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Tolerance Is Not Relativism
The simple unspoken reality is that all religions are not equally good. Some,
in fact, are downright bad. The problem we have as Americans, however, is
that our fundamental attachment to tolerance makes it very difficult for
us to say so. It pains us to say, “You are wrong. This religion
is bad.” Ouch! As is always the case our greatest strength is
also our greatest weakness.
As a consequence, we typically confuse our absolute adherence to tolerance
with relativism. But tolerance is diametrically opposed to relativism. American
Tolerance is, thankfully, an inflexible absolutism regarding a single value:
The conflict of ideas allows for the advancement of knowledge. And this in
fact is the actual crux of our First Amendment. The State favors no religion,
which means all religions retain equal status only insofar as all, both good
and bad, are allowed to enter into the arena of competing religious beliefs
and ideas.
The relativist on the other hand presumes that all religions and all ideas
are equally good. For the relativist there is no conflict. There is not arena
of competing ideas. For the relativist contradiction is rejected.
True and false, good and bad are identical. A genuine relativist, for
example, would have to say the morality of the wife-burners of rural India
is just as good a morality as any other morality. Not so the advocate
of tolerance. For the advocate of tolerance that perverse morality
would be allowed entry into the arena of ideas, but the utter intolerance
of wife burning would lead swiftly to its rejection.
The principle of tolerance is not at all relativism because it allows us
to say, “Your religion is wrong, perhaps even bad, but my absolute adherence
to tolerance means I will not try to squelch your bad religion. I will however
write and speak openly that it is wrong.” We who adhere to tolerance as an
absolute value are of the reasonable view, I think, that all people are morally
required to tolerate what each of us considers the foolishness of others
because each of us requires others tolerate what they may consider our own
foolishness. We are also required to argue vigorously against those with
whom we disagree. This is an absolute principle, not at all relativistic,
and a good absolute principle.
A fool tolerated, however, remains a fool despite our tolerance of his, or
our own, foolishness. The only thing the adherent of absolute tolerance cannot
tolerate, and must not tolerate, is intolerance, for intolerance is a rejection
of our one absolute value: One Must be Tolerant. It is this strict
adherence to tolerance that John Stuart Mill had in mind in his essay On
Liberty. The marketplace of ideas certainly does not hold all ideas in equal
esteem despite the freedom all should have to express them. In fact some
ideas are just plain awful, despite the moral requirement that those who
hold these awful ideas retain their right to express them.
In a word, we have an absolute right to have bad religions and say stupid
things, but it is immoral for us not to allow others their right to have
bad religions and say stupid things. So lots of bad religions and stupid
things abound in America, and our tolerance of this makes none of it less
bad or less stupid.
Paradoxically, our national adherence to the absolute value of tolerance
is ultimately what gave rise to the now utterly intolerant PC culture that
lurks with its iron fist throughout academia. Political correctness
that began with an astute insight that the language of the dominant culture
can oppress the speech of those marginalized by the dominant culture, has
itself now become a weapon to marginalize and silence any who oppose them.
As a consequence the contemporary PC culture of Academe rigidly refuses to
tolerate any opposition to its own favored PC parochialisms. I, however, intend
here to attack this academic parochialism along with numerous others, by
simply arguing that some religions are bad, some ideas are bad, and yes, some
people are bad too; and no, they are not all Conservatives or George W. Bush,
or even Republicans. Yes, we should tolerate bad religions and their religious
ideas to the degree that they tolerate us who hold tolerance dear; but bad
religions remain, nevertheless, bad. Third wave Feminism and its PC
zealots are clearly members of a bad, downright exclusionary, religion.
The problem, of course, is by what criterion can a religion, be it P.C.ism
or radical Islamism, be judged a bad religion? Certainly a radically
exclusionary religion is not a tolerant religion, but neither is a radically
tolerant religion necessarily a good religion. A pseudo-religion like scientology
is open to any who want to pay to join. On the other hand, very exclusionary
religions like Orthodox Judaism and Catholicism are for all intents and purposes
closed religions; yet, I intend to argue they are good religions. So
there must be more than merely whether a religion is open to new members
that determines its strength as an authentic religion.
For example, suicidal religions such as the Halle-Bopp-black-Nike wearing
castrati of California, the Kool Aid drinking Christians of Jonestown and
the Branch Davidians at Waco, Texas are clearly examples of pseudo-religions,
as are some of our other contemporary extremist Christian, Jewish, Islamist,
PC, or Right Wing religions. Bearers of bad fruit all.
