Continue reading »]]> As with mostly strongly held beliefs or formative influences, religion is part of a believer’s identity.

Some people seem to find that peculiar or irrational or just plain incomprehensible. But how peculiar is it really, when one considers all of the things we humans attach our identity to: jobs, professions, gender, sexual orientation, skin color, ethnic origins, place of birth, place of residence, political persuasion or party affiliation, educational level or intellectual accomplishments, physical appearance, even the sports teams we follow or what foods we eat (or refuse to eat). We seldom, I think, sit down and contemplate how central these things really are to who we are or perceive ourselves to be.

I self-identify as a believer in God—specifically, a Bahá’í. Because I’m a Bahá’í, my identity and what I build it around is exactly the sort of thing I’m encouraged to contemplate. I also self-identify as a mother, wife, writer, and musician—specifically, as a singer, and a filker. Each of these things forms a greater or lesser part of my identity from moment to moment. Some are “containers” of more minutely defined bits of identity.

But what connects them all in one way or another is the first—my identity as a believer.

Why? Because it’s contributory to the other areas. I wrote in an earlier episode of Why Religion that religion, in the scriptures of the Baha’i Faith, is a target—a set of goals. Of those goals I wrote:

“It’s the bullseye at the center of the human being that we strive to hit. Could I have come to appreciate these qualities were I an atheist? Maybe, but I doubt that I would have seen it as part of my identity as a human being to work day in and day out to acquire them. I doubt I would be conscious of their effect on every facet of my life, or concern myself with how I should apply them to every situation I encounter.”

Hence, my faith or religion or spiritual orientation, if you will, is what gives me both the incentive and the tools with which to strive consciously to progress in all of the other areas—to be a better mother, wife, writer, musician. The conscious aspect, I think, is important. The scriptures of religion make a point about self-knowledge and self-awareness. Buddha remarks that:

“Nirvana comes to thee when thou understandest thoroughly and livest according to that understanding, that all things are of one Essence and that there is but one law.”

The Bahá’í writings frequently refer to the human heart as a mirror and note that the purer and more polished the mirror, the greater its reflective powers. They also state what should be obvious on a moment of—heh—reflection: a mirror reflects whatever the individual chooses to turn it toward. ‘Nuff said.

I freely admit to bias in this area. I derive a great deal of joy from my faith, but in part that’s because it satisfies and challenges on so many different levels. I can think of no negatives to having an identity that is grounded in a process of conscious transformation. For one thing that process is infinite. You never use it up, it doesn’t fade with age, you don’t lose it if the stock market crashes, or if you lose your job, or if your marriage crumbles, or if the Muse deserts you—the words won’t come and the music won’t play. In fact, you may be even more aware of the process in the throes of some difficulty.

Well, I can think of one negative of the above. It’s work. It’s a lot like being a student. What I am studying is being human.

One of my favorite passages of Bahá’í scripture, is one in which Bahá’u’lláh warns of basing identity on the wrong things—things that perish, things that may even be harmful. He concludes:

“For every one of you his paramount duty is to choose for himself that on which no other may infringe and none usurp from him. Such a thing—and to this the Almighty is My witness—is the love of God, could ye but perceive it. Build ye for yourselves such houses as the rain and floods can never destroy, which shall protect you from the changes and chances of this life.” — Gleanings CXXIII

It goes hand-in-hand with Bahá’u’lláh’s exhortation to “translate that which hath been written into reality and action….”

This is similar to Christ’s message to believers in the Sermon on the Mount, which is contained in the seventh chapter of Matthew.

“Therefore everyone who hears these words of mine and puts them into practice is like a wise man who built his house on the rock. The rain came down, the streams rose, and the winds blew and beat against that house; yet it did not fall, because it had its foundation on the rock.”

This is not easy advice to follow. It’s perilously easy to become attached to the things and people around us such that they begin to define who we are. Many people are attached to their political parties or to particular politicians whose identities (at least publicly) seem to mirror their own in some way. Even in the realm of faith, it’s easy to identify with outward forms, rituals, and doctrines—and I think this is what secularists quite rightfully decry when they see it in the religious sphere. Those outward forms change, and if we attach our identities to them rather than to the process of transformation that the Revealers of religion have universally encouraged, then we may find ourselves in a constant battle to maintain those forms.

If we look at those outward forms and trappings of religion as if they were religion, itself, then it’s no wonder our secular friends may wonder what possible benefits we can derive from our faith.

Next time: Religion as a source of awe.

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Maya Bohnhoff

Some folks suppose that religion is, to all (or at least most) religionists, a social club, or a means of maintaining social status. Intelligent politicians and clergymen (yes, some will complain those are oxymorons) are especially suspected of not really believing, but only claiming to believe for the sake of political position. I’ve read numerous claims on atheist blogs that since President Obama is obviously an intelligent man, he must be a closet atheist. The same is said of such figures as Newton, Galileo, and probably even Francis Collins. A common refrain among new atheist writers is that most clergymen no longer believe in God (or at least in Christ’s divinity) and remain in harness for practical reasons.

There are at least three separate issues here:

1. social belonging—it is the social aspects of the religious community that are important to the individual rather than the spiritual teachings;
2. insincere belief—the believer is in the religious community for the sake of family and friends or is pretending belief to ensure the approval of necessary parties;
3. specialness—the believer likes being a member of what he regards as an elite group. He is saved, but that guy over there in that other church or faith, not so much.

Social belonging

Are some believers engaged in religion because of community? Sure. Belonging is the core item in Maslov’s hierarchy of human needs. Belonging is tightly knit to a human being’s sense of identity.

I’ve known people who were very up front about their motivations in that regard. They were Catholic because they liked the pomp and splendor of mass or attended an Evangelical church because they liked the social aspects or outreach ministry of that group.

Does that make it reasonable to assume that all or even most religious people are religious because they like being part of a particular group? I don’t think so, but that may be because I’m only social because my faith stresses the importance of strong communities and it’s hard to be part of a community without interacting with other people. With the exception of hanging out with small groups of very close friends, I don’t value socializing for its own sake. What I do value is getting together to do something that “feeds” me—that might be studying scripture and discussing how the principles found therein inform and affect life, or it might be playing music. You might get me into a social gathering with a promise of fesenjoon (a delightful Persian dish) and strong black tea, but I will flee as soon as humanly possible.

And that, frankly, is one of the main attractions religion holds for me—my faith not only recognizes the need for individual and societal transformation, it offers the spiritual guidelines and practical tools necessary to effect that transformation. My dialogues with other believers of a variety of faiths have convinced me that this is what motivates a lot of people. There are a great number of us religious types who value faith because it offers both challenge and potential for transformation. We don’t want a faith that is “fun”. (If I want fun, I can go to a movie, a theme park, read a book, or write one.) We don’t want a faith-based social club. (When I want to “party”, I’ll go to a science fiction convention and hang out in the filk room.) We want a belief system that will call us out—that will put the responsibility for our spiritual welfare back on us and make better human beings of us.

Certainly, my faith community offers a network of individuals who hold the same basic beliefs and who are working on the same set of virtues. But it is those virtues themselves that, to most of us, have the real appeal. We are where we are because we each hope to transform our own character in a way that will exert a positive effect on the people our lives touch and on humanity in general. Obviously, it makes sense to actively pursue such transformation in an environment where it is supported—just as it makes sense to go to the gym to effect physical transformation.

Do faith communities exert a positive effect on people in this way?

Recent surveys carried out by a number of groups—including the Pew Foundation and Faith Matters—show that people engaged with religious communities (even secular spouses of religious people) are significantly more inclined to give of both time and resources to charitable causes than their secular peers. The surprise in the studies was that this was true of secular causes as well as religious ones and “liberal” causes as well as “conservative” ones. People of faith give more to secular causes than secularists do.

Go figure.

People from faith communities are also significantly more likely to be involved in the larger community, to be active in civic affairs. They are more inclined to offer what Muhammad referred to in the Qur’an as “small kindnesses” to strangers and neighbors.

This stands to reason. Groups support and enable behaviors. What behaviors they support will, naturally, depend on what values the group holds in common and what principles serve as a foundation for their activities. It should be no surprise that the principles underlying revealed religion (such as the “Golden Rule”) result in individuals and groups that are active in promoting general human welfare, and in caring for the poor and disenfranchised.

The big surprise should be when they don’t.

Next time: More God of the Month Club—the Identity Gambit

Continue reading »]]> This philosophy suggests that religion is a security blanket. Religious people have Linus van Pelt’s disease and are unable to give up their blankies and join the adults. The reason religious folks cling to their beliefs, this viewpoint asserts, is merely for the comfort and meaning it brings to their lives.

That’s the basic belief as I’ve heard it expressed by such respected thinkers as Richard Dawkins and Caroline Porco. A permutation of this is the related idea that religious people don’t handle uncertainty well and that this is why we cling to the absolute.

I can certainly vouch for the fact that my belief in God has helped me through some very difficult situations. My mother’s first encounter with cancer when I was seven or eight, my father’s death when I was fifteen, my mother’s when I was in my twenties, a divorce, a brain tumor and the subsequent surgery, dealing with occasional depression. I have found great support in considering the example of Baha’u'llah’s son Abdu’l-Baha (the centenary of whose visit to the US and Europe is being celebrated this year).

But I have to ask, why would that be a negative?

Other people find comfort in their therapist’s office, in medications, in support groups and communities of activity, or in other individuals. But a belief in God is rarely equated with those coping mechanisms. Rather it is mentioned in the same breath with drugs, alcohol and other escapist activities.

Do some people use religion to escape? Certainly. I felt a strong compulsion to run off to a convent when I was a teen despite the fact that I was not Catholic. There is much to be envied in a monkish life for one like myself who is socially inept and loves to read, devour information, and spin it out again in a web of stories. But this is where my faith has been the most helpful: in keeping me from doing exactly that—escaping.

Bahá’u’llah, like Christ before Him, insists that Bahá’ís stay engaged with the world, understand its workings and avail themselves of its benefits—while not getting caught up in them.

I’m reminded, in that context, of a truism—provenance unknown—that says courage is not the absence of fear, but doing what needs to be done in spite of one’s fear. That is the way most of the religious people I know experience their faith. It is not something they hide in or behind, but something that enables them to go out into the world and live.

One thing most of us are faced with on a daily basis is uncertainty. The revealed scriptures have a great deal to say about living with uncertainty, which is why when I heard it suggested that religion kept people from handling uncertainty well, I did a spit take.  The statement that caused this messy reaction was: ‘To my mind, most religious/supernatural beliefs come from an intolerance for uncertainty. If there is no immediate physical/scientific explanation for something people wonder if there is a religious/supernatural explanation, rather than just saying “I don’t know.”’

Now, for one thing, this is a binary way of looking at the situation: it has to be either or. One cannot be a secularist and intolerant of uncertainty or religious and tolerant of it. For another, I have to question the premise. First, it seems to me that even when a secularist says “I don’t know”, he does so with the certainty that there is a scientific (i.e. secular) explanation for it (whatever ‘it’ is). He is equally certain that there is no God. Conversely, when a Bahá’í says, “I know there is a spiritual existence beyond this one,” the “I don’t know” that is the inevitable answer to the question “What will that existence be like?” is complete and abject.

In my experience, it’s the folks I’ve encountered who embrace an uncompromisingly materialist ideology who have a problem with saying “I don’t know.” There is a compulsion in human beings to explain everything in terms we can understand. We want explanations to be neat and tidy and visible. We want a single filter that will explain everything. Some of us have chosen science as that single filter.

But much of what scientists are discovering about the very fabric of our universe is NOT visible and may not ever be directly knowable. People of faith are well-acquainted with the notion that some very important things must be known indirectly through their evidences and by inference.

It’s that concept of albedo, again. At night, we can know the Sun still exists because we can see its light reflecting on the face of the moon. IF we understand a little about orbital mechanics, we can work out that the moon doesn’t give its own light, but is reflecting the invisible Sun (a nod to Sting). If we think that orbital mechanics is superstitious nonsense, we might well hold out for another explanation that does not include an invisible Sun.

Most of what goes on in a human brain both while we’re engaged in solitary thought or interacting with others has nothing to do with the material world. Our lives are lived in a landscape of intellect and emotions and ideas that are as far beyond the merely physical as religionists propose God is. The human intellect is reflective of something that we have yet to find in the “material world.” That is what a great many of us call God.

We are completely uncertain of what God is like except through His reflection in creation and in the human Emissaries that have arrived like clockwork for millennia to teach us how to deal with the uncertainty of life. Their advice is, I think, both compelling and pragmatic. They taught largely about how we were to treat each other, how to stay unperturbed in the face of uncertainty and even insecurity and danger, how to build communities, how to conduct business equitably, how to take care of the poor and unfortunate, how to avoid becoming attached to “stuff” . . . or certainty.

“He should succour the dispossessed, and never withhold his favour from the destitute. He should show kindness to animals, how much more unto his fellow-man, to him who is endowed with the power of utterance. He should not hesitate to offer up his life for his Beloved, nor allow the censure of the people to turn him away from the Truth. He should not wish for others that which he doth not wish for himself, nor promise that which he doth not fulfil. With all his heart should the seeker avoid fellowship with evil doers, and pray for the remission of their sins. He should forgive the sinful, and never despise his low estate, for none knoweth what his own end shall be.” — Bahá’u’lláh, Kitab-i-Iqan, para 214

I recently had hip surgery and have had to learn to walk again normally. When I was fresh out of the operating room I had a walker, graduated to a cane, and then left that behind to embark on a regimen of physical therapy, exercise and healthy habits that I will continue to use for the rest of my life. That seems, to me, a more fitting analogue for religion—it’s not a device one leaves behind as one heals, but a process that one undertakes to build strength and ensure good health. It requires discipline, is sometimes painful and difficult, but the rewards in terms of health (and therefore independence and freedom) are great.

Next timet: The God of the Month Club

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Maya Bohnhoff (and Clancy)

A recurring theme I hear in the commentary and conversation of some anti-theists is that religion is not about life on earth in the here and now, but focuses its entire attention on the afterlife. This, it is supposed, leads to the belief among the majority of believers that nothing we do here matters and social ills like poverty and injustice can be blissfully ignored.

I’ve been a Bahá’í my entire adult life. This means I have been immersed for many years in a scriptural philosophy and community culture that teaches . . . well, almost exactly the opposite of the above thumbnail sketch.

Bahá’ís are asked to to focus on what we learn and do here so that we have the tools and qualities to be the best human beings we can be … both here and in the next phase of our existence. It’s rather like a student who understands the balance and relationship between how well she does in school and how successful she will be as an adult human being once she leaves the learning environment. Sure, adult independence is the goal, but it isn’t the purpose. The purpose of getting that shiny education is the qualities and skills you acquire in the process. Without those qualities and skills, the goal is unreachable.

This comes down to the purpose of religion, which Bahá’u’lláh describes this way in one of His tablets:

The Purpose of the one true God, exalted be His glory, in revealing Himself unto men is to lay bare those gems that lie hidden within the mine of their true and inmost selves. — Gleanings from the Writings of Bahá’u’llah, CXXXII

Pretty straightforward metaphor: the purpose of religion is the revelation in each of us of human virtues.

