As a species, we have a genius for fouling things up. Atrocities have also been committed in the name of secular ideologies: one need think only of Stalin. I have had several threatening letters from fervent atheists, who tell me that if they find out where I live they will burn my house down. We are a cruel species. At its best, religion, like the best secular ideologies, was designed to curb our tendency to destroy anything or anyone that appears to threaten us.
I used to think that it would be better if religion had never been invented because religious people have done such harm in the world. But after twenty-five years of studying the major world faiths, I have had to change my mind. When I was researching The Great Transformation: The Beginning of our Religious Traditions, for example, I was surprised to learn that each one of what we call the great world faiths originally developed in a revulsion from contemporary violence; each one -- Hinduism, Buddhism, Jainism, Confucianism, Daoism and the three monotheisms -- began at a time when violence had reached an unprecedented crescendo, and in each case, the catalyst for religious change was a principled rejection of aggression and a deliberate cultivation of a compassionate ethic. It is not "religion" that is responsible for evil; it is the greed, selfishness, and violence of humanity. We often call evil acts "inhuman" but this is inaccurate: these acts are all too human. We are capable of heroism and generosity; but aggression is also something that comes naturally to us.
Some forms of religion are, as the Buddhists say, more "skilful" or "helpful" than others. A great deal of harm has been done when people have cultivated an idolatrous conception of God, thinking of "him" as a powerful being, like ourselves, writ large, with likes and dislikes similar to our own. This imaginary deity is simply an idol, which we have created in our own image; it gives a sacred seal of absolute approval to some of our worst prejudices and impulses. That is why some of the greatest Jewish, Christian and Muslim theologians fought against this idolatrous tendency by emphasizing the transcendence of God -- as I explained in my answer to the second question.
And this reminds us that organized religion has its uses. It preserves wisdom like that of such theologians as Hillel, Rabbi Meir, Rabbi Akiva, Maimonides, the great Kabbalists, Isaac Luria, Martin Buber, Ibn Sina, Avicenna, Al-Ghazzali, Ibn Arabi, Suhrawardi, Mulla Sadra, Mir Dimad, the Cappadocian Fathers, Denys, Duns Scotus Erigena, Aquinas, Meister Eckhart, Karl Rahner, Paul Tillich, and Bernard Lonergan. Of course organized religion can become idolatrous; many church leaders are simply religious politicians, and politicians, as a breed, are not famous for their lack of ego. Any institution, be it secular or religious, has a tendency to become an end in itself -- or, in religious terms, an idol.
Human beings are chronically predisposed towards idolatry. We constantly give absolute value to purely temporal, limited realities, such as a god, a nation, or an ideology. When something inherently finite is invested with ultimate value, its devotees feel obliged to eliminate any rival claimant because there can only be one absolute. We find this kind of idolatry in the Book of Deuteronomy in the Bible; but it also characterised some of the worst political and moral disasters of the twentieth century.
enlashok asks: How bad does an idea have to be before the appropriate reaction is to discard it?
This question comes from Enlashok, but he has asked a lot of other questions and makes a lot of other points too, particularly about the harm religion does. I will try to give as comprehensive an argument as possible.
First, I freely admit that a great deal of religion is indeed "unskilful" -- there is bad religion just as there is bad art, bad sex, and bad cooking. I have written books about this type of destructive faith. Far too many people, as Enlashok points out, are uncritical of themselves and their tradition; they have indeed "maintained and propagated immoral, racist, sexist and homophobic policies, promoted tribalism, and shielded extremism." Religion -- like any art or science -- is very difficult to do well. Religion may, for example, teach compassion, but far too many people -- secularists as well as religious -- prefer to be right rather than compassionate.
Enlashok says that he realizes he has asked a lot of questions and that he would be content if I would simply answer his first question, which I have cited above. So let me say again: religion is not an "idea." Its doctrines can only be verified when they are consistently translated into practical action. They are certainly not ideas that can be "factually supported from available evidence," to quote Enlashok again. As I have tried to explain, the notion that religion is an idea that can be empirically proven is a great fallacy that developed in the Christian West during the early modern period, when theologians tried to force theology into a scientific idiom that was alien to it. As soon as they did this, atheism became inevitable. When you mix mythos with logos, you get bad science and unskilful religion. Unfortunately, as globalization proceeds and more and more people adopt the Western ethos, this unviable, "scientific theology" is spreading to other faiths and other regions.
Instead of seeing religion as a science manqué, I think it is more helpful to regard it as an art form. Like art, religion at its best helps us to find meaning in a tragic world; like art, it holds us in an attitude of wonder and introduces us to a mode of knowledge that is not dependent upon logic or empirical truth. Music, for example, is not about anything and you cannot verify the meaning of a late Beethoven quartet, but it has a powerful and enriching effect upon us. Poetry pushes language to the limits and makes us aware of the difficulty of expressing some of our more profound insights in a purely logical way. Religion has always expressed itself most effectively in terms of art: poetry, music, dance, song, architecture, calligraphy, drama, and sculpture.
Religion differs from art in its summons to practical action. It is not sufficient to have an aesthetic or "spiritual" experience. The Buddha explained that, after achieving enlightenment, a person must come down from the mountain top, return to the market place and there practice compassion for all living beings. A spirituality that focuses only on a numinous warm glow is "unskilful" and selfish. All art is transformative; it is meant to change us. Religion -- at its best -- is a form of ethical alchemy that helps us to limit the egotism that causes so much human suffering, both to ourselves and to others.
Like art, religion was not meant to provide us with information and explanations that lie within the remit of scientific logos. It helps us to consider problems for which there are no final solutions -- mortality, the prospect of our inevitable and painful extinction, sickness, injustice, and cruelty. It does not mean that we will suffer less but, if we work hard enough, we might be able to endure our own pain and to assuage the suffering of others.
Science deals with verifiable ideas; scientists struggle with a problem, and when that is solved move on to the next one. There is continuous improvement, progress and development. But the humanities do not function like that. Philosophers are still meditating on the same issues and problems that preoccupied Plato. Harold Pinter is not necessarily a better playwright than Shakespeare, simply because the sum of human knowledge has advanced since Shakespeare's time. There are some aspects of life -- death, sorrow, the nature of happiness, evil and the nature of goodness -- that each generation has to grapple with for itself. And there never seems to be a definitive solution.
SomeKindOfPrimate asks: You often defend religion by arguing that god is a vague numinous force known only through mystical experience. But a god that doesn't answer prayers and intervene in the world is impotent to most believers. If god doesn't throw thunderbolts and intervene in the affairs of mankind, what is the point of believing in god and practising religion?
First of all, I personally would not like to worship a god who throws thunderbolts. The Greeks had one, whom they called Zeus; like the other gods, he continually intervened in human affairs in a highly irresponsible way. The kind of god you describe is, surely, undesirable.
In the ancient world, people believed in the existence of gods in a way that was not irrational at a time when there were so many unseen forces -- wind, infection, disease, emotion -- that had a profound influence on human life. But they were not gods in our sense of the word, because they were not omnipotent or omniscient; they had a fuller share of Being than other creatures because they were immortal, but otherwise they shared the human predicament and had to live according to the natural laws of the cosmos. There was no ontological gulf between the natural world and the gods, no concept of the "supernatural" in our sense: gods, humans, animals, trees, rocks and stars were made up -- in varying degrees -- of the same divine substance. Homer depicts the gods as more powerful than human beings but basically trivial and lacking in seriousness precisely because they did not have to face the horror of death. In the eastern religions, the gods are lower in status than an enlightened teacher such as the Buddha; they too have to work for their own enlightenment and study such disciplines as yoga under a human guru.
In making a mere god the only symbol of the ultimate transcendence, the people of Israel were doing something highly unusual. And because this god, at the very start of the history of Israel, had all the irresponsible, thunderbolt-hurling defects of many of the other gods, they had to develop their theology, reaching out to what theologians call the ineffable God beyond god. A personalised God can help us to recognize the sacredness of human personality, but there carries an inbuilt danger of idolatry because it is all too easy to make the biblical god an idol, the end of the story. Religious language always points beyond itself; it is and can only be symbolic.
That is why the later prophets and the rabbis of the Talmudic Age had to refine the god depicted in the earliest parts of the Bible, making it clear that God was not yet another being. I have described this long and complex process in A History of God. Jews do not even speak God's name, a discipline that reminds them that any human expression of the divine is so inadequate that it is potentially blasphemous. In the Talmud, the rabbis make it clear that there is a vast gulf between the human experience of the divine and the divine reality itself (which Jewish mystics called Ein Sof, "Without End"), which would always remain beyond our ken. One rabbi went so far as to say that Ein Sof was not even mentioned in the Bible or the Talmud.
Christians and Muslims made exactly the same distinction. The distinction between the God we somehow experience and the ineffable reality itself lies behind the doctrine of the Trinity, which was meant to remind Christians that it was impossible to think about God as a simple personality. When he was devising the doctrine of the incarnation of God in the man Jesus in the 4th century, St Athanasius explained that we could only make this claim because we did not know what God was. If God were simply a big, almighty Something, like an immense thing in our experience, it would be impossible for God to be present in a human being; it would be like trying to cram a whale into a can of sardines. But in the man Jesus, Christians could glimpse an incomprehensible transcendence that was entirely distinct from anything in our normal experience.
But during the modern period, influenced by scientific logos of modernity, people began to lose the older symbolic habits of thought, started to read their scriptures with a literalism that is without parallel in religious history, and began to envisage God as a fact. They saw their idea of God as identical with the transcendent reality, instead of simply being a symbol. Unlike the theologians of the past, they had no problem thinking that he existed like any other being. As Paul Tillich explained:
We can no longer speak of God easily to anybody, because he will immediately question: "Does God exist?" now the very asking of that question signifies that the symbols of God have become meaningless. For God, in the question, has become one of the innumerable objects in time and space which may or may not exist. And this is not the meaning of God at all.
