Demythologizing Hinduism

Demythologizing Religion: Hinduism and the Possibility of Pluralism

David Ketchum

March 27, 2022

Watch the Video HERE

    When I spoke about Buddhism last week, I could speak from the perspective of someone who has personally benefitted from Buddhist teachings and practices and is an active member of a Buddhist community. In other words, I have a lived context for what I was sharing and accountability for mistakes and misunderstandings. It’s important to me to acknowledge that this is not the case when it comes to speaking about Hindu traditions. I have not formally studied Hinduism for a couple of decades and I don’t currently have any personal connections with Hindu communities or practitioners. When it comes to these reflections, I want to be a courteous guest. 

The Voice of a Poet 

    I know I often speak about books and how they changed me. This might have always been the case; I find genuine delight and joy in reading. But part of their power also lies in the fact that I grew up in southwest Missouri, in a very conservative religious community, and books opened the world to me in ways that I otherwise could not have imagined. That curiosity inspired the teenage version of myself to pick up a copy of Rabindranath Tagore’s Gitanjali as I wandered through the used bookstore. From the first verses, I was enthralled: 

“Thou hast made me endless, such is thy pleasure. This frail vessel thou emptiest again and again, and fillest it ever with fresh life.

This little flute of a reed thou hast carried over hills and dales, and hast breathed through it melodies eternally new.” (https://www.gutenberg.org/files/7164/7164-h/7164-h.htm ) 

    Though his skill obviously transcended my own, I recognized a fellow traveler in the poet’s words. I carried that little paperback with me over the Ozark hills. I knew what he meant about being a “little flute of a reed,” one small melody of divine joy and divine sorrow carried on the wind. I put verse seven to music and sang it as part of my devotions: 

“My song has put off her adornments. She has no pride of dress and decoration. Ornaments would mar our union; they would come between thee and me; their jingling would drown thy whispers.

 

“My poet’s vanity dies in shame before thy sight. O master poet, I have sat down at thy feet. Only let me make my life simple and straight, like a flute of reed for thee to fill with music.” (ibid) 

     I did not understand at the time the complex cultural, sociological, and religious contexts that nourished Tagore, which he called “a confluence of three cultures” – Hindu, Muslim, and British. His family was Hindu, the family name an anglicization of Thakur. They lived in what is now Bangladesh, and, though he died in 1941, Tagore witnessed the violence of colonialism and the buildup of tension and violence leading up to the Partition of Pakistan in 1947. It took many years for me to begin to understand, not just the beauty, but the sociopolitical critique in the words I contemplated in that thin paperback: 

“Where the mind is without fear and the head is held high; 

 Where knowledge is free; 

Where the world has not been broken up into fragments 

 by narrow domestic walls; 

Where words come out from the depth of truth; 

Where tireless striving stretches its arms towards perfection; 

Where the clear stream of reason has not lost its way 

 into the dreary desert sand of dead habit; 

Where the mind is led forward by thee into 

 ever-widening thought and action— 

Into that heaven of freedom, my Father, 

let my country awake.” (ibid) 

The Possibility of Pluralism 

     Tagore also expressed this freedom in a letter to a friend: “Whatever we understand and enjoy in human products instantly becomes ours, wherever they might have their origin… Let me feel with unalloyed gladness that all the great glories of [humanity] are mine.” (https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/economic-sciences/1998/sen/biographical/ ) This openness is a fitting aspiration for the pluralism that has often characterized Hinduism, the Sanatana Dharma (“eternal law/way”), over its long history. It contains six major schools of thought, a huge and diverse collection of sacred writings, and a long history of contributions to society, from early metallurgical practices (c. 3000 BCE) to the concept of zero (200 CE). (https://www.hinduamerican.org/hinduism-basics ) There is also a wide diversity of belief and practice, from local traditions to Vedic Hinduism to Yogic Hinduism to devotional expressions and more. Hinduism itself is an umbrella term that brings together all these traditions, without a single founder or unifying rite. 

     This pluralism is generally reflected in Indian society as a whole. The Pew Research Center completed a large survey of almost 30,000 adult participants in India from 2019 to 2020, and it uncovered some very positive patterns. Consistently, most members of all major religions reported that they felt they were “very free to practice their religion”. Further, they believed that “Respecting all religions is very important to” both their Indian and religious identities. As the Pew Center wrote, “Indians see religious tolerance as a central part of who they are as a nation. … Indians are united in the view that respecting other religions is a very important part of what it means to be a member of their own religious community.” (https://www.pewforum.org/2021/06/29/religion-in-india-tolerance-and-segregation/ ) 

     From an outsider’s perspective, this appears to be a very strong foundation to build upon. But the research also pointed to some gaps between these aspirations and reality. Despite the high value on religious tolerance, building relationships with people across religious and ethnic differences is more of a challenge. A practical marker of this can be seen in the fact that most respondents, especially Hindus and Muslims, want to prevent interreligious marriages. The issue persists when people were asked if they would be willing to have members of a different religion live in their neighborhood or village. Though having an integrated neighborhood was more generally tolerated than having interreligious marriages, the numbers are still very high: 

 “For example, many Hindus (45%) say they are fine with having neighbors of all other religions – be they Muslim, Christian, Sikh, Buddhist or Jain – but an identical share (45%) say they would not be willing to accept followers of at least one of these groups, including more than one-in-three Hindus (36%) who do not want a Muslim as a neighbor.” (ibid) 

     This discriminating attitude was found across religions, too, and raises questions about what it means to live together on this shared earth. It is a powerful reminder that a common human concern is maintaining an unique cultural identity. Minority populations especially may simultaneously promote both religious tolerance and religious segregation as a way to preserve their culture, traditions, and institutions. In the Pew Center’s analogy, “While people in some countries may aspire to create a ‘melting pot’ of different religious identities, many Indians seem to prefer a country more like a patchwork fabric, with clear lines between groups.”  (ibid) 

The Dangers of Nationalism 

     We can understand, and even be sympathetic to this reality, while also aware of the dangers. To take one example, it’s no surprise to note that nationalism is again on the rise in many places around the world, often with violent and destructive results. There are several varieties and fusions of nationalism, such as religious nationalism. I began paying more close attention to religious nationalism within conservative Christianity, for instance, back in 2006 or so. I was the pastor of a small, rural church in Missouri and was teaching a class on the importance of religious freedom in the Baptist tradition. Historically, this was something that Baptists were proud to claim as their own, so I remember feeling shocked when one of the prominent members took exception to it. “If it were up to me,” she said deliberately, “I’d outlaw every religion except Christianity.” I didn’t know what to say, and so I looked around the room for help – and there was no help. A shift was clearly underway. 

