Syncretism for the Masses

You know, sometimes you hear or see a discussion, and it makes you think about how you would respond if that topic were to come up in conversation.  Back in the old days, you would probably just wait for someone to bring it up at a party or somesuch.  Nowadays, you can write a blog post about it.

I was listening to Mayim Bialik’s Breakdown recently, and her guest was rabbi Steve Leder, who had some really fascinating things to say.  I particularly liked his point about not blaming all religious people for the actions of the religious extremists, which almost all of us tend to do (well, with all relgions except our own, of course).  I also enjoyed his rejection of biblical literalism and his explanation of the value of many religious practices that otherwise we might think of as frivolous or pointless.  It’s a great show, and you should probably listen to it (or watch it).

But naturally I didn’t agree with everything he had to say.  At one point, he opined:

... and in this business about “I don’t like organized religion,” I ask people: what would you prefer, disorganized religion?  Like, would you like your phone call never to be returned when you call the rabbi for your mother’s funeral?  Would you like your name to be wrong on everything?  ...  Come on, let’s think a little more deeply about these things.  I think that’s just a straw man.

What’s hilarious about this argument, of course, is that his argument is the true straw man.  The opposite of organized religion isn’t disorganized religion.  It’s individual religion, self-directed religion ... in other words, spirituality.  There’s quite a huge gulf between the pomp and cirumstance of the Catholic Church, for instance, and a Buddhist monk meditating alone for years on the nature of the universe.  Some people want to be a part of the large organization, and they’re willing to put up with the downsides—the bureaucracy, the potential for corruption, the chance that your problem might slip through the cracks, the ostracization of those who don’t fit the traditional ideas of how people should behave.  But other people—and I would argue more and more people in modern times—think that they don’t need the big organization to mediate between them and their higher power.

Thank goodness that show has Jonathan Cohen.  Listening to Mayim Bialik’s Breakdown is a bit like listening to Dead Can Dance.  (Yes, this is going to be a tortured metaphor, but bear with me.)  Most likely, you showed up because of Lisa Gerrard’s amazing voice, and sometimes it can be easy to forget about Brendan Perry, just because Gerrard’s vocals are so captivating.  You know he’s there in the background, doing stuff ... you’re just not thinking about it.  And then, all of a sudden, you stumble across “Black Sun” or “The Ubiquitous Mr. Lovegrove” and you’re like: whoa ... I’m so glad that guy is there.

So Cohen had my perspective’s back, and he followed up with this:

I think that’s what people mean when they talk about “disorganized religion” or, you know, when they ... not that I think they want disorganized religion, but I think what they’re saying, or what some people say when they’re like, “oh, I’m spiritual not religious” is that they’re looking for the connection points between all these faiths, which are all paths towards the same road, and they’re like, “okay, but, you know, the specifics of any particular path or dogma I can leave, but what I want are those ...”

And here Leder cut Cohen off:

But that’s not how it works.  You cannot separate the values from the specific vehicles that transport those values through society.  You can’t do it that way.  You know, you just can’t do it that way.  What you can do is assign equal value to these different paths.  ...  And so to dismiss all religion, and say “I don’t want the particulars, I just want the outcome” ... that is impossible.  It doesn’t work.

Which misses the point yet again, I think.  Luckily, Cohen was still with me, and not willing to let it go just yet:

I don’t think they want the outcome as much as they say “look: Buddhism has a variety of practices that are very positive and very helpful, and Judaism also has that ...  Again, just playing that other role, is that why can’t I have some of the Buddhist, some of the Judaism, some of those aspects, and why can’t I mix them together, and why does [sic] all of these paths have to be separate?

Yeah, Jonathan: you tell him!  Now, this is followed by a bit of a digression from Mayim, which I won’t repeat here because I thought she made some good points, but I didn’t agree with everything she said, but mostly I don’t want to get off on any more tangents than I’m already prone to.  But the main thing is, both Mayim and the rabbi make some (in my opinion unflattering) assumptions about people who say they are spiritual-not-religious, and I think that my perspective (and, I suspect, Cohen’s) is quite different from how they view us.

Certainly, some people are indicating that they are still Christian, or Jewish, or Muslim, or Buddhist, just without the need for the church (or temple, or mosque).  But I think more often people are indicating that they are truly agnostic, which is certainly my perspective.  Way back in my discussion of balance and paradox (which is really the one post on this blog you probably should read), I (half-jokingly) referred to myself as a “Baladocian.” If you’ll allow me the indulgence of self-quotation:

Primarily I do this because it sounds cool and it gives them something to chew on.  The truth is that I believe that all the major religions are right ... and they’re all wrong.  Heck, that probably applies to most of the minor religions too.  When it comes to Truth, you take it where you can find it, be that the Bible, the Tanakh, the Qur’an, the Upanishads, the Analects, the Tao Te Ching, Stranger in a Strange Land, or Cat’s Cradle.

Now, I moved on from that opening to discuss the intricacies of believing that two extremes are simultaneiously neither true and both true, which was the point of that post, after all.  But what I was alluding to in that last sentence is really the main thrust of this post, and it’s an actual concept called religious syncretism.  Now, syncretism itself is neither good nor bad (which should be an entirely unsurprising statement coming from the Baladocian); in fact, it can be quite negative, such as how the Greeks mostly won the mythology war by absorbing the Roman pantheon, even though the Romans were the actual conquerors, or how the Christians absorbed the pagan and druidic celebrations, which is how we ended up with Christmas trees and Easter bunnies.  But, then again, it can also be quite positive, which is what I was getting at when I said you have to take Truth where you can find it.  As someone whose approach to religion is, paradoxically (go figure), very logical, it only makes sense that to say that the concept that ideas from other cultures, other religions, other scriptures, cannot be correct just because we hadn’t heard them yet ... well, that’s just nonsensical.  It’s a bit conceited to imagine that all the people in the world who don’t wholly embrace your faith can’t be right about something.

