Religion and Religious Diversity

1. Mark Pursley Religion and Religious Diversity Mark Pursley

2. Defining Religion • Religion is a universal dimension of human experience. • Why are humans religious? • What is religion? • Definitions may be substantive (what religion is), or functional (what religion does). • ion? • Definitions may be substantive (what religion is), or functional (what religion does). Mark Pursley

3. Sample Definitions • Religion is the state of being grasped by an ultimate concern, a concern which qualifies all other concerns as preliminary and which itself contains the answer to the question of the meaning of life. Paul Tillich. • Religion is that system of activities and beliefs directed toward that which is perceived to be of sacred value and transforming power. J.C. Livingston. • The essence of religion consists in the feeling of an absolute dependence. F. Schleiermacher. Mark Pursley

4. Definitions • Religion is that which grows out of, and gives expression to, experience of the holy in its various aspects. Rudolf Otto. • Religion is a set of beliefs and practices that provides answers to fundamental questions about the origin, purpose, and destiny of human existence by positing supernatural forces, realities, or principles. Mark Pursley Mark Pursley

5. Axial Age Religion • Religion is a system of beliefs and practices aimed at transforming human beings from their unsatisfactory natural condition, into a superior condition that conforms with an Ultimate Reality. (Based on John Hick’s, An Interpretation of Religion) • Pre-axial religion (ancient religion): tribal, national religions. Ritual and sacrifice used to win divine favor. Religion brings stability to the group. • Axial age (900- 200 BCE) transition from tribal religions to world religions- with a new emphasis on personal salvation. Religion brings a personal experience. Mark Pursley

6. Pre-Axial Religion • Pre-axial religion is world-accepting, concerned with preserving the cosmic and social order. It provides a mythical framework for bestowing meaning on the basic realities of life- survival, reproduction, social cohesion. • The aim of pre-axial religion is to promote the stability of the tribe in an uncertain natural environment. • …in the first millenium B.C. all across the Old World, [there occurred] the phenomenon of religious rejection of the world characterized by an extremely negative evaluation of man and society and the exaltation of another realm of reality as alone true and infinitely valuable…[Now] the religious goal of salvation (or enlightenment, release…) is for the first time the central religious preoccupation. (Robert Bellah) Mark Pursley

7. The Axial Age • In the axial age, humans are viewed not primarily as members of a tribe or clan, but as beings capable of salvation. • …[I]n the axial age the human mind began to stand back from its encompassing environment to become conscious of itself as a distinct reality with its own possibilities. Accordingly, whilst archaic religion accepted life as it is and sought to continue it on a stable basis, there came through the outstanding figures of the axial period the disturbing yet uplifting thought of a limitlessly better possibility. (John Hick) Mark Pursley

8. Why Study Religion? • To understand our nature. • To overcome our ignorance. • To comprehend our culture. • To achieve a global perspective. • To help formulate our own religious outlook or philosophy of life. • The unexamined life is not worth living. Socrates • Real courage is not the courage of our convictions but the courage to examine our convictions. Nietzsche Mark Pursley

9. Responses to Religious Diversity • When we examine the claims that different religious traditions make about the nature of Ultimate Reality, the origin and destiny of humans, and historical events, we find that many of these claims are incompatible. How should we interpret these conflicting accounts? No one comes to the Father but by me. Mark Pursley

10. Exclusivism: only one Religion is correct. • Extra ecclesiam nulla salus. (Outside The Church there is no salvation.) • Epistemological problem: How can one know that a particular religion is the one and only correct path to God or Ultimate Reality? • Moral problem: It seems unfair for Ultimate Reality to single out a particular culture as specially favored while condemning the mass of humanity to perdition or ignorance. Mark Pursley

11. Inclusivism • Inclusivism: One religion is fully correct, others are partially correct. Anonymous Christians (Rahner). • The “seeds of truth” present and active in the various religious traditions are a reflection of the unique Word of God, who “enlightens every man coming into the world” (cf. Jn 1:9) …They are together an “effect of the Spirit of truth operating outside the visible confines of the Mystical Body” and which “blows where it wills” (Jn 3:8) • Helps resolve the moral, but not the epistemological problem. • Those who, through no fault of their own, do not know the Gospel of Christ or his Church, but who nevertheless seek God with a sincere heart, and, moved by grace, try in their actions to do his will as they know it through the dictates of their conscience — those too may achieve eternal salvation" (Second Vatican Council, Lumen Gentium, 16). Mark Pursley

12. Subjectivism and Relativism • Subjectivism: Each religion is correct for the individuals who adhere to it. • The meaning of religious language can only be understood by observing how it functions in a religious community. (Noncognitivism) D.Z. Phillips • Relativism: The correctness of a religion is relative to the world view of its adherents. Claims about reality are relative to particular societies. • There are mutually incompatible yet individually adequate sets of conceptual-schema-relative truths. J. Runzo Mark Pursley