Spirituality Is No Determinant of Religious Goodness
My late father, a World War II veteran who landed in Normandy, always responded
to my religious skepticism with a nod and the simple retort: “Everyone
prays like hell once the shooting starts.” With this I entirely agree.
Sometimes, however he would resort to the old cliché: “There are no
atheists in a fox hole.” With this, however, I am entirely unconvinced.
The first statement about prayer refers to the near unavoidable spirituality,
perhaps even mystical awakening people seem to experience when their lives
become utterly terrifying. I have no doubt that many an agnostic is
reborn a Christian with dirty drawers under an artillery bombardment.
Nevertheless I am equally certain that it is not at all the case that every
act of felt prayer or mystical awakening is an acceptance of God, Christian
or otherwise. As Kierkegaard might have said, the infinite act
of subjective will that initiates one’s leap of faith is no objective evidence
of the existence of an objective god. The subjective experience of
mystical enlightenment is an inner transformative experience not at all necessarily
dependent on God. The sudden startling awareness of some variety of
Grace may as well be experienced by the atheist as by the theist, by the
Christian as by the Peyote Eater, by the Radical Islamist Terrorist as by
the Buddhist Monk.
It is essential to recognize therefore, that likely all pseudo-religions
and certainly all authentic religions are systems that help heighten the
subjective experience of spirituality among their members. Mystics
of all cults and religions experience some variety of this apparently mystical
grace. All experience some subjective inexplicable sense of world inclusion
and enlightenment. But certainly it is not the case that all cults and religions
must accept a god. Buddhism, a religion that can legitimately be considered
atheistic in that it entirely lacks any personal deity, is, nevertheless
an extraordinarily spiritual religion. So, too, are the God-fearing pseudo-religions
of radically hateful cults of killers. These are the theistic religions
of death and self-sacrifice, whose rituals glorify suicide and murder and
in so doing heighten the subjective experience of spirituality within its
members by demanding vengeance and hatred as avenues of mystical enlightenment.
Spirituality, then, is the necessary condition of all religions, but certainly
is not a sufficient condition of religious authenticity. As pointed
out by Harvard neurobiologist Dean Hamer in The God Gene (2004), in the height
of the 1960’s many an atheist found LSD and other drugs an avenue for decidedly
spiritual experiences. Spirituality can as likely be experienced by
the hunter facing his prey in nature as by the eco-extremist working ardently
to frustrate that very same hunt. Walking in the woods with a camera
or a rifle, entering a cathedral or a desert, fasting or gorging, practicing
asceticism or bacchanalia, speaking in tongues or killing infidels, the sacred
is uniquely personal in its spiritual connection with the individual who
feels it. The spiritual experience is also utterly distinct from the
acceptance or non-acceptance, existence or non-existence, of God.
The spiritual experience that a religion provides is not therefore to be
confused with the authenticity of the religion that evokes that particular
spiritual experience. Any religion that requires fasting, isolation,
meditation, intense prayer or a myriad of other possible behaviors can evoke
the experience of the spiritual. Man, as Hamer demonstrates, is likely
genetically programmed, made to be spiritual, but man is certainly not made
to know definitively the name or even the existence of the ineffable mystery
we each yearn to know more clearly and hope to grasp through mystical spirituality.
The mystical, spiritual, sense is certainly not then to be confused with
the existence of God absolute. God is defined by each religion, and
is not therefore extra-religious. God is a decidedly theological entity,
and is accordingly described quite differently by different theological systems,
and worshiped quite differently with the rituals demanded by different religions.
I say this to make clear that I am not at all pretending to argue either
on behalf of or against the existence of God. Spirituality may be heightened
by any variety of religions or even no religion at all. Spirituality
may be experienced by those of any variety of faiths in God or by those who
adhere to bald faced atheism. Spirituality is a statement of human
experience, perhaps merely an experience caused by human brain chemistry,
and thus not at all evidence for or opposed to the existence of an extra-human
God.
Spirituality, therefore, provides no measure whatsoever of whether a religion
is a good religion or a bad religion. All religions, from the most
murderous to the most loving, from the bleakest pseudo-religion to the grandest
authentic religion, all religions function to heighten the individual’s subjective
experience of spirituality.
