06.24.08
If you meet the Buddha on the Road …
Kill your idols (before they kill you).
Here’s a shirt with some splendid irony. I might have to add it to my already excessive collection. All my Dylans have been chucked on the rag pile.
05.30.08
To Believe is Human
My neighbor casually tells me, “Dan, some people are believers and some people aren’t.” Neurologist Robert Burton, likewise, says “some people are naturally doubters, and nothing feels as though it’s certain.” Burton, unlike my neighbor, sees the gap between believers and skeptics as more as a spectrum; a continuum.
| I’ve been listening to a fascinating interview with Robert Burton on KQED’s Forum. Give it a listen. Burton appears to be suggesting that faith is a physiological impulse. This may sound reductionistic, and perhaps it is. Less reductionistically, you might say that faith is a “feeling”. I find it interesting because I have such a hard time—how should I put it—believing that believers really believe. This doubt is so strong that I often wonder whether believers are just lying about their belief. It sounds rather like a paranoid fantasy, doesn’t it? Well, so be it. |  |
You see, I used to be a believer. That is, I was raised as a believer. When I was young, I suppose it might have been that I accepted my indoctrination as a factual education. It’s hard to tell, but I do remember having a sense of faith being a willful effort to conform to my upbringing. I considered myself a believer, in a doubtful sort of way. Maybe in an envious sort of way.
Thanks to the testimony of Dostoevsky and others, science has come up with the notion that many mystical experiences are related to epileptic seizures. Can I try one of those? I feel quite deprived. Honest! I wonder what it feels like.
What’s peculiar in my case is that my mother is an epileptic, and she had some bad seizures back around the time she became a Baha’i and married the man who spoke at the first Baha’i meeting that she attended. I wonder how different the world feels to her. Does she really have a sense of certainty about the faith that she seems so overly confident about?
I must admit that this gives me a new sense of tolerance for believers, as obnoxiously overbearing as they can be. Maybe believers aren’t a load of liars. Maybe they really do believe. Maybe belief is just part of being human; or rather, maybe belief is just part of being mammalian?
03.18.08
The Faith
Mehrzad was raised in a religious household. His family was Iranian and Muslim, though his parents were not Shi’a or even Sunni. They didn’t mind being the only Muslims in Sinktown, as they were not suited to the specific practices of most Muslims, a fact that would inevitably produce friction in a Muslim community.
Mehrzad played violin. As a boy, he did this as a matter of obedience to his parents and as a religious obligation, for music was the only form of prayer practiced in the Kariyani household.
Mehrzad’s parents were radical Islamists, but not the kind of inflammatory stereotype that the appellation Islamist is likely to conjure up. The Kariyani sect is fundamentalist with a single fundamental: monotheism. For him, “one God” meant that no one man or ideal can represent God. Even Muhammad, for him, could only have been a man of his time and place, and the Qur’an was no more than a book of its time and place. Still, both Muhammad and the Qur’an meant a great deal to Dr. Kariyani as a Muslim, even though he would call other Muslims “idolators” for making the Prophet and the Qur’an “partners with God”. Though for most Muslims an absolute, unwavering belief in the Qur’an and the traditions of the Prophet is the foundation of their faith, Dr. Kariyani would often assert that “belief is just a pretty name for idolatry“.
So it was that the Kariyani boys, as good Muslims, would perform their prayers five times daily. Each boy would pick up his instrument, face their Qiblah, and reverently perform his scales or a song. For most Muslims, facing the Qiblah means turning toward the Ka’aba, a pre-Islamic stone idol in Mecca. The Kariyanis did not do this, for obvious reasons. Instead, they faced the sun, which meant that they would face a different direction each time. In the morning, they would face the East. In the evening, they would face the West. At noon, they would turn opposite the shadows on the ground outdoors. When praying during moonlit nights, they would face the moon. “We face the light,” Mr. and Mrs. Kariyani would often say. They did this as Iranian Muslims, knowing that their ancestors turned toward fires and other light sources during prayer. The Iranians had prayed five times daily long before Muhammad, and their prayers were songs.
