Religion, Atheism, and Dying

Two years ago around this time I met weekly with a former professor of psychology from UPenn who, because of his age and ailments, attended a nursing home. To put it abruptly, my job was to baby sit him with the probing questions of an enthusiastic grad student. He was bored and desperate to feel engaged, just like the good ol’ days, and I was happy to meet with him.

I liked the idea then as much as I do now. Who in their right mind would pass up speaking with a highly-educated Third Reich atheist about religious experience?

Because as a rule old people nearing death no longer give a damn. They are candid. They have either abandoned formalities and niceties because they’re out of time or because they’re out of their minds. Both are excellent.

Sure you have some who are shy about their last vestiges of consciousness, but the honest ones know they don’t have time for that. Whether someone is religious or not, death is a practical matter. The epitaph must be decided upon, the will and testament drafted. The aged know this best of all. Even before then, in youth, measures are taken to prolong physical well-being, thought is given to how or even if to live a good life while death looms (somewhere) on the horizon.

As such, I have not forgotten the old professor’s words to me. “It may be,” he said contemplatively, “that I need God in my dying moments. I do not know. But I don’t think I will. I can live with the fact of dying.”

Immediately upon hearing this, a Faulkner quote passed through my mind. “It’s not when you realize nothing can help you,” says Quentin, “—religion, pride, anything. It’s when you realize you don’t need any aid.”

For the brief moments I walked this earth as an atheist I had to mark with honesty that both Quentin’s and the professor’s words, and that my similar position, was an instance of atheistic psycho-linguistic therapy disguised as bravery and strength. Fascinatingly, the very act of naming or categorizing the event gave me control over my ominous future by giving me a designator inadvertently designed to stifle anxiety.

That is, the “rage against the dying of light” ceased when I compacted all my premonitions of death into a designator whose grammatical function was to enact acquiescence—which is to say emotional passivity.[1] It was not Christian hope and therefore not Christian therapy, but it was atheistic passivity and therefore atheistic therapy. It's not totally unlike Buddhism, really. Different method and emotions, same result--though not in degree.

What I thought was that I was being brave by shedding the hope associated to Christianity and simply ‘facing the fact of death.’ But in reality each time I spoke or thought about my death  as something I had ‘accepted,’ I blindly drank the very cup I accused the Christians of drinking.

For all my admiration of Sisyphus, I could not help but wonder what attracted him to pushing the boulder in the first place. What function did it serve him if not a therapeutic function? Why not roller-skate instead or get high? Why not wallow or, for me, believe in better/more effective therapeutic measures? For if both we atheists and Christians are unconsciously seeking therapeutic measures, and the absurd problem still faces us, why opt for the lousier of the two? Such were my thoughts at the time. 

What I realized was that all the mental toughness self-attributed by (certain) atheists to themselves can be reduced to mental tenderness in light of the fact that they still seek or simply find themselves with therapeutic counter-measures.

My omnipresent brain editor William James likewise accuses atheists of being intellectually tender for merely ‘facing the fact of death’ because it is symptomatic of the need to satisfy the demands of Western man’s obsession with the ultima ratio, the total ‘filling in’ of one’s worldview (a point Heidegger would like, too). According to James, to quantify death fits neatly into the modern rationalist’s tendency to ‘need an answer’ and ignores any degree of mental discomfort over the possibility for alternative explanation—which here means incomplete explanation and for James means pluralistic explanation. To put it differently, it’s the comfort epistemology well known to religious enterprises manifesting in an atheistic way through atheistic language (a point which amounts to a very Eliadaian extrapolation, I’m proud to say).

   

In the history of my life, I’ve supported any number of versions and competing therapeutic narratives. The more popular Protestant version of it here in America appears in conservative comfort theology, where foreign philosophizing and theologizing are simply ignored for the fear of paradigm shifting. Above all my ideologies hovers the eternal cloud (smog?) of this fundamentalism. I shall forever be haunted by it. I supported it in my youth and abandoned it in adulthood. Most of my family still operates inside of it. In most cases, this tough-faith approach is mental tenderness manifesting as mental stupidity. The methods used by this class are so dubious that even those within the Christian tradition recognize it as mental tenderness. 

