Religions: Problems, Solutions, Techniques

Simplifying a four-part  schema employed by Stephen Prothero in his God Is Not One (Harper, 2010, p. 14), I propose, in agreement with Prothero, that each religion can be usefully seen as addressing itself to a problem; offering a solution to the problem, a solution that also constitutes the religion's goal; and proposing a technique for solving the problem and achieving the goal.

This post will consider five religions and how the simplified Prothero schema applies to them. 

For Christianity, the problem is sin, the solution or goal is salvation, and the technique is some combination of faith and good works. (14)  For Buddhism, the problem is suffering, the solution or goal is nirvana, and the technique for achieving nirvana is the Noble Eightfold Path. (14)  Prothero's main purpose in his book is to stress the differences between religions.  That is the point of the silly title, "God is Not One."  Obviously, God is one by definition; it is the conceptions of God that are various.  It is also a bad title because Prothero's topic is religion, not theism.  Buddhism, after all, is not a theistic religion.  But let that pass.  I can't fault the man for wanting to attract buyers with a catchy title, one reminiscent of Hitchens' God Is Not Great.  The schema makes clear the differences between these two great religions:

Are Buddhists trying to achieve salvation?  Of course not, since they do not even believe in sin.  Are Christians trying to achieve nirvana?  No, since for them suffering isn't something that must be overcome. (15)

If salvation is salvation from sin, then of course Prothero is right.  Sin is an offence against God, and in a religion with no God there can be no sin.  Nevertheless, I am a bit uneasy with the starkness of Prothero's contrast.  The Buddhist too aims at a sort of salvation, salvation from all-pervasive suffering.  To use 'salvation' so narrowly that it applies only to the Christian's religious goal obscures the commonality between the two great religions.  I should think that some soteriology or other is essential to every religion.   A religion must show a way out of our unsatisfactory predicament, and one is not religious unless one perceives our life in this world as indeed a predicament, and one that is deeply and fundamentally unsatisfactory, whatever the exact nature of the satisfactoriness.

For Islam, the problem is neither sin nor suffering but self-sufficiency,"the hubris of acting as if you can get along without God, who alone is self-sufficient." (32)  The solution or goal is "a soul at peace" (Koran 89: 27) in submission to Allah.  The technique that takes the believer from self-sufficiency to Paradise is to 'perform the religion." (42: 13)  Orthopraxy counts for more than orthodoxy.  The profession of faith is relatively simple, to the effect that there is no god but God and that Muhammad is the messenger of God.  That is the First Pillar of Islam.  The other four concern practice: prayer (salat), charity (zakat), fasting (sawm), and pilgrimage (hajj).

For Hinduism, the problem is samsara, "the vicious cycle of life, death, and rebirth." (136)  The solution (goal) is moksha, liberation from samsara.  The aim is not to escape into an afterlife, but to escape once and for all from the wheel of becoming whether here or beyond.  Moksha is not salvation because the goal is to escape samsara, not sin.  The various yogas are the techniques, whether karma yoga, jnana yoga, or bhakti yoga, whether work yoga, wisdom yoga, or the yoga of devotion.

For Judaism, the problem is exile, "distance from God and where we ought to be."  The solution is return, "to go back to God and our true home." (253)  The techniques are to keep the narrative alive and to obey the law, to remember and obey.  

So much for a quick little sketch of Prothero's new book.  A popular treatment but well worth reading.    

 

The Muslim Cab Driver and the Fundamentalist Christian Pharmacist

Mark Whitten inquires by e-mail re: Alcohol, Dogs, and Muslim Cab Drivers:

What is the difference between a Muslim cab driver who does not wish to transport a person with a dog or [an unopened container of]  alcohol, and a fundamentalist Christian pharmacist who does not want to dispense birth control?

Is there not a similar issue of social (dis)harmony / ‘‘assimilation’’ here?

I will assume arguendo that the arguments  against the moral permissibility of birth control (i.e., techniques that prevent conception as opposed to terminating a conceptus) are no better than the arguments against the moral permissibility of imbibing alcoholic beverages in moderation and keeping (well-behaved) dogs as pets  and transporting them in public.  On this assumption what the Christian pharmacist and the Muslim cab driver are doing is very similar.

