Mindful Ink

First off… sorry things are a bit slow. I’ve been in the process of getting back into the swing of things here in the real world, and my energy afterwards is usually pretty limited. I’ve not vanished, just busy working at my internship, taking my senior capstone, cleaning up all the mess from being sick, and preparing for a TA position next semester. Given a month ago I was barely off the couch, I’m afraid I’m barely up to the task. :) But it’s getting better.

Secondly, I’ve gotten a lot of questions about what Religious Studies is, as people often think it is theology. Well…. it’s not theology, though I often study theology. Religious Studies isn’t quite comparative religion, either. Essentially, it is an interdisciplinary study of religion. For me it was a great fit because I am interested in many different subjects and interested enough in religion to go with it. I study sociology, history, philosophy, psychology, theology and politics. In particular, I generally focus on philosophy and psychology.

Third, people have emailed about some of my rather… unfavorable references to such popular writers such as Sam Harris and the other “New Atheists.” These guys are very popular with the internet crowd and so I’ve gotten some rather unfavorable feedback due to it. So, let me clarify this… I study these guys as a part of “what’s going on today in religion” NOT because they have anything worth saying in an academic sense, just that people are listening and that is worth looking at. The arguments themselves are pretty much not worth paying attention to, because they offer nothing that hasn’t been said before by others (and better).

Like there are good and bad religious writers (say “God in Search of Man” by Abraham Heschel or anything from the Left Behind series, respectively) there are good and bad atheistic writers. You want some good atheism read some Walter Kaufmann (one of my favorite books, actually - even though I agree with little of it) or Bertrand Russell, and leave Harris, Hitchens and Dawkins to their own subject matter (which isn’t religion, but rather Neuroscience, Journalism and Biology, respectively.)

I say this more as a scholar than anything else. I study religion, and am thus very critical of both religionists and their detractors. But just like a good scientist knows better than to pretend “Intelligent Design” is good science, an academic knows better than to give these guys much in the way of respect. It’s the atheistic version of the “Celestine Prophecy” and that’s about it.

Their central thesis, that religion is inherently bad, only works with the straw men they create. Religion is many things, but ultimately, it always comes down to being a reflection of the culture and time the practioner is in. And one need only look at the history of religion to find just how different one “religion” has actually been expressed over the eons. When religion is absent, something else that serves the same role steps in (one need only look at the USSR or China to see this. The party or the state usurps the role) as religion is a psycho-social construct from which we make sense of the world. Most often it may include some sort of transcendent reality, but it could also be political or psychological or even atheistic. Individuals may be able to be good secular humanists, but nothing in science or history would suggest that entire populations are capable of this. As such, religion is one of the greatest causes excuses of human evil in the world, but it also the greatest cause of good.

Herbert Youtz, a good 100 years ago or so, put it this way:

“The savage man has a savage God; the cruel man has a cruel God; the effeminate man has an effeminate God; while the good man lifts up holy hands to a God who rewards goodness.”
-Herbert Youtz The American Journal of Theology: Vol. 11, No. 3 (Jul., 1907), pp. 428-453

Net result? People suck. And thus so do the things they invest with meaning - whether that be politics or religion (both universal in man, and often the same thing) end up with both our compassion and our sadism, the call to be more than we are and the most base thrusts of our nature.

Ironically, the greatest mistake these “New Atheists” make is they declare, much like fundamentalists of all varieties, that religion is only one thing and anything else is a sham - and both prop up the most virulent and vile forms of religion to be that one thing. They would let Pat Robertson and Rabbi Ovadiah Yosef be the speakers for all religion and ignore the Desmond Tutus and Martin Luther Kings. They would ignore all the billions of people of faith who are interested and willing to work towards those words of Isaiah:

Learn to do what is right! Promote justice! Give the oppressed reason to celebrate! Take up the cause of the orphan! Defend the rights of the widow!

So, yes… I enjoy my study of religion. And I respect both those who believe and those who don’t. Living in the “Buckle of the Bible Belt” in the US and being all too aware what kind of ignorance and evil religion can foster, I am very suspicious and critical of religion - but I’m not, as an individual or a scholar, willing to throw the baby out with the bath water. But I don’t like stupid or cruel or greedy wherever I see it.

If you’ve any other questions, feel free to comment or email (unless you want to discuss Intelligent Design, I don’t want to spend any more time even thinking about that subject). I am keeping a “Academic Blog” that I drop stuff into from time to time - it doesn’t require as much work as this blog, so it is updated more often - feel free to look at it here: ReligiousStudy.Org.

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