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
SECTION I
Overview
I reject parsing religions into denominations or sects and, ultimately, I reject parsing religion itself into “religions.”
Religion is religion, no matter now denominated. There is one God. By whatever Name you call Him, He is He: Vocatus Atque Non Vocatus Deus Aderit. There are as many responses to Him as there are minds. Let us face this Truth.
After the foreshadowing of the global acceptance of human values, aka liberal republican ideals, around 1910, Islam encountered a unified world and a universe of power and meaning not of its making.
Islam’s first response to these realities was political: engage but keep at a distance.
After the Vietnam Conflict defeated in principle the last European challenge to global acceptance of human values, around 1972, Islam’s second response to the reality of a now even more united world and an even more universal structure of power and meaning not of its making was eschatological, comprising the familiar polarity of revulsion driving withdrawal and hatred driving attack.
Today, Islam still pursues an eschatological response to the united world and the universe of human values (aka liberal republican ideals) not of its making, which it encounters everywhere it turns. It believes that by driving against this universal structure of life, either defiantly (Shiites) or implacably (Sunnis), it can bring on the fulfillment of history in a paroxysm of universal conflict that will either:
(1) purify the world and establish peace in history, because it is under Islamic hegemony, or
(2) force a self-transcendence of history, because it is under Islamic hegemony, into a titular supra-history comprising the end of life as we know it and in its place, though still on earth, the beginning of unambiguous (eternal) life, now deemed identical with the previously imagined supra-historical Islamic “heaven.”
These concepts are familiar in Christian history as millenarianism. They are a species of utopianism, which means “no place, no location.” Utopian or millenarian ideas have no potential to be as a place, no truth or reality, no potentiality and therefore no possibility of being actualized anywhere. The history of every utopian ideal and millenarian foundation illustrates this truth: for example, Unitarianism and its descendant Transcendentalism in New England.
Eschatological or millenarian/utopian ideologies are linguistic constructions manufactured by tyrants to manipulate credulous believers. They deserve no more exegesis than that. This is why the church has deemed Unitarianism and Transcendentalism heresies. Utopianism, such as these embody, produces distress. A recent book about the Peabody sisters makes this point.
Opposition is a form of reunion employed by those whose freedom and destiny disinclines them to immediate participation in economics, in building up culture, religion and morality.
Islam is required to come of age in this united world of universal human values, shut up, behave itself and live up to its name. Islam, in the persons of its scholars and believers, is required to accept and appreciate its sister religions, in the persons of their scholars and believers, especially Hinduism, Buddhism, Zoroastrianism and Christianity. Islam will do this, it will re-cognize its status and conditions in the context of Sanathana Dharma, the universal thirst and striving for God.
SECTION II
If man is homo faber, unlimited maker of tools, he is also anthropos logikos, unlimited maker of languages.
Animals make and use tools and languages but in limited sets. Man makes and uses new tools and new languages in all directions, all the time and without limit.
Man not only has an environment, as do animals, he also has a world and a universe. The world is that which man encounters as “object, “the other.” The universe is the unity of power and meaning which he creates, maintains and transcends from himself and things and persons he encounters as his world.
Because in him are fully actualized the ontological principles of the self-creation, self-integration and self-transcendence of life, man transcends his environment in space, time, causality and substance, the four categories of being, thereby encountering the world and creating a universe. Man alone of creatures we know is not only subject to his environment but has power to transcend his environment. He does this with his use of images or ideas. Only man, of all creatures, can create a world and beyond his world, a universe of power and meaning.
The basic structure of reality for man, therefore, is self-world, subject-object. Man experiences this structure as a disjuncture, a split between himself and his world. The experience of this split ramifies throughout man’s life, causing all the negativities to which he is prone and knows so well.
Man spends his life looking for ways to overcome, and attempting to overcome, the subject-object split, the estrangement he experiences between himself and his world and between himself and himself, between his existential condition and his essential nature, which he experiences immediately, without the mediation of words or images.
In other words, man experiences separation between himself and the world and between himself and God and he strives to overcome that separation. Man also experiences separation from himself, self-alienation.
Man’s reality is God, his self, the world he encounters and the universe of power and meaning he creates. The combinations and permutations man drives from the basic subject-object structure of self-world are the content of his life, which are in three inter-related functions of his spirit: culture, religion and morality.
All of that reality is rooted in the divine ground from which man feels estranged but which he knows belongs to him and he to it essentially. Man’s being is rooted in Being-Itself. The structure of his life is analogous to the structure of the divine life. But man feels estranged from the divine life, as indeed he is, and he seeks reunion.