   Over the last 15 years, we’ve witnessed the grotesque flowering of these ideas into a Christian nationalism now endemic to large parts of the United States. In a report for NPR by John Burnett, Jim Willis described leaving California for Tennessee and to a congregation called the Patriot Church. "This is a spiritual battle. It's good versus evil," he said. "And, unfortunately, evil has taken charge." Burnett describes a “movement of ultra-conservative, politicized churches” that provide “a godly underpinning for right-wing activism in venues like school-board elections, anti-vaccine protests, and the Jan. 6 attack on the capitol.” (https://www.npr.org/2022/01/14/1073215412/christian-nationalism-donald-trump ) 

     As you’ve probably experienced, the fusion of religious and political identities is a powerful combination. Similar dynamics have been at work in India, with its own expressions of Hindu nationalism. Parth M.N. and David Pierson, reporting in the Los Angeles Times, recently told the story of Nasir Ali. Ali was guilty of selling Thakur Footwear, which is “the largest wholesaler and leading manufacturer” of shoes for women and children. Unfortunately for Ali, Thakur is also a significant name in India’s caste-based social structure, belonging to the warrior caste and ranking just below the Brahmins. Hindu nationalists surrounded Ali and shouted, “How can you sell shoes with Thakur written on them when you are a Muslim?” They called the police, who arrested Ali “for provoking unrest.” He spent two days in jail, where he was beaten and harassed. “I was targeted because of my religion,” he said. “I live in fear that anyone can beat me up and there’s nothing I can do. It makes you feel helpless.” Ali had to shut down his shoe business and go back to his previous job of selling vegetables. But that, too, carries risks, because of rumors that Muslims were “spreading the coronavirus. One 18-year-old vegetable seller was even “beaten to death by three police officers for violating COVID-19 restrictions.” (https://www.latimes.com/world-nation/story/2022-02-16/india-religious-persecution ) 

     The history behind today’s expressions of Hindu nationalism are complicated, with the most recent roots in the Partition of Pakistan. India’s prime minister, Narendra Modi, leads the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), which has successfully campaigned on – and encouraged – anti-Muslim sentiments as a way “to galvanize support from Hindus”. Parth and Pierson went on to detail how political goals, such as rewriting India’s constitution and declaring a Hindu nation-state, have paralleled “mob rule” in communities. In one southwestern state, nationalists harassed Muslim children wearing head scarves to the point that the authorities shut down schools and colleges for a time. Mobs have also: 

 “burned effigies of Santa Claus and crashed Christian services, and nationalists have called for the massacre of Sikhs because of their prevalence in farm protests last year that forced Modi to scrap one of his signature policy initiatives, agricultural reform. / In December, a mob of Hindu nationalists stormed a Catholic school to prevent what they thought was a religious conversion ceremony in the central state of Madhya Pradesh.” (ibid) 

     Meanwhile, at least one far-right leader, Swami Prabodhanand Giri encouraged “every Hindu” to arm themselves and prepare for genocide. “Either you prepare to die now, or get ready to kill, there’s no other way,” he said. “This is why, like in Myanmar, the police here, the politicians here, the army and every Hindu must pick up weapons because we have to conduct this cleanse.” (ibid) On another occasion, he said: 

“We will stand up against every jihadi in India and clean the country of their presence. … If you keep weapons to fight irreligion as Ram did in Mahabharat, you will be blessed by Lord Ram and Krishna. Weapons are essential, to fight with Jihadis and there is no other way … Will a cat not attack and eat a pigeon if it closes its eyes? In such a situation (threat to life) why shouldn’t we first attack the cat and gauge its eye before it attacks us?” (https://www.siasat.com/after-haridwar-event-prabodhanand-giri-again-makes-provocative-remarks-against-muslims-2254487/ ) 

Seeing the Divine 

     This is all in stark contrast to the beautiful words I read as a teen, written by a man devoted to freedom and at home in a diverse world. Amartya Sen, an economist and philosopher whose work on capabilities has been a key influence in my life, observed that: 

 “Rabindranath would be shocked by the growth of cultural separatism in India, as elsewhere. The ‘openness’ that he valued so much is certainly under great strain right now – in many countries. Religious fundamentalism still has a relatively small following in India; but various factions seem to be doing their best to increase their numbers. Certainly religious sectarianism has had much success in some parts of India (particularly in the west and the north). Tagore would see the expansion of religious sectarianism as being closely associated with an artificially separatist view of culture.” (https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/literature/1913/tagore/article/ )

 

    Thankfully, there are also movements resisting religious nationalism. One example of how Hindus are organizing to transform the situation is Hindus for Human Rights. Their mission explicitly names several values important to their faith, such as peace, justice, and truth, supporting their goal to “advocate for pluralism” and civil and human rights. This includes resisting “all forms of bigotry and oppression,” such as caste, Hindutva (Hindu supremacy/nationalism), and racism. Their description of “inclusive Hinduism” affirms: 

 “We celebrate the diversity of Hindu traditions, and we believe that we must hold our traditions accountable to their highest teachings. We are committed to the annihilation of caste, and the right to equality for … all communities that have been marginalized by our traditions.” (https://www.hindusforhumanrights.org/en/our-vision ) 

     I found my way to Hindus for Human Rights through an article by one of its founders, Sunita Viswanath, in Foreign Policy. She wrote: 

 “The BJP government’s platform, since its election in 2014, has been based on the false promise that Hindu nationalism is the path to ‘acche din’ (good days). The ongoing COVID-19 crisis reveals a truth that many of us have known all along: You cannot build a thriving society on a foundation of hate. / Hindus are taught to see the divine in everyone they encounter. This radically inclusive philosophy is diametrically opposed to Hindutva. By allowing Hindutva ideology to become so entrenched in our communities, in religious and social spaces as well as in politics, we have suffered a loss even deeper than the material losses: We have betrayed our faith itself.” (https://web.archive.org/web/20210526140930/https://foreignpolicy.com/2021/05/26/modi-hindu-nationalism-hindutva-hurts-hindus-too/ ) 