The other and less popular version (in America) of Protestant mental toughness is more sophisticated, and usually appears as an argument from authority based on faith—which is to say an argument for Catholicism without the Pope. I myself currently belong somewhere between this class and a religious pluralist. They/we believe in such and such based on the legitimacy of these traditions: insert list here with accompanying propositional, historiological, metaphysical and other such reasoned paraphernalia. To this class, one can market the advances of philosophy and science with much less push back. For Protestants in this set, mental toughness means not breaking at each newly learned or refined philosophy, but instead a steady metamorphosis toward more complete faith. Even doubt works within the mechanism, and oddly becomes a garment of faith itself. So tough are the Christians in this set that they’ll listen to pretty much anything without dropping their belief.

In the case of Christianity—not to mention religious systems like it—the popular criticism against it is obvious. Death is so horrifying that people are willing to believe crazy shit to circumvent the void. Religion is by many estimations (which is to say Atheist/Agnostic) the tender-est of the bunch simply in virtue of being the most obnoxious relative to the wisdom of the scientific era and Ockham’s razor—a point that standing by itself is pretty naïve but is often rhetorically convincing. 

Every system, I imagine, has their ‘death solution.’ Buddhism solves the death problem simply by never letting anyone die. Atheism plays dodge ball. Islam, if I understand it right, solves the problem in much the same way as Protestantism. Agnosticism, to oversimplify, doesn’t have a fucking clue what to do with any of it so it finds distractions (of a Pascalian sort) or despairs (of  Kierkegaardian sort) and is thus restless (of an Augustinian sort). Catholicism and Dante toss you purgatory and time to work out the kinks. And early rabbinical Judaism contribute retribution theory to the mix after simply neglecting the possibility for an afterlife. I suspect that with a little work you might locate the “tenderness” in any tradition.

Because what is meant by tenderness of mind, I’m sure you’ve noticed, is relative and informed by someone’s weltanschauung. James thinks dogmatist (of any degree and of any worldview) are tender because they need to feel complete, where James is satisfied being tough in the open-endedness of pragmatism/pluralism. Atheists (and sometimes agnostics) think James and religious folk are tender because they can’t face the misery of ‘shuffling off this mortal coil.’ And Christians (probably other religions as well) find James tender for lacking the requisite faith to be dogmatic and the atheists tender for lacking the requisite faith to have hope. It’s a rough summary, but with a little gerrymandering, I think you can see the truth in it. Or, at least, I’ve bought into something like this story for the time being.

In the end, we are, I am, at my core, deeply concerned with dying, my own death and other’s. In my mind, Heidegger was right to locate the human problem as the ‘throwness’ problem, the inevitability of death problem, and wrong to depend on that finitude to enable Dasien to ‘care.’ But I certainly understand the appeal. 

It's true; they don't teach us this in our temples; they teach the opposite.

And the “one short sleep past we wake eternally” is the answer par excellence to Christianity. Probably in large part due to my background it remains the par excellence narrative to me. So powerful was Paul's "death has lost its sting" revelation that many early Christians were signing up to become martyrs, and I have always been attracted to it.

Even still, Christianity by and large has neglected the value space of the finite, either subjecting the finite to an Augustinian critique and devaluation, or, more regularly, being totally oblivious to its existence. Both are probably atrocious underestimations of its importance. Chesterton is about the only Christian I've ever noted to have noted it on its own terms. His model is essentially Humean, though I have no space/time to deal with it here.

Ah well, I'll have to write another blog. I'm afraid 3 pages is already too much. Kevin out.