Man’s basic tool for the conquest of his self-God-estrangement and self-world estrangement is language. The elements of language are words, which occur and are treated as images, or what in Greek philosophy are called “ideas.” The word idea (Greek ideo) means image(1).
Man’s cognizing occurs in words as images and his communicating, which is the character of his activity per se, occurs in more words as images. Even his cognizing of sound and emotion occurs in words as images.
Images are central to man’s life. He cannot do anything without employing images or ideas. He cannot stop the flood of images that wells up from the depths of his being and occupies both his waking and his dreaming states. Even in deep sleep, images are the content of the structure of man’s reality, front to back, top to bottom, backwards to forwards, in time both as chronos (time as duration, per the clock) and as kairos (time as fulfillment, per the moment of auspicious confluence of potentialities as actualities).
From his innate image-built, image-generating and image-requiring nature, man creates the new, the beautiful, the good and the true. He creates meaning and value. It is his nature to do this. This ability distinguishes man from all other creatures, some of whom can create things but not meaning or value.
Man lives in the dimension of spirit, the dimension of the unity of meaning and power. No other creature lives in the dimension of spirit, only man. This is why man’s spiritual life is so important to him and why he fights indomitably not only to preserve but to expand it(2).
Being actualizes itself in structures of images that have power and meaning and also unity. Being actualizes itself in individuals, in worlds and in universes of power and meaning.
SECTION III
Historical And Scientific Criticism Of Sacred Scriptures
With the publication by Lessing in 1774-78 of posthumous fragments of Reimarus’ historical and scientific criticism of the Bible, modern biblical scholarship commenced in earnest. Critical examination of the biblical texts, to include redaction and collation, was not new in Christian thought. Jerome, Origen, Augustine, Tertullian, Scotus and others followed Jesus and Paul in the critical examination and exegesis, and for Jerome collation, of sacred scripture.
So Reimarus’ work, inspired by his rigorous Enlightenment Deism, was not a novelty per se. It was a novelty, however, in context of the great Protestant Orthodoxy and Pietism that immediately preceded it in Germany, France and elsewhere. It also was a novelty in context of the Tridentine fortress and army the Vatican constructed to fix and destroy the Protestant Principle of immediate (direct, non-mediated) participation by man in God and God in man.
The strongest effect of Reimarus’ work in biblical criticism was from the Deistic assumptions driving it rather than from the scholarship of scientific method and biblical criticism that was its method or the results that were its content.
Deism implicitly drove to separating objects and subjects, objects and objects and subjects and subjects — starting with its separation of God and Creation. So the main effect of Reimarus’ application of scientific method to biblical criticism was to separate the study of scripture from the study of theology and the practice of religion, and in both the academic and the popular orbits. Protestant Orthodoxy already had separated the study of scripture and the study of theology from the practice of religion, a premise Pietism vigorously had attacked.
The separation of scripture, theology and piety, or, of exegetes, theologians and believers, had positive and negative consequences. A positive consequence was the application of inquiry, at least in principle, including doubt, to all aspects of man’s existence. A negative consequence was the loss of wholeness, of comprehensiveness, which means the loss of comprehension, which means the loss of radical and thorough inquiry.
It is a predictable irony of “science,” or philosophical positivism, which is the sole epistemology accepted by descendant of the Enlightenment and Deism, that its modern protagonists seek codes, mores and laws restricting inquiry to subjects they approve and employment to individuals who join their programs and pogroms. For example, see the Faculty of Harvard Madrassa of late in the treatment of their President. Most academic faculties, regardless of level, in Europe and the Americas seek to restrict inquiry to subjects they find amenable to their tastes and customs.
“Scientists,” including biblical scholars, attenuate and limit inquiry, thus contradicting the founding assumption of science, which is the release of unlimited inquiry.
Yet despite that negativity, and especially since the fragmentary publication of the work of Reimarus, Christianity has pursued with power and benefit historical and scientific criticism of its central literature, the sacred scripture called the Bible, to include both Old and New Testaments.
An effect of this activity has been a strengthened grasp of the value of man, both his self and his accomplishments. The high value of man was a central tenet of the Enlightenment, as it had been earlier of the Renaissance. The principle of unlimited inquiry expresses courage and confidence in man’s essential nature and also in his existential condition.
Restricting or diminishing that principle, as academic faculties are wont to do, especially modern politically-formed faculties, expresses anxiety and despair regarding man, his ability and accomplishments, and opposes a spirit of Enlightenment.