In this context, Bahá’u’lláh writes about our duty to each other and to this world in passage after passage of the works that form the foundation of His faith. He makes it clear that simply believing a theological formula is not the goal of the exercise, rather:

It is incumbent upon every man of insight and understanding to strive to translate that which hath been written into reality and action….  That one indeed is a man who, today, dedicateth himself to the service of the entire human race. The Great Being saith:  Blessed and happy is he that ariseth to promote the best interests of the peoples and kindreds of the earth. — Gleanings from the Writings of Baha’u'llah. CXVII

Abdu'l-Bahá

His son Abdu’l-Bahá enlarges on this idea in a number of places, including in this talk given on 21 April 1912 at a Universalist Church in Washington, D.C.

All the Prophets of God, including Jesus Christ, appeared in the world for the education of humanity, to develop immature souls into maturity, to transform the ignorant of mankind into the knowing, thereby establishing love and unity through divine education and training. . . . Prophets have appeared in this world with the mission that human souls may become the expressions of the Merciful, that they may be educated and developed, attain to love and amity and establish peace and agreement.  — `Abdu’l-Bahá, Promulgation of Universal Peace, p 39-42

In these passages, Bahá’u’lláh and Abdu’l-Bahá promote the idea that the Bahá’í Faith is not unique in this focus on religion as the means of individual and societal transformation—the former being necessary (obviously) to the latter.

The evidence that Bahá’u’lláh and Abdu’l-Bahá are correct in these statements can be found in earlier holy texts. From Krishna to Moses to Zoroaster to Buddha to Christ to Muhammad, the revealers of religion have concerned Themselves primarily with how human beings comport themselves here.

In the Bhagavad Gita (a Hindu scripture) Krishna speaks of selfless service:

Selfish action imprisons the world. Act selflessly, without any thought of personal profit. . . . Every selfless act, Arjuna, is born from Brahman . . . Brahman is present in every act of service. All life turns on this law, O Arjuna. Those who violate it, indulging the senses for their own pleasure and ignoring the needs of others, have wasted their life. —Krishna, Bhagavad Gita. 3:9, 15,16 (Easwaran translation)

Krishna does not offer any future “heaven” to those who obey this law, but rather says of them that:

They find their joy, their rest, their light completely within themselves. United with the Lord, they attain nirvana (bliss) in Brahman. — Krishna, Bhagavad Gita 5:24

Bliss is not a goal, but the result or consequence of actions taken for reasons other than 
”personal profit”.

The Dhammapada opens with these twin verses from the Buddha:

“He insulted me, he beat me; he threw me down and robbed me.” Dwell on such thoughts, and your hatred will never cease. “He insulted me, he beat me; he threw me down and robbed me.” Put away such thoughts and hatred will never arise. For in this world, hate never yet has dispelled hate. Only love dispels hate. This law is ancient and will last forever. — Buddha, Dhammapada, 1:3-5

Buddha asks His followers to concern themselves with the Eightfold Path:

1. Right Understanding
2. Right Thought
3. Right Speech
4. Right Action
5. Right Livelihood
6. Right Effort
7. Right Mindfulness
8. Right Concentration

Zoroaster also focuses on good thought, good words, and good deeds (which is what some refer to as the Zoroastrian “motto”). And, of course, most Westerners are at least marginally aware of Christ’s teachings about human behavior:

One of the teachers of the law came and heard them debating. Noticing that Jesus had given them a good answer, he asked him, “Of all the commandments, which is the most important?” “The most important one,” answered Jesus, “is this: ‘Hear, O Israel, the Lord our God, the Lord is one. Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind and with all your strength. The second is this: ‘Love your neighbor as yourself.’ There is no commandment greater than these.”— Mark 12:28-30

Most Westerners are probably not so aware of a similar focus in Muhammad’s teachings on behavior in the here and now and His focus on “small kindnesses”:

Hast thou observed him who belieth religion? That is he who repelleth the orphan, and urgeth not the feeding of the needy. Ah, woe unto worshippers who are heedless of their prayer; who would be seen (at worship) yet refuse small kindnesses! — Qur’an, Surih 107:1-7 (Yusuf Ali translation)

These are, of course, just a few examples of a thread that runs through all of the revealed religions. Something that revolutionized (or evolutionized) my own thinking about religion was the discovery—through personal research—that what I had grown up with as the Golden Rule and thought unique to Christianity existed in religions both older and newer. In all cases, is this principle—that we should treat others as we would be treated—is given singular emphasis.

• This is the sum of duty:  do naught to others which if done to thee would cause thee pain. (Krishna, The Mahabharata)
• What is hateful to you, do not to your fellow men.  That is the entire Law; all the rest is commentary. (Hillel, The Talmud)
• Tzu-kung asked, ‘Is there a single word which can be a guide to conduct throughout one’s life?’  The Master said, ‘It is perhaps the word “shu” (reciprocity).  Do not impose on others what you yourself do not desire.’” (Kung-fu-tse, Analects)
• So in all things, whatever you would have men do to you, do also to them, for this sums up the Law and the Prophets. (Christ, The Gospel of Matthew)
• No one of you is a believer until he desires for his brother that which he desires for himself. (Muhammad, Hadith)

Bahá’u’lláh puts it this way in one of His letters:

O son of man! If thine eyes be turned towards mercy, forsake the things that profit thee, and cleave unto that which will profit mankind. And if thine eyes be turned towards justice, choose thou for thy neighbor that which thou choosest for thyself. — Bahá’u'lláh, Epistle to the Son of the Wolf

Where’s the emphasis? In the simple contextual knowledge that Bahá’u’lláh also wrote in one of His major compositions that “the best-beloved of all things in My sight is justice. . .”

Strong words.

Are there believers who are focused on what I referred to previously as the Express Train to Valhalla? Sure. I overheard one of them not an hour ago in a yogurt shop trying to convince the young woman who worked there that there was nothing we could or should do here because scripture said that God was going to “intervene” and fix everything at the end of the world. (Which, as near as I can tell, is a doctrine constructed from a number of Biblical passages that are not always talking about the same thing.)

How big a group are we talking about? If recent studies undertaken by the Pew Trust and the Faith Matters Surveys are any indication, the group is rather small. According to Robert Putnam and David Campbell, who conducted a two wave panel study entitled Faith Matters and wrote about it in detail in American Grace: How Religion Divides and Unites Us (2010), about 11% of Christians surveyed hold these sorts of deeply fundamentalist views. Hence, it is far from a majority position even within Christianity.

Other believers—including Hindus, Buddhists, and Bahá’ís—don’t have a conception of heaven as a physical place where you go to be rewarded for doctrinal purity or proper affiliation. Nor does Muhammad portray this sort of afterlife party as the goal of our existence.

So he who gives (in charity) and fears (God), and (in all sincerity) testifies to the best, We will indeed make smooth for him the path to Bliss. But he who is a greedy miser and thinks himself self-sufficient, and gives the lie to the best, We will indeed make smooth for him the path to Misery; nor will his wealth profit him when he falls headlong (into the Pit). — Quran, Surih 92: 4-11

The Pit in the above verse refers to the grave, not a fiery hell (the provenance of belief in which is a fascinating study). The Pickthall version of the Qur’an uses the words “state of ease” in place of the Yusuf Ali translation’s “Bliss”, and “adversity” in place of “Misery”. It also renders Ali Yusuf’s “falls headlong” with its parenthetical “into the Pit” as “when he perisheth”. In either case, it is not a promise of pie in the sky by and by. The emphasis—as in all the scriptures I’ve searched—is on how we think, speak and act toward our fellow human beings in the here and now, and whether we allow the teachings of faith to transform us . . . or not.

The good news is, most believers get this. They are not putting off work in this world in favor of getting their dogma ducks in a row for the next. This is borne out by the studies I mentioned above which show, for example, that religious people—of whatever tradition—are far more involved in civic and philanthropic causes both through giving and volunteerism, than are their more secular confreres. And their activity is not restricted to religious charities and causes. They are more involved in secular causes than their secular neighbors. (See American Grace for a comprehensive look at the data).

These studies conclude that a high level of activity in a religious community in the here and now results in the opposite of the attitudes and behaviors I described in my opening paragraph. Why is the perception otherwise? I leave it to the reader to consider.

Next time: Religion as security blanket

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Maya Bohnhoff is a professional writer who lives and works in San Jose.

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Maya Bohnhoff

I often come across the assumption that I view my religion as a vehicle—the express train to Valhalla. This scenario proposes that I am concerned chiefly with my personal salvation and am obedient to the laws of my faith for that reason alone.

To be fair, there are believers who are chiefly concerned with their personal salvation. It is of such deep concern because there are a number of sectarian groups that stress the idea that one must be right with God in order to go to heaven and so a great deal of importance is attached to knowing what one must do to be right with God—to be saved. Growing up, I encountered a number of suggested formulas for this: faith + grace = salvation; faith + works = salvation; faith + works + grace = salvation.

These have loomed so large historically that believers have been considered apostate or even heretical for adhering to a particular formula. Blood has been shed over the creation of these doctrinal statements.

I can understand the impulse to set up such formulas. It makes it easy to know with certainty that you’re right with God. It might even enable you to know if another believer is “right” simply by knowing if they believe a particular, doctrinally correct formula. You can know, theoretically, if you or a fellow believer is heaven bound by simply getting the answer to one simple question: “Are you saved?” Meaning, are you doctrinally correct?

This ostensibly takes the guesswork out of salvation because, as one Christian minister of my acquaintance told me, it’s impossible to know if you’ve done enough good works or loved others enough to be saved. Therefore, salvation surely must depend upon something quantifiable.

Now, I say I’ve encountered these formulas, but I find them remarkable for two reasons:

1. They are not held universally by believers even in the one faith we tend to associate with the question: “Are you saved?”
2. They are not taught as formulas (or vehicles) in the various scriptures.

Religion—whether we’re discussing Hinduism, Buddhism, Christianity, Islam, or the Bahá’í Faith—suggests that the believer’s spiritual state (their readiness for “heaven”) depends on their behavior, which is a reflection of their inner spiritual state and—dare I say it?—their inner virtues. Christ, for example, ties eternal life (that trip to “heaven”) to obedience.

“No one has greater love than this, that someone would lay down his life for his friends. You are My friends if you do what I command you. …This is what I command you: Love one another.” (John 15: 13, 14, 17)

He repeats this combining of obedience and love several times for emphasis.

My pastor friend had a great deal of trouble with this verse because it put the emphasis on behavior (obedience) and on an intangible (the love in a believer’s heart).

“How obedient do I have to be? How much love is enough?” he asked me.

“I don’t know,” I said, “but why do I need to know? My concern is to do my level best to obey and love.”

For the record, other Prophets / Avatars have said something similar:

“Not by the Vedas (Scriptures), or an austere life, or gifts to the poor, or ritual offerings can I be seen as thou hast seen Me.  Only by love can men see Me, and know Me, and come unto Me.  He who works for Me, who loves Me, whose end Supreme I am, free from attachment to all things, and with love for all creation, he in truth comes unto Me.” — Bhagavad Gita 11:53, 54

So, far from being a vehicle that seals your certainty of going to heaven (however you define that), religion to most of the religionists I know isn’t a vehicle we’re in, but a road we’re on. Faith is as much a process as it is a quality one has or an emotion one feels. At the risk of being misunderstood, I’m going to borrow a word from the Qur’an to describe this process: jihad.

Yes, I know it’s been co-opted to describe terrorist activities, but I’m using it in the original sense of the word. In the context of faith, jihad means to “strive in the way of God”. In other words, to put yourself on the road and strive day by day until you reach the end. A believer can’t be certain that “heaven” (which most believers I know understand as as spiritual state, and not a physical place) lies the end of his particular road, or if he’ll take a detour somewhere along the way. And there’s no way to count instances of obedience or even love that add up to “I’m saved”, or to point to a particular doctrine that spells “salvation”.

So . . . if the certainty of heaven isn’t the big prize for all religionists, why obey any commandment?

The Bahá’í sacred texts explain it this way:

“Worship thou God in such wise that if thy worship lead thee to the fire, no alteration in thine adoration would be produced, and so likewise if thy recompense should be paradise. Thus and thus alone should be the worship which befitteth the one True God. Shouldst thou worship Him because of fear, this would be unseemly in the sanctified Court of His presence, and could not be regarded as an act by thee dedicated to the Oneness of His Being. Or if thy gaze should be on paradise, and thou shouldst worship Him while cherishing such a hope, thou wouldst make God’s creation a partner with Him. . . That which is worthy of His Essence is to worship Him for His sake, without fear of fire, or hope of paradise. Although when true worship is offered, the worshipper is delivered from the fire, and entereth the paradise of God’s good-pleasure, yet such should not be the motive of his act.” — The Bab

While there are believers in every faith path that confuse the goal with the results of striving for the goal, it’s certain that all believers don’t do that. To a great many of us, religion is not a means to a self-exalting end, but a process by which we can become more fully realized human beings.

Next time: Pie in the sky by and by…how religion encourages us to think about the there and then instead of the here and now.

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Maya Bohnhoff is a professional writer who lives in San Jose, CA.

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Maya Bohnhoff

Last time, I gave an overview of a number of secular views of religion that I’ve encountered in my travels. I’d like to poke at these ideas a bit in the hope of maybe increasing understanding among both religious and secularist readers. Those of you who are religious, I’m hoping, might have an aha moment about why your secularist colleagues and friends suppose that giving up your faith is as simple as taking off a pair of unfashionable gloves.

Those of you who are not religious, I’m hoping will have a similar epiphany (pun intended) related to why your religious acquaintances and friends don’t just swap that purse they’ve spun out of moonbeams for one of good, serviceable vinyl.

That there are people who use religion to accessorize their lives, and who choose their place of worship—and possibly their faith, itself—the way they’d choose a color for their car or a handbag to match their shoes—is undeniable. I’ve been surprised, myself, at having someone explain to me that they go to such and such church or center for spiritual enlightenment because it suited them. That might change in a week or a month or a year, but it suited this phase of their life, so that was where they went.

Truth to tell, I had a close friend who switched religions the way I switched colors of eye makeup and who had been a Daoist, a Wiccan, and a follower of Eckankar among other things. His clothing—and sometimes his name—changed right along with his faith. I’ve known other people who have adopted a particular religious affiliation because it they thought it was cool or trendy or because their friends were involved in it.

But I am surprised by these revelations precisely because they are unusual.

I have another dear friend who, as a teen, was a militant atheist, but who went to the Baptist church because they had a good baseball team. He eventually became a Baha’i—which is why we met—and has been a Bahá’í for over 30 years. My own family denomination-hopped for years among Protestant churches before I, and then my mother, became Bahá’ís.

Why?

Ultimately, in all of the above cases the connecting element is identity. The identity of some believers is plastic. It shifts constantly and they shift religious affiliations to accommodate these shifts in identity—religion becomes a sort of vision-quest. Others, like my mother, for example, have a very strong sense of religious identity and “church-hop” in a quest to find a mirror for that identity among other believers. In my mother’s case, she wasn’t looking for a group that interpreted every jot and tittle of scripture as she did, but rather one that viewed it in principle as she did. The first quest depends upon how one sees one’s self. The second on one sees one’s faith.

My mother’s devotion to God was not only strong, it was central to her personality, her worldview, her very sense of self. The same is true of me and of a great many other believers I know. And it is true whether they are Bahá’í, as I am, Muslim, Christian, Buddhist, Jewish, Hindu, Wiccan or whatever.

To me, as a Bahá’í, my faith is a mirror in which I can see myself—the ideal me and the real me—and by which I can adjust the real to conform more with the ideal. And the ideal has nothing to do with accesorizing and everything to do with what lies at the core of my being—the qualities I strive to possess. Qualities such as selflessness, patience, courage, radiant acquiescence, rationality, hunger for knowledge and the ability to pursue such goals as returning hatred with love, and putting the interests of others ahead of my own.