The fact of the matter is that even spending a very small amount of time reading different religious texts should convince you that there are a lot of good ideas—even a lot of Truths—spread around in quite disparate doctrines.  There are things in the Tao Te Ching which just blew me away, and I know, in my heart, that they are True ... but I would not say that I’m a Taoist.  Likewise, there things that Jesus Christ said which are so profound and meaningful that I cannot ever deny them ... but I do not describe myself as a Christian either.  Of course, I think there are some pretty big Truths in works of fiction too, from Stranger in a Strange Land to Quantum Psychology, but I’m not gonna claim to be a “Heinleinian” or a “Wilsonian” either.  All those texts have problems.  None of them are perfect.  But they all have something important, and it just doesn’t make any sense to me to not try to synthesize them all into a cohesive picture of the universe.

In my opinion, a “proper” agnostic is a person who believes that there is something ordering the universe—that is, someone who rejects the explicit “everything happens due to random chance” attitude of the true atheist—but that we just don’t know exactly what it is.  I’ll go even further: I personally believe that it’s entirely possible—probable, even—that we can’t know exactly what it is, and that it’s silly to imagine we can.  I think that part of what it means to be human is to accept that and learn to be okay with it.  Contrariwise, that doesn’t mean you don’t try.  It’s another paradox, I know, but think of it this way:  You know you can never be perfect, right?  But that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t always strive to be better.  No matter how good you are, you could always be better, and you should shoot for that ... even while recognizing that ultimate perfection is out of your reach.  Likewise, I believe that we should continuously strive to understand the universe, even though we must accept that we can never understand it all.  Same principle.

And, so, in our attempts to know the unknowable, why in the world would we handicap ourselves by limiting ourselves to only one religion?  It’s just silliness.  Well, the rabbi Leder has an answer for that as well:

I also think it’s disrespectful to other religions in this sense, okay?  They are not the same.  There are very profound differences between Judaism and Christianity and Buddhism; they are not the same.  They have the same goal, they have their own structures and rules to achieve that goal, but they are not the same, and some of their beliefs—despite how much in America we want to make a big party out of everything—some of their beliefs are antithetical to each other.  Period.  End of story.  And we are being dishonest and disrespectful to those religions when we pretend otherwise.

You know, this reminds me a of a passage from Extreme Programming Explained.  I read this book about midway through my programming career, and it really changed the way I approached my craft.  There were a lot of really radical ideas in there, and it made me rethink concepts I hadn’t even realized were ingrained in me.  But it also contains a bit of dogma here and there.  Starting right in the section entitled “What Is XP?”:

XP is a discipline of software development.  It is a discipline because there are certain things that you have to do to be doing XP.  You don’t get to choose whether or not you will write tests—if you don’t, you aren’t extreme: end of discussion.

I remember reading this and immediately saying “I reject that premise.” Now, possibly a lot of that has to do with my innate repudiation of authority, or indeed absolute statements in general.  I probably have a touch of oppositional disorder in my psyche, if I’m being honest.  But, also, those types of statements just never turn out to be factual.  I’ll avoid the absolute statement by rephrasing it this way: perhaps someday I’ll read about something where you have to do All The Things in order to be getting anything out of it and it’ll turn out to be true, but so far that day hasn’t come.  It wasn’t true for XP, as it turned out, and I just don’t believe it’s true for religion either.  I don’t have to do all the Jewish things to derive some value from Judaism.  And, furthermore, considering that rabbi Leder is a practitioner of Reform Judaism, I think his actions and his words are providing a bit of cognitive dissonance on this particular front.

I think it’s also worth noting that this concept of religious exclusivity—that is, I am a Jew therefore I cannot be a Christian, I am a Christian so therefore I cannot be a Muslim, etc—is distinctly a concept of the Western religions.  Now, obviously I am no expert on theology, but one of my favorite courses in college was taught by Dr. Young-chan Ro, and he is an expert on theology.  And what he taught me (among many other things) was that the Eastern religions, for the most part, have absolutely no problem with you belonging to several of them.  If you want to be a Hindu and a Buddhist and a Taoist, that’s fine.  It’s a peculiarity of those religions which share an Old Testament (probably because of the whole “thou shalt have no other gods before me” thing).  It’s a bit of a bummer, though, because I think it leads to a lot of us-vs-them mentality, which doesn’t help anyone.  It’s also very strange to me that Jews and Christians and Muslims are so canonically disposed to disregard each others’ beliefs even though they’re all worshipping the same god.  Why can’t we all just get along indeed?

So I take from all the religions at the same time I reject all the religions, and I believe in evolution at the same time I find William Peter Blatty’s discussion of the impossibility of it (in Legion) fascinating, and I reject several of rabbi Leder’s premises at the same time I think he makes some excellent points, and seriously made Judaism sound more attractive than any of the other faiths out there (ironic, since Jews famously don’t proselytize).  I say the “profound differences” are just the surface bits: the bits we should be ignoring.  We should be digging past all that, looking for the deeper meaning ... for the deeper Truth.  And we don’t have to adopt all the practices in order to mine that Truth.  I’m not saying the practices are useless—again, I think rabbi Leder was quite eloquent in explaining the value of many of those practices—but I do think they are there as a way to get us to the underlying Truths.  It’s easy to get caught up in the ceremony, but that’s just the floor show.  The real treasure is what lies beneath the glitz and the glitter.  And we should dig for as much of that as we can.