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[1] I think of Freudian psycho-therapy as an example. In Freud the utterable or at least conscious retrieval of the traumatic memory supplies the patient with a designator or a pointer to a designator—be it an image, phrase, word, or all of the above—with which they can quantify and measure that event. You might call the quantifying act a naming act. Once it’s named it can be manipulated and either purposively shoved forever back into the subconscious (whatever that is) or placed ‘out in the open’ for further repairs to the psyche. Once the cause is diagnosed, which is to say identified and named, the effect no longer permeates because the cause is no longer a cause; it’s just another designator in an ever evolving idiolect.

As such, the cause designator gives the patient the equipment for accepting, combating, or revalorizing his/her present experience in, quite literally, new terms. More often than not, what was originally a cause becomes a designator designed (consciously or unconsciously) by the agent to be therapeutic. (The same thing, by the way, occurs when husbands and wives come home from work and ‘get things off their chest’ through ‘talking it out.’)

Why I Don’t Wear Pants at the Library, Stepfather-hood, and Some Haphazard Remarks Concerning Religious Pluralism.

I have a library now. I didn’t used to, but now I have one. I don’t mean that I lock my front door and turn the keys to start my car and drive over to a newly discovered library located in downtown Ephrata. I don’t have a favorite couch I like to sit on there, or a favorite parking spot near the entrance. The clerk and I don’t exchange knowing glances or jokes about my countless late fees.

I mean that I walk out of my bedroom first thing in the morning with my hair pointed awkwardly over my ears and simply, if not nonchalantly, step into my library. I mean I have my own private library. I mean that I can go to the library without my pants on. George R.R. Martin seems to think I can live a thousand lives before I die if I spend enough time in books, so in the interest of learning from my betters, I take his advice—only in my case I do so without pants.
  

My family and I have moved to a new crib with six bedrooms, two living rooms, and all manner of other things we don’t need yet are glad to have. The rent is good, and we don’t have enough belongings to put in the rooms.

Fortunately, however, we do have enough books—an overabundance in fact— and have made one of the living rooms into a library. Inside it are four overflowing bookshelves, a lamp, a night stand, globes, maps, and, naturally, a framed medieval ship mounted on the wall.

In spite of having lived in more places than I remember, I have never had the opportunity to have a library. And every one of my relocations has had an intellectual phase associated with it. That is, I remember what I used to think about by remembering where I read my books.

In Columbia’s Cool Beans coffee shop I studied Augustine and Plato. At Penn’s main entrance, I studied religious theory and myth theory. On my back porch with a pack of Camel menthols, I studied C.S. Lewis and J.R. R. Tolkien.

With this new house I expect I’ll look back remembering this as the time I began engaging religious pluralism. The difference now is that I have kids roaming about, asking me unrelated complex questions concerning why prince Arthur doesn’t have hair as long as Sir Gwaine or why we haven’t gone to McDonalds since yesterday.

The other difference that comes with stepfather-hood is that now I no longer look into intellectual fields with just my own interests and heart in mind. Now I have to ask at the end what I will tell my kids about religion when they’re old enough to fully understand. Well that, and what to tell them now, while they’re not old enough to understand.

One thing I won’t tell them is that religion and theology are simple. The world and its gods are not simple, only the people who worship them. My (ever ongoing) master’s degree has taught me that.

In fact, I remember my first day at Penn. I was nervous as hell. In my mind I had traveled some 500 miles to engage some of the world’s brightest minds concerning some of the most complicated topics accessible. My nervousness was silly, I realize, because I was only concerned with not wanting to seem stupid in front of people.

“You know nothing John Snow,” I should have told myself.

They were all to converge on me at once, mankind and idea alike, and I was nervous for the wrong reason. I did not expect to change as much as I should have expected it, and as much as I did. Because in most of those rooms I possessed only average intelligence, and I was definitely the least educated of the bunch. I didn’t stand a chance. I felt the shock of philosophical and religious novelty perhaps more than anyone there. In a way, you might say that my current interest in religious pluralism comes as a result of the explosion of philosophical and religious ideas entering my mind from that time period. 