This kind of literal thinking produces a very primitive notion of deity. A God who interferes with human freedom is simply a tyrant; a God who hurls thunderbolts is a liability; a God conceived as living in a world of his own was simply a being; even the Supreme Being was just another Being, the final item in the series. Tillich argued that to deny the reality of the idolatrous, interventionist god was a religious act.
It is just no good thinking that God will answer our prayers, cure our sickness, ensure the success of our nation or give us a fine day for the picnic, because "he" simply doesn't do it. And if you are convinced that God has cured your cancer and saved your life, then you really do have a problem: why did God not save the lives of the six million Jews who died in the Shoah? Elie Weisel said that this interventionist God died in Auschwitz. But there is an Auschwitz story that I think wonderfully expresses the true purpose of religion. Even in the camps, some inmates continued to study Torah and observe the festivals, not in the hope of placating an angry deity, but because they found that these rituals helped them to endure the horror. One night the Jews put God on trial. In the face of such inconceivable suffering, they found the conventional arguments for his existence utterly unconvincing. If God was omnipotent, he could have prevented the Holocaust; if he could not stop it, he was impotent; and if he could stop it but chose not to, he was a monster. They condemned God to death. The presiding rabbi pronounced the verdict, and then went on calmly to announce that it was time for the evening prayer. Ideas about God come and go, but prayer, the struggle to find meaning even in the darkest circumstances, must continue.
The "God beyond god" is only vague, abstract and difficult to understand if you are not living the mythos of religion. If one just considers God as an abstract idea, without putting into practice the teachings of religion, as I have described above, God becomes as abstract as the rules of a board game.
maxmax asks: John Doe calls himself an atheist. He never goes to a house of worship. He doesn't look to religious texts for guidance. He doesn't believe that there is such a thing as a god, at least not in any literal way. Nonetheless, he believes in the Golden Rule (Do unto others…). While logically he realizes that it leads to more happiness for more people, he also personally finds satisfaction in caring for others and treating them with respect. This sense of satisfaction (perhaps even transcendence), in fact, is really where he finds the willpower to keep doing the caring and thoughtful things he does. Would you consider John Doe to be a religious person? If not, what is he lacking?
If John Doe puts the Golden Rule into practice "all day and every day" as Confucius prescribed, not simply doing his "good deed for the day" and then returning to a life of self interest; if he does not confine his benevolence to his own group, tribe or nation or to people he finds congenial, but extends it to all members of the human race -- and, indeed, to all species; if every time he is tempted to speak unkindly of an annoying sibling, an ex-wife or a people with whom his country is at war, he refrains; if he never speaks an unkind word, never makes an irritable gesture, but behaves with friendly courtesy to all; if he does not look down, even in his most intimate thoughts, on those who do not share his beliefs; if he does not inveigh impatiently at what he regards as the credulity of the religious; if he works energetically and in practical ways to assuage the suffering and injustice of life, even if this goes against his own interests; if he is open-hearted, generous and kind at every moment of his life, I would not only call him "religious" but I would bow before him as a Sage, a perfected human being.
Such a commitment to the Golden Rule produces what the Chinese called a Sage; what the Greek Orthodox called a deified human being; what others have called a Buddha, an enlightened human being, so identified with Nirvana that s/he has become inseparable from it. Such a person has gone beyond ego, because at each moment of the day, s/he has laid selfishness to one side and is living in a state of ekstasis, "standing outside" the prism of selfhood; such a person has broken down the barricades that most of us erect around ourselves to protect the frightened, defensive ego. Such a person is indeed, as you suggest, living in relation to transcendence, because s/he is not focused on what s/he is transcending to, but concentrating on what s/he is transcending from.
I would like to close this question with two quotations. The first is from Confucius's Analects. These words were spoken by Yan Hui, Confucius's most talented pupil, and describe a life of constant ren. Later Confucians would define ren as "benevolence, compassion", but Confucius always refused to define it because he said it a state that was incomprehensible to a person who had not achieved it. It was itself the transcendence one seeks -- hence the Chinese often speak of the ultimate reality as the "Way" (dao) and prefer to remain silent about the Terminus of the religious journey. For Yan Hui the practice of ren was an end in itself, but it demanded a lifelong effort which, once undertaken seriously, has its own dynamic, which he described, "with a deep sigh":
The more I strain towards it, the higher it soars. The deeper I bore down into it, the harder it becomes. I see it in front, but suddenly it is behind. Step by step, the Master [Confucius] skilfully lures one on. He has broadened me with culture, restrained me with ritual. Even if I wanted to stop, I could not. Just when I feel that I have exhausted every resource, something seems to rise up, standing over me sharp and clear. Yet though I long to pursue it, I can find no way of getting to it at all. (Analects 9:10)
Ren was not something you "got" but something you gave. It is not something that you could nail down and define. Living a compassionate, empathic life took Yan Hui beyond himself, giving him momentary glimpses of a sacred reality that is not unlike the "God" pursued by monotheists. It was both immanent and transcendent: it welled up from within but was also experienced as an external presence "standing over me sharp and clear."
The second quotation is a very early Buddhist prayer -- attributed to the Buddha himself -- which expresses the compassionate attitude. John Doe could certainly use this prayer, because it can be prayed by anybody, whatever her beliefs or lack of them:
Let all beings be happy! Weak or strong, of high, middle or low estate,
Small or great, visible or invisible, near or far away,
Alive or still to be born -- may they all be perfectly happy!
Let nobody lie to anybody or despise any single being anywhere.
May nobody wish harm to any single creature, out of anger or hatred!
Let us cherish all creatures, as a mother her only child!
May our compassionate thoughts fill the whole world, above, below, across, --
Without limit; a boundless goodwill toward the whole world,
Unrestricted, free of hatred and enmity! (Sutta Nipata 118)
Selph asks: If the Golden Rule is the best and most important part of religion, why should we not discard religion and just teach the Golden Rule?
This overlaps with the last question. And here is probably the place to answer its last query: "What is John Doe missing?"
To practice the Golden Rule in the way that I have described above is very difficult; every day one tends to fail, time and time again, with an impatient word, an angry gesture, a contemptuous glance. So the traditions have devised aids to help us. Classical yoga, for example, of the kind practised by the Buddha, was not an aerobic exercise; nor was it a way of feeling peaceful and happy with our lot. It was a systematic and highly technical way of combating ego. It also rooted the compassionate ethos deeply in the subconscious. Religious art and ritual brought a sense of beauty, joy, wonder and transcendence to the compassionate lifestyle. If, for example, you contemplate Andrey Rublev's 15th century icon (and in the Orthodox Christian traditions icons have the same kind of authority as scripture) you see, beautifully depicted, what has become an archetypal image of the divine and of the compassionate personality: it is an icon of selflessness and eternal, personal dispossession (I have described it in more detail in The Case for God).
A supportive community can also prevent discouragement; and each tradition has amassed a treasury of wisdom on the "Do's and Don't's" of the compassionate life, pointing out the ever-present danger of segueing into self-congratulation and egotism (it is all too easy to be lethally charitable to others!), so that you don't have to go it alone. The ideal of community is crucial to all faith traditions and it is an education in compassion. In every community, there are bound to be people we find uncongenial (the same can also be said of family), and by learning to relate empathically to them, we prepare ourselves for the encounter with the more challenging Other outside.
But the faith traditions are not monolithic, unified systems. They are immensely complex and have also amassed a lot of inessential practices, doctrines and rituals over the centuries that are either "unskilful" or outdated. We have seen that institutional religion has a tendency to become egotistic and idolatrous -- the same is also true, surely, of secular institutions. What worked beautifully for medievals will not necessarily work for people in the 21st century. So a good deal of weeding out has to be done. The practice of religion is always highly selective. We have a choice: we can either emphasize those aspects of a tradition, secular or religious, that speak of superiority, exclusion or even hatred and disdain; or we can choose those that speak of compassion and learn to look for the compassionate core of what seems, at first glance, an unpromising doctrine or ritual. Religion is hard work; each tradition represents a constant dialogue between transcendence and current conditions; it demands a constant creative effort to speak to the peculiar conditions of the modernity in which we find ourselves. I personally think that we can lay to one side many aspects of a religious tradition if they do not help us to implement the Golden Rule in the way our world needs.
deadlytoque asks: How do you respond to Richard Dawkins' assertion that religion is corrosive to science, and that it encourages people to be satisfied with "trivial, supernatural non-explanations"?
I would agree that religion can indeed encourage this kind of sloppy, facile thinking. But it need not and should not, as I have tried to show in The Case for God.
First, the distinction between mythos and logos meant that until the 17th century, there was no conflict between science and religion:
•Until that time, nobody read their scriptures in a wholly literal way. Every single statement of the Qur'an, for example, is called an ayah, a "parable, sign, or symbol." In their creative midrash ("interpretation, investigation") of scripture, the Rabbis were highly inventive and felt no qualms about adding to the original revelation or interpreting the sacred texts in a way that the biblical authors would have surprising in order to make them address the current needs of the community. And in the Christian world, until the 16th century, pastors, preachers and monks all interpreted each verse of the Bible in four senses: literal, moral, allegorical and mystical. Nobody stuck with the plain sense. And, as a Catholic child, I was taught to read the Bible in this way: the word "evolution" never cropped up in a religious context during my time at school.
•So nobody, for example, understood the first chapter of Genesis as a literal account of the origins of life. That was not the purpose of cosmology in the ancient world. Until the 16th century, people felt at liberty to make up entirely new creation myths or to interpret each word of these early chapters of Genesis as an esoteric allegory.
•In the early fifth century, St Augustine, who can be called the founder of the Western Christian tradition and is revered as a major authority by Catholics and Protestants alike, insisted that if a biblical text contradicted science, that text had to be interpreted differently and given an allegorical significance. The revealed words reflected the world of the biblical authors and were, therefore, "accommodated" to their understanding. The ancients, for example, had thought that a body of water existed above the clouds and was the source of rain. But science, Augustine argued, had moved on and nobody believed that any longer. So when the Bible spoke of the "waters above the earth", we could not take this literally. Augustine's "principle of accommodation" was the bedrock of biblical exegesis until the 16th century. (Incidentally, Augustine also insisted that if a biblical text seemed to preach hatred, violence or exclusion, it must also be interpreted allegorically and made to speak of charity).
