transcendence of these accidentals as having any rights or powers over others. This points to the greater social sensitivity Richard Rorty emphasized needs to be developed in order to create a social solidarity, to move the private ethics back into unity with the public sphere, to be willing to open our conception of who is included by our “we” or to quit thinking of so many people as simply “they” or “them.”28 This, of course, is precisely the opposite of what the standard of negotiation is when the privileged people or those already in power define it as one “needing to negotiate from one’s strengths,” which is simply another term for “advantage,” so many of which are completely irrationally or accidentally determined.
If religion, or faith as trust were given this emphasis, perhaps Reverend Wilmot would not have dissolved his family with frustration and died a premature death. He had read books by atheists, which seemed to make him feel it was all or nothing. Perhaps as regards the idea of a personal God who intervenes in history and ultimately saves His people, it appeared to him that it had to be an either/or, an all or nothing. He could not conceive of the symbols and ideas of religion being deprived of their absoluteness, which he had learned from the heteronomous position of the seminary teaching. If they lost their absoluteness, to him they lost their meaning, and he lost his mission in life. His rigidity prevented him from moving away from any literal interpretation of the religious scriptures or tradition, even when his superior suggested he should see things differently.
Had he been able to conceive of viable alternatives, his faith might have survived by transcending a mere heteronomous theistic tradition foisted off on him. He might not any longer have had to see even the morality espoused by the Church as a form of ressentiment by which religious authorities or the priestly class deny to all others what it lacks the courage to enjoy,29 nor would he have been crippled, feeling all the unscientific things in the scriptures had to be accepted by mere authoritarian power. He could not see that to be religious or to trust in the way we have described could possibly eliminate any need to make incredible claims about oneself or one’s religious community. Certainly, he could have abandoned the typical Christian belief of having a right or claim on some fantastic reward for oneself for being religious—certainly not a reward that others are deprived of by divine fiat.
But, of course, perhaps he had no real choices since the way the faith had been defined for him talked only in other-worldly terms, not of life on earth and social contract, not of the necessity of self-integrity and mutual autonomy, and not of the present world much. Its focus was on the inaccessible distant past, the imaginative but invisible other-world above the heavens, and the unknowable distant future, and it spoke only in Absolute terms of a wholly transcendent God. To follow the advice of his superior meant simply being a hypocrite, pretending to believe what he could not possibly believe, what he had not been taught comprised saving “faith.”
This is because few if any religions create a contract of equality with each member, allowing the members to reinterpret all of its important claims in any way they see fit. Instead, the member is required or at least expected to trust the religious authority, whatever form that takes, and ancient tradition, hierarchical authority, and inequality are the keys. This means that the kind of relationship one is expected to subscribe to religiously is almost the exact opposite of the ordinary relationships one sustains with others or contracts with as a part of a family, group, or nation. Wilmot knew his “duty” as a pastor, but a sense of “duty” was no longer enough. Yet his rigidity knew nothing else. It was all or nothing at all. It killed his self-integrity and self-respect.
How graphically I remember an incident that occurred when I took one of my college classes to a Bar Mitzva at a Reform synagogue in Santa Monica, California, many years ago. The rabbi kindly entertained questions after the service. One of my students asked him whether Jews believe in heaven and hell. He replied, “Some Jews do, some don’t. We just figure if God can take care of you in this life, if there is another life, God could take care of you then too.” I hoped this would satisfy my student, but he held up his hand again, and the second question was more pointed, “Then if you don’t believe in heaven, why do you do what is right?” The rabbi replied, as kindly as possible, “Why can’t you just do what is right because it is the right thing to do?!”
Yet as we noted in chapter 1, philosopher/psychologist William James noted that people do want something for being religious, and many times they expect a great deal.30 They “use” this God. Otherwise, he added, they don’t care anything about this God or His rules. Perhaps that explains why “Oh, my God!” has become the ubiquitous expression of surprise, exclamation, or even indignation, and insurance companies call “acts of God” anything they cannot explain, anticipate, or evaluate, so refuse to cover.
But what if there were no promises of anything for being religious or belonging to any faith in the traditional sense? Could not people be satisfied to do the good simply because it is good, or be satisfied with the mere promise of realizing who they are while helping others do the same by their encouragement? Is this not real self-integrity and therefore real faith or trust? Without self-realization or self-integrity, could any fame, good health, great wealth, fabulous friends and family, or longevity of life have any real meaning? Is this not the vital choice of which Jesus spoke, the choice between either gaining the whole world while losing one’s self, or self-renunciation that leads to full self-realization or living as one’s true self?
In Buddhist terms one must find the self in order to “get rid of the self,” which is primarily a form of self-renunciation or self-denial, absence of egoism. The latter emphasizes the impermanence of everything, including oneself, the “dependent co-origination” of all, and thus the “emptiness” of all by those two understandings. This deeper notion of the “no-self” necessarily must be accompanied in earthly life with a more conventional idea of the discernment of discrete objects or parts or individual identities strictly necessary for social responsibility. But the “no-self” is therefore an emphasis upon the basic unity (not mere identity) of all individuals, a theme we will see in a later chapter. I am suggesting that both levels of consciousness are necessary, as Buddhists know, which I discuss more in chapter 10, which focuses on the thought of Rabbi Richard Rubenstein. Buddhist scholar Masao Abe incisively spoke of the necessity of keeping intact these “two levels” of discourse in order to have any ethic at all.31
Those who exercise this kind of trust (with a sense of impermanence as well as unity with everything) will not feel threatened by science, new discoveries, new political or social structures, whether it be life in other galaxies, newly uncovered prehistorical bones, or new discoveries of past history such as the evolution of homo sapiens that were not known prior to the nineteenth century so are far beyond most religious cosmogonic myths that include the supposed origin of humans. Three thousand years ago, most religious people belonging to the nation of Israel as well as other nations such as Egypt, were convinced that the sun circles around the earth (so God could stop the sun in its movement for a whole day to benefit Joshua if need be), since the latter is the center of the universe. Copernicus and others put an end to that ancient idea. The great Christian theologian, St. Augustine (AD 354–430) was certain from his knowledge of the Christian Bible that every human lives on a flat disc so there cannot be people living on the other side (bottom) of the disc, which he referred to as “antipodes.” Today we know the earth is round, and our universe is heliocentric, and we are even seeing photographs of objects in space that are 4 billion miles from Earth.
Augustine was also certain that every human is born totally guilty of Adam’s sin and therefore deserves eternal punishment of the “second death” if he or she does not become Christian. How is one idea of his less credible than the others? St. Thomas could even assert, in the late Middle Ages, that a Christian’s resurrection body at the end might not be the same molecules as one had during life (since one might have been eaten by fish if one died at sea), but one could be certain to have the identical number of molecules! At that time, theology was considered the “queen of the sciences.”
As
