Supporting Muslims in America

Hassan Shibly

We all know this recent Muslim travel ban was just a shot over the bow.  Trump promised much worse during the campaign, and apparently he intends to deliver.  There has even been talk that we might soon have something resembling a Muslim registry. Some say, if it comes to that, they will register as Muslims.  Though I am sympathetic with this impulse, I will not be able to sign that with integrity.  I am not Muslim.  So, where can I sign now, to let my government know where I stand on religious freedom?

To find out, I visited the local mosque to attend a CAIR (Counsil on American-Islamic Relations) sponsored event: “Unapologetically Muslim and American”.   It featured Hassan Shibly,  Chief Executive Director of CAIR Florida, along with Karen Dabdoub, Executive Director of the Cincinnati Chapter.

The message of the presentation was clear.  Islamophobia is rampant throughout the country.  Incidents range from bullying in school through discrimination in the workplace or in housing all the way to hate crimes.   The presenters advised Muslims to stand up for their rights, to refuse to hide or simply hope that the situation would resolve itself, and to involve CAIR as soon as possible before things escalate.  CAIR is there to help.

They also noted the support Muslims have received from the majority community in America. They described incidents of Muslims praying in airports, for example, protected by Jews and Christians standing silently by to prevent any disruption of their prayers.  They mentioned Madeline Albright, who says she is ready to sign up if that Muslim registry comes to exist.  They also reminded us of the history of immigrant groups coming to America, groups which faced bigotry but eventually gained acceptance, at least from most Americans.

Shibly focused on relations with the government, especially US Customs and the FBI (“definitely not the Friendly Brotherhood of Islam”).

They spent quite a bit of time talking about what to expect on returning to this country from abroad.  Everyone is asked where they went and why they traveled.  Some will be pulled aside for secondary screening. Whereas this occurs for a typical American citizen about 1% percent of the time, Muslims were being pulled aside for this extra scrutiny about half the time, according to Shibly. Shibly’s advice was simple: as soon as they ask anything about your personal political or religious views, assert your rights.  As an American citizen, you have the right to ask for a lawyer to present during the questioning.  If you are a non-citizen,  with a green card for example, the prerogatives of the officials are less constrained, but you still have the right to call a lawyer.  Despite what the officials might say, you are likely to be detained just as long whether you call a lawyer or not, and without the protection of someone familiar with the intricacies of the law and normal procedures, you will be vulnerable.  Karen Dabdoub urged people to text the CAIR office when arriving, before getting off the plane, so that if CAIR does not hear from you within an hour or so, they can know to intervene with Customs to find out what has happened to you.  Thus, a Muslim entering the country can expect to be inconvenienced, but, with proper precautions and the help of CAIR, these inconveniences need not grow into anything more severe.  Nonetheless, foreign students are strongly encouraged to stay inside the country until their education is finished.

Shibly then went on to discuss the FBI, which he described as a government agency that is targeting Muslims, through entrapment and through intimidating people into becoming informants.

Karen Dabdoub

Karen Dabdoub followed up with a hypothetical example of an person who thinks they have nothing to hide talking with the FBI.  The agent might ask a question, and then much later in conversation, ask the same question differently.  If there were inconsistencies in your answers, then they could charge you with lying to the FBI, a crime that can be punished with up to five years of jail time.  (Of course, it is perfectly legal for them to lie to you.) Now, they have something to hold over you, to intimidate you into becoming an informant.

Their advice was the same: ask for a lawyer to be present during questioning.  Whatever the motives of the people in power, the American government is constrained by the Constitution.  Muslims, like all Americans, need to assert their rights under this Constitution in order to maintain them.  If the government tries to intrude into your personal life in any way, don’t try to handle it yourself; call CAIR.  CAIR has a lawyer who will contact the FBI on your behalf.  Shibly recalled one incident where he felt the FBI had a legitimate reason to question his client, but in the others, he told the agent that he would advise his client to not answer any of his questions.  Usually, the FBI would then leave the person alone after that.

All this sounded pretty paranoid to me.  After, the event, I did a little research to find out whether the paranoia was justified.  Interestingly, I found a 2005 article where a freshman at the University of Buffalo named Hassan Shibly was detained at the border, apparently for no reason other than he was Muslim.  I suspect that experience had a role in shaping his career.

In a more comprehensive view, Human Rights Watch clearly supports their complaints:

In a lengthy examination of U.S. terrorism prosecutions, Human Rights Watch, working with Columbia Law School’s Human Rights Institute, said the FBI and the Justice Department have created a climate of fear in some Muslim communities through the use of surveillance and informants.

I found several accounts of the “Newburgh Four”, a group caught up in an FBI sting operation that Shibly had mentioned.  It appears sordid.  Yes, these guys, all black, all Muslim, all poor, did get caught up in a terrorist plot, but the plot was entirely concocted by the paid FBI informant.  Even the judge who sentenced the defendants was upset by the FBI’s conduct.

 Only the government could have made a terrorist out of Mr Cromitie, a man whose buffoonery is positively Shakespearean in its scope… I believe beyond a shadow of a doubt that there would have been no crime here except the government instigated it, planned it and brought it to fruition.

Unfortunately, one of the men caught up in the scheme was mentally ill, possibly schizophrenic.   Shibly reported visiting him in jail, apparently out of his mind, on suicide watch in solitary confinement, cold, sad and hopeless.

It is hard to see how we are made any safer by such operations.

It doesn’t have to be like this. For example, in Dearborn, Michigan, which has a sizable Muslim population, the local chief of police runs an outreach and informant program that is considered a model by authorities on counterterrorism.  Informally, it appears to employ the same principles of “community policing” that have proven successful in Cincinnati.  You engage the community, treat people fairly, and they help you succeed because they want to live in safety.  It works.  The police chief in Dearborn can cite examples where Muslims have turned in fellow Muslims.

The FBI might pay lip service to building this kind of trust with the Muslim community, and in fact some within the bureau appear to be making a sincere attempt to do that.  However,  based on what I have learned, from Human Rights Watch, from CAIR, and from reliable news sources, that ship has sailed, and the Trump administration is unlikely to ask it to change course.

Following the presentation by Shibly and Dabdoub, there was a question and answer session.  I got to ask my question.  I referenced Madeline Albright’s willingness to sign up if there is ever a Muslim registry.  “But I will not be able to sign that with integrity.  So where can I sign up now to let my government know where I stand?”

My question got a round of spontaneous applause.  The answer was a little vague.  Go to the alerts on the CAIR website and write your Senators and Congressman about the issues that concern us all.

It looks like we will have lots of opportunities to do that.

Trump has expressed surprise that there was so much furor over his executive order.   After all, “We had 109 people out of hundreds of thousands of travelers and all we did was vet those people very, very carefully.”  Of course, he seems to enjoy the drama of it all.

We should not expect Trump’s assault on the Constitution to begin with a massive charge, but with a limited action such as this one.  Regardless of the number affected, we need to guard against anything that “target[s] individuals for discriminatory treatment based on their country of origin and/or religion, without lawful justification.” (item 64, page 13)  .   If we want to preserve our freedoms, we must preserve them for everybody.

 

Protesting the Ark Encounter: a Personal View

A couple of years ago, after the debate between Bill Nye, the science guy, and Ken Ham, the Answers In Genesis CEO, I started blogging, under the perhaps foolish notion that I had something to contribute to the chatter. When I heard about the opening of the Ark Encounter, I looked for a protest to join, and found one organized by the Tri-State Freethinkers.   On Thursday morning, I headed off to the event, armed with my home made sign, a copy of the New Testament, and a few local Ordovician fossils.

I knew I was getting close when the traffic sign warned me to expect delays at next exit.  However, there were no delays.  In fact, for a grand opening, traffic seemed pretty light all day.

As I exited the highway about 15 minutes before the protest was scheduled to begin, I saw the protest gathering on the left of the exit ramp, just before the T intersection with the state route.  I found my way to the small graveled parking area up the hill and walked down to the protest area with a group of about a dozen. We were greeted by a volunteer who gave a safety talk: don’t get too near the road, don’t talk with people in the cars, because that would hold up traffic, don’t engage with the counter protesters over there, because we don’t want any trouble.  They talked about a possible “civil discussion” tent, but I don’t think this was ever set up.

I registered my presence at the main tent.  Appreciative of their efforts organizing the event, I donated some money but did not ask to join. Evidently, the money was considered membership dues anyway, and I am now an accidental member of the Tri-State Freethinkers.

We held up signs for the people on the exit ramp to see.  Some drivers honked approval, some looked the other way, or gave us a thumbs down.  No middle fingers that I saw.

A lot of the signs objected to taxpayer funding of the “Genocide and Incest Park”.  One guy had a life size cardboard cutout of the guy in the #ohnoahhedidnt sign.  My own sign, “Don’t Bury the Bible in Ignorance,” was too subtle for some, who were not sure which side I was on until they say my t-shirt from the “The Origins Centre”, a souvenir from South Africa.