•Many of the people who oppose the teaching of evolution in the public schools would call themselves Calvinists. But Calvin himself would not have approved of their campaign. Writing during the dawn of the scientific revolution, he adhered to Augustine's "principle of accommodation." He was not surprised to hear that the biblical description of the cosmos differed from the latest discoveries of the learned philosophers. The Bible, for example, says that the sun and moon were the largest of the heavenly bodies, but now modern astronomers claimed that Saturn was bigger. "Here lies the difference: Moses wrote in a popular style things, which, without instruction, all ordinary persons, endued with common sense are able to understand. But astronomers investigate with great labour whatever the sagacity of the human mind can comprehend." The Bible had nothing to say about astronomy. "He who would learn astronomy and other recondite arts, let him go elsewhere," Calvin instructed emphatically. Science was "very useful" and must not be impeded "because some frantic persons are wont boldly to reject whatever is unknown to them."
•At the time of the disgraceful Galileo crisis, a witty Cardinal in the Vatican made this bon mot: "In scripture, the Holy Spirit is telling us how to go to heaven -- not how the heavens go."
•The pioneering scientists of the early modern period were all devoutly religious: Newton, Kepler, Mersenne, and Descartes; as were most of the Enlightenment philosophers. In England, the Protestant and Puritan ethos were felt to be congenial to early modern science and helped its advance and acceptance. The Jesuits encouraged the young Descartes to read Galileo and were fascinated by modern science; indeed, it has been argued that the first scientific collective was not the Royal Society but the Society of Jesus.
•Newton and Descartes both claimed to have proved the existence of God. This claim would have horrified previous theologians, like Thomas Aquinas but the physics of Newton and Descartes would not work without God. But this reduced God to a scientific explanation and to a mere fact; God was assigned a function -- and even a location in the universe. This conflation of mythos and logos broke with centuries of tradition and it also made the doctrine of divine creation important in the way it had never been before (it is scarcely mentioned in the New Testament and when theologians first formulated the doctrine of creation "out of nothing", they concluded that the universe could give us no information at all about the nature of God.)
•But of course within a few generations, scientists such as Laplace found that they could dispense with the God-hypothesis. But by this time theologians, churchmen and, finally, evangelical Christians had made the scientifically proven God of Newton central to the Western Christian tradition. They had become addicted to the idea of absolute certainty and so lost the older habits of thought that when Darwin came along many seemed without other resource.
The real enmity between science and religion is, therefore, of fairly recent origin. Despite occasional skirmishes, such as the Galileo fiasco, the problem was the religion and science fell in love with one another in a way that proved finally detrimental to religion.
http://blog.ted.com/2009/11/ted_and_reddit_3.php
The Charter for Compassion is the result of Karen Armstrong’s 2008 TED Prize wish and made possible by the generous support of the Fetzer Institute. It will be unveiled to the world on November 12, 2009.
Why a Charter for Compassion?
The Charter of Compassion is a cooperative effort to restore not only compassionate thinking but, more importantly, compassionate action to the center of religious, moral and political life. Compassion is the principled determination to put ourselves in the shoes of the other, and lies at the heart of all religious and ethical systems. One of the most urgent tasks of our generation is to build a global community where men and women of all races, nations and ideologies can live together in peace. In our globalized world, everybody has become our neighbor, and the Golden Rule has become an urgent necessity.
The Charter, crafted by people all over the world and drafted by a multi-fath, multi-national council of thinkers and leaders, seeks to change the conversation so that compassion becomes a key word in public and private discourse, making it clear that any ideology that breeds hatred or contempt ~ be it religious or secular ~ has failed the test of our time. It is not simply a statement of principle; it is above all a summons to creative, practical and sustained action to meet the political, moral, religious, social and cultural problems of our time.
We invite each of you to adopt the charter as your own, to make a lifelong commitment to live with compassion..
http://charterforcompassion.org/about
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Hear what Ali Asani has to say about the Charter
Video
http://charterforcompassion.org/learn/c ... ali-asani/
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With the launch of the Charter for Compassion, it's the TED Blog's pleasure to unveil Karen Armstrong's responses to the top 10 questions asked and voted on by the TED and Reddit community. (See all the questions users asked.) She covers the nature of compassion, the history of the conflict in the Middle East, and tough questions such as these:
•Religion seems to cause racism, extremism -- why not get rid of it?
•What's the point of a God that doesn't intervene?
•Why not discard religion and just teach the Golden Rule?
A Q&A that rewards deep reading. Enjoy!
Capitol62 asks: It seems that the nexus of modern religious conflict is in the Middle East. If that is correct, for your ideas about bringing faiths together with compassion and understanding to be successful you will need a strong commitment from religious leaders there. I was wondering if you've made any progress getting the Charter for Compassion together and how it has been received by Muslim leaders in the Middle East.
Actually the Middle East conflict is secular in origin. It began as a conventional political dispute about a land. Zionism was originally a rebellion against religious Judaism and the PLO Charter was essentially secularist. But because the conflict was allowed to fester without a resolution, religion got sucked into the escalating cycle of violence and became part of the problem. Violence and warfare affect everything that we do: they affect our dreams, aspirations, fantasies, relationships -- and our religion. Most of the religiously-articulated terrorism that troubles us today arose in regions where an originally secular armed conflict has become chronic. It is patently the case in Afghanistan. The root of the problem is political and unless there is a just, political solution to these problems in the Middle East, no amount of inter-faith understanding will be effective.
But you are right that the Middle East conflict is a "nexus." It has become a symbolic issue which stands for more than itself in the three monotheisms of Judaism, Christianity and Islam. For many Muslims, the plight of the Palestinians has become emblematic of the apparent defeat of their religious, cultural and political aspirations in the modern period; the State of Israel has inspired most Jewish fundamentalist movements -- some passionately for the secular state of Israel and others vehemently either against it or adopting a deliberate and defiant neutrality towards it; and the State of Israel also figures prominently in the End Time scenario of the Christian Right in the United States.
All this has certainly muddied the waters, because once a conflict becomes sacralised, issues become absolute and compromise is far ore difficult.
But by no means all Jews, Christians or Muslims adopt these extreme positions. Many are eager, even desperate to achieve a peaceful solution in the Middle East and these are the voices that we need to amplify. On our Council of Conscience, we have a Palestinian peace activist and the Grand Mufti of Egypt, one of the most senior clerics in the Middle East. As I write this, we are reaching out to political and religious leaders in the Gulf States. But there can be no quick fix. Decades of warfare and destruction have made people on all sides suspicious and wary. The political problems remain; they are formidable and until a solution is found that satisfies all parties, there is no hope of either a secular or a religious settlement. The Golden Rule could certainly be a useful yardstick: if we always treated others as we expect to be treated ourselves, many of the heinous actions that are the cause of such suffering to people on both sides of this conflict would be impossible. If we would not like to suffer dispossession and exile, suicide bombing, oppression and terrorism, we should not inflict these on others. But alas, that is not the way politicians think. And when violence has become endemic, some religious people will, not surprisingly, become fearful, angry and, losing hope in the possibility of a conventional political settlement, some will turn to extremism. Charismatic individuals can work wonders. It is a pity that there is no politician or religious leader on either side of this conflict of the moral and spiritual stature of Gandhi, Mandela and Tutu.
renderedit asks: Why did the Buddha teach that the existence of God (that is, whether God exists or not) is irrelevant?
Before we get to the Buddha, I want to describe a spiritual exercise that developed in India in the 10th century BCE, four hundred years before his lifetime and which is a model of authentic religious discourse. Other traditions have developed their own versions of this sacred contest and the principle it embodies underlies the Buddha's apparent insouciance about the ultimate reality.
It was called the Brahmodya Competition and its aim was to find a verbal formula that defined the Brahman, the ultimate reality that lies beyond the gods and is indefinable because it is the inmost essence of all things, the force that pulls the disparate parts of the universe together. First, the Brahmin priests would go out into the jungle to make a retreat. They fasted and practised breathing exercises that induced a different form of consciousness. This is an important point. You cannot talk about God, Brahman, Nirvana or Dao in the same way as you might discuss a business deal or argue an academic point. You have to put yourself into the receptive frame of mind that is similar to the way we listen to music or poetry.
After their retreat, the priests returned to the compound to begin the competition. The challenger issued his own elliptical and paradoxical description of the Brahman, one that embodied all his learning and insight. Then his opponents had to respond, building on the challenger's formula and taking the description a step further. But the winner was the priest who reduced everybody to silence -- and in that silence the Brahman was present. It was not present in the brilliant verbal conundrums but in the stunning realization of the impotence of speech.
Other traditions have called this transcendence God, Nirvana, or Dao and have also insisted that it lies beyond the reach of words. It is not easy for us to appreciate this reticence. We are used to getting instant information at the click of a mouse and can feel frustrated by the experience of unknowing. We talk, I think, far too glibly about God, asking "him" (ridiculous pronoun!) to bless our nation, save our queen, and support our side in a war or an election, even though our opponents must also be the objects of God's concern. We have domesticated God's transcendence. We often learn about God at about the same time as we are learning about Santa Claus; but our ideas about Santa Claus change, mature and become more nuanced, whereas our ideas of God can remain at a rather infantile level.
This experience of numinous unknowing seems to be part of the way we human beings experience. It lay at the heart of the Socratic dialogue, which can be seen as a rational version of the Brahmodya: it did not conclude with one of the participants defeating the arguments of the others but in a profound realization of the profundity of human ignorance. When he contemplated the indeterminate universe of modern physics, Einstein said: "To know that what is impenetrable to us really exists, manifesting itself to us as the highest wisdom and the most radiant beauty which our dull faculties can comprehend only in their most primitive forms -- this knowledge, this feeling is at the centre of all true religiousness." This is the kind of knowing that we derive from poetry -- it can take a lifetime for a complex poem to declare its full meaning to us. Music also, a highly rational art intimately related into mathematics, segues naturally into transcendence. Good theology is also an attempt to express the inexpressible. A modern theologian has described theological discourse as speech that segues into silence. At the end of the symphony, when the last notes die away, there is often a pregnant, eloquent beat of silence before the applause begins. Instead of giving us precise information about God, theology -- at its best -- should hold us in that beat of silence -- just as the Brahmodya did.