Religion, in the scriptures of the Baha’i Faith, isn’t an accessory, it’s a target. It’s the bulls-eye at the center of the human being that we strive to hit.

Could I have come to appreciate these qualities were I an atheist? Maybe, but I doubt that I would have seen it as part of my identity as a human being to work day in and day out to acquire them. I doubt I would be conscious of their effect on every facet of my life, or concern myself with how I should apply them to every situation I encounter.

So, when a secularist asks me why I can’t just swap out my beliefs, the answer is that I would be swapping out what makes me ME. My faith lies at the heart of who and what I perceive myself to be. It supplies the ideal I am striving toward (exemplified by Baha’u'llah’s son, Abdu’l-Bahá), and the tools necessary to that journey.

This bears, too, on why religious folks are offended when well-meaning non-believers respond to the knowledge that they are religious with mockery and insult.

So, dear atheist friends, It isn’t as if you’ve just told your religious acquaintance that her purse is ugly and her shoes unfashionable. It’s as if you’ve told her that her inner being is ugly and unfashionable. Forgive her for taking offense and try to imagine yourself in her place. Imagine that someone has just told you they regard that part of you that is most intrinsically, essentially you as being worthless, stupid, and even evil and maybe contemplate the idea that the Golden Rule is something we all can aspire to, whether we are religious or not.

Next time: Religion as an express train to Valhalla.

Continue reading »]]> I, and many folks I know who would describe themselves as religious (aka, a person of faith, or spiritual) are puzzled by the reactions to religion by some of our secularist and atheist acquaintances. It’s not that we don’t grok people’s disgust with the things that have been done in the name of religion. We not only get that,  we share their disgust. Indeed, to a person of faith, the fact that Christ’s or Muhammad’s or Buddha’s name as been invoked to wreak mayhem on other human beings is not just disgusting, it’s agonizing, because it degrades, distorts and ultimately destroys something that we hold sacred.

What we don’t “get” is why this antipathy extends to ALL religion and religious ideals everywhere and why people who frame the “debate” about the role of religion in terms of rationality and irrationality are, themselves unable to rationally distinguish between religion and what people choose to do with it.

This distinction is not lost on them when it applies to science. To observe, as Common Ground blogger Steve Friberg has done, that science has been implicated in some of humankind’s ugliest atrocities will draw the immediate response that science cannot be blamed for these things because it is neutral. It espouses no values and offers no dogma. It is, one of my atheist confreres noted, like a scalpel. Whether it is an instrument of salvation or destruction depends entirely upon what you do with it.

For some reason, though, it’s impossible for a great many secularists to apply the same very rational argument to religion. I’ve made the argument here before that the same case can be made—indeed, must be made—for religion. But religion and science are not alike in one important respect: science, ideally, is neutral (which begs the question of how it can be used to derive a moral foundation for the planet).

Religion is not neutral. It has a set of principles that—regardless of whether we’re discussing Hinduism or Buddhism, Christianity or Judaism, Islam or the Baha’i Faith—have been recorded for posterity in written form.

While social teachings change and flex from age to age, the essential principles at the core of the world’s religions have remained strikingly consistent. At the heart of it all is something for which we’ve coined the phrase “Golden Rule” in an effort to suggest something of its value, if in somewhat materialisitc terms. This is the basic concept of treating others as we would like to be treated. Krishna refers to this as “the sum of duty”, rabbinical scholar Hillel as “the entire law” (“all the rest is commentary”, he adds), Christ summed it up as the one law upon which all others depend, Baha’u'llah as the epitome of justice (which is, He also says, “the best-beloved off all things” in God’s sight).

Religion, then, is not neutral, but prescriptive. It calls for a standard of faith, yes, but—more importantly, in the eyes of the Founders of religion (Krishna, Christ, and Baha’u'llah, for example)—it calls for a standard of behavior toward our fellow human beings that we, all too often, disregard.

We are, as a species, awfully good at finding things that trump our religious principles—reasons why they don’t apply to this or that person or group—their skin color or point of origin, their social status, gender or political views. It’s no wonder, then, that our secularist fellows have a shallow and often narrow idea of what place religion holds in the life of the religious. Some of their assumptions about it—and about us—seem naive, at best. At worst, they compound the misunderstanding by allowing their very righteous outrage over what has been done in the name of religion to trump their own reason and sense of justice.

Here are a handful of the assumptions I’ve run across on atheist websites, on inter-religious forums and in new atheist polemics:

• Religion is an accessory, like a purse or a pair of gloves. It’s handy, but easily switched, according to one’s fashion sense, or simply put down and picked up again at will.
• Religion is a vehicle. It’s a fashion statement, but one that we actually expect to get us somewhere—namely to that big old pie in the sky, Heaven, where tuxedoed dolphins bring us breakfast and … no, wait, that’s a Was Not Was song. Anyway, the idea is that religion is something we use to get us where we hope to go.
• Religion is not about life on earth in the here and now; it’s about the afterlife. Hence, nothing we do here matters and social ills such as poverty and injustice can be blissfully ignored.
• Religion is a security blanket. Religious people are the Linuses of the world, unable to give up our blanky and join the adults. We are, therefore, impervious to reason and must be reasoned with like children and offered sweets in return for giving blanky up. The reason we cling to religion is merely for the comfort and meaning it brings to our lives.
• Religion is a social club, or a means of maintaing necessary social status. Intelligent politicians and clergymen (yes, some will complain those are oxymorons) are especially suspected of not really believing. I’ve read claims on atheist blogs that since President Obama is obviously an intelligent man, he must be a closet atheist. The same is said of such figures as Newton, Galileo, and probably Francis Collins, as well.
• Religion is a source of awe. Some secular thinkers have spent a great deal of time trying to figure out how to convince us religious “types” that science is more awe-inspiring than God or religion. Why aren’t we capable of appreciating the awesomeness of the Universe, they wonder?
• Religion encourages shallow thinking. It keeps us from having to think too deeply about life, the universe and everything. (I know, I know—don’t laugh.) This is sort of the ignorance is bliss take on faith and it gets a lot of “airplay”. Religious people, this view supposes, are hiding from reality behind dogma and have checked their brains at the door.
• Religion is penance. We we believe we are sinful and therefore incapable of making rational decisions for ourselves. Therefore we accept the authority of a church or guru or clergy of some sort to make all our decisions for us, thereby saving us from having to make any ourselves.

The problem with all of these is that they easily become entrenched positions. Certainty that this is what religious people feel and how they think can deafen the non-believer to what we really feel and think, thereby effectively shutting off communication and understanding and perpetuating the “war”.

Over and against these notions of what religion means to religious people, are what religion really means to the people that espouse it in its varied forms. For example, to a great many of us (from a diverse array of faiths) religion is the grounding point for our sense of personal and communal identity, it prompts us to attain greater self-knowledge than we might otherwise aspire to. Religion, in that context, sheds light on our inner landscape and the world around us. It is a lens through which we view ourselves and our world—a means of achieving perspective. It is, in essence, our reality check.

But more on that later.

In future blogs I’d like to take a look at and discuss each of the ideas raised above and conclude with some thoughts about the role religion really does play in the lives of many believers.

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Maya Bohnhoff

I’ve frequently heard the sentiment expressed that dogmatism is a feature (or even a hallmark) of “the religious mindset”. (I’ll let the reader decide whether the presumption that there is such a thing as “The Religious Mindset” is, itself, a dogmatic statement.)

The observation is often part of a larger assertion about the essential difference between science and religion. Science, as New Atheist writers such as Sam Harris and the late Christopher Hitchens claim, is not only self-correcting, but non-dogmatic. This point of view is not exclusive to New Atheist thinkers, of course. It is a widely accepted assumption and, at first glance, it seems reasonable. Science, after all, is about empirical knowledge and facts. It deals in certainties and provables, not in fuzzy, squishy, or emotionally fraught subject matter.

At least, that’s the myth. But is it true?

A number of the writers here at Common Ground Group have addressed the issue of whether “the religious mindset” is inherently or exclusively dogmatic, irrational, or unscientific. What I’d like to address here is the related idea that science—as opposed to religion—is proof to dogmatism.

First, I’d like to define dogmatism.

dictionary.com defines it as: “The tendency to lay down principles as incontrovertibly true, without consideration of evidence or the opinions of others.”

The Merriam-Webster says dogmatism is: “1 : positiveness in assertion of opinion especially when unwarranted or arrogant  2 : a viewpoint or system of ideas based on insufficiently examined premises

The Webster thesaurus adds: “stubborn or intolerant adherence to one’s opinions or prejudices”.

I think that most reasonable people who are knowledgeable about science can think of at least one example of dogmatism in the scientific realm if they stopped to think about it in the context of the above definitions. I also think there may be areas of science that are more prone to this than others. This makes sense when one considers that some scientific disciplines are supported by evidence that has a low empirical and high  theoretical component.

William S. Hatcher

Mathematician William S. Hatcher comments that

“. . . the pregnant statement “e=mc2” has such a high theoretical component that it takes years of concentrated effort to assimilate its meaning. This statement is far removed from simple, direct physical observations like the whiteness of paper. On the other hand, “this paper is white” has such a simple linguistic structure involving the use of concrete terms that its meaning might even be conveyed by the one word “white” accompanied by appropriate gestures toward the physical object in question. It is inconceivable to think of conveying the meaning of a highly theoretical statement in this manner.” — William S. Hatcher, The Science of Religion

Hatcher goes on to say that

“A statement with a high empirical component and a low theoretical component corresponds to the popular notion of a fact. . . . Often, but not always, the important statements of science are statements with a high theoretical component.”

Such a high theoretical component, of course, leaves much open to interpretation and extrapolation both from empirical facts and foundational theories and reasoning. Physics is one of the areas in which this is most apparent; scientists line up on one side or another of theoretical issues. So, too, are the sciences that deal with the evolution of our planet and life on it. As much as we would like to believe that debates about scientific ideas are conducted with academic detachment, rigorous rationality, and decorum, this is not always the case.

Richard A. Lovett deals with this phenomenon in his science article in Analog magazine “Geology, Geohistory, and Psychohistory . . .” May 2009). He deals with a number of subjects in the article, but the one that really caught my attention was the debate between supporters of (believers in?) the theories of uniformitarianism and catastrophism.

Simply put, uniformitarianism is the theory that the geological processes we see on Earth have been in operation long enough that they are entirely responsible for the geological evolution of the planet and the life on it. Catastrophism is the theory that many of the features of the planet were caused by geological catastrophes—floods, volcanic activity, asteroids and the like.

Now it seems to me that this is a lot like the nature vs nurture debate in which it seems obvious to a great many people (myself included) that both processes contribute to the “finished” product. (I put that in quotes because neither human beings nor planets are really finished in the sense that a manufactured item is finished,) I had no idea that the debate between these two points of view was so heated. (Silly me.)

J Harlan Bretz

I was bemused to learn of the reaction J Harlan Bretz (who, in general, leaned toward uniformitarianism along with most of the geological community) got when he proposed that the scablands of Oregon were formed by a violent flood or floods. The idea, which he aired at a conference of elite scientists in 1927 in Washington DC, loosed its own  violent flood of disagreement and verbal abuse. He did not make it through his long, carefully researched and prepared presentation at the conference. His peers rose one after the other to denounce him. He packed up and went home.

Lovett comments: “To the geologists of Bretz’s era, this principle had nearly the force of religious dogma.”  He adds: “The problem with grand theories like uniformitarianism is that they blind you to what the data itself might be trying to say.” He quotes Victor Baker, Professor of Geosciences  at the University of Arizona:

“The grounding for science is not a principle. The grounding is that you are open to what nature has to tell you. If you dismiss something as impossible, you will not learn anything about it.”

A little more recently, I had a ringside seat for the “debate” that played out in the pages of various scientific journals when the prevailing theories about the Cretaceous-Tertiary boundary were challenged by Walter and Louis Alvarez. The Alvarezes (father and son) proposed that the dinosaurs were wiped out 65 million years ago, not by volcanic eruptions as had been supposed, but by an asteroid striking the Earth near the Yucatan.

My first exposure to their theory was in Science News, which treated it as a straightforward news article. Later I read a detailed article on the subject in Scientific American and was bemused by the response from the more vocal “supporters” of the volcanic theory, both in letters to the editor and in responsive articles by other scientists. Instead of a reasoned discussion of the evidence, the Alvarezes were treated to scorn, vitriol, and questioning of their scientific rigor and credibility. One colleague after another expounded why an asteroid impact was impossible, regardless of the fact that the theory accounted for the physical features of the Chicxulub impact area and the high concentrations of iridium in the strata for the KT period.

Scott Atran

“. . . communism and fascism – were explicitly based on what were once seriously thought to be scientific theories and philosophies. These particular variants led to the greatest mass murders in human history.” — (Response to the 2006 Beyond Belief Conference)

A secularist friend, upon reading such criticisms, was afraid they would be taken as grounds to be anti-scientific. “It’s not science,” he insisted. “Science is only a tool. It’s like a scalpel. In the hands of a surgeon, it can save lives. In the hands of the ignorant or the criminal, it can take them.”

I agreed with him wholeheartedly and asked if it wouldn’t be fair to say the same thing of religion. After a moment’s thought, he said he could see my point.

The point is this: Science—that process by which we gather evidence about the physical world and generate therefrom statements that we believe reflect its reality—cannot be dogmatic. But people—obviously, even scientists—can and will.

The fact that science can serve dogmatic interests should not lead us to become anti-scientific. But it should lead us to strive to be as non-dogmatic as is humanly possible—not just when it comes to science, but in every area of our lives. (Well, perhaps with the exception of our baseball teams.)

Otherwise, as Richard Lovett suggests, we will cease to learn.

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Maya Bohnhoff

“The Scientific Revolution liberated science from religion. The new science separated spirit from matter. Reason and experiment replaced revelation as the source of knowledge of the world. After the Scientific Revolution, it was inevitable that God would eventually be pushed entirely out of nature and that science would deny the existence of God.” — Margaret J. Osler, Galileo Goes to Jail and Other Myths (Professor of History and Adjunct Professor of Philosophy at the University of Calgary and author of Reconfiguring the World: Nature, God, and Human Understanding in  Early Modern Europe)

This is Something-Everyone-Knows, right?

Yet, Professor Osler follows the above pronouncement with these words: “These unsubstantiated claims have worked their way into the popular history of science and are frequently repeated.” Osler gives a list of folks from the right and left of the debate who “repeat this mantra, reinforcing the belief that the seventeenth century witnessed the divorce of science from religion.”

I find her use of the idea of divorce interesting—as if science and religion were a mid-life crisis married couple scrapping their life together for menopause, youthful fantasies, and red sports cars. Looking at the scrapbook of science and religion’s years together, it’s clear that she doesn’t choose the word idly.

Back in the day, science wasn’t science (as other scholars have pointed out) it was “natural philosophy”. Nor were there such things as scientists, per se. The men and women who did what we call science nowadays were—more often than not—people of faith. They were often, in fact, members of the clergy of one faith or another.  And—as I pointed out in a previous episode—natural philosophy was part of the undergrad curriculum of all medieval universities, with little reference to specific church doctrine. It was theology that was taught as a separate course of study by a specialized faculty.