If I were the owner of the pharmacy, I would fire the fundamentalist and give him this little speech:  "We live in a tolerant pluralistic society in which people disagree about many things including the morality of contraception.  I grant you that, objectively, the practice is either morally acceptable or it is not.  But we don't know which it is. While I respect your deep conviction, it is cuts no ice.  So we tolerate those who differ.  If in good conscience you cannot dispense birth control pills and devices, then you should resign.  But if you refuse to do your job, then you are fired."

If I were the owner of the cab company, I would fire the Muslim and give him this little speech:  "We live in a tolerant pluralistic society in which people disagree about many things including the morality of drinking.  I grant you that, objectively, the practice is either morally acceptable or it is not.  But we don't know which it is. While I respect your deep conviction, it  cuts no ice.  So we tolerate those who differ.  If in good conscience you cannot pick up uninebriated and otherwise well-behaved fares who are transporting unopened containers of hooch, then you should resign.  But if you refuse to do your job, you are fired.

And similarly for the Muslim supermarket checkout girl who refuses to touch a package of bacon.  She ought to be fired.  Ditto for the Muslim Disneyland hostess who insisted on wearing a hijab.  She should be fired and told to look for a job at ShariaLand.

Suppose a flat-chested lass tries to get a waitress  job at Hooters.  Hooters  is an establishment wherein adolescent males of all ages assemble to gawk at the front-end endowments — the 'hooters' — of nubile young ladies. (Some eating and drinking takes place as well.)  Suppose the applicant  is refused on the ground of cup size.  I would say that that is a legitimate form of discrimination  given the puerile purposes of that private enterprise.  It is similar to the Disneyland case.  The average American goes to Disneyland for a dose of pure Americana.  That's what  Disneyland sells.  The rubes from fly-over country don't want to see no Muslims.  Disneyland, as a private enterprise, has the right to demand that its employees project the right image. 

And political correctness be damned.

 

Alcohol, Dogs, and Muslim Cab Drivers

Apparently, significant numbers of Muslim taxi drivers in the Minneapolis-St. Paul area are refusing to transport people carrying  dogs or unopened containers of alcoholic beverages. There is a lesson here, but I am quite sure that liberals won't learn it, until they learn it the hard way.  It is a simple lesson really: social harmony is difficult in any event and is made especially difficult when large numbers of people are let into a society who (i) have wildly different values than the rest of us, and (ii) have no intention of assimilating.

On Praying for Christopher Hitchens

There is something strange, and perhaps even incoherent, about praying for Christopher Hitchens if the prayers are not for his recovery or for his courageous acceptance of death, but for conversion or a change of heart.  Let's think about it.

I do not play the lottery; I have good reasons for not playing it; I have no desire to win it, and I believe that I would be worse off if I were to win it.  Suppose you know these facts about me, but say to me nonetheless, "I am praying that you win the lottery," or "I hope you win the lottery."  Surely there is something strange about praying or hoping that I get something that I don't want and that I believe would make me worse off were I to get it. But beyond strange, it may even be incoherent.  Given that I do not play the lottery, there is no way I can win it; so if you hope or pray that I win it, then you are hoping or praying for the impossible.  Of course, you could hope or pray that I start playing.

Hitch does not want salvation of his soul via divine agency, and he has reasons that seem good to him for denying that there is such a thing.  And he presumably believes (though I am speculating here) that survival of bodily death and entry into the divine milieu would not be desirable.    For one thing, his brilliance would be outshone by a greater Brilliance which would be unbearable for someone with the pride of Lucifer, the pride of the light bearer.  It may also be that he believes, as many atheists and mortalists do, that the meaning of life here below, far from requiring a protraction into an afterlife, is positively inconsistent with such an extension.  "How boring and meaningless eternity would be, especially without booze and cigarettes and (sexual intercourse with) women!"