In the past some of the most influential Jewish, Christian and Muslim theologians, such as Maimonides, Aquinas and Ibn Sina, made it clear that it was very difficult to speak about God, because when we confront the ultimate, we are at the end of what words or thoughts can do. They insisted that we really do not know what we mean when we say that God is "good," "wise" or "intelligent;" they devised spiritual exercises, like the Brahmodya, that made us realize the inadequacy of all God-talk. Some pointed out that we could not even say that God "existed," because our concept of existence was too limited. Some even preferred to call God "Nothing" because God was not another being.
So, if we cannot know what God is, what is the point of religion? The traditions have found that, even though God is not a metaphysical fact that we can know in the same way as we know the beings of our experience, we can gain some intimation of the divine by means of disciplined spiritual exercises -- like the Brahmodya Competition -- and a compassionate lifestyle. All the traditions have discovered that the chief obstacle to this insight and enlightenment is egotism -- selfishness, greed, envy, self-preoccupation and our engrained tendency to make ourselves the centre of the universe. Yoga, for example, was a systematic dismantling of ego and an attempt to remove the "I" from our thinking. In compassion, which all the traditions say brings us into relation with the transcendence we seek, we learn to dethrone ourselves from the centre of our world and put another there.
That is why the Buddha always refused to define the ultimate. He had a monk, who was a philosopher manqué. Neglecting his yoga and ethical practice, he kept pestering the Buddha about such questions as the existence of God and the creation of the world. The Buddha told him that he was like a man who had been shot with a poisoned arrow but refused to have any medical treatment until he had discovered the name of his assailant and what village he came from: he would die before he received this perfectly useless information. One could, the Buddha said, spend many pleasant hours discussing these fascinating topics but this would distract a monk from his main objective: "Because, my disciples, they will not help you, they are not useful in the quest for holiness; they do not lead to peace and to the direct knowledge of Nirvana."
In the oriental traditions, especially in India and China, the emphasis is not on what we are transcending to (God, Nirvana, Brahman, Dao) but on what we must transcend from, tamping out the "unhelpful states of mind" arising from egotism that hold us back from the perception of this transcendent reality that we can glimpse, but never rationally define.
blackstar9000 asks: What one aspect of religion would you say is least understood by the general population, how can it be addressed, and what do you think would be the result if more people understood it?
I think that the Western world -- and particularly, perhaps, the Western Christian world -- has lost sight of the fact that religion is a practical rather than a notional discipline. It is not a question of thinking or "believing" things but of behaving consistently in a way that changes you at a profound level. This is one of the principal themes of my book The Case for God. Religious knowledge has to be acquired by dedicated practice -- like driving, swimming or cooking. You cannot learn dancing or gymnastics by reading a book. You have to devote hours and years of time to practising this skill; you do not necessarily understand how your body achieves these amazing feats, but if you persevere you may learn to move with an unearthly grace and reveal a physical potential that is impossible for an untrained body.
The myths of religion are essentially programmes for action. Many of the most ancient myths are overtly about the gods but are actually about humanity. These stories about gods descending into the underworld and fighting with monsters were not meant to be factual or historical; they were telling you how to enter into the labyrinthine world of the psyche and fight your own demons. Unless a myth is put into practice, it remains as opaque and abstract as a musical score, which is impenetrable to most of us until it is "incarnated" instrumentally. It is only when you apply it practically to your own life -- either ritually or ethically -- that it reveals its truth, in rather the same way as the instructions of a board game, which seem incomprehensible, complicated and boring until you pick up the dice and begin to play when everything falls into place. Such a myth is not providing us with factual information about the universe but telling you something profoundly true about our humanity, the way our minds and hearts work, and how we can live more richly and intensely, beyond the reach of fear, hatred, and envy.
This is very clear in Buddhism, Confucianism, Judaism and Islam, which are all essentially religions of practice and have little or no obligatory dogma. The "five pillars" of Islam, for example, are activities (pilgrimage, almsgiving, fasting) rather than doctrines requiring belief. But it was also true of such Christian doctrines as Trinity (originally a meditative exercise) and Incarnation (a call to lay aside the ego; see Philippians 2:1-11). A myth has been defined as something that -- in some sense -- happened once but which also happens all the time. It is only when you activate a myth, making it a reality in your own life, that you recognize its truth.
We lost this understanding of religion during the early modern period, when our conception of truth, became more notional, mythos was discredited, and practical knowledge downgraded. At this time, the English word belief changed its meaning: beliven used to mean "love, loyalty, commitment, engagement;" it was related to the German liebe ("beloved") and the Latin libido ("desire"). Only in the late 17th century did it come to mean: "an intellectual acceptance of a somewhat dubious proposition." In the New Testament, when Jesus was asking for "faith" (Greek: pistis, "trust, involvement, commitment") he was not asking for a credulous acceptance of a set of doctrines. He was calling for action, seeking disciples who would give what they had to the poor, live rough, behave compassionately even to social outcasts, and devote their lives to the coming Kingdom when rich and poor, weak and powerful would live together in harmony. When the early Christians recited "creeds" they were not expressing "belief" so much as making this kind of commitment; the Latin credo derives from cor do: "I give my heart."
By making "belief" in the modern sense so essential to religion, we have distorted our understanding of faith and placed far too much emphasis on doctrinal orthodoxy. Nobody, after all, can have the last word on what we call "God." We now call religious people "believers" as though accepting certain dogmas was the most important thing that they did. People like the rabbis, the fathers of the church, the Buddha, the sages of the Upanishads and Confucius would have found this very strange, because the teachings of religion make no sense until and unless they are translated into action.
Today we often think that before we start living a religious life we have first to accept the creedal doctrines and that before one can have any comprehension of the loyalty and trust of faith, one must first force one's mind to accept a host of incomprehensible doctrines. But this is to put the cart before the horse. First you change your behaviour -- and only then do you begin to understand the truth that lies behind the dogma.
In his famous prayer, St Anselm, the 11th century archbishop of Canterbury, says: credo ut intelligam, which is usually translated: "I believe in order that I may understand." As a child, I always thought this meant that first I had to force my mind to "believe" the articles of the creed and then, as a reward, God would give me understanding. But Anselm's words are more accurately translated: "I involve/commit myself in order that I may understand." It is only when you involve yourself in the ritual and ethical practices of religion that you achieve understanding. That is why Anselm goes on to say: "And unless I so involve myself, I will not understand."
The person who asked me this question also asked a series of questions about the Golden Rule ("Do not do to others what you would not like them to do to you" or "Always treat all others as you would wish to be treated yourself"). Why the emphasis on the Golden Rule? Why is it universal? Does it tell us anything substantial about religion, since it is also fundamental to secular ideologies? Because religion is essentially a practical activity, religious people are very pragmatic. They do not usually adopt an ideology because it sounds good but because it has been found to work. When people have practised the Golden Rule "all day and every day" as Confucius (the first person to formulate it in the sixth century BCE) prescribed, you find that you lay aside the ego, because the Golden Rule requires you to overcome selfishness and put yourself, consistently, kindly, and intelligently, all day and every day, in somebody else's shoes.
People have discovered that if they practice the Golden Rule faithfully, it slowly, incrementally, changes them. They achieve what the Greeks called ekstasis, which is not an exotic trance but a disciplined, habitual "stepping outside" of the prism of selfishness. This practice is fundamental to the enlightenment that we call God, Nirvana, Brahman or Dao. As a dancer reveals the full potential of the human body, people find that living beyond the confines of self helps them to cultivate new capacities of mind and heart; they discover a transcendent peace within themselves, which enables them to live serenely and creatively in the midst of the suffering that is an ineradicable part of the human condition. The Golden Rule is the basis of religion and morality because this is the way our humanity works; this tells us something profoundly true about the human condition.
But it is no use either "believing" or "dis-believing" in the efficacy of the Golden Rule. You only discover its truth and effectiveness if you put it into practice "all day and every day."
Read the rest of Karen Armstrong's answers, after the jump >>
(Continued)
rakv1971 asks: What is the role of God in a world where neuroscience is peeling away at the subjective?
I am afraid I am not up at the cutting edge of neuroscience, so I am not sure what you mean by "peeling away at the subjective?" Do you mean that our subjective impressions are unreliable representations of objective reality? If so, the mystics and sages of religion, especially in the eastern traditions, have long been aware of this. They have all insisted that the ultimate (God, Nirvana, Brahman, Dao) lies beyond our normal psycho-mental states. You could not think about Brahman; nor could you experience God emotionally. For the sages of the Upanishads (c. 7th century BCE), In the seventh century BCE, Yajnavalkya, one of the great teachers in the Upanishads, the Brahman is identical with the innermost core (atman) of each human being, but it lay far deeper than our normal thoughts, sensations and experiences:
You can't see the Seer who does the seeing; you can't hear the Hearer who does the hearing; you can't think with the Thinker who does the thinking; you can't perceive the Perceiver who does the Perceiving.
In the same way, the Buddha emphasized the ephemeral nature of our perceptions: to achieve enlightenment one had to go deeper. And until the fourteenth century, when a fervid emotional piety began to surface in Europe, most of the Christian masters of the spiritual life insisted that you could not feel God any more than you could know what God is. "Blessed is he who is without sensations during prayer," said Evagrius of Pontus, one of the monks who lived a contemplative life in the Egyptian desert.