Several people wore pink t-shirts saying “Thou shalt not mess with women’s reproductive rights.  Fallopians 4:28.”  For fun, I tried looking the verse up in Philippians; it ends with 4:23.

A guy stood up in a loud voice and said that he had an expert on the Constitution with him, and asked if anyone wanted to talk with him.  Nobody was taking the bait.  After a while, I said that I would start.  He asked me why I was there, starting off on taxpayer support.   I mentioned that I was not happy with the taxpayers of Kentucky supporting the ministry, but that was not why I was there.  He tried to correct me on the taxpayer support, which is murky, indirect, and has passed a test in court.  It was a little while before I got to why I was there: I showed my sign. He said “well I could say the same thing about you, that you were burying the Bible in ignorance.”  Meanwhile people at my side were telling me not to engage him, that he would just edit it to make me look dumb.  I had noted the video cameras, and said “I know that.”  However, it was clear that I didn’t represent what most people wanted, and I allowed myself to be guided by their supposed wisdom.  After I left to rejoin the sign wavers, the guy with the Satanic beard did exactly what he had told me not to do, and engaged in a heated debate.  I don’t know what he said, but he cheers from the on-lookers.  The interviewer, turned out to be Eric Hovind founder of Creation Today.  Here and here are his posts on the counter protest.

After a while, someone passed out a song: “Ark Encounter is a sham, E I E I O” etc.  Group protests like this are not the place for nuance.

As who thinks Young Earth Creationism is ignorant, I had plenty of company.  As a someone who calls himself Christian, I was at odds with pretty much everyone there.

One protester asked me further about what I believed.  Not enamored with dogma, I always preface my answer to such questions with prevarication:  I do not base my life on my notions about that which is beyond my understanding.  After a while, he tried to pin me down, asking whether I was an Old World Creationist.  I said that I was not really a creationist of any kind, but that I did not have a problem with Old World Creationists because they did not have to war with modern science.

I met one person who had a nasty sign about the Bible.  She had read it all the way through (I confessed that I haven’t) and has a visceral hatred of it.

I spoke with another very dogmatic protester: all religion was bad, all the scriptures were bad, I was part of the way there because I didn’t believe every word of the Bible, but the truth was whatever it was that he had figured out (I am sure he would object to me using the word “believed”).  I found in him the same arrogance I see in some evangelical Christians, eager to tell you what they know, not eager to learn anything from your experience or point of view.

I spoke with one young man who asked me  what I thought was important in the Bible.  I pointed to the teachings of Jesus, particularly “Love thy neighbor as thyself”.  He asked “What does that mean”, and someone else responded with something like “jerk off your neighbor.”  The young man questioned further, “ ‘Honor thy father and mother’ what does that mean, really?”  I was surprised by the question, and without a quick answer. I was taking his question seriously, contemplating  in good Quaker fashion how to respond, but, unaccustomed to such pauses, he wandered away.

Any time I look around and see only one African American, I see it as an obligation to make sure that he of she feels welcome.  In this case, the man happened to be an officer of the state patrol, there to ensure order.  I introduced myself, with the observation that I was a little surprised that he was only black person there.  He said, “There’s plenty of us around.”  I thanked him and his colleagues for being there.  I think we both found it a bit embarrassing.  For me, it is the same embarrassment that I feel in some religious settings, where there are very few blacks.

Toward lunchtime, I encountered Harold, a volunteer about my age from Answers In Genesis.  He was there without cameras, or any group of followers.  He seemed genuinely interested in learning what our point of view was.  We talked for quite a while, finding points of agreement and of contention.  I mentioned one of my favorite Bible verses, which I quoted (not quite word for word, too many translations in my head)  “… what does the Lord require of you?  To act justly and to love mercy and to walk humbly with your God.”  “Yes, Micah 6:8” he replied.  We spoke about the age of the universe.  I talked about the expansion that is going on, that light from the most distant stars will never reach us.  He sees that as a key to the thinking of Answers in Genesis.  I didn’t try to contradict him.  In the protest, I was making my voice heard against the ignorance of the ark, but in this conversation, I was there to find out who he was, and how he thought, and help him similarly understand my point of view.

Harold believes in a infinite God, whom he places first, above anything that man has devised.  He wants to have a firm foundation, and God’s word revealed in scripture gives him that.  I think that when Martin Luther used the Bible to free us from a corrupt and apostate church, he did a wonderful thing, but he did it without contradicting the scientific understanding of his day.  However, science has progressed, and his scientific assertions are no longer viable.  Harold thinks that since God’s word is eternal and unchanging, he should be able to rely on the same basic conclusions as his forefathers.   I also suspect that, to Harold, if the theology his forefathers relied on was flawed, their eternal salvation was in question as well.

Harold questioned me about my foundation.  I replied that my goals were a little more humble than that: I want to know what God would have me do.  We agreed that Micah 6:8 was a good place to start.

I told him that I know that he might not consider me a real Christian, but that wouldn’t bother me a bit.  However, that I fall short of following Jesus’s commandments, therein lies a judgement that I care about.  “But we all fall short of that” he replied.

Harold headed off to get some lunch.  The counter protesters had brought some food from Chick fil A which they offered for free, but since that chain has made a stance the LGBT finds abhorrent, the free thinkers would not accept the offer of free food.  Harold, however, was hungry.  I told him to enjoy his lunch.  I saw him still at the protest hours later when it was breaking up.  He was still smiling, and he had apparently enjoyed himself.

Toward the end of the protest, I had a similar encounter with Sarah, a young AIG volunteer who I think might be Harold’s daughter.  She had stopped by the Ark Encounter on her way home to Iowa from the National Education Association convention in Washington where she had manned the Answers in Genesis booth.  I joined a conversation already in progress that included an archeologist.  Again, it was a respectful exchange among people trying to understand each other.  Sarah did not pretend to have pat answers for everything.   When the archeologist asked about carbon dating, Sarah  deferred to experts and the web site.

Later I asked her about her experience of Jesus.  She retreated a bit and relied on the teachings of the Bible.  After talking for a while, including my reservations about dogma, I found myself called to make some dogmatic assertions: the view of the Bible expressed by Answer In Genesis is idolatrous, the Bible was never intended to be the kind of book they made it out to be, and their assertions about the age of the earth are absolutely false.  I then apologized for my inconsistency in making such a pronouncement within the context of our conversation.

Both Harold and Sarah require a firm foundation for their life.  They are grateful for the sacrifice that Jesus made for their sins.  My sense of the Bible as an inspirational text, but one that you have to pick and choose from, is fully unsatisfactory to them.  They see it as a whole, the inerrant word of God.  Their experience of the divine seems to be second hand, though they might object to me describing it that way.  They have accepted a teaching, and want to share that teaching with the world.  Both of them showed a humility and an openness that was completely lacking in many others who were there, both among the protesters and the counter protesters.

As the protest was breaking up, I asked about the rally being held at UC. It was really for members, and I (mistakenly) thought that I was not one. I talked with one person, who asked someone, and came back with a statement that I wouldn’t really be welcome. As I got the car, I happened to speak with someone in the parking area, who asked me whether I was coming to the rally. I told him that I thought I was not welcome. He called someone, and said something about “someone in the middle”. The upshot was that they did not want the event to be disrupted. Knowing that I was a theist, he thought I would hear a bunch that I wouldn’t like; I responded that I was not trying to live in an echo chamber. I said that if there was an opportunity to ask questions, I might make my position known, but I had no desire to make a nuisance of myself.

Later in the evening, I went to the rally which was broadcast live by Dogma Debate.  I learned about the background of the Tri-State Freethinkers, and later about the Young Skeptics.  This information I found helpful and interesting.

Jim Helton, President of the Tri-State Freethinkers, told us I the full story of the port-a-potties.  During the protest, there was someone who periodically would gather together a carful of people for a bathroom run.  It turns out that the Freethinkers had contracted with someone to provide a port-a-potty at the site of the protest, but on that morning, when the company realized that it was going to be at this protest, they declined to fulfill the contract, not wanting to have their brand associated with these atheist weirdos.  So, the freethinkers improvised, and found a location not too far away that had a port-a-potty available.  The port-a-potty turned out to be from the same company, so people took selfies of themselves with at the port-a-potty with the company logo to post on the web.

Aron Ra, Jim Helton and Family at the Ark Encounter

Typical of the other speakers was Aron Ra, of American Atheists.  He began his talk with an interesting exposition of the Mesopotamian sources for the flood myth.  However, it soon devolved into long catalog of what was ridiculous about the Answers in Genesis position on the Noah myth.  Another speaker went through the sources of the races, according to AIG, from the children of Noah.  People seemed to like it, but I found it boring.

One person suggested a web site devoted to refutations of everything that Answers In Genesis asserts.  Although that seems to be an interesting project in the abstract, it runs into two problems: the overwhelming size of the mountain of manure that these people produce, and the colossal boredom of actually shoveling out from in under it.

