Chaitanya Jyothi Museum Opening, 2000

RAMANAM
In the Name of The Father, and of The Son and of The Holy Spirit, Amen.

Countrymen,

ORBIS NON SUFFICIT
SOLUS DEUS SUFFICIT

The inability of the US Constitution to protect religion from profanization and demonization and therefore society from hustlers and demoniacs claiming the authority of religion — because everyone then knew, well enough anyhow, what religion is and is not — gives rise to the thought of a Constitutional Amendment which would address this now-danger — and phenomenologically rather than doctrinally so as to admit to legal formulation.  Thus this:

Religion is the ritual one enacts in transcendence of religion.  Ritual expresses the reunion of that which had come undone.  The goal of religion is freedom from religion because religion obsoletes itself by succeeding.  With respect to religion, the inalienable right of liberty is firstly freedom from religion and secondly freedom to enact the rituals of a religion.  Government shall neither abridge nor infringe that right and shall protect those freedoms.

Update 1: A phenomenology of genuine and demonic religions is here.  A phenomenology of genuine and demonic clergy and scholars is here.  A phenomenology of the plurality of civilizations is here.

Update 2: My friend, historian Dr. Marek Jan Chodakiewicz, notes, correctly:

Alas, this can only pass within the context of strict originalism.
Religion was taken for granted by the Founding Fathers, like oxygen.
Nowadays your proposal will be attacked as attempting to undermine the division of the Church and state.

I replied, with edits here:

Indeed, and one is ready for that attack with a better one: there is Constitutional division between civil and religious law but not, phenomenologically, between the activities of government and those of religion. The founders, including Jefferson, the division/separation man, well-knew and oft spoke to that effect. The Constitution forbids establishment (as in State Religion, uniting civil and religious law) but not normal human activities, which are seamless and cross-linked across the entire human enterprise: religion, culture and morality.

The real purpose of the rhetoric to separate/divide church and state is to deny the dimension of spirit which humans only among creatures inhabit. The attack on that denial runs along the lines of demonstrating its phenomenological poverty and petulant pigheadedness.

You are right, one must be prepared for that attack. Actually, the proposed amendment is already a pre-emptive attack against it, putting the attack you mention in a reactive rather than an active stance.

The entire Caliphist world would shriek at the proposed amendment and hunt down its proponents. Their motives would be political and financial. The entire Anglican, Protestant and Reformed worlds would at least shriek. Their motives would be financial. Roman Catholics probably would disagree over, support and attack the proposed amendment in ways I cannot see to anticipate. Their motives would be numerous and not all low. Hindus, other than their puritans, would support the proposed amendment.

Update 3: Five descriptions of religion and its phenomenology:

From Pensieri – I:

Religion is a set of deeds in response to a gift.  Happiness is that gift.  Religion does not produce happiness.  Happiness produces religion.  First happiness, then religion.  Religion happens because happiness does.  Religion cannot cause happiness.  Those who dislike religion are unhappy. That is why they dislike religion.  Those immersed in happiness experience duty as God and work as worship, all duty and all work.

From To Religion Parks From Religion Wars:

Religion is a basic function of life involving the polarity of freedom and destiny.

Religion is the self-transcendence of life in the dimension of spirit.

Religion is the point at which the answer to the quest for the unambiguous is received.

Religion is man’s response to the power of Grace, effective through the mystery and miracle of revelation, re-binding together (from Latin religare) that which is paralyzed, unbounded, dangling and therefore useless. Religion is man’s response to the initiative of God reuniting man with his self, his world and Himself.

From Apologia Ecclesiae: The Church Answers A Common Word Between Us and You:

The purpose of religion is to reunite that which is estranged and sublimate that which is ambiguous. The experience of reunion is salvation (Latin salus, health).  The experience of sublimation is eternal life (Latin aevum, life force, Élan Vital [Aristotle, dynamis, potentiality] + German leib, body, form [Aristotle, energeia, actuality]).

All religions come from a single source, the Divine Life self-revealed throughout a myriad of times, climes and events. The root of life is God. The vital force of being which is life is the Divine Life. The root of being is Being Itself (Latin esse ipsum). The structure of being is the Tree of Life. The structure of being and the power of being are one and the same.

Existence is estranged from the experience of its essential unity with Being Itself, with the Life of God. Life works against itself, denies its root, attacks its nature and forbids its own fulfillment. Yet it also drives for its root, delights in its nature and anticipates its fulfillment: diligentibus Deum omnia cooperantur in bonum (Romans 8:28: For those who delight diligently in God, all activity is good and goes to good.)

Existence participates in ambiguity because it is estranged from its divine origin and nature. Life, whose essential nature is bliss, seeks the conditioned, it yearns for the tawdry, the fleeting, the unsatisfying. Yet it also demands its essential nature, it grasps for truth, it is eager for nobility and the elevation of taste and feeling: beatus vir qui non abiit in consilio impiorum et in via peccatorum non stetit et in cathedra pestilentiae non sedit sed in lege Domini voluntas eius et in lege eius meditabitur die ac nocte (Psalm 1: Happy is the man who does not associate with the impious or live among the evil-doers or take counsel or refreshment from mockers. Instead, he makes it the purpose of his being to fulfill God’s wish, and to discern God’s wish he delves ceaseless into the depths of his own heart and the abyss of his own being.)

