How We Mold Our Own And Each Others' Religions

From Tikkun:


How we mold our own and each others’ religionsby: Dave Belden on September 15th, 2010
6 Comments »Robert Wright has a piece in the NYT today that takes essentially the same line I was taking in my “How We Discuss Religion On Tikkun Daily” post  ****INCLUDED BELOW****. He says it in a slightly more cynical way, pointing out how we all have tunnel vision and only see, let alone emphasize, those parts of our holy texts and traditions that reinforce our own attitudes; whereas I was arguing that if we actively seek and share what will bring us inspiration and nourishment then, if we are trying to build a caring world, we make our own religions into their best versions of themselves. Maybe it’s the same thing. Wright writes:



All the Abrahamic scriptures have all kinds of meanings — good and bad — and the question is which meanings will be activated and which will be inert. It all depends on what attitude believers bring to the text. So whenever we do things that influence the attitudes of believers, we shape the living meaning of their scriptures. In this sense, it’s actually within the power of non-Muslim Americans to help determine the meaning of the Koran. If we want its meaning to be as benign as possible, I recommend that we not talk about burning it. And if we want imams to fill mosques with messages of brotherly love, I recommend that we not tell them where they can and can’t build their mosques.



Of course, the street runs both ways. Muslims can influence the attitudes of Christians and Jews and hence the meanings of their texts. The less threatening that Muslims seem, the more welcoming Christians and Jews will be, and the more benign Christianity and Judaism will be. (A good first step would be to bring more Americans into contact with some of the overwhelming majority of Muslims who are in fact not threatening.)

 
And, also from Tikkun:
 
How We Discuss Religion on Tikkun Dailyby: Dave Belden on September 11th, 2010
7 Comments »

"Miscommunication" by Peter Lewis (see http://www.tikkun.org/tikkundaily/art-gallery/peter-lewis/)

It’s quite an experience to read all the comments on Amanda Quraishi’s post “I Can’t Make It Any Clearer.” They provide more of a snapshot of the comments widely seen on the web than we often get at Tikkun Daily: some are characterized by one of the commenters as “vitriolic.”



If I try to practice the art of empathy for all the commenters — which is by no means the same as agreeing with them, but involves trying to imagine myself in their shoes — I can make guesses that may or may not hold some truth for the commenters involved.



I find it easy to empathize with Amanda Quraishi and other practicing Muslims when faced with Rob Fox’s comments about that he calls “the psychopathology of Islam,” because I was raised myself in a religious movement that was very heavily attacked, in the press and in books available in the library, in terms that dismissed the entire thing as, essentially, evil. I found these attacks extremely hurtful, because I knew that my family and the people in our movement were very decent people. As a child I couldn’t understand why others were so unable to recognize us as we were.



Later I came to understand that a major source of the attacks came from people on the Left who were afraid that the conflict resolution emphasis of our movement would weaken the efforts of the working class to ratchet up the conflict necessary to create the revolution; and other attacks came from people who, as it turned out, correctly identified the movement’s cultural ethos as homophobic. I also didn’t meet the wounded who had left our movement because of the cruelties or mistakes of its ethos or practitioners until later in my life. When I understood all this, it didn’t stop me loving my friends and family in the movement, but it made me sadder and wiser about even our most idealistic human efforts.

Religion can and on so many occasions has justified terrible cruelties, and a wide range of more humdrum cruelties, if one can make such a distinction. So I have acquired over the years a great deal of empathy for those who make “vitriolic” attacks on religion. I imagine that while their antipathy may partly lie in personal psychological events, just as people’s adherence to religions does, I also share their anger and horror at these more general cruelties. There is real concern for the wounded and oppressed in these attacks (even when they seem to condemn a whole slew of decent people in an indiscriminate and withering fire).



I don’t believe that we can argue ourselves through these kinds of differences. There is a rationalistic style of debate that tries, for example, to total up all the worst verses in the Qur’an against the worst in the Hebrew and Christian Bibles and declare a loser; or that tallies the worst historical acts of one religion’s followers against another’s, or of all religions vs. secular ideologies; or that weighs the worst alleged actions of one founder against another (Muhammad against Jesus, for example) — alleged, because we weren’t there and don’t know what happened behind closed curtains when Muhammad reportedly took his nine-year-old wife to bed, or whether Jesus really frightened his audience with talk of the everlasting fires of hell or if that was added later.