I was surprised in a gathering of freethinkers that there was no time for questions.  It was packed full of one presentation after another.  As it entered the third hour, I left.

There are a few conclusions that I draw from the experience.  First, both the Freethinkers and the fundamentalist Christians are most concerned about being able to pass their values on to their children.  For example, David Smalley, the host of the radio show, went on a free tour of the Ark, with Eric Hovind serving as docent.   He enjoyed much of it, until he encountered the children’s section, which he found almost frightening.  Another instance is the Young Skeptics, founded explicitly to provide an alternative to the after school programs offered by Good News Clubs.  Because we have a public education system, this struggle of ideas has a political dimension.  Both sides want to control the curriculum.  The creationists want to teach the controversy; the  overwhelming majority of scientists think the controversy was resolved over a century ago and don’t want any part of the Bible presented in science class.

Secondly, I found people on both sides that I could have conversations with, and engage with on a personal level.  However, with the leaders, those with a public face, conversation was difficult.  They had their agenda, their conclusions, and their debate points all lined up, and nuanced engagement was pretty much impossible.

Finally, both sides see the argument as binary: either you are for God and this inerrant Bible, or you are for science and reason.  In this, I was on an island, attached to neither continent.

Jim Helton pointed to a number of things that he thought the protest accomplished.  Of these, the most cogent was that they changed the story: the media no longer talked just about the Ark, but also of the the protest against this simplistic rejection of modern science.

I was also there to change the story.  I wanted people to see that the choice was not limited to  godless rationalism on the one hand or mindless dogma on the other, and that the Bible, though not a good science text, is a wonderful book.  In this, I largely failed, but I was energized by the attempt.

 

Open Letter to Protesters at the Ark Encounter

Free Thinkers:

To begin, let us pause for a moment to bask in the superiority of our own understanding.

<—–>

Wasn’t that fun?

Now, can we put aside the ridicule?  Young Earth Creationists have been enduring such mockery since the Scopes Monkey Trial almost a century ago.  If you have paid attention, you might have noticed that it accomplishes nothing.  It just makes them feel persecuted, and they love that.

And this noise about genocide and incest in the Noah story is also pointless.  Yes there are plenty of horrible things in the Bible.  Try taking a look at the book of Judges for example. But I don’t believe you care about that.

Another question: what is the harm?  People have the right to believe whatever they want.  Here, however, you have a point. In a democracy, people have power, and if a large number of us are misguided, it effects the whole society.  In a world as dependent on technology as ours, where our collective actions impact the environment of the entire planet, we absolutely need for the public to have a certain basic scientific literacy.  Instead, we put in power congressmen who think large chunks of the current scientific consensus are “lies straight from the pit of hell.”  Because of the success of groups like Answers In Genesis in this country, both our politics and our science education are a mess.

Their dogma also poisons religion.   They take this beautiful gift, the Bible, full of the wisdom of the ancients, especially the teachings of Jesus, and bury it in a mountain of idolatry and ignorance.  They hide the insights and beauty in the  scriptures with this elaborate pseudo science.  They  present God as deceitful: using our God given gifts of observation, we can see the world appears to be billions of year old, but the Young Earth crowd  insists that this is illusion.  They make it appear that Christ is opposed to Truth.  Just what kind of God are they serving?

Ark Encounter

There is in this an  emotional whirlpool that Answers in Genesis and its predecessors have long relied on, and one that the free thinkers are easily caught up in.   Creationists see their literal reading of the Bible as essential to true Christianity, and everything else falls into a tarpit of secular humanism or, worse, outright atheism.  Many have felt what they consider to be God’s presence in their lives.  They have witnessed people transform from selfishness to service, from disorder to discipline, and from despair to hope.  They are not about to give that up.  They will grasp at any straw to maintain a hold, no matter how tenuous, on the beliefs of their forefathers. What you might see as a choice between logic and faith, they see as choice between heaven and hell.  Answers in Genesis wants this to be the choice that its followers face, so they are happy to have free thinkers protesting their new theme park.

It is this mindset among Creationists that needs to change.  I believe that this can be accomplished by acknowledging the authenticity of their experience, perhaps even approaching them with enough humility that we admit the possibility of learning something from that experience.  However, validating their experience does not require adhering to obviously false doctrine.  Getting them to this point is the key to helping them separate from what is false and make peace with modern science.

I believe (there’s that word again) that no matter how far science progresses, we will still be faced with the reality of living in society as semi-rational beings.  In this, the teachings of Jesus and the message of redemption at the heart of Christianity and are a good place to start.

So, there is great harm in Young Earth Creationism, and this theme park means that the harm will continue for some time.  It is important that we register our opposition to it.  Eventually, we need to put Answers In Genesis where it belongs, along side the Flat Earth Society, a small, and mostly harmless anachronism.

I plan to join you in protest.  I will bring a Bible, a few local Ordovician fossils, and my sign:

Don’t Bury

the Bible in

Ignorance

See you there.

in peace,

jp lund

P.S.

https://jplund.wordpress.com/2014/07/22/to-young-earth/

https://jplund.wordpress.com/2014/06/28/willful-denial/

 

 

 

Sources of Guidance for Muslims

The essay below is written by Freda Shamma, a member of the Clifton Mosque, whom I met in the most recent series of Interfaith Dialogues.   As Freda describes it, she was raised as a typical American WASP (White Anglo Saxon Protestant).   She was educated, ultimately attaining a PhD in education, and spent her career as an educator.  She converted to Islam almost 50 years ago.  She says, “My values haven’t changed but my understanding of religion has, and I love the real diversity in the Muslim community.”

She brought copies of this essay to the dialogues, and I found it helpful in understanding the point of view of a devout Muslim.  Having been raised Christian, she knows how to explain her faith to Christians.  In the wake of all the banter going around about the nature of Islam, I am pleased to post the words of an actual Muslim.

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What are the sources of guidance for Muslims?

By Freda Shamma

It may be helpful to understand the Qur’an by comparing it to the Bible. Much of the Bible is a chronological history of the Jewish people written at various times and by a variety of people. The New Testament is basically a biography of Jesus, in the four gospels, and then a collection of letters and writings by later Christians, attempting to explain their faith. The Qur’an is none of these.

The Qur’an is, first and most important of all, the words of God, and only His words. It is the collection of revelations that God sent to the prophet Muhammad, God’s peace and blessing be upon him, via the angel Gabriel. Angels were created to serve God but have no free will so are incapable of doing anything other than what God says.

The first surah, or chapter is a prayer which God wants people to use, and is given later in this article.

The next chapter begins with “This is the Book: in it is guidance sure, without doubt, to those who fear God.” (The word translated as ‘fear’ does not mean ‘afraid’ but more ‘in awe of’ or those who hate to displease God).

The Qur’an was revealed in stages over a 23 year period (610-632). The majority of the revelations sent to Prophet Muhammad when he was first teaching in Mecca are generally short chapters found in the last part of the Qur’an. At this time the Muslims were few in number and new to the religion. God’s guidance was mainly in the area of belief, the contrast between those who believe and those who do not, and their respective destinies in the hereafter. God describes the believers as those who believe in Him and choose right from wrong, and do good to others, including sharing their wealth. Other revelations give descriptions of heaven and hell, and the Day of Judgment. The mercy and forgiveness of God as well as other of His attributes is also included.

The longer chapters (surahs) were revealed to Prophet Muhammad after the Muslim community was established in the city of Madinah. Much of the revelation in these chapters gives practical details of life between people, i.e. the nature of male and female, the relationship in marriage, dealing with parents, children, neighbors, orphans, non-Muslims, dealing with honesty and justice, even against one’s own family. It also deals with economics, governing, and life in general.

Even the worst enemies of the Muslims among the early Arabs, who were noted for their beautiful language and love of poetry, acknowledged that the Qur’an was the most beautifully written book they could imagine. Any translation is going to fall short of the original. The Qur’an is always in Arabic, the language it was revealed in. For those who cannot understand Arabic, an approximate translation is also included. It is impossible to make an exact translation of something which God has said, since His revelation is on many levels at the same time.

There are two aspects of the Qur’an which often cause a problem for non-Muslims trying to read it. The first is that it is not chronological. The story of Adam and Eve is mentioned quite a number of times throughout the Qur’an, for example. Each time, God asks us to consider a different aspect of the event, in order to be guided in a certain way.