Religions are started, maintained, fulfilled and become distorted in the dialectical process comprising the responses of individuals and groups to a self-revelation of the Divine Life, of God. Religions become distorted because the dialectical character of their Sitz im Leben – German: setting in the whole of life; the being there of a thing; Heidegger’s Dasein in the abyss of its ontic root; the full congregation of consequences of being thrown into existence (Heidegger) by Being Itself (God) — compels them to participate in the general conditions of existence, specifically estrangement and ambiguity.

With this participation comes the potential of distortion of the character and purpose of religion and the not infrequent actuality of such distortions operating not as anti-religion but in the beguilement of religion: The devil hath power to assume a pleasing shape.

I know my course. The spirit that I have seen
May be the devil: and the devil hath power
To assume a pleasing shape; yea, and perhaps
Out of my weakness and my melancholy,
As he is very potent with such spirits,
Abuses me to damn me: I’ll have grounds
More relative than this: the play’s the thing
Wherein I’ll catch the conscience of the king.

William Shakespeare, Hamlet Prince of Denmark, Act II, Scene ii

Just so with religions, or what sometimes passes for them.

All distortions of religion bear witness to their own religious illegitimacy in two pieces of evidence:

• They demand submission to a body of law or a structure of belief.
• They denounce the legitimacy of legitimate religions.

Throughout history, revelations (Latin revelare, to pull back the veil) of the common source of religions are made by a concrete presence of the Divine Life. These revelations, which are Divine self-revelations, along with the responses to them by individuals and groups, are tangible events of history. They are historical content. They are kairoi occurring in chronoi.

(Kairoi: Greek: time as auspicious constellations of events uniting power and meaning; historical tipping points governed by the inner telos [Greek: aim, purpose, intent of movement] of history to drive forwards [self-generation] and upwards [self-transcendence]; in the singular: kairos.  Chronoi: Greek: time as duration, the ticking clock, a sequence of events in history as ordinarily understood and expected; in the singular, chronos.)

From My Last Sermon: Christianity Free Of Religion:

Religion-less Christianity is being Christ-like but not religious. No prayers, no worship, no acts of supererogation, no duties, no hierarchies, no laws, no rituals, no judicatories, no meetings, no projects, no good-deed-doing, no moralisms … unless such activities occur in dolce far niente. And that would be naturally, not under a whip or even just the slightest hint of compulsion, external or internal.

What a person does naturally is sufficient prayer and worship. What is done in the sweetness of utter freedom pleases God. Even the Devil and his minions win His Grace when they act in utter freedom, in dolce far niente. Religion-less Christianity is Christianity in freedom from impulse, one way or another. Christianity free of religion is the phenomenon Bonhoeffer experienced and notably named religionless Christianity (religionsloses Christentum). Though he did not use that language, I think it is the phenomenon Teilhard observed — naming it Noosphere — in the geological and archaeological record.

Christianity free of religion — in dolce far niente — is the phenomenon Tillich, in his last lecture, names Religion of the Concrete Spirit. A bit Germanic, but it does the job.

Listen to Callas or Gould or Richter (either one) and you will hear music just rolling out free of striving … music in dolce far niente. Or watch Secretariat at Belmont.

From The Reverend Dr. Paul Tillich Answers The Demonic Dr. Harvey Cox

Here is Tillich’s answer, two year ahead of its publication, to Cox’s The Secular City:

Systematic Theology
Volume III
Part IV, Life and the Spirit
Section III, The Divine Spirit and the Ambiguities of Life
Subject 4, The Conquest of Religion by the Spiritual Presence and the Protestant Principle
Pages, 243-245
The University of Chicago Press, 1963

In so far as the Spiritual Presence is effective in the churches and their individual members, it conquers religion as a particular function of the human spirit. When contemporary theology rejects the name “religion” for Christianity, it is in the line of New Testament thought. The coming of the Christ is not the foundation of a new religion but the transformation of the old state of things. Consequently, the church is not a religious community but the anticipatory representation of a new reality, the New Being as community. In the same way, the individual member of the church is not a religious personality but the anticipatory representative of a new reality, the New Being as personality. Everything said heretofore about the churches and the life of their members points in the direction of the conquest of religion. Conquest of religion does not mean secularization but rather the closing of the gap between the religious and the secular by removing both through the Spiritual Presence. This is the meaning of faith as the state of being grasped by that which concerns us ultimately and not as a set of beliefs, even if the object of belief is a divine being. This is the meaning of love as reunion of the separated in all dimensions, including that of the spirit, and not as an act of negation of all dimensions for the sake of a transcendence without dimensions.

