Why do so many people still admire Osho?

Osho is quite popular here in Taiwan.  Some of my friends share quotations from him, and some of his ideas seem quite inspiring to people here.

I know Osho as Rajneesh, and my main knowledge of him came from reading magazine and newspaper articles back in the 1980s when he and his followers created an intentional community in Oregon (Antelope, Oregon). I’ve had a life-long interest in alternative lifestyles, intentional communities, communes, and spiritual teachers, both those within the mainstream religious traditions and those outside those traditions. But, I haven’t really read or studied Rajneesh, and haven’t been interested in him.  

When evaluating the teachings of someone, or judging whether their insights and wisdom are actually wise or accurate, it’s important to do independent investigation.  The essence of justice is using our own eyes and ears, instead of just relying on what we hear second-hand, and I realize most of what I know about Osho (Rajneesh) is second-hand.  I’ve read some of his materials, and watched some old videos with him, and I have some observations.

There are plenty of hostile writings about Osho available on the internet.  Some people seem to think he belongs in a category with other mind-control cult leaders such as Jim Jones, David Koresh, or Shoko Asahara. Others seem to think he was a great New Age spiritual leader like Emanuel Swedenborg, Paramahansa Yogananda, or Rudolf Steiner. I’d put him more in a category with people who offered a mix of wisdom and silliness, who meant well, but didn’t always live up to their potential, and associate Osho with people such as G. I. Gurdjieff, Helena Blavatsky, Jidda Krishnamurti, or Edgar Cayce (although to be fair to Cayce, he was never a teacher or leader of anything when in a waking state, but the things he revealed when in a trance offer a similar mix of profound and inspirational wisdom combined with baffling pronouncements that are obviously ridiculous). 

By the way, my personal favorite guru was ‘Abdu’l-Baha, although I am fond of some of the works of Abū al-Faḍl Gulpāyigānī, Thomas Merton, Loren Eiseley, Rene Dubos, Buckminster Fuller, Philip K. Dick, Edgar Cayce, P. D. Ouspensky, Charles Fort, Edmund Gurney, William James, Frederick W. H. Myers, Alfred Russel Wallace, Frank Podmore, Carl Jung, and sometimes for intellectual entertainment I like engaging with the ideas of persons such as Graham Hancock, Rupert Sheldrake, Stuart Hameroff, John Polkinghorne, Werner Heisenberg, Stanislav Grof, Bertrand Russell, and William R. Corliss.  Recent and contemporary gurus who I think are better than Osho would include: David Deida, Thich Nhat Hanh, Shih Cheng Yen, Jack Kornfield, Thomas Moore, the 14th Dalai Lama, and Pope Francis. However, I strongly recommend anyone who admires gurus and spiritual leaders to give a few hours to “The Guru Papers: Masks of Authoritarian Power” by Diana Alstad and Joel Kramer, which should provide an engaging intellectual and spiritual challenge.

There are many things I don’t like about Osho.  I’ll describe a few. 

His community and followers seem very much centered on him, his person.  I prefer communities centered on ideas or ideals, teachings and principles. When I see a community with too much emphasis on a leader or guru, this repels me. This probably comes from my Protestant and Baha’i spiritual background, as I was brought up in a liberal United Methodist tradition that emphasized a direct relationship between the individual and the Divine, and I have been a practicing Baha’i for over thirty years, and the Baha’i Faith forbids clergy, teaching that in this age people are enlightened and wise enough to read for themselves and think for themselves. I also know enough about psychology to be cautious about the unhealthy dynamic between gurus and their followers. I’m too egalitarian for that.   

Osho seemed to have too many psychological problems.  Some people suggest he had narcissistic personality disorder, but I don’t know if that is accurate. He also supposedly had issues with addictions to medications. Again, these allegations may not be true.  There are worse allegations about his problems, but I don't know if those are true, either. But, all in all, I sense that he was more psychologically troubled and damaged than most people I know, and when I admire the writings and ideas of someone, I like also knowing that the person whose ideas I’m admiring was also a throughly psychologically healthy and well-adjusted person.

He allowed people with horrible agendas to do horrible things on his behalf.  When he lived in Oregon, the person he put in control of his affairs attempted to murder people and attempted to poison the food supply of a town in Oregon.  Osho claimed he knew nothing about what was done, and I think there was no evidence that he was guilty of anything, but still, it shows his poor judgement that he promoted a person so deeply flawed into a position of trust under him, and allowed that person to amass such power while he was still alive.

Some of his teachings about sex were, I think, not especially healthy or helpful to his followers. I think the women who experimented with working in pornography or prostitution to get over sexual hangups, based on advice from Rajneesh, were probably not helped much by following his advice.  This is just my intuitive sense of things, as I don’t think anyone researched this. 

I don’t like how he collected luxury cars and insisted that material things were no barrier to spirituality. It may be true that for some enlightened persons, the material things and luxuries could be meaningless, and perhaps Rajneesh was trying to show that he didn’t care about material things by having so much luxury around himself. But, I think for most people wealth and material luxury is a barrier to spirituality, and I think science will probably confirm this, and therefore, I think Rajneesh was wrong.  

His spirituality seems to me very much centered on personal growth and personal spirituality, but I think better spirituality combines in approximately equal measure the teachings for personal spiritual cultivation with commitment to others through the charitable love, empathy, and compassion that lead to solidarity, self-sacrifice, activism, volunteering, and philanthropy. There is nothing wrong with helping individuals autonomously reach personal wisdom and spiritual insight, but if that aspect is emphasized and the commitment to community is neglected, I am dissatisfied.

In his rhetoric, he was given to hyperbole. I object to some things he said, but I don't know if those things I object to were intended as literal truth or as exaggerated positions he used to shock and alert his audience.  For example, he said that he rejected all religion, or all human history. He wanted new people to arise, new people who were free from the mental shackles of the past and of traditions. I don't think he could have been serious in some literal sense when he said that. Human nature has potential for good and evil, and rejecting all religion or all past conventions of humanity is to reject all the good that is already present in human nature and achievement, simply because it is associated with all the bad we have also committed or suffered. Radical rejections of everything seems to indicate to me a discomfort with the facts of human nature, and a rejection of reality.

For an example of the type of foolishness or folly I find mixed in with his wisdom, I will take two claims from “Understanding the Nature and Nurture of Love” from “Being in Love: How to Love with Awareness”.  First, Osho wrote: “Love cannot be learned, it cannot be cultivated. The cultivated love will not be love at all. It will not be a real rose, it will be a plastic flower.”  This sets up a false dichotomy between “learning and cultivating” something and having something occur naturally and spontaneously. It is natural for people to learn things, to cultivate things, and to practice behaviors or thoughts until they improve. There is nothing artificial about people improving themselves or improving their feelings and behaviors. Intuition and spontaneity may sometimes be preferable as a means for achieving something, but even so, achieving the same thing through effort and struggle doesn't mean the end result is false or diminished. If I find a gold nugget lying in a stream, I’m luckier than the miner who had to blast and dig through hard rock to find a similar quantity of gold, but in the end, the gold is the same. 

Osho also wrote: “When you learn something, it means something comes from the outside; it is not an inner growth.”  I think here Osho is forgetting that we exist partly as individuals inside bodies, but also as relationships and interactions in environments. My “self” includes, to some degree, the people with whom I interact. I express myself and exist partly by what I say and do with others. Learning is simply taking knowledge and behavior from the environment and internalizing it and incorporating it into our own individuality. Inner growth usually comes from our interactions and responses to external stimulation. Learning (from outside) is to great extent the process by which we experience inner existence and inner growth. 

On the other hand, Osho was quite correct to say that love could be our natural, spontaneous being. I think we have within us the spark of the divine, or the clear mirror capable of brightly reflecting the splendor of the holy. As “love” (compassion, altruism, affection, devotion, intimacy, mutual aid, altruism, kindness, attraction, benevolence, joy, and caring) seems to be a very fundamental aspect of human nature (and a tendency in the universe, and a force I associate with God), I think Osho is correct to suggest it is natural for us to love, and much of our inability to love correctly arises from bad information and unpleasant experiences we’ve learned from our environments. So, while I think love can be learned and cultivated, and learning and cultivating something good (such as love) is often admirable or necessary, the other insight (that acquired knowledge or experience may be blocking a natural love) is probably quite useful and accurate in some cases.

    

Osho is too proud.  He compares himself to Messengers of God such as Jesus or the Buddha. Osho is not a Messenger of God, and it’s a marker of his folly that he would compare himself to those Messengers. But, on the other hand, Truth is Truth, whether it comes from the mouth of a Messenger of God, or a modern guru, or a friend having a nice conversation with you, so in that sense, as we are all sometimes vehicles for expressing Truth, Osho can compare himself to Jesus or Buddha, but so can anyone else. 

I can see why people are attracted to Osho’s teachings. I admire some of what he says.

Osho had an admirable ability to use humor and ridicule in his teachings. 

In the communities of Osho followers, people tried to make spirituality fun.

Osho was strongly against nationalism.

Many of Osho’s teachings are quite reasonable and wise. Looking through some of his books, I can see that he does have some deep insights, some clever ways of putting the problems of life into a healthy perspective. Although I find within his books of wisdom some utter foolishness and ignorance, there is nothing unusual about that. Most of us are capable of some deep wisdom and some folly and foolishness. Osho is like all of us. 

Osho has a playful way of presenting his ideas.  His lack of seriousness is refreshing.

