Salman Taseer
But it won’t help you die. I was thinking about Islam and assisted dying when the news came in that the brave and funny Governor of the Punjab had been killed by his police bodyguard, because of the Governor’s stance on Pakistan’s medieval blasphemy law. So I did a perfunctory search to find out what the Islam which stones women and kills blasphemers thinks about assisted dying. The answer is no. The Islam which prompted a man to pump 26 rounds from his Kalashnikov into the Governor’s back, won’t help you die if you are dying in intolerable pain. Life, you see, is sacred!
You might say it wasn’t Islam that motivated him. But why should we say this? The man was defending a law of his country which says that it’s okay to kill blasphemers. Did the Governor not blaspheme simply by opposing this law? I say it was Islam that motivated his killer. Muslim leaders throughout Pakistan were calling for Governor Taseer’s head. One of the faithful answered the call. Anyway, his killer says that’s why he killed him.
Religion is like that. It is based on beliefs which are completely without foundation, and which are, therefore, simply random occurrences. It is used, without predictability, to support completely bizarre social and political arrangements. It motivates people to perform acts of the most absurd personal abnegation at the same time that others are prompted by the same beliefs to acts of incredibly brutal and inhuman cruelty. And then, despite the evidence of millennia of experience, and sacred texts replete with violence, we are told, with every evidence of sincerity, that religion is about love and compassion, and the mind simply weeps!
So I looked, as I mentioned a moment ago, for something about Islam and assisted dying, and the first site that I came upon included this.
Marian, from the United States, asks:
I was just wondering (I’m not a doctor or anything) if euthanasia (mercy killing) is allowed in Islam. I think that if someone is enduring blinding pain and doesn’t really have much time to live (2 or 3 months), the doctor should kill that person and end his/her misery. What do you think? Is Euthanasia allowed in Islam?
The Muslim Agony Aunt at Islam.net, answers:
In the Name of Allah, Most Gracious, Most Merciful.All praise and thanks are due to Allah, and peace and blessings be upon His Messenger.
Dear questioner, we would like to thank you for the great confidence you place in us, and we implore Allah Almighty to help us serve His cause and render our work for His Sake.Euthanasia, in modern terminology, refers to facilitating the death of an incurable patient at his own pressing request presented to the treating physicians. There are various types of euthanasia and each type has its own ruling. However, all Muslim scholars agree that killing a person to reduce his pain or suffering from sickness is not allowed in Islam. Having said this, we can say that if a number of medical experts decide that there is no hope for a certain patient to recover, then it could be permissible for them to stop the medication.
I was raised with almost no religion and, admittedly, it requires real work for me to feel as though I understand the religious mentality.
In situations like this, the analogy that jumps to my mind before any other, is the image of a weapon. The second image is of a long-term virus.
As a weapon it is sometimes a pistol, sometimes a sword, sometimes a bomb, and sometimes a slow-poisoning chemical. It can be used to attack or to take hostages. It can be used to rob, steal, and blackmail. The Stockholm syndrome is very real here too.
As a virus, it infects its host with the programming to infect as many others as possible. Sometimes it has to kill.
I am uncomfortable with this scenario because it seems to take away even the illusion of free will, but what if it is, in essence, true?
Sad…
I give a little space for Unitarians and Quakers, and even some smallish space for liberal Catholics (Jesus, Mary & Joseph!), and some Anglicans, and liberal Lutherans too.
But it’s all a delusion ultimately.
Eric, no, religion did not kill Salman Taseer – theology killed him. Religion and theology are not synonymous interchangable terms. What killed Taser is a theological idea translated into real physical action.
If atheism is ever going to be sucessfull in working towards a more humane social environment – then it truly needs to clean up its own act. It needs to spell out exactly what it is ‘fighting’ – name the beast, name the theological ideas – get it’s hands dirty with real battles not the easy target of ‘religion’ – as though that term is the catch- all for all the misery and hatred in the world. Not so. Lets call a spade a spade and take the shapeshifting theological monster to the cleaners – and leave the phenomenon of religion where it has been for all of human history – a part of human nature that needs to be acknowledged and understoood, not vilified.
http://rjosephhoffmann.wordpress.com/2010/07/
Well, Maryhelena, if it comes to that, an automatic weapon killed him. However, I’m not sure that the distinction between religion and theology is all that intuitive. My guess is that theology came with monotheism, and is inseparable from it. I don’t want to deny that people have experiences of the numinous, or feelings of absolute depedence, or other weird and wonderful phenomenology. Nor would I want to deny that religion can inspire selflessness and caring. But I really do not think the price is worth it.
It may be true that theology is the source of the problem, but I think that theology is inseparable from monotheism, because the basic premise of monotheism is not so much that God is one, but that our God is the only true one, and this belief arouses some of the most unlovely passions.
As Jan Assman says in his insightful book, The Price of Monotheism, “Monotheism is theoclasm.” (22) That is, monotheism is premised on the destruction of gods, and this rhetoric of violence implicit in monotheistic religion is inseparable from it. Read the Bible or the Qu’ran to see how predominant the violence really is. Recall Elijah slaughtering the priests of Baal (1 Kings 18), a lesson in intolerance that has not been lost on his successors. The same kind of zeal for the Lord is seen in the New Testament, where warnings of ‘wolves in sheeps clothing’ abound, and the spectre of fratricidal violence is raised even by the teachings of Jesus.
