Holte's corner

Combatting fanaticism

There are a lot of people who claim that they know better than anybody else what the Constitution says, much the same way people with similar attitudes claim to understand the bible and Christianity, or the Koran and Islam, or any other body of religious or human knowledge. My observation is that people who make such claims often haven't really read those documents in their complete context, or haven't bothered to understand that context. Instead they trust people who set themselves as "experts" and buy into various dogmas. The trusting of some purported "sages" over other sages on a particular subject, rather than leading to wisdom, often leads to literalism, dogmatism, fanaticism and conflictive behavior. The enemy of true religiousity (or good political philosophy), is literalism and fanaticism.

People who believe in a religious approach usually come at their religion from a faith perspective. Faith is the belief that a thing can be true despite the lack of immediate evidence. Faith is meant to guide us when life is too dark to see the path we need to be on. Faith, however, is used by religious authority and corrupt teachers to create an artificial barrier between the reality of the world around us and the reality of the mind. Fundamentalism, dogmatism, and fanaticism, all tend to substitute a childlike, literalist, and fantasy version of faith for the real thing.

The primary reasons why teachers get away with teaching such things, and believers continue to believe in such things, are the power of faith and the laziness of the people who come to believe in a thing. But there are logical reasons why people get mislead as well.

If a person hears something that sounds good but represents only one view, the logic of that view will sound unassailable. One of my favorite of Nichiren's writings was actually not written by Nichien at all, but by one of Nichiren's disciples. It is called "dialogue between a sage and a foolish man" and it is told as a series of dialogues between a "foolish" man and a series of "sages." Each sage criticises his rival and proposes a plausible sounding alternative. If the author had been telling a joke instead of putting forth his own views, he probably would have had the poor fool come back to where he started.

Religious dogmatism starts because people make choices between views not realizing that religion is highly figurative, and that to be religious demands that we get beyond a fantasy interpretation of such figurative language and learn from it. Actually the dialogue ends with promoting the Lotus Sutra, which teaches exactly this. Even so many who "believe" in the Lotus Sutra don't believe in it in such a way as to get beyond the second chapter. Even people who study the Lotus Sutra should master its context and study it in relationship to other teachings.

Which brings us to the next point, that of studying things in context. The Lotus Sutra was first taught in one context, first transmitted and developed as a set of oral teachings, then written down and "redacted" or edited, and finally transmitted to China and from there to other countries. Read in each context it was interpreted different. Translated into Chinese it was even "redacted" or edited, to fit the needs of a chinese audience. Something similar has happened to the Bible. Oral teachings are committed to words that are easy to remember. They are conveyed in the form of poems, stories, and parables, that are easy to remember.

Their historical value is sometimes remarkable, but usually they are more valuable and valued as fiction. For every Icelandic Saga that has been transmitted faithfully, there are many more stories that were first converted to mythological form before they were ever transmitted. Sages doing battle with hunger are depicted as fighting a dragon. Stories are told as allegories meant to convey a point about the teller more than about the subject. And these may be finalized into versions authored many years after the time of their purported authors, and written down many years after even those times.

This is true of Buddhist and Jewish teachings, including the Lotus Sutra and the Bible. This doesn't detract from their value or their truth. On the contrary, the stories contained were picked out because they contain universal and eternal truths. Just not literal ones. Even when a sage has some historical reality, his works are written down by disciples. The founder of Islam, Mohammed, recited his Koran. He doesn't seem to have written it down. The authors collected those poems and are rightfully proud of their efforts to create a work completely fidel to the poet/prophet. But even they have to concede that for all the beauty and wisdom of each of those poems they represent transmissions of a fallible man, and thus are "two flights" from God. According to legend they came from Gabriel. They are not meant to be taken completely literally, they are meant to be studied, even "struggled with." Literalists take "jihad" to mean war with everybody. The truly religious take "jihad" to mean that inward struggle.

Even Mohammed has to be taken in context. God may be perfect but no human being is perfect, and while every sage claims to be perfect, and may well be for his time and place, all of them must be understood in their time and their place. No one gets to put a "seal" on human understanding or transmissions from the eternal. It just doesn't work that way. Today is different from yesterday. Even if the text is the same the text will be read differently today. But of course that is not an orthodox view. I can only hope that what today seems heterodox will one day be seen as simply true.

This leads to the final source of religious confusion. Claims to Orthodoxy was created by secular authorities and enforced with beheadings, burnings, or lesser punishments, and has resulted in more than a thousand years of conflict as people still ended up fighting over what that means. Authoritarian claims of orthodoxy are the source of hell. When someone says that their opponents are on a 'path of hell' it usually means that they are headed that way themselves. Most human beings don't see all the sides of the "world elephant" and so are only exercising their arrogance when they claim to understand life. Religious dogmatism, conflict, and religion based violence, reflect irreligiousity and hypocrisy not a genuine spiritual path. Those who engage in it are on a path of selfishness and darkness, not a path to enlightenment or the "kingdom of heaven."

Faith is meant to guide us when the path is otherwise unknown. It is a powerful thing. Faith can build pyramids, or palaces, cities, or graveyards. It can produce prosperity or it can build extermination camps. Faith in lies can only produce failure and conflict. Faith that guides reality is wisdom. Faith that fights with and contradicts the possible is anti-faith. And faith that dwells in fantasy is childish. Eventually we have to put aside the "things of childhood" and stop playing with reality. Faith is serious. We can transform this world with it. But not if we believe in lies or fail to do the work of understanding our own faith in the context of reality, and applying the ideations of faith to mastering that reality.

Chris