I like how Osho knows enough about religion and philosophy to bring together ideas from many sources. I’m a scholar, so I’m concerned that he doesn’t usually refer to his sources or inspirations, and I as I read his ideas and find ideas I’ve encountered before, I do note that he frequently is not giving credit to earlier thinkers who have said essentially what he is repeating.  However, he is a teacher giving sermons and lessons to followers, and not an academic presenting theories at a conference or in an academic speech, so I guess his approach is appropriate for what he is doing. I do find that many of the things he brings in from philosophy or religion are the same sorts of ideas that I found attractive, so in most of what I’ve read, I find Osho’s ideas generally to be a pleasant mix of the sort of ideas I find attractive.

A guru or autocratic leader may have some brilliant ideas worthy of admiration, and some bad ideas as well. Even the worst doctrines had at least some reasonable and good teachings, otherwise they would never be able to hold on to followers and supporters.  The Nazis supposedly had good animal welfare policies and taught reasonable things about nutrition and public health. Transcending selfishness and egoism is a worthy spiritual goal, but taken to excess and used by gurus or political leaders, this noble tendency can be distorted. The North Korean regime survives by forcing North Koreans to leave behind egoism and devote themselves to the adoration of the Kim family, and the Nazi Party in Germany attracted people by visions of self-sacrifice for the “greater good” and surrendering of personal interest to the complete devotion to Hitler. The group called “Daesh” or “ISIL” asks sincere Muslims to give loyalty to God (as understood by the Daesh theologians), which would be all fine and good, except that their understanding of God is horribly wrong. Jim Jones of the People’s Temple taught many progressive spiritual critiques of modern racism and capitalist excesses, but he was always a bit crazy, and finally forced or convinced hundreds of his followers to commit suicide with him (much as Hitler convinced so many Germans to engage in hopeless wars that led to the destruction of Germany).  Osho seems to have been far less dangerous or toxic than these mind-control cultists like the Nazi leadership or the People’s Temple or the current regime in North Korea. On the contrary, in many respects he seems benign or harmless, and perhaps even quite helpful or useful to persons exploring spirituality and critiques of mainstream mindlessness in conventional society or religion.  

However, I do wish people would explore a wide variety of gurus and spiritual teachings, mix in a bit of serious scientific or philosophical work with their new age spirituality reading, and keep an open mind about some of the wisdom to be found in conventional and mainstream religious traditions and organized religions. The Western and Eastern traditions have precious insights to offer everyone, but they also have imperfections.  People ought to keep this in mind, and even if you give yourself over to certitude and faith and devotion, it’s wise to preserve some detachment from one’s own passionate belief and faith.  Love can be a sort of attachment that leads us astray just as much as hatred, and the constructs we hold in our mind, whether they seem fair or foul, might be wrong. As long as people retain this bit of doubt and maintain a seeking or critical attitude, at least in respect to their personal understanding of what it is they believe, I think people can enthusiastically embrace faith and devotion to religions and spiritual leaders.  But people must maintain their common sense ethical compass, and look out for religions and spiritual leaders transforming the religious experience into mind-control cults. When our gurus or religious leaders become promoters of violence and hatred, or turn their followers into zealous loyalty-based groups defining the world in terms of “us versus them” where only the in-group of true believers are treated with the decency and respect that everyone deserves, then it's time to leave. Osho didn’t teach violence or hatred. He didn’t get extreme in the “in-group versus out-group” loyalty game with his followers.  Although in certain times and places some of his followers seem to have attempted to set up a mind-control cult in his name, it doesn’t seem Osho was directly doing that.   

But it is remarkable that, despite the serious flaws in his life, teachings, and his community of followers, his lectures and teachings have been gaining popularity, and many people today find them quite inspirational.  

Hawking and Mlodinow say God did not create the universe

The weekend edition of the Wall Street Journal published an excerpt from Stephen Hawking and Leonard Mlodinow’s The Grand Design. The title was “Why God Did Not Create the Universe.”

When a certain type of scientist makes this claim, their position always runs along these lines: science can explain whatever phenomena a religious person uses God to explain, and since science can explain it without requiring God or supernatural powers, it follows that God and supernatural powers don’t exist. Boiled down to its essence, the argument is that if we use parsimony (Occam’s Razor) we won’t have any reason to believe in God, at least not any reason based on our desire to explain or describe what we perceive in the universe.

The Hawking and Mlodinow argument follows this line. They point out that when people didn’t know much about science, they made up stories about gods or supernatural forces to explain their experiences. Even now, some people suppose there must be a God because there is something rather than nothing. We exist in a universe that seems to have just the right settings to allow life to evolve, and our planet seems remarkably well-suited to human evolution. This seems like a remarkable coincidence, so perhaps God designed the universe to be just right for us. Yet, science (as presented in the Hawking and Mlodinow book) has shown that there can be many universes, and universes can emerge from nothing, and if there are a nearly infinite number of universes it follows that there must be some universes such as ours where life as we know it can evolve. And since life has evolved here, this just happens to be a universe where it’s possible for life to emerge and evolve. So, we don’t need God to explain this universe, its creation, or its remarkable suitability for life.

The sort of God this argument dismisses is one who would fashion a creation in such a way that there would be gaps, cracks, holes, and incongruities within the creation so that intelligences within the creation would be able to logically discern the existence of the Creator, and understand that the Creator had intervened within the creation. It also dismisses a God who would set up a universe with two conflicting systems, one a system of physical laws and forces working according to a particular set of rules, and another a system of supernatural forces working according to an entirely different set of rules. In other words, the "God of the gaps" idea that we believe in God because only God can explain certain observed phenomena (like the existence of the universe) is refuted by science which has eliminated all gaps. This is an argument against a God who inspires belief because people need a "god hypothesis" to fill in explanations for things that aren't understood.

But really, there is no point in entering into a debate with such assertions. Occam’s Razor (the rule of parsimony) will always rule out God. Any evidence of God (defined as an all-powerful, all-knowing, Source of creation and Sustainer of reality with attributes analogous to what we experience as will and consciousness and emotion) can be explained parsimoniously as evidence for more advanced civilizations, rather than God. That is, in a universe such as ours it is quite plausible that there could be entities who belong to races or civilizations that evolved and advanced past our current technological state hundreds of thousands of years ago, or even millions or tens of millions of years ago. There could be beings in this universe that passed our present state of evolution and knowledge over a billion years ago. Such entities and their civilizations might be able to manifest all sorts of powers and technologies which would look to us like the work of an all-powerful, all-knowing Creator God. But, if we apply the rule of parsimony, we must stick with the hypothesis that all indications of this “God” are in fact the manifestations of natural and scientific technologies far beyond our current understanding. Advanced alien races and technologies, rather than supernatural gods or magical powers of a deity, can always be suggested as an alternative scientific explanation for what appears to be evidence of God. Such explanations, which conform to Occam’s razor, give us questions about any god that science eventually finds. For example, from what race of beings did this god evolve, and how did the god develop powers and attributes, and by what technologies or physical laws does this god manifest seemingly miraculous powers and attributes? This is quite different from the typical religious contention that God was uncreated, and God is above questions related to causes, technologies, and so forth.

Some people come to belief in God through the teachings of Messengers of God. Unlike many other branches of human religion that follow Messengers of God whose lives and revelations are considerably obscured by historical distance and lack of solid evidence, Baha’is follow the Revelation of a Manifestation who lived from 1817-1892. There are plenty of obscuring legends and exaggerations around the life of Baha’u’llah, but we have enough physical and historic evidence, as well as original source materials, to make some factual observations about His life and message.

Yet, even these, which I take as convincing proof and a basis for faith, could never overcome a strong attachment to the rule of parsimony. Baha’u’llah revealed scriptures of high excellence and wisdom, sometimes spontaneously and rapidly. This seems like a possession by the Holy Spirit or a Revelation from God to those who have faith. But, rather than resort of supernatural explanations, one could use the rule of parsimony to point out that many people have revealed poems, stories, and other miraculous material while in trances, or under hypnosis. There have been cases of automatic writing (spirit writing) and so forth, all related to dissociative mental activity, and this isn’t so different from the way Baha’u’llah revealed Baha’i scriptures. Baha’u’llah evidently saw and heard things that others couldn’t hear, and this sort of phenomena is fairly common in people who suffer from schizophrenia, or persons who aren’t mentally ill, but who experience objectively non-real experiences such as alien or fairy abduction or conversations with dead ancestors (at least non-real to mortal observers, but I have no idea about what is going on in the brains of such people). Delusions are also widely known, and Baha’u’llah’s beliefs about His station could be explained as delusions without invoking a supernatural God to explain them. The fact that Baha’u’llah seems to have fit in with prophetic predictions about a Manifestation of God could be dismissed, if we use parsimony, as coincidence, or as stretching the facts to fit vague prophetic traditions. A person could just argue that Baha’u’llah didn’t in fact fulfill prophesies. Likewise the remarkable or miraculous events surrounding Bah’u’llah’s life or his remarkable abilities could be dismissed as untrue stories, or merely remarkable coincidences or luck. It is always more scientific to invoke Occam’s razor and explain away aspects of Baha’u’llah’s life as coincidence, false stories, or something else that doesn’t require a divine supernatural God.

Even if one did accept that something seemingly supernatural was going on in Baha’u’llah’s life and Revelation, it would be more parsimonious to suggest Baha’u’llah was merely using natural forces that science hasn’t yet detected and explored, rather than to accept that God was involved. In fact, in some of Baha’u’llah’s writings (such as the Tablet of Wisdom) it appears that Baha’u’llah was picking up some ideas current in his time and culture about history, rather than picking up direct factual information about history. This fits with an idea that natural technologies or powers were involved, rather than an all-powerful, all-knowing Divine Force.