The second problem for many is the repetition. I don’t know the figure, but I jokingly say to my Muslim friends whenever patience is hard to come by, ‘It’s no wonder the Qur’an mentions patience so many times!’ It is a fact that most of what is second nature to us, has come about by repetition. How many of you wash your hands after digging in the dirt? How many times did your mother have to repeat “go wash your hands” until finally it became part of you, and you don’t even think about it? When you are in a stressful situation, what pops into your mind to help you – perhaps the 23rd psalm? Didn’t you have to repeat it many times before it became a part of you? And so God repeats His guidance in many ways, sometimes with a story, sometimes as a simile, sometimes a direct command, sometimes with reference to some historical event or some scientific truth. Look at the way Allah made the bees and their way of getting food and their social organization, and then look at mankind and consider that God will not let us suffer or fail, without giving us the right guidance to be able to change our situation. As the Qur’an says in Surah 14:1: The Qur’an is “a book which We have revealed unto thee in order that thou might lead mankind out of the depths of darkness into light – by the leave of thy Lord – to the way of Him the exalted in power, worthy of all praise.” In this verse God is addressing Prophet Muhammad directly, but reminding us that Muhammad is only able to lead mankind because God has given him the ability to do so.

Muslims depend on two sources of guidance. Foremost is the Qur’an which is the direct words of God, delivered by angel to Prophet Muhammad. As the verses of the Qur’an were revealed to the Prophet, he had them written down. There are still pieces of the original, which were written on leather, existing in the Topkapi Palace in Istanbul. The copies of the Qur’an today are letter by letter exactly the same as the first Qur’an.

The second source of guidance is the example of the Prophet Muhammad, a man who was guided by God to live a godly life. We look to him because God in the Qur’an tells us to follow his example. Sunnah (what he did) and hadith (what he said) show us what Muhammed did, and what he said in the twenty three years of his prophethood. These were also written down during the life of the Prophet, and have been exhaustively researched and verified to make sure no falsehoods or mistakes are in the authenticated sunnah and hadiths.

There is no pope, or priest, or minister to come between a Muslim and God. Everyone is supposed to study these sources of guidance for him/her self. When there are disagreements, or something unusual comes up that requires a thorough knowledge of the scriptures, then Islamic scholars are consulted. During the required Friday noon prayer, any knowledgeable Muslim can give the sermon. Where an Islamic scholar is available, he is usually asked to deliver it.

---

Worshippers finishing the ṣalāt al-maġrib at the Islamic Center of Greater Cincinnati. Charleston Wang, photographer. http://www.wangnews.net. Used with permission.

This is the opening chapter or the Qur’an.  It is the prayer that Muslims say at least 17 times every day in the five required prayers.  Notice the similarities to the Lord’s Prayer.

Surah 1: Al Fatiha (The Opening)        The Lord’s Prayer, Matthew 6: 9-13

In the name of Allah,                               Our father, who art in heaven,
the Lord of Mercy,
the Giver of Mercy

Praise belongs to God,                             Hallowed be thy name.
Lord of the Worlds,                                   Thy kingdom come,

The Lord of Mercy,
the Giver of Mercy,

Master of the Day of Judgement.              Thy will be done,
on earth as it is in heaven.

It is You we worship;                                 Give us this day our daily bread, and
it is You we ask for help.                            forgive us our trespasses as we
.                                                                forgive those who trespass
.                                                                against us.

Guide us to the straight way                      Lead us not into temptation
The way of those on whom
Thou has bestowed thy Grace,

Not of those who have gained wrath         but deliver us from evil.
nor of those who have gone astray.

Some topics discussed in the Qur’an

Nature of Mankind              Surah 20:120-124

120:    But Satan whispered evil: “Adam! shall I lead thee to the Tree of Eternity and to a kingdom that never decays?”

121:    In the result they both (Adam and Eve) ate of the tree and so their nakedness appeared to them. They began to sew for their covering, leaves from the Garden: thus did Adam disobey His Lord and allow himself to be seduced.

122:    But the Lord chose him (for His Grace): He turned to him and gave him guidance.

123:    He said: “Get ye down all together from the Garden with enmity one to another (Adam and Eve vs. Satan); but if as is sure there comes to you guidance from Me, whosoever follows My guidance will not lose his way nor fall into misery.

124     “But whosoever turns away from My Message, verily for him is a life narrowed down and we shall raise him up blind on the Day of Resurrection.”

Tolerance

49:13     O mankind! We created you from a single pair of a male and a female, and made you into nations and tribes that ye may know each other (not that ye may despise each other.) Verily the most honored of you in the sight of God is he who is the most righteous of you.

Charity

2:277     Those who believe and do deeds of righteousness and establish regular prayers and regular charity will have their reward with their Lord; on them shall be no fear nor shall they grieve.

No compulsion in Religion  

2:256     Let there be no compulsion in religion. Truth stands out clear from error; whoever rejects evil and believes in God hath grasped the most trustworthy hand-hold that never breaks, And Allah heareth and knoweth all things.

Business dealings                

2:282.   O ye who believe! When ye deal with each other in transactions involving future obligations in a fixed period of time reduce them to writing…

Fostering, not adoption    

33:5       Call them by the names of their fathers; that is more just, in the sight of Allah, but if ye know not their father’s names, call them your brothers in faith. (One of the rights that Islam gives to the child is the right to know who his parents are.)

Gender Equity

4:1      O mankind! Reverence your Guardian-Lord Who created you from a single person, created of like nature his mate…

9:71    The believers, men and women, are protectors one of another; they enjoin what is just and forbid what is evil; they observe regular prayers, practice regular charity, and obey God and His apostle.

Justice

4.135    O ye who believe! Stand out firmly for justice as witnesses to God, even as against yourselves or your parents or your kin and whether it be rich or poor; for Allah can best protect both. Follow not the lusts of your hearts lest ye swerve, and if ye distort justice, or decline to do justice, verily Allah is well-acquainted with all that ye do.

22:39    To those against whom war is made, permission is given to fight because they are wronged, and verily God is Most powerful for their aid.

42:40    The recompense for an injury is an injury equal thereto (in degree), but if a person forgives and makes reconciliation, his reward is due from Allah; for Allah loveth not those who do wrong.

Humility

25:63     The servants of the Most Merciful are those who walk on the earth with humility, and when the ignorant address them say (words of) peace.

God is unknowable in His entirety, but He gives us 99 attributes (or names) in the Qur’an, including:

 The Most Merciful, The Most Beneficent, The Creator, The Most Loving, The Most Just, The Most Powerful, The Everlasting Sustainer of All, The Greatest, The One above all, The Most Wise, The All-knowing.

 

Praying with Muslims

Worshippers finishing the ṣalāt al-maġrib at the Islamic Center of Greater Cincinnati. Credit: Charleston Wang, http://www.wangnews.net.

What do you do when a mass of gun toting citizens, self-anointed guardians of some misbegotten fantasy about the way things should be, gathers outside your place of worship with the explicit intent of being as obnoxious and offensive as our constitution allows?  Invite them in.

A few of the well-armed people at the #PHxMosque Friday night http://t.co/K4xHSnAcSM—
Eric English (@EricEnglish15) May 30, 2015

When this happened at a mosque in Phoenix recently, the president of the congregation, Usama Shami, did just that, inviting people to join them in prayer.  Two, both wearing t-shirts bearing profane insults to Islam, accepted the offer.  They found the experience of observing devout Muslims in prayer transforming.  Removed from the vitriol of the demonstration outside, they were almost surprised to realize that Muslims were people.  One reported, “It was something I’ve never seen before,” the other left saying “I promise, the next time you see me, I won’t be wearing this shirt.  I won’t wear it again.”

Recently, I had a similar experience observing Muslims in prayer, though, since I entered with less prejudice, it was not as transforming.  I had been involved in an interfaith dialog entitled “Rooted in Abraham”, a set of weekly get togethers among Christians, Jews, and Muslims.  It was hosted alternately at the (Catholic) Centennial Barn, the Valley Temple, and the Clifton Mosque.

The so-called protest in Phoenix (it might have been just a money making scheme on the part of the organizer) points to the value of having open paths of communication between the faith communities, so that a mutual, coordinated response can be easily organized if it is needed.  However, for now, this was just a group of interested people getting together, sharing their experiences, learning from each other.

Of course, this is a self selected group: we who attended were willing to share our experience without insisting that others agree with a particular theological tenet, and were, for the most part, willing to listen and perhaps learn from people with a different point of view.  Some were thoroughly grounded in one of the traditions; others were more loosely affiliated with a faith community or frankly seeking guidance for their own spiritual journey.  Those more concerned with orthodoxy, whether Jewish, Muslim or Christian, did not choose to participate.  For example, Christian evangelists might have thought it a waste of time, because there would not be much opportunity to turn anyone to Christ, and they typically do not think that other religions have much to teach them.

The format of the dialogs is one that has been honed over the years.  A topic, such as “Extremism” or “The Role of Women”, was chosen for each session.  The evening began with a representative of each faith speaking for about 10 minutes.  Then there was a short intermission, with snacks, before we reconvened in groups of six to twelve people.  These small discussion groups worked well, except when one person was inspired to speak at length, showing little interest in what anyone else had to say.

The emphasis was on our shared humanity.  In such a setting, we tend to see our differences as superficial, less important than perhaps they actually are.  The tone was reasoned and cordial rather than passionate or fervent.