Not only has Christianity fostered criticism of its canonical literature, it has clearly asserted that the canonicity of that literature is an accomplishment of human effort in response to expressions by the Divine Spirit. The Christian Bible is an expression of the Life of God, and the relationship of the Church with the Bible through the centuries has been and will continue to be a creative one because it expresses the Life of God.
In India the same phenomenon may be observed regarding the central texts of Sanathana Dharma or what today, as a specialized form of Sanathana Dharma, is called Hinduism. The Vedas, the whisperings of God, were recorded by Sages in man’s most onomatopoeic language, Sanskrit, which is the base of all Indo-European languages, including English. The Story of Rama, the Ramayana, the primal epic of the human race, was composed by the Poet and Sage Valmiki.
As the scriptures are used and preserved, accretions, emendations, recensions and deletions occur within them. They live with the people using them inside and also outside the orbit of faith created by the Divine Spirit as its own self-manifestation.
Periodically the scriptures undergo collation and/or purification at the hand of a Sage given birth for that purpose or at the Hand of a Divine Personality.
For Christianity, first Jesus the Christ, then St. Paul and finally St. Jerome performed this office. Martin Luther also acted in this capacity but not with universal acceptance of his result, which is nonetheless of the highest spiritual formative capacity.
Jesus the Christ purified the interpretation of what came to be called the Old Testament. St. Paul established the standard of canonicity, which is the structure of religion generally: salvation by Grace through faith, which is a condition or estate gifted by Grace, not subscriptions to doctrines or beliefs or persons in an ecclesiastical hierarchy. At the turn of the Fourth and Fifth Centuries, St. Jerome collated, translated for all to read and thereby settled the Christian canon. By using an ecumenical approach to language itself and to the treatment of sacred literature, Jerome established the Latin Church and through it Western Civilization(3).
For Sanathana Dharma, the Mother of Humanity, the Sage Vyaasa performed this office by collating the Vedas during the time of Krishna, about 3800 years ago. Vyaasa also wrote the Mahaabhaaratha, the Bhaagavatha, the eighteen Puraanas and the Brahmasuuthra. Recently, Sathya Sai Baba has purified the Ramayana from accretions it had suffered since the time of its author, Sage Valmiki. As translated by N. Kasturi this universal standard of sacred scripture is here.
Christianity, also, is a characteristic form of Sanathana Dharma. So are Buddhism, Zoroastrianism and Islam.
Islam has not permitted historical criticism of its sacred literature, the Koran and Hadith, nor admitted to changes the text of the Koran has undergone both at the hand of Mohammed and also during the centuries since it was collated and written down by Mohammed.
Islam tends to take the Koran and Hadith as the absolutely and indefinitely valid, immutable standard of religious and civil authority for the whole world. This is idolatry of books, the Koran and Hadith, that is analogous to idolatry of the Bible in the Christian orbit.
This resistance to admission of the fact that the Koran is an edited, redacted and collated scripture, and but one among several such, is at the root of the extreme disquiet afflicting the world from the Muslim orbit at this time. The attitude of modern Islam toward the Koran is idolatrous and therefore toxic. The infidelity by Islam toward the reality of the Koran is a radical, fatal offense against Islam that has allowed thugs, criminals, revivers of pre-Muslim Assassin Cults, to hijack the flag of Islam to cover their nefarious activities: comprehensive, violent extortion.
Its own titular representatives afflict Islam with the bane of Koranolatry and that perversity is the source of the violence that titular Moslems –- actually criminals, revivers of pre-Muslim Assassin Cults, Mohammedans — are wreaking on humanity. In fact, those titular Moslems, Mohammedans, who are wreaking havoc in the name of Islam, which means Peace, are not of the human race. They are of a demonic, idolatrous genetics, ogres in fact.
There are two Semitic religions, Hebrew Prophetism and Islam. Christianity is based on the Seers of Buddhism and Islam is based on the Prophets of Christianity. Fear of and therefore opposition to images in the daily and especially the religious life characterize the Semitic religions, Hebrew Prophetism and Islam. The fear of images arises from a misunderstanding of the nature of communication and a consequent self-righteousness producing fanaticism about not using images so as to avoid profaning the holy. This phenomenon is called iconoclasm, the urge, originating in ignorance and thus fear, to destroy images and deny their value in religious activities as well as in communication at all.
Every thought, word and deed is an image, an ideo.