Baha’i writings about miracles also seem to take this view, that miracles and miraculous events should not be relied upon as evidence, unless one has directly experienced the miracle or event for oneself. The supernatural stories surrounding Baha’u’llah are evidence to those who were present when the miraculous events took place, but for the rest of us, such stories are merely stories, and we should not take them as evidence for Baha’u’llah‘s status as a Messenger of God. After all, there are many people who have sometimes exhibited miraculous powers or encountered supernatural forces, and this sort of experience isn’t really all that unusual.

What frustrates me is that atheistic scientists who present these arguments that Occam’s razor and the rule of parsimony remove God from the question because science can explain everything without God are claiming that the domains of logic and empirical evidence (the sort of evidence that can be reproduced and manipulated through experiment) are sufficient domains to explain the world. In essence, they are claiming that science and logic and rational thought are sufficient for our beliefs and models of the world. This is, I believe, a mistake. There are other domains of life and other models of understanding that work quite well, and are needed, and some of these domains are outside of science. Religion is one of these domains. I think when religion makes propositions about the natural world, it is the duty of the religious person to subject their assertions to scientific investigation. But the scientific method is not an especially useful way to investigate the realms of meaning, value, ethics, theology, and so forth. There are other realms such as arts, economics, human relationships, dreams, and various other aspects of the world that may also lie mostly outside of the scientific method. That is, we use models of understanding and meaning within these realms in a way that makes science and rational thought not really very useful. Scientific methods can be applied in order to try to unify all knowledge under the umbrella of reason and rational thought and the scientific method, but I think the scientific method will not eventually capture a satisfactory understanding of all aspects of human experience and life.

The continuing attempt by certain scientists and atheists to remove superstitious belief in a God who must intervene to make things happen in this universe is usually quite unsatisfactory. They are arguing against a level of theological understanding that seems to only exist in certain fundamentalists or very conservative and traditional theologians. It seems a waste of their intellect. I suppose there are enough literally-minded religious traditionalists and fundamentalists running around in our world to keep the atheists and scientists busy, but rarely do I see anything written in a sensitive way that would really persuade a literalistic believer. Nor do I see a sophistication in the dialogue that would engage with someone who had a more sophisticated critique of scientism or a more post-modern theological belief system. Mostly, these books are intended for an audience that already accepts science and tends to have a simplistic view of religious believers, or a condescending view toward religious faith. It is of course interesting news that cosmologists have answers they find logical and scientific to questions such as why is there something instead of nothing, and how did the universe emerge out of the pre-universe, and why is it that our universe has scientific laws and constants that seem to make it such a nice place for life. But to then take answers to such questions and make a claim that this tells us something new and important about God is not very convincing.

I continue to have faith, but I see my faith as being outside of my scientific approach to the world. My faith is unscientific. That’s not a problem that needs to be resolved.

The Park51 Controversy

Today as I was walking through the library I picked up one of the mainstream newsweeklies (TIME). The cover was asking if America was anti-Muslim. Inside, I read a poll that claimed about 61% of Americans oppose the Park51 Project. This was a real bummer. I had supposed that the people who were loudly complaining about this were just a fringe. I'm puzzled how so many Americans can take this position. I like what Juan Cole wrote about this issue. I think he has it right. So does Scott Kurashige.

I just don't know what to say. I guess I'll say I'm frightened a bit by it. I happen to believe that Mohammad was a Prophet of God. The Angel Gabriel gave Him the Sacred Verses. It wasn't a standard hallucination or a fabrication. God's Will became manifest in the Qur'an. Islam is a beautiful religion, and a path toward Truth. How on earth can people really believe that the Taliban and the Wahhabi/Salafi represent Islam? It's like my agnostic or atheist friends who think that snake handlers and the Christian Identity Movement represent Christianity, never caring about what people like Reinhold Neibuhr or Hans Kung or Matthew Fox have said.

Happy Ramadan! Eid al-Fitr will be here in a couple weeks (sunset Thursday the 9th of September in North America).

Christians and Poverty

I've been looking for books that would exhibit some of the attitudes and beliefs of early Christian social work pioneers. Then, while I was doing that, I collected some other books that I thought might interest one of my advisees who will be doing an independent study with me on theology and service to the poor. I used RefWorks, a tool that is like EndNote, to collect the reference information for some sources that were available in Illinois (thank goodness for I-Share and the UIUC library!). I'm trying to encourage students to use RefWorks or Endnote to get their citations right, but now that I see the results here, I'm not so sure this is exactly what I wanted. Anyway, I'll share the list of books here:

Barnett, , & Barnett, H.,. (1972). Practicable socialism; essays on social reform,. Freeport, N.Y.: Books for Libraries Press.

Brace, C. L.,. (1885). Gesta Christ, or, A history of humane progress under Christianity. New York: A.C. Armstrong & Son. (chapters 9, 21, 29, 31, & 32)

Brace, C. L.,. (1967). The dangerous classes of New York and twenty years' work among them. Montclair, N.J.: P. Smith.

Brace, C. L., & Brace, E.,. (1894). The life of Charles Loring Brace chiefly told in his own letters. New York: C. Scribner's Sons.

Chalmers, T.,. (1821). The application of Christianity to the commercial and ordinary affairs of life, in a series of discourses. New York: S. Campbell & Sons.

Chalmers, T.,. (1821). The Christian and civic economy of large towns. Glasgow: Printed by J. Starke for Chalmers & Collins.

Chalmers, T.,. (1911). Dr. Chalmers and the poor laws: A comparison of Scotch and English pauperism and evidence before the committee of the House of Commons,. Edinburgh: D. Douglas.

Chalmers, T., & Masterman, N.,. (1900). Chalmers on charity; a selection of passages and scenes to illustrate the social teaching and practical work of Thomas Chalmers, D.D. Westminster: A. Constable and Co.

Davis, T.,. (2007). Red letters : Living a faith that bleeds. Colorado Springs, CO: David C. Cook.

Gurteen, S. H. (1882). A handbook of charity organization. Buffalo: The author.

Gurteen, S. H. (1883). How paupers are made; an address on the prevention of pauperism ... Chicago:

Gurteen, S. H., & Charity Organization Society of Buffalo. (1879). Hints and suggestions to the visitors of the poor. Buffalo [N.Y.]: Published by the Charity Organization Society of the City of Buffalo.

Hamlin, C. (2006). William Pulteney Alison, the Scottish philosophy, and the making of a political medicine. Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences, 61(2), 144-186.

Katz, Michael B. (1996). In the shadow of the poorhouse, revised edition. New York: Basic Books.

King, M. L., & Carson, C.,. (1998). The autobiography of Martin Luther King, Jr. New York: Intellectual Properties Management in association with Warner Books.

Niebuhr, R., & Robertson, D. B.,. (1967). Essays in applied Christianity: The Church and the new world;. New York: Meridian Books.

Schweitzer, A., & Campion, C. T.,. (1949). Out of my life and thought: An autobiography. New York: H. Holt.

Schweitzer, A., & Joy, C. R.,. (1967). Albert Schweitzer; an anthology. edited by Charles R. Joy. Boston: Beacon Press.

Sider, R. J., & Gay, C. M. (1997). Rich Christians in an age of hunger - revisited. U.S.: Christians Scholar's Review.

Taylor, G.,. (1913). Religion in social action,. New York: Dodd, Mead and Co.

Taylor, G.,. (1936). Chicago Commons through forty years. Chicago, Ill.: Chicago Commons Association.

Teresa, , & Benenate, B. (1997). In the heart of the world: Thoughts, stories, & prayers. Novato, Calif.: New World Library.

Teresa, , González-Balado, J. L., & Playfoot, J. N. (1985). My life for the poor. San Francisco: Harper & Row.

Tillich, P.,. (1966). On the boundary; an autobiographical sketch. New York: Scribner.

Tillich, P.,. (1971). Political expectation. New York: Harper & Row.

Tuckerman, J.,. (1838). The principles and results of the ministry at large: In Boston. Boston: J. Munroe.

Tuckerman, J.,. (1839). Christian service to the poor in cities, unconnected with any religious denomination a series of extracts from "the principles and results of the ministry at large" in Boston, U.S.

Tuckerman, J.,. (1971). On the elevation of the poor; a selection from his reports as minister at large in Boston. New York: Arno Press.

My student will actually be reading about half of these, and I guess I will too. Hopefully I can blog about some of these in the coming months.

Leaving New Orleans

I left New Orleans today. I was there for the SSWR conference. I think this was the seventh one I've attended in the past eleven years. Anyway, I was staying on Magazine a few blocks off Canal, in the Country Inn. When it was time to head over to the airport I had considered taking the airport shuttle or a taxi, but it seemed I had time to take the bus, so I walked up to the Walgreens at the corner of Elk Place and Tulane to catch the Tulane bus out to Carrollton to catch the E-2 Airport bus (which doesn't come downtown on weekends). It's strange, but there is no direct bus between the New Orleans airport and the downtown area where the hotels are. Sure, on weekdays the E-2 runs from the airport to downtown, but it stops about six blocks away from where there is a high concentration of hotels, and like I said, it doesn't even run on weekends, so you have to take the Tulane Bus up there to connect with it. I had planned to take the 3:40 Tulane Bus, which would have given me about a thirty minute wait at the corner of Tulane and Carrollton. There wouldn't be anything wrong with that. There is a Nike shoes factory store and a bowling alley there, so I could have bought shoes for my son an perhaps bowled ten frames. But, I was going to catch the 4:10 Tulane bus, which would give me all of three minutes to make the conection to the 4:29 E-2. I overheard someone at the bus stop say that busses "run slow" on Sundays, and I wondered if I would miss the connection to the E-2 and need to wait an hour there.