For me, the most memorable evening was the one held at the mosque.  The topic for the evening was “extremism”.  The small group session that I was in was particularly lively.  Some in our group were disappointed that it ended so soon, but it was time for evening prayer, the ṣalāt al-maġrib.

We visitors were allowed into the sanctuary behind the men who were gathering for the evening prayer.  The women prayed in the balcony upstairs.  The men stood in a row, shoulder to shoulder.  The prayers were led by an Imam with obvious skill and devotion.  At the appropriate times, all bowed together, putting their heads to the floor, in total submission to God.  I attempted to follow along in the back, but the movements were too unfamiliar and too distracting for me to achieve any sense of reverence while doing them.  However, I did come to an appreciation for the formal daily prayers of Islam.

When they pray in this formal way, they orient themselves to their place in the universe: where they are on the surface of the earth in relation the sun and to Mecca, their point of reference. The time of the prayer is determined not by the clock but by  the natural cycle of the day, different at each time of the year and each place on the globe.  They pray with their entire body, indeed, with their entire being.  Five times each day, they reestablish their connection with the universe and with the greatest good that they know.  It is easy to understand the continuing appeal of this tradition in our modern world that so often seems rootless, disorienting, and distracted from those things that we profess to be most important to our lives.

My local meeting, Eastern Hills, has been hosting a monthly interfaith prayer service, jointly sponsored by Greater Anderson Promotes Peace.  Our suburban location, far from any mosque or synagog, led to limited participation from some faiths, but a couple of Muslims occasionally attended.

The format of these gatherings is based on the unprogrammed worship in the manner of Friends.  For one thing, this is what we know how to do, and for another, we imagined that this is free from dogmatic content.  Our idea is to bring people together and ask them to pray for peace, in whatever way they found most meaningful.

Having witnessed Muslims praying formally in their home sanctuary, I think we were right that praying together is a key to a deeper connection with others, but that we were naive in thinking our format was flexible enough to really accommodate people from such a different tradition. We are coordinated by the clock, not the position of the sun in the sky.  We are oriented to the center of the room, not to our place on the globe.  The arrangements of our chairs interfere with praying with our whole body. One Muslim woman adapted, and offered a prayer, but it was not the same experience that I later saw in the mosque.

James’s Answer: Variety of Religious Experience #4

  What is it that I want to tell skeptics to about religion?  It is something essential to the human condition, such as what William James offers at the end of his Study in Human Nature.

He asks what for many are the critical questions concerning religion [pg. 507-8]:

First, is there, under all the discrepancies of the creeds, a common nucleus to which they bear their testimony unanimously?

And second, ought we to consider the testimony true?

His answer to the first is succinct:

I … answer it immediately in the affirmative.  The warring gods and formulas of the various religions do indeed cancel each other, but there is a certain uniform deliverance in which religions all appear to meet. It consists of two parts: —

1. An uneasiness; and 

2. Its solution.

The uneasiness, reduced to its simplest terms, is a sense that there is something wrong about us as we naturally stand.

The solution is a sense that we are saved from the wrongness by making proper connection with the higher powers.

His answer to the second question is more involved, in part, because this philosopher has already stated: [pg. 455] “In all sad sincerity I think we must conclude that the attempt to demonstrate by purely intellectual processes the truth of the deliverances of direct religious experience is absolutely hopeless”.

Thus, although he thinks religious experience is “absolutely authoritative over the individuals to whom they come” [pg. 422], those of us who have not had such experiences, must come to conclusions based on our inclinations, our passions, or, as he puts in an earlier essay, our Will To Believe.  However, he does come to one striking conclusion about the truth of religious testimony [pg. 515]:

Disregarding the over-beliefs, and confining ourselves to what is common and generic, we have in the fact that the conscious person is continuous with a wider self through which saving experiences come, a positive content of religious experience which, it seems to me, is literally and objectively true as far as it goes.

(Sometimes, William James sounds like he is imitating his brother Henry, the novelist renown for his elaborate and occasionally impenetrable prose.   Without the background of the previous discussion, the above sentence might seem fairly opaque, so I offer some explication, of course, colored by my own understanding.)

James is laying out what he thinks is objectively true.  He is putting aside, for the moment, the unique mystical or religious experiences that have been the subject of the entire book.  He is also laying aside “over-beliefs”, by which he means propositions for which there is insufficient evidence, but which can be accepted anyway through leaps of faith. James is speaking to the skeptic examining the human condition.  Based on those common experiences that all humans share, James asserts a simple fact: the consciousness of a person is part of something larger.  Further, it is by developing awareness of this larger self, this higher power, that we are relieved from that uneasiness, that sense of wrongness, that is part of the human condition.

James goes further, describing his own religious stance [pg. 516-7]:

If I now proceed to state my own hypothesis about the farther limits of this extension of our personality, I shall be offering my own over-belief — though I know it will appear a sorry under-belief to some of you — for which I can only bespeak the same indulgence which in a converse case I should accord to yours.

… [pg 517]

God is the natural appellation, for us Christians at least, for the supreme reality so I will call this higher part of the universe by the name of God. We and God have business with each other; and in opening ourselves to his influence our deepest destiny is fulfilled. The universe, at those parts of it which our personal being constitutes, takes a turn genuinely for the worse or for the better in proportion as each one of us fulfills or evades God’s demands.  As far as this goes, I probably have you with me, for I only translate into schematic language what I may call the instinctive belief of mankind: God is real since he produces real effects.

…[pg 519]

I believe the pragmatic way of taking religion to be the deeper way. It gives it body as well as soul, it makes it claim, as everything real must claim, some characteristic realm of fact as its very own. What the more characteristically divine facts are, apart from the actual inflow of energy in the faith state and the prayer state, I know not.  But the over-belief on which I am ready to make my personal venture is that they exist….By being faithful in my poor measure to this over-belief, I seem to myself to keep more sane and true. I can, of course, put myself into the sectarian scientist’s attitude and imagine vividly that the world of sensations and of scientific laws and objects may be all. But whenever I do this, I hear that inward monitor of which WK Clifford once wrote, whispering the word bosh. Humbug is humbug even though it bear the scientific name, and the total expression of human experience, as I view it, objectively, invincibly urges me beyond the narrow scientific bounds.  Assuredly the real world is of a different temperament, — more intricately built than physical science allows. So my objective and my subjective conscience both hold me to the over-belief which I express. Who knows whether the faithfulness of individuals here below to their own poor over-beliefs may not actually help God in turn to be more effectively faithful to his own greater tasks.

Thus, William James, the rational pragmatist, finds pure reason insufficient.  He does not attempt to refute atheism or agnosticism, he rejects them.  Human experience is too rich, too multi-faceted, to be fully guided by rational skepticism.  For his own life, he chooses to embrace an over-belief, to make a leap of faith,  because it enables him to live more abundantly.

To use an old Quaker phrase, this speaks to my condition.

Tolstoy’s Spiritual Journey: Varieties of Religious Experience #3

Leo Tolstoy:  “Faith is a knowledge of the meaning of human life, in consequence of which man does not destroy himself but lives. Faith is the strength of life.”

Tolstoy, at the height of his powers and fame, underwent a profound spiritual crisis.  He chronicled his journey down to the suicidal depths and back to spiritual health in My Confession.  Such experiences are the grist of William James’s book, and he quotes Tolstoy at length.  Here, I have attempted to capture the essence of both Tolstoy’s journey and James’s observations.  Tolstoy’s crisis, and his ultimate resolution of it, speaks to my condition, today.

[pg 151 – 156]

In Tolstoy’s case the sense that life had any meaning whatever was for a time wholly withdrawn. The result was a transformation in the whole expression of reality.

…

“I felt,” says Tolstoy, “that something had broken within me on which my life had always rested, that I had nothing left to hold on to, and that morally my life had stopped. An invincible force impelled me to get rid of my existence, in one way or another. It cannot be said exactly that I wished to kill myself, for the force which drew me away from life was fuller, more powerful, more general than any mere desire. It was a force like my old aspiration to live, only it impelled me in the opposite direction. It was an aspiration of my whole being to get out of life.

“Behold me then, a man happy and in good health, hiding the rope in order not to hang myself to the rafters of the room where every night I went to sleep alone; behold me no longer going shooting, lest I should yield to the too easy temptation of putting an end to myself with my gun.

“I did not know what I wanted. I was afraid of life; I was driven to leave it; and in spite of that I still hoped something from it.

… 

“All this took place at a time when so far as all my outer circumstances went, I ought to have been completely happy. I had a good wife who loved me and whom I loved; good children and a large property which was increasing with no pains taken on my part. I was more respected by my kinsfolk and acquaintance than I had ever been; I was loaded with praise by strangers; and without exaggeration I could believe my name already famous. Moreover I was neither insane nor ill. On the contrary, I possessed a physical and mental strength which I have rarely met in persons of my age. I could mow as well as the peasants, I could work with my brain eight hours uninterruptedly and feel no bad effects.