Islam comes by its tendency to iconoclasm honestly. It arose in the Arabian Desert as a reaction — justified in its target but not in its remedy — against superstitions, profanations and lascivious practices that had arisen among Christian monastics living there. It arose also as a medicating, uniting power against the poison and division of Arab tribal enmity and violence.
The urge to iconoclasm infects Judaism and not a few Christian groups as well, especially, during the early centuries, in monasteries in Egypt and Arabia Deserta and later among Calvinist and sectarian or evangelical radical orbits of the Reformation. Certain monastic strains of the pre-Middle Ages and the Middle Ages in the Roman Catholic orbit — and their modern descendants — were iconoclastic in theology and piety both. Any church or synagogue having a plain, unadorned presentment reflects the spirit of iconoclasm.
So iconoclasm is not only a problem in Islam. But historically it is most virulent and destructive in the orbit of Islam. It is used cynically by demonic Arab and Arab Persian personalities — demonic clergy and scholars, criminals and hegemonists — to drive periodic pandemic recrudescence of Caliphist tribal, clan and racial hatreds out into the world as if it is Islamic Evangelism.
At his best, Mohammed was a man of love and peace, forbearing and patient. He had, at least at first, no worldly aims, no hegemonistic intentions or plans. He denounced tribalism and was compelled finally to wage war against it. Mohammed, like Jesus before him, experienced the truth, Sanathana Dharma, that is beyond the parsing of religions. He did not “found” a religion, at least not by initial intention. He reminded man of his essential unity, beyond differences and distinctions, with himself, his world and with God. He did not claim, at first, that the divine revelation to which he responded and which, with that response, started and augmented a revival of Sanathana Dharma in Arabia Deserta, was a new religion or that anyone or everyone must accept it. He said that holy war or jihad against the evil impulses of one’s own heart is required of all, regardless of their condition in life.
God has no need for converts! To even think that He wants them is insane. To think that an original receptor of divine revelation, such as Mohammed or St. Paul or Sage Vyaasa, feels the need for, expects or plans a conversion movement for the content of the revelation they received and to which they and others respond also is insane.
Moslem iconoclasm, probably starting by Mohammed himself, calls on Koranolatry to give it titular support of a sacred scripture. Actually, no scripture supports iconoclasm because the scripture itself is images, ideas, words. Communication occurs in words, so there is no escaping the predicament that the holy is potentially profaned by the very act of expressing it and even by experiencing it.
All experience, mental, emotional, intuitive and immediate, occurs internally as words and images or almost instantly produces them. One cannot avoid the possibility of profaning the holy — the ineffably great and ultimately meaningful — by refusing to use images. This would be refusing to exist, and that is not possible because the act of refusing is an act of existence.
One cannot experience the holy separated from images. Even non-mediated or immediate experience drives inexorably into images so long as its receptor has existence, is embodied.
But Islam now, and for long, and probably starting with Mohammed himself, ignorantly, insensitively bypasses this reality, ignores it, and asserts that it does not use images because the Koran says not to and the Koran itself is unavailable for critical examination because examination would subject it to communication and thus treatment as an image or set of images. Islam declares that Arabic language and writing and geometrical shapes are not images, which is equivalent to saying that they are not communication.
This is all the nonsense of colossal ignorance and malevolent pretense. It was not Mohammed’s intention, at least initially. It would not be the first intention of any great personality because it creates a dangerous situation: the Koran is elevated to the status of ultimacy, making it an idol, the very thing iconoclasm aims to prevent.
In Christian language, Islam goes beyond admiration for the Koran, as pointing to the ultimate, to God, and instead demands adoration of the Koran as the sole, perfect, plenary, incontestably valid in perpetuity repository of the will of God in and for the whole world. This makes of Islam a demonic religion not a genuine one. Iconoclasm has this effect whenever and wherever it occurs.
Islam, probably starting with Mohammed, has turned the Koran into an idol. It has deified and therefore defied its own truth and legitimacy by corrupting its approach to its linguistic base. It has made communication with those called by other self-expressions (revelations) of God impossible except as the Islamic side of the discussion takes an attitude of superiority. We see this phenomenon daily in the Middle East, coming from both Arabs and Persian Arabs, and also in schools and governments in Europe and the Americas. Moslems can be nothing but haughtily ugly because they assume as truth what is idolatry of the Koran.
And it goes farther. There is no Moslem scholarship that takes a critical historical and scientific approach with the Koran, such as Reimarus and Christian scholars have done with the Bible. To attempt such an approach with the Koran would lead directly to the death of the scholar by fiat (they call it “fatwah”) from demonic Arab and/or Arab Persian clergy and scholars, aka extortionist gang lords.