Hitch has lived his life as if God and the soul are childish fictions.  As a result, he has done none of the things that might earn him him immortality and fellowship with God, even assuming he wanted them.  This suggests that it is not just strange, but incoherent to pray for Hitch's metanoia.  For that would be like praying that he win the lottery without playing, without doing the things necessary to win it.

If a merciful God exists, then he should do the merciful thing and simply give Hitch what he wants and expects, namely annihilation.  Either that, or assign him another go-round, or series of go-rounds, on the wheel of samsara until such time as he is ready to accept the divine offer of everlasting life.

As for the prayer day in his honor, Hitch won't be attending.

 

Word of the Day: ‘Nychthemeron’

You may have noticed that 'day' is ambiguous: it can refer to a 24  hour period or to the non-nocturnal portion of a 24 hour period. The ambiguity spreads to the Latin injunction, Carpe diem! Does it include Carpe noctem! or exclude it? Or perhaps neither: to seize the day is to make good use of the present, whatever its duration, whether it be an hour, a day, a week.

A nychthemeron, from the Greek nyktos (night) and hemera (day) is a  period of 24 hours, a night and a day. Sleep researchers distinguish the nychthemeral from the circadian. According to Michael Quinion, "Circadian refers to daily cycles that are driven by an internal body clock, while nychthemeral rhythms are imposed by the external environment."

The use of the word is illustrated in this magnificent sentence from  "The Neglected Argument for the Reality of God" by the great American philosopher, C. S. Peirce:

The dawn and the gloaming most invite one to Musement; but I have
found no watch of the nychthemeron that has not its own advantages
for the pursuit.

'Gloaming' is another one of those beautiful old poetic words that we conservatives must not allow to fall into desuetude. Use it or lose   it. It means twilight.

On Religious Pluralism and Religious Tolerance

If you are an adherent of a given religion, why ought you tolerate other religions?  We must tolerate other religions because we do not know which religion is true, if any is, and this would be something very important to know if it could be known.  So we must inquire, and our inquiry will be aided by the availability of a a number of competing religions and nonreligious belief systems. 

But toleration has limits.  No religion or nonreligious ideology may be tolerated if it doesn't respect the principle of toleration.  And so we ought not tolerate a religion whose aim is to suppress and supplant other religions and force their adherents to either convert or accept dhimmi status.  Proselytization is tolerable but only if it is non-coercive.  The minute it becomes the least bit coercive we have every right to push back vigorously.  But equally, we ought not tolerate the ideology of the New Atheists  if and to the extent that they aim to suppress religion.  But is there any such tendency among the New Atheists?  Here is Stephen Prothero (God Is Not One, Harper 2010, p. 321) on Sam Harris, one of the 'Four Horsemen' of the New Atheism:

Harris then attacked the ideal of religious tolerance as "one of the principal forces driving us toward the abyss."  "Some propositions are so dangerous," he wrote in a chilling passage, "that it may even be ethical to kill people for believing them."  For Harris, religious tolerance is almost as dangerous as religion itself.  Belief in God is not an opinion that must be respected; it is an evil that must be confronted.

Like me, Harris believes that toleration has limits.  Of course it does.  But Harris and Co. draw the line in the wrong place, and they do so because they are not merely opposed to fanatical religion, jihadist religion, religion that violates freedom of inquiry and autonomy of thought, but to religion as such.  For them, religion itself is the problem.  But this is a shockingly puerile view that ignores the vast differences among religions, differences that Prothero's book does a good job of setting before us in all their richness.

On an approach more nuanced than that of the New Atheist ideologues, one grasps that some religions are tolerable, some are intolerable, some antireligious ideologies are tolerable, and some are not.  If the fulminations of Harris and friends spill over into actions that involve the suppression of religion, then he and his ilk are intolerable and ought to be opposed with vigor.

My view is not merely that most religions and anti-religious ideologies ought to be tolerated, but that the existence of these competing worldviews is a good and enriching  thing in that it helps us clarify and refine and test our own views and practices and helps us progress toward truer and more life-enhancing systems of thought and practice. 