Because having moved back to Pennsylvania where I grew up as a child has shown me just how small my family’s background is, and, I say this cautiously, how small their ideas are. One day I hope to write an essay entitled, “In Defense of Horse and Buggy,” to defend a culture that, at bottom, is not altogether distinguishable from Hobbiton. But though I admire much about the epistemologies of Amish folk, I have no time for such defenses today. For now it is enough to say along with Frodo and Sam that I have returned from Mordor and I cannot go back to the hobbit I was.

I’m sure many of my kin and kith would very much agree to the Mordor analogy and the effect it’s had on me.

But it’s only natural that a (former/sorta still) student of religious theory find himself confronted with religious pluralism. It’s not surprising either that as a student of philosophy I have already beheld atheism and agnosticism in all their glory, and, in a way, ‘dealt’ with them. To most of my readers ‘dealt’ will mean reviewed and refuted, but I do not mean this. I mean something more existential. That is, I have rejected them not on philosophical grounds—because it’s not clear to me that there are any— but pragmatic grounds.

   

Really, for some time now I have said something to the effect of, “atheism is the most scientifically agreeable, agnosticism the most philosophically reasonable, and religion the most ethically and aesthetically tenable.”

Because come now, let us be true to one another, many of us who believe in Christianity believe it faute de mieux. I don’t mean this logically, because to mean it logically is necessarily the case. We all opt for that worldview that seems the best option for the very simple reason that there is nothing better than the best option.

No, I mean it psychologically, where the implicature seems to be, “I’m not satisfied with the current version of theology I’m given, but what else can I do? I just wish this whole God thing made more sense.” The gospel seems better than every other worldview because at bottom I know nothing about the other world views. Jesus seems better because I live in a community of Jesus followers. For what reason would I abandon that post? Christianity seems better because I already know its theology and its rituals.

And in the case where you believe that there’s nothing especially more appealing about another worldview why bother with them? What advantage do they pose?

I like what William James says here. He makes the perfect (albeit obvious) case that some weltanschauungs, like wires, are ‘live’ while others are ‘dead’—each relative to particular individuals in particular places at particular times. To an Arab atheist, Islam is live and Christianity is dead. To an American atheist, Christianity is live and Islam is dead. To both, tribalism is dead, and to both, atheism is live. Nietzsche (and Heidegger) believe that God is dead, and everyone believes that Baal is dead.

The deadness or liveness of the weltanschaunng is directly correlative to the willingness of the agent to believe in it, and the willingness of the agent to believe is directly correlative to the social atmosphere within which they find themselves.

James’ account seems a bit overly agent-sensitive. Even still, I think I can comply with him and say somewhat reservedly that religious pluralism has moved to the rank of ‘live’ for me, just as it had in the case of atheism and agnosticism some years ago. Beforehand, religious pluralism was, I confess, simply too ‘weird’ to be taken seriously. Of course, it was only weird because my tradition told me it was weird, illogical because my tradition told me it was illogical.

In reality, it was only foreign because I wasn’t born a Sikh or in New York City, or, for that matter, Corinth or Rome. When you talk to actual pluralists you’ll find nothing even remotely weird about it. Very roughly, pluralism is to religion as agnosticism is to philosophy. It’s liberal enough to be concerned with all men and humble enough to recognize it lacks an epistemic grasp of both gods and men.

It probably also has similar flaws to that of agnosticism. And as the main problem with agnosticism is action, or rather, lack of action, so too with pluralism. What ritual, I wonder, does one participate in to the god with many faces? And how are we to ask Him, or Her, or It if we cannot identify some strand of theological truth within which to speak about this holy ‘X’? Does the holy ‘X’ speak? Does it have agency, or is it just a Oneness with being? A pluralist can’t be a compatibilist, especially when trying to combine Buddhism or Taoism with the Semitic religions. At best, a pluralist can only be an extreme inclusivist without any real theology.