“And yet I could give no reasonable meaning to any actions of my life.  And I was surprised that I had not understood this from the very beginning. My state of mind was as if some wicked and stupid jest was being played upon me by some one. One can live only so long as one is intoxicated, drunk with life; but when one grows sober one cannot fail to see that it is all a stupid cheat. What is truest about it is that there is nothing even funny or silly in it; it is cruel and stupid, purely and simply.”

[pg 155]

“…What will be the outcome of what I do to-day? Of what I shall do to-morrow? What will be the outcome of all my life? Why should I live? Why should I do anything? Is there in life any purpose which the inevitable death which awaits me does not undo and destroy?

“These questions are the simplest in the world. From the stupid child to the wisest old man, they are in the soul of every human being. Without an answer to them, it is impossible, as I experienced, for life to go on.

“ ‘But perhaps,’ I often said to myself, ‘there may be something I have failed to notice or to comprehend. It is not possible that this condition of despair should be natural to mankind.’ And I sought for an explanation in all the branches of knowledge acquired by men. I questioned painfully and protractedly and with no idle curiosity. I sought, not with  indolence, but laboriously and obstinately for days and nights together.  I sought like a man who is lost and seeks to save himself, — and I found nothing. I became convinced, moreover, that all those who before me had sought for an answer in the sciences have also found nothing. And not only this, but that they have recognized that the very thing which was me to despair — the meaningless absurdity of life — is only incontestable knowledge accessible to man.”

To prove this point Tolstoy quotes the Buddha Solomon and Schopenhauer. And he finds only four ways in which men of his own class and society are accustomed to meet the situation. Either mere animal blindness, sucking the honey without seeing the dragon or the mice, — “and from such a way,” he says, “I can learn nothing, after what I now know;” or reflective epicureanism, snatching what it can while the day lasts, — which is only a more deliberate sort of stupefaction than the first;  or manly suicide; or … weakly and plaintively clinging to … life.

Suicide was naturally the consistent course dictated by the logical intellect.

“Yet,” says Tolstoy, “whilst my intellect was working, something else in me was working too, and kept me from the deed — a consciousness of life, as I may call it, which was like a force that obliged my mind to fix itself in another direction and draw me out of my situation of despair. . . . During the whole course of this year, when I almost unceasingly kept asking myself how to end the business, whether by the rope or by the bullet, during all that time, alongside of all those movements of my ideas and observations, my heart kept languishing with another pining emotion. I can call this by no other name than that of a thirst for God. This craving for God had nothing to do with the movement of my ideas, — in fact, it was the direct contrary of that movement, — but it came from my heart. It was like a feeling of dread that made me seem like an orphan and isolated in the midst of all these things that were so foreign. And this feeling of dread was mitigated by the hope of finding the assistance of some one.”

[pg. 184-6]

... Tolstoy, pursuing his unending questioning, seemed to come to one insight after another. First he perceived that his conviction that life was meaningless took only this finite life into account. He was looking for the value of one finite term in that of another, and the whole result could only be one of those indeterminate equations in mathematics which end with 0 = 0. Yet this is as far as the reasoning intellect by itself can go, unless irrational sentiment or faith brings in the infinite. Believe in the infinite as common people do, and life grows possible again.

“Since mankind has existed, wherever life has been, there also has been the faith that gave the possibility of living. Faith is the sense of life, that sense by virtue of which man does not destroy himself, but continues to live on. It is the force whereby we live. If Man did not believe that he must live for something, he would not live at all. The idea of an infinite God, of the divinity of the soul, of the union of men’s actions with God — these are ideas elaborated in the infinite secret depths of human thought. They are ideas without which there would be no life, without which I myself,” said Tolstoy, “would not exist. I began to see that I had no right to rely on my individual reasoning and neglect these answers given by faith, for they are the only answers to the question.”

Yet how believe as the common people believe, steeped as they are in grossest superstition. It is impossible. — but yet their life! their life! It is normal. It is happy! It is an answer to the question!

Little by little, Tolstoy came to the settled conviction — he says it took him two years to arrive there — that his trouble had not been with life in general, not with the common life of common men, but with the life of the upper, intellectual, artistic classes, the life which he had  personally always led, the cerebral life, the life of conventionality, artificiality, and personal ambition. He had been living wrongly and must change. To work for animal needs, to abjure lies and vanities, to relieve common wants, to be simple, to believe in God, therein lay happiness again.

“I remember,” he says, “one day in early spring, I was alone in the forest, lending my ear to its mysterious noises. I listened, and my thought went back to what for these three years it always was busy with — the quest of God.  But the idea of him, I said, how did I ever come by the idea?

“And again there arose in me, with this thought, glad aspirations towards life. Everything in me awoke and received a meaning. … Why do I look farther? a voice within me asked. He is there: he, without whom one cannot live. To acknowledge God and to live are one and the same thing. God is what life is. Well then! live, seek God, and there will be no life without him. . . .

“ After this, things cleared up within me and about me better than ever, and the light has never wholly died away. I was saved from suicide. Just how or when the change took place I cannot tell. But as insensibly and gradually as the force of life had been annulled within me, and I had reached my moral death-bed, just as gradually and imperceptibly did the energy of life come back. And what was strange was that this energy that came back was nothing new. It was my ancient juvenile force of faith, the belief that the sole purpose of my life was to be better. I gave up the life of the conventional world, recognizing it to be no life, but a parody on life, which its superfluities simply keep us from comprehending,” — and Tolstoy thereupon embraced the life of the peasants, and has felt right and happy, or at least relatively so, ever since.

[footnote]: I have considerably abridged Tolstoy’s words in my translation.

As I interpret his melancholy, then, it was not merely an accidental vitiation of his humors, though it was doubtless also that. It was logically called for by the clash between his inner character and his outer activities and aims. Although a literary artist, Tolstoy was one of those primitive oaks of men to whom the superfluities and insincerities, the cupidities, complications, and cruelties of our polite civilization are profoundly unsatisfying, and for whom the eternal veracities lie with more natural and animal things. His crisis was the getting of his soul in order, the discovery of its genuine habitat and vocation, the escape from falsehoods into what for him were ways of truth. It was a case of heterogeneous personality tardily and slowly finding its unity and level. And though not many of us can imitate Tolstoy, not having enough perhaps of the aboriginal human marrow in our bones, most of us may at least feel as if it might be better for us if we could.

James has one further critical observation about Tolstoy’s experience, found in a footnote [page 247]:  There was almost no theology in his conversion. His faith-state was the sense … that life was infinite in its moral significance.

Today, most discussions about religion concern theology, and the struggle to reconcile  old dogmas with the discoveries of modern science.  However, such discussions are irrelevant to faith such as Tolstoy’s.  His faith is a response to the human condition, the condition of finite man in relation to the infinite, a condition unchanged by technological advances.

Religion and Reason: Variety of Religious Experience #2

Religious people often have difficulty communicating about their faith with people who, on the basis of reason, have already rejected religion.  Usually, both sides are to blame, less interested in understanding the other’s point of view than in winning a theological or philosophical debate.  Thus, the conversation deteriorates into assertions of unprovable “truths”. In the Varieties of Religious Experience, William James offers a totally different approach.  He looks at private, inward experiences, as reported by people in their letters, journals and autobiographies, with the analytic eye of a philosopher and scientist.  In doing this, he provides a ground that can be shared by both the skeptical and the faithful. For example, when he talks about God, James does so as an empiricist, without asserting more than he can prove.  After discussing extended quotations of first hand reports from various saints, he says the following: [pg. 271-3] The saintly character is the character for which spiritual emotions are the habitual centre of the personal energy; and there is a certain composite photograph of universal saintliness, the same in all religions, of which the features can easily be traced.

1. A feeling of being in a wider life than that of this world’s selfish little interests; and a conviction, not merely intellectual, but as it were sensible, of the existence of an Ideal Power.  In Christian saintliness this power is always personified as God; but abstract moral ideals, civic or patriotic utopias, or inner visions of holiness or right may also be felt as the true lords and enlargers of our life … 
2. A sense of friendly continuity of the ideal power with our own life, and a willing self-surrender to its control. 
3. An immense elation and freedom, as the outlines of the confining selfhood melt down. 
4. A shifting of the emotional centre towards loving and harmonious affections, towards ‘yes, yes’ and away from ‘no, no’. …

I have heard religious people struggle unsuccessfully to explain what they meant by the “Will of God” and why someone would submit to it.  In the above passage, James explains this beautifully, without resorting to religious clichés. Of course, it is this very impulse toward self-surrender which many, particularly atheists like Christopher Hitchens, find so abhorrent, and which, to be honest, ecclesiastical hierarchies, charlatans, and cults have sometimes perverted to their own advantage.  For the most part, James does not discuss this problem, but after one particularly powerful first hand account, he writes the following:

[pg. 337]

A genuine first hand religious experience like this is bound to be a heterodoxy to its witnesses, the prophet appearing as a mere lonely madman.  If his doctrine prove contagious enough to spread to any others, it becomes a definite and labeled heresy. But if it then still prove contagious enough to triumph over persecution, it becomes itself an orthodoxy; and when a religion has become an orthodoxy, its day of inwardness is over: the spring is dry; the faithful live at second hand exclusively and stone the prophets in their turn. The new church, in spite of whatever human goodness it may foster, can be henceforth counted on as a staunch ally in every attempt to stifle the spontaneous religious spirit, and to stop all later bubblings of the fountain from which in purer days it drew its own supply of inspiration. 

