importance of interreligious knowledge
Sunday, June 21, 2009
♥ Sunday, June 21, 2009
If it is to find out how our religion is in anyway superior, we have completely and utterly and miserably lost the point in our ridiculous arrogance. If we laugh at some teaching that goes against what we stand for, we should re-evaluate what exactly we stand for.
The importance of interreligious knowledge lies in a deep appreciation of our own faiths, through a certain understanding of the common points of departure, differences in traditions, and the richness of the other faiths. I would suggest that to actually begin approaching such "enlightenment", one must continually ask himself or herself what all that he or she is learning, means. Otherwise, it would just fall into a mere occasion to judge. What do i mean?
Philosophically speaking, one derives where he stands or who he is, through the identification of the other. This is for many, the source of which one learns. But this is on an intellectual level, which is all fine and good, just that what the jewish people call the "yetzer ra", easily morph such knowledge into points of attack for persons of other faiths. It is easy to label the "other", because it is an inevitable result of the concept of "us". To the jewish person, the concept of God made man is just inconceivable, and maybe to a certain extent laughable when a Christian argues that when that man was crucified, he redeemed humankind from the pains of sin. A Buddhist might argue that our understanding of pain and death result from the inability to reach the nirvana-ic state of ridding our conception of self- to a catholic that might be incomplete perception of truth, and therefore become “ridiculous” or “illogical”.
But if we care to reflect, we will realize that the "yetzer ra", might not be too different from the catholic idea of "concupicence", that the idea of sexual immorality has been regarded as a sin regardless of the religion in which one views these acts, that in his speech in Cairo, the President of the United States rightly pronounced that we are all joint by the law of "do unto others what you want others to do to you"- reflection of our common humanity. So the starting point, to begin appreciation, must be to reflect.
What then do we reflect upon? Nostra Aetate, a church document which literally means "in our time", in the late Pope John Paul 2's reflections, contain the right starting point when it says "Men turn to various religions to solve mysteries of the human condition, which today, as in ealrlier times, burden people's hearts: the nature of man; the meaning and purpose of life; good and evil; the origin and purpose of suffering; the way to true happiness; death; judgment and retribution after death and origin of our existence." The Pope said "we should be amazed at the number of common elements found within them". This is because the Council itself issued a declaration of semina Verbi. Meaning that the seeds of God's truth exist in all religions.
The intellectual challenge lies here: to see commonality could potentially dilute the doctrinal understanding, or worse still the purity in a person's initial conviction- why? Because if it is common, one could begin seeing (if one hasnt ardy) that what differs protestant teaching from the catholic’, is a matter of human interpretation. Which brings to mind how much exactly, are religions divine, and how much are they human-inspired. Understandably, a human-inspired religion can only gather so much conviction in the masses. This is the beginning of more profound reflection: we stop asking what my religion means, but what does Religion mean to me. What is subjective and what is objective?
It is the appreciation of the objective, that we replace our prejudice with appreciation.
Every person, almost definitionally, as part of being a person holds his world-view, and sees through the lenses which are often filled with a certain degree of prejudice and ignorance as well. How then does truth emerge, with vessels incapable of holding the weight of pure, unstained truth? How do you pour new wine into old wineskins without it bursting? There is that school of thought, arising from a case in America that holds that truth emerges from a marketplace of ideas. In the discussion of interreligious faith, we should await eagerly in our learning, the emergence of truth. That perhaps is where we eradicate our prejudices. Because truth resides in all of us, as moral and rational beings, we must first get rid of the illusion that every person is the perfect embodiment of whatever his religion professes. He is human, as we ourselves are and have “fallen short of the glory of God”.
The necessary second step, is to acknowledge not that we are prejudiced, but that the possibility of being prejudiced is very real. We look through the prisms of our own experiences, and undergo what is a very personal encounter within our own faith. More often than not, our faith moulds our perception because it offers an explanation for what happens within ourselves, and makes sense of what is without. Naturally, when a different perspective is proffered, one that threatens our order of life, because it is another sense of right and wrong, we react to it in a hostile manner. Prejudice is just a manifestation of that hostility.
It is at this point in time, that we might come to realize that our prejudices might just be a shallow attempt at splitting hairs between different religions, that if the starting point for all religion is the same, the need to provide Man with a sound basis for the “questions of his heart”, then a different religion is a result of another language being used, and a different expression that results from that use of language, which in turn sparks different traditions and consequently, different believers. We are not so different then, are we?
Put simply, the difference between appreciation and prejudice, which is the key point of studying the different religions, is also the difference between dialogue and debate- one seeks to know, another seeks to be right. More often than not, the need to be right is almost an inevitable consequence of the fear of being wrong. A dialogue embraces the realities that there is a fear of being wrong, but that all are seeking what is right. An accumulation of knowledge, must serve that greater purpose of reaching out for the right, by seeing the unique-ness and the rich heritage present in the various religions, even if it cannot be understood in its full complexity, it must allow us a deep awareness of the historical persecutions and promote sensitivity for the other.
In summary, the Dalai Lama offers a paradoxical proposition: the importance of knowledge on religion is so that we stop emphasizing on religion.