There is actually a growing literature of the relationship between religion and violence. Hector Avalos’ Fighting Words, for example, Regina Schwartz’s The Curse of Cain, or Jack Nelson-Pallmeyer’s Is Religion Killing Us? Violence in the Bible and the Quran spring immediately to mind. The themes of violence run very deep, especially in the monotheistic religions, and I suspect they are ineradicable, not because of the theology, but because monotheistic religions are in a sense surrogates for a kind of intense community identity — even, that is, in the absence of community. It arouses very much the same kind of feelings of belonging that is characteristic of the worst sorts of nationalism, and it has the same kind of violent fallout.
I know that there is a tendency — and I sometimes succumb to it — to make a kind of blanket condemnation of religion, as though, as you say, it is a holdall for “all the misery and hatred of the world.” This is probably wrong, though it is hard to think of a power in the world today which is most likely to do more harm than religion. It is all very well to remember the religious who have given themselves to selfless and compassionate service. It is important to remember the multifarious ways in which it causes harm and destruction too, and arouses passions which are very hard to allay.
I still think that religion killed Salman Taseer, not theology. Theology may justify it, but the passions that led to the murder are purely religious.
Yes, of course an automatic weapon killed Salman Taseer…:-)
Eric – I don’t see your definition of *religion*? Do you have a definition that does not resort to theology in any shape or form? I don’t think religion can be defined by it’s theological superstructures. These come and go – god is forever on the run.
In your blog post you did say:“Religion is like that. It is based on beliefs which are completely without foundation, and which are, therefore, simply random occurrences.”
Religion based upon beliefs? Is this not back to front, a case of putting the cart before the horse? Surely, beliefs are the superstructure that theology has build upon religion. Beliefs are subject to the winds of change, to the shifting sands of time. Religion stays put. It’s survival a testimony to its very secure foundation in human nature, in the reality of our existence, an existence that in order to prosper needs a structure of values – particularly spiritual values. Gods may come and go – but our human need for spiritual values remains a constant element in our existence.
Religion, seen as an expression of what each of us value as spiritual values (love, kindness, charity etc) seen as an expression of how humans strive to live and interact beyond the bare fact of existence, is, in actuality, something about human nature that could well be viewed as ‘sacred ground’. In contrast, theology, does not stand upon ‘sacred ground’. It stands upon purely intellectual premises. Premises that are continually subject to the winds of change, to the onward call of intellectual evolution.
I’m afraid, for me anyway, knocking religion misses the real target that atheists are aiming at: theological ideas that are infiltrating the very fabric of society. Theology is insidious and needs to be brought to task. By not clearly differentiating between religion and theology, atheists are simply hitting in the air; no direction, just a wild uncoordinated rage against religion – and making themselves very unpopular in the process.
“Tread softly” said Yeats, “don’t tread on my dreams”. By all means should atheists rage against theology’s infiltration into moral issues – but they also must tread very softly when approaching the spiritual values that religion strives to uphold and express.
Maryhelena, clearly I’m going to have to do a little more thinking about this. However, I can say a few things now. If religion comprises only dreams and numinous experiences, and theology is a superstructure built on this, then of course we could say that the problem is theology. But is this true?
First of all, I don’t think trying to define religion is particularly helpful. Every definition that has been tried really doesn’t cut it. There is no completely inclusive defintion that captures all that people mean when they use the word, so trying to define it is a bit like hunting the snark — for the snark was a boojum, you see.
However, I don’t think, in most cases, we can separate religion from belief. That’s a bit chicken and eggish, after all, since people who are brought up in a religious tradition learn the beliefs at the same time as they experience whatever it is that the religion provides, whether belonging, transcendence, the mystical, or…. And the experiences of religion exist within a theological framework from the start. Don Cupitt, for example, thinks that mystical experience is really literary, rather than something purely phenomenologicl, and I suspect this is right. People express their mystical experiences in terms of literary figures. For example, Christian mystical experience is closely allied with what people think is characteristic of female sexuality. Male saints, as Cupitt says somewhere, know a lot too much about how women experience sex.
You speak of religion as “an expression of what each of us value[s] as spiritual values (love, kindness, charity etc) seen as an expression of how humans strive to live and interact beyond the bare fact of existence, [which] is, in actuality, something about human nature that could well be viewed as ‘sacred ground’.” I guess I find that question-begging. Why isn’t this just being human? Why call this religion? The only reason for calling something religion is to distinguish a particular cultural project from other cultural projects. There is art, music, literature, drama, cuisine …., and then religion. What is distinctive about it? Not love, kindness, charity as such, since there is no obvious reason why these can be had in the absence of religion. How are religious experiences of these things different from an experience which does not acknowledge any of the supernatural objects of most religions? Not just living and interacting beyond the bare fact of existence. This is simply — what shall we say? — civilisation or culture. Why add the word ‘sacred’ to this, instead of speaking of something as being highly valued and treasured? Life is valuable, even very precious, but sacred? Why sacred? What does adding that word add to the sense of something’s being especially valued? And is adding it healthy?