Anyway, when I got to the Walgreens I started up a conversation with a guy standing there. First off, I just asked him if the Tulane bus, the route 39, would stop there, and he said the bus "would be coming just around the corner in a few minutes to take us all down Tulane," which was a relief to hear. He asked if I had any spare change, and I said, "yeah, I've got to keep some here for the bus fare, but I know I can spare at least a quarter," and rather than scoff at a mere quarter he took it with an expression of delight, smiled at me, nodded, and said, "it adds up, you know." Gee, I thought, giving someone a quarter is like nothing, like sharing a match with someone to help them light up a cigarette or something like that. But I was really glad that he was so happy, and the little symbolic gift seemed to set a happy mood as we were standing there. As I often do when I'm standing with someone, I was friendly and mentioned I was going back up to Springfield, Illinois. We talked together briefly about where we were from. I said my family was from California and I was born there, and my new friend said he'd been there, and he named some towns around Berkeley and Oakland and he knew the names of some streets there. His speech was very slightly disorganized. He spoke vaguely about falling off his bike (somewhere in California?) and said he was embarrassed to admit it (admit what? falling off his bike once?) Anyway, he obviously wanted to connect with me in a friendly way, as he told me, when he heard I was from the West Coast originally, that "yeah, I'm from there too" (although he didn't exactly say where.

Then, suddenly, our conversation took a profound and spiritual turn. All of a sudden he started singing a Sunday School song. He had a sweet African-American voice of a middle-aged man, and it just conveyed joy and devotion and enthusiasm. I was stunned and transported. He sang a Stuart Hamblen medley, starting with the cute little children's song "I love to go to Sunday School" and then moving on to the more inspiring "It Is No Secret (What God Can Do)." There was another song I didn't recognize about loving Jesus, and my new comrad at the bus stop sang it with sincerity and conviction. He was totally into it, and so was I, standing there beaming at him. When I hear songs about The Friend of God I know that the same Spirit was inspiring all the Manifestations, but I don't usually feel any need to discuss theology or my religion with a person so obviously moved by love for God. I just soaked up the devotion to God's Messenger and the feeling of love. Well, about that time the bus arrived to pick us up, just as my new friend had predicted. I guess this guy might have been slightly teched in the head, but I would have liked to get to know him better.

I mean, it's a little beyond normal convention to start singing like that while waiting at the bus stop, but feelings of devotion can come down on a person almost any time. It's hard to stop those feelings, and why should you, anyway? Who cares if you're a little crazy? What's that in comparison of the delight of contemplating God? I know I can feel a sudden rush of trembling awe and joy each afternoon when I say the short obligatory prayer (but heck, I wouldn't sing it out on the street). But still, that sudden quantum leap from the mundane act of standing around waiting for a bus to thinking about God was brilliant. After singing his song he told me he would have a CD out soon. I hope he does.

Religious Law and Literalist Legalism

What does it mean to have a religion or follow a religion? Part of the answer would be that one’s behavior would conform to the teachings and proscriptions of that religion. One’s beliefs would generally match the teachings of a religion as well. Religions give guidance and laws, and followers of a particular religion partly base their religious identification on the degree to which they conform to the teachings and laws of their religion.

Yet, religions have many teachings, and many laws. Do followers of a particular religion obey all the laws and follow all the teachings? Should they be expected to? What if they fall short, or ignore some laws and teachings? Does that make them hypocrites? Also, the laws seem to have varying importance. Laws forbidding murder, incest, theft, and dishonesty seem extremely important. We don’t admire religions that allow adherents to ignore rules against murder and robbery. But what about rules about washing feet, cutting one’s fingernails, the sort of coffin one should use at burial, and so forth? What about teachings that seem to contradict one another? Most religions teach the values of kindness, tact, wisdom, and benevolence. Yet, most religions warn believers to beware of certain types of people (e.g., false prophets, non-believers, apostates, evil-doers, atheists, “enemies of the religion,” and so forth). What about dietary restrictions? What about exhortations to “take care of the poor” and “look after orphans and widows,” and so forth? Many religious rules are like this, general directives to do particular types of acts, like serving humanity. When has one done enough to address one’s obligations to others? When can one in good conscience turn from serving humanity or serving one’s faith and give attention to one’s own family or interests quite apart from altruistic or religious work?

Some religious people, including myself, have concluded that as a practical matter, people must pick and choose among the various teachings and laws their religions offer them. Some teachings and laws must be obeyed. Some should be obeyed, but in certain circumstances or situations it might be permissible or even advisable to overlook or ignore those laws. Some laws and teachings seem somewhat trivial or unimportant, and we may practically ignore the literal meaning of such teachings and instead try to find the figurative meaning or spirit of such teachings and follow that. That is, the in some cases “following” a teaching or rule might mean that we should ponder the teaching or rule and try to find some symbolic value in it. As a practical matter, it seems to me that even fundamentalists do this, and ideally wouldn’t let their commitment to being obedient believers drive them to obey the letter of the law in the trivial matters if this caused them to violate the bigger teachings of their religion.

For example, my religion teaches that we ought to bury our dead, not cremate them. If one of my co-religionists has died and his family wants to cremate him, how firm should I be in opposing the cremation? Should I take the issue to court, and fight against the family, thus alienating them and showing my inflexible obedience to the law, or should I allow the family to cremate my friend’s body? Allowing the cremation would show that I valued the preservation of good-will and kindness in a situation of grief. Religions (including mine) teach that we ought to be kind, and help people when they are grieving, so maybe those teachings should be considered as more important over obedience to the letter of the law in burial matters.

Long ago, when philosophers first started asking questions about moral and ethical matters, some concluded that ethics involve a class of rules where there are few natural laws that must always be followed. With other classes of phenomena, such as physics with its potentially precise measures of weights and forces, or mathematics with its rules and numbers, we can often say with great confidence that something is certainly true or not-true. With ethics we don’t usually have the same degree of certainty. Aristotle observed, this, and so have many other philosophers. And yet there is a certain mindset that says, “such-and-such is absolutely clear” and “the inescapable conclusion is that thus-and-thus must be done.” Yes, a certain personality-type may prefer black-and-white thinking and clear and direct rules that remove the need for reasoned thought and careful decision-making, but I don’t think religions are only meant to be spiritual homes for people with those kinds of psychological preferences.

In order for religions to work in human societies they may need to give literal teachings that are quite strict and absolute, but allow some discretion for believers to deal with the letter of the law in a flexible way. Religions that take away all flexibility and become rigid in most matters of religious law and belief will fail to provide workable or satisfactory solutions to new social problems. Religions that remain extremely vague and flexible in the literal presentation of rules and belief systems will be unsatisfactory for the many people who need such clear directions, and such vague and ambiguous teachings may also not impose a strong check on certain tendencies in human nature that get people into trouble.

Secular legal codes are lengthy and detailed, and people still argue about their application or contradictions. Laws given to us by our secular authorities often have exceptions, exemptions, and loopholes, and these are sometimes thoughtfully written into the laws to make them workable. In contrast, with religions we have the potential for more absolute rules and laws. Religions give more general directives, and it usually ruins the effect of a general directive to add in a list of exceptions, exemptions, or situations where the directive must be applied with more delicacy and less rigor. Even if there are exceptions where a law should be ignored, it seems hardly feasible to address all the various contingencies where this might be so. If laws are good in 98% of all situations, but in 1.9% of situations the law may safely ignored, and in 0.1% of situations it would be better to break the law, then do we really expect holy scripture to go through all possible situations and specifically address the few cases where a law should be ignored or violated?

Most laws, such as “do not murder” are easy to follow. We hardly ever really want to murder anyone. Other laws, such as “only express your sexual nature within a married relationship” are harder to follow. Most humans have opportunities and temptations to violate such a law, and many would gladly do so if there were no law forbidding sexual behaviors outside of marriage. If religions gave us laws that stated, “it’s generally a bad idea to murder, so refrain from it as much as possible” this would hardly increase the rate of murdering going on in our societies. The simple commands “no not murder” or “punish murderers severely” gives us nearly the same result as the milder exhortation to avoid murder as best as we can. Yet, with laws concerning sexual behavior, we would get a different result. If religion taught us that in general we should try to confine sexual behavior to marriage, or we should strive toward heterosexual sexual behaviors as much as possible, this would allow people to engage in homosexual behaviors or sexual behaviors outside of marriage with little caution and little guilt. Simple rules such as “heterosexuality is approved, and homosexuality isn’t,” or “sexual acts within marriage are acceptable, but sexual acts outside of marriage aren’t” give us clear direction, and will aid us in conforming to those standards, even if there are exceptional cases where those standards shouldn’t be used.