     Hearing these voices gives me hope. Beyond the ‘good days’ of the BJP and the MAGA hats of the GOP, we have cultural and religious resources to say no to what harms and yes to what heals. To return to the words of the poet: 

 “Where the mind is without fear and the head is held high; 

 Where knowledge is free; 

 Where the world has not been broken up into fragments 

 by narrow domestic walls; … 

 Where the clear stream of reason has not lost its way

 into the dreary desert sand of dead habit; … 

 Into that heaven of freedom, … let [us all] awake.” (op cit)

Demythologizing Buddhism

Demythologizing Religion: Buddhism & Nonattachment to Views 

David Ketchum 

March 20, 2022 

Watch the video HERE

    As Roger has pointed out, one of the motivations for these lectures on demythologizing religion is to emphasize how that we must learn to live together in healthy, compassionate, wise, and joyful ways. As he put it, “you can be very accepting of what other people’s religious beliefs are as long as there is not a casualty count.” In particular, I am interested in how many (mis)use a faith tradition in order to protect abusive and oppressive systems of thinking and acting. As I’ve noted before, “If an institution can’t survive without tolerating or protecting abuse, then it should not survive.” 

    Buddhism has long enjoyed a reputation, at least in the West, for being one of the more flexible and tolerant religions. There are good reasons for that, and my focus today is on one of those strengths. But it is also important to point out that Buddhism has been subject to the same limitations as any other cultural or religious system, including fundamentalist violence. Buddhist societies have struggled with war, economic injustice, patriarchal and gender violence, racism, and genocide. 

     For those wanting to go more deeply into this topic, Michael Jerryson, who wrote If You Meet the Buddha on the Road: Buddhism, Politics, and Violence, made important and crucial contribution to the study of violence and Buddhism. It was Jerryson’s work, for example, that introduced me to one historical extreme, a story from sixth-century China, when the:  

“Buddhist monk Faqing led a revolt and declared the arrival of a new Buddha. He marshalled 50,000 men to fight, promising them that, with each kill, they would reach a higher stage in the bodhisattva path.”  (https://aeon.co/essays/buddhism-can-be-as-violent-as-any-other-religion ) 

    We want to be honest about this history, and about the current violence that has filled the news over the last several years. From Sri Lanka to Myanmar to Thailand and beyond, we’ve witnessed that Buddhists are not immune to the rise of nationalism or the horrors of committing religious and ethnic violence. 

    As Phil Robertson, deputy Asia director at Human Rights Watch, has reminded us: "The problem is far too many Westerners fail to understand that Buddhism, like any other religion, can be misused for political purposes.” (https://www.abc.net.au/news/2018-10-21/buddhist-extremism-meet-the-religions-violent-followers/10360288 )  It’s an important reminder. One of the challenges all cultural traditions have to navigate is not only creating healthy patterns of relating to ourselves, others, and the earth, but also updating and sustaining them. Even with our best intentions, it is not inevitable or automatic. 

A Point of Contrast

    Today, I’d like to focus on one of those ways that religious discourse and thinking is so often misused, using my own experience growing up in a conservative Christian tradition as a point of contrast. Like many of you, I grew up in a tradition that viewed mental assent as the pinnacle of faith. We were taught that: 1) we already knew what to believe, 2) our beliefs represented changeless and eternal truths, and 3) our obligation was to accept those beliefs as 100% true. Though I’m certain my teachers would disagree, this resulted in a situation where coercion was the heart of my experience. Everything was already decided and our only responsibility was to believe what we were told. Any attempts to change those beliefs were experienced as threats: our faith was under attack. “Keeping the faith” meant doing our best to believe in certain doctrines, no matter what evidence might exist. And we were encouraged to base our entire identity on our commitment to believing and defending core doctrines, the popularly called “fundamentals.” We were taught that, if we allowed any of those fundamentals to be understood in a different way, let alone doubted, our entire faith system would crumble to dust. There was a lot of pressure involved, as you might guess.     

    This is pointed out as an observation. Although some religious systems seem to be particularly vulnerable, all human beings have this capacity, whatever their culture or religion. We can become so attached to our views that we willingly harm ourselves or others to defend them. This may be to protect our privileges, power, and conveniences. It may be to protect our self-view, to avoid facing our own complicity in injustice. It may be to avoid social rejection, preventing our relationships, employment, and social supports from being snatched away. It may even be to insulate us from information that would be overwhelming or that would leave us feeling helpless or afraid. This capacity is a survival mechanism, because natural selection is more interested in whether you survive than whether you are right. 

When a society or community is healthy, many of these assumptions work well, or well enough. But human society has been sick, with unhealthy patterns stuck on repeat. Gratefully, we are increasingly understanding why this is so and how these processes work in both our minds and our communities. There is an urgency to this healing work, however. The frighteningly rapid expansion of conspiracy theories has exposed, for example, the lie that we are somehow immune to being manipulated. All of this can be painful and difficult to tackle and digest, and that is why we can be grateful for critical thinking, scientific disciplines, and reflective practices that can help correct the mistaken assumptions and behaviors that bring about oppression and injustice. All cultural and religious traditions need to continually be a part of this transformation, including Buddhism. 

Right View & Training the Mind

    I began studying Buddhism academically in the late 1990s, but didn’t begin practicing with the Buddha’s teachings until 2005. What I found immediately empowering was that, in contrast to my childhood religious experience, the Buddhism I encountered did not emphasize mental assent. While the goal of Buddhist practice, Enlightenment or Awakening, does connect with what is called Right View as part of the Eightfold Path, Right View is not a mere list of doctrines. Instead, it emerges out of the cultivation of insight and wisdom. Mere belief in a set of doctrines will not finally lead you to an end of suffering, and you cannot coerce yourself into believing something that will suddenly and magically make everything okay. Instead, through developing insight into how suffering arises, when it arises, what fuels it, and when it goes away, our understanding is deepened and wisdom has a chance to grow. As we develop wisdom and compassion, we are able to relate more skillfully to every aspect of lives, including our suffering. It doesn’t happen by forcing ourselves to believe a certain way. It happens because we allow our beliefs - our views - to be shaped by putting the teachings into practice, observing their impacts, and paying attention to insights that come our way. This is the practice of Right View. 

