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COPYRIGHT 2005 Professors World Peace Academy
Religious polemics and conflicts often occur because people fail to recognize the common core of the world's religions (encounters with the other of all socially constituted worlds) and that differences between religions stem from different historical and social faithful responses to these encounters. Heavily responsible for this cognitive failure are incoherent and unjustifiable metaphysical explanatory projects. Freed from metaphysics, each world religion mandates that people respect and cherish all other faithful religious responses and, in liberating people from suffering and into joyous living, these religions provide the motivation to obey this mandate and to creatively enter into dialogue with each other.
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Polemics rather than dialogue has become the standard practice for many people engaged in what is called "religious talk." Cultural wars, fed by the mass media's insatiable craving for ear-shattering polemics, are waged between atheists and secularists on the one hand and "defenders of religious beliefs" on the other. Violent wars are waged between peoples trying polemically to use "religious talk" to legitimate claims to land and state power. Sectarian splits within established religious traditions get cemented into virtually irreconcilable differences because of polemics over literal vs. non-literal interpretations of religious texts. The disastrous effects of such polemics will not be ended until the anti-religious presumptions behind such polemics are exposed and extinguished. These are presumptions which prevent people from seeing encounters with the infinite as the common core at the heart of the world's religions and from seeing different religions as socially constituted ways of responding to these encounters, different faithful responses which the common core requires be respected and cherished.
In this essay, I will attempt to do three things: (1) Identify the common core at the heart of the world's religions. (2) Identify and critique the confused presumptions and their motivations which prevent so many people from focusing on this common core and which encourage them to engage in destructive polemics. (3) Show how encountering the infinite provides motivation for respecting and cherishing different religions and for entering into cross-religion dialogues which can strengthen creatively the fundamentals in each religion.
THE COMMON CORE IN THE WORLD'S RELIGIONS
By "encountering the infinite" I mean encountering the non-finite, the other to all socially constituted objects and subjects, the only kind of objects and subjects there are. Elsewhere I have presented the post-modern case that all objects of thought, speech, and experience, and all thinking, speaking, and experiencing subjects, are socially constituted. (1) Words and concepts are social tools, and among the things we do using them, we talk and think about objects and events, and we experience such objects and events. Their use is constituted by our social practices of classification and individuation. People, who speak, think, and experience, are what they are because they have been socially trained to speak, think, and experience as they do. All objects and subjects, all linguistic, conceptual, symbolic, and experiential worlds are social all the way down. When I talk about the finite I am talking about such socially constituted objects and subjects. By encountering the infinite, I mean encountering the absence of the self-sufficiency or exhaustiveness of the finite. I mean encountering that which is presupposed by the finite but which is not any being at all, not a socially constituted being and not some asocial and ahistorical being transcending our finite worlds. Encountering the infinite other of the finite is encountering the finite in a certain way. It is encountering it thankfully, joyfully, ethically, and trustingly. It is encountering it religiously.
Kierkegaard locates the religious in our subjectivistic, rather than our objectivisitic, modes of subjectivity, modes or ways of living. (2) How does one relate to socially constituted objects and subjects, to finite objects and our own finite characteristics? That is the religious question. Scientism views such objects and our socially justified beliefs about such objects as self-sufficient and exhaustive, thereby denying itself the ability to see that its stance towards such objects is just another form of subjectivity. Postulations of a transcendent being, in order to give metaphysical, ultimate explanations, confusedly fails to recognize that this metaphysical God is just one more socially constituted object, feeding intellectual cravings and not faithful responses to the finite's other. Religious subjectivity views finite objects and our beliefs about them as historically and socially constituted and constrained, and thus not to be absolutized. Religious subjectivity excludes cravings to be lord and master of the finite world, either politically, technologically, or intellectually. Faithfully responding to encounters with the infinite is never a matter of trying to grasp and control the infinite, but it is always a matter of surrendering as hostages to the infinite, surrendering so as to be freed from enslavement by the finite. Religious subjectivity recognizes that people are never just biological or socially constituted creatures. They are the ones constituting the finite worlds in which they dwell. Different vocabularies and different practices produce different worlds in which people live. In addition to their biological and social inheritances, people constitute themselves by living out some of the unlimited number of possibilities left open by their inheritance. Most importantly, in the case of people, "The ethical reality of the individual is the only reality." (3)
Building on Kierkegard's work, a host of twentieth-century thinkers have attempted to show why objectivistic modes of subjectivity exclude religious modes of life. Heidegger, in his attack on all ontotheologies, points out that one cannot pray to an ontotheological god; instead one must consider a god that lies beyond thinking, (4) and one must consider a kind of thinking which is a thanking for the earth upon which all social worlds are built. (5) Wittgenstein, who confesses that every question he investigated was a religious question, writes that in addition to describing objects in the world one must show in one's way of life a non-verbal "mystical" stance toward the world as a "whole." (6) He stresses that one must not attempt to reduce religious discourse expressing such stances to psychological, sociological, or metaphysical objectivisitic discourse about objects. (7) In his later writings, Derrida makes more and more explicit the religious motivation for his whole project of deconstructing all metaphysical claims about the presence of self-contained and self-sufficient meanings or objects, pointing out that everything finite and socially constituted points to an unrepresentable past and an infinitely open future. (8) Religiously powerful developments of Derrida's thinking on religion have been written by Americans John D. Caputo (9) and Mark Taylor. (10) For all these thinkers, religious discourse about the infinite is not discourse about any being about which one can have objectivisitic beliefs.
In order to see how religious discourse about the infinite does function, a good place to look is at the writings of Emmanuel Levinas. (11) Levinas provides phenomenological analyses of five aspects of human life which involve encounters with that which is other than Husserl's conceivable objects and Heidegger's usable tools. First, analytically prior to our experience of objects, there is our encounter with the brute otherness of an environment we cannot escape, an encounter that fills us with the horror felt by children alone in a dark room, that sense of dread and fascination felt encountering the other of all socially constituted phenomena, which Rudolph Otto called the sense of the Holy. (12) Second, there are our joyous, living encounters with the elements: drinking fresh water, walking and running, losing oneself in sunrises and sunsets. These encounters are the enjoyments, not yet controlled by conceptualizations, pointed to by the many myths of paradise. These encountered enjoyments are what Lacan calls the Real, the other to the symbolic realities we have constituted which always leave fractured our social worlds and which leave a void at the core of our constituted self identities. (13) Third, there are our interpersonal encounters with each other in the gentle intimacy of home life that are analytically prior to all encounters with socially masked people. These are the encounters pointed to in utopian myths. Fourth, there are encounters with the possibility of our own death, the possibility of having no more possibilities. We cannot represent to ourselves our own death, because being dead means that we are not around to do any representing....
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