Let’s examine homosexuality as an example. I personally assume that homosexuality is “right” and the correct, moral, and ethically responsible way for some small percentage of the population, say about 1% of any human population, to feel and behave. I am convinced of the evidence that in about this percentage of cases the homosexuality is rooted in the configuration of the body rather than learned behavior (that could be unlearned). There is certainly evidence that some persons with homosexual identities and behaviors live satisfying and spiritually rich lives, are good people, and suffer no obvious harm from their homosexuality (beyond the harm inflicted upon them by the prejudices of their societies). This percentage might also include some of us who are born with an indeterminate gender, or those of us born with unusual physical conditions (e.g., women with XY chromosomes and no sensitivity to testosterone, persons with mosaic conditions involving the fusing of male and female twin zygotes, etc.) There is more diversity in human sexuality and sex determination than most people realize, and it seems reasonable to me that homosexuality is the “right” situation for a large number, but small percentage, of the total human population.

Homosexuality isn’t a dichotomous thing where one is either straight or gay. This sort of thing exists along a continuum, where some people are only attracted to same-gender partners, while others are mainly attracted to same-gender partners, and so forth, down the continuum to the many of us who are only attracted to other-gender partners. Still, it seems reasonable, given what we know from research into human sexuality and sexual behavior, that another 4-6% of any population tends toward homosexuality, but could, with some effort, become completely fulfilled in heterosexual relationships. Does it matter if we have values and expectations that allow these 4-6% of potentially homosexual or bisexual persons to do whatever they like, and live with homosexual relationships or heterosexual relationships merely depending on circumstances of their lives? Perhaps it’s better if more of these potentially homosexual persons are urged to actually live as homosexuals, especially if this lowers the birthrate, given the world’s current problem of human numbers and available crop-producing land. Or, perhaps it’s better if society encourages more heterosexuality among those who are potentially homosexual. Or, perhaps it’s better if society and religion make no preference or expectation, and allow people to explore and find what’s right for them without social and institutional pressures.

This is the sort of question where we might turn to religion for an answer, and religions seem to generally discourage homosexuality. I therefore assume it’s better for almost all of these potentially homosexual people to go about the task of pushing themselves toward heterosexual relationships in traditional marriages. But note that I don’t think everyone should be heterosexual. I still think some people are purely homosexual, and I see no reason why they should be pushed toward heterosexuality. There will also be “potentially homosexual” persons who have already formed life-long partnerships or marriages with someone of the same gender, and it would be a violation of the religious teachings about divorce and family to encourage such persons to try to transform into heterosexual persons. To me, the values of loyalty and life-long love in marriage or partnerships seems far more important than the rules about homosexuality.

I assume over half of any population could be socialized toward homosexuality, but that in almost any situation, societies and civilizations are more sustainable and peaceful if in fact this half of the population is generally socialized toward heterosexuality. It seems to me that if religions say nothing about homosexuality or heterosexuality, then perhaps 5% to 10% of a population might engage mainly in homosexual relations, and the potential exists for a society to evolve toward a situation where over half of the population engages sometimes in homosexual acts. Such a society, I suppose, would be overly homosexual. It wouldn’t be healthy, and many people would be living false lives. On the other hand, a society with zero tolerance for homosexuality, in which all homosexuality was severely punished, might force 1% or 2% of the population into false lives and bad moral situations. I don’t want to go into detail about what it means for homosexuality to be “bad” or “good” in various circumstances, or the idea that there may be an optimal range for the incidence of homosexuality in a civilization. Suffice it to say that my reading of the literature on why people become homosexual, how people explore sexuality in heterosexual and homosexual ways, and so forth convinces me that homosexuality can be good and can be bad, and that it seems to be “good” for a small percentage minority of general populations. [Actually, evolution probably gave us homosexuality as a case where there is too much of a good thing. Guys who are almost-but-not-quiet homosexual tend to have more sexual partners than men who are not-at-all-even-close to being homosexual. The advantages to our male ancestors who carried the potential for homosexuality without actually becoming exclusively homosexual outweighed the costs to their male descendants who inherited "too much" of the homosexual predisposition and ended up never reproducing. Even those non-reproducing homosexual relatives could have been helpful uncles and brothers to their more sexually successful siblings and nephews.]

So, if reality works the way I am supposing it works with homosexuality, what are religions to do? If they allow or encourage something that is good for only a small minority, they risk allowing many people to follow a path that isn’t spiritually healthy for them. If they totally forbid something, they risk forcing many people (even a small minority may be millions of people) into a path that isn’t spiritually healthy for them. Given realities like this (if I’m even right that there are such ethical realities), how could religions encourage societies to reach the optimal mix?

It seems almost like a math problem to me. If the religion offers no prohibitions, perhaps 10% to 15% will experiment with this behavior, and 5% to 10% will end up with a life-long pattern of doing this behavior, but only 1% of the population will be having a spiritually good result in the behavior, and the other 4% to 9% will have a spiritually damaging experience. If the religion does prohibit, perhaps only 4% to 8% will experiment with the behavior, and only about 1% of the population will end up with a life-long pattern, and of that 1% about half will be doing what is spiritually correct for their needs, while another half will be have spiritually damaging experiences with the behavior, but also now another 0.5% of the population will be refraining from the behavior when in fact this behavior would be beneficial for them. With no prohibitions, all the 1% of the population that “should” have done the behavior are living as they should, but an additional 4% to 9% is living as they shouldn’t. With prohibitions only half of all the population who “should” have done the behavior are living a life without the benefit of living as they should have, but that’s only half of 1% of the "right" population, and now with the prohibition only about half-of-a-percent of the population that should have refrained from the behavior is actually doing this behavior that is wrong for them. So, without the prohibition perhaps 4% to 9% of a population is living the “wrong” way, while with the prohibition only about 1% is living the “wrong” way.

There might be many experiences in life that work this way. Divorce, homosexual marriage, killing, theft, war, and many other things might generally be bad, but in some rare cases these could be good. Religions may be more helpful to us if they generally prohibit these things, but allow for them through some flexibility and some allowances for discretionary application of religious law in unusual circumstances. Liberally allowing these things in all cases without any cautionary language or discouragement might allow civilizations to do too much of these things. Imposing strict legalistic and literal rules that forbade all killing, theft, divorce, or homosexuality could lead to societies that were also flawed. Sometimes divorce is a good solution to a horrible problem. There are conditions in which a war could be the best solution to an evil situation. I think there are people for whom homosexuality is the best sexual orientation. It seems to me that religions can try to achieve the optimal situation by forbidding certain behaviors softly, and encouraging other behaviors that will help the right people find the right behavior, even if that behavior is softly forbidden.

I really don’t know if sexual behavior and homosexual behavior in particular has any spiritual value or harm attached to it. Promiscuous sexuality seems harmful to most individuals and most societies. But is it evil and sinful? I don’t know. Maybe it is. Maybe homosexuality is bad. Or maybe homosexuality is spiritually neutral, with no good or bad implications. Possibly homosexuality is, as I’ve suggested, a “good thing” for some people, and a “bad thing” for others.

The point is, in many behaviors it’s difficult to know whether an act is always bad or good. Honesty is usually good, but sometimes it’s cruel and tactless, and then it can be bad. Chastity is usually good, but it can be taken to excess where a person hates their sexuality or sexual desire in general, and becomes frigid or prudish or so sexually repressed that after marriage they still cannot enjoy the sexual aspects of love in a marriage. Kindness is certainly a virtue, but it is possible to show too much kindness to a child or a criminal who has behaved in a destructive way, and then too much kindness can lead to a child learning a bad lesson (that they can get away with a bad behavior) or a criminal being let loose to harm another victim. It is praiseworthy to work for social justice and help the poor or disabled, yet a person can devote so much of their life and mental activity to good and selfless deeds that they fail to adequately care for their own needs or fail to develop their spirit in other areas beyond service. For example, a humanitarian could become so dedicated to doing good works for others that they never had time to learn about economics and politics, and then never got involved in changing laws or policies that would raise many people out of poverty or prevent many people from becoming disabled Or, a person could spend so much time doing good works that they lost time for cultivating their own intellect or social networks, and thus missed out on opportunities to innovate or collaborate to have greater efficiency in their good deeds.

So, while religions may say, “such-and-such is bad” or “people must do such-and-such” you will also find that religions make allowances for the fact that sometimes people will do “such-and-such” and in extreme circumstances it may not even be very bad for people to do this. And, likewise, religions tend to teach moderation and wisdom, and ask people to balance various claims on their time and attention. Maybe we all should do “such-and-such” but we can’t do it every waking hour, and we’re not expected to do so.

I don’t expect perfection in complex systems. The universe has some serious flaws in it. For example, with life as common as I assume it is, there must be many planets in every galaxy on which complex multi-cellular life forms evolve into intelligent social animals with emotions and behaviors analogous to what we know as love, loyalty, honesty, and nurturing kindness. Some of these beings probably experience awe, religious ecstasy, and spiritual insight. No doubt that among the several planets with such beings, there must be some that have had life wiped out by supernovae or asteroid collisions. That looks like an imperfection to me. The way that the Black Plague spread over Europe in the 14th century looks like a flaw. But, given the laws of physics and evolution that even make physical existence and life as we know it possible, it’s also a given that you’ll have some of these unimaginably tragic catastrophes. Miscarriages are another example. Some estimates based on studies of women’s hormones suggest that as many as 30% of fertilized eggs (pregnancies) end without a live birth. That’s a terrible cost in dead embryos, fetuses, and babies, but with evolution and sexual reproduction you pay a price like this. That’s the way life works, and it looks like an imperfection and flaw, but it’s no more of a flaw than any other fact of the universe or law of physics or principle of mathematics. It’s just the way the universe works.