    As an example of how Buddhists have tried to embody this approach in today’s complicated world, we can turn to The Fourteen Mindfulness Trainings developed by Thich Nhat Hanh in Saigon in 1966. This context is important, as it was part of the ongoing efforts of socially engaged Buddhists in Vietnam to work for justice and peace amid the buildup to and then during the horrors of war. They’ve remained a core part of the Order of Interbeing and the Plum Village tradition since then. The first three trainings are especially relevant to this reflection on Right View: 

 “The First Mindfulness Training: Openness

Aware of the suffering created by fanaticism and intolerance, we are determined not to be idolatrous about or bound to any doctrine, theory, or ideology, even Buddhist ones. We are committed to seeing the Buddhist teachings as a guiding means that help us learn to look deeply and develop understanding and compassion. They are not doctrines to fight, kill, or die for. We understand that fanaticism in its many forms is the result of perceiving things in a dualistic or discriminative manner. We will train ourselves to look at everything with openness and the insight of interbeing in order to transform dogmatism and violence in ourselves and the world.” (https://plumvillage.org/mindfulness-practice/the-14-mindfulness-trainings/  ) 

Especially notice that this commitment is grounded in observation and social engagement. Our starting points are a commitment to well-being and an awareness of suffering (rather than mental assent to any doctrine) and to “develop understanding and compassion.” This allows us to relate to our beliefs, not as ends, but as “guiding means” that “train ourselves”. And so we aspire to transform “dogmatism and violence.” 

 “The Second Mindfulness Training: Non-Attachment to Views

Aware of the suffering created by attachment to views and wrong perceptions, we are determined to avoid being narrow-minded and bound to present views. We are committed to learning and practicing non-attachment to views and being open to others’ experiences and insights in order to benefit from the collective wisdom. We are aware that the knowledge we presently possess is not changeless, absolute truth. Insight is revealed through the practice of compassionate listening, deep looking, and letting go of notions rather than through the accumulation of intellectual knowledge. Truth is found in life, and we will observe life within and around us in every moment, ready to learn throughout our lives.” (https://plumvillage.org/mindfulness-practice/the-14-mindfulness-trainings/  ) 

Cultivating an awareness “that the knowledge we presently possess is not changeless, absolute truth” is a classic case of easier said than done. It’s unsettling to acknowledge that, not only can I be wrong, I have been wrong and will be wrong again – and so will you. Our cognitive biases are real, as is the human tendency to attach to our views. Beyond this, we also understand that our knowledge of the world, from social to scientific, is limited. This doesn’t mean that all our understandings are up for grabs, and we should especially have confidence in the knowledge we gain that is based on the hard work of study and scientific research, our own or the peer-reviewed research of others. But even the knowledge that we have now that is correct may be – may even probably be – incomplete. When you compare, for example, what we know now to what we knew 100 years ago, fifty years ago, or even 20 years ago, it becomes quite evident that we need to cultivate a willingness to change our minds when we encounter new data. The Mindfulness Training points out that this is a practice of being open to and encouraging insight, rather than merely accumulating knowledge. Insight applies that knowledge in a way that leads to change.

  “The Third Mindfulness Training: Freedom of Thought

Aware of the suffering brought about when we impose our views on others, we are determined not to force others, even our children, by any means whatsoever — such as authority, threat, money, propaganda, or indoctrination — to adopt our views. We are committed to respecting the right of others to be different, to choose what to believe and how to decide. We will, however, learn to help others let go of and transform fanaticism and narrowness through loving speech and compassionate dialogue.” (https://plumvillage.org/mindfulness-practice/the-14-mindfulness-trainings/  )

This Training is perhaps most directly related to my experience of growing up in a tradition that focused on mental assent and believing “the right things.” Coercion has no place in the practice, avoiding both forcing others “to adopt our views” or passively ignoring “fanaticism and narrowness.” This is also why the Mindfulness Trainings are presented as practices, not rules that we rigidly cling to. We aspire to these ideals and then continually figure out how to live up to them in our selves, communities, and societies. The practice itself is a way of learning, of training the mind. 

The Sermon to the Kalamas

Such an approach did not come from nowhere, and the Buddha Gotama’s sermon to the Kalama community is probably the best known example of this. Part of his advice was that:

“It is proper for you, Kalamas, to doubt, to be uncertain; uncertainty has arisen in you about what is doubtful. Come, Kalamas. Do not go upon what has been acquired by repeated hearing; nor upon tradition; nor upon rumor; nor upon what is in a scripture; nor upon surmise; nor upon an axiom; nor upon specious reasoning; nor upon a bias towards a notion that has been pondered over; nor upon another's seeming ability; nor upon the consideration, 'The monk is our teacher.' Kalamas, when you yourselves know: 'These things are bad; these things are blamable; these things are censured by the wise; undertaken and observed, these things lead to harm and ill,' abandon them. … Kalamas, when you yourselves know: 'These things are good; these things are not blamable; these things are praised by the wise; undertaken and observed, these things lead to benefit and happiness,' enter on and abide in them.”   ("Kalama Sutta: The Buddha's Charter of Free Inquiry", translated from the Pali by Soma Thera. Access to Insight (BCBS Edition), 30 November 2013,     http://www.accesstoinsight.org/lib/authors/soma/wheel008.html .) 

It’s beautiful and refreshing, especially from a religious teacher, isn’t it? “It is proper for you, Kalamas, to doubt, to be uncertain”. The Buddha didn’t appeal to his own spiritual authority, but to the ability of the listeners to think it through. A misunderstanding of this is that every view is somehow equally legitimate, or that we need to give all opinions equal consideration. Working with doubt as a spiritual practice is not the practice of paranoia, a flight into conspiracy theory. And key to this is the orientation around wellbeing. The Buddha instructed that we will know if something is worth believing if it leads to health in our selves and society: “these things lead to benefit and happiness.” Those are the things worth doing, worth our effort to “abide in them.” Doubt is not the goal; wellbeing is. It is a standard that can help us get free of violence and oppression and gives us a clear goal, even when the road to get there is complicated. 