In so far as religion is conquered by the Spiritual Presence, profanization and demonization are conquered. The inner-religious profanization of religion, its transformation into a sacred mechanism of hierarchical structure, doctrine and ritual, is resisted by the participation of church members in the Spiritual Community, which is the dynamic essence of the churches and of which the churches are both the existential representation and the existential distortion. The freedom of the Spirit breaks through mechanizing profanization — as it did in the creative moments of the Reformation. In doing so it also resists the secular form of profanization, for the secular as secular lives from the protest against the profanization of religion within itself. If this protest becomes meaningless, the functions of morality and culture are opened again for the ultimate, the aim of the self-transcendence of life.

Demonization is also conquered in so far as religion is conquered by the Spiritual Presence. We have distinguished between the demonic that is hidden — the affirmation of a greatness which leads to the tragic conflict with the “great itself” — and the openly demonic — the affirmation of a finite as infinite in the name of the holy. Both the tragic and the demonic are conquered in principle by the Spiritual Presence. Christianity has always claimed that neither the death of the Christ nor the suffering of Christians is tragic, because neither is rooted in the affirmation of its greatness but in the participation in the predicament of estranged man to which each belongs and does not belong. If Christianity teaches that the Christ and the martyrs suffered “innocently,” this means that their suffering is not based on the tragic guilt of self-affirmed greatness but on their willingness to participate in the tragic consequences of human estrangement.

Self-affirmed greatness in the realm of the holy is demonic. This is true of the claim of a church to represent in its structure the Spiritual Community unambiguously. The consequent will to unlimited power over all things holy and secular is in itself the judgment against a church which makes this claim. The same is true of individuals who, as adherents of a group making such a claim, become self-assured, fanatical, and destructive of life in others and the meaning of life within themselves. But in so far as the divine Spirit conquers religion, it prevents the claim to absoluteness by both the churches and their members. Where the divine Spirit is effective, the claim of a church to represent God to the exclusion of all other churches is rejected. The freedom of the Spirit resists it. And when the divine Spirit is effective, a church member’s claim to an exclusive possession of the truth is undercut by the witness of the divine Spirit to his fragmentary as well as ambiguous participation in the truth. The Spiritual Presence excludes fanaticism, because in the presence of God no man can boast about his grasp of God. No one can grasp that by which he is grasped — the Spiritual Presence.

In other connections I have called this truth the “Protestant principle.” It is here that the Protestant principle has its place in the theological system. The Protestant principle is an expression of the conquest of religion by the Spiritual Presence and consequently an expression of the victory over the ambiguities of religion, its profanization, and its demonization. It is Protestant, because it protests against the tragic-demonic self-elevation of religion and liberates religion from itself for the other functions of the human spirit [culture and morality], at the same time liberating these functions from their self-seclusion against the manifestations of the ultimate. The Protestant principle (which is a manifestation of the prophetic Spirit) is not restricted to the churches of the Reformation or to any other church, being an expression of the Spiritual Community. It has been betrayed by every church, including the churches of the Reformation, but it is also effective in every church as the power which prevents profanization and demonization from destroying the Christian churches completely. It also is not enough; it needs the “Catholic substance,” the concrete embodiment of the Spiritual Presence; but it is the criterion of the demonization (and profanization) of such embodiment. It is the expression of the victory of the Spirit over religion.

In my opinion, these are the most apropos, for present conditions, and inspiring words Tillich wrote.

Systematic Theology, Vols. I, II, III

The Rev. Dr. Paulus Johannes Tillich

Update 4: From Power Line: Science and Scientism.

Update 5: The Blindness Of The Ideologically Bound.

Update 6: Why The American Church Should Go Off The Grid.

Update 7: Reality has caught up with King Abdullah of Jordan, at least superficially.

Update 8: Jack Cashill on Neo-Puritans

Update 9: Dr. Ben Carson for protection of religious freedom.

Update 10: Rush Limbaugh on what’s actually happening

Update 11: Richard Fernandez: The Hoarders

Update 12:
kevinstroup
Not believing in religion is not the same as not believing in God. You can be spiritual without being religious.

David R. Graham to kevinstroup
Well, Tillich is famous for saying that Christianity is the world’s great anti-religion religion.  I add Hinduism to that description, but that will be a bridge too far for many at this time.

Dragblacker to David R. Graham
I’m not sure I follow.  Does it mean that Christianity and Hinduism have elements in them that lead some people to eschew religion entirely?

David R. Graham to Dragblacker
Yes, that is what it means.  It also is in Hebrew Prophetism.  Religion is a means, not an end, much less the end.  Like all means, it is fraught with danger because it can lead either Godward or Godaway because there are right ways to be religious and wrong ways.  In fact, far more wrong ways than right ways.  Far, far more.  Religion is very dangerous in the absence of experienced and skilled guidance.  Religion (Latin re + ligare) means binding up that which has become unbound.  Once a body is repaired, its ligaments (ligare) grown or tied back together, it has no need for the doctor who or the procedures which repaired it.

Lawman45 to David R. Graham
Tillich is correct.  Christianity, shorn of the Elmer Gantrys of the world, is a great handbook to living in a large society.  Just remember that the substance is correct but all the rest is B.S.  And, as I learned at Notre Dame, the “Priests”, the “Rabbis”, and the “Ministers” are just ordinary folk who live life free off of the insecurities of others.

AUM NAMAH SHIVAYA