A Theological Criterion for Religious Adequacy
So, without spirituality to provide sufficient evidence of religious adequacy,
the problem facing us in an age marked by the ideological bookends of religious
terrorism on one extreme and religious relativism on the other, is
how to determine when a religion has abandoned a coherent logos, and descended
instead into the belligerent unreasonableness of a rigid extremism. How
can we distinguish between a perversity of faith and an adequate religion?
How do we distinguish between the religious pretenders and authentic religions?
Though religious perversities are clearly spiritually charged faiths, this
by no means demonstrates that they are adequate or good religions.
They are instead the pseudo-religions and junk ideologies of our age, just
as various non-testable ad hoc assemblages of presumption are the pseudo-sciences
of our age.
In past ages these religions pretenders also carried enormous sway over vast
numbers of people. The great mystery religions, from the cults of Attis
to Isis that were pervasive throughout Rome, are ideal examples of pseudo-religions.
These mystical, faithful cults survived for a time but their own incoherencies
ultimately led to their demise when they faced competing religions of greater
theological coherency. Greek mythology itself also succumbed to very
much the same sorts of incoherencies found in the Mystery Religions with
the advent of philosophers like Plato, Pythagoras and Xenophanes, who demonstrated
the contradictions and incoherencies inherent within these myths. In
particular these philosophers demonstrated that no perfect god would or could
metamorphose from a perfect form to imperfect form; no perfect god could
demand the imperfection of Dionysian bacchanalia when the truths of number
endure eternally; no perfect god would have the face of a horse if its worshippers
were horses. My contention then is theological coherence is ultimately
the factor that allows us to distinguish between religion and its pretenders.
Theology at its core is none other than the objective logical rigor of philosophy
applied to the subjective spiritual experience of faith. Indeed the
history of theology generally refers to the application of reason to Judeo-Christian-Muslim
faiths, but reason is equally applicable to others faiths as well. We
need not presume, then, that theology as it was originally defined by Christian
philosophers from Augustine to Aquinas is the only legitimate definition possible.
For the sake of the argument that follows we will expand the meaning of theology
more broadly to the application of reason to any religious system of faith
or spirituality. In fact, every religious system that demands some
set of rituals for the sake of evoking faith or spirituality can be evaluated
in terms of its inner theological coherence. The total human being
is endowed with both gifts simultaneously: the gift of spirituality and the
gift of reason. Any adequate religion, therefore, would seem required
to have both faith and reason.
If one accepts the twin requirements of faith and reason as essential for
any authentic religion then the analogy between pseudo-science and pseudo-religion
becomes stronger. A pseudo-science is marked by its foundation on a
set of arbitrary ad hoc
presumptions that are entirely untestable, and yet accepted with axiomatic
certainty. So it is not whether a pseudo-science can provide answers
to questions about the empirical world that makes it a pseudo-science, it
is the absolute inability of a pseudo-science to test its fundamental premises
despite the answers it provides for empirical questions that makes it a pseudo-science.
Analogously, pseudo-religions are marked by an incoherent set of ad hoc spiritual presumptions. For example
where pseudo-religions depend on mindless subjective faith, authentic religions
use reason to demonstrate the coherence of their religious principles.
Neither an unreasonable pseudo-scientific presumption that the Bermuda Triangle
just must be the work of extra-terrestrials nor the mindless pseudo-religious
presumption that faith alone requires the murder of infidels is sufficient
evidence for those quasi-axioms. Real scientific hypotheses can be
found false and real religious principles can be found incoherent.
In fact herein is the strength of the great religions. Once Catholicism,
for example, determined Limbo was inconsistent with its fundamental principles
of sin’s dependence on will, Limbo was rejected.
The religion of Catholicism had to recognize a theological error, and they
did recognize it, and they changed their religion to reflect their theological
advancements. Not so with the pseudo-religion of Jonestown. Their
theological incoherencies led to a mass suicide/murder. There was no way
for theology to inform religion for the followers of Jim Jones’s pseudo-religion.
As astrology, psychoanalysis and creationism are pseudo-sciences, so too
are scientology, new-age-eco-feminism and Heaven’s Gate pseudo-religions.
But pop-religions have no corner on the pseudo-religion market. The great
Western religions of Islam, Christianity and Judaism have each spun off superb
examples of extraordinarily obtuse pseudo-religions, and so too have the
great American political ideologies of liberalism and conservatism spun off
equally obtuse pseudo-religions. It is clear that many shaking, shrieking
Democrats and Republicans experience raw spirituality during their own party’s
political revivals.