“Words are inadequate for prayer,” the elder Kariyanis would occasionally insist, though Mrs. Kariyani would still chant the orthodox Islamic prayers of her childhood. She would defend her action by pointing out that she did not speak Arabic or understand the words. She insisted that it was the chanting and the sound of the words that aroused the spirit; not the meaning of the words.
© 2008 Dan J. Jensen
12.28.07
Offender of the Faithful?
This blog got its name “Idol Chatter” for a reason, or even a couple of reasons. First of all, the blogger is a rather militant unitarian (note lowercase ‘u’). Secondly, he tries not to take his own chatter too seriously.
By “unitarian” is here meant anyone who recognizes the tendency of leaders, doctrines, and ideologies to become idols that stand in the way of our search for truth. Idolatry, according to this school of thought, is a mighty sly shape-shifting devil. As a former Unitarian minister once challenged us:
“We boast our emancipation from many superstitions; but if we have broken any idols, it is through a transfer of the idolatry.” — Ralph Waldo Emerson
Similarly, a Greek philosopher once cautioned:
“It is wise to listen not to me, but to the Logos, …” — Heraclitus
I use the term “unitarian” because this cautious mode of thinking is embodied in the Unitarian tradition, in which some Christians long ago determined that worshiping Jesus is missing the message of Jesus, who did not forbid blasphemy against himself, but rather forbade blasphemy against “the spirit”. It is the spirit of the message that gives life, he said, not the flesh of the messenger; not even the letter of the message.
In this sense, we can see that Jesus, whom some identify with the Logos, was not so different from Nietzsche’s anti-prophet Zarathustra:
“All the names of good and evil are parables: they do not declare, but only hint. Whoever among you seeks knowledge of them is a fool!” — Thus Spoke Zarathustra
The Great Iconoclast
Imagine if you will a medieval man, centuries after Christ, who was familiar with Judaism and Christianity. Imagine that this man was impressed by the Judaic aversion to idolatry, but also recognized Christ as a man—or messenger—of Truth. Imagine that he rejected the Trinity, and the notion that Jesus is God. Imagine that this man became quite well known for his opinion that Jesus is not God, such that we might consider him the first Unitarian. Imagine that he was a man of his time, and realizing the efficacy of power, mustered an army and ordered that army to pursue idolators and smash idols to the ends of the earth.
Let us call this man, for lack of a better name, Muhammad. Maybe this man was so single-minded about smashing idols that he might be called a prophet. Perhaps he was such a dedicated Unitarian that he rejected the very possibility of any religion other than the religion of Unitarianism, going so far as to call himself “the Seal of the Prophets”:
“Muhammad is not the father of any man among you, but he is the Apostle of God, and the seal of the prophets: and God knoweth all things.” Qur’an (Rodwell translation)
Let us further imagine that this man was seen by by his enemies as a militant religious fanatic and his followers as a crusader for his god Allah. Perhaps we can imagine that they had him wrong. Perhaps we can imagine that he was after something more fundamental, and that the rest—his doctrines, methods, and even his personal beliefs—was all circumstantial.
The man in the painting is not going bowling. If we look closely enough, we find that even Muhammad was an idolator; but who isn’t? Shall Muslims be permitted to rise above the man? Not if they continue to idolize him.
It is commonly understood that Islam means “submission”, but submission to what? Submission to Islam? Certainly not. That would be circular, would it not? It has always been understood to mean “submission to God”; but what is God? Is God to be taken as the Islamic image of God, “Allah”, or is God to be taken as that ultimate, unknowable creative essence behind—or within—things? Perhaps the core meaning of Islam is “submission to no idol, however subtle”.
“Seek knowledge even unto China” — Muhammad
If we were to take this as the essence of Islam, could this not be a religion of the future? Could we go so far as to say that Islam is faith in Reason? If this seems like too much of a stretch, can we at least see how Islam might be seen as a medieval attempt to free humanity of idolatry?
Let the true Muslims step forward to smash the idols of Islam.