Islam does not allow examination of the Koran that would reveal the Koran as a dynamic, interacting historical phenomenon, at the text level itself. The actual sources of the Koran Islam does not want revealed, much less discussed.
More importantly, Islam does not want the Koran revealed as conditioned by the actualities of its origins, including the vagaries of Mohammed himself, or as having responded, at the text level, to changing actualities during the history of its existence.
Islam wants to say that the Koran is written once and for all, in effect denying the dynamics of history, and is valid once and for all, denying the changing conditions of existence, because it never has been circumscribed or altered by the force of historical circumstances. No aspect of finitude attends the Koran, Islam declares.
While interpretation of the Koran is permissible, i.e., the Hadith and then only by Moslems scholars certified to do that, critical examination of the Koran is forbidden on the grounds that such would constitute blasphemy of the divine majesty.
The Koran is pure God dropped on man, an external, heteronomous phenomenon. Islam asserts that rather than the Koran responding to historical circumstances in dynamic interaction, which is the truth, the Koran is an eternally fixed entity to which historical circumstances must conform as the Koran once-and-for-all defines and directs them to do.
Traditionally, the exegesis of Islamic scholars, who were patronized by the several competing Caliphates, was believed to yield the appropriate meaning of the Koran for contemporary circumstances. However, since the 18th Century, and especially since the writings of Sayyid Qutb, the purview of scholars has been steadily usurped by a bumptious phenomenon new to Islam: clergy. These individuals argue that the appropriate meaning of the Koran for contemporary circumstances is their wishes, which are by way of being the wishes of extortionist gang lords, and the concerted will of their followers. Koranic scholarship and especially criticism is not among their interests although radical idolatry of the Koran is.
It is ironic that the origin of Islam is in a Christian Prophetic reaction against idolatry! The great “iconoclastic religion” became the “great idolater” — and of itself.
This outcome reminds us to be cautious of finding faults in others because:
(1) the faults we find in others are the faults we have in ourselves — otherwise we could not find them in others, for, we know only that which we are — and
(2) finding faults in others magnifies those faults in ourselves.
We become what we oppose because opposition is a method of reunion. This is one of life’s many paradoxes or unexpected occurrences. Life is about reunion, routinely and entirely.
We may observe from these considerations, firstly, the central paradox of existence, that life can drive against itself, subverting its own inner aim, without being aware of its doing so, and secondly, the central ambiguity of life, that the persistence and even flourishing of life, despite driving against itself, implies that whereas the power of being which actualizes itself as life brings with it the threat of non-being, nonetheless that non-being is contingent on and therefore less than the power of being. Life is both self-creative and self-destructive but more the first than the second. The reason is that life is rooted in God in whom all separations are both conquered and transcended and all creativities confirmed in their establishment. This phenomenon Vedas call Dharma.
In fact, inquiry reveals that the self-destructive tendency in life is not an independent essence but a contingency depending on the power of being itself, which manifests itself as a power of self-creativity with a contingent power of self-destruction. The power of being gives non-being its power to be.
Idolatry produces thuggery in the name of itself and against an alleged but foreign idolatry. As well as today in Islam, some Christian monastics in the deserts of Arabia and North Africa during the Second, Third and Fourth Centuries, and even later, were notorious for thuggery in the name of an idolatrous Christianity. The followers of Arius in Egypt, for example, were known for stomping theological and monastic opponents to death with their hobnail boots and for other atrocities we would characterize today as “skin head,” fascist,” “communist” or “raver.”
Thuggery and violence from regions of the Middle East ante-date Islam. The Hashshashin (Assassin) Cults did not start within Islam in the 11th Century, as many claim. They are as ancient as the smuggling families of Arabia Deserta and Afghanistan.
SECTION IV
The Central Thesis
Until Islam’s idolatry of the Koran is defeated, the Moslem orbit will generate a continuous stream of killer extortionists promoting this agenda or that.
Scholars must join Soldiers in defeating Islam’s idolatry of the Koran, and while they are at it, Christianity’s idolatry of the Bible, Judaism’s idolatry of the Torah and the idolatry of all religions regarding their sanctuaries, their liturgies and their divisions or denominations.
The Koran must be subjected to historical and scientific criticism. The ethnology, historiography and sociology of its origin, development and usage must be illuminated. The history of its textual development must be reconstructed, despite significant efforts by Muslim scholars across the centuries to destroy the evidence of their additions, deletions, emendations and collations. The congruence and divergence of the Koran‘s meaning with meaning found in other sacred scriptures must be elaborated.