Science has. to be sure, risen to the same level of specialization, but I have to ask: is such specialization in one field inimical to specialization in another? Science—as a field of study—is, itself, broken down even further into physics, chemistry, biology, molecular biology, astronomy, et cetera, et cetera. But I doubt that anyone would suggest that the existence of a specialized curriculum devoted to particle physics is the death knell of chemistry.

Natural philosophy, quite naturally, took in such subjects as the origin of the universe or First Cause, the laws guiding creation and its design, and the nature of the human soul. Nascent science hung close to the meaning of its name scientia. That is, the real knowledge of the essences of things. And, in the eyes of some, this precluded “natural philosophy” from becoming true science (scientia) because the observations of human beings were imperfect and therefore incapable of the level of certainty required to know the essence of anything.

Johannes Kepler

I’ll admit that, as I read the history of such concepts as mechanical philosophy, the intention for which was to explain all natural phenomena in mechanical terms, I assumed that the promoters of such concepts must have had the agenda of removing God from the process. Imagine my surprise when I discovered that the individuals involved were devoutly religious. This included such luminaries as Gassendi, Descartes, and Boyle. Even Johannes Kepler, with his certainty that God had created a universe that exhibited mechanical harmony and order, could be numbered among the proponents of mechanical philosophy.

The analogy that leaps to mind when I consider the supposed dichotomy of mechanical versus spiritual philosophy is writing. When I look at what it takes to write a novel from gleam in the eye to the last period, I see that there are at least two processes at work: one mystical and the other mechanical.  On the mystical hand is the generation of the idea for a story—the birth and genesis of its characters, the “aha” moments and wild flights of intuition and passion that link events and characters and plotlines and clothe them in words. On the other is the purely mechanical activity of committing those words and ideas to “real” media. Typing them out, just as I’m typing this blog entry, and putting them where they can be experienced by other people. (Who will, however, never experience them as I have.)

Writing Process

But please note: these two processes are mutually dependent upon each other. The ideas stay in La-La Land if I don’t write them down. They remain a loose collection of ideas— daydreams at best and will never become a story. And without those ideas, those interconnections, those characters and my love for them and passion for their story, there’s nothing for the mechanical process to do and, again, no story is forthcoming. Nothing gets created.  To paraphrase Professor Osler: even a mechanical creation has room (or perhaps need?) for purpose and design.

Bottom line: The novel exists because I take the product of the intellectual/spiritual process and apply the mechanical process to it. The words that I write are evidence to the reader of the intellect behind the words. They are also evidence of the spiritual process.

Lord Kelvin

It does not surprise me to discover that a number of natural philosophers voiced the opinion that (as Osler put it) “natural philosophy, properly pursued, leads to knowledge of the Creator.” Among those who held this view was Lord Kelvin who advised:

Do not be afraid of being free thinkers. If you think strongly enough you will be forced by science to the belief in God, which is the foundation of all Religion. You will find science not antagonistic, but helpful to Religion. — Lord Kelvin

As you might expect, similar sentiments are voiced by religious voices, as well. Notably, Bahá’u’lláh (“The beginning of all things is the knowledge of God.”) and His son Abdu’l-Bahá, who wrote:

Science is an effulgence of the Sun of Reality, the power of investigating and discovering the verities of the universe, the means by which man finds a pathway to God. — Abdu’l-Bahá

Sir Isaac Newton

Isaac Newton had it that:

“. . . all discourse about God is derived from a certain similitude from things human, which, while not perfect, is nevertheless a similitude of some kind. . . . [A]nd to treat God from phenomena is certainly part of natural philosophy.” (Principia)

In other words, as imperfect as our ability to grasp it is, the creation can tell us something about the qualities of its Creator or, as the Psalmist wrote:

The heavens declare the glory of God; the skies proclaim the work of his hands. Day after day they pour forth speech; night after night they reveal knowledge. They have no speech, they use no words; no sound is heard from them. — Psalm 19

I have heard it repeatedly suggested that men like Newton were only giving lip service to the religious authorities of the day out of fear of censure or loss of support. That they really didn’t believe in God at all. Not only does this figure them as colossal liars and somewhat lacking in courage, but it begs a question about where their words are to be trusted and where they are to be winked at.

That question is my own. Professor Osler simply points out that people making this particular unsubstantiated claim fail to understand the genesis of natural philosophy and its gradual evolution into modern science.

In any event, the historical record is clear: natural philosophers (or early scientists, if you prefer) did not segregate their observation and exploration of the natural world from their religious beliefs and theological assumptions. Rather, science and religion (or natural philosophy and theology) were inextricably linked (rather like the two wings of a bird) and both were necessary to our flight toward greater knowledge of the essence and mechanics of things.

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Well, it’s official: I am now a cyborg. On December 2nd, 2011, I joined the ranks of Darth Vader, Luke Skywalker, John-Luc Picard and Seven of Nine (which is, by the way, my husband’s new nickname for me). I prefer to think of myself as the Borg Queen.

How did this come about? Long story.

Short form: Apparently I was born with an abnormal left hip. No one realized there was anything abnormal about the hip with the possible exception of a Kansas City chiropractor who told my mom when I was about ten that he thought my left hip was not seated properly in the socket and theorized that the leg might be starved for blood, thus making it shorter (about 1/4 inch), smaller, and weaker than the right one.

This put me on intimate terms with Dr. Scholl and orthopedic Oxfords. Without lifts in my shoes, my hips were perpetually crooked. I could not stand up completely straight. I could not run. When I hit stride, my left leg simply quit working. Neither, could I climb The Rope. (You know the one.) Oddly, I could dance, play volley ball and tennis, ride horses and swim. (Hey, even hippos are elegant in the water.) I developed a host of compensatory “tricks” that I didn’t recognize as such until years later, such as an exaggerated hip swing and standing with my full weight on my right leg.

Fast forward to 2002 when I had my daughter Amanda. My left hip forced me out of my exercise routine a month before she was born, not because I couldn’t swim, but because I couldn’t get out of the pool back onto dry land. And though six months of physical therapy shored the hip up admirably, things were headed  south.

Fast forward again to 2011, when I finally got to the point that I could no longer walk without a pronounced limp, I worried about how close to things I could park, or how badly I really wanted the object I’d just dropped on the floor. I finally had the hip and its fellow joints X-rayed. My doctor looked at the pics and informed me that I had no cartilage (zip, nada, nil) in my left hip. She wondered how I had managed to go so long without needing hip surgery and asked, “What did you DO? All your other joints are normal.”

I had a long list of “bad things I have done to my left hip” that included falling off horses repeatedly as a teen, over-flexing the hip while working out after my first child was born, playing racquet ball five months pregnant with my second child, and getting pregnant a third time at the age of 48. Did I mention that I frequently schlep guitars though airports and jump around on stage pretending to be Roger Daltrey?

The doctor was skeptical. “That shouldn’t have done this to a normal hip. Would you like to have a new one?”

Would I? Sure. Sign me up. She did. And so, Friday December 2 at approximately 11 AM, I got a lovely new titanium hip. (We are Borg. Resistance is futile. Prepare to be assimilated.) The old hip, according to my doctor, did not look as if it had ever been normal. There was something extremely wrong with the top of the femur. The bone looked “bubbled”.

Who knew?

Okay, that’s the science side of the equation. Where does faith come in?

Did I pray for God to give me a “sign” as to whether to have the surgery? No. I knew there was no choice, really—I had to have the hip replaced; I’d been living with the alternative and it was untenable. The teachings of my faith tell me to seek a competent physician to get such advice. My physician was the one who advised me to have the hip replaced.

Did I pray to God demanding or pleading that the surgery go well? No. I did examine my life. That’s the sort of self-examination that I think comes naturally to people who are, chronically and increasingly “in pain” (as in, inhabiting it every moment, waking or sleeping). It’s also the sort of self-examination that Baha’is are encouraged to do on a regular basis.

My desire for continued life had much to do with my usefulness—to myself, to others, and to the communities I am part of. I thought about the things I do for my children and husband, my friends, collaborators and other people who depended on me. Having lost a parent at the age of 15 myself, I understand perfectly well what sort of effect that can have on a young life. I naturally did not want my children to go through that. So, yes I did pray, calmly and without histrionics, that the surgery be a success so I could finish Job One—raising my kids.

Did I consider the time I’d like to spend with my husband and friends, the joy I get from writing and music? Sure, but I hate whining—especially my own. I’ve been given an extraordinarily good life; it seems petty to suggest that it wasn’t enough. In the long run why should I care if I didn’t live long enough to see my most recent novel hit the bestseller list? I did let a fragment of a favorite Hindu prayer run through my mind: “O Lord, let not the thread of my song be cut while I sing.”

Why pray for what an omniscient God already knows I want?

Prayer—any prayer—is for the believer’s benefit, not for God’s. I have nothing to give God but my love … and my attention. An important aspect of prayer, I think, is that it maintains a connection between lover and Beloved—the way that the touches my husband and I exchange when we pass by each other in the house maintains an important human connection—and, in this case, it called on me to focus on how well I’d paid attention throughout my life. It also called upon me to value my own life enough to think about WHY it was valuable, and to make the effort to articulate that for my own sake. Framing the prayer allowed me to articulate the results of a lifetime of hopefully “teachable moments”.

My family was not open to hearing about my “last instructions” or things they should do if the surgery did not go well. But, the Bahá’í Faith has encouraged me to have a sense of responsibility about such things, so I sat down and—once again, calmly and without maudlin hysterics—wrote out a set of instructions that included such things as who would have first call on my guitar (Clancy), my computer (Castle), and my various heirloom bits of jewelry. You can’t take those things with you, but someone else might like to have them. I noted that I want to be buried in my Giants jersey with a baseball. I did not tell my husband about the document until they were ready to give me “something to make you relax” (no one should be so relaxed).

So, having prayed, did I have faith that God would bring me through the surgery alive? No, I had faith that whatever was supposed to happen would happen and that either way, I’d end up somewhere I belonged, prepared to go on. So, for me, it was easy. I’d go sleep cozy and warm and I’d either wake up in that lovely post-op haze or I wouldn’t. In that case I would, as Muhammad put it, “draw a quarter of the heaven” to which I turned.

Here again, I turned to my faith. I have no “picture” of what the next “world” is like. The Bahá’í writings indicate that even the metaphors in the scriptures are unequal to any real description. So, harboring some idea of where I’d be going seemed . . . well, silly. That part of the equation was only within my control through my life-choices and the qualities I had or had not acquired. All I could choose, now, was what to take into that existence (or my continued existence here) with me.

I write Star Wars novels, among other things. So a metaphor that works for me here is to imagine the flip side of Luke Skywalker’s cave: What’s in it? What you take with you.

Abdu'l-Bahá

I chose to take Abdu’l-Bahá, eldest son of Bahá’u’lláh (Founder of the Bahá’í Faith).

Abdu’l-Bahá is a unique individual. His own Father called him “the Master” and exhorted all Bahá’ís to look to him as an example of a human being’s true potential. Abdu’l-Bahá is someone whose words and life I have read and meditated on for the past 36 years of my life, whose life is a source of inspiration and practical example, whose attitudes and behaviors are, to me, the highest expression of what it is to be human. All of what makes Abdu’l-Baha unique was woven out of the fabric of his Father’s teachings.

In that choice, I had a win-win. I may not know where I was headed, but I knew who was going with me.

As it happened, I returned to this life grateful to science and the fabulous team of doctors, nurses and therapists who wielded it with  faith that it would restore me to health. I’m  grateful, as well, to faith and the astonishing panoply of guidance, support, inspiration and practical example that allowed me to enter into this life-changing experience with an open and fear-free mind.

In the coming months I expect I will assimilate (ahem) things I’ve learned from my transition from human to Borg. And here, again, I think faith plays a role. Faith is what tells me that resistance (to this learning) is not necessarily futile—I can certainly refuse to glean any spiritual growth from this painful and protracted episode—but it would be counterproductive.

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Maya is a science fiction writer who lives in San Jose. Her most recent novel is STAR WARS: SHADOW GAMES—a collaboration with Michael Reaves.

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Maya Bohnhoff

Take the word “Religion”…

Please, take it.

It causes just as much miscommunication as that other word . . . what was it again? Oh, yeah. “Science”. If we use either word as if we think we know what it means, we may be surprised by the response.

Someone once said that England and America were two nations divided by a common language. I think the fault lines of language lie even closer together. This is something I’ve been aware of for a very long time, but it was underscored for me recently in a series of postings in our forum as we discussed the idea that people can be good without religion.

A group of people, allegedly speaking the same language fall into a debate about the concept, or entity, or reality of religion. One party to the discussion was certain that religion was all bad; they produced stories from history (usually involving genocide and other atrocities) to prove it. I suggested that we seek a common definition of the word “religion” and/or discuss the various meanings we held. Another party suggested that we needed to stop using the world entirely if it made people uncomfortable.

An interesting idea. One that raises the question: What word to we substitute in its place? Back to that later. What I’d like to do now is look at some ideas about the meaning of the word “religion.”

It’s from the Latin “religio” meaning “to bind together.” Nice idea. And according to scripture, that’s essentially its purpose. Christ speaks repeatedly of the unity of the believers, Buddha of the unity of the sangha or community of bhikkus or devotees. In the Bahá’i writings Bahá’u’lláh says that

“The fundamental purpose animating the Faith of God and His Religion is to safeguard the interests and promote the unity of the human race, and to foster the spirit of love and fellowship amongst men. Suffer it not to become a source of dissension and discord, of hate and enmity.” Gleanings from the Writings of Bahá’u’lláh, p. 215

His son, Abdu’l-Bahá, explains further:

“True religion is based upon love and agreement. Bahá’u’lláh has said, “If religion and faith are the causes of enmity and sedition, it is far better to be nonreligious, and the absence of religion would be preferable; for we desire religion to be the cause of amity and fellowship. If enmity and hatred exist, irreligion is preferable.” Therefore, the removal of this dissension has been specialized in Bahá’u’lláh, for religion is the divine remedy for human antagonism and discord. But when we make the remedy the cause of the disease, it would be better to do without the remedy.” Promulgation of Universal Peace, p. 232

Bold words. And I’m sure that many of my atheist confreres would simply say, “Fine. Let’s get rid of religion then.”

But that’s the problem, isn’t it? It isn’t religion—at least by Bahá’u’lláh’s and Abdu’l-Bahá’s definitions—that needs to be gotten rid of, but dogmatism that pretends to own the word.

Abdu’l-Bahá writes of religion that it is

“. . . the road of the divine Kingdom. It involves the acquisition of praiseworthy attributes, heavenly illumination and righteous actions in the world of humanity. This pathway is conducive to the progress and uplift of the world. It is the source of human enlightenment, training and ethical improvement—the magnet which attracts the love of God because of the knowledge of God it bestows. This is the road of the holy Manifestations of God; for They are, in reality, the foundation of the divine religion of oneness. There is no change or transformation in this pathway. It is the cause of human betterment, the acquisition of heavenly virtues and the illumination of mankind.”

That’s the meaning the Bahá’í scriptures attach to religion. Clearly that meaning is at variance with that of my secularist colleagues. But when those colleagues rail against the Crusades, or the various pogroms or atrocities committed in the name of religion (which are dwarfed, as Stephen has pointed out, by bloodshed committed for secular reasons), they’ve got my full support and the full support of Bahá’ís in general. We’re all standing on the same soapbox. The difference is this—the recognition that there is a true, beneficial thing called religion that has nothing to do with dogmatic adherence to divisive manmade beliefs.