Likewise in human systems I expect a certain amount of flaws. In any religion, corporation, government, or family there will be problems rooted in laziness, incompetence, selfishness, and lack of vision. You can expect petty feuds, unimaginative stupidity, a bit of gossip and back-stabbing, some freeloading, and plenty of failure. That’s just the human way, and in any large group of people working together, some of these unimpressive aspects of the human way are going to manifest. Given a human nature that allows us to be noble, creative, ethical, skilled, talented, and altruistic, you’re pretty much stuck with some of the other traits as well.

Religion is a way to give us a push towards what is best in us, and a way to help us recognize and struggle against our worst. I don’t think, however, that religion is a way to force people to become perfect and leave all their flaws behind. Yes, it would be nice to make that quantum leap from our limited humanity and become instant saints. Certainly religion gives us high ideals and goals, and I appreciate that higher expectations lead to better results. Yet, as a practical matter, we’re not all going to become saints, and patience with ourselves and others will help us keep on striving toward the impossibly high goals we have set for ourselves, and never give up.

Some people believe strongly that we must not pick and choose the laws and teachings a religion provides us. We must accept it all or else not accept it. I have known former Baha’is who left the religion because they believed it was intellectually irresponsible to claim identity as a Baha'i while holding beliefs or practicing behaviors that contradicted the mainstream Baha'i beliefs or teachings. I remember one Baha'i girl who had been brought up in a very literalist and fundamentalist family, who seemed to believe that one had to choose between the style of religion she had grown up experiencing or atheism, and she chose atheism.

People who want to judge religions and hold them accountable for their teachings and laws prefer religions in which the laws and teachings are clearly spelled out and all held with equal seriousness and literalism. If the religion says on page X of book Y that action Z is forbidden, then action Z is clearly forbidden, and there is no getting around it. So, in evaluating your religion and its merits or logical consistency, we have established that action Z is clearly forbidden. That is the way they would have it. But do believers really always refrain from action Z? If sometimes believers do action Z, what does that mean?

This is an old question. In the early Christian church there was some controversy over whether Christians should obey the laws of the Old Testament. The Gospel of Matthew (chapter 7, verses 21-23 and much of chapter 13) seems to encourage people to obey the laws and expect that righteous obedient actions are required for salvation. The Epistle of James (e.g., chapter 2, verses 10-14) takes the position that if you break any laws you become a law-breaker, which is bad. But on the other hand, whoever wrote Paul’s letter to the Hebrews stressed that the old Jewish laws were no longer so important (Hebrews 7:11-28; 8:12). See also chapter 7 in Paul’s letter to the Romans, and Ephesians 2:15. You may remember the famous account of Jesus and the disciples gleaning grain on the Sabbath (see Mark 2:27), and the saying that “The Sabbath was made for man, not man for the Sabbath.” Such a phrase may remind some Baha’is of the fifth paragraph in the Kitab-i-Aqdas, “Think not that We have revealed unto you a mere code of laws. Nay, rather, We have unsealed the choice Wine with the fingers of might and power…”

Here are some of the quotations from Baha’i scriptures related to laws and rules.

“My commandments are the lamps of My loving providence among My servants, and the keys of My mercy for My creatures.”

“Were any man to taste the sweetness of the words which the lips of the All-Merciful have willed to utter, he would, though the treasures of the earth be in his possession, renounce them one and all, that he might vindicate the truth of even one of His commandments…”

“From My laws the sweet-smelling savour of My garment can be smelled, and by their aid the standards of Victory will be planted upon the highest peaks. The Tongue of My power hath, from the heaven of My omnipotent glory, addressed to My creation these words: “Observe My commandments, for the love of My beauty.”

“They whom God hath endued with insight will readily recognize that the precepts laid down by God constitute the highest means for the maintenance of order in the world and the security of its peoples. He that turns away from them is accounted among the abject and foolish.”

What does it mean to “turn away from them” and what does it mean to “observe My commandments” as described in the above texts? For some people, if we find particular laws or teachings in the Baha'i Faith that we dismiss or ignore, then we are “turning away from” the commandments, and we are not observing them. For others, the Baha'i Faith and its laws, including the Kitab-i-Aqdas must be understood in a broad context of religion, human nature, and the covenants between God and man. For some with this sort of understanding, a careful study of the commandments and ordinances reveals that the various laws and ordinances should not be read as a simple list of what we must do and what we must not do, and therefore if we ignore the literal meaning of some laws and teachings we're not really "turning away from God."

The Kitab-i-Aqdas tells us, “To none is it permitted to seek absolution from another soul; let repentance be between yourselves and God.” Does this mean that we can’t ask others to forgive us when we apologize to them? No, it’s a rule prohibiting something like the relationship between a priest who is acting as a confessor and a layperson seeking absolution for their sins. The same paragraph in the Kitab-i-Aqdas prohibits the kissing of hands. Is this a law about a form of sexual expression? No, it’s a rule about egalitarianism and avoiding certain forms of ceremony that would abase one individual in relation to another. The literal meaning of the laws would be misleading. One must understand the context (that some people seek forgiveness through ritual confessions or show respect for authorities by kissing their hands) to see that the laws have a meaning in a context that isn't exactly the literal meaning.

The Kitab-i-Aqdas also tells us to pare our nails. In the same paragraph we are warned to avoid the stinking pools in Persian courtyards. So, how long may we allow our nails to grow? And, does it make sense to give us a book of laws for the whole planet that will be in force for centuries and make a condemnation of a specific sort of cultural phenomena (many different people washing over and over again in a single water source that wasn’t refreshed)? Perhaps it does, if you take everything literally. But there are probably deeper meanings here. For example, the passage about how horrible the Persian pools are illustrates that we should be hygienic. The rule that we should cut our nails comes after a paragraph that forbids any of us from taking authoritative positions where we claim authority for our interpretations. Clearly there is some deeper meaning here, we should protect ourselves, and avoid harming ourselves (the juxtaposition of giving wrong-headed authoritative interpretations to scriptures with the laws about grooming helps make this apparent, as I think Terry Culhane once pointed out).

Imagine a teacher encourages you to use your intellect, look for the deeper meanings, and obey their teachings because you’re motivated by love for the teacher. And then that same teacher says that they value independent and critical thought, that they dislike people being picky, and using religion to play status games about superiority and putting others down. Further, the same teacher sometimes suspends some of their own rules and laws in certain circumstances. The teacher gives you letter after letter telling you how to organize your life and how to organize society so that life will be best for you and for your society, but these letters are mostly exhortations to be devout, virtuous, loving, pure, honest, etc. Then, someone in your class asks for a book of laws, and the teacher gives you a book of laws that is largely concerned with how inheritance rules should work when a person doesn’t leave a will (but the rules say that someone should leave a will). The law book tells readers how people ought to recognize the teacher’s status, but also tells people to pare their nails, bathe regularly, and not commit murder or marry their widowed step-mothers. Now, when you say you are a student who follows such a teacher, will you mean that you follow every letter of the rules in the book of rules, or will you mean that you aspire to follow those rules in the multiple letters that urge people to be decent, devout, loving, honest, etc.? When you do an assignment to demonstrate to your teacher that you have learned your lessons well, will you memorize all the details of the laws in the law book and show that you follow them all to the letter, or will you show that you have passionately been trying to follow all the advice in those letters about being a good person, and also trying to live by the laws in the law book as much as possible? Would such a teacher really expect you to consider all these things equally important? I'm an educator, and I know some of the things I try to help my students learn are vital to their success in life or in their careers, while other things are more like interesting details that might help increase their understanding or appreciation, but aren't really so significant. Isn't that how most things are? Is religion an exception to this?

The Baha’i book of laws has some guidance like this:

Adorn your heads with the garlands of trustworthiness and fidelity, your hearts with the attire of the fear of God, your tongues with absolute truthfulness, your bodies with the vesture of courtesy. These are in truth seemly adornings unto the temple of man, if ye be of them that reflect. Cling, O ye people of Bahá, to the cord of servitude unto God, the True One, for thereby your stations shall be made manifest, your names written and preserved, your ranks raised and your memory exalted in the Preserved Tablet.

The book of laws also has some guidance like this:

The Lord hath decreed that the dead should be interred in coffins made of crystal, of hard, resistant stone, or of wood that is both fine and durable, and that graven rings should be placed upon their fingers…. …The Lord hath decreed, moreover, that the deceased should be enfolded in five sheets of silk or cotton. For those whose means are limited a single sheet of either fabric will suffice…. It is forbidden you to transport the body of the deceased a greater distance than one hour’s journey from the city; rather should it be interred, with radiance and serenity, in a nearby place….

I’m suggesting that some of this guidance is subordinate to other forms. It matters a great deal that we are trustworthy and truthful. It matters also that we are interred in coffins made of durable wood or stone in a cemetery near the place where we died, but this is certainly less important. Sometimes we won’t be truthful and trustworthy. We’ll fail to follow though on things we said we would do. We will exaggerate. And likewise, some Baha’is will ask to be cremated after death, or they will donate their bodies to medical schools for students to study, or they’ll die without leaving a will.

Yet, these people are all Baha’is. It makes no sense to me to encourage people to leave a religion simply because they don’t live up to all the laws and believe all the teachings.

Can Baha'is be free thinking?