    Thanissaro Bhikkhu, a Buddhist monk, scholar, and translator in the Thai Forest tradition of Theravadin Buddhism, has pointed this out:

  “Although this discourse is often cited as the Buddha's carte blanche for following one's own sense of right and wrong, it actually says something much more rigorous than that. Traditions are not to be followed simply because they are traditions. Reports (such as historical accounts or news) are not to be followed simply because the source seems reliable. One's own preferences are not to be followed simply because they seem logical or resonate with one's feelings. Instead, any view or belief must be tested by the results it yields when put into practice; and — to guard against the possibility of any bias or limitations in one's understanding of those results — they must further be checked against the experience of people who are wise. The ability to question and test one's beliefs in an appropriate way is called appropriate attention. The ability to recognize and choose wise people as mentors is called having admirable friends.” ("Kalama Sutta: To the Kalamas" (AN 3.65), translated from the Pali by Thanissaro Bhikkhu. Access to Insight (BCBS Edition), 30 November 2013, http://www.accesstoinsight.org/tipitaka/an/an03/an03.065.than.html .)

This community aspect also provides the context for the story. If you read the entire passage, the Kalamas are asking the Buddha how they can possibly know what to believe when so many contradicting views are being authoritatively taught to them. Teachers were all coming to the Kalamas and demanding that their beliefs be accepted as the best and true ones. And all of them were disparaging the beliefs of the others. It sounds a bit like the comment section on your favorite social media site: “They expound & glorify their own doctrines, but as for the doctrines of others, they deprecate them, revile them, show contempt for them, & disparage them. They leave us absolutely uncertain & in doubt”. Amid this confusion, the Buddha doesn’t say, “Just believe what I have told you and everything will be okay.” He didn’t demand mental assent to his favorite doctrines. He didn’t threaten the community with exile or punishment, here or in a future life. Instead, he affirmed their experience: “Of course you are uncertain, Kalamas. Of course you are in doubt. When there are reasons for doubt, uncertainty is born.” (ibid) 

These are valuable insights, especially in a time of conspiracy theories, disinformation, and violence born of attachment to views. And it is a practice. The history of Buddhism itself reveals the ongoing failure to take the Buddha’s advice to the Kalamas. But it also provides an opportunity and a set of practices for self-correction, which is profoundly important in creating and sustaining healthy communities. 

When we attach to views, when we hitch our well-being to the inviolability of our opinions, we experience doubt and uncertainty as threats to our identity. We become defensive and cannot risk uncertainty. But this is impossible! The world is constantly changing; we are constantly changing. Every conditioned phenomenon – every thing - is in process; everything is a process. Our suffering is a process. Injustice and oppression are processes. Our attachment to views makes reflection and transformation difficult, skills which are increasingly important as change today occurs at such a fast and unrelenting pace. In this ongoing practice of transforming our cultural and religious traditions, these kinds of practices offer an important approach to the process. And it has personally offered me an understanding of “keeping the faith” that helps and heals, rather than harms: “We are committed to seeing the Buddhist teachings as a guiding means that help us learn to look deeply and develop understanding and compassion. They are not doctrines to fight, kill, or die for.” 

Demythologizing Judaism

Demythologizing Judaism   March 13, 2022    Dr. Roger Ray, co-pastor 

CLICK HERE TO SEE THE VIDEO

John 4: ¹⁹ The woman said to him, “Sir, I see that you are a prophet. ²⁰ Our ancestors worshiped on this mountain, but you^[c]say that the place where people must worship is in Jerusalem.” ²¹ Jesus said to her, “Woman, believe me, the hour is coming when you will worship the Father neither on this mountain nor in Jerusalem. ²² You worship what you do not know; we worship what we know, for salvation is from the Jews. ²³ But the hour is coming, and is now here, when the true worshipers will worship the Father in spirit and truth, for the Father seeks such as these to worship him.

 

 

I began this series of sermons that David and I are doing last week when I suggested that all modern religions are in need of being demythologized. We can find insights and wisdom and, perhaps more importantly, community, in all of the traditional religions of the world, but in this modern era, we have reason to demand critical thinking, historical honesty, and moral clarity. Which means that the myths and superstitions of the ancient world need to be set aside in order to allow the real value of each of these religions to emerge.

 

And I feel that I need to apologize a bit about using a passage from the Christian Gospel of John to introduce this lecture on demythologizing Judaism. John is the least historically reliable of the four canonical gospels and that is saying a lot. It is an early second century creation and its version of the story of Jesus is almost entirely a work of fiction and it is the most clearly Anti-Semitic of the gospels. But for our purposes today, it is a piece of fiction written in a time when there was still a living memory of the competition between the Jews in Jerusalem and the Samaritans, who thought of themselves as being Jews, whose temple was on Mt. Gerizim.

 

This is relevant to us only because current canon of the Hebrew Bible would have had us to believe that there was only one Temple and that Judaism revolved around only the temple on Mt. Zion in Jerusalem. The fact is that there were at least four and possibly more. Two were in Egypt, in Alexandria and one on Elephantine Island, and one, as mentioned, on Mt. Gerizim in Palestine. What Christians call “the Old Testament” is just the version of Semitic writings as they were edited by the priests and scribes within the Jerusalem sect, but there were other, and sometimes intensely competitive, sects. 

 

When I teach a college course on Western Religions, I tell my students that you really have to think about Judaism as having been at least two entirely different religions and more likely, it is best to think of it as having had four of five iterations. But for simplicity’s sake today, let’s think of it in two major divisions. 

 

The most ancient Israelite religion was focused on the ritual sacrifice of animals managed by a priesthood. It was not a monotheism. Ancient Semites accepted that there were many gods but that Yahweh was their god.  In the time of Moses and King David, Yahweh was a regional god of war who accompanied Judah in battle  and Yahweh was more likely to be helpful on the battlefield if they didn’t sacrifice to rival gods. Yahweh was described as being “jealous” that way and sometimes maybe even petty and vengeful. At the very least, you would have to say that Yahweh was moody. 

 

In the sixth century before the common era, Judah was conquered by the expanding empire of Babylon and most of the literate people and skilled craftsmen of Judah were taken into captivity. 

