authorities in our religions become absurd, real burdens to bear. Great Christian theologians like Augustine were influenced not only by Neoplatonists such as Plotinus, but by a form of Pythagoreanism, so one can find all kinds of allegorical or spiritual meaning in numbers, making three, seven, ten, twelve, and so forth all numbers of perfection, so Philo could be thrilled to discover that the human head has precisely seven openings on it, which makes it perfect. But numbers such as six or eleven are terrible, either falling short of perfection or going past the standard of ten, so Augustine traces original sin through eleven generations at the beginning. It may be fun today to read those things. We do not blame any thinker in the past for being confined to the understandings of his or her age. It really can never be otherwise. The question is only why these kinds of ideas should have any relevance for humans in the twenty-first century CE? Especially is this the question when we recall that Michel Foucault showed how there was never a real “science” of what it is to be human prior to the late eighteenth century, when the old “metaphysics of infinity” finally gave way to the new empirical approaches to reality with its new forms of measurement and comparison.32
Some traditional doctrines of one’s particular religious tradition occasionally can be retained if they can withstand a significant revision and take on more social meaning. Hopefully, some will find it unthinkable to want to claim belonging to a “superior” race, sex, religion, or an “elect” group arbitrarily singled out for special favors by God, and will no longer fear developing meaningful relationships with those who are radically different in particulars when one discovers this sense of self within unity or one’s identity or I in the other. Yet sexual identity, racial identity, economic identity, religious identity, political identity—all seem to be extremely deeply set within our psyches, causing many people to fear any significant contact with those who differ. But we do still have a continual choice, not simply of which religion, if any, we want to belong to, but how much if any of the ancient myths, cosmogonies, and metaphysics we are willing to accept merely on the basis of the religious institution’s claims of authority, that is, its heteronomy.
The creation and preservation of self-integrity within a mutual autonomy could finally relieve one of any feeling of competition between religious groups, and partisan or ideological distinctions between the supposedly religious and nonreligious no longer hold since the categories no longer make sense. Of course, it may sound almost utopian for us to say that “faith” as self-realization obtained in one’s relation to the other could promote human relationships and move people beyond debilitating fears that are barriers to meaningful human dialogue in our societies. Yet when the other is no longer conceived of as an object or mere other, “outsider,” “stranger,” “infidel,” or “unbeliever,” one will be more likely to be moral in one’s relations with the other, even without having to be instructed of the Kantian maxim or even the “Golden Rule” attributed to Jesus, to “treat the other as you want to be treated.” Even if the ideal is not fully met, what does obtain of the unity will be a significant improvement over the traditional and present alternatives of operating as a robot at the heteronomously rigid commands of the Other.
If religion can be de-mythologized and de-literalized and thereby reduced more to morality, there are many stories, doctrines, creeds, and rituals in the tradition that cannot any longer be used. They will have no more credibility because of their lack of real relevant morality than did the myths of ancient Greece when Plato objected to them for their lack of morality. The idea of “sin” might be retained as a violation of the mutual trust between myself and the other, or any detrimental affect I initiate on that potential mutual self-realization, although for many religious people it still carries too much of a heteronomous law, the metaphysical idea of violating God’s personal will. The real negatives of “sin,” the socially negative consequences, would no longer be thought to be remedied by some sacrifice to God, or even more easily by a mere reference to a sacrifice to God, or even more easily by a simple prayer to God for forgiveness or a group absolution during worship by a single prayer of a priest or pastor—but would rather have to be actually rectified by an actual restoration of the abused or ruptured human relations. Hegel may have been too much of an idealist for many people, but on the idea of reconciliation, he was quite realistic: human relations continue to need real reconciliation, as Prof. Mollie Farnell has pointed out.33 This real reconciliation should begin to change most religions fairly quickly, just by the taming of the incredible metaphysical and mythological claims and improvement of human relations.
To reconsider the wildly transcendent and personal claims made for God that are destructive of human relations would mean re-examining all talk of “incarnations” or God intervening in history on someone’s side against others. It would mean being able to abandon the idea that “God” as infinite became finite or incarnate in only one specific human being, whether occurring only once for all time as in Christianity, or multiple times in history as in the Boddhisattva’s thousands of incarnations in Buddhism, or in a particular location of this world, or that “God” becomes incarnate only when the world gets run down or overcome with evil (Vishnu’s role in Hinduism).34 The same would be true of the Islamic claims made that “God” transported a favored person from Arabia to Jerusalem and back, or into some particular level of paradise or heaven and back. These ramifications will become more evident in each future chapter.
It would include finally eliminating claims that “God” will not allow one to be hurt by handling any poisonous serpent or even in drinking strychnine. And what about the belief that this god would impart all the contents of a sacred book into a person’s mind when one simply asked for that help through ritual and then leafed quickly through the book? Or what about the apparently easy talk about God as one who commanded the patriarch Abraham to sacrifice his son? Or God as intervening continually in nature, even keeping the planets and asteroids in their places? Or raising people from death? Or stilling a storm or causing a she-ass to speak as a human? Or returning bodily from some outer-spatial sphere in the form of a Jesus to reward a few select individuals with eternal life while punishing eternally everyone else?
Inasmuch as these old images, framed in very ancient terms, now used literally, paint God as capricious, childish, playing favorites, less compassionate, less noble, less ethical, less humane than many humans we know—they cannot be taken seriously, and many of them can hold no useful purposes even if not taken literally. Many of them serve only to reinforce a picture of a wholly transcendent deity (a “Wholly Other” as Rudolf Otto defined, Who as Otto painted, is fairly terrifying), which means a super-strong heteronomy or authoritarianism or the Absolute which, in turn, serves to create a fear and then unreasonable guilt. At best, they are only stories or images of ancient imagination to fascinate and entertain—like the ancient tale of the small child Jesus who kicked a playmate off the roof so he could go down to him and raise him from death, or, on another occasion made mud birdies like his playmates, but his were different because they took off in flight—but which have at best no positive power, little real entertaining power, and at worst possess considerable negative power in distracting one from her search for mutual discovery of her self in the self of another, even threatening to disrupt if not prevent any meaningful mutual human relating. This means we must find and observe the limits of claims, especially those about a transcendent, personal god who controls what He wants only when and how He wants, and at other times ignores the terrible tragedies, no matter the havoc it reeks on humanity and the cosmos. This is serious because of what an acceptance of an Absolute can do to a person when the person begins to realize it belonged only to a distant age and mentality. Hopefully, one can see the other options of finding one’s self in others, in mutual autonomous relations of trust, of mutual encouragements to “take the next step,” to find a larger “we,” to be less judgmental of those who differ, and to feel relief in being able to take responsibility for one’s own life and decisions with true innocence and openness to others, rather than tortured by an ideology that seems divisive at best, lethal at worst.
As Reverend Wilmot’s life revealed, certain types of “faith” probably need to be “lost” or terminated—before they destroy the most obvious and precious relations we have on earth. His “faith” in the invisible seemed to leave little room for faith
