Will Humanity Survive Religion?. W. Royce Clark
wisdom? He also said that there is only the “whole” since everything that happens came from what was before and would not have been so had the “before” been different.43 One cannot pick and choose from life and history little snippets that one likes, since they cannot be removed from the whole. But Buddhism knew that centuries before as it spoke of “dependent co-origination” and “emptiness.” The whole picture is great by virtue only of all the parts that create a coherent whole, and Whole finally takes priority, just as any single piece in a puzzle is not an end-in-itself but finds meaning within the whole picture. How do we get there?
It requires not oversimplifying the past, present, or future, not detaching parts of life when the results seem to offend us, not to live in a dream of perfection that is totally unreal, and not to confine ourselves to a single perspective. We need to broaden our perspectives through education, worldwide travel, and developing real friends among those in different cultures. Even marriage across cultures and religions may be the only really effective forms of bridging the gulf of racial–cultural exclusiveness and religious-divisiveness. Without these, cultural difference can become exaggerated, with caricatures of other ethnic and religious groups becoming silly, hyperbolic, or even outright lies with a demonic effect. Those who are in power can pass laws that favor only them, restrict immigration of significantly different “others,” utilize laws and incarceration more prolifically against the different others, and even engage finally in an extermination of those others, the “strangers,” the “evil” ones.44 Richard L. Rubenstein’s brilliant and life-transforming After Auschwitz in its second edition is a gripping analysis of the relation of religion to genocide.45 The Holocaust was not simply a political device, but its ground was centuries of anti-Semitism within the Christian faith and culture, even in Germany blaming the Jews for their God displacing the Teutonic gods, and Hitler taking over the German Christian Church. In Holocaust conferences, Rabbi Rubenstein even referred to that as a “holy war” or religiously motivated war. Of course, there were many other factors involved in what the Third Reich called the “Jewish Problem,” such as race, politics, and economics, but no factor was more powerful than centuries of Christians seeing the Jews as “God-killers.” This “bifurcating” of humanity, an Absolute, exclusive inclusiveness is inhumane, a form of “superiority” as sinister as ethnic, racial, sexual, or any other.
It did not die with the Inquisition. Even though the “end of white Christian America” was predicted in 2016,46 the result of the election that year by virtue of being supported by white evangelical Christians and the subsequent rise of pro-white “hate” groups in the United States shows a rebirth of ideology of the twins of racial and religious bifurcation of humanity.
Conclusion
It is quite interesting to see that even “Ezra” challenged God in that old apocalypse. In the name of humanity, who will I challenge, what alleged Absolute will I doubt, and who will I be willing to irritate over the presumptuousness of each religion equating its people with the saved while it considers everyone else as worthless and beyond our consideration? Does “God” really tell us not to be concerned about others’ potential or real suffering, as in IV Ezra, even though those others were no more depraved or fallible that Ezra himself? Or is it time for the “camel” to take this burden of exclusive inclusivism to the lonely desert and dump it?
Christian theologian Dorothee Soelle insisted that so long as anyone is “unsaved,” to that degree, all others remain that way as well. That is the whole, which religions feel so uncomfortable allowing, as Nietzsche said, the only possible meaning of “redemption” would be redemption of the whole. Soelle accused the predominant Christian theology as being far too “individually” concerned rather than seeing the vital importance of our place in community. She also raised the question of whether those in economically secure countries have not become preoccupied with “having” or “possessing” instead of relishing their very “being.” She posed the challenges as a choice between cynicism and acceptance of the others, of death or life, and this means, both for the religious and nonreligious, that it is not merely a private choice but very public. She emphasized that our first-world cultures are overpowering the others with their egoistic capitalistic ideology of selfishness, extreme individualism, isolationism, and cynicism—especially cynicism, even “structures of cynicism”—in the tendency to define ourselves by what we have rather than who we are and by our treating other humans as mere objects to be used.47
The Dalai Lama has indicated much the same about the bifurcating influence of the most developed countries that cannot satisfy the “inner need” of humanity.48 This requires us to redefine ourselves as Richard Rorty says, to develop a greater sensitivity to others, to be able to hear in their cry, real life, in novels or movies, or even see our own cruelty in others’ cruelty. This is the way to become more human as well as unite what should never have been theoretically divided. In this way, our “we” is greatly enlarged, and “they” or “them” is greatly reduced, as Rorty proposed.49 That is the social solidarity answering the contingency of our being and our language.
The question is whether the religious institutions’ exclusiveness has outweighed the benefits of one’s being “included” within the group? Is it possible to feel uniquely fortunate in one’s relationships without feeling superior to others or without thinking that for some reason, the others must have deserved being less fortunate?50 Is it possible that we have oversimplified life and humanity to think there was some obvious way of dividing it that would do full justice to everyone’s lives in their extreme complexity? Is it possible that one raised on such a diet of the obvious or even ultimate bifurcation of humanity could move beyond Ezra’s cognitive dissonance and, as Nietzsche’s “camel,” take this “burden” to the loneliest of lonely deserts and dump it there? Is it not time to be unburdened from that old sense of two worlds, two humanities of which one is of value but not the other? That would also be helpful to all those who undertake to minister to others in the name of the religion, moving beyond a self-destructive if not relation-destructive cognitive rigidity. This kind of future would also help alleviate what Karl Barth often called humans’ secret desire to be god—which might have been the problem from the outset of human history—an unrealistic hubris of humans dividing humanity under the name of “God.”
There are also many other “burdens” one’s spirit bears, which we must also examine. The next one continues the issue of “cognitive dissonance” in a very different but general area.
NOTES
1. Pure Land Buddhism began within Mahayana in India, then China, and finally became an independent sect under Honen in Japan in the twelfth century. It has many forms, but as a form of Mahayana, it believes the teachings of the Buddha must be taught, that humans seem incapable of Dharma, and so need help from the Compassionate One. By various means of keeping Amitabha Buddha before one’s mind, one may escape reincarnation by being reborn in the Pure Land.
2. The prolific twentieth-century New Testament scholar, Rudolf Bultmann, explained the rise of eschatology as emerging when a people are desperate and have no other hope, yet that hope or faith somehow enables them, despite all the cosmological paraphernalia in their apocalypses, to find the “presence of eternity.” See Bultmann, History and Eschatology, The Presence of Eternity (New York: Harper Torchbook, 1962).
3. The Fourth Book of Ezra, from which this quotation is taken, may be even less known among lay religious people than Habakkuk. The latter is one of the canonical prophets (i.e., included in the Christian “Old Testament”), dating from very early sixth century BCE (or BC), supplying a three-part theodicy at the height of the Babylonian power. On the other hand, the Fourth Book of Ezra is a non- or extracanonical apocalyptic theodicy belonging to the Pseudepigrapha of the Old Testament, dating around the end of the first century CE (AD). While it is a defense of God, the irony is that the compassion Ezra himself manifests for the “lost” seems even at times to exceed the compassion attributed to God. See James Charlesworth, ed., The Old Testament Pseudepigrapha, Vol l (Garden City: Doubleday and Co. Inc., 1983), pp. 517–59, esp. pp. 521, 542–44.
4. Bultmann, see note 2 above.
5. This is one of the strongest appeals of a religion as