When people today say they are “opposed to organized religion”, I think that are instinctively reacting to the characteristics that James has described above. One worry that religious people often have with atheism in particular is that they think it undermines the basis for moral behavior: life without faith means life without a moral compass. Although James deals morality primarily as an outward expression of a person’s inward state, when he does address it, he does so in terms that the non-theist would find congenial:

[pg 278-9]

Let me pass next to Charity and Brotherly Love, which are a usual fruit of saintliness…. When Christ utter the precepts: “Love your enemies, bless them that curse you, do good to them that hate you, and pray for them which despitefully use you, and persecute you,” he gives for a reason: “That ye be the children of your Father which is in heaven; for he maketh the sun to rise on the evil and on the good, and sendeth rain on the just and on the unjust.” One might therefore be tempted to explain both the humility as to one’s self and the charity towards others which characterize spiritual excitement, as results of the all-leveling character of theistic belief. But these affections are certainly not mere derivatives of theism. We find them in Stoicism, in Hinduism, and in Buddhism in the highest possible degree. They harmonize with paternal theism beautifully; but they harmonize with all reflection whatever upon the dependence of mankind on general causes; … Religious rapture, moral enthusiasm, ontological wonder, cosmic emotion, are all unifying states of mind, in which the sand and grit of the selfhood incline to disappear, and tenderness to rule.

Thus, James frames the teachings of Christ in a way that separates it from the theological dogmas of Christianity.  The faithful and agnostic alike can read such a passage and find agreement, perhaps with reservations, but without feeling that their core beliefs are being challenged. A similar discussion follows the first hand reports of mystics from various traditions.  Here James evaluates their significance to the rest of us, pinpointing what we can learn from the experience of religious mystics, even though we might not have directly had such experiences ourselves.

[pg.422-3]

My next task is to inquire whether we can invoke [mystic consciousness] as authoritative.  Does it furnish any warrant for the truth of the twice born-ness and supernaturality and pantheism which it favors? …

1. Mystical states, when well developed, usually are, and have the right to be, absolutely authoritative over the individuals to whom they come.
2. No authority emanates from them which should make it a duty for those who stand outside of them to accept their revelations uncritically. 
3. They break down the authority of the non-mystical or rationalistic consciousness, based upon the under standing and the senses alone.  They show it to be only one kind of consciousness.  They open out the possibility of other orders of truth, in which, so far as anything in us vitally responds to them, we may freely continue to have faith.

In a lecture entitled “Philosophy”, James examines attempts to prove the validity of religion through purely rational arguments.  He concludes:

[pg. 455]

In all sad sincerity I think we must conclude that the attempt to demonstrate by purely intellectual processes the truth of the deliverances of direct religious experience is absolutely hopeless. 

Thus, religion is not purely rational, and attempts to make it so, in James’s view, ultimately fail.  However, the thrust of James’s investigation is that religious experiences, though irrational, transitory and irreproducible, are both real and important to the human condition.  No purely rational approach is sufficient to fully understand human nature.  For a rational person who has not directly experienced such things for himself, James says that accepting their authority is a matter of choice, of faith. Nonetheless, ignoring religious experience, as many empiricists are wont to do, simply leaves one with a philosophic point of view that is incomplete and hollow.

Observations on George Fox: The Varieties of Religious Experience #1

  

 

In the Varieties of Religious Experience, the philosopher and psychologist William James focuses on those intense, personal experiences that he sees as the core of all faiths, eschewing the creeds and theology that usually dominate comparative studies of religion.  Quakers will find this approach congenial, and indeed, James expresses admiration for our religious society.  Among the many first hand accounts that he quotes in these lectures are three extended passages from the Journal of George Fox. I have collected these here, along with James’s observations, not as a summary of the book, but as a slice of particular interest to Friends.

The first is from the opening lecture, on “Religion and Neurology”.

[pg. 6-8]

There can be no doubt that as a matter of fact a religious life, exclusively pursued, does tend to make the person exceptional and eccentric.  … [They have] presented all sorts of peculiarities which are ordinarily classed as pathological. …

If you ask for a concrete example, there can be no better one than is furnished by the person of George Fox.  The Quaker religion which he founded is something which it is impossible to overpraise.  In a day of shams, it was a religion of veracity rooted in spiritual inwardness, and a return to something more like the original gospel truth than men had ever known in England.  So far as our Christian sects to-day are evolving into liberality, they are simply reverting in essence to the position which Fox and the early Quakers so long ago assumed.  No one can pretend for a moment that in point of spiritual sagacity and capacity, Fox’s mind was unsound.  Every one who confronted him personally, from Oliver Cromwell down to county magistrates and jailers, seems to have acknowledged his superior power.  Yet from the point of view of his nervous constitution, Fox was a psychopath or détraqué  of the deepest dye. His Journal abounds in entries of this sort: —

“As I was walking with several friends, I lifted up my head, and saw three steeple-house spires, and they struck at my life.  I asked them what place that was?  They said, Lichfield.  Immediately the word of the Lord came to me, that I must go thither.  ….till I came within a mile of Lichfield; where, in a great field, shepherds were keeping their sheep.  Then I was commanded by the Lord to pull off my shoes. I stood still, for it was winter: but the word of the Lord was like a fire in me.  So I put off my shoes, and left them with the shepherds; and the poor shepherds trembled, and were astonished.  Then I walked on about a mile, and as soon as I was got within the city, the word of the Lord came to me again, saying: Cry, ‘Wo to the bloody city of Lichfield!’  So I went up and down the streets, crying in a loud voice, Wo to the bloody city of Lichfield!  It being market day, I went into the market-place, and to and fro in the several parts of it, and made stands, crying as before, Wo to the bloody city of Lichfield! …. But afterwards I came to understand, that in the Emperor Diocletian’s time a thousand Christians were martyr’d in Lichfield.  …. So the sense of this blood was upon me, and I obeyed the word of the Lord.”

James goes on to say that it is ludicrous to reject an idea because of the medical condition of its author:

[pg. 14]

According to the general postulate of psychology just referred to, there is not a single one of our states of mind, high or low, healthy or morbid, that has not some organic process as its condition. Scientific theories are organically conditioned just as much as religious emotions are; and if we only knew the facts intimately enough we should doubtless see ‘the liver’ determining the dicta of the sturdy atheist as decisively as it does those of the Methodist under conviction anxious about his soul .

A second George Fox excerpt is from the lectures on Saintliness.  Here James is discussing the desire of the devout to live in harmony with their calling.

The ascetic forms which the impulse for veracity and purity of life may take are often pathetic enough. The early Quakers, for example, had hard battles to wage against the worldliness and insincerity of the ecclesiastical Christianity of their time. Yet the battle that cost them most wounds was probably that which they fought in defense of their own right to social veracity and sincerity in their thee-ing and thou-ing, in not doffing the hat or giving titles of respect. It was laid on George Fox that these conventional customs were a lie and a sham, and the whole body of his followers thereupon renounced them, as a sacrifice to truth, and so that their acts and the spirit they professed might be more in accord. 

“When the Lord sent me into the world” says Fox in his Journal, “he forbade me to put off my hat to any, high or low: and I was required to ‘thee’ and ‘thou’ all men and women, without any respect to rich or poor, great or small.  And as I traveled up and down, I was not to bid people Good-morning or Good-evening, neither might I bow or scrape with my leg to any one. This made the sects and professions rage. Oh! the rage that was in the priests, magistrates, professors, and people of all sorts: and especially in priests and professors: for though ‘thou’ to a single person was according to their accidence and grammar rules, and according to the Bible, yet they could not bear to hear it: and because I could not put off my hat to them, it set them all into a rage. … Oh! the scorn, heat, and fury that arose! Oh! the blows, punchings, beatings, and imprisonments that we underwent for not putting off our hats to men! Some had their hats violently plucked off and thrown away, so that they quite lost them. The bad language and evil usage we received on this account is hard to be expressed, besides the danger we were sometimes in of losing our lives for this matter, and that by the great professors of Christianity, who thereby discovered they were not true believers. And though it was but a small thing in the eye of man, yet a wonderful confusion it brought among all professors and priests: but blessed be the Lord, many came to see the vanity of that custom of putting off hats to men, and felt the weight of Truth’s testimony against it.”