In the past, the most thoughtful spiritual advisers in all the major traditions have distrusted visions, exotic feelings or heavenly voices; they claimed that they were the product of a fevered imagination and a distraction from the transcendence we seek. Buddhists say that this type of experience is like so much electronic "noise," a natural effect of the yogic disciplines, which have little significance in themselves. They certainly have no supernatural origin. Many of the meditative exercises developed in the traditions were designed precisely to wean people away from this type of emotional excess. To cultivate extraordinary feelings and sensations and luxuriate in a warm glow meant that the contemplative or yogin would remain trapped in the ego that s/he was supposed to transcend. Once religious experience is equated with fervid enthusiasm, people are in danger of losing touch with the psychological rhythms and realities of the interior life.
sweetbldnjesus asks: What do you think accounts for today's strong disconnect between logos and mythos?
In most premodern cultures, there were two generally recognized ways of thinking, speaking and acquiring knowledge. The Greeks called them mythos and logos. Both were essential and neither was considered superior to the other; they were not in conflict but complementary. Each had its own sphere of competence and it was considered unwise to mix the two. Logos ("reason") was the pragmatic mode of thought that enabled people to function effectively in the world, so it had to correspond accurately to external reality. Logos was essential to the survival of our species, but it had its limitations. It could not assuage human grief or find ultimate meaning in life's struggles. For that people have turned to mythos, which focused on the more elusive, puzzling and tragic aspects of the human predicament that lay outside the remit of logos.
Human beings are meaning-seeking creatures. We fall very easily into despair if we do not find some significance in our lives. Myth helps us to achieve this. If your child dies or you witness a terrible natural disaster, you want a scientific, rational explanation but you also need help in coping with the turbulence of your grief and despair. Science can diagnose your cancer and can even cure it; but it cannot assuage the disappointment, terror and dismay that come with the diagnosis, nor can it help you to die well. That is the role of myth. But a myth was not just a pretty story that provided you with a facile answer to the problems of mortality, pain, and sorrow. It was, as I said above, a programme for action. It could put you in the correct psychological or spiritual posture, but it was up to you to do the hard spiritual and psychological work with yourself and take the next step, making the "truth" of the myth a reality in your own life.
The modern disjunction between mythos and logos was one of the effects of the 17th century scientific revolution in the West. At this time, logos began to achieve such spectacular results that myth became discredited. So much so that in popular parlance today a "myth" often simply refers to something that is not true. If accused of a peccadillo in his past life, a politician is likely to say "It is a myth"; i.e., it didn't happen. During the modern period in the West, the scientific methodology of logos was widely regarded as the only reliable means of attaining truth and this would make religion difficult, if not impossible. As theologians began to adopt the criteria of science, the mythoi of Christianity were interpreted as empirically, rationally and historically verifiable and forced into a style of thinking that was alien to it. Philosophers and scientists could no longer see the point of ritual, so religious knowledge became theoretical rather than practical. Because we started to read our scriptures as though they were factual logos, we lost the art of interpreting the old stories of gods walking the earth, dead men rising from tombs or seas parting miraculously. We also began to understand such concepts as faith, revelation, myth and mystery in ways that would have been very surprising to our ancestors.
This questioner also asks: If so much evil has been perpetuated in the name of religion, is it not better to avoid organized religion altogether?
There is no denying that terrible things have been done in the name of religion. As a species, we have a genius for fouling things up. Atrocities have also been committed in the name of secular ideologies: one need think only of Stalin. I have had several threatening letters from fervent atheists, who tell me that if they find out where I live they will burn my house down. We are a cruel species. At its best, religion, like the best secular ideologies, was designed to curb our tendency to destroy anything or anyone that appears to threaten us.
I used to think that it would be better if religion had never been invented because religious people have done such harm in the world. But after twenty-five years of studying the major world faiths, I have had to change my mind. When I was researching The Great Transformation: The Beginning of our Religious Traditions, for example, I was surprised to learn that each one of what we call the great world faiths originally developed in a revulsion from contemporary violence; each one -- Hinduism, Buddhism, Jainism, Confucianism, Daoism and the three monotheisms -- began at a time when violence had reached an unprecedented crescendo, and in each case, the catalyst for religious change was a principled rejection of aggression and a deliberate cultivation of a compassionate ethic. It is not "religion" that is responsible for evil; it is the greed, selfishness, and violence of humanity. We often call evil acts "inhuman" but this is inaccurate: these acts are all too human. We are capable of heroism and generosity; but aggression is also something that comes naturally to us.
Some forms of religion are, as the Buddhists say, more "skilful" or "helpful" than others. A great deal of harm has been done when people have cultivated an idolatrous conception of God, thinking of "him" as a powerful being, like ourselves, writ large, with likes and dislikes similar to our own. This imaginary deity is simply an idol, which we have created in our own image; it gives a sacred seal of absolute approval to some of our worst prejudices and impulses. That is why some of the greatest Jewish, Christian and Muslim theologians fought against this idolatrous tendency by emphasizing the transcendence of God -- as I explained in my answer to the second question.
And this reminds us that organized religion has its uses. It preserves wisdom like that of such theologians as Hillel, Rabbi Meir, Rabbi Akiva, Maimonides, the great Kabbalists, Isaac Luria, Martin Buber, Ibn Sina, Avicenna, Al-Ghazzali, Ibn Arabi, Suhrawardi, Mulla Sadra, Mir Dimad, the Cappadocian Fathers, Denys, Duns Scotus Erigena, Aquinas, Meister Eckhart, Karl Rahner, Paul Tillich, and Bernard Lonergan. Of course organized religion can become idolatrous; many church leaders are simply religious politicians, and politicians, as a breed, are not famous for their lack of ego. Any institution, be it secular or religious, has a tendency to become an end in itself -- or, in religious terms, an idol.
Human beings are chronically predisposed towards idolatry. We constantly give absolute value to purely temporal, limited realities, such as a god, a nation, or an ideology. When something inherently finite is invested with ultimate value, its devotees feel obliged to eliminate any rival claimant because there can only be one absolute. We find this kind of idolatry in the Book of Deuteronomy in the Bible; but it also characterised some of the worst political and moral disasters of the twentieth century.
enlashok asks: How bad does an idea have to be before the appropriate reaction is to discard it?
This question comes from Enlashok, but he has asked a lot of other questions and makes a lot of other points too, particularly about the harm religion does. I will try to give as comprehensive an argument as possible.
First, I freely admit that a great deal of religion is indeed "unskilful" -- there is bad religion just as there is bad art, bad sex, and bad cooking. I have written books about this type of destructive faith. Far too many people, as Enlashok points out, are uncritical of themselves and their tradition; they have indeed "maintained and propagated immoral, racist, sexist and homophobic policies, promoted tribalism, and shielded extremism." Religion -- like any art or science -- is very difficult to do well. Religion may, for example, teach compassion, but far too many people -- secularists as well as religious -- prefer to be right rather than compassionate.
Enlashok says that he realizes he has asked a lot of questions and that he would be content if I would simply answer his first question, which I have cited above. So let me say again: religion is not an "idea." Its doctrines can only be verified when they are consistently translated into practical action. They are certainly not ideas that can be "factually supported from available evidence," to quote Enlashok again. As I have tried to explain, the notion that religion is an idea that can be empirically proven is a great fallacy that developed in the Christian West during the early modern period, when theologians tried to force theology into a scientific idiom that was alien to it. As soon as they did this, atheism became inevitable. When you mix mythos with logos, you get bad science and unskilful religion. Unfortunately, as globalization proceeds and more and more people adopt the Western ethos, this unviable, "scientific theology" is spreading to other faiths and other regions.
Instead of seeing religion as a science manqué, I think it is more helpful to regard it as an art form. Like art, religion at its best helps us to find meaning in a tragic world; like art, it holds us in an attitude of wonder and introduces us to a mode of knowledge that is not dependent upon logic or empirical truth. Music, for example, is not about anything and you cannot verify the meaning of a late Beethoven quartet, but it has a powerful and enriching effect upon us. Poetry pushes language to the limits and makes us aware of the difficulty of expressing some of our more profound insights in a purely logical way. Religion has always expressed itself most effectively in terms of art: poetry, music, dance, song, architecture, calligraphy, drama, and sculpture.
Religion differs from art in its summons to practical action. It is not sufficient to have an aesthetic or "spiritual" experience. The Buddha explained that, after achieving enlightenment, a person must come down from the mountain top, return to the market place and there practice compassion for all living beings. A spirituality that focuses only on a numinous warm glow is "unskilful" and selfish. All art is transformative; it is meant to change us. Religion -- at its best -- is a form of ethical alchemy that helps us to limit the egotism that causes so much human suffering, both to ourselves and to others.
Like art, religion was not meant to provide us with information and explanations that lie within the remit of scientific logos. It helps us to consider problems for which there are no final solutions -- mortality, the prospect of our inevitable and painful extinction, sickness, injustice, and cruelty. It does not mean that we will suffer less but, if we work hard enough, we might be able to endure our own pain and to assuage the suffering of others.
Science deals with verifiable ideas; scientists struggle with a problem, and when that is solved move on to the next one. There is continuous improvement, progress and development. But the humanities do not function like that. Philosophers are still meditating on the same issues and problems that preoccupied Plato. Harold Pinter is not necessarily a better playwright than Shakespeare, simply because the sum of human knowledge has advanced since Shakespeare's time. There are some aspects of life -- death, sorrow, the nature of happiness, evil and the nature of goodness -- that each generation has to grapple with for itself. And there never seems to be a definitive solution.
SomeKindOfPrimate asks: You often defend religion by arguing that god is a vague numinous force known only through mystical experience. But a god that doesn't answer prayers and intervene in the world is impotent to most believers. If god doesn't throw thunderbolts and intervene in the affairs of mankind, what is the point of believing in god and practising religion?
First of all, I personally would not like to worship a god who throws thunderbolts. The Greeks had one, whom they called Zeus; like the other gods, he continually intervened in human affairs in a highly irresponsible way. The kind of god you describe is, surely, undesirable.
