Accidental Canonization

The more I study religions the more I am convinced that man never worshiped anything but himself.
-Richard Francis Burton

In his recent book Everything You Know About God Is Wrong, Russ Kick claims that the majority of atheists and agnostics surveyed are in full support of comparative religion classes taught in public school, while the most vocal opposition comes from Christians. This seems counter-intuitive, since many conservatives are constantly attempting to bridge Church and State, especially in regard to public education, but there are a number of reasons that American Christians might be against the study of religion in schools.

First, and perhaps most predominantly, many Christians (as well as Muslims and Jews) are against comparative religion because they distrust teaching any religion or mythology other than their own, especially one that might be presented on equal footing (1). Second, there is a certain amount of willful ignorance about the academic side of Christianity among many self-proclaimed Christians. This can be seen in a public distrust, not just of historians and archaeologists, but also of any recent translation of the Bible. There is a growing movement against all non-King James versions of the Bible, and especially against the more scholarly college-approved editions such as the New Revised Standard Version (2). As Miriam Fergusun, the former Governor of Texas, famously stated, "if English was good enough for Jesus, it's good enough for Texas." (3)

Comparative Religion

It is true that a greater knowledge about religion can lead to a greater certainty in one's own unbelief (for example, the more I learn about the early history of the LDS Church the less likely I am to convert to Mormonism, to pick on an easy target). However, a deeper knowledge about one's own beliefs and those of others might also lead to a more stable and enriching faith. Just as atheists with a passable knowledge of religious philosophy tend to be more secure in their convictions and argue their case better, so too do monotheists or polytheists seem to value their own tradition the more they learn about it's history or theology.

The majority of Christians will probably agree on the importance of learning about the history of their religion, but a far smaller percentage will argue for the merit of learning about other faiths. After all, the Bible implicitly states that other religions were created by the Devil (2 Corinthians 11) and explicitly says that the only way to salvation is through Christianity (John 14:6), so why should anyone care about what those heathens believe when we already know about Jesus? Well, for starters, many of those heathens are our friends and neighbors, and those that aren't are the people that we're trying to save, either spiritually or militarily. More to the point, a decent understanding of others' faiths can lead to a greater understanding of our own. This is true when theologians adopt philosophies and practices from other religious traditions, such as using Muslim or Hindu arguments for the existence of the Christian God, and equally true when determining what does not work in one's own tradition, such as when the Greek Orthodox Church discovered that they accidentally canonized a major figure from a rival religion.

The story of Barlaam and Josaphat (not to be confused with Jehosaphat, the famous jumper from the Old Testament) is thought to have been written down in the 11th Century, though they are said to have lived sometime around the 3rd Century CE. Both St. Barlaam and St. Josaphat are commemorated in the Eastern Orthodox Church on August 26th, while the Catholic Church held their feast day on the 27th of November.

12th Century Scroll of Barlaam and Josaphat

The gist of the story is that a rich Indian king had been persecuting Christianity and that an astrologer predicted that the King's son would grow up to become a Christian. The King feared this fate and kept his son Prince Josaphat inside the palace walls since birth in order to prevent him from being a religious man. However, the Prince eventually snuck out of the palace and saw the suffering of the outside world as well as a traveling Christian hermit named Barlaam. Barlaam introduced Josaphat to spirituality, and the Prince eventually left his cozy palace and became a Christian saint.

If that story sounds at all familiar, it is probably because you have had some amount of study in comparative religion. The religious scholar Wilfred C. Smith discovered that the story of Balraam and Josaphat was in fact the story of the Buddha, translated and retold over numerous centuries (4). Even the name Josaphat comes from the Sanskrit term Bodhisattva, which is what the Buddha was until his death and attainment of nirvana at the age of 80. From Bodhisattva came the Persian Bodasiv, and from that the Arabic Yudasaf, which was translated into Greek as Ioasaph and eventually as the Latin Iosaphat.

What we can learn from all this is the way in which knowledge of one religion can enlighten us about another. The Roman Catholic Church has since removed the feast day of Balraam and Josaphat from their calendar, though many fictional or mythological saints still remain both in that institution and in the Eastern Orthodox Church (5). The fact that the study of religion helped in some way to improve a tradition reinforces the central thesis of this blog: that in order to save religion, we must perform surgery upon it.

Links:
1. Atheist Teaches Religion in Public Schools, on About.com
2. God's form of government is a theocratic monarchy...therefore, it makes perfect sense that His word would be translated for the English speaking people under a monarchy, by a crazy person
3. Spanish in Texan Classrooms, by Jimmy Carter
4. Buddha Turned Into European Saint, on the Free Republic
5. St. Brigid, Pagan Goddess, on Wikipedia

Good Luck, Mr. Gorsky

40 years ago tomorrow, two men set foot on the Moon for the first time in human history, one of the most poignant achievements of mankind. While the scientific and cultural merits of the Apollo 11 Moon landing have been praised for decades, the spiritual impact of this event has yet to fully sink in.

Humans have been curious about the nature of the moon since the dawn of religion at least 70 thousand years ago. We have come to understand this celestial body in a number of ways: as a goddess of witchcraft to the ancient Greeks and Celts; to Chinese astronomers, as a reflective orb made of silver; and as a watery planet filled with various flora and fauna to Americans in the 1830s (1). Today, scientists are fairly confident in the theory that the Moon was formed some 4.5 billion years ago as the result of a Mars-sized body of rock colliding with the Earth. Across cultures there is a day of the week named after this satellite, always coming between the day of the Sun and the Day of Mars (Tuesday in English, after the Norse war-god Tyr who represents that planet), and from the root moon comes the words month and menstruation.


In occult practices across the world, the path to the Moon has been considered a journey of extreme importance, albeit a more metaphorical one than that undertaken by Armstrong and Aldrin. The Kabbalistic tradition describes ten spheres of existence, called the Sephirot, which represent the ten stages between God and Man. It is the goal of the Kabbalist to climb these spheres in order to understand God more completely. Each of the Sephirot correspond to one of the planets in the Ptolmic model of the universe, with the lowest being Malkuth, relating to the Earth, and the next being Yesod, represented by the Moon. The transition from Malkuth to Yesod represents the transition from base matter to a more spiritual state of being, a connection with the unconscious mind and an awareness of the higher powers in the world.

The moon represents the unconscious in nearly all religious traditions, both popular and esoteric, from the goddesses Diana and Hecate to the Shinto deity Tsuki-Yomi. The psychologist Carl Jung interpreted the alchemist's search for silver, as symbolized by the Moon, as a quest to understand the unconscious and feminine aspects of one's self. Similarly, the 18th major Arcana in a Tarot Deck, the Moon, is said to signify intuition, dreams, and life after death. Tarot cartomancers associate the Moon with Qof, a letter in the Hebrew alphabet that also means "the back of the head," and thus can be associated with the unconscious mind.


Like the Kabbalists and their Sephirot, Indian mystics consider the journey from the earth to the Moon to be the first step in spiritual progress. The root chakra, Muladhara, is said to contain the energies relating to instinct and the most basic conditions of human awareness, while the chakra above it, Svadhisthana (aka. the Moon Chakra), is said to empower a person's creativity, sexuality, and emotional well-being. In all of these traditions, reaching "the moon" represents a contact with one's own intuition and spirituality, something that many of the astronauts of the Apollo missions claim to have experienced.

There is a popular urban legend which states that Neil Armstrong heard sounds in a strange language while on the Moon, and that after returning to earth he realized what he had heard was in fact the Muslim call to Prayer and subsequently converted to Islam (2). While this story has about as much truth to it as the belief that Nixon hoaxed the Moon landings, there were other astronauts who equate their space travels with nothing short of a spiritual experience. Apollo 17 Captain Eugene Cernan said that viewing the Earth from the Moon was "like standing on God's front porch." Jim Irwin of Apollo 15 became a minister after returning to Earth, while Apollo 12's Alan Bean dedicated the rest of his life to detailing his experience in paintings. Buzz Aldrin famously took communion on the surface of the Moon (3). Most remarkably, Apollo 14 astronaut Dr. Edgar Mitchell, the sixth man to have walked on the Moon, claims to have had a transcendental experience while on the return trip to earth and founded the Institute of Noetic Sciences, a research center for the understanding of meditation and psychic abilities (4).

The Apollo 11 Astronauts in quarantine due to the 1969 Extraterrestrial Exposure Law (5).

The Moon landing unified people across the planet as a distinctly human, and not just American, achievement. However, the primary initiative for lunar travel stemmed from our conflict with the Soviet Union, and as soon as that cooled down, the incentive to send men to the moon also waned. The last time mankind has set foot on the Moon was December 14th, 1972- nearly 37 years ago. Although NASA plans to return humanity to the Moon by 2018, this is low on the list of priories for a nation currently battling two wars and an economic collapse and which has shifted its position on the importance of science dramatically since 1972. That said, I believe that the American people can be swayed to supporting the space program again if we phrase the debate in terms of social and spiritual implications and not just scientific ones. Regardless of one's religious background, we should all agree that the Moon landing represents the actualization of one of mankind's oldest and most unattainable desires: to travel to the Heavens and touch the unknown.

Links:
1. The Great Moon Hoax of 1935, on Wikipedia
2. Neil Armstrong Converts to Islam, on WikiIslam
3. Astronauts After the Moon Landings, on CNN.com
4. Dr. Edgar Mitchell's Spiritual Conversion, on Hinduism Today
5. The Extra-Terrestrial Exposure Law, again on Wikipedia