Louis Lavelle on Our Dual Nature

 Louis Lavelle, The Dilemma of Narcissus, tr. Gairdner, Allen and  Unwin, 1973, p. 165:

The centaur, the sphinx, and the siren express the idea that man emerges out of an animal, and that he never sheds his hoofs, his claws, his scales. Man is a mixture; his dual nature is what makes him man; it is the essence of his vocation and destiny. It is folly to imagine him a god or reduce him to an animal; he is more like a satyr with two natures, and it would be hard to say whether his deepest desire is to raise the animal within him to the contemplation of the divine light, or to bring the god down into his animal body, and make him feel every impulse coursing through his flesh.

I would only add that it is man's spiritual nature that allows him to make such errors as to think that he is — nothing but an animal.

Why Philosophical Problems are Important

Philosophical problems are genuine intellectual knots that show us our intellectual exigency.  They humble us, whence their importance.  They rub our noses in the infirmity of reason.  The central problems are genuine and important but humanly insoluble. That is what two millenia of philosophical experience, East and West, teaches.  Their genuineness is wrongly denied by the Ordinary Language crowd; their spiritual importance by most analytic puzzle-solvers; their absolute insolubility by the optimistic pure theory types.

A Closer Look at Material Composition and Modal Discernibility Arguments

(For David Brightly, whom I hope either to convince or argue to a standoff.)

Suppose God creates ex nihilo a bunch of TinkerToy pieces at time t suitable for assembly into various (toy) artifacts such as a house and a fort.  A unique classical mereological sum — call it 'TTS' — comes into existence 'automatically' at the instant of the creation ex nihilo of the TT pieces. (God doesn't have to do anything in addition to creating the TT pieces to bring TTS into existence.)   Suppose further that God at t  assembles the TT pieces (adding nothing and subtracting nothing) into a house.  Call this object 'TTH.'  So far we have: the pieces, their sum, and the house.  Now suppose that at t* (later than t) God annihilates all of the TT pieces.  This of course annihilates TTS and TTH.  During the interval from t to t* God maintains TTH in existence.

I set up the problem this way so as to exclude 'historical' and nonmodal considerations and thus to make the challenge tougher for my side.  Note that TTH and TTS are spatially coincident, temporally coincident, and such that every nonmodal property of the one is also a nonmodal property of the other.  Thus they have the same size, the same shape, the same weight, etc.  Surely the pressure is on to say that TTH = TTS?  Surely my opponents will come at me with their battle-cry, 'No difference without a difference-maker!'  There is no constituent of TTH that is not also a constituent of TTS.  So what could distinguish them?

Here is an argument that TTH and TTS are not identical:

1. NecId:  If x = y, then necessarily, x = y. 

2. If it is possible that ~(x = y), then ~(x = y). (From 1 by Contraposition)

3. If it is possible that TTS is not TTH, then TTS is not TTH. (From 2, by Universal Instantiation) 

4. It is possible that TTS is not TTH.  (God might have assembled the parts into a fort instead of a house or might have left them unassembled.)

5. TTS is not TTH. (From 3, 4 by Modus Ponens)

The gist of the argument is that if x = y, then they are identical in every possible world in which both of them exist.  But there are possible worlds in which TTS and TTH both exist but are not identical. (E.g., a world in which the pieces are assembled into a fort instead of a house.)  Therefore, TTS andf TTH are not identical.

If you are inclined to reject the argument, you must tell me which premise you reject.  Will it be (1)? Or will it be (4)? 

Your move, David.

 

Of Haircuts, Amphibolies, and Maxims

I got my quarterly haircut the other day.  A neighbor remarked, "I see you got a haircut," to which I responded with the old joke, "I got 'em all cut."

In this as in so many other cases the humor derives from ambiguity, in this case amphiboly (syntactic ambiguity.)  The spoken 'I see you got a haircut' can be heard as 'I see you got a hair cut.'

The neighbor laughed at the joke, but I spared him the analysis, not to mention my theory of humor, both of which would have bored him.

Two relevant maxims: 'Tailor your discourse to your audience' and 'Among regular guys be a regular guy.'  And a meta-maxim: 'Step out of your house only with maxims at the ready.'