“True religion is the source of love and agreement amongst men, the cause of the development of praiseworthy qualities, but the people are holding to the counterfeit and imitation, negligent of the reality which unifies, so they are bereft and deprived of the radiance of religion. . . . That which was meant to be conducive to life has become the cause of death; that which should have been an evidence of knowledge is now a proof of ignorance; that which was a factor in the sublimity of human nature has proved to be its degradation. Therefore, the realm of the religionist has gradually narrowed and darkened, and the sphere of the materialist has widened and advanced; for the religionist has held to imitation and counterfeit, neglecting and discarding holiness and the sacred reality of religion.” Promulgation of Universal Peace, p. 179

Now, I’m a wordsmith by trade and rather partial to using words as accurately as possible. The very fact that religion (or any other important word) means so many different things to so many different people is a source of great frustration to me. But I’m flexible, and while my preference would be to use the word “religion” to mean simply the binding together of the hearts of human beings around divine principles of conduct and to use the terms “dogma” or even “religious dogma” to refer to the dogmatic belief in particular doctrines, I’m open to finding new words if my correspondents can’t bend that far.

So, the question is: What words can we safely use?

Abdu’l-Bahá suggests the idea of a Road or Path—a spiritual Path that he recommends we tread with practical feet. Buddha would call it a Dharma (a path to truth), Muhammad advanced the concept of the Din—a transaction or covenant with the Divine by which the believer committed to a journey of transformation and the daily effort to acquire divine qualities such as kindness, mercy, justice, and the like. We might also simply call it a Faith, which perhaps steps back a bit from the community aspect toward the individual relationship with God.

Many people have said (sometimes with an inexplicable air of superiority) “I’m not religious. I’m spiritual.”

And I find, as I write this, that my own definitions of “spirituality”, “faith” and “religion” revolve around individual and community relationships. My spirituality is what happens deep inside (whatever the very physical idea of “inside”ness means in this context); it is a quality or condition of my personal inner state. My faith is my relationship with God and His Word. What bridges the two are my efforts to cultivate transformative virtues. My religion is my relationship with my fellow Bahá’ís and, beyond them, all other human beings. What bridges the three is how my practice of those transformative virtues strengthens and deepens my relationships with other human beings.

In short, I could say that my religion is “The earth is one country and mankind its citizens”. That seemingly simple statement covers a world of complexity.

Given that, the implications for the relationship between religion (as I define it) and science (which Stephen has been writing on) should be fairly clear. For there is nothing in the idea of the acquisition of virtues or their application to life and community that violates scientific principle, or eschews scientific process. In fact, scientific process is enshrined, if you will, in the Bahá’í writings:

“The third teaching or principle of Bahá’u’lláh is that religion and science are in complete agreement. Every religion which is not in accordance with established science is superstition. Religion must be reasonable. If it does not square with reason, it is superstition and without foundation. It is like a mirage, which deceives man by leading him to think it is a body of water. God has endowed man with reason that he may perceive what is true. If we insist that such and such a subject is not to be reasoned out and tested according to the established logical modes of the intellect, what is the use of the reason which God has given man?” Promulgation of Universal Peace. p. 43

Good question.

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Maya Bohnhoff is s writer of science fiction and fantasy. Her latest novel STAR WARS: SHADOW GAMES releases on November 29.

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Maya Bohnhoff

Theological assumptions unique to Christianity explain why science was born only in Christian Europe. Contrary to the received wisdom; religion and science not only were compatible; they were inseparable.  … Christian theology was essential for the rise of science. — Rodney Stark, For the Glory of God (2003)

Borrowing a phrase from Newton, essayist Noah Efron (chair of the science, technology and society program at Bar-Ilan University in Israel) notes that “for every myth is an equal and opposite myth” (Galileo Goes to Jail). He then produces a myth that I admit I had never heard before, but which seems a natural outgrowth of that form of Christian theology that treats the faith of Christ as if it were the only legitimate expression of faith in God in all of human history.

The myth I refer to is that Christianity not only gave birth to modern science, but that, as Stark supposes in the opening quote, it was the only possible parent for that maturing discipline. Indeed, another commentator, Father Stanley L. Jaki—professor of Physics at Seton Hall—has it that science was stillborn “in all ancient cultures, and had its only viable birth in Christian Europe”.

Anyone who has some knowledge of the history of science in Europe has reason to question this claim, though hopefully, they will also recognize that the teachings of Judaism and Christianity—like those of both earlier and later revelations—encourage rather than discourage the sort of rational inquiry that lies at the heart of modern science.

By way of example, a passage from the Torah tells us that

The heavens declare the glory of God, and the expanse proclaims the work of His hands. Day after day they pour out speech; night after night they communicate knowledge.  There is no speech; there are no words; their voice is not heard. Their line has gone out to all the earth, and their words to the ends of the inhabited world. — Psalm 19:1-4 (Holman Translation)

I’ve commented before that this seems to me an open invitation to explore the world, the cosmos and our own inner landscape. I refer the reader especially to the idea that the physical Universe “pours out speech” and “communicates knowledge” . . . without words. This idea—that the physical universe speaks eloquently of its Creator—is a foundational concept in all revealed faith. So, too, is the expectation that mankind will use its considerable and unique faculties to “hear” what the Universe has to tell us.

Jesus Christ explains to His listeners that they must judge of things by their “fruits” or results (Matthew 7:15-20). He goes to some length to illustrate the point using the metaphor that one knows summer is near by observing the evidence in natural phenomena (Matthew 24:31-33). These are only two of the passages in which Christ invokes the practice of observation and the use of the human rational faculty in gathering an understanding of the world and making decisions.

LeMaitre and Einstein

The source teachings of Judaism and Christianity clearly promote the exploration of the Universe through observation and reason. It should be no surprise, then, that many Christian scholars studied natural history and philosophy because they felt the Biblical teachings exhorted them to do so. From Descartes to Newton, Occam to LeMaitre, men of the Christian faith have dived head first into a study of the Universe they believed was a God-inspired place. But is it accurate to say that only Christianity could have given birth to the physical sciences?

As Efron points out in his essay, Christian ideas about Life, the Universe, and Everything are not exclusively Christian ideas. They have their roots in Judaism, for one thing. But they are also ideas shared by other revealed religions as diverse as Buddhism and Zoroastrianism and from cultures as widely separated as the Chinese and the Greek. And, of course, there was a hefty influence on European science by Arabic scholars such as Ibn Sina, Ibn Rushd and others we’ve written about here at CCG.

Everyone involved in the process of bringing science to the world stood upon the shoulders of the scholars who went before. No science leapt, fully formed, from a particular worldview, culture, or philosophy. Realistically, the Christian scholars of medieval Europe owed much of their science to the work of Indian, Persian, and Greek forebears that was incorporated, expanded upon, and worked out by medieval Muslim and Jewish scholars. By the ninth century, there were more volumes of scientific interest translated into Arabic than into Latin or any other language.

The claim that Christianity gave birth to modern science is significant in an age in which unity in diversity has been raised to the level of a survival skill. Dr. Efron notes that when people voice this claim, they are not only saying something about Christians and about everyone else, but they are also saying something significant about science. The claim is, in essence, that science has only one history or backstory, one point of origin, and one flavor, and that it can only be understood in one way.

This claim about the path to knowledge reminds me, ironically, of a similar claim an evangelical Christian friend made about the path to God. He asked how I and my husband had come to belief. I was raised a Christian and my husband was raised an agnostic. But we both had come to our Bahá’i belief—which included a reverence for Christ—through love and reason. My evangelical friend insisted that this was all wrong. There was only one way to come to God and that was through fear and an awareness of one’s complete worthlessness. That was the way he had come to belief, of course, and no amount of scriptural evidence to the contrary could convince him that God might be found in any other way.

It takes only a moment of reflection to grasp that this particular concept of Christianity is lightyears from the spirit of belief and faith that inspired the early Christian (and Jewish and Muslim and Hindu) scientists and philosophers. It reduces both the religion and science of non-Christian scholars to admirable, but insignificant achievements devoid of the sort of intellectual quality Christian scholars alone are imagined to possess.

As Rodney Stark puts it in “False Conflict”, The American Enterprise, (Oct/Nov 2003):

“Real science arose only once: in Europe.  China, Islam (sic), India, and ancient Greece and Rome each had a highly developed alchemy. But only in Europe did alchemy develop into chemistry. By the same token many societies developed elaborate systems of astrology, but only in Europe did astrology lead to astronomy.”

Jesus Christ, as I noted earlier, required that His followers subject claims of truth to the measure of reason—judging such things by their fruits or results. Any objective look at the history of science reveals that it is, first of all, a human endeavor and that the humans who shaped it—for good and ill—came from every conceivable background. Certainly, one can make the case that there have been more significant contributions made in the foundational years of the sciences by believers of a number of faiths, but from the 19th century onward, the number of unaffiliated, agnostic, and atheist contributors to science have grown.

Yet, regardless of the belief system of the scientist or consumer of science (and it’s important to bear in mind that science itself is not a belief system), science can be employed malignly if it is not set in a moral framework that adheres as much to Christ’s Golden Rule (“Whatever you would have men do to you, do likewise to them.”) as it does to Socrates’ Triple Filter (“Is it true? Is it good? Is it useful?”)

Both religion and science can become (and have become) vehicles for dogmatic human interests. At the heart of the Bahá’i Faith is the firm conviction that we must do our utmost to keep that from happening.

As Abdu’l-Bahá stated in a speech in New York in July of 1912:

Reason is the first faculty of man, and the religion of God is in harmony with it.” — Abdu’l-Bahá, Promulgation of Universal Peace, p. 231

Continue reading »]]> Report exposes Iran’s media campaign to demonize Baha’is

NEW YORK — In a wide-ranging media campaign that has gone largely unnoticed outside of Iran, hatred and discrimination are being systematically stirred up against the country’s 300,000-member Baha’i minority.

In a report released today, the Baha’i International Community documents and analyzes more than 400 press and media items over a 16-month period, that typify an insidious state-sponsored effort to demonize and vilify Baha’is, using false accusations, inflammatory terminology, and repugnant imagery.

Read the full report here (PDF)

“This anti-Baha’i propaganda is shocking in its volume and vehemence, its scope and sophistication,” said Bani Dugal, Principal Representative of the Baha’i International Community to the United Nations.

“It’s all cynically calculated to stir up antagonism against a peaceful religious community whose members are striving to contribute to the well-being of their society,” she said.

Titled Inciting Hatred: Iran’s media campaign to demonize Baha’is, the report’s main conclusions are:

• anti-Baha’i propaganda originates with – and is sanctioned by – the country’s highest levels of leadership, including Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, who gave a highly discriminatory speech in the holy city of Qom a year ago;

• the campaign spurns international human rights law and norms, including a precedent-setting resolution passed earlier this year at the United Nations Human Rights Council that specifically condemns and combats the negative stereotyping and incitement to hatred of religious minorities;

• Baha’is are branded as “outsiders” in their own land and as enemies of Islam in a manner that is clearly calculated to provoke the religious sensibilities of Iranian Shiite Muslims;

• the campaign aims to deflect attention away from calls for democracy in Iran by using Baha’is as an all-purpose “scapegoat” – and, in so doing, to smear those who oppose the government as well as human rights campaigners as Baha’is, “as if that were the most heinous crime.”

• the authorities disseminate ludicrous conspiracy theories including that foreign broadcasters, in particular the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) and Voice of America (VOA), are controlled by or under the influence of Baha’is because they report stories about human rights violations in Iran;

“The diverse content of these attacks demonstrates tremendous effort and commitment of resources by the Islamic Republic,” says the report.

“Many attacks are built on gross distortions of Baha’i history; some attempt a strategy of guilt by association through lumping Baha’is together with completely unrelated groups – such as ‘Satanists’ or the Shah’s secret police; still others deploy a tactic of connecting Baha’is with ‘opponents’ of the regime, which allows the Government to discredit both the Baha’is and its opponents in a single transaction. The campaign makes extensive use of the World Wide Web, and often uses graphic images that portray Baha’is as fiendish ghouls or agents of Israel.”

Bani Dugal said the demonization of Iran’s Baha’i community is a matter that deserves the attention of governments, international legal institutions, and fair-minded people everywhere.

“The campaign not only clearly violates international human rights law,” she said, “it also utterly contradicts Iran’s long-standing claim at the UN and elsewhere that it is working to support measures to outlaw or condemn hate speech directed against religions or religious followers.”

“The parallels between the campaign of anti-Baha’i propaganda in Iran today and other state-sponsored, anti-religious campaigns of the past are undeniable. History shows us that such campaigns are among the foremost predictors of actual violence against religious minorities – or, in the worst case, precursors of genocide.

“It is time for Iran to be told that such egregious violations of international law and norms cannot be tolerated,” said Ms. Dugal.

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You can also read an article on the CNN site about this. And also in this CNN belief blog.

I’ve been following the commentary on the plight of the Baha’is in Iran spurred by the collaborative letter from Bishop Desmond Tutu and President Ramos-Horta of East Timor and the Education Under Fire effort. Many people have sympathized and even empathized with the Baha’is in Iran, especially with regard to the strictures on our youth enrolling and/or testing in colleges. But there were some commentaries I found both puzzling and sad.

In the former category were comments to the effect that we oughtn’t waste time worrying about the Baha’i students in Iran when our own educational system in the US is in trouble. Or that we oughtn’t be concerned about the Baha’is in Iran when other groups in Iran or in Libya or in some other country are being denied their rights.

Several people expressed the idea that this was one more example of the current liberal administration wasting precious American time on people  who were obviously not American—i.e. “other.”

One might imagine from such commentary that there is a limited amount of compassion in the world and these different groups are in competition for it. If I care about the Baha’is, these folks might be thinking, I cannot also care about the Palestinians or ethnic Albanians or Kurds or Mexican immigrants or any other oppressed or disenfranchised group in the world.

Oddly, that has not been a problem for me since I began to have a glimmer of and inkling of an idea of what the Baha’i Faith is really about. I freely admit it—my heart bleeds a lot, and I don’t mind. My faith informs me that there are not certain groups that deserve my concern or compassion and others that do not.

The second category of negative comment—and there were blessedly few of them in NPR and Huffington Post feeds—were aimed at telling anyone who might be tempted to find compassion in their hearts for the Baha’is that these cultists were not what they seemed to be. They were snake oil salesmen—teaching dentistry without license to do so and endangering the lives of the Iranian people. That was, the reader was assured, the only reason the Iranian government was shutting down their so-called higher education.

If that was the case, I wondered aloud (like I do) why was the Baha’i curriculum accredited by universities elsewhere in the world? Why would the Baha’i international community call for their courses to be examined and approved or improved by input from accredited institutions?

Here are some other comments:

“My question is why do we spend money on a commission on international freedom. Let their “god” protect them. Here is a budget cut on a plate.”

Allah'u'abha = God is Most Glorious

“Bahai = Evil look at the symbolism on their Art, they are a cult of psychological orphans, trying to steal your souls people. The one true religion they say, then give me all your money.”

“Bahai is not a religion. It’s a marketing scam!” (That’s it. Nothing to substantiate or explain the point of view).

A religious respondent opined that the Baha’i Faith was a cult and gave a multi-comment lecture on how to deprogram cultists. Meanwhile, an atheist produced reasons why this was just one more proof that all religion is intolerant and that the Baha’is are at fault for their own predicament.