Some of the Psalms reflect the anxiety of those Jews about whether or not it made any sense to pray to Yahweh when they were so far away from Zion. They believed that god was enthroned in the clouds above Jerusalem and without of the trumpets and rams’ horns being blown in the temple, they could hardly get his attention even there, but from some 1700 miles away, near what is modern day Baghdad in Iraq, they despaired that their god could possibly hear them. It was in the slave ghetto of Babylon that Judaism began to change from being a temple based religion managed by priests who ritually sacrificed animals into being religion based on religious texts that were read and interpreted by literate community leaders who were called “teachers,” which, in Hebrew, is rabbi. 

 

It was in Babylon that Jews were influenced by the Persian religion, Zoroastrianism, which introduced them to concepts of monotheism as well as beliefs in such things as angels and demons as well as heaven and hell. The religion that emerged, nearly a century later, didn’t look much like the religion that they had carried with them into captivity. 

 

After the return of the Jews to Judah, a temple was rebuilt but the temple cult was, from that time on, in competition with the Jews who worshipped in synagogues that were focused, not on sacrifices but rather on the study of the religious texts, most of which were compiled from oral traditions in Babylon. This competition between the temple based priesthood and the form of Judaism practiced in synagogues continued right into the time of Jesus. 

 

In fact, for those of us who grew up going to Christian Sunday Schools, we were led to believe that Jesus, his disciples, and most early Christians were Jews and everyone who wasn’t a Jew was a gentile. That is our modern use of those words but in the time of Jesus, when the priests spoke of Jews, they meant people who lived in Jerusalem who continued in the traditions of the animal sacrifice, priestly cult. They would have thought of Jesus and his disciples from the Galilee as being gentiles as much as the pagans in Rome were gentiles. 

 

When the temple in Jerusalem was destroyed in the late first century of the common era, Judaism became a religion exclusively based on a book and centered in synagogue worship. As Rome embarked on a first century genocide of the Jews, Judeans were scattered around the world, forgetting their tribal identifications and giving up any hope of ever having a temple in Jerusalem again until the mid 20^th century, in response to the Nazi Holocaust, the nation of Israel was re-established in 1948. 

In the nineteenth and twenty centuries, Judaism evolved into four distinct groups: reformed, orthodox, conservative, and the lesser known reconstructionist movements. 

The majority of Jews you will encounter are reformed but the ones we hear the most about in the news are the Orthodox sects who have a lot of influence in the government policies of Israel. 

 

The kind of curious thing about modern Judaism is that we know much about them at all.

Looking that the global population, nearly a third of the people in the world identify as being Christian. About a fourth of the world identifies as being Muslim. 15 or 16% choose to either remain unaffiliated or identify as being Hindu . . . which can mean a lot of different things. Only 7% of the world describes themselves as being Buddhist and less than 1/4^th of 1% identify as being Jewish . . . 0.2% of the world. 

How do they still cast such a long shadow on the consciousness of the world?

 

How do 15 million people stand out so much in a world with more than 7.5 billion people in it? 

Racial and cultural stereotypes are always inherently dangerous and probably racist. Trust me, as the adoptive father of a very bright young Korean daughter, all Asians are not good at math and science. My daughter majored in business because she thought it would be easy and their study abroad program featured a semester in Italy.  You can imagine how proud I was of that choice!

But for 0.2% of the population, in modern times, nearly a fourth of all Nobel prizes have gone to Jews. Half of the Oscars for music have gone to Jews and you don’t even want to think about modern philosophy or psychiatry without Jewish thinkers and scholars. And when it comes to comedy, fuhgeddaboudit.

From Albert Einstein and Sigmund Freud to Jon Stewart and Groucho Marx, the Jewish people have put their stamp on what it means to live in the modern era.

And right now, you can’t mention Jews who have made significant contributions to the modern would without mentioning the former comedian and actor, turned president of Ukraine, Vladimir Zelenskyy. I don’t want to say too much about this amazing national leader because I’m slightly jealous that my girlfriend and every other woman on earth has such a crush on him, and if he keeps up this courageous showdown with Vladimir Putin, I may have a man crush on him myself! May his tribe increase!

 

But so far as demythologizing and reformation in the 21^st century goes: it should go without saying that the fact that the Hebrew scriptures contain a claim that the god of the Hebrews somehow uniquely chose them is just a bit of religious propaganda. The Jews are no more chosen by God than are the Boston Red Socks. We have no special reason to believe that Moses existed in history and we have lots of reason to assume that most of the Exodus narrative is fictional, if not all of it. God didn’t write the Ten Commandments and the Torah is not really sacred writ, any more than any other ancient or modern religious writing. It is an older equivalent of the Book of Mormon with just about as many preposterous claims and fictional stories. 

 

Judaism is not, as I have tried to explain, a single, static religion but rather an ever evolving spiritual community with many ancient and current expressions. But it is a community that has valued identity, ethics, and intellect. Although their numbers are small globally, we can be grateful for their contributions to the arts and the sciences as well as to global politics.

 

For the past 80 years, this small population has suffered more than its share of discrimination and violence. Ironically, we also find the modern state of Israel, the geographic center of Jewish identity, to now be dishing out some of the same abusive injustice that they have been famous for suffering. I insist upon the obvious right to be critical of the state of Israel without being dismissed out of hand as being anti-Semitic. 

 

Among the Orthodox, Conservative, and Reformed movements, you would find rituals and language that sounds very much the same but it is fair to say that only the Orthodox would take supernatural theistic claims and the historical narratives of the Torah as being literally true. Sadly, the Orthodox swing a big bat in Israeli politics and their belief in being God’s chosen people and in a piece of real estate given to them by God creates a lot of the tension that exists between Islamic governments in the Middle East and Israel. There are offenses on both sides of this divide and the dynamic created when land was taken from Palestine in the 1940’s to create the state of Israel caused deep entrenchments on both sides.

 

I am deeply and profoundly sorry that in a fit of Biblical romanticism, the USA and the nations of Europe went along with the creation of modern Israel in the ancient land of the Hebrew Bible. The Holocaust was a European sin and though the Jews deserved a safe homeland, it should have been established in Europe. Making Palestine pay for the sins of Germany and Nazi sympathizers has set up a situation with almost no solution.

 

Seventy years into this geographical mistake, I honestly don’t have any idea how to unwind it. 