Is there a way to approach religion? Religions and their theologies will want to move centrifugally, interpreting the data and phenomenon of the cosmos in light of their dogmas. Every sophisticated faith, I imagine, has its own credo ut intelligum, not just Christianity’s Anselm of Canterbury. And even for the unsophisticated ones, one week’s dive into a phenomenological text will reveal that certain types of knowledge are purely experiential. Heck, one doesn’t need books; falling in love can teach you as much. A religion believed is a religion informing your interpretation of data and phenomenon.

The alternative, perhaps, is a centripetal method, where we start with a given set of criteria and determine which God or god’s or Universal Oneness is the actual. But how do we determine such criteria? How could we possibly be objective? Are we not forced to use the very centrifugal theologies we have to guess at the attributes of the holy “X”?

Maybe we could go about it in a Heideggerian way. We would have to ‘dive into religion in the right way,’ whatever the heck that would look like.

Maybe, maybe, maybe.

To recount all of this is not to have abandoned my Christianity; it is only to mark with honesty that my Christianity is a complicated psychological and philosophical matter. The world, I tell you, is a complicated thing. The world, I say, is an aporetic cluster fuck.

And so, for me, I return to the, ‘to whom else shall we turn’ of Peter. Scholars (Coleridge?) often talk about the willing suspension of disbelief with respect to the reading of fiction stories. Readers ignore all questions of whether or not the events occurring in the story could actually happen. At the phenomenological level, belief in the death, burial, and resurrection of Christ is an analogous (and conscious) act in the face of the anti-theses posed by religious pluralism—at least in my case. The same, I repeat, applies to atheism and agnosticism.

I’m sure over the next few months I’ll overview the works of people like John Hicks and MacIntyre, or Westphal, Ricoeur, and Heidegger and come to a fresh, more comprehensive view of religion and Christianity. For the time being, I am contented with my new home, my new family, and my old—albeit reformed—faith. 

Publishing, Family, and Afterthoughts On My Break from Tradition

It’s been a little too long since I’ve made the effort to write to you, you faithful and few who make up my audience. In a way I am tired of writing, juggling a thesis along with working as a freelance writer from home wears out one’s fingers. The nitpicky, precise, and complex energies Heidegger steals from me added to the boring and banal experience of writing ads is enough to leave one wishing for the balm of a television screen at the end of the day.

But there is a space in the writing world that neither Heidegger nor ads can touch, that is, the space called, “whatever the hell I want to write about.”

I have spent much of my recreational writing energies, the mental ones anyway, being much less concerned with the blog sphere by itself. Most of my research and interests lately, not to mention in the years to come, have been and will be focused on publishing. There is, for example, an incredible amount of data now available concerning the publishing industry which shows, conclusively, that at least half of book sales are now ebook sales. 

Moreover, it is about 100% easier to publish an ebook than it is to get published by a publisher. I could literally publish a book by the end of the hour at no cost. The hard part is the advertising, a piece of work historically left for the publishing companies. Right now I’m teaching myself advertising: yes, shameless self-advertising is one of the curses authors must all overcome.

In any event, I intend on publishing via ebook within the next few years. Perhaps by the end of the year I’ll have at least one text finished and up for sale.

Something pragmatic happens to a man who decides (at the shock of many, including myself) to make the conscious choice to fall in love not only with a woman but with her children. Blogs are fun, but they take up time which is not in any way lucrative. With filial value sets confronting me now, though, I know that with a minimal shift of my energies, my writing can be turned into something lucrative, however minuscule that fiscal gain may be. Worst case scenario I publish a long, uninteresting blog-like book that no one buys but my mother.

$2.99 at 70% royalties = $2.093.

Nice.

Speaking of family, I’m learning that family mental life has none of the organization of academic life. It’s too chaotic to follow every possible rabbit trail, too loud and too undulating: the little people change too much, or have the potential to change so rapidly that any opinion formed in February is totally obliterated by March. I have noticed within myself, however, the tendency to apply to each child a certain category or name, and by informing them of that category, shape them dramatically; that is, by naming them, I confirm and affirm a set of acts that will become the best description for who they are for any period of time.