Religion may be all that you say it is, but it is also something more, and that’s where theology comes in. I don’t see how to define religion without including some reference to theology, for religious claims themselves are inseparable from theology. Theology is an inevitable accompaniment of religion, because people will think about their experiences, and this thinking results in beliefs, just as they think about other things, and form opinions about what they think about. We seek to understand, and theology is the effort to understand what it is that our religious experiences signify. And because this is so, religious beliefs are always located behind the battlements of theology. Religions are exceedingly durable cultural products. They don’t exist merely as personal experience. The spiritual values that you think religion tries to uphold and express are supported, and made intense, by the theological distinctions and exclusions that are coordinate with those values.
So, most religion is theological. The spiritual values may, in fact, be what is valuable about religions, and so the best thing to do with those values would be to separate them from religious allegiance, and pursue them for their own sake. But as they stand, the book religions, in particular, just are theological at their heart. Show me religion without the theology, and perhaps there will be room for the kind of thing you are proposing.
Here is another definition of religion (a definition by Hans Kung is in the link in my earlier post).
The Encyclopedia of Religion describes religion in the following way:
“In summary, it may be said that almost every known culture involves the religious in the above sense of a depth dimension in cultural experiences at all levels — a push, whether ill-defined or conscious, toward some sort of ultimacy and transcendence that will provide norms and power for the rest of life. When more or less distinct patterns of behaviour are built around this depth dimension in a culture, this structure constitutes religion in its historically recognizable form. Religion is the organization of life around the depth dimensions of experience — varied in form, completeness, and clarity in accordance with the environing culture.”
(Winston King, Encyclopedia of Religion, p 7693)
A ‘depth dimension’ in a culture – in other words, something more than simple existence. To prosper requires values, love, kindness etc. Words and ideas are not necessary at this basic level. Connection to one another provides life with experiences that are not intellectual. Nature provides ample scope for wonder and awe. Sure, another name could be brought forth for this – spirituality? But we have the word *religion* – so no need to try and re-invent the wheel…
Show you a religion without theology? Every human has a *religion* in the basic meaning of the term – values for living and prospering on this earth. We might value one thing over another – but values – both material and spiritual we do have.
I would agree with your: “ I don’t think trying to define religion is particularly helpful. Every definition that has been tried really doesn’t cut it. There is no completely inclusive defintion that captures all that people mean when they use the word, so trying to define it is a bit like hunting the snark — for the snark was a boojum, you see.”
Words are often inadequate vehicles to carry the sort of ‘spiritual’ load that we might want them to. So, in the case of a definition of religion – perhaps there never can be a ‘true’ definition. Perhaps all we need, perhaps at different stages in our lives, is a definition that works at that time. One cannot tie religion down to a neat, one size fits all, definition. A broader definition will, by its nature, allow for more diversity in our desire to comprehend the phenomenon. What is important re any attempt at a definition is that the definition clearly allows for a separation between religion and theology.
Yes, unfortunately, the ‘chicken and eggish’ theology/religion diet today makes the differentiation between the two difficult to observe. Children are fed a diet of theology before they have experience of life. But a diet of theology is not what sustains religion. All that is, ultimately, is a diet of words without any relevance to living. Sure, people are prepared to die for some hare-brained idea – but it’s living that flourishes with a hand to hold. Religion without theology – without a superstructure, without the ability to give voice, to give words, to it’s depth experiences of living? Hardly. Gods come and they go – all *god* can be is a symbol of our need for a hierarchy of values – top slot goes to *god* – or whatever it is that we hold as our highest value.
Of course, being religious is simply to be human
Sure, we have art, music etc. *Religion* happens to be the time honoured designation for the ‘spiritual’ we find among the mundane experience of life. Indeed, some people are happier with ‘spiritual’ than ‘religious’ – but that’s just a consequence of the very bad reputation that theology has given to religion.
Why use the word ‘sacred’ in connection with religion? Life is sacred and religion strives to ennoble that experience of life by striving for spiritual values. OK, such terms might not be everyone’s cup of tea – but confining a term such as *sacred* to theological ideas is nonsense. Ideas can never be *sacred* – they serve their time and then must give way to the new.
Theology as the “more” of religion? Theology has the inherent potential to destroy ideas, to keep intellectual evolution up and running. So in a sense it is an added element, a superstructure, to religion. A superstructure that can be continually knocked down and rebuilt. Problems arise when theology and religion become synonymous. Thereby giving birth to the dangerous monstrosity we see today – theology that is stagnant. Theology that has lost it’s ability to renew itself. And religion, contaminated by it’s amalgamation with theology, reaps the backlash of theology’s numerous humanitarian crimes.
Indeed, no man is an island – so people will seek to bring about communities or associations – but are we now back to that quote at the top of this post… “Religion is the organization of life around the depth dimensions of experience —“.
Lots to think about re the religion and theology issues…
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