A two-state solution seems workable ideologically but, if past is prelude, any Muslim state adjoining Israel is likely to return to wanting to push the Jews into the sea. Dramatic reform in the religious thinking of both Jews and Muslims is needed but there is so much grievance on both sides of the conflict, it is difficult to see it happening. 

 

I am one of those people who fell in love with Israel the first time I visited it. I have wished that both Jews and Muslims could share political power and preserve the rich history and meaning of the place to Jews, Christians, and Muslims. I don’t know what kind of magic it would take but I do know this, there is not a military solution to this problem. That has been tried for four generations in modern times and all of those solutions have only made matters worse. 

 

Again, there are offenses on both sides of the equation, but I can say this about Israel, keeping Palestinians from being able to have decent employment, education, health care, and freedom to travel is only making it worse. I have loved Israel, but I won’t be going back under current circumstances. 

 

I realize that Orthodox Jews and conservative Muslims think that there are too many differences between them to ever be peacefully reconciled. I believe that the real problem is that they are too much alike. They both have projected onto the skies and image of a God who makes them entitled to land and power and they are both wrong. 

 

The Quran says that when a land has been under Muslim rule, it must be under Muslim rule forever. The Torah says that God gave Palestine to the Jews. Both are wrong. God is not a real estate broker. 

This is not going to make me popular among traditional Christians, Orthodox Jews, or conservative Muslims, but this is the ultimate failure of all monotheisms. If you are convinced that there is one god and that your religion is the one that represents that god, then all of the others have to be wrong. Polytheism may not be attractive to many people in the modern world, but it allows for cooperation and peace and that can’t be all bad.

 

Of course, I advocate for a post-theism. If you can give up your imaginary friend in the clouds and accept that whatever is of the divine cannot be known, is beyond knowing and description, then we can all get along by acknowledging the mystery of the universe without anyone having to be wrong.

 

Trust me, I see the paradox. I’m saying that monotheism is wrong because it rejects others, but I am rejecting monotheism. It is like when Scott Peck says that community is inclusive of everything except for exclusivity. The world can no longer afford to abide any religion that insists upon being right by making everyone else wrong. I continue to believe that all of the world’s great religions have insights to share about morality and ethics but only after you strip away the magical thinking and the ancient superstitions with all of the entitlement that seems to come with it.

 

Demythologizing Religion

Demythologizing Religion    March 6, 2020   Dr. Roger Ray

click here to see the video

About five years ago, college student and internet troll, Peter McIndoe, saw a protest going on and he decided to join it in the most disruptive way possible. He pulled a poster down off of a utility pole, turned it to the blank back side and wrote on it in big black letters the most off the wall thing that came to him in the moment . . . just three words . . . “Birds Aren’t Real.” He carried the sign around in the protest, to make fun of conspiracy theorists and radical lunatics but his participation was filmed, and he got onto the news and on the internet and a number of young people liked the idea and it went viral.

 

A couple of years later, McIndoe dropped out of college to run his absurd conspiracy theory full time, selling merchandise, and making media appearances, insisting that in the 1950’s, the government started to kill off all of the bird population and replaced them with spy drones that are constantly watching us and gathering our information. Some pigeons, he claims, have been upgraded so that they can get your Social Security number and your credit card information, just by looking at you.

 

It was an obvious ruse, or, I should say, it should be an obvious ruse, but so many people have taken up the cry that “birds aren’t real” that, last month, the US Consumer Product Safety Commission felt it was necessary for them to launch a campaign assuring the public that birds are real and that they are not, in fact, spy drones. Or, I suppose, at least most of them are not.

 

It seems that we have come to live in a rampantly anti-science, era in which conspiracy theories flourish amidst a population that seems to be willing to believe any nonsense that suits their personal preferences. None other than MSNBC’s Joy Reid took time in her evening program last month to assure viewers that the conservative conspiracy theory that was spreading on the internet, claiming that the Biden administration was spending hundreds of millions of dollars on free crack pipes that they were giving away, was, in fact, not true. . . as if anyone who would believe that Biden was giving away millions of crack pipes would be convinced by the black woman on TV telling them that it just isn’t so.

 

People believe what they want to believe, sometimes what they have an emotional or an ideological need to believe, but most often they will believe what it seems like other people believe. Most of the people who are a part of Peter McIndoe’s spoof conspiracy, claiming that Birds Aren’t Real, are in on the joke, but not everyone is. Some people are paranoid enough about government surveillance to jump on the band wagon and they are wearing the tee-shirts and carrying the signs in public because they actually believe that pigeons and crows are disguised drones taking their credit card numbers straight out of their wallets. 

 

As Mark Twain said, “A lie told and stuck to is as good as the truth.” If you can get enough people to repeat a lie often enough, it slips, almost unconsciously, into the belief system of the people. Republicans have been claiming that Joe Biden stole the 2020 election for so long that three-fourths of Republican voters actually believe it. There is no evidence of widespread voter fraud and most of the isolated incidents of voter fraud that have been found were Trump voters, casting votes for their deceased relatives, and yet, bankers, doctors, lawyers, will tell you that the Democrats pulled off an ingenious plan and secretly stole the election.

Which is amazing since anyone who looks around and considers the facts could realize that the Democratic Party couldn’t organize a picnic. Especially not here in Missouri and even more in our district…. Could Billy Long beat anyone for our congressional seat if the Democrats could run a campaign? He has won 6 times! There is no one here who would hire him mow your lawn, but he has represented us in Congress for 12  years. Thank God Congress members from Colorado and Georgia are slightly more embarrassing which is the only thing that keeps Billy Long out of the national media. Thank you, Marjorie Taylor Green, for talking about Nancy Pelosi’s gazpacho police!

 

But, seriously folks, we don’t have to talk about anti-vaxers or covid deniers to come up with examples for how gullible people can be. I have asked David to join me in a series of messages in which we will try to demythologize modern religious beliefs. For the next few weeks, we will talk about many of the world’s major religions, considering both their absurd devotion to outrageous and obviously not true beliefs, as well as their more applicable and useful iterations in the 21^st century.

 

But first let me talk about the concept as a whole. I don’t know if Rudolph Bultmann coined the phrase but he was the one who made the concept of demythologizing famous when he delivered a series of lectures at Vanderbilt Divinity School in 1940 which he later published under the title Demythologizing the New Testament. When I started seminary there nearly 40 years later, it was still required reading for every entering student. 