Both the Koran and Islam generally must be correlated with the scriptures and structures of the other great religions, especially Christianity, Hinduism, Buddhism and Zoroastrianism.
Additionally, the Koran must be accepted and appreciated as sacred scripture by non-Muslim scholars and believers, who, along with Muslim scholars and believers, must accept and appreciate the equal status of the Koran, the Bible, the Bhaagavatha, etc., as sacred scriptures. Much in the Koran that is not of the Koran.
Doing these things will invite threats to the life of those undertaking them. Islam is murderous toward efforts to demolish its idolatry of the Koran, per its idolatrous scholarship and piety. The guild of scholars can show their courage as well as their solicitude for the welfare of humanity by steadfastly exposing the Koran to historical and scientific criticism, to the light of the universal Logos.
Historical criticism of the Koran will yield a most valuable result, although the same result can be achieved more quickly and easily by the route of systematic theology, as it is here. The result is the revealing of Shariah, so-called Islamic Law, because its source is said to be the Koran, as religious law, not civil law. The meaning of this is that Shariah is not appropriate for civil society and certainly not enforceable in that or any context.
Religious law is not meant as civil law, which is to be obeyed in this world. Religious law is meant to point symbolically to the reunion of man’s existential with his essential nature, to the experience of Eternal or Unambiguous Life in God. This experience does not fall under any actual law whatsoever, nor is it of this world, although it can occur, in a fragmentary and anticipatory way, while one is in this world. The experience to which religious law points is a gift of God. Religious law is a symbolic expressions of that gift.
And it stands as condemnation of all achievements, movements, efforts, thoughts for insufficiency at the goal of reunion. Religious law reminds man that he is not reunited with his Ground, he is short of who he really is. St. Paul described this purpose of religious law with profound existential grasp.
Shariah is religious law. It is not civil law. Treating Shariah as civil law is analogous, in Christian terms, to identifying Caesar with God or giving God to Caesar. The Romans themselves did not accept that insanity, and when it was forced on them, they fragmented, as would be necessary under such circumstances. Tyranny is the only possible result of taking Shariah as civil law, and of course we see this in every situation today where Shariah is made “the law of the land.” It can never be that because that is not its purpose.
O ignorant man! How violently you do ram
Your concupiscence through others’ hearts,
Depriving them of life to satisfy your ego!
This result of systematic theology generally and historical criticism of the Koran in particular with respect to Shariah destroys the motivation for Islam’s idolatry of the Koran. It solves the problem of unending violence afflicting the world from the Muslim orbit. Without the pretense that Shariah, especially their version of it, is civil law, the malevolent gang lords calling themselves Muslim clergy have no basis for their claims. They are bereft of support, and when these criminals are in that condition, violence ceases to come into the world from the Muslim orbit.
The pretense that Shariah is necessary, universal civil law underlies the Arab and Persian Arab Assassins who cover themselves with the pretense of Islam in order to extort men and nations to whatever agenda they have going for self-promotion and self-aggrandizement.
An analogous phenomenon will occur with respect to the promoters of idolatry in the Christian and Hindu orbits when they are undercut by the exposure of their supports as a mere pretense of religion as well as a radically evil misrepresentation of God. For example, what passes for Protestant Christianity in the United States these days is versions of popular psychology, sentimentalism, revivalism and mere acting (rhetoricians they were called in Greco-Roman civilization). The Protestant Churches are mere moral clubs at best. Really speaking they are NGOs. Roman Catholic Christianity, aka the Vatican, since the Council of Trent is the fist of hegemony inside the glove of technical reason, a configuration that is analogous to the programs and methods of Assassins.
Because of the pretense of legitimacy asserted by their leaders, all of the so-called religious groups in the United States today threaten, one way or another, the national security and economic viability of their host nation. As ever larger numbers of Muslims, Mexicans, Chinese and other immigrants arrive here with no expectation of gratitude or loyalty to the United States for receiving them, and with every expectation of taking over the place for themselves, and as teachers in our schools and universities assiduously deconstruct the grace and greatness of America in favor of the pure and noble immigrants, who have terrified the teachers into submission, the certainty of bloodthirsty so-called religious war, after the manner of 16th Century Europe, strengthens accordingly.
In Europe this potentiality already is manifest, seething just prior to actualizing. Europeans have no idea how to deal with bloodthirsty so-called religious wars because they decades ago dismissed the truth that culture is the form of religion and religion is the content of culture. Furthermore, most European nations must operate through civil law rather than through the more supple and useful (especially in this case) common law.
