How far can pluralism go?
Ryan responded to my response.
And so in the good spirit of blogs, I will respond again.
I guess I need to go back and read more of Ryan’s previous posts on pluralism because the following caught me off-guard:
religion stones women to death for adultery. Real religion demands
obsessive-compulsive obedience to a heinously invasive and controlling
body of behavioral codes. Real religion uses magical spells and sees
demons and ghosts around every corner, vengeful gods behind every
thundercloud. Real religion is about sorcery and curses and divination
and charismatically charged psychosomatic healing. By contrast, weak
religion seems ridiculously boring, like skim milk or fat-free chips.
It reminds me always of James Fowler’s Stages of Faith, which
made a point of saying the best kind of faith is one that makes no
judgments or demands, a rational, frozen Unitarianism.
“Real” seems to be synonymous with extreme. Unless your religion
and its concomitant beliefs require extremism, the term seems to imply
it’s not “real.” The terms “strong” or “weak” are better, in that
they denote a level of cliam that the religious system makes upon one’s
personhood, one’s individual nature. A “strong” religion seems to
be one that requires the most loss of self. Along with that loss
of self comes the loss of the ability to critique and consider.
“Strong” religion seems to have little capacity for
self-reflection. And, so far as I can see, it’s “weak”er religion
that might actually be the more dynamic force, because it has an
adaptability to human situations that’s necessary in all those human
institutions that survive a changing world. (Yeah, there’s a lot
to unpack there, but I’m taking a shortcut in the hopes of putting the
idea in “print” a bit faster.)
I don’t think “strong” religion will really work in a Western
context. The problem in the West, at least insofar as its
religious root (which is one of the West’s many cultural roots [and my
familiarity lies most in Western systems of thought, so I won’t attempt
to overreach my expertise here]) is concerned, stems from the fact that
the two major religious traditions both contain the seeds of Ryan’s
“weak religion.” Judaism and Christianity both contain
self-critique mechanisms within themselves. Yes, there can be
manifestations of these religions that demonstrate “strong” tendencies,
but I think that they are temporally bounded in a fairly major
way. “Traditional” forms of the religion have always existed, but
the approaches they have taken to survival differ. In
Christianity, the forces of traditionalism are always different, with
different rallying cries, and they always seem to get swept up in the
tides of history. Today’s “liberal” Christian practitioners are
very often tomorrow’s moderates and next week’s conservatives. In
Judaism, the approach that the very traditional have taken required the
ghetto, and those who have wished to remain the most traditionally
Orthodox have had to make some accommodation to the modern world.
(E.g., Joe Lieberman may be “modern” Orthodox, but the first of those
very terms indicates that accommodations and adaptations have occurred.
Institutional and individual adaptation are endemic to human social and
political life. It’d be surprising not to see them.
And, for the record, I’d hate to live in a “rational, frozen
Unitarianism.” Maybe that’s the “strong” part still making its
claim in and on me.
Right. Now, since Lost in Translation plays in 20 minutes, I need to go!
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