If Parker is smart, it is as much a matter of me telling him he is smart as it is he is actually biologically gifted. If Connor is sensitive and caring it is as much Amber and I fawning over his hugs as it is his neurological structure. If Kalli is completely out of her mind, it is both because I call her crazy (or more popularly, “monster”) and because she has a bad habit of running down the street butt naked. Parenthood is certainly descriptive work, learning who your child is and who they are changing into, but it is also prescriptive work at the linguistic level, a type of word-choice binding with the act of adulation, or of admonition, but even more so, with appellation. It is powerful and horrifying and exciting.

Many times, I think the act is sinful, my own act, I mean, because it does not pay careful attention to the balance between nature and nurture. The appellatory act turns out to be an impeding on the individuality of a child. Parents do this sort of b.s. all the time, not necessarily making children in their own image, but making them in the image of the image they have in their imagination. Either type is a gross projection, and the both projections vary in degrees of grossness. A father who wants his child to play baseball like he did in elementary school makes the unconscious choice of wanting his son to be happy how he was happy. If it is wrong, it is forgivable because the man works with the categories and experiences he has. What makes a person happy is relative in cases like this. The boy will never learn to be happy as Neil Armstrong was happy as he walked the moon because the boy will not go to the moon to be moon happy.

There is nothing wrong with presenting familiar modes of happiness to your children. We all work with what we have. If I could give my boys the moon I would. I’m afraid I can only offer them basketball and Plato and poetry. But I know that it is that very limitation, my limitation and theirs, which will make them like art in my own hands as well as God’s. Both of us must be careful (God will be better at it) to not infringe on the piece, only to help it know its boundaries, know what it is and isn’t. The rest will take care of itself.

That is why I believe that what a parent wants for their child is a shadow and should always be treated as such. Once you have moved past the abstract, “I want them to be happy” or “live a good life,” once you move en concreto, that is,  you have molested their personhood with ghosts and chimeras.

In any event, I’ve tossed myself in en medias res, an action condoned by few in our culture save the children who need fathers and the widowed and divorced who have suffered more than anyone should. The disparagement of the act, of me, has good reasons behind it, I grant. It is true: multiplying the complexities of life only increases the chances for failure. The statistics are there. And despite what my objectors think, I am the most conscious of the numbers. (Fortunately for me I have a body of advocates as well).

But what was I to do? Not fall in love with an incredible woman (*wink) because she has children? Implicit to that position is the belief that children are solely a burden. Or maybe I should not fall in love with the kids because their emotional lives are and will be complicated? Inherent to that position is the belief that ‘normal’ upbringings don’t present problems of their own. Even still, I can understand the anti-sentiments, and the belief that I am making it harder on myself. I can accept that this is a fact. And perhaps it would have made me a prudent man to back out; but I could never shake whether it would have been evidence of me being a good man.

Not that I love them because I want or wanted to prove my goodness to myself or others, but that choosing not to love them for fear of failure is a shitty reason not to love. Though, ‘choosing’ to love them is an oversimplification. Choosing to love someone happens in moments, generally when someone has ticked you off or disappointed you. Conscious efforts must then be made to do right and good by them in accordance with and proportionate to the infraction.

No, what I chose was to put myself in a position where I knew I would fall in love with them by virtue of their being humans; that is, discover them as people and learn to protect, nurture, and enjoy that discovery pragmatically and at the individual level. More precisely, the choice involved moving past that generic mode of love into the context of fatherly and husbandly love. I knew I had to categorize and valorize my love in the terms of my relationship to each of them. Doing this with friends was old news: I have a talent for it, you might say. Doing it as a father and lover is a whole other ball game, but I’m getting the hang of it.

In any event, I get that people fear that which is foreign. I just think it’s stupid. I also get the fear of hardship. I just think it’s a bad reason to do anything or not do anything.

And as so many things do these days, it all reminds me of the mythologies we are brought up in while in Fundamentalist[1] Christianity. Fear dominates that culture in a way I am only beginning to recognize. New categories and foreign experiences are shunned. 