Here in the United States steps can be taken, difficult but necessary ones, to head off so-called religious wars before their potentiality mounts into actuality. The following section outlines a conceptual, legal and physical framework for doing this.
SECTION V
The Stage And The Actors On It
In its recent decision of SUSETTE KELO, ET AL. Petitioners, v. CITY OF NEW LONDON, CONNECTICUT, ET AL. Respondents, the Supreme Court of the United States of America offers an opportunity for state and local governments to prevent a looming security crisis by structuring a resolution of an historically destabilizing condition.
With one kind of defiant estrangement — African — already allowed to root in the midst of American cultural liberality and a companion kind — Mohammedan — being allowed to root there as well as in the midst of European cultural liberality, the question of structuring civil interactions to prevent chronic/acute instability and require harmony rises to the top of the policy and leadership agenda.
From every titular religious denomination, individuals and groups claiming exclusive religious and civil authority have been dishing out dis-ease, dis-quiet and de-spair for sixty years and more. Every titular religious organization has instigated this dis-service to humanity, even those proclaiming themselves pacifist or seeking so-called social justice, by which is meant hegemony for themselves in some arena of activity.
The mission of this discussion is to point out that, in the name of truth, leading forward together, peace and love, and on the basis of compelling government interest, state and local governments must require mutual participation among all titular religious organizations by co-locating them on real estate set-asides designated for that purpose and by requiring that each titular religious organization abjure its claim to exclusive validity and therefore authority in the affairs of man.
State and local governments must require the extirpation of hegemonistic ideologies from titular religious organizations by co-locating them physically and by demanding their mutual support theologically as equals in validity and therefore authority.
This amounts to ensuring the operational dominance of appreciation and acceptance of and by all religious organizations in all jurisdictions of civil government.
Religious law is not and can/must never be civil law.
The proliferation of titular churches — as distinguished from the Church — already commands a large amount of real estate and therefore time, money and energy in American and European nations. Most of this spending is wasted for religious purposes and all of it is wasted for economic purposes.
The proliferation of other-than-Christian groups organized for titular religious purposes in those nations augurs even more aggressive consumption of real estate, causing further calls on time, money and energy, and, in addition, raising the threat of chronic/acute conflict.
In the case of Voodoo and Islam, and especially of tribal, clan and racial hegemonists sporting the name of Islam, the proliferation of their meeting places in the Americas and Europe augurs permanent fundamental conflict with all groups organized for religious purposes other than what they regard as their own.
The determined international hegemonistic intention of Muslims, apparently but not necessarily all of them, primarily drives this crisis at this time. A second driver of international hegemonistic intention is Voodoo, which is less aggressive militarily than the titular Muslim variety, but has three decisive negativities:
(1) its persistence in an area once rooted,
(2) its pan-debilitating effect on economics worthy of the name – that is, economics other than drug-and sex-commerce – and
(3) its natural fit, therefore, with tribal, clan and racial hegemonism flying out of Arabia Deserta and Iran to “convert/compel the world to the one way of life and nation of Islam.”
However, it should not be overlooked that:
(1) as presently constituted, every titular religious organization, with some exceptions among Christians, clings to a belief in its own exclusive validity and therefore authority — cf. especially the Roman Catholic Church, the Anglican Church and Orthodox Church — and that
(2) this belief compels hegemonistic intentions in those organizations. In some, particularly the largest ones by numbers, hegemonistic intentions compelled by belief in exclusive validity are no less implacable than are those cherished by demonic clergy and scholars calling themselves Muslims.
There is uncertainty whether the distinction regarding the Muslim presence in the Americas and Europe is between so-called moderate Muslims and so-called Islamists(4) planning, on the one hand, slow but steady or, on the other hand, rapid and catastrophic transformation of those so-called territories of the so-called Muslim Nation to Shariah, or, whether the distinction regarding the Muslim presence in the Americas and Europe is between genuine Muslims — assuming some answer that description — who do not plan world domination, and so-called moderate Muslims and so-called Islamists, who do, though differing in tactics (i.e., intimidation or revolution, respectively).
For these reasons, and absent structural remedies to prevent it, the outlook for the Americas and Europe is permanent chaos and malevolent tyranny comprising conflicting claims of cultural, religious and moral hegemony and, specifically, determined, inter-and intra-national lethal intent with respect to American and European cultural liberality and identity.