13. Religious Pluralism • Each of the major religions is correct insofar as it provides an authentic context for salvation. The different sets of religious ideas and practices taught by the great world traditions constitute different but in each case valid ways of conceiving, experiencing, and responding to the ultimately Real. (John Hick) • God or Ultimate Reality as infinite, is unknowable by finite human minds . An infinite transcendent reality is being differently conceived, differently experienced, and differently responded to from within our different religio-cultural ways of being human. (John Hick) Mark Pursley

14. Salvation • Salvation = the transformation of individuals from self-centeredness to Reality-centeredness, from selfish egoists to compassionate golden rule followers. • Each tradition conceptualizes the wrongness of human existence: as fallenness from paradisal virtue, or as a condition of moral weakness and alienation from God, or as the fragmentation of the infinite one into false individualities, or as a self-centeredness which poisons our involvement in the world process , making it an experience of anxious unhappy unfulfillment. Mark Pursley

15. Salvation/Liberation: Common Themes in Diverse Traditions • Ordinary human existence is unsatisfactory. (yetzer ha-ra- Judaism; fallen- Christianity; ghafala- Islam, avidya- Hinduism; dukkha- Buddhism). • Salvation as a transformation from self-centeredness to Reality centeredness. • When all love of the I and the Mine is dead, then the work of the Lord is done. (Kabir) • Thinking on there being no self, he wins to the state wherein the conceit “I am” has been uprooted, to nirvana, even in this life. (The Buddha) • …[W]e must give up our particular will, die to our ego, by surrendering its whole nature …to the divine. (Radhakrishnan) Mark Pursley

16. Naturalism • Naturalists claim that the supernaturalistic explanations of the origin and destiny of the universe found in religion are remnants of a pre-scientific culture. The empirical methods of scientific inquiry find no evidence for the reality of supernatural forces. Naturalistic explanations (e.g. evolution, big bang) provide more adequate descriptions of material and biological phenomena. Therefore, the naturalist suspects that all religions are mistaken. Mark Pursley

17. From Deism to Naturalism • Geocentrism to heliocentrism- end of the three story universe. Naturalistic explanations of natural phenomena (weather, historical development, consciousness, origins of life, and the origins of the universe) eliminated the role of an interventionist deity. • But if the universe is really completely self-contained, having no boundaries or edge, it would be neither created nor destroyed. It would simply be. What place, then, for a creator? (Stephen W. Hawking) • The universe we observe has precisely the properties we should expect if there is, at bottom, no design, no purpose, no evil and no good, nothing but blind, pitiless indifference. (Richard Dawkins) Mark Pursley

18. Postmodern Accounts of Religion • There are no facts, only interpretations. Nietzsche. • Postmodern thinkers distinguish three main eras in the history of western religion. The age of faith- characterized by belief in a supernatural God who intervened in nature and history and revealed himself in scripture. The age of reason- beginning in the enlightenment period when scientific explanations of nature and history replaced supernaturalist accounts, and the methodology of literary criticism was applied to scriptural texts, revealing their human origins. Leading finally to the age of interpretation. Mark Pursley

19. The Age of Interpretation • Postmodern thinkers deny the metaphysical notion of objective truth, in science and theology. They emphasize that all concepts and theories are conditioned by historical and cultural circumstances. Reality is reduced to message. In a world where God is dead- where the metanarratives have been dissolved and all authority has …been demythologized, including that of objective knowledge- our only chance of survival rests in the Christian commandment of charity. Gianni Vattimo Mark Pursley

20. References • Armstrong, Karen. ( 2007). The great transformation. New York: Anchor • Gundry, S.N., Okholm D.L. & Phillips, T.R. (Eds.). (1995). Four views on salvation in a Pluralistic world. Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan. Hawking, Stephen. (1998). A brief history of time. New York: Bantam. Hick, John. (1980). God has many names. Philadelphia: Westminster. Mark Pursley

21. References • Hick, John. (1989). An interpretation of religion. New Haven: Yale University Press. • Hick, John. (1993). Disputed questions. New Haven: Yale University Press. Hick, John. (1993). God and the universe of faiths. Oxford: One World. Hick, John. (1995). A Christian theology of religions. Louisville, Kentucky: Westminster Mark Pursley

22. References • Hick, John, & Hebblewaithe, B. (Eds.). (2001) Christianity and other religions. Oxford: One World Livingston, J.C. (1989). Anatomy of the sacred. New York: Macmillan. Otto, Rudolf. (1923). The idea of the holy. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Ramm, Bernard. (1953). Protestant Christian evidences. Chicago: Moody Press Rorty, R. & Vattimo, G. (2004). The future of religion. New York: Columbia University Press. Mark Pursley