And this is what I find most puzzling: That given a situation that calls for simple compassion, some people will opt instead for  blaming the victims, thus relieving themselves of the need to care about what happens to them. Instead of expressing pity, they instead express antipathy making use of sarcasm, flippancy and vitriol.

I remember once asking my mother what made people mean. She said it was because they were afraid and vulnerable when presented with a situation they couldn’t understand. The Baha’i Writings are clear on how Baha’is are to treat other people, even the meanest:

Act in accordance with the counsels of the Lord: that is, rise up in such wise, and with such qualities, as to endow the body of this world with a living soul, and to bring this young child, humanity, to the stage of adulthood. So far as ye are able, ignite a candle of love in every meeting, and with tenderness rejoice and cheer ye every heart. Care for the stranger as for one of your own; show to alien souls the same loving kindness ye bestow upon your faithful friends. Should any come to blows with you, seek to be friends with him; should any stab you to the heart, be ye a healing salve unto his sores; should any taunt and mock at you, meet him with love. Should any heap his blame upon you, praise ye him; should he offer you a deadly poison, give him the choicest honey in exchange; and should he threaten your life, grant him a remedy that will heal him evermore. Should he be pain itself, be ye his medicine; should he be thorns, be ye his roses and sweet herbs. Perchance such ways and words from you will make this darksome world turn bright at last; will make this dusty earth turn heavenly, this devilish prison place become a royal palace of the Lord—so that war and strife will pass and be no more, and love and trust will pitch their tents on the summits of the world. Such is the essence of God’s admonitions; such in sum are the teachings for the Dispensation of Bahá. — Abdu’l-Baha

This probably seems an odd point of view given the prevailing idea that if one person disagrees with another it requires them to dislike or even hate that person and the group that person represents. It probably seems to most people that the Baha’is must hate Muslims because Muslims persecute them in Iran, or that we must hate Christians because so many of them believe we are a dangerous cult, or that we must hate atheists because they don’t believe in the God that we love. I am sure there are Baha’is who do hate, despite such words as those of Abdu’l-Baha. But if we are hateful, it is not our Faith that causes us to be so. Our Faith calls on us to look past the poisonous words to find compassion for those who feel the need to use them.

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Maya Bohnhoff

“The great Galileo, at the age of fourscore, groaned away his days in the dungeons of the Inquisition, because he had demonstrated by irrefragable proofs the motion of the earth.” — Voltaire, “Descartes and newton” 1728

“To say that Galileo was tortured is not a reckless claim, but is simply to repeat what the sentence says.” —Italo Mereu, History of Intolerance in Europe (1979)

The centerpiece of any book named Galileo Goes to Jail has to be about Galileo going to jail. The chapter on the titular subject was written by Maurice Finocchiaro (distinguished professor of Philosophy Emeritus at University of Nevada, Las Vegas). Dr. Finocchiaro looks carefully at Voltaire’s allegation that Galileo “groaned away his days in the dungeons of the Inquisition”.

We know that the Church took exception to his promotion of the idea first advanced in Nikolaj Kopernik’s 1543 volume On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres that the earth moved. Conservative philosophers saw this, for whatever reason, as a contradiction of scripture. We know Galileo was arrested, tried and sentenced by the Inquisition and that he spent the last nine years of his life under house arrest in his villa outside of Florence. This is no myth.

What Dr. Finocchiaro and others say is mythological is the part about dungeons and torture.

The recorded facts are these: Galileo found evidence through his use of the telescope that he felt confirmed Kopernik’s theories. In response to the criticism of conservative philosophers, Galileo wrote a several private letters explaining his position. The content of the letters became common knowledge among Galileo’s conservative opponents prompting further outrage and, in 1615, the first official complaint against him was filed with the Inquisition by a Dominican friar. Later that year, Galileo went to Rome voluntarily to defend Copernican theory. He may have won the intellectual arguments, but lost the theological battles—battles he really wasn’t trying to wage.

Nikolaj Kopernik

Early the following year, Cardinal Bellarmine (who now has several educational institutions named after him, ironically) wrote a warning to Galileo on behalf of the Inquisition forbidding him to publicly support Kopernik’s “heretical” ideas. Galileo agreed to this. Immediately after, the Church declared the idea that the Earth moved false, as it contradicted scripture. Kopernik’s book was banned until revised.

Things floated along like this until 1623 when a new pope was elected. This was Pope Urban VIII who, as Cardinal Barberini, had been an admirer of Galileo. Feeling freer with his knowledge, Galileo wrote a book defending Copernican theory. But it was an unusual book. Wary of breaking Bellarnine’s injunction, he wrote a dialogue between three characters about physical and astronomical issues without touching on the theological ones. It was titled, appropriately, Dialogue. While he felt that the arguments for the Earth’s motion were stronger than the arguments against it, Galileo didn’t feel he had clearly espoused one view over another. It was a merely a dialogue between different points of view.

Galileo’s enemies, however, protested that the book violated Bellarmine’s edict. A new charge was added, as well, that he had broken a decree that forbade him to mention the earth’s movement in any way. He was summoned to Rome for a trial that began in April 1633 and in which he denied that he had ever received an injunction not to discuss the Earth’s movement in any way. Bellarmine had only forbidden him to hold or defend the idea that the Earth moved and Dialogue had not done that. It had only presented the divergent views without espousing a particular one.

In the end, Galileo was found guilty of an intermediate level of heresy officially called “vehement suspicion of heresy”. The proscribed offenses were the astronomical theory that the Earth moved and the methodological principle that the Bible was not an authority in the area of science (or natural philosophy as it was known). In penance, Galileo was forced to recite an abjuration of his theories, essentially retracting his belief in them. His book was banned.

A document summarizing the interrogation was drawn up in which the Inquisitors noted that they did not think he had “said the whole truth” about his intention and explained that therefore they found it necessary to examine him rigorously. “Here you answered in a Catholic manner,” they wrote, “though without prejudice to the above-mentioned things confessed by you and deduced against you about your intention.” And they added a penalty to the abjuration and book banning: “We condemn you to formal imprisonment in this Holy Office at our pleasure.”

At the time, the only documents released were the Inquisition’s sentence and the abjuration Galileo had made. And these were circulated widely in books, newspapers and circulars by the explicit order of Pope Urban VIII, who wanted to make sure all Catholics understood the consequences of heretical beliefs—even (or perhaps especially) when held by such a respected man as Galileo, who was chief mathematician and philosopher at the court of the Grand Duke of Tuscany.

The ideas that the term “rigorous examination” indicated physical torture and that Galileo was remanded to a prison cell stood for over a century because no other documentation (the text of the interrogation and the actual sentence exacted) was released by the Church. About 150 years later in the case of imprisonment and 250 years later in the case of torture, new documents came to light that indicated Galileo had actually suffered neither.

According to correspondence between the Tuscan ambassador to Rome and the Tuscan secretary of state (and also with Galileo himself), the mathematician/philosopher  was incarcerated in the home of the ambassador and his wife before and after his trial, while during it, he and his servant lodged in the apartments of the prosecutor, though his meals were sent over from the Tuscan embassy. The record is detailed enough that all of Galileo’s time at court was accounted for except for three days in June of 1633. While he might have spent those three days in a dungeon, there is no rational reason to suspect that he did not return to the prosecutor’s rooms as he had done previously.

What about torture? The transcript of his interrogation speaks of torture in rather vague “mistakes were made” terms. After Galileo assures the Inquisition that he did not after its 1616 rejection by the Holy See, espouse Copernican theory, the record reads: “And he was told to tell the truth, otherwise one would have recourse to torture.” Indeed, one would.

This line is what other documents refer to when they note that Galileo was questioned “under threat of torture”. Galileo answered: “I am here to obey, but I have not held to this opinion after the determination was made, as I said.” At which point the transcriber notes : ”And since nothing else could e done for the execution of the decision, after he signed he was sent to his place.”

Personally, I suspect there was a great deal of winking and nodding going on at this point. It’s hard to believe that Galileo really rejected Copernican astronomy or that anyone in the Inquisition actually believed that he did. But I could be wrong.

In Galileo Goes to Jail, Dr. Finocchiaro goes through the historical record to dissect the timeline to see if there is a time during which Galileo might have been tortured. He concludes that there is only one day on which that could have occurred, but it would have left the old man unable to attend his sentencing or give his abjuration. He also notes that if Galileo were tortured there would be a detailed record of both the torture (literally a blow by blow account) and its ratification as required by Inquisition rules. No such records exist. Inquisitorial rules also preclude the torture of the elderly, pregnant women, and children, and Galileo was at this time in his sixties. He was also, as noted, a very respected man and a functionary in the court of the Tuscan Grand Duke. In other words, he had friends in high places.

I think, personally, that Finocchiaro’s citation of the above facts should be unnecessary. I think the trial records speak for themselves, as do the charges. Galileo was not charged with the most serious form of heresy. His offenses were not at a level that would have required him to groan away his days in the dungeon of the Inquisition.

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Maya Bohnhoff

“In connection with his Copernican beliefs, he [Bruno] held also that the universe contains an infinite number of worlds populated by intelligent beings. On account of these teachings, Bruno was tried for heresy by the Inquisition and burned at the stake in 1600. He then became the first martyr of modern science at the hands of the Church, and thereby a precursor to Galileo. . . . The facts of this myth are true, though sketchy to the point of poverty and generally misleading in their emphasis.” — Edward Gosselin and Lawrence Lerner, The Ash Wednesday Supper

Giordano Bruno was an Italian philosopher, mathematician and astronomer. As an astronomer, Bruno posited cosmological theories that went beyond the Copernican model to propose the idea that the Sun was just another star, and that, if there were an infinite number of stars, there were likely also an infinite number of inhabited worlds populated by intelligent beings. A universe full of Edens with their Adams and Eves, some of whom would choose to eat of the Tree, and some of whom would not.

As the opening quotation recounts, in 1600, Bruno was sentenced to death by the Roman Inquisition and burned at the stake.

These two facts—that he spoke of multiple earths and was sentenced by the Inquisition—combined into a powerful myth that, as Gosselin and Lerner put it, he “became the first martyr to modern science at the hands of the Church.”

One of the first concise statements linking these two facts was in the 1876 volume The Warfare of Science by Andrew Dickson White, who describes Bruno being “hunted from land to land” before turning on his pursuers and cursing them.

Giordano Bruno

“For this he is imprisoned for six years, then burned alive and his ashes scattered to the winds. Still, the new truth lived on; it could not be killed. Within ten years after the martyrdom of Bruno . . . the truth of the doctrine of Kopernik was established by the telescope of Galileo.”

A romantic and dramatic idea, couched in religions terms (martyrdom, doctrine, etc) but how much truth is in it? Was Bruno really martyred because he believed there was life on other planets, or that the Sun was a star among millions of others, or—as the reference to Kopernik suggests— because he advocated heliocentrism?

A summary of the proceedings of Bruno’s trial rediscovered in 1940 lists the numerous charges against him. They included blasphemy, immorality, and heresy against church dogma.

Here’s a more comprehensive list as cited in the court proceedings of the Roman Inquisition, according to which Bruno:

• spoke against the faith and its ministers;
• held opinions contrary to Catholic doctrine on the Trinity, the divinity of Christ, and His Incarnation;
• held opinions contrary to Catholic doctrine pertaining to Jesus as Christ;
• held opinions contrary to Catholic doctrine on the virginity of Jesus’ mother, Mary;
• held opinions contrary to Catholic doctrine about both Transubstantiation and Mass;
• claimed the existence of a plurality of worlds;
• believed in the transmigration of the human soul into animals;
• dealt in magics and divination.

On that evidence alone, it’s tempting to call this myth busted, and I think it’s worth noting that a number of scholars on the subject have opined that, as historian William Bynum wrote, Bruno “died at the stake (though probably for his interest in magic rather than his devotion to plenitude)”. Others have rejected the “martyr to science” label because they consider Bruno’s work unscientific. In any event, the only charge against him that can even be narrowly construed as scientific in nature is the existence of other worlds. But the additional charge of pantheism indicate that this was largely because the inquisitors felt Bruno’s words about multiple Edens suggested a plurality of gods as well.

The question here is this: Was Giordano Bruno burned at the stake for accepting Copernican theory?

Over and against all the commentary that insists he was, we have the record of his trial (and his own writings on such subjects as the Trinity and the transmigration of souls) to show that he was not. For nowhere in the documentation of his case is heliocentrism a factor. It wasn’t his “promotion” of the Sun to the center of the solar system that got Giordano Bruno killed (a dubious promotion, since we’ve seen that being at the center of things wasn’t the source of glory we moderns might imagine—see my previous blog: Nicolaus Kopernik, Killjoy). Rather it was his demotion of Christ and the human soul—neither of which, at the time, were considered to be within the realm of science.

Bruno’s execution was a cruel, irrational, and un-Christian reaction to his ideas, regardless of what they were. But the historical record reveals that the Church—however wrong-headed its outlook—was reacting not to his teachings on natural philosophy, but to his teachings on matters of faith.

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Maya Bohnhoff

“Dethronement of the Earth from the centre of the universe caused profound shock: the Copernican system challenged the entire system of ancient authority an required a complete change in the philosophical conception of the universe.” — Britannica Concise Encyclopedia (2007)

The myth that Nicolaus Copernicus (Nikolaj Kopernik) “dethroned” Earth and humanity from the center of the Universe is repeated so often and in so many contexts—many in educational spheres—that it’s as reflexive as the assertion that “Columbus discovered America”.

What’s wrong with that? Turns out it’s inaccurate in a number of ways and Dr. Dennis Danielson, author of The First Copernican: Georg Joachim Rheticus and the Rise of the Copernican Revolution undertakes to enumerate them, referring to the myth as “a perennial mold in our collective mental cupboards”.

The myth goes something like this: Copernicus (a Polish prelate) moved Earth from the central place in the solar system, which

1. demoted the planet,
2. dethroned mankind, and
3. totally mucked up all religion and religious conceptions of man’s importance because it argues against Biblical (i.e. Jewish and Christian) conceptions of the cosmos.

That’s quite a lot for Copernicus’ slick bit of observation and reasoning to be credited with or blamed for.

The three points above rest on a number of assumptions about reality, such as:

1. physical centrality is equivalent to metaphorical, spiritual, or intellectual centrality;
2. physical centrality is good;
3. physical centrality is essential to human ideas about identity and self-worth because religion promotes anthropocentrism and the hubris of humankind through this alleged centrality;
4. the validity of religion depends upon a literal interpretation of Biblical commentary on the nature of the cosmos (specifically where the planet is in relation to other stuff);
5. the Bible teaches literal physical centrality of the Earth.

Got all that?

Danielson comes at these assumptions from a variety of directions, several of which were new to me because I took the scenery along the way so for granted.

First, Danielson points out that it’s pretty clear that something does not have to be literally in the center of things in order to have importance. I might say that my faith and family occupy a central place in my life or that my writing has a central place in my thoughts. Neither of things is literally true. The books of scripture that inspire me in a variety of ways, for example, reside in a bookcase in the living room. This room is not physically central in our home. It’s figuratively central in that it’s where we hang out to do important things like hold devotions, watch baseball and Dr. Who, rehearse music, and work. It’s where we visit with friends. In other words, it is central intellectually and emotionally without being at all central physically. In fact, when I consider the idea of centrality, I can’t think of an institution in which the physical centrality of a particular building determines the building’s importance.

Obviously, then, physical centrality is not equivalent to importance, so we can tick off point one. For me, the coherence of the truism falls apart on that alone, but I think the more complex ramifications are worth a look.