As an aside, it is worth mentioning the sybaritic back-side of titular Muslim iconoclasm and puritanism. Not an icon of nature or man anywhere — An Offense Against Islam — but my-oh-my the voluptuaries’ alternatives! Something to relate enthusiastically to the prospective catamites!
SECTION VI
The Nature Of Religion
The word religion means rebinding together that which has come apart, that which is estranged from itself, that which is in pieces. Religion implies a restoration of a particular kind, namely, by a binding together of that which is loosed, which has come apart. The word paralysis, meaning unbinding or loosening of necessary bonds, indicates vividly, and for some experientially, the condition religion addresses.
Paralysis is the result of a destruction of the balance of the polarities of freedom and destiny, dynamics and form and individualization and participation. Paralysis is the diffusion of purpose caused by the unbinding of light. Paralysis is the phenomenology of death.
Religion addresses the unbinding of light into a diffusion of purpose and death. Religion addresses the threat of non-being. Religion’s aim is the rebinding or reunion of light to an integral purpose supported by balance of the polarities of being. Life is light. Light is God. Religion rebinds, reunites life with God.
Religion, therefore, is God’s action and man’s reaction. Man cannot reunite himself with God. There is no self-salvation, which is the error of all legalism, including those committed in the name of religion. Religion is the process of reconstituting life and the world, of reuniting man and God, of restoring the unity of power and meaning as the Divine Life.
In place of the word religion we may use the word reunion, although reunion does not imply the rebinding activity that is characteristic of the process called religion. The word reunion implies the goal (reunion) of religion whereas the word religion expresses the process (rebinding) that is religion.
That which causes disintegration or disunion, that which causes a structure go to pieces, to undergo paralysis, is not religion. It is irreligion, the negation of religion. It is anti-religion or irreligion.
Thus, those who conflict communities, families or individuals, who find fault with persons or animals or treat them as things, those who talk without listening, who argue without hearing, who demand their wishes be accomplished without attending the wishes of others, who seek to harm others — these are anti-religious demonic individuals or groups who may not claim the name of any religion because they do not serve the purpose of religion.
A demonic power is a dependent power that threatens being with non-being. A demon is a creature who has implacably elevated a non-ultimate to ultimacy — starting with itself, its ego and its wishes — and has been abandoned, on that account, to its own self-destruction. Demonic powers and demons are what classically are meant by the word evil used as either an adjective or a noun.
A common term among United States Armed Forces for Arab, Iranian, European, American and Asian individuals and organizations resisting Coalition and construction in Afghanistan and Iraq is evil bastards. Just so, this informal description is literally true. Perhaps equally useful are the the terms violent extortionists and demonic clergy and scholars, for, that is their character as descendants of the pre-Muslim thugs known to students of history as Assassins.
Religious leaders set God against religions, all of them, not religions against religions. Religions are necessary and in any case unavoidable, but they must be constantly subjected to prophetic criticism and reformation from the perspective of that which is truly ultimate. Religions are required to subject themselves to self-criticism with a view to defeating their own idolatrous tendencies and creations.
True religious leaders set God against religion. What can withstand opposition by God will be found to be genuine religion. Demonic religious leaders set religion against religion.
For example, it is said by the ignorant today that St. Paul founded the religion of Christianity and the Church, with the implied or direct assertion that he did this contrary to the wishes of his Master, Jesus the Christ, who, the argument goes, was merely reforming Judaism, the one true and universal religion.
Reading Paul writing to the churches one sees how far off the truth this thesis is. Paul opposes Jesus as the Christ to the churches he addresses, sometimes even sarcastically. He opposes God to religions of all descriptions, including Christianity. St. Paul was followed by St. Jerome in this line of address and that is why Jerome bears the title in the Church of Doctor Maximus In Exponendis Sacris Scripturis and a dignity just less than that of an Apostle.
A genuine religious leader can be recognized by their opposition to religion, any religion, in the Name of God and the voice of the Prophetic Spirit or, what is the same thing, the Protestant Principle.
Footnotes
1 Cf. Jesus the Christ is the ideo of God, as in the hymn refrain, “Ideo. Gloria in Excelsis Deo.”
2 The dimension of history is predicated on the dimension of spirit. Only man has history.
3 Later, Martin Luther’s translation of the Bible established the German language and John Calvin’s Institutes of the Christian Religion established the French language.
4 Who in reality are tribal, clan and racial hegemonists spouting hegemonistic political propaganda as if it were Islam.
Update 1: An American Renaissance.
Update 2: Sarah Hoyt: Upside Down
Update 3:
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