It is a disease of thought prone to denying the value of anything beyond its own philosophical parameters. I was given a Christian, white, male, bourgeoisie, raise my hand during worship, be a missionary every day, marry a virgin, American, Republican archetype, and told implicitly and explicitly to strive for it, as if real life has anything to do that image. As if that archetype and a good man were coterminous.  

But I learned some time ago to abandon the mythos and the myths of that tradition. They have brought me little else besides confusion and despair. I was taught to believe the historicity of myths. I was taught that the doctrine of salvation is simple. I was taught that alcohol is an important moral issue. I was taught that there is a spiritual geography called heaven and hell, gold streets and brimstone. I was taught about the certainty of God’s existence. I was taught to over-value the sexual experience. I was taught to under-value the importance humble thinking (ironically, I was also taught not to think). I was taught to value the comfort of being saved over the beauty of hoping that there is even such a thing as being saved. I was taught to balk at novelty. I was taught to neglect counter-intuitions. I was taught to trust a pastor with minimal training and distrust the church with a host of geniuses. I was taught that worship meant singing when really it meant most anything, especially that mode which is most natural to the person. I was taught to read scripture like a fauna and a fool.  I was taught I couldn’t learn anything everlasting from a tribesman or a Taoist.  

I was taught, I was taught, I was taught.  

But Anne Rice said something that struck me as correct and that helped me recognize what lay at the root of my recalcitrance toward my former tradition. She said, “I hope God loves us as much as we love him.” To many this appears to be nasty inversion of what conservatives take the doctrine of biblical love to be. But it’s not actually that. That interpretation would reflect a sort of prescriptivist view of language which is too simplistic here. We can’t simply substitute the words “God’s love” tit for tat each time. They mean different things at different times.

In this context, Rice means that religious people are surprisingly fervent across the board, and that they trust their particular tradition to bring them hope: happiness via proper relation to God or the gods. For me, any Christian theology which does not give an account of this phenomenon is worse than wrong; it is dangerous and geo-ethno-socio-centric and primitive.

Part of the evolution of theology must involve (and is already becoming) the growing recognition that we live in a highly populated world where if, “wide is the gate and many are there that enter it” is true tout court, it is simply too harsh. If, for example, we cannot extract a universalist Christian God from the ethnocentric Yahweh found in the O.T. we run into serious problems. When is ethnic cleansing ever O.K., Philistine or no Philistine? And how could a universalist God ‘die for the sins of the world’ if he didn’t give a rip about them a few centuries earlier? Band-aid apologetics to follow from conservative mouths, for sure. But this is an appendage of Christianity, not a scrape of the knee. Band-aids don't count. 

Of course, I oversimplify, not to mention that I’m being painfully unclear and metaphorical. But the liberal approach, it’s concern for spacio-temporal/universal man, is both more and less comfortable to me. It is less comfortable because there is so much theory to be theorized and worked out in myself. The recognition that I recognize very little makes one antsy. And this stands in direct contradistinction to the conservative tradition out of which I come, a class of people who hold to any number of dogmas at any given moment.

On the other hand it is more comfortable because it makes a Muslim a person. It makes Ghandi like me. It forces humanity into our theory; it forces empathy and sympathy upon us in ways which make the men and women around us painfully similar.

Fascinatingly, I didn’t learn this type of empathy during Sunday school. I didn’t learn it in a church or from my family. I learned it from despair. I learned it in those moments when  I didn’t know much of anything other than I didn’t really want to exist or live anymore. I knew then what it must feel like to need a religion. I knew myself, too. That I knew I needed it just to walk around, eat food, sleep. Religion, nay, Christianity became a practical matter in a very dictionary-definition sense. And I learned most of all the deep pain that comes from life, and knew I couldn’t stand the thought of another person, any other person suffering it for any period of time. I crossed the pons assinorum  of what old men’s wrinkled faces and sullen eyes mean, and discovered my compassion for humanity, all humanity on the other side.