So how do we make the evaluation between good and bad religions, between
authentic and inauthentic religions? In a word, it is a matter of asking
if reason in the form of theology can inform one’s religion. If one’s
religious practices are impervious to a coherent theology also embraced by
that religion, or if one’s ritualistic spiritual practices are utterly devoid
of theology, then one is a member of a pseudo-religion. Extremist Islam
is by this standard quite clearly a pseudo-religion. Radical Islamism is
a theologically vacuous wasteland of psychosis and fear, nothing at all like
the noble religion from which it devolved.
In the Middle Ages authentic Islam was home of some of the most sophisticated
theologians in the history of human civilization. Avicenna and Averroes represented
the pinnacle of rational theology which was ultimately transformed into the
rational mysticism of Mullah Sadra in the 17th century. These brilliant Islamist
theologians epitomized the work of all theologians by using reason, logos,
to understand and analyze the god, Theos, of their faith. And for authentic
Christians and Muslims alike that god is The God of Abraham. But eventually
the intellectual sophistication, the logos, of many Islamic religious sects
was superseded by anti-intellectual literalism that inevitably led to the
extraordinarily rigid and perverse religious bellicosities that now undergird
those perverse Islamic extremisms, pseudo-religions, that encourage suicide
in the pursuit of unimaginable sexual rewards in a dubious after life.
In light of the relationship that exists between an authentic religion and
theology I propose a three-part test to determine whether a religion is a
pseudo-religion or an authentic religion. What follows is the promised
test for religious adequacy:
1. Any religion lacking a guiding coherent theology is a pseudo-religion.
2. Any religion entirely self referential is pseudo-religion.
3. Any religion whose only fruit is adherence to itself is pseudo-religion.
In a word, the sundry “gods” of literalist extremists, be they Christians,
Muslims, Feminists or Gun Owners is not God, but at best a perverse idolatry
that praises fanciful mythologized characterizations of the Mystery that
is the Judeo-Christian-Islamic God. The idolater worships the symbol over
the symbolized. The idolater adheres to ungrounded moralities that
crush the tenuous voice of reason, reason, one of the two true gifts unique
to of the human species: fide et ratio, faith and reason.
Literalist anti-theological religions are ideally illustrated by the radical
Islamism of the Ayatollahs who issue fatwa’s against fellow Muslims, like
Salman Rushdie, who refused to embrace the incoherent, fundamentally insipid,
literalisms of far too many contemporary Muslims. Of course these same sorts
of intentionally anti-theological literalisms can be found in our major American
religions, political parties and academic institutions. We need merely remember
Pat Robertson’s recent appeal to the wrath of his malignant idol to crush
the people of Dover, Pennsylvania for replacing their creationist school
board. We need merely remember the myriad examples of the intentional misuse
of statistics by extremist third-wave feminists to promote their favored
political aspirations in the name of their inflexible pseudo-religion.
Each of these is also an example of a pseudo-religion that refers only to
its own rituals to verify the “reasonableness” of its own rituals.
“I am right because I am right.” These pseudo-religions are radically
circular, utterly non-informative. They demand adherence, and in adherence
the reward is spiritual experience. But if the only reward for strict
adherence is the mystical experience of spiritual salvation, that same reward
can be had vastly more easily with dopamine and serotonin pills. With
regard to the third principle, what indeed is the fruit of the contemporary
cult of third-wave feminism other than proselytizing for the recruitment
of converts to this pseudo-religion of helplessness and vindictiveness?
What indeed is the fruit of radical Islam other than the recruitment of more
suicidal followers? And what indeed is the fruit of the hell-paranoid
literalist Christian other than raising money to perpetuate their pathological
fear of hell ad infinitum?
As a friend of mine is fond of saying, “Why study theology?” That’s
an easy question. “Why NOT study theology?” That’s the hard one. By extension,
why use reason? That’s the easy one. To borrow from Kant, reason
without spirituality is empty and spirituality without reason is blind.
I, however, fear the murderous cruelty of blind passion far more than the
boring blandness of empty reason. Yet brought together, faith and reason,
brings genuine solace to the authentic human hunger for authentic religions.
James D. Carmine is chair of the Philosophy Department at Carlow University in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.
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