Last year Mavaddat Javid posted a couple responses to some ideas I shared on this blog, and he had some of his readers leave interesting comments related to his posts. I posted a response to his idea that it’s intellectually dishonest to believe that the Baha’i Faith asks believers to exercise their judgement and pick and choose on how they apply the Baha’i teachings in their lives. I think it’s okay. It was clear (to Mavaddat) that the Baha’i Faith demands that believers not pick and choose among the laws and teachings. I agree that Baha’u’llah dismissed the idea that some people are above the laws, or beyond the laws of God. I agree that He did emphasize that religious laws are important, and should be obeyed. (I don’t see how a religion or a religious teacher could say anything other than this.) But, I think that when Baha’u’llah stressed the idea that Baha’is should follow all the teachings and laws, He was including in “all,” those particular teachings emphasizing that many religious sources are figurative and metaphorical. He was also including (I suppose) the principles of independent pursuit of truth, respect for our rational faculties, and so forth. I think you also need to consider Baha’u’llah in the context of His time and the ideas that were popular among the people who received His message while He lived. Baha’u’llah was clearly fond of people with liberal or progressive theologies, such as Jala-u-din Rumi and Shaykh Ahmad (1753-1826), whose teachings were the source of the Shaikhi School. I think Baha’u’llah wanted to avoid a descent into antinomianism or some extreme dervish dismissal of all religious law and authority, but he was in the tradition of Maimonides, who wanted to correct ridiculous literalism both among the faithful and those who used literalistic interpretations to attack a religion. Baha’u’llah was not a literalist reactionary like Muhammad ibn ‘Abdu’l-Wahhab, Ibn Taymiyyah, Moses Schreiber, or Norman Geisler.

One problem I have with the way Mavaddat described religion is that he supposes that calling yourself a believer in a particular religion implies that you will follow all the laws and hold all the beliefs of that religion. I think that religions instead ask us to strive toward perfection, and attempt to instill in us a desire to aspire toward perfection without much hope that we will ever reach perfection. This means, in a practical sense, that you might not always obey the letter of the law in every situation. You would try to, strive to, and hope to obey the law, but sometimes you wouldn’t obey. This might be because you conceive of laws as existing in a hierarchy, and some laws are more important than others, and you might perceive that obeying a lesser law might make it difficult to obey a more significant law. You might also simply not be able to follow a particular law, and although you wouldn’t resign yourself to a life where you never obeyed that particular law, you might have various priorities about which laws you followed, and leave some laws for later in your life while other laws would immediately get your attention as targets for achievement. Or, you might understand some laws as general principles rather than literal laws.

You might also violate Baha’i laws because you understood some laws as existing in a figurative sense where the spirit of the law is more important than the letter of the law. For example, some people think laws about personal appearance and hygiene seem more sensible if they are not always taken literally. If we instead take them as general rules about how to remain clean, they make more sense. So, for example, the quotation from Baha'u'llah that urges Baha’is to not even wear an item of clothing that has a stain on it may simply mean to generally clean one’s clothing, and not literally mean that we must stop wearing anything with any sort of stain on it. (...Cleave ye unto the cord of refinement with such tenacity as to allow no trace of dirt to be seen upon your garments. Such is the injunction of One Who is sanctified above all refinement. Whoso falleth short of this standard with good reason shall incur no blame....) Rules about not plunging our hands into common food dishes may mean that in general we should avoid having potentially germ-contaminated surfaces such as our skin come into contact with foods we are sharing with others, at least as far as reasonably possible. Rules about avoiding pools of water in Persian courtyards may mean that we should generally try to secure clean water for our washing and drinking, and not allow situations in which people must use contaminated water. Baha’is who serve in government or public utilities might be the intended audience for such laws, rather than those of us who visit unhygienic Iranian homes with courtyard pools. Given that approach, I might share a platter of finger food with some friends while wearing a shirt with a small stain on it, and also go wading in a public fountain where others have also been wading, and still think I was obeying Baha’i laws about hygiene, because I was striving to obey the spirit of the laws rather than the letter of the laws. It’s not a case that such laws may be ignored, but rather, that we should realize there are different ways to approach those laws and try to obey them.

Religions have many laws and rules and suggestions for how people ought to live. A person who takes their religion seriously might aspire to follow all the laws, and believe all the teachings, but accommodate themselves to a situation where they have not yet reached a point where they can follow all the laws and believe all the teachings. Or, a person might understand a particular point of belief or law differently than you do, so while it appears to you that the person is violating a law, to that person’s point-of-view they are obeying it. Saying that people are “giving lip service” to their religion is a claim that people say they believe in a religion while they in fact do not believe it, and so they are being dishonest. The accusation is that they make a claim about their state-of-mind (saying “I am a Baha’i”) while in fact their state of mind is different than described (they don’t believe all the Baha’i teachings).

This is a viewpoint that a religious identity or belief system is a dichotomous thing, a black-and-white thing, where either one accepts and lives according to 100% of the religion’s content in belief and practice or else one isn’t really a member of that religion. This is not a way of conceiving of religion that we use when we look at religions with a social science perspective, because belief and practice are really things that exist along a continuum. There is an idealistic sense in which only a person who really believes and practices everything taught by a religion can legitimately claim to be a member of that religion, and this is the sort of aspirational definition. We aspire to be true Baha’is, but perhaps only one human ever was such a thing (The Master, ‘Abdu’l-Baha).

You can claim that it would be more intellectually honest to stop claiming to be a member of a particular religion if you didn’t accept every teaching and law within that religion. Leave the religion, and make up your own religion that only includes beliefs and practices with which you agree. That would be good advice if the purpose of religion is to provide a set of beliefs and practices with which one entirely agrees so one can have intellectual honesty. But, I don’t think this is the purpose of religion. I think one purpose of religion is to provide human societies with standards and codes that anchor morality and ethics outside the opinions of any individual. In essence I’m suggesting that religion plays a role something like the Leviathan, which Hobbes described as a thing having a monopoly on legitimate violence and coercion in order to give people security so they could devote their talents to improving themselves and their community rather than devoting their time to defending themselves from anarchy (the war of all against all). Religion provides society with a thing that has a monopoly on final ethical authority so that people can be protected from trends in human nature that would allow societies to surrender ethical decision-making to a powerful leader or king, or to a powerful ideology. Without religion, if everyone has their own personal religion, there are weak community codes of ethics. With religion, there are shared codes of ethics, and everyone must deal with those codes, accepting them or challenging them, but sharing a sense that those religion-provided codes are worth consideration.

I wouldn’t want to live in a society where everyone was “making up and inventing their own religion to which they could be true, because their own religion would be free from the objectionable or difficult bits they ignore in the existing religions.” This is because I think many humans would make up and invent their own religions that would endorse selfishness and deceit. Many people would create religions that had exaggerated us-versus-them moral codes where outsiders could be treated as sub-human and only insiders would get decent treatment. Religion (good religion) is a check against some defects in human nature that give us (when unchecked) such abuses as genocidal ideologies, super-violent warrior cultures, and predatory gangsterism.

It is also possible to believe that “true religion” has a pure source that gets obscured in the process of Revelation, so that not 100% of a religion's content is really Divine Truth. A person might believe that as some Truth comes from the Divine Source in a pure form it is converted into human thought in the brain of a human who serves as a Manifestation of God, and then the Truth is converted from human thought to human language, and then it is converted to the speech or writing of the Manifestation, or it may be written by a secretary or note-taker, and then it may be converted through language translations. Nuances that existed in the languages that existed when the Revelation came may change, and the original subtleties of meaning may be lost (the meanings of words are always changing, and the meanings of words can often be debatable). With this perspective I'm describing, it’s possible to “believe in a religion” and suppose that some teachings or laws are closer to the Truth than others. A religion must claim that all its teachings and laws are true and that believers must follow all of its teachings and laws. If it doesn’t, the religion will allow people to settle into comfort in their decisions about what aspects of a religion are true and important, and which are misunderstandings or unimportant. Also, foolish and ignorant people would be given freedom to propagate all sorts of stupidity if a religion said, “sure, some of this religion is false and unimportant, so you are free to ignore portions of it.” So, religion gives believers a vast amount of material, and those who think carefully about their religion must make reasonable and cautious decisions about what they believe and how they should behave.

I disagree with anyone who tells me that to be a true Baha’i I must be dogmatic and literalist. Yes, I suppose a Baha’i may be dogmatic and literalist, but a Baha’i may also have a quest-orientation to religion and take a liberal theological approach to textual analysis and religious law. That’s something I like about the Baha’i Faith, it seems to me that Baha’u’llah and ‘Abdu’l-Baha intended to have this religion be broad and accepting of a wide variety of thought and belief and practice.

Religions set high standards, but people fall short. For example, religions generally teach chastity and purity, but most human beings have strong sexual drives that are somewhat unfocused, and thus impure and unchaste thoughts plague humanity, and many people act on these thoughts rather than finding the discipline to dismiss them or sublimate them. For example, lust is a basic element of human nature, while self-sacrificing love may be a higher, and more complicated and socially-embedded aspect of our emotional and behavioral repertoire; so while lust is the basis for huge and profitable industries (pornography, many forms of popular music, some forms of advertising, etc.), you see much less commercialization around higher levels of love and commitment. It’s difficult to quickly evoke the self-actualization and personal improvement through long-term loving relationships that demand self-sacrifice and dedication and faith, but it’s very easy to evoke desire for sensual delight. Anyway, religions have a task of helping people find the long-lasting love and relationships that will help people grow and develop, and also create stable families where children will be reared well. If religions allow lust to be the main form of love in a society, the society is going to be doomed to significant trouble (violence rooted in jealousy and poorly-reared children). A religion needs to demand high standards of purity and chastity in order to help people control their lust or express it in limited ways so that other higher forms of love can be fostered and society can get along with the business of helping people live good lives.