Nikolaj Kopernik

We assume—for reasons that it had never occurred to me to question, really—that in this case,  physical centrality is equivalent to goodness or virtue. And this is where Danielson surprised me with new ideas and new information. Tongue in cheek, he asks if Copernicus’ work called for a market re-evaluation of the Earth’s neighborhood once he’d moved it from the downtown area to the cosmic suburbs.

What do estate agents have to say? The Aristotelian model in vogue at the time of Copernicus—and, later, Galileo—had it that the center of a system was where the gross, heavy stuff collected. In the Ptolemaic model, the center was the low point. Jewish philosopher Maimonides (1135-1274) wrote that when it came to the cosmos,

“the nearer the parts are to the centre, the greater is their turbidness, their solidity, their inertness, their dimness and darkness, because they are further away from the loftiest element, from the source of light and brightness.”

His Christian contemporary, Thomas Aquinas, agreed that the Earth, having the central position, was “the most material and coarsest of all bodies.” He used the Latin word ignobilissima to refer to the Earth. Not a good thing.

Some theologians, in fact, rejected heliocentrism as falsely exalting the Earth by placing the Sun—a symbol of the Divine and the source of light—in the lowly spot in which “the universe’s filth and ephemera collect” (as Galileo put it) and by granting the Earth movement and a place among the stars.

This hardly supports the idea that human worth was derived from the physical centrality of the ball of dust we lived on. As Maimonides implies, the Earth was the lowly, shadowy sphere over which the illumined realm of God arched.

Growing up in a Christian household, I took the diminution of human physical worth as a given. In fact, a common argument against Christian belief is that it devalues humanity by suggesting that we may contain defects.

“When I observe Your heavens, the work of Your fingers, the moon and the stars, which You set in place, what is man that You remember him, the son of man that You look after him?” (Psalm 8: 3-4)

Paradox? Not really. While there are passages in all scripture that ascribe potential greatness to humankind, that greatness has nothing to do with location, location, location and everything to do with conditions inside the human being.

The Bahá’í scriptures, too, are replete with passages that make a point of the non-material nature of human value.

“If true glory were to consist in the possession of such perishable things, then the earth on which ye walk must needs vaunt itself over you, because it supplieth you, and bestoweth upon you, these very things, by the decree of the Almighty. In its bowels are contained, according to what God hath ordained, all that ye possess. From it, as a sign of His mercy, ye derive your riches. Behold then your state, the thing in which ye glory!” —Bahá’u’lláh, Gleanings from the Writings of Bahá’u’lláh, p 250

And:

“Know ye not why We created you all from the same dust? That no one should exalt himself over the other. Ponder at all times in your hearts how ye were created. Since We have created you all from one same substance it is incumbent on you to be even as one soul, to walk with the same feet, eat with the same mouth and dwell in the same land, that from your inmost being, by your deeds and actions, the signs of oneness and the essence of detachment may be made manifest.” — Hidden Words of Bahá’u’lláh, #68, Arabic

The conflation of intellectual concepts with their physical analogues or metaphors has dogged mankind since we first attempted to “put into words what cannot be put into words” as my colleague, Ursula Le Guin has summed up the writer’s job. We sometimes seem to have difficulty distinguishing fact from metaphor.

So, then, religious scripture—and I’m not talking about just the Bible here—makes a distinction between a physical “place” and an intellectual or spiritual one. Even as scripture takes pains to rob us of our sense of entitlement due to our address, it stresses a different type of centrality that owes nothing to location.

“Dost thou reckon thyself only a puny form
When within thee the universe is folded?” — The Imam Ali

But back to the questions: Does the validity of all religion rest on the literal interpretation of a particular set of holy books (in this case, the Christian Bible)? I’d suggest that the answer to this is “of course not” simply because to insist on such dependence would be irrational.

Then there’s that last point—does the Bible, in fact, teach that the Earth is the center of the solar system? Here, again, the myth collapses, for the Bible does not give the Earth a lofty place in relation to other bodies or the generic “heavens”. As Copernicus was aware, in the Bible (as in other scripture) the Earth was symbolic of grosser material concerns. The heavens were exalted. The heavens were the throne of God. The Earth was only His footstool.

“But I tell you, don’t take an oath at all: either by heaven, because it is God’s throne; or by the earth, because it is His footstool. . .” — Matthew 3:34-35a

So whence the myth? Dennis Danielson conjectures that there was a collision of a number of different world views as each new scientific discovery changed the way we see the universe. What’s fascinating to me about this is that as the telescope showed us more and more of the cosmos, two polar opposite reactions have emerged. Many religious people react to scientific discovery as theologian Cotton Mather did, by exclaiming,

“Great God! What a variety of worlds Thou hast created! . . .  How stupendous are the displays of Thy greatness, and of Thy glory!”

I have to admit that, in my own life, the more I know about the way the Universe works, the deeper my appreciation of God grows. On the other side of the aisle in perfect synchronicity, are those who see the unveiling of the universe as inimical to the whole idea of God.

It is, as with many things, a matter of perspective.

But I digress. Danielson suggests that what Copernicus did—in a staggering feat of spin—was to redefine the center of the known universe as a glorious throne for the Sun rather than a cess pit in which the basest matter collected. Possibly, later thinkers unfamiliar with the theology of the issue assumed that the center had always been a lofty rather than base location and that Kopernik the Killjoy had simply shoved a different component into the place of honor.

Whatever the reason, the first known appearance of the cliché that Dr. Danielson cites was in 17th century France when Cyrano de Bergerac wrote of geocentrism as contributing to “the insupportable arrogance of mankind, which fancies that Nature was only created to serve it.” By the end of the 17th century, the standard interpretation of Copernican cosmology was, as Bernard le Bouvier de Fontanelle wrote, that the monk’s “design” was “to abate the vanity of men who had thrust themselves into the chief place of the universe”. By the 1800s it had become a trope that Wolfgang Goethe hailed by saying that “no discovery or opinion ever produced a greater effect on the human spirit than did the teaching of Copernicus”. In his mind this “teaching” caused Earth to give up the “colossal privilege of being the center of the universe.” (Hyperbole, anyone?)

Given the opinions of some of his peers, I imagine Copernicus would be very surprised to learn that’s what he’d done . . . let alone that it would be what he’d be primarily remembered for.

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You are seated in a classroom at your American University and two armed officials enter in military garb. The room goes silent. All eyes look towards the front of the room as one of the guards calls your professor aside and whispers something into her ear. The professor turns for a moment and looks in your direction. She points at you. Your classmates watch in nervous silence as the guards cross to you and insist that you follow them out of the room. Now you are in a wing of the Dean’s office-a makeshift interrogation chamber. Your heart races as the guards question you about your political beliefs. They seem fine with your answers. Then they ask you about your religious persuasion. You pause for a moment. You take a breath, steeling yourself against the mounting anxiety. You answer them truthfully. The officials smile knowingly and nod at one another. They leave the room. You find yourself expelled from the University and barred from ever attending any institution for higher learning in the country.

This is the lead-in on the Education Under Fire website, explaining the vision that has prompted the making of a documentary on the plight of Baha’i students in Iran and an open letter (below) from two Nobel Laureates—Bishop Desmond Tutu and President José Ramos-Horta of East Timor.

This issue, for me, is personal. I have been a Baha’i for 36 years. I’ve followed the situation in Iran closely since 1979 when the current regime came to power. I have many Persian friends. My National Spiritual Assembly has asked that we—the Baha’is of a country where we are free to follow our Faith—do whatever we can to bring this situation to the attention of our friends and acquaintances. This is part of my effort to do just that.

A number of visitor comments at HuffPost indicate that some folks don’t see why they should care about the Baha’is in Iran when their own country (usually the US) has more pressing problems such as high taxes or a broken political system or <your cause here>. Maybe this quote from a German clergyman in the days leading up to WWII will serve as a reminder:

“First they came for the communists­, and I didn’t speak out because I wasn’t a communist. Then they came for the trade unionists, and I didn’t speak out because I wasn’t a trade unionist. Then they came for the Jews, and I didn’t speak out because I wasn’t a Jew. Then they came for me and there was no one left to speak out for me.” — Reverend Martin Niemoller

In future days, the Common Ground Group blog site will also take up the call. For now, please read the Horta-Tutu letter below. (Also at www.educationunderfire.com.)

==========================================

Open letter from two Nobel Laureate s— Bishop Desmond Tutu and President José Ramos-Horta of East Timor.

The forward progress of humankind in the last centuries has been fueled, more than any other factor, by increasing access to information, more rapid exchange of ideas, and in most parts of the world, universal education.

Freedom of education and freedom of information are integral to freedom of thought. Few advances have been made for humankind which were not preceded by new ways of looking at our world and new schools of thought.

So it is particularly shocking when despots and dictators in the twenty-first century attempt to subjugate their own populations by attempting to deny education or information to their people. Not only is it futile in the long term, it makes them appear fearful of the very age they live in, and haunted by the new thinkers in their midst.

Perhaps the most glaring example of this fear today is the denial of higher education to the members of the Baha’i Faith in Iran — a peaceful religion with no political agenda, which recognizes the unity of all religions.

In 1987, after being barred by their government from Iranian universities because of their faith, the resourceful Baha’i community in Iran organized the Baha’i Institute for Higher Learning, a decentralized network of teachers delivering college level classes in kitchens and living rooms across Iran. Baha’i professors and administrators who had also been banned from their universities for their faith were joined by courageous Muslim academics who would risk their careers and even imprisonment to support the network and teach the youth.

Taught by accredited professors, the quality of the coursework has been recognized and accepted for credit by more than fifty universities outside of Iran, allowing the BIHE students to continue with graduate work abroad. This creative solution has lifted the lives of thousands of Baha’i students who would otherwise have been denied meaningful careers.

On May 21, 2011, the BIHE came under attack when Iranian officials raided thirty Baha’i homes and arrested over a dozen of its teachers and administrators. Those arrested were neither political nor religious leaders. They were lecturers in subjects that included accounting and dentistry, who today face the prospect of decades in prison. The crime with which they are charged – delivering higher education to Baha’i youth.

The suppression of education in Iran is not limited to those of the Baha’i Faith. Other Iranian youth have been expelled from universities for their beliefs or for holding viewpoints determined to be counter to the ruling party, including pro-reform views. Iranian officials have forbidden new delivery of and are in the process of rewriting the course content of twelve social sciences on the university curricula — including law, philosophy, management and political science – to make them more closely align with their own interpretation of the Islamic faith. They have stated that up to 70% of the course content in the social science will be rewritten by government officials.

We believe it is important to recognize that these actions are neither the result of or dictated by the Islamic faith. One need only look at the Dark Ages of Europe or the Spanish Inquisition to see that Iranian Ayatollahs are certainly not the first to use religion as the cloak to attempt to forcibly suppress ideas and knowledge that they fear could threaten their power. The rich philosophical and artistic Iranian traditions, the contributions of Iranian scholars worldwide, and the actions of the Muslim community members who have aided and supported the BIHE, are testament to the fact that the actions of their leaders are no reflection of the Muslim faith or the many good-willed Muslims in Iranian communities.

And while we believe that both historically and in today’s “wired” world it is futile to suppress the quest for knowledge, there are many in Iran whose lives are being threatened or damaged by the attempt.

They need our support.

We call on the international academic community to come to the aid of those whose lives are being subjected to these oppressive laws.

Specifically we, the undersigned, ask that the international academic community:

1. Call on the government of the Iranian Republic to release unconditionally and drop charges against the BIHE educators currently under arrest and facing charges related to their educational activities.
2. As academic leaders, administrators and professors, register through any possible channels in the Iranian academic community their disagreement with and disapproval of any policy which would bar individuals from higher education based on their religious background or political persuasion, or which would remove or corrupt any established fields of study from a university curricula for religious or political reasons.
3. Encourage their own universities to review the educational quality of the BIHE coursework for possible acceptance of its credits, so that those who have had the benefit of its programs can continue at higher levels of study.
4. As possible, offer available online university level curricula, through scholarships if needed, to students in Iran who would otherwise be deprived of the right to higher education or who, due to government limitation on social sciences, would not have a full array of educational options available to them in their own county.

Thank you for your support.
And please also watch this video.

With warm regards,

Archbishop Desmond M. Tutu, O.M.S.G, D.D., F.K.C.
Anglican Archbishop Emeritus of Cape Town
1984 Nobel Peace Prize recipient

President José Ramos-Horta
President of East Timor
1996 Nobel Peace Prize recipient

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Maya Bohnhoff

My friend Bahram did a couple of blogs on the contribution of Muslim scientists to our knowledge of the world and the sciences, but I think that, given the number of times I hear people advance myth that Islam was inhospitable to science, it’s worth delving into further.

This myth has been stated and restated over time:

“The pious Muslim . . . was expected to avoid . . . [rational] sciences with great care because they were considered dangerous to his faith. . .” — Ignaz Goldziher (1916)

“. . . possession of all this ‘enlightenment’ [of Greek thought] did not prompt much intellectual progress within Islam, let alone eventuate in Islamic science.” — Rodney Stark (2003)

“Alas, Islam turned against science in the twelfth century.” — Steve Weinberg (2007)

Baghdad

Today we think of Baghdad as a benighted place with a struggling populace shivering in fear of terrorist bombings. In the tenth century, the capital of the Abbasid Empire was then the largest known city (population over one million) and had become a cultural center where scientific and philosophical activity was pursued at such institutions as the House of Wisdom.

One of the “dangerous” pursuits carried on by these Muslims was a massive academic project in which Sanskrit, Farsi, and Greek texts were translated into Arabic. By the twelfth century—at which time Weinberg tell us Islam had turned against science—these Arabic texts were translated again, this time into Latin, for consumption in Christian Europe. The Latin translators worked from the Arabic rather than the Greek texts because the Abbasid scholars had added to the work annotations and commentaries challenging, supplementing, and correcting some of the original Greek ideas.

Despite this well-documented process, the myth persists that the Arab-speaking sages had nothing to contribute to the work they translated and were only uninventive parrots. I find that ironic, considering that the charge against Islam, as voiced by Goldziher, is  that it was inimical to these schools of knowledge from the get-go. One might ask, then, how a “pious Muslim” was allowed to even translate these texts, let alone study them, disseminate them, and make use of the knowledge they contained. I’d think this pious act of translation alone would be enough to put the myth to rest.

Nor was the task of translation supported only by academics. The rank and file Muslims at all levels of the society supported the scholarly work monetarily. Historian Dimitri Gutas writes that this support cut across all classes and that it included “Arabs and non-Arabs, Muslims and non-Muslims, Sunnis and Shi’ites”. It deserves, Gutas wrote in his 1998 publication Greek Thought: Arabic Culture, to be seen as part of “the same narrative as that of Pericles’ Athens, the Italian Renaissance, or the scientific revolution of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and . . . to be so recognized and embedded in our historical consciousness.”

al-Khwarizmi

The original contributions to scientific and mathematical thought can be seen in the translation of  such works as Diophantus’ Arithmetica into the Arabic Art of Algebra (the word “algebra”, itself being the latinization of the Arabic word al-jabr, meaning “the restoration”). In this work, Qusta ibn Luqa (820-912) framed the Greeks’ mathematical operations in terms of a new discipline realized by the mathematician Muhammad ibn Musa al-Khwarizmi—from whose name we derive the term algorithm. The claim that these Muslim scholars added nothing new or original to the mix was quickly discredited when it became obvious that if one reverse-translated the Arabic back into Greek, one did not arrive at the original Greek text.

