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Studying about religion can help us all
In a Pew Forum survey released Tuesday, atheists and agnostic surpass all other groups in their knowledge of religion. How do you explain this? Educational level? That they have given more consideration to the religions they have rejected?
Is knowledge of religion important? Why?
Nearly everyone in America today understands the value and importance of education, but far too few of us understand the value and importance of studying about religion using a scholarly approach. Throughout our known history, religion has played a pivotal role in much of what has occurred in life. I regularly tell incoming students in the introductory religion courses I teach that religion is one of the worst, and one of the best, of human creations. Religious narrow mindedness and bigotry have caused more violence in the world than anything else, while at the same time religious wisdom and selflessness have brought peace and compassion to and improved the lives of millions. Religion has also inspired and produced countless great individuals. Among those with whom we are more familiar are the Buddha, Jesus, Mