Post 87 –Remedy for Religious Fundamentalism?

Remedy for religious fundamentalism?  Who would have the nerve to make such a proposal? Seeking a remedy for such a wild societal phenomenon?  You’re in for a bit of lay philosophizing. Hope you’re up to it?

Some behind-the-scene stuff here. Originally I made a typographical error in the above paragraph. Instead of “seeking,” I wrote “seeding”  so that the sentence read “Seeding a remedy….”  Now wouldn’t that be wonderful? We just go out, buy a bag of seed, put it in the spreader and there it goes throughout the society, slowly germinating and sprouting the “remedy” flower till it has taken over the entire field.  Wouldn’t that be nice? Alas, only a typo!  Not even a dream, though it almost germinated one in me!

One of my favourite columnists in the Vancouver Sun, Michael Den Tandt, had the courage—or should I say “nerve?”-- to suggest a remedy, using the title of this post I borrowed from him, but without the extension “…is clear.”  His full title: “The remedy for religious fundamentalism is clear” (Boxing Day, Dec. 26, 2015).  Wow!  This is something we’ve all been waiting for: a clear remedy for this scourge of fundamentalism. I could hardly think of a more appropriate Christmas gift, even now that we are into January 2016 with Christmas long behind us.

For those of us who are writers, there is enough in Den Tandt’s column to fill a good-sized volume with comments, reactions and alternatives. I will have to be very selective to keep this down to an acceptable blog post length. It’s possible that I will have to use two posts even to say the minimum, but that would not be the end of the world, at least, not of my world. So, Michael, I’m going to think along with you a little and make some suggestions as well as ask some questions. I do this in the framework of appreciation for your courage to even dream of a remedy of so intractable a global scourge.

Den Tandt’s remedy? In his words, “It is, simply, ecumenism.” That term means, again in his own words, “the notion that people of faith, and indeed agnostics and atheists, have far more in common than they sometimes wish to believe.”  My association with Humanist Atheists has taught me that this is a typical perspective of that group of people. In fact, based on my association with them, I consider that part of the core of Humanism and Atheism. Taking that away from them would be similar to taking Jesus away from Christians or Muhammad from Muslims. You end up with an empty shell. 

Jesus observed that a tree shall by known by its fruit. We know that there are many kinds of trees, each with its own fruit. Now trees have certain basic things in common that mark them as trees. They have roots, stems, branches and, often, leaves and, usually, fruit, though not necessarily edible. Without those they are not considered trees. Though they share certain structural features, their root structures vary, bark is different so that we can identify them as this or that kind of tree. Their leaves look and behave differently as does their fruit. Trees, yes, all of them, but still they are very different from each other, used for different purposes ranging from shade, decoration,  construction, canoes, nesting, food all the way to burning. All trees, yes, but how different from each other.  By their fruit, including their various uses, you will know that it is this tree or that tree. Anyone who can’t tell the difference between a Western apple tree and an African baobab would be looked at askance.                           

Every society is undergirded by a worldview that gives it shape and values. Most members of a given society are hardly aware of that worldview; they just assume it as their “common sense,” but it affects both their thought patterns as well as behavior.  In fact, it creates their culture. Part of that worldview is the dominant religion of the culture. Yes, behind every culture lies a religion of some sort. That is to say, a more or less coherent set of values and ideas by which the  people guide their lives and form their social structures and to which the people have given their hearts. All of this means that you can learn something about a people’s religion by analyzing their culture.

It may be that the above was more true in the past when most cultures tended to be cohesive mono-cultures and mono-religions.  This situation may be breaking down into groupings within a given culture so that today one finds more worldviews next to each other in any society. Nevertheless, the dominant cultures of the world have religions behind them, religions that have taken on a large variety of shapes, values and beliefs that undergird the societies.

Now, can you possibly believe that with, say, Chinese or Indian cultures being so different from Western cultures, the roots of these greatly different cultures are one and the same? If the fruits of two or more trees are widely different, can you argue that the trees are one and the same?  If you did, people would not take you seriously. These cultures are different because the underlying religions are different from each other. The fruits from all these different cultures are different because the religions are different.

Dogmatic insistence that these religions are basically the same is just that: dogma, ideology, in this case modern Humanistic , Secular or Atheistic ideology or religion. Adherents of these movements will ward off any argumentation countering that dogma as much as any Christian will resist arguments against Christ or a Muslim against Mohammad. We all defend the values, philosophies and beliefs that constitute the core of our hearts and minds. Den Tandt is really expressing a major core value of one of these three close buddies, Humanism, Secularism or Atheism—or all three.

I am tired of having to mention all three of this triad all the time. I am going to refer to the whole gamut simply as “Humanism,” realizing full well not all adherents are Atheists. This will also hold for the next post.

Now, I’m all for the tolerance and peace Den Tandt is really after and I honour him for trying to help us solve a major problem of our time.  Absolutely. However, that should not be based on the faith of one of the many religions, in this case, Secular religion or worldview. He is really interpreting the entire range of religions from his particular secular dogmatic view point. And that's alright, as long as he recognizes the legitimacy of others as well. His remedy is undergirded by another core component of his worldview or religion, namely that his is the only rational or scientific one. And if I may be politically incorrect, most adherents of his Humanism, deep down, have contempt for all the other religions except their own and basically think of them as nonsense. I would hope this is not true of Den Tandt, but there is a sign in his column that would make us think that this might be the case, but that we’ll examine in the next post.

As a closing aside, there is one other religion that thinks of all religions as being the same, namely Baha’i. Baha’i members I know tend to be very sweet and amicable people; most of them have none of the hard pride that tends to mark Humanists—or condemnation. I suspect the reason for the difference between these two perspectives to be that the Baha’i come out of a non-Enlightenment context, a context they share with all non-Humanist religions, whereas Humanists have faith in reason which has harder edges and less room for emotion or affection.