It is the same Evangelical altruism without the narrowness of method in applying it. It is liberal, you might say, if that word can still be said to be useful.

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[1] I no longer distinguish Evangelicalism from Fundamentalism, not, at least, Bible-belt/conservative Evangelicalism. The word is almost useless, but nonetheless, my point is taken. 

Kant and Otto Paper

Kantian Influence on Rudolf Otto’s The Idea of the Holy

           
            Rudolf Otto’s The Idea of the Holy is widely known to harbor the most popular exposition of sui generis religious experience, an experience Otto calls the mysterium tremendum of the numinous object. Less spoken of, however, is the degree to which Otto is dependent on Kantian thought. This paper explores three aspects of Otto and Kant’s relationship, with particular emphasis on the first: 1)  the ways in which Ottoian and Kantian models of schematization ‘match up’, 2)  the degree to which or sense in which Otto is Kantian, and 3) what Kantian influence on Otto can tell us about Kantian influence on religious theory at large. The latter two points are implied through a careful analysis of the first, and though they do not make up of the meat of this paper, they may be said to be the purpose of this paper.
            In general, the phenomenological schools of both the philosophical and religious theory traditions—the latter of which Otto is something of a co-founder[1]— reflect a Kantian methodology. The efforts of Husserl and Heidegger, for example, are contiguous with a Kantian-like, transcendental formula. For Husserl, the necessary and universal conditions for the possibility of intentionality come to the fore. For Heidegger, the necessary and universal conditions for the possibility of Being in the world come to the fore. On the religious studies side, Otto, whose theory depends so much on Husserl (see footnote 1), reflects the same method. Like Kant, Otto is concerned to a high degree with delineating the universal and necessary conditions— as a priori conditions—for the possibility of the numinous object. Where for Kant the transcendental deduction concerns itself with problems of epistemology, such as the possibility of synthetic a priori judgments, Otto is preoccupied with, roughly, transcendental sui generis religious experience.

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     [1] The other is William James.  Really, the relationship between philosophical and religious phenomenology with respect to religious experience is very close. For example, when James first distinguished individual religion from institutional religion in The Varieties of Religious Experience, he centered the discussion of religious experience around Husserl’s account of phenomenological experience, viz. the possibility of intentionality. After all, it was Husserl who first exposed philosophy to the rigors of the phenomenological reduction. In The Idea of Phenomenology we find Husserl concerned almost exclusively with a bracketing methodology. Ignore everything but, “that which is appearing,” he says, especially ontological questions and categories. Only once that which is appearing is our object of study can we begin an empirical analysis of what conditions of consciousness must be necessary for intentionality to occur at all.

      Thus, by bracketing institutional influence on individual experience James allocates authority to the incorrigibility of Husserlian-like intentional  moments. This was James’ primary contribution to the religious theory debate: an argument from authority based in intentionality. For James, mystical experiences, “usually are, and have the right to be, absolutely authoritative over the individuals to whom they come.”  Religious phenomenologists thereafter have employed more or less the same strategy.
      Otto, who comes a little after James, constructs his own argument from authority by grounding his mysterium tremendum (a trans-religious experience) on the incorrigibility of cross-cultural intentional experiences. Like James, Otto thinks that since no one can tell John Smith that his experience did not appear to him the way it did, John is the authority on the matter, and we are at the mercy of his memory and communication skills. What Otto adds to the discussion is the fact that many Johns across time and space say exactly the same thing: that the experience is inexplicable and can only   be ‘known’ by direct contact with it. Otto infers from the ubiquity and similarity of these testimonies that something transcendent does, indeed, interact with people. This, again, is an argument from authority. But instead of being merely authoritative to the individual, like we find in James, Otto thinks that the similarity between cross-religious experience grants authoritative reliability to them, leaving even those who have not experienced the mysterium tremendum with good reason to believe in its legitimacy. If all the best authorities are saying that something transcendent interacts with them, who are those on the ‘outside’ to disagree?