In the ancient world, people believed in the existence of gods in a way that was not irrational at a time when there were so many unseen forces -- wind, infection, disease, emotion -- that had a profound influence on human life. But they were not gods in our sense of the word, because they were not omnipotent or omniscient; they had a fuller share of Being than other creatures because they were immortal, but otherwise they shared the human predicament and had to live according to the natural laws of the cosmos. There was no ontological gulf between the natural world and the gods, no concept of the "supernatural" in our sense: gods, humans, animals, trees, rocks and stars were made up -- in varying degrees -- of the same divine substance. Homer depicts the gods as more powerful than human beings but basically trivial and lacking in seriousness precisely because they did not have to face the horror of death. In the eastern religions, the gods are lower in status than an enlightened teacher such as the Buddha; they too have to work for their own enlightenment and study such disciplines as yoga under a human guru.
In making a mere god the only symbol of the ultimate transcendence, the people of Israel were doing something highly unusual. And because this god, at the very start of the history of Israel, had all the irresponsible, thunderbolt-hurling defects of many of the other gods, they had to develop their theology, reaching out to what theologians call the ineffable God beyond god. A personalised God can help us to recognize the sacredness of human personality, but there carries an inbuilt danger of idolatry because it is all too easy to make the biblical god an idol, the end of the story. Religious language always points beyond itself; it is and can only be symbolic.
That is why the later prophets and the rabbis of the Talmudic Age had to refine the god depicted in the earliest parts of the Bible, making it clear that God was not yet another being. I have described this long and complex process in A History of God. Jews do not even speak God's name, a discipline that reminds them that any human expression of the divine is so inadequate that it is potentially blasphemous. In the Talmud, the rabbis make it clear that there is a vast gulf between the human experience of the divine and the divine reality itself (which Jewish mystics called Ein Sof, "Without End"), which would always remain beyond our ken. One rabbi went so far as to say that Ein Sof was not even mentioned in the Bible or the Talmud.
Christians and Muslims made exactly the same distinction. The distinction between the God we somehow experience and the ineffable reality itself lies behind the doctrine of the Trinity, which was meant to remind Christians that it was impossible to think about God as a simple personality. When he was devising the doctrine of the incarnation of God in the man Jesus in the 4th century, St Athanasius explained that we could only make this claim because we did not know what God was. If God were simply a big, almighty Something, like an immense thing in our experience, it would be impossible for God to be present in a human being; it would be like trying to cram a whale into a can of sardines. But in the man Jesus, Christians could glimpse an incomprehensible transcendence that was entirely distinct from anything in our normal experience.
But during the modern period, influenced by scientific logos of modernity, people began to lose the older symbolic habits of thought, started to read their scriptures with a literalism that is without parallel in religious history, and began to envisage God as a fact. They saw their idea of God as identical with the transcendent reality, instead of simply being a symbol. Unlike the theologians of the past, they had no problem thinking that he existed like any other being. As Paul Tillich explained:
We can no longer speak of God easily to anybody, because he will immediately question: "Does God exist?" now the very asking of that question signifies that the symbols of God have become meaningless. For God, in the question, has become one of the innumerable objects in time and space which may or may not exist. And this is not the meaning of God at all.
This kind of literal thinking produces a very primitive notion of deity. A God who interferes with human freedom is simply a tyrant; a God who hurls thunderbolts is a liability; a God conceived as living in a world of his own was simply a being; even the Supreme Being was just another Being, the final item in the series. Tillich argued that to deny the reality of the idolatrous, interventionist god was a religious act.
It is just no good thinking that God will answer our prayers, cure our sickness, ensure the success of our nation or give us a fine day for the picnic, because "he" simply doesn't do it. And if you are convinced that God has cured your cancer and saved your life, then you really do have a problem: why did God not save the lives of the six million Jews who died in the Shoah? Elie Weisel said that this interventionist God died in Auschwitz. But there is an Auschwitz story that I think wonderfully expresses the true purpose of religion. Even in the camps, some inmates continued to study Torah and observe the festivals, not in the hope of placating an angry deity, but because they found that these rituals helped them to endure the horror. One night the Jews put God on trial. In the face of such inconceivable suffering, they found the conventional arguments for his existence utterly unconvincing. If God was omnipotent, he could have prevented the Holocaust; if he could not stop it, he was impotent; and if he could stop it but chose not to, he was a monster. They condemned God to death. The presiding rabbi pronounced the verdict, and then went on calmly to announce that it was time for the evening prayer. Ideas about God come and go, but prayer, the struggle to find meaning even in the darkest circumstances, must continue.
The "God beyond god" is only vague, abstract and difficult to understand if you are not living the mythos of religion. If one just considers God as an abstract idea, without putting into practice the teachings of religion, as I have described above, God becomes as abstract as the rules of a board game.
maxmax asks: John Doe calls himself an atheist. He never goes to a house of worship. He doesn't look to religious texts for guidance. He doesn't believe that there is such a thing as a god, at least not in any literal way. Nonetheless, he believes in the Golden Rule (Do unto others…). While logically he realizes that it leads to more happiness for more people, he also personally finds satisfaction in caring for others and treating them with respect. This sense of satisfaction (perhaps even transcendence), in fact, is really where he finds the willpower to keep doing the caring and thoughtful things he does. Would you consider John Doe to be a religious person? If not, what is he lacking?
If John Doe puts the Golden Rule into practice "all day and every day" as Confucius prescribed, not simply doing his "good deed for the day" and then returning to a life of self interest; if he does not confine his benevolence to his own group, tribe or nation or to people he finds congenial, but extends it to all members of the human race -- and, indeed, to all species; if every time he is tempted to speak unkindly of an annoying sibling, an ex-wife or a people with whom his country is at war, he refrains; if he never speaks an unkind word, never makes an irritable gesture, but behaves with friendly courtesy to all; if he does not look down, even in his most intimate thoughts, on those who do not share his beliefs; if he does not inveigh impatiently at what he regards as the credulity of the religious; if he works energetically and in practical ways to assuage the suffering and injustice of life, even if this goes against his own interests; if he is open-hearted, generous and kind at every moment of his life, I would not only call him "religious" but I would bow before him as a Sage, a perfected human being.
Such a commitment to the Golden Rule produces what the Chinese called a Sage; what the Greek Orthodox called a deified human being; what others have called a Buddha, an enlightened human being, so identified with Nirvana that s/he has become inseparable from it. Such a person has gone beyond ego, because at each moment of the day, s/he has laid selfishness to one side and is living in a state of ekstasis, "standing outside" the prism of selfhood; such a person has broken down the barricades that most of us erect around ourselves to protect the frightened, defensive ego. Such a person is indeed, as you suggest, living in relation to transcendence, because s/he is not focused on what s/he is transcending to, but concentrating on what s/he is transcending from.
I would like to close this question with two quotations. The first is from Confucius's Analects. These words were spoken by Yan Hui, Confucius's most talented pupil, and describe a life of constant ren. Later Confucians would define ren as "benevolence, compassion", but Confucius always refused to define it because he said it a state that was incomprehensible to a person who had not achieved it. It was itself the transcendence one seeks -- hence the Chinese often speak of the ultimate reality as the "Way" (dao) and prefer to remain silent about the Terminus of the religious journey. For Yan Hui the practice of ren was an end in itself, but it demanded a lifelong effort which, once undertaken seriously, has its own dynamic, which he described, "with a deep sigh":
The more I strain towards it, the higher it soars. The deeper I bore down into it, the harder it becomes. I see it in front, but suddenly it is behind. Step by step, the Master [Confucius] skilfully lures one on. He has broadened me with culture, restrained me with ritual. Even if I wanted to stop, I could not. Just when I feel that I have exhausted every resource, something seems to rise up, standing over me sharp and clear. Yet though I long to pursue it, I can find no way of getting to it at all. (Analects 9:10)
Ren was not something you "got" but something you gave. It is not something that you could nail down and define. Living a compassionate, empathic life took Yan Hui beyond himself, giving him momentary glimpses of a sacred reality that is not unlike the "God" pursued by monotheists. It was both immanent and transcendent: it welled up from within but was also experienced as an external presence "standing over me sharp and clear."
The second quotation is a very early Buddhist prayer -- attributed to the Buddha himself -- which expresses the compassionate attitude. John Doe could certainly use this prayer, because it can be prayed by anybody, whatever her beliefs or lack of them:
Let all beings be happy! Weak or strong, of high, middle or low estate,
Small or great, visible or invisible, near or far away,
Alive or still to be born -- may they all be perfectly happy!
Let nobody lie to anybody or despise any single being anywhere.
May nobody wish harm to any single creature, out of anger or hatred!
Let us cherish all creatures, as a mother her only child!
May our compassionate thoughts fill the whole world, above, below, across, --
Without limit; a boundless goodwill toward the whole world,
Unrestricted, free of hatred and enmity! (Sutta Nipata 118)
Selph asks: If the Golden Rule is the best and most important part of religion, why should we not discard religion and just teach the Golden Rule?
This overlaps with the last question. And here is probably the place to answer its last query: "What is John Doe missing?"
To practice the Golden Rule in the way that I have described above is very difficult; every day one tends to fail, time and time again, with an impatient word, an angry gesture, a contemptuous glance. So the traditions have devised aids to help us. Classical yoga, for example, of the kind practised by the Buddha, was not an aerobic exercise; nor was it a way of feeling peaceful and happy with our lot. It was a systematic and highly technical way of combating ego. It also rooted the compassionate ethos deeply in the subconscious. Religious art and ritual brought a sense of beauty, joy, wonder and transcendence to the compassionate lifestyle. If, for example, you contemplate Andrey Rublev's 15th century icon (and in the Orthodox Christian traditions icons have the same kind of authority as scripture) you see, beautifully depicted, what has become an archetypal image of the divine and of the compassionate personality: it is an icon of selflessness and eternal, personal dispossession (I have described it in more detail in The Case for God).
