The Incredulity of Saint Thomas, Caravaggio, 1602
I would like to post an expanded version of a short article that I originally shared in November 2013. It fits well with the Easter season. The original title is My Very Own Historical Jesus and can also be found in the archives in its original form. Please feel free to comment. Continue reading
Filed under Christianity, Origins, Religious Controversy, Revelation
Hieronymus Bosch, late 15th century, “Garden of Earthly Delights” detail
Anyone studying the religions of the world will encounter from time to time the notion that all religion is somehow fundamentally anti-human; all religion seems to denounce and find fault with life-on-planet-Earth.
Are there any religions that do not reject our earthly existence?
The translation of the title (above) is: “The World, the Flesh and the Devil”
Filed under Origins, Religious Literacy, Revelation
Aboriginal tribesmen of Australia
The student who is truly attracted to the study of religion will benefit from the enormous number of sacred stories of indigenous religions collected by anthropologists. The roots of religion pass backward from ancient religion through indigenous religion into prehistoric religion. There are hundreds of living indigenous religions and thousands that have faded into extinction. Continue reading
Filed under Origins, Religious Literacy
Interfaith council, publicity photo depicting: Rabbi Yona Metzger, Rabbi Shlomo Amar, Grand Mufti Muhammad Ahmad Hussein, and Catholic and Orthodox representatives
Now that the smoke has cleared, I would like to reference the heated discussion between writer Sam Harris and producer, director, actor Ben Affleck. Mr. Affleck got very annoyed as both religious and secular ecumenical norms were being so crassly neglected by the atheist and the politically incorrect.
Ecumenicism is a movement promoting cooperation and unity among differing religious groups. Ecumenical and interfaith movements have grown up alongside of and are entwined in the academic study of religion and have had a strong influence on how we speak publicly about religion. Continue reading
Filed under Religious Controversy, Religious Literacy
When Socrates refers to ‘Hades’ in Plato’s dialogue Phaedo, he describes it as the afterlife reserved for the good; and he describes the good man as the ‘philosopher.’
Bust of Socrates, Vatican Collection
Throughout Antiquity, there were many variations on the theme of life after death, all of which predate Christianity and Islam. The insistance on a “final judgement” in both Christianity and Islam comes directly from the early civilizations of Mesopotamia, the Mediterranean, and the Levant.
Filed under Origins, Religious Literacy, Revelation
It is standard these days to describe Shi’ah Islam as a splinter group that formed very early in the history of Islam as a result of disagreement over the rightful successor to the Prophet Muhammad. But the student of religion should consider this explanation as part of the sacred history (traditional narrative) of Islam and not as historical fact.
The newly restored (Shi’ah) Al Askari Shrine, north of Baghdad: originally built in the tenth century, destroyed in Sunni – Shi’ah conflict in 2006-7.
Filed under Origins, Religious Controversy, Religious Literacy
When studying religion, either on your own or in university, it is helpful to recognize that there are, almost always, two types of literature associated with a religion, that is, if the religion has a written tradition.
detail of unnamed sacred Hindu texts from collection of prof Klaus Klostermaier
The two types of religious texts are 1) sacred scripture, and 2) non-sacred, but cherished, traditional writings and commentaries.
George Whitefield, preacher of the Christian revivals that became the ‘Great Awakening’ in colonial US.
Many Christian churches of North America have their origins in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and my students often asked me whether these are best studied as Modern Religion or as part of Christianity.
The introductory class on religion is not the place to memorize the hundreds of different sects of Christianity or their origins. Later, when studying Christianity in depth, a student can research the details of sectarianism in European churches and the continued splintering of denominations in the Americas.
Filed under Christianity, modern religion, Religious Literacy
I recently went to a screening of a film entitled Meditation, Creativity, Peace for the promotion of the David Lynch Foundation For Consciousness-Based Education and World Peace. The film was put together by film students and featured David Lynch as he toured and talked about Transcendental Meditation.
For anyone interested in understanding religion, in an attempt to start with clarity, I recommend a category of ‘Modern Religion.’ Any religion that has a founder or foundation after the beginning of the nineteenth century should be arranged for study in the category of Modern Religion.