James follows this with a passage from the autobiography of Thomas Elwood, who was at one time secretary to John Milton. James concludes, “These early Quakers were Puritans indeed. The slightest inconsistency between profession and deed jarred some of them to active protest.” [pg. 294] James then continues with an excerpt from John Woolman, an eighteenth century American Friend.

James’s other extended quotation from Fox’s journal is one that many of us would choose in an introduction to Quakerism.  Here, Fox describes the moment when he received the inspiration that launched the Religious Society of Friends.

[pg 335-7]

But in this course of lectures ecclesiastical institutions hardly concern us at all.   The religious experience which we are studying is that which lives itself out within the private breast.  First hand individual experience of this kind has always appeared as a heretical sort of innovation to those who witnessed its birth.  Naked comes it into the world and lonely; and it has always, for a time at least, driven him who had it into the wilderness, often into the literal wilderness out of doors, where the Buddha, Jesus, Mohammed, St Francis, George Fox, and so many others had to go. George Fox expresses well this isolation; and I can do no better at this point than read to you a page from his Journal, referring to the period of his youth when religion began to ferment within him seriously.

“I fasted much,” Fox says, “walked abroad in solitary places many days, and often took my Bible, and sat in hollow trees and lonesome places until night came on; and frequently in the night walked mournfully about by myself; for I was a man of sorrows in the time of the first workings of the Lord in me.

“During all this time I was never joined in profession of religion with any, but gave up myself to the Lord, having forsaken all evil company, taking leave of father and mother, and all other relations, and traveled up and down as a stranger on the earth, which way the Lord inclined my heart; taking a chamber to myself in the town where I came, and tarrying sometimes more, sometimes less in a place: for I durst not stay long in a place, being afraid both of professor and profane, lest, being a tender young man, I should be hurt by conversing much with either. For which reason I kept much as a stranger, seeking heavenly wisdom and getting knowledge from the Lord; and was brought off from outward things, to rely on the Lord alone. As I had forsaken the priests, so I left the separate preachers also, and those called the most experienced people; for I saw there was none among them all that could speak to my condition. And when all my hopes in them and in all men were gone so that I had nothing outwardly to help me, nor could tell what to do; then, oh then, I heard a voice which said, ‘There is one, even Jesus Christ, that can speak to thy condition’. When I heard it my heart did leap for joy. Then the Lord let me see why there was none upon the earth that could speak to my condition. I had not fellowship with any people, priests, nor professors, nor any sort of corruptions. I was afraid of all carnal talk and talkers, for I could see nothing but corruptions.  When I was in the deep, under all shut up, I could not believe that I should ever overcome; my troubles, my sorrows, and my temptations were so great that I often thought I should have despaired, I was so tempted. But when Christ opened to me how he was tempted by the same devil, and had overcome him, and had bruised his head; and that through him and his power, life, grace, and spirit, I should overcome also, I had confidence in him. If I had had a king’s diet, palace, and attendance, all would have been as nothing; for nothing gave me comfort but the Lord by his power. I saw professors, priests, and people were whole and at ease in that condition which was my misery, and they loved that which I would have been rid of. But the Lord did stay my desires upon himself, and my care was cast upon him alone. ”

George Fox: Journal, Philadelphia, 1800, pp. 59-61, abridged.

A genuine first hand religious experience like this is bound to be a heterodoxy to its witnesses, the prophet appearing as a mere lonely madman.  If his doctrine prove contagious enough to spread to any others, it becomes a definite and labeled heresy. But if it then still prove contagious enough to triumph over persecution, it becomes itself an orthodoxy; and when a religion has become an orthodoxy, its day of inwardness is over: the spring is dry; the faithful live at second hand exclusively and stone the prophets in their turn. The new church, in spite of whatever human goodness it may foster, can be henceforth counted on as a staunch ally in every attempt to stifle the spontaneous religious spirit, and to stop all later bubblings of the fountain from which in purer days it drew its own supply of inspiration. 

This book contains many passages that are just as provocative as those above. I hope this taste has whetted your appetite, because I plan to write more about James’s ideas.

Science and Faith: An Encounter with A Brief History of Time

  I have just finished rereading A Brief History of Time, by Stephen Hawking. What a marvelous book! Hawking explains ideas beautifully, almost convincing me that I understand what he is saying.

Actually, there is a lot in this little book that I don’t really understand.  For example, I don’t get quantum mechanics at all, but since Feynman said “nobody understands quantum mechanics”, I don’t feel too bad about it.  Though I can follow along with Hawking’s clearly written presentation, I know that behind the curtain is a whole bunch of mysterious math, which I am grateful that he left that out. He could say pretty much anything, I would accept it. And he says some pretty outlandish stuff:

There are a number of different varieties of quarks: there are thought to be at least six “flavors”, which we call up, down, strange, charmed, bottom, and top. Each flavor comes in the three “colors”, red, green, and blue. [pg. 65]

Real [as opposed to virtual] gravitons make up what classical physicists would call gravitational waves, which are very weak — and so difficult to detect that they have never yet been observed. [pg. 70]

The fact that confinement prevents one from observing an isolated quark or gluon might seem to make the whole notion of quarks and gluons as particles somewhat metaphysical. [pg. 73]

The suggestion is that the other dimensions are curved up into a space of very small size, something like a million million million million millionth of an inch. [pg. 163]

This is science? I can imagine a Monty Python skit giving a better explanation of some of this than I could. To those of us who have not made the observations for ourselves and do not understand the underlying mathematics, this stuff is pretty close to revealed Truth. We accept it on faith, faith in the high priests of the scientific establishment, faith that if there are flaws in any of this, the experts will find them and come up with something closer to the truth.

   I read Hawking’s book in part as an antidote to the Answers in Genesis website, where I had been spending far too much time since I had started this blog. For the most part, I understand what these young earth creationists are saying all too well, usually well enough to refute it. Needless to say, I am not prepared to challenge much of anything Hawking says.

My point is this: A Brief History of Time, I believe, even though I don’t really comprehend it, while Answers in Genesis, I fully understand but reject out of hand. I think the young earth creationists are ridiculous. But, is my own position not equally so? Accepting Hawking as I do, can I not understand how someone could accept Ken Ham and his reading of the Bible in the same way?

To the layman, or to the young student, science is handed down from on high. Yes, I did experiments in science lab, sometimes even getting them to work. However, if the experiment didn’t work out as it was supposed to, I assumed that I did something wrong and accepted the bad grade. Scientific theory remained intact, unaffected by my actual results.

Especially when it comes to scientific work on the fundamental properties of the universe, there is much that we who are not experts accept on trust. Fundamentalist Christians put their trust in the Bible. They have devised Young Earth Creationism in an attempt to hold fast to the religion of their forefathers and reconcile a particular reading of the Bible with the observations of modern science. Despite its sometimes tortured logic, this pseudo science is easier for some people to buy into than the abstruse concepts that Hawking describes, no matter how clear his prose.  To the fundamentalist, Young Earth Creationism simply has more truthiness.

Orion Nebula, from Hubble

Part of what has made Hawking’s book so popular is that he deals explicitly with the theological implications of his work. Although he mentions that the Catholic Church has declared the Big Bang compatible with the Bible, he is acutely aware of that he leaves little room for the creator God of traditional Christianity.

One possible answer is to say that God chose the initial configuration of the universe for reasons that we cannot hope to understand. This would certainly have been within the power of an omnipotent being, but if he had started it off in such an incomprehensible way, why did he choose to let it evolve according to laws that we could understand? The whole history of science has been the gradual realization that events do not happen in an arbitrary manner, but that they reflect a certain underlying order, which may or may not be divinely inspired. … There ought to be some principle that picks out one initial state, and hence one model, to represent our universe.
[pg. 122-123]

There would be no singularities at which the laws of science broke down and no edge of space-time at which one would have to appeal to God or some new law to set the boundary conditions for space-time ….. The universe would be self-contained and not affected by anything outside itself. It would neither be created nor destroyed. It would just BE. [pg. 136]

Though Hawking carefully avoids ever denying the existence of a Creator, any explanation of the world that relies on the existence of such a God seems, for him, to be a failure of human understanding. It is here that I begin to be able to challenge what he says. Take, especially the final paragraph:

However, if we do discover a complete theory, it should in time be understandable in broad principle by everyone, not just a few scientists. Then we shall all, philosophers, scientists, and just ordinary people, be able to take part in the discussion of why it is that we and the universe exist. If we find the answer to that, it would be the ultimate triumph of human reason — for then we would know the mind of God. [pg. 175]

This is a beautiful sentiment and a powerful conclusion to this marvelous little book, but it is pure hubris. I believe the scientific method to be a powerful tool. With this tool, we are perhaps even capable of discovering a complete theory of the physics underlying our universe. As marvelous as that triumph would be, I do not think it will help us much with the day to day problems of life. Human reason has it’s limits, limits that fall well short of knowing whatever it is that we refer to as the Mind of God. For mere mortals like ourselves, that will remain a mystery.

“Science without religion is lame, religion without science is blind.” – Albert Einstein