A supportive community can also prevent discouragement; and each tradition has amassed a treasury of wisdom on the "Do's and Don't's" of the compassionate life, pointing out the ever-present danger of segueing into self-congratulation and egotism (it is all too easy to be lethally charitable to others!), so that you don't have to go it alone. The ideal of community is crucial to all faith traditions and it is an education in compassion. In every community, there are bound to be people we find uncongenial (the same can also be said of family), and by learning to relate empathically to them, we prepare ourselves for the encounter with the more challenging Other outside.
But the faith traditions are not monolithic, unified systems. They are immensely complex and have also amassed a lot of inessential practices, doctrines and rituals over the centuries that are either "unskilful" or outdated. We have seen that institutional religion has a tendency to become egotistic and idolatrous -- the same is also true, surely, of secular institutions. What worked beautifully for medievals will not necessarily work for people in the 21st century. So a good deal of weeding out has to be done. The practice of religion is always highly selective. We have a choice: we can either emphasize those aspects of a tradition, secular or religious, that speak of superiority, exclusion or even hatred and disdain; or we can choose those that speak of compassion and learn to look for the compassionate core of what seems, at first glance, an unpromising doctrine or ritual. Religion is hard work; each tradition represents a constant dialogue between transcendence and current conditions; it demands a constant creative effort to speak to the peculiar conditions of the modernity in which we find ourselves. I personally think that we can lay to one side many aspects of a religious tradition if they do not help us to implement the Golden Rule in the way our world needs.
deadlytoque asks: How do you respond to Richard Dawkins' assertion that religion is corrosive to science, and that it encourages people to be satisfied with "trivial, supernatural non-explanations"?
I would agree that religion can indeed encourage this kind of sloppy, facile thinking. But it need not and should not, as I have tried to show in The Case for God.
First, the distinction between mythos and logos meant that until the 17th century, there was no conflict between science and religion:
•Until that time, nobody read their scriptures in a wholly literal way. Every single statement of the Qur'an, for example, is called an ayah, a "parable, sign, or symbol." In their creative midrash ("interpretation, investigation") of scripture, the Rabbis were highly inventive and felt no qualms about adding to the original revelation or interpreting the sacred texts in a way that the biblical authors would have surprising in order to make them address the current needs of the community. And in the Christian world, until the 16th century, pastors, preachers and monks all interpreted each verse of the Bible in four senses: literal, moral, allegorical and mystical. Nobody stuck with the plain sense. And, as a Catholic child, I was taught to read the Bible in this way: the word "evolution" never cropped up in a religious context during my time at school.
•So nobody, for example, understood the first chapter of Genesis as a literal account of the origins of life. That was not the purpose of cosmology in the ancient world. Until the 16th century, people felt at liberty to make up entirely new creation myths or to interpret each word of these early chapters of Genesis as an esoteric allegory.
•In the early fifth century, St Augustine, who can be called the founder of the Western Christian tradition and is revered as a major authority by Catholics and Protestants alike, insisted that if a biblical text contradicted science, that text had to be interpreted differently and given an allegorical significance. The revealed words reflected the world of the biblical authors and were, therefore, "accommodated" to their understanding. The ancients, for example, had thought that a body of water existed above the clouds and was the source of rain. But science, Augustine argued, had moved on and nobody believed that any longer. So when the Bible spoke of the "waters above the earth", we could not take this literally. Augustine's "principle of accommodation" was the bedrock of biblical exegesis until the 16th century. (Incidentally, Augustine also insisted that if a biblical text seemed to preach hatred, violence or exclusion, it must also be interpreted allegorically and made to speak of charity).
•Many of the people who oppose the teaching of evolution in the public schools would call themselves Calvinists. But Calvin himself would not have approved of their campaign. Writing during the dawn of the scientific revolution, he adhered to Augustine's "principle of accommodation." He was not surprised to hear that the biblical description of the cosmos differed from the latest discoveries of the learned philosophers. The Bible, for example, says that the sun and moon were the largest of the heavenly bodies, but now modern astronomers claimed that Saturn was bigger. "Here lies the difference: Moses wrote in a popular style things, which, without instruction, all ordinary persons, endued with common sense are able to understand. But astronomers investigate with great labour whatever the sagacity of the human mind can comprehend." The Bible had nothing to say about astronomy. "He who would learn astronomy and other recondite arts, let him go elsewhere," Calvin instructed emphatically. Science was "very useful" and must not be impeded "because some frantic persons are wont boldly to reject whatever is unknown to them."
•At the time of the disgraceful Galileo crisis, a witty Cardinal in the Vatican made this bon mot: "In scripture, the Holy Spirit is telling us how to go to heaven -- not how the heavens go."
•The pioneering scientists of the early modern period were all devoutly religious: Newton, Kepler, Mersenne, and Descartes; as were most of the Enlightenment philosophers. In England, the Protestant and Puritan ethos were felt to be congenial to early modern science and helped its advance and acceptance. The Jesuits encouraged the young Descartes to read Galileo and were fascinated by modern science; indeed, it has been argued that the first scientific collective was not the Royal Society but the Society of Jesus.
•Newton and Descartes both claimed to have proved the existence of God. This claim would have horrified previous theologians, like Thomas Aquinas but the physics of Newton and Descartes would not work without God. But this reduced God to a scientific explanation and to a mere fact; God was assigned a function -- and even a location in the universe. This conflation of mythos and logos broke with centuries of tradition and it also made the doctrine of divine creation important in the way it had never been before (it is scarcely mentioned in the New Testament and when theologians first formulated the doctrine of creation "out of nothing", they concluded that the universe could give us no information at all about the nature of God.)
•But of course within a few generations, scientists such as Laplace found that they could dispense with the God-hypothesis. But by this time theologians, churchmen and, finally, evangelical Christians had made the scientifically proven God of Newton central to the Western Christian tradition. They had become addicted to the idea of absolute certainty and so lost the older habits of thought that when Darwin came along many seemed without other resource.
The real enmity between science and religion is, therefore, of fairly recent origin. Despite occasional skirmishes, such as the Galileo fiasco, the problem was the religion and science fell in love with one another in a way that proved finally detrimental to religion.
http://blog.ted.com/2009/11/ted_and_reddit_3.php
November 26, 2009
Op-Ed Columnist
The Religious Wars
By NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF
Just a few years ago, it seemed curious that an omniscient, omnipotent God wouldn’t smite tormentors like Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens and Sam Harris. They all published best-selling books excoriating religion and practically inviting lightning bolts.
Traditionally, religious wars were fought with swords and sieges; today, they often are fought with books. And in literary circles, these battles have usually been fought at the extremes.
Fundamentalists fired volleys of Left Behind novels, in which Jesus returns to Earth to battle the Anti-Christ (whose day job was secretary general of the United Nations). Meanwhile, devout atheists built mocking Web sites like www.whydoesGodhateamputees.com. That site notes that although believers periodically credit prayer with curing cancer, God never seems to regrow lost limbs. It demands an end to divine discrimination against amputees.
This year is different, with a crop of books that are less combative and more thoughtful. One of these is “The Evolution of God,” by Robert Wright, who explores how religions have changed — improved — over the millennia. He notes that God, as perceived by humans, has mellowed from the capricious warlord sometimes depicted in the Old Testament who periodically orders genocides.
(In 1 Samuel 15:3, the Lord orders a mass slaughter of the Amalekite tribe: “Now go and attack Amalek, and utterly destroy all that they have, and do not spare them. But kill both man and woman, infant and nursing child.” These days, that would earn God an indictment before the International Criminal Court.)
Mr. Wright also argues that monotheism emerged only gradually among Israelites, and that the God familiar to us may have resulted from a merger of a creator god, El, and a warrior god, Yahweh. Mr. Wright also argues that monotheism wasn’t firmly established until after the Babylonian exile, and he says that Moses’s point was that other gods shouldn’t be worshiped, not that they didn’t exist. For example, he notes the troubling references to a “divine council” and “gods” — plural — in Psalm 82.
In another revelation not usually found in Sunday School classes, Mr. Wright cites Biblical evidence that God (both El and Yahweh) had a sex life, rather like the Greek gods, and notes archaeological discoveries indicating that Yahweh may have had a wife, Asherah.
As for Christianity, Mr. Wright argues that it was Saint Paul — more than Jesus, an apocalyptic prophet — who emphasized love and universalism and built Christian faith as it is known today. Saint Paul focused on these elements, he says, partly as a way to broaden the appeal of the church and convert Gentiles.
Mr. Wright detects an evolution toward an image of God as a more beneficient and universal deity, one whose moral compass favors compassion for humans of whatever race or tribe, one who is now firmly in the antigenocide camp. Mr. Wright’s focus is not on whether God exists, but he does suggest that changing perceptions of God reflect a moral direction to history — and that this in turn perhaps reflects some kind of spiritual force.
“To the extent that ‘god’ grows, that is evidence — maybe not massive evidence, but some evidence — of higher purpose,” Mr. Wright says.
Another best-seller this year, Karen Armstrong’s “The Case for God,” likewise doesn’t posit a Grandpa-in-the-Sky; rather, she sees God in terms of an ineffable presence that can be neither proven nor disproven in any rational sense. To Ms. Armstrong, faith belongs to the realm of life’s mysteries, beyond the world of reason, and people on both sides of the “God gap” make the mistake of interpreting religious traditions too literally.
“Over the centuries people in all cultures discovered that by pushing their reasoning powers to the limit, stretching language to the end of its tether, and living as selflessly and compassionately as possible, they experienced a transcendence that enabled them to affirm their suffering with serenity and courage,” Ms. Armstrong writes. Her book suggests that religion is not meant to regrow lost limbs, but that it may help some amputees come to terms with their losses.
Whatever one’s take on God, there’s no doubt that religion remains one of the most powerful forces in the world. Today, millions of people will be giving thanks to Him — or Her or It.
Another new book, “The Faith Instinct,” by my Times colleague Nicholas Wade, suggests a reason for the durability of faith: humans may be programmed for religious belief, because faith conferred evolutionary advantages in primitive times. That doesn’t go to the question of whether God exists, but it suggests that religion in some form may be with us for eons to come.
