to make people doubt their own judgments to the point of losing confidence in themselves. One must simply try to figure out what it is that one believes or trusts and why. That comes not simply as a single question to be solved for all time by a short inquiry, but probably rears itself up at least to one’s conscious level quite often in life. I am personally aware of many religious laypeople and even ministers, priests, and monks who have felt terrific burdens in different intensities and varied issues because of religious heteronomy and a divisive Absolute and/or outdated metaphysical and ethical stances. Christian churches continue to splinter over these manifold burdens.
Religious leaders and institutions themselves will need to continue to explore those elements of belief and practice that they feel can become terrible burdens in order to serve as they promised. For some people, this may require a de-absolutizing for religion to become more credible and more humanizing. Since I am not persuaded that such a de-absolutizing in favor of a humanizing would be undesirable, I present only a few of the many burdens that I see as the most obvious. I claim no authority nor exhaustive scope or perfection of knowledge and analysis. I am interested in ideas and reality, in an author’s argument and persuasiveness rather than his or her reputation. I have no interest in trying to categorize scholars, which usually results in oversimplifying their views. I have no patience for using language that the educated non-specialist cannot understand. Where I analyze an author who does use such terms, I will explain his or her meaning if the author has not, or simply translate it by what I think is a more common word. I fully recognize the lack of clarity created by many terms used in the field of religious studies and especially theology, so I try to qualify terms that seem slippery, overworked, obscure, or “favorites” of some self-appointed members of a club. If I capitalize a word, I try to do that only for a proper name, not simply a common noun, certainly not to give some eternal or ethereal quality to a common noun such as being, spirit, will, and so forth—unless the author I am analyzing insists on using it that way. I usually capitalize “Absolute” not simply because Hegel did but because it is used as a designation for something that is alleged by religion in general to be either a person, personal god, or a surrogate for a person, not a mere common adjective.
My aim is only to open up the question along slightly new lines or by new cross-disciplinary approaches since I do not see that religion’s “divisive Absolutes” have yet been resolved. My analysis is not comprehensive as any writer of a broad subject has to admit. But it may be that only a narrow slice of the inquiry will assist in determining the relevance of all the other “burdens.” I will introduce “burdens” that many have already known, but hopefully I can shed some different light, not to pick winners or losers but to assist in the humanizing of humanity. We all read and write with presuppositions, and my primary one at this stage of my life is that humans should be intent on realizing the potentiality of their specie rather than to allow it to self-implode by closing down original thinking and meaningful relating. That does not mean we all recognize some predefined “essence” of what a “human” is or should be, but that we have some basic clues of elements that would need to be actual to be convincing.
In his fascinating Origins Reconsidered: In Search of What Makes Us Human, the world-famous paleoanthropologist Richard Leakey turned his vision to the future:
“What will happen next?” The world will carry on without us once Homo sapiens becomes extinct, no doubt about that. But that is of no account to me, to my children, and to the rest of the human species. None of us will be around. The period over which we have responsibility, the period in which we have an interest as a species, the period in which we can make a difference, is now. We need to be quite clear about ourselves as one species among many. We need to be better tenants. I hope that what will happen next is that, collectively, we decide we will be better tenants.12
NOTES
1. Sean Carroll, From Eternity to Here: The Quest for the Ultimate Theory of Time (New York: Dutton, 2010), p. 349. Carroll, Research Prof. of Physics at Caltech, points up the problem in the “arrow of time” as the question of why entropy would ever have been low, given the process we presently experience, and posits that the answer could possibly be found in there being not a single universe but multiple universes, and he shows how quantum gravity, dark energy, and our accelerating universe make that palpable.
2. “Absolute” means perfect, unchanging, the totality of reality, the unquestionable, and other such adjectives. Charles Hartshorne listed six theological mistakes that were made in the Dark Ages by Christianity being redefined by Greek philosophy: (1) God is absolutely perfect, and therefore unchangeable; (2) God is “omnipotent”; (3) God is “omniscient”; (4) “God’s Unsympathetic Goodness”; (5) “Immortality as a Career After Death”; and (6) “Revelation as Infallible.” This is probably the simplest philosophical introduction to the problems with Western religions’ metaphysics, as he points out, differs considerably from religions of the East. I believe that most of the religions eventually absolutized certain elements, if they did not make their founder a “god,” no matter how secular or civic they were in their beginnings. But his arguments against this NeoPlatonic re-reading of Christianity is superb. See Hartshorne, Omnipresence and other Theological Mistakes (Albany: State University of New York, 1984).
3. This has been long recognized. G. E. Moore acknowledged that “metaphysical,” though having different possible meanings, in religion and ethics, invariably meant an equation of the Supreme Good as “supersensible” reality that exists yet not as an object that exists within Nature, but nevertheless is believed to provide truth to humans. Moore, Principia Ethica (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1903), pp. 112–13. Such ethics, he suggested, seem always to be built on this type of “metaphysics,” which presents innumerable problems.
4. My criticism assumes that this was not just Kierkegaard’s way of mocking Hegel and his “Absolute.”
5. See William Theodore De Bary, ed., The Buddhist Tradition in India, China and Japan (New York: Vintage Books, 1972), pp. 28–29; 57–72. In his “last instructions” (pp. 28–29), he insists that “with the Tathagata, there is no such thing as the closed fist of the teacher who keeps some things back.” And in the latter reference (pp. 57–72) the tradition of his home life included his father deciding he must keep Gautama entertained with sensual pleasure, and he married a beautiful princess, and had a son, Rahula, by her. This made it even more difficult to leave home, which is why the Akanistha gods had to turn him against these pleasures by putting a sudden spell of sleep on all the beautiful young women attending him, leaving them in very disturbing poses. This, added to the terrible four passing sights he had earlier encountered, created in him the desire to leave, so the Akanistha gods opened the gates and he departed to the forest. Although he was fast learner, according to these traditions, there is no trace of his being thought of as a god, much less as Absolute.
6. See note 2 above.
7. Friedrich Nietzsche, “Twilight of the Idols,” in The Portable Nietzsche, tr. and ed. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Viking Press, 1954), pp. 479–80.
8. Tillich insisted that “revelation” involves mystery and ecstasy in which the mystery of the abyss beyond the polarity of being/nonbeing or mystery of ultimate concern is ecstatically experienced, that is, beyond one’s rational subject–object structure, but revelation does not negate that structure nor does it supply information. As an experience of the “mystery of being,” if one communicates with others, even the same words that were revelatory to the first person will not have the same meaning when communicated by a human. Finally, he insists that “actual revelation is necessarily final revelation,” and “final revelation” means that it has the “power of negating itself without losing itself,” or is completely “transparent to the mystery which it reveals.” Systematic Theology, 3 vols in 1 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1967), I:106–159, but esp. pp. 129, 132–33. It turns out to be a noninformative experience of one’s own transcendence, but beyond any rational