In a refutation of the idea that Islam was inimical to science, more recent scholarship tells us that the civilization raised on the foundation of Muhammad’s teachings dominated the field of science (especially mathematics and astronomy) from roughly 800-1300 CE.

Nor did the Muslim scholars see their science as being at war with their faith. The field of astronomy was important for reasons of faith and reason (i.e. the calculation of prayer times and the study of God’s might and perfection as well as natural causes of cosmic phenomena). The first observatory built by Muslim astronomers was constructed in Baghdad in 828 CE, while in the 1300s Ibn al-Shatir (who was a timekeeper at a Damascus mosque) proposed the lunar model used by Nicolaus Copernicus in his 1543 work, De Revolutionibus.

Ibn-Sina's The Canon

Remember, too, that the European universities I discussed in a previous post used a number of Arabic texts that had been translated into Latin. Medicine would not be what it is today without the encyclopedic work of Ibn-Sina (Avicenna)—The Canon. This text was used for centuries in European medical colleges. A further sampling in the field of medicine yields the discovery of pulmonary blood circulation by a Syrian physician and theologian, Ibn al-Nafis. Moving to the discipline of physics, we can cite the work of al-Haytham (Alhazen) who linked mathematics and physics and who, according to historian David Lindberg—author of Theories of Vision from al-Kindi to Kepler—was “the most significant figure in the history of optics between antiquity and the seventeenth century”.

Okay, so, clearly the situation is not so cut and dried as Steven Weinberg and company suggest. So, you might be asking, what are they on about? What happened that gave rise to the idea that Islam contributed nothing to science (or at least nothing original) and, as Weinberg proposes, “turned against science” from about the twelfth century onward?

Weinberg’s answer is that Islam was influenced by a philosopher named Abu Hamid al-Ghazali who argued against the concept of static laws of nature on the basis that such laws would tie God’s hands. This idea arose out of the writing of Ignaz Goldziher (quoted earlier) who claimed that the philosophies of Ghazali, in the words of Syed Nomanul Haq—essayist and visiting scholar of Near Eastern Language and Civilization at UPenn—“helped to bring Islamic science to a screeching halt”.

Hey, we’re making progress—at least Goldziher and Weinberg seem to acknowledge that Islamic science existed and was making some progress.  But how good is the claim against Ghazali?

George Siba—professor of Arabic and Islamic Science at Columbia University—finds it less than credible. He points out certain problems with this evaluation, chiefly that the supposedly unscientific Sufi mystic not only supported the study and use of logic and mathematics (something even Goldziher concedes) and, lamenting that Muslim scholars were not doing as much as they could in the disciplines of anatomy and medicine, undertook to write on these subjects himself.

“If we only look at the surviving scientific documents, we can clearly delineate a very flourishing activity in almost every scientific discipline in the centuries following Ghazali.” (George Siba, Islamic Science and the Making of the European Renaissance, p. 21)

Ghazali’s work has received good marks from other more recent scholars, as well—such as Oxford historian Emily Savage-Smith. Smith suggested in her 1995 paper on Islamic attitudes toward dissection that Ghazali, far from halting scientific research, rather encouraged it—especially in medicine.

This, despite the fact that what Dr. Haq calls “political Islam” had sustained a series of severe blows including the loss of Cordoba and Seville to the crusading Europeans, the destruction of Baghdad by Hulagu Khan, and the Mongol’s capture of Damascus in 1260.

I must make one more observation about the supposition by some westerners that a single Muslim scholar—and one not in the mainstream of Islamic theology, at that—could affect the thoughts, attitudes, and practices of even a significant portion of the Muslim world. Islam, unlike the Catholic Church or the Bahá’í Faith, has no centralized theological authority, least of all one that sets the tone for the entire body of believers. Rather, a number of schools of thought have evolved within the two main sects. The Sufis are one of the more mystical traditions and, as a tradition, are credited by some as having inspired a Golden Age in Islamic scholarship starting—ironically— right around 1300.

It is Dr. Haq’s considered opinion (one shared by a growing body of scholars) that

Ibn Firnas

“. . . for centuries, while science in the Latin West had lain in the doldrums, no culture in the world provided a more hospitable home to science than Islam. And no group of Muslims cultivated science more than the religious . . .” — Syed Haq, Galileo Goes to Jail, p 41

In fiction, we call this “working against type”.  The scholarly, science-loving cleric isn’t a character some of us expect to find on the pages of history and yet, as we learn more about the interactions between faith and science in the Middle Ages and beyond, we are forced to view him as typical.

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Maya Bohnhoff

When I was in school, I was taught that “everyone” believed the Earth was flat until the brave Christopher Columbus argued the point with Isabella and Ferdinand and sailed off to the west, proving the planet to be a globe. Hence, Columbus Day.

There are a number of reasons why we should perhaps not celebrate Columbus (some of which my eldest daughter outlined emphatically in a fifth grade essay). One of them is that what I learned in school was a myth—Columbus did not “prove the world to be round” for the simple reason that most people with any education already knew—or at least believed—that it was.

How do we know this? Because people during the Middle Ages wrote about such things and left us a record of their thoughts on the subject. Scholarship new and old is telling us emphatically that, no, people living in the Middle Ages did not, as a rule, believe the world was flat.

So, why do so many of us believe they did?

The idea that Columbus’s “discovery” of the Americas and his insistence that the world was a globe ushered in the age of modernity was introduced in 1828 by storyteller Washington Irving (of Rip van Winkle fame) in The Life and Voyages of Christopher Columbus. Some years later,  John Draper expressed the myth this way:

“. . . the question of the shape of the earth was finally settled by three sailors, Columbus, da Gama and, above all, Ferdinand Magellan.” — History of the Conflict Between Religion and Science, 1874

All right, so if Columbus and his colleagues did not prove the world was a sphere, then what exactly did he argue with the crowned heads of Spain? According to the written reports of his son, Fernando, and Bartolomé de las Casas—a priest who wrote a history of the New World—the skepticism centered around the size of the planet, not its shape, and hence the expanse of ocean Columbus’s ships would have to navigate. Nor was Columbus a free thinker out to prove a point. He was a devout Catholic who thought he was doing God’s work by providing the Church and Crown with riches galore. This, according to his own diaries and logs, some of which I’ve read (and included in my novelette “O, Pioneer”, which you can read at Book View Café).

Remember the universities I mentioned in my last blog? Those universities left records of what they were teaching, and they were teaching Aristotle—including his mathematical proof of the sphericity of the world. Moreover, the list of major natural philosophers whose work supports a spherical earth is both long and illustrious. It includes Ambrose (d. 420), Augustine (d. 430), Aquinus (d. 1274), Magnus (d. 1280), and Bacon (d. 1294). Two standouts of the 13th and 14th centuries were Jean de Sacrobosco and Pierre D’Ailly (d. 1410), archbishop of Cambrai. Sacrobosco’s book—De Sphera, which demonstrated the sphericity of the Earth—was used as a textbook in the aforementioned universities throughout the Middle Ages. D’Ailly wrote a book, too, entitled Imago Mundi, which discussed the spherical shape of the planet.

Only one or two renowned thinkers deviated from this opinion. One Lactantius (4th c.) opined that all pagan learning distracted from man’s rightful study, which was his salvation. Another, whose views were just ambiguous enough to fuel the science and religion “controversy”, was the 5th-6th century encyclopedist, Isadore of Seville. A statement in his De Natura Rerum that draws criticism from writers like Draper is that people all over the world experienced the size and heat of the sun in the same manner. Some modern critics have taken this to mean that this statement proves he believed the Earth was disc-shaped. Other scholars note that it might also be a reference to the fact that the Sun does not appear to change shape as it “moves” through the heavens. These same scholars point out that among Isadore’s works on physics and astronomy are concepts that are consistent with, and even dependent upon, a spherical world.

In any event, thinkers like Lactantius and Isadore form a tiny minority and their presence suggests to modern scholars—such as Lesley B. Cormack, Dean of Social Sciences at Simon Fraser University—that the record of such views “merely indicates that the early-medieval scholarly climate was open to debates on the subject” (Galileo Goes to Jail, p. 33) According to Professor Cormack, only one medieval scholar is known “explicitly to deny the sphericity of the earth”. That was Cosmas Indicopleustes—a Byzantine monk who developed a cosmological model that featured Earth as a table-land.

Now that’s the sort of Earth Chris Columbus’s sailors might be excused for fearing they’d fall off the edge of . . . except, of course, that they did not, in fact, express such a fear. According to Columbus’s logs, his men’s biggest complaints were that the trip was taking longer than the Admiral of the Seas had promised, and that because the wind seemed always to blow to the west, they might not be able to sail east on their return trip.

Oh, yeah, and there was never enough grog.

Next time: Islam and Science, Redux

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Maya Bohnhoff

“What has Athens to do with Jerusalem?”

That question—asked famously by Tertullian—forms the basis of a myth related to the one I explored in my previous blog about the rise of Christianity and its effect on science in the Middle Ages. This myth has it that the medieval church actively suppressed the growth of science. It was actively promoted in John Draper’s 1874 volume, The History of Conflict Between Religion and Science, in which he states:

The Church . . . set herself forth as the depository and arbiter of knowledge . . . She thus took a course that determined her whole future career; she became a stumbling block in the intellectual advancement of Europe for more than a thousand years.

Carl Sagan

No lesser personage than Carl Sagan (whom I’ve always thought of fondly as “Uncle Carl”) gave the idea credence in Cosmos (1980), which contains a chart of astronomical progress. The chart covers antique Greek thought up to the time of Hypatia, then leaves about a thousand year gap between the lady mathematician and her contemporaries and Copernicus and DaVinci. In the words of the caption on Sagan’s chart, this vast “gap” was “a poignant lost opportunity for mankind”.

As a teenager, I idolized Carl Sagan. And I bought into the myth, too. I still have a huge amount of respect for Uncle Carl and his demystification of science, but I recognize that even very smart men can make mistakes and have gaps in their knowledge just like the rest of us.

This blog has dealt with the contributions to natural philosophy by such Middle Eastern luminaries as Ibn-Rushd (Averroes), Ibn Sina (Avicenna), and Ibn Furnas.

But wait, there’s more!

A short list of the accomplishments from this allegedly dark era in Europe (scientifically speaking) includes: William of Saint-Cloud’s work on solar eclipses, Dominican friar Dietrich von Freiberg’s discoveries about rainbows, Jean Buridan’s application of impetus theory to explain projectile motion, free-fall acceleration, and the rotation of the night sky. Bishop Nicole Oresme argued, in his youth, for the rotation of the earth, though there were not then empirical evidence or conclusive rationale arguments for the idea.

Meanwhile, at Oxford, natural philosophers were applying mathematics to the study of motion. We now know that science was happening in the Middle Ages at places like Oxford—that is, at Universities. Universities were founded at Oxford, Bologna, and Paris before 1200 CE. By 1500, there were about 60 of these institutions seeded around Europe, with about 30 percent of the curricula dedicated to the study of the natural world.

Here’s the myth-buster: The organization that was the greatest supporter and underwriter of the development of these institutions was . . . wait for it . . . the Catholic Church.

Historian John Heilbron (best known for his histories of physics), wrote:

“The Roman Catholic Church gave more financial and social support to the study of astronomy for over six centuries, from the recovery of ancient data in the late Middle Ages to the Enlightenment, than any other, and probably all, other institutions.” (The Sun in the Church, Harvard University Press, 1999)

In his essay in Galileo Goes to Jail (“Myth #2: That the Medieval Christian Church Suppressed Science”), Michael Shank—professor of the history of science at the University of Wisconsin, Madison—notes that the discovery of the Church’s role in funding these early universities has met with the argument that, of course, the students at these schools were monks or priests chiefly studying theology. According to historical records, however, this was not the case. Most students had no theological subjects at all. Of course, there were monks and priests at some universities studying theology, but this required the taking of vows, for one thing, and a master of arts course of study for another. Indeed, some universities didn’t even have a theological faculty, so only “secular” studies were taught.

The point is easily missed that even if most scholars were studying “the queen of sciences” (i.e. theology) along with astronomy, natural history, and mathematics at the behest of the Catholic Church, that would undermine any notion that the Church saw natural philosophy as something to be eschewed by Christians. Thousands of scholars (Professor Shank cites a figure of around 250,000 in Germany alone, beginning in 1350 CE) were learning the latest in scientific knowledge—whether clerics or laymen. The Church not only permitted this, the Church encouraged it and funded it.

Roger Bacon

Were there instances in which theologians came into conflict with what the universities or particular masters were teaching? Certainly. Roger Bacon (Master or Arts at Paris and a Franciscan by calling) had a falling out with the Church for applying prophecy in ways that Rome took exception to, and, for various reasons, the Bishop of Paris  condemned practices of the University there. He and his cohort also fell into disagreement with his Aristotelian colleague, Thomas Aquinas. In fact, it seems to have required a papal bull (Parens scientiarum or “mother of science”) to uphold the university curriculum against the Parisian bishopric.

Aristotle

In 20/20 hindsight, the danger of imputing the actions of local authorities to “the Church” or “Christianity” should be obvious. It allows for the creation of a mythology that fosters prejudice and irrationality and gives a skewed view of the historical relationship between science and religion. The machinations of local authorities affected a minority of students; even when the Bishop of Paris was at his most dictatorial, scholars and masters alike were free to pick up and move to another university. In fact, in 1229, when the Parisian university was tussling with the local bishopric, the University at Toulouse took the opportunity to lure away students with the promise that they could “hear here the books of Aristotle that were banned at Paris” (Thorndike, University Records and Life in the Middle Ages, Columbia University Press. 1944).  Ironically, Parisian Bishop’s attempts to control the studies in university became a recruitment device for a neighboring school.

To sum this one up, the historical record demonstrates that the Church—as an institution—did not suppress science, but rather promoted it. Hence, if the Catholic Church intended to quash the sciences, its methods were darned peculiar. In 20/20 hindsight, the danger of imputing the actions of local authorities to “the Church” or “Christianity” should be obvious. It fosters a mythology that is both prejudicial and irrational, and gives a skewed view of the historical relationship between science and religion.

This counter-productive promotion of scientific ideas (if we are to believe that religion is inherently opposed to them) was also followed by Islam and even more markedly pursued by the Bahá’í Faith. Muhammad famously exhorted his followers to search even to the ends of the earth for knowledge of every kind, the result of which history attests. Both Bahá’u’lláh and Abdu’l-Bahá raised the study and application of the sciences to the level of worship.

“Scientific knowledge is the highest attainment upon the human plane, for science is the discoverer of realities. It is of two kinds: material and spiritual. Material science is the investigation of natural phenomena; divine science is the discovery and realization of spiritual verities. The world of humanity must acquire both. A bird has two wings; it cannot fly with one. Material and spiritual science are the two wings of human uplift and attainment. Both are necessary…” — Abdu’l-Bahá, Promulgation of Universal Peace, p. 138 (23 May 1912, Cambridge, MA)

The above statement was one Abdu’l-Bahá made in a city famous for its institutes of higher learning. He also spoke at Stanford University in California and there—as in many of his discourses—he expounded the importance of science and its harmony with religion. This deep regard for science within the realm of religion is directly responsible for the fact that so many people of faith have chosen to pursue scientific knowledge and have made important scientific discoveries.  I have no doubt they will continue to do so.