I’m hoping that the latest crop of books marks an armistice in the religious wars, a move away from both religious intolerance and irreligious intolerance. That would be a sign that perhaps we, along with God, are evolving toward a higher moral order.
I invite you to comment on this column on my blog, On the Ground. Please also join me on Facebook, watch my YouTube videos and follow me on Twitter.
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/26/opini ... nted=print
Op-Ed Columnist
The Religious Wars
By NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF
Just a few years ago, it seemed curious that an omniscient, omnipotent God wouldn’t smite tormentors like Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens and Sam Harris. They all published best-selling books excoriating religion and practically inviting lightning bolts.
Traditionally, religious wars were fought with swords and sieges; today, they often are fought with books. And in literary circles, these battles have usually been fought at the extremes.
Fundamentalists fired volleys of Left Behind novels, in which Jesus returns to Earth to battle the Anti-Christ (whose day job was secretary general of the United Nations). Meanwhile, devout atheists built mocking Web sites like www.whydoesGodhateamputees.com. That site notes that although believers periodically credit prayer with curing cancer, God never seems to regrow lost limbs. It demands an end to divine discrimination against amputees.
This year is different, with a crop of books that are less combative and more thoughtful. One of these is “The Evolution of God,” by Robert Wright, who explores how religions have changed — improved — over the millennia. He notes that God, as perceived by humans, has mellowed from the capricious warlord sometimes depicted in the Old Testament who periodically orders genocides.
(In 1 Samuel 15:3, the Lord orders a mass slaughter of the Amalekite tribe: “Now go and attack Amalek, and utterly destroy all that they have, and do not spare them. But kill both man and woman, infant and nursing child.” These days, that would earn God an indictment before the International Criminal Court.)
Mr. Wright also argues that monotheism emerged only gradually among Israelites, and that the God familiar to us may have resulted from a merger of a creator god, El, and a warrior god, Yahweh. Mr. Wright also argues that monotheism wasn’t firmly established until after the Babylonian exile, and he says that Moses’s point was that other gods shouldn’t be worshiped, not that they didn’t exist. For example, he notes the troubling references to a “divine council” and “gods” — plural — in Psalm 82.
In another revelation not usually found in Sunday School classes, Mr. Wright cites Biblical evidence that God (both El and Yahweh) had a sex life, rather like the Greek gods, and notes archaeological discoveries indicating that Yahweh may have had a wife, Asherah.
As for Christianity, Mr. Wright argues that it was Saint Paul — more than Jesus, an apocalyptic prophet — who emphasized love and universalism and built Christian faith as it is known today. Saint Paul focused on these elements, he says, partly as a way to broaden the appeal of the church and convert Gentiles.
Mr. Wright detects an evolution toward an image of God as a more beneficient and universal deity, one whose moral compass favors compassion for humans of whatever race or tribe, one who is now firmly in the antigenocide camp. Mr. Wright’s focus is not on whether God exists, but he does suggest that changing perceptions of God reflect a moral direction to history — and that this in turn perhaps reflects some kind of spiritual force.
“To the extent that ‘god’ grows, that is evidence — maybe not massive evidence, but some evidence — of higher purpose,” Mr. Wright says.
Another best-seller this year, Karen Armstrong’s “The Case for God,” likewise doesn’t posit a Grandpa-in-the-Sky; rather, she sees God in terms of an ineffable presence that can be neither proven nor disproven in any rational sense. To Ms. Armstrong, faith belongs to the realm of life’s mysteries, beyond the world of reason, and people on both sides of the “God gap” make the mistake of interpreting religious traditions too literally.
“Over the centuries people in all cultures discovered that by pushing their reasoning powers to the limit, stretching language to the end of its tether, and living as selflessly and compassionately as possible, they experienced a transcendence that enabled them to affirm their suffering with serenity and courage,” Ms. Armstrong writes. Her book suggests that religion is not meant to regrow lost limbs, but that it may help some amputees come to terms with their losses.
Whatever one’s take on God, there’s no doubt that religion remains one of the most powerful forces in the world. Today, millions of people will be giving thanks to Him — or Her or It.
Another new book, “The Faith Instinct,” by my Times colleague Nicholas Wade, suggests a reason for the durability of faith: humans may be programmed for religious belief, because faith conferred evolutionary advantages in primitive times. That doesn’t go to the question of whether God exists, but it suggests that religion in some form may be with us for eons to come.
I’m hoping that the latest crop of books marks an armistice in the religious wars, a move away from both religious intolerance and irreligious intolerance. That would be a sign that perhaps we, along with God, are evolving toward a higher moral order.
I invite you to comment on this column on my blog, On the Ground. Please also join me on Facebook, watch my YouTube videos and follow me on Twitter.
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/26/opini ... nted=print
December 12, 2009
Op-Ed Columnist
Paranormal Flexibility
By CHARLES M. BLOW
The Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life released a report on Wednesday that is bound to stir conversation about the increasingly complicated cacophony of spirituality in America — a mash-up of traditional faiths, fantasy and mythology.
Entitled “Many Americans Mix Multiple Faiths,” the report points out that many Americans are now choosing to “blend Christianity with Eastern or New Age beliefs” and that “sizable minorities of all major U.S. religious groups” said that they have had supernatural experiences, like encountering ghosts.
For the first time in 47 years of polling, the number of Americans who said that they have had a religious or mystical experience, which the question defined as a “moment of sudden religious insight or awakening,” was greater than those who said that they had not.
(Question: Does the first time I saw Michael Jackson’s “Thriller” video count?)
Twenty percent of Protestants and 28 percent of Catholics said they believe in reincarnation, which flies in the face of Christianity’s rapture scenario. Furthermore, about the same percentages said they believe in astrology, yoga as a spiritual practice and the idea that there is “spiritual energy” pulsing from things like “mountains, trees or crystals.” Uh-oh. Someone’s God is going to be jealous.
Surprisingly, in some cases, those who identified themselves as Christian were more likely to believe these things than those who were unaffiliated. (It should be noted that unaffiliated is not the same as nonbeliever. Many are spiritual people who simply haven’t found the right church, synagogue, mosque, coven, Ouija board club, or whatever.)
Furthermore, 16 percent of Protestants and 17 percent of Catholics said that they believe that some people can use the “evil eye” to “cast curses or spells that cause bad things to happen.” I have to say that based on the looks my mother used to shoot me when I was misbehaving, that evil eye thing might have legs.
Since 1996, the percentage of Americans who said that they have been in the presence of a ghost has doubled from 9 percent to 18 percent, and the percentage who said that they were in touch with someone who was dead has increased by nearly two thirds, rising from 18 percent to 29 percent.
For those keeping political score, Democrats were almost twice as likely to believe in ghosts and to consult fortune-tellers than were Republicans, and the Democrats were 71 percent more likely to believe that they were in touch with the dead. Please hold the Barack-Obama-as-the-ghost-of-Jimmy-Carter jokes. Heard them all.
The report is further evidence that Americans continue to cobble together Mr. Potato Head-like spiritual identities from a hodgepodge of beliefs — bending dogmas to suit them instead of bending themselves to fit a dogma. And this appears to be leading to more spirituality, not less. Cue the harps, and the sitars, and the tablas, and the whale music.
•
I invite you to visit my blog, By the Numbers. Please also join me on Facebook, and follow me on Twitter, or e-mail me at [email protected].
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/12/12/opini ... nted=print
Op-Ed Columnist
Paranormal Flexibility
By CHARLES M. BLOW
The Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life released a report on Wednesday that is bound to stir conversation about the increasingly complicated cacophony of spirituality in America — a mash-up of traditional faiths, fantasy and mythology.
Entitled “Many Americans Mix Multiple Faiths,” the report points out that many Americans are now choosing to “blend Christianity with Eastern or New Age beliefs” and that “sizable minorities of all major U.S. religious groups” said that they have had supernatural experiences, like encountering ghosts.
For the first time in 47 years of polling, the number of Americans who said that they have had a religious or mystical experience, which the question defined as a “moment of sudden religious insight or awakening,” was greater than those who said that they had not.
(Question: Does the first time I saw Michael Jackson’s “Thriller” video count?)
Twenty percent of Protestants and 28 percent of Catholics said they believe in reincarnation, which flies in the face of Christianity’s rapture scenario. Furthermore, about the same percentages said they believe in astrology, yoga as a spiritual practice and the idea that there is “spiritual energy” pulsing from things like “mountains, trees or crystals.” Uh-oh. Someone’s God is going to be jealous.
Surprisingly, in some cases, those who identified themselves as Christian were more likely to believe these things than those who were unaffiliated. (It should be noted that unaffiliated is not the same as nonbeliever. Many are spiritual people who simply haven’t found the right church, synagogue, mosque, coven, Ouija board club, or whatever.)
Furthermore, 16 percent of Protestants and 17 percent of Catholics said that they believe that some people can use the “evil eye” to “cast curses or spells that cause bad things to happen.” I have to say that based on the looks my mother used to shoot me when I was misbehaving, that evil eye thing might have legs.
Since 1996, the percentage of Americans who said that they have been in the presence of a ghost has doubled from 9 percent to 18 percent, and the percentage who said that they were in touch with someone who was dead has increased by nearly two thirds, rising from 18 percent to 29 percent.
For those keeping political score, Democrats were almost twice as likely to believe in ghosts and to consult fortune-tellers than were Republicans, and the Democrats were 71 percent more likely to believe that they were in touch with the dead. Please hold the Barack-Obama-as-the-ghost-of-Jimmy-Carter jokes. Heard them all.
The report is further evidence that Americans continue to cobble together Mr. Potato Head-like spiritual identities from a hodgepodge of beliefs — bending dogmas to suit them instead of bending themselves to fit a dogma. And this appears to be leading to more spirituality, not less. Cue the harps, and the sitars, and the tablas, and the whale music.
•
I invite you to visit my blog, By the Numbers. Please also join me on Facebook, and follow me on Twitter, or e-mail me at [email protected].
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/12/12/opini ... nted=print