Yet, given human biochemistry, people won’t perfectly embody the highest expressions of purity and chastity. So, religion has to also give people a break, and allow them to turn back to religion when they fail or fall short. Just as a relapsing former addict needs to be able to return to whatever treatment techniques have generally helped prevent a full-blown return of an addiction, so religious people need to be able to return to their religion after they have strayed. So, strong religions that last will have both the high standards and a sort of recognition that people will fail to live up to them. That failure must be presented as based on the difficulty of the task or the weakness of human nature, not not presented as a thing that is okay, so that people can just give up on trying to reach their spiritual goals and settle for a life of debauchery or whatever.

The human intellect must be used when considering religious laws and teachings, and in deciding how to behave one must consider not only a specific written law, but also the entire body of scripture, authoritative interpretations, traditions established by Manifestations of God, and opinions that were praised or endorsed by the religion’s legitimate authorities. As with other forms of human law (religious law is a form of human law, it is the root of secular law), an unwritten and invisible system of assumptions and social constructions lie outside the written text, and a person will approach the literal written word of a law with influences from these sources that lie outside the literal written word of the law. In the Baha’i Faith, when we consider the entire body of scripture, authoritative interpretations, traditions established by Baha’u’llah and ‘Abdu’l-Baha, and opinions that were endorsed by Baha’u’llah and ‘Abdu’l-Baha, we find that there is considerable emphasis on people using their intellects and their own understanding, and there is considerable material to discourage blind imitation, literalistic and static interpretations, and collective consensus on the meaning or application of religious laws and teachings. Instead, we're supposed to have some degree of diversity, because people have varying capacities.

Can Baha’is “cherry pick” their beliefs and the laws they will follow? Maybe they can. I don’t mean they can select things in the Baha’i scriptures that support what they want to believe and ignore things in authoritative Baha’i sources that contradict what they want to believe (that would be one literal understanding of what “cherry picking means”). Rather, I mean that in religious law, ethics, and spiritual teachings there are various rules and laws that help humans find good ways to live, and such laws discourage extremes, and therefore sometimes laws and teachings seem to contradict one another. Thus, Baha’is must think about what they should do, and choose from among the various teachings and laws, sometimes recognizing that there are seeming contradictions. The choices must be motivated by a honest desire for truth, self-improvement, and righteousness, rather than a desire to prove a pre-existing and unexamined bias. In choosing among the various teachings and laws to find the right way to behave, Baha’is may make better or worse decisions, as some ways of applying Baha’i teachings are close to ideal, while other methods of application would be disastrous. In other words, Baha’is must pick from a range of possible ways to apply Baha’i teachings, and they must choose which laws and teachings to follow, and how to follow those laws and teachings.

There are many examples to illustrate. I’ll first use the issue of speech. It is possible to speak too much. Some speech harms others, and is tactless or rude. Sometimes people use speech to inflict harm, share anger or hurt, or mislead. It is also possible to use too much discretion, and fail to use speech when we ought to. People often remain silent when they should speak up. It is possible to use too much wisdom and withdrawal, and fail to add one’s voice to a discussion. Religious teachings have to advocate tact and wisdom, and discourage angry and hurtful speech or backbiting. That’s religion’s way to address the first problem (of too much speech). Religious teachings also must ask for boldness and audacity in speech (to address the second problem of people not speaking up when they ought to). In any given situation, when one is thinking about whether to speak, or how to speak, one must pick and choose among the various teachings and laws about speech. I suppose one must cherry-pick to find the best teaching for whatever situation one finds oneself in.

Here’s another example. A religion needs to encourage believers to show obedience to authority; it needs to encourage collective identity and social cohesion among believers, which pretty much means in practical application that a religion must encourage believers to think of themselves with some degree of pride or satisfaction in the fact of their belief and religious identity. The obedience and hierarchy of authority is a necessity if the religion is going to remain coherent and unified. Without some framework of authority and obedience the natural divisions of understanding will make the religion very broad, and some people will create their own authority or divisions within the religion, or split off from it. Buddhism, Hinduism, Judaism, Islam, and of course in Christianity religious authorities and teachers organize and lead their religions, and others follow those leaders and teachers.

On the other hand, if you want to have a good religion that can deal with some flaws in human nature, you need to help people avoid religious bigotry, spiritual pride, cross-religious conflict, and blind imitation. You also want to have elements of your religion that will prevent religious persecution or religious war. And so, a religion (if it’s any good) will have some teachings and rules that help people be critical of their religious leaders. There will be teachings that encourage people to retain some ethical decision-making instead of surrendering their critical faculties to blind obedience to authority, but at the same time, there will be teachings about the importance of obedience to authority (to preserve the unity and continuity of the religion). There will be elements of a religion that encourage believers to feel good about their religious identity, and other elements that warn believers that even though they are members of the “true” religion, they still must be humble and recognize that they may be imperfect or weak or wrong. You will have teachings asking people to respect the learned, the leaders, the teachers, and the administrators, but you will also have teachings lamenting the defects in the learned, the leaders, the teachers, and the administrators. Religions need authoritative teachings that guard against the extremes.

Religions must work against the cognitive distortions and biases that make some people feel too bad about themselves. Thus, a religion must have much that is affirming. Religions will describe people as being glorious and great and wonderful. We’re made in God’s image, and God is in us, and God made us because God loves us, and so forth. But religions must also work against the human tendency to have blindness to one’s own faults and failures, or the human tendency to overvalue the individual and ignore one’s own insignificance or mortality. Thus, a religion will have teachings that help people find self-effacing thoughts and beliefs. There should be ego-destroying stuff about how we are just dust and worthless, but also life-affirming stuff about how we are made in God’s image and have God’s attributes manifested through us.
And so, a healthy religion will have diverse teachings and passages. These teachings and passages must be considered in their entirety, and this will help people find the balance they need. In any situation, a believer may draw from various prayers and teachings. A person who is depressed may not benefit from those prayers that emphasize our powerlessness and helplessness, and might instead find solace in those prayers and teachings about the nobility of the human spirit. Or, perhaps the content of the religion that emphasizes the destruction of the self and the worthlessness of human life would be helpful to some depressed or grieving people, and they could find religious wisdom and insight out of their dark night of the soul, and those people wouldn’t easily relate to the content about how marvelous humans are. At any rate, one must choose from among the wide and diverse content of a religion to find what one needs in any given situation.

I had earlier written that...

You must also accept the idea that we should use science and our rational thinking to enhance our understanding of our religion. You can’t reject that, because if you take the Baha’i Faith in its entirety, you can’t get away from such fundamental teachings.

Mavaddat responded by citing Baha’u’llah’s statement to clerical leaders:

Say: O leaders of religion! Weigh not the Book of God with such standards and sciences as are current amongst you, for the Book itself is the unerring Balance established amongst men.

This was of course a letter to clergy, and the term that is translated as “standards and sciences” had at the time a connotation of the best academic practices used in religious study to verify religious truth. We’re not talking about laboratory-based natural sciences, or even empirical social sciences here, are we? It seems to me that Baha’u’llah is saying that in a religious investigation of religious truth the standard of truth is found in revealed writings from Manifestations of God rather than in other forms of human learning and argument. For example, this blog and what I write in it is not a standard by which anyone should judge the Baha’i Revelation. If one takes as an axiom that the Baha’i Revelation is the Truth from God, this makes sense. I agree it’s not a convincing argument to win over non-believers, but clergy of other religions are already supposed to be believers, so I suppose this line of argument was appropriate for the context.

Mavaddat also offered a quotation he (imprecisely) attributed to Shoghi Effendi (in fact it was a letter written by Shoghi Effendi’s secretary on the Guardian's behalf to someone in New Zealand back in June of 1946). You can find an extract from the letter in Arohanui. Such letters written by Shoghi Effendi's secretaries to individuals are not legitimate or authoritative sources of Baha’i doctrine or law, so I won’t even bother responding to it. Nor will I bother to respond to the quotation Mavaddat offered from a letter from the Universal House of Justice, as that body is a source of legislation, but not doctrine, and the letter he cited only made a (correct) distinction between “eternal principles proclaimed by God’s Messenger” and “scientific statements and theories.” Baha’is make a distinction between eternal spiritual principles and the social teachings of religions. Religions will always teach people to refrain from murdering others or stealing (with some exceptions in unusual situations), but we always expect that science will have new and better theories about why matter has mass, or what dark matter is, or how galaxies form, and so forth.

Mavaddat offered the quotations from Baha’u’llah, Shoghi Effendi’s secretary’s letter to an individual in New Zealand, and a passage from a letter from the Universal House of Justice to establish that “The Bahá’í Faith is dogmatic through and through.” I don’t think his quotations do establish that. He also offers the blessing from Baha’u’llah that: “Blessed is the learned who doth not allow science to intervene as a veil between him and the Known....” as evidence that the Baha’i religion expects believers such as me to be dogmatic. I don’t see how this blessing establishes that. I am a scientist, and I do scientific research and publish in scientific journals and teach scientific research methods to my students at the university where I am employed. It does seem to me that science can be a veil that makes faith difficult. Surveys of scientists seem to confirm that religious faith is less common among those of us with doctorate degrees than among the general public. Saying that those of us who have faith in the scientific method without losing our religious faith are blessed doesn’t seem to me to be a call to dogmatism or literalist mentalities.