 

Not all, but certainly most new seminary students begin their training in a time of personal religious zeal and certainty, and almost all of us would have taken most of the religious myths we had heard growing up as being real, honest, historical accounts told by reliable, trustworthy writers, who were all eye witnesses of the events they described. 

 

Some of those accounts had been cleaned up a little bit . . . it wasn’t as it says in Genesis, that Adam and Eve actually talked to a real live talking snake, but rather it was Satan disguised as a snake! That makes a big difference, don’t you know?! 

 

A lot of students begin to drop out when they learned, if they were lucky enough to go to an honest grad school, that none of the Bible was written by eye witnesses and most of the stories were total fabrications, not based on history or real events at all, but they were useful myths, told to teach a moral lesson, more akin to Aesop’s fables than like an Ancient Near Eastern version of the New York Times. 

 

Clearly, God did not write the Hebrew Bible or the New Testament, or any of the writings sacred to Muslims, Hindus, or Buddhists. All of these were written by people, most of whom were sincere and who, I believe, had the best of intentions in a pre-modern world where being factual and literal were not highly prized. 

 

The ancient writers of all religious texts perpetuated the primitive tendency of early humans to personify nature. We experience the world through our emotions, acting and reacting to events with love, anger, indifference, greed, jealousy; and so ancients projected these human emotions onto the weather, the oceans, forests and rivers. 

 

We progressives may have mostly intellectually dismissed all personifications of nature, but I see it slipping into our language at times. And it can be seductive. If you have never watched the Conservation International series of ecology films

in which Julia Roberts gives voice to Mother Nature, Penelope Cruz is water, Harrison Ford speaks as the oceans, and Robert Redford speaks for the giant Redwoods, you really should take a few minutes on YouTube to watch them. There are several and many of them absolutely send chills up and down my spine. I’m a terribly over educated and painfully cynical old man, but I am not inured to the effectiveness of thinking of aspects of nature as being somehow human . . . it makes the earth more approachable, more loveable and, I’ll pretty much believe anything Julia Roberts tells me. . . and I don’t think that is just me.

 

It can actually be helpful in some ways, but it can also mire us in myth. I think that attempting to demythologize religion is a major part of what I have been doing for the past two generations but I am asking David to work with me on this short series because, organized religion, Buddhism, Hinduism, Judaism, Christianity, Islam, and even modern feminist theologies, can serve to perpetuate racial prejudice, homophobia, and misogyny as well as teaching people to believe in magic and superstition. 

 

In many ways, the anti-vax and covid denial we have witnessed over the past two years is a failure of our public school science classes but it is also a failure of organized religion teaching people to adamantly believe what is clearly not true. 

 

I cannot tell you how many families I had in counseling in the 1980’s when the AIDS scare had religious parents tragically disowning their gay sons, many of whom insisted that their son was actually demon possessed. Hard to believe that anyone who had the sense to learn how to read and write would still believe in demon possession in the late 20^th century, but such beliefs allow you to blame an invisible spirit for what you cannot accept in your own son. 

 

Regular listeners will have heard me say that you can be very accepting of what other people’s religious beliefs are as long as there is not a casualty count. Sadly, however, many people’s primitive religious beliefs lead to breaking up families, trap gay people in straight marriages, it can be traced to suicides, and self-medication with alcohol and harder drugs. 

 

I would not be talking about demythologizing world religions if they were all mere matters of opinion and preference. They are not. There are healthy ways to be spiritual and there are unhealthy ways of being religious and some of those are extremely unhealthy, encouraging domestic violence, substance abuse, and, over the centuries, literally millions of suicides. 

 

What we want from a religious life is a dedication to the truth, not a perpetuation of a bunch of ancient myths. It is ironic to me that so many traditional religious people never seem to question the fact that the Virgin Mary only seems to appear to Catholics, the Buddha only appears to Buddhists, and Jesus only appears to Christians. It is especially telling that no one has the slightest idea what Jesus, Buddha or Mary actually looked like, but they have visions anyway and they always seem to know who the characters in their visions are. 

 

People with sketchy relationships with reality tend to be quite narcissistic. They will assert that something is true because they experienced it. Their proof that Jesus is God or at least a heavenly son of God, is because they have seen and heard Jesus personally, usually when they were being given morphine following surgery but, still, they saw him. 

 

Beliefs in religion should be more like beliefs in a science lab. We only believe in things that can be repeated and tested. There have been about 1700 people, mostly in America, who claim to have been abducted by aliens, most of whom report being subjected to examinations of their private parts. . . we don’t really need Freud to sort through the repressed sexual issues behind that hallucination. But even with nearly 2000 people reporting being abducted, we still don’t find these personal accounts to be persuasive. And, thankfully, with the advent of cell phones with cameras in them, the incidents of alien abduction have nearly come to a complete halt. 

 

You may have had a profound and life changing experience and, most of the time, people report religious visions or sightings of ghosts or long lost relatives in times of great stress or grief, but if you can’t repeat the experience, if you can’t examine it or let others see it or test it, then what possible reason would anyone have to take that as evidence, any more than one of the hundreds of alien abduction accounts?

 

Most people in the modern world have given up on religion entirely, finding that, in balance, there is way too much harm done to justify being involved, in spite of the good things. If there is to be a future for organized religion, there is going to have to be a radical reformation to all of the world’s major faiths.

 

I grew up in a small town in southern Kentucky. My family was very involved in the local Christian Church. My first pastor was fired when I was only six or seven years old but he wasn’t fired for his public advocacy to integrating our segregated schools, or for campaigning against the death penalty, both of which he did very forcefully. He was fired for helping to organize a labor union in a sewing factory in town. My mother worked there, however, the owners were also elders in our church. It was a horrible and unjust situation but, my point is, in the late 50’s and early 60’s, even in a small town in southern Kentucky where the zip code was E-I-E-I-O, even there and then, there was a religious community working on social justice rather than teaching prejudice, sexual discrimination, and superstition. 

 

What I am proposing is that we become churches, synagogues, mosques, and temples that are more reflective of Martin Luther King, Jr. and Gandhi, than they are like televangelists and purveyors of hatred. That is my modest proposal and I hope that you either approve of what we are going to be teaching or that you will be able to open your mind enough to consider our discussions of the world’s largest religions.