[Buddha-l] it's not about belief (was: Anyone up for another year?)

[curt]

Richard P. Hayes wrote:

>Just our of curiosity, are any of your reading Sam Harris's book, The
>End of Faith? It has pretty well convinced me that Judaism, Christianity
>and Islam are all seriously diseased ways of being human and that the
>survival of our species depends on putting those religions into the past
>tense. My lifetime commitment to religious pluralism and to classical
>liberalism is being deeply challenged by what Harris writes. I am
>thinking of leaving of selling my books and moving to Mars.
>
>
>  
>
I am looking over this book at amazon right now, as well as checking out 
Harris' very interesting website at http://www.samharris.org/. It looks 
to me like Harris makes the mistake of failing to distinguish adequately 
between Christianity in particular and Religion in general. 
Christianity, in the form it has taken since the First Council or 
Nicaea, is radically different from almost all other Religions in that 
it assumes that human beings are, by nature, fundamentally ignorant 
concerning spirituality absent proper (ie, Christian) Religious 
instruction. In contrast to this, most other Religions inherently accept 
what John Locke might have called a "self-evident" spirituality that is 
universal to humanity. The emperor Julian said it better than I can in 
his treatise "Against the Galileans":

"It is not by teaching, but by nature that humanity possesses its 
knowledge of the Divine, as can be shown by the common yearning for the 
Divine that exists in everyone, everywhere - individuals, communities, 
and nations. Without having it taught to us, all of us have come to 
believe in some sort of divinity, even though it is difficult for all to 
know what divinity truly is and far from easy for those who do know to 
explain it to the rest."

In other words - Religion is universal to humankind, and all Religions 
are based on the same innate "knowledge" of Divinity that all human 
beings possess "by nature". This approach to Religion is so basic to 
most of the world's Religions that it is mostly unconscious. Only once a 
Religion that did not share this basic assumption, ie Christianity, came 
along was it possible to articulate this idea of knowledge of Divinity 
"by nature". Prior to that it would have been like a fish trying to 
describe water.

The idea that divinity is already "known" by all human beings with or 
without Religious instruction of any kind, undercuts not only 
Christianity, but any "fundamentalist" approach to Religion whatsoever. 
Julian of course leaves the door open enough to say the obvious - that 
some people understand the Divine better than others, and even among 
those who have a good understanding, the ability to articulate this 
understanding still varies a great deal. But compare this with the 
Christian view that people who are not Christian are deluded by beliefs 
that are fundamentally false. In Julian's view, it seems that the only 
fundamentally false Religious belief that is possible is precisely that 
of the Christians - that human beings do not possess an innate knowledge 
of the Divine - but can have this knowledge only if they are told about 
it (by the Christians, of course).

In her recent book "Beyond Belief: The Secret Gospel of Thomas", Elaine 
Pagels makes a small step in the direction of pinpointing when and how 
Christianity became a "faith based" Religion - more or less the year 435 
at the First Council of Nicaea. The idea of requiring everyone to stand 
up and recite a list of things that everyone agrees to (or else!) is 
completely foreign to other Religions - as testified by the fact that no 
other religion does this. That is not to say that other Religions don't 
have doctrines and doctrinal disputes - its just that doctrines and 
doctrinal disputes play a completely different role in other Religions 
than they do in Christianity.

Take the example of Mahayana Buddhism (aha! I managed to bring in 
Buddhism after all). To this day westerners still scratch our heads over 
the phenomena of Mahayana Buddhism.  At first we naively tried to impose 
the following logic: Buddhism is to Hinduism as Christianity is to 
Judaism, and Mahayana is to Hinayana as Protestantism is to Catholicism. 
Today no self-respecting person would actually say that (well, maybe - 
see http://www.aasianst.org/EAA/Siddhartha.htm), but how far have we 
actually managed to get away from the assumptions behind that absurdity? 
While we still wrestle uncomfortably with finding a way to articulate 
what Mahayana "is", we nevertheless now are starting to realize that 
"doctrinal" disputes in Buddhism are a different kind of animal from 
what they are in Christianity - and that is because Buddhism, like 
almost all other religions, accepts unquestioningly (and unconsciously) 
what the emperor Julian pointed out so long ago: it's not about belief.

Harris does make positive statements about not only "spirituality" but 
even "mysticism" - for which more hard-core die-hard secularists have 
cast aspersions in his general direction. But Harris claims that the 
"spirituality" that he heralds is something new. Harris should know 
better - since he has, according to his web page, studied eastern 
religions and "contemplative disciplines". But it seems he still carries 
around the idea that Christianity is not much different from other 
Religions, and that in order to get away from the problems of 
Christianity something fundamentally "new" is needed. Things look quite 
differently, and a lot more complicated, when you realize that 
Christianity's fundamental flaws are not shared by most other Religions 
(Islam is probably the only one that does share them - Judaism is a 
completely different critter altogether).

- Curt

P.S. In the section quoted, Julian was paraphrasing the Philosopher 
Iamblichus - in fact he was practically quoting straight out of 
Iamblichus' work "On the Mysteries of the Egyptians".