It’s useful for scholars to research and debate these things, and sometimes light is cast. But generally speaking, the light that is cast concerns the danger of privileging ends over means. The great religious teachers all taught, along with whatever else they may have said or done, that the means are the end. If you ride roughshod over people, paying little heed to the wounds you cause, even for the sake of “love,” truth, justice, or conversion to the true faith (atheism included) — let alone for the sake of greed, conquest and all the usual negatives — then you are in deep trouble.



So another way to debate religion is not to argue that this one is true and this one false, or more true or more false than that one or than none at all, but to ask each other what kind of inspiration and help we get from our religious or atheistic traditions in putting love, empathy and Hillel’s famous injunction (sometimes translated as “That which is hateful to you, do not do to your fellow”) into practice. Some elements of our traditions are particularly helpful and inspiring to us: let’s hear them. Some are confusing, or downright negative. If one of us tells of a painful element in the behavior of their co-religionists or in their sacred texts, let’s not answer by saying, “told you so, come over to my belief system,” but instead let’s be supportive, offer empathy, and if asked for experiences of our own that relate to living with paradox, or with nasty relatives, or with things about our tradition or our world that we just don’t understand or that we hate, offer them.



I don’t mean that we need to tiptoe around our differences with each other, in the way that interfaith dialogue too often does. We may have huge problems with each others’ actions and we often assume that those flow from each others’ religions. We need to bring these things into the open and talk about them with each other. But there’s a way of being open about our own hurts that doesn’t involve making judgments and condemnations of the other. Suppose that when I was a teenager and feeling hurt about all the attacks on our religious community someone had said to me that they felt for me, but they were gay and feeling extremely hurt that the entire mainstream culture was condemning them and that they were particularly afraid of religious groups like mine that condemned homosexuality, and indeed were afraid for their life. No one said that to me until I was a grad student and being taught to counsel people on the university suicide hotline, when a gay student explained the reasons gay students might call us (this was 1972 I think). When I told him that I thought gay sex was unnatural, he was very kind to me, delighted someone had said what he suspected many straight people thought but would not say, and his empathy for me along with his clarity about how hurtful my ideas were to him, helped me rethink. By then many things had happened to me and I could hear what he said; I don’t know how I would have responded as a teen. But I believe I would have been stunned and moved to question and think about my movement in a way that all the attacks in the press had not made me question and think. If we explain our problems with each others’ religions in terms of our own hurts, and have compassion for and are open to hearing the experiences of the other, we can get further than through the kind of accusatory arguing we see so often on the web comments. Empathy changes where vitriol antagonizes.



Each religion has a vast trove of texts, interpretations, metaphors, experiences, stories, history. The fact is, though Biblical literalists disagree, that we all choose what elements from these smorgasbords to put on our plates and which ones to leave untouched on the buffet. We may decide to follow an authority in our religion, a denomination, priest, imam, rabbi, whomever, and we may feel we are not making a choice but just following the true path. But those authorities have made their own choices, and even a passive choice to follow them is a choice. It is the people who live their religions who make these choices, and so the religions change in how they are lived as people choose. Any number of experiences affect people’s choices, especially all the wide range of influences that sociologists and psychologists study. This means that biblical or Qur’anic or Hindu texts and traditions have exactly the weight that current practitioners give them in their lived responses to the world, and so it is how the religions are lived that matter most. Whatever genocides God perpetrated in the bible, God also freed the slaves from Egypt. And so we reinterpret, and construct ideas such as Rabbi Lerner’s about the left and right hands of God, and about the voices of accumulated pain on the one hand and of healing and transformation on the other. Some of us find great comfort, depth, inspiration, and connection with community and ancestors, by maintaining our religious traditions while unconsciously or deliberately reinterpreting them. Others of us start afresh. Neither way is the only right way. Instead of judging each other, let us ask and hear why we are making the choices we are making.



We are family: whatever race or religion or politics we claim. So let us see that all the members of our family are heard.