Filed under Easy Categories, Origins, Religious Literacy
One of the best things you can do for yourself as an honest student of religion is to throw away the common concept of a ‘religious cult’.
The porch of caryatids at the Erechtheum in Athens, the civic cult of Athena.
The student who has accepted my notion of Modern Religion and has discarded the concept of religious cult (or ‘secte’ in French) as a rogue religion, will be able to explore these religions, whether or not these religions function within accepted laws or cultural norms and regardless of their modern expression, denomination, or relationship to the state.
The ‘cult of a god’ is a term that goes to the heart of all religion, both the living traditions and those that are extinct.
Filed under Origins, Religious Controversy, Religious Literacy
To help you remember the many and diverse religions of the world, my seven categories of all religions past and present offer you assistance and support.
The Mahikari-no-Waza Temple at Takayama, Japan.
Modern Religion – the last of my categories – allows you to easily isolate the more recent religions from their ancient inspiration. A modern religion is any and all religion that has a founder or foundation after the beginning of the nineteenth century. Modern religion contains at least one, but most often several, of the following: Continue reading
image above: detail of Abraham and Isaac on the way to the Place of Sacrifice Marc Chagall, 1931
It is endlessly troublesome to create helpful categories for the myriad religions of the world.
The centuries of hostility between the so-called Abrahamic religions originate from their competitive claims to the Hebrew prophetic tradition and from their mutually exclusive claims to the revelations attributed to Abraham and the canon of Israelite prophets. I’m not sure why this category title ever felt right to anyone, religious or otherwise. Continue reading
My religion told me about your religion! The student of religion is very often discouraged and deterred by the discovery that all religion spends so much time and effort commenting upon, and criticizing the religions of others.
For the good Muslim, it is God who speaks in the Qur’an; it is God who writes the poetry of the Qur’an, and in this poem God mentions the Jewish people and the Christians by name. To be more precise, God devotes more than twenty per cent of the Qur’an to talking about Judaism, Christianity and other religions.
God discusses the failings, or otherwise, of the Sabeans, possibly the Mandaeans, and of numerous ancient religions of various Arabic tribes.
Filed under Religious Controversy, Religious Literacy
Most all religions have at one time or another described themselves as a path to truth and a recipe for happiness. As these recipes are believed to come from a spokesperson for the divine, it’s fair to say that some part of religion consists of a ‘how to’ set of instructions, like a recipe, revealed, as it were, from the Divine Chef.
Filed under Origins, Religious Literacy, Revelation
The terminology we choose in our study of religion can block us from looking closely into the various topics we are hoping to investigate. Uncritical and wonted use of words like ‘magic’, ‘superstition’ and ‘pagan’ consistently send us off in the wrong direction.
The most familiar of these words is the term ‘spiritual’. We sometimes use the term spiritual as synonymous with ‘religious’ and at other times to indicate ‘ethereal’ or ‘non-material’ and at other times to indicate ‘mind and emotion’. Often we wander through these various meanings without taking much care. Continue reading
Filed under Religious Literacy
During my years of teaching, the thoughtful student often asked whether Buddhism could be excluded from the category of religion altogether as there are often no gods or concept of divinity to be found in many expressions of this rather elastic religion. 
In many books on religion the authors feel compelled to qualify Buddhism as more of a philosophy than a religion, or to single out Zen Buddhism and similar sects as expressions of Buddhism that are somehow separate from Buddhist religious practice. Continue reading
Filed under Origins, Revelation
In the fall of 2006, the Pope of the Catholic Church, in a public discourse, quoted a medieval Byzantine emperor who had declared (hundreds of years ago) that Islam had added nothing new to the world of religious thought.
Implied in the statement was the idea that much of Islam is found in the beliefs of those who were assimilated into the Arab Empire and that Islam had added only the oppression of the new rulers.
This quotation caused an outpouring of indignation, with many voices claiming to have been sorely insulted. Of course, the original statement from the late 1300s can tell us quite a bit about the conflicts between empires, the nature of religious controversy and something of the Byzantine mind. Continue reading
Filed under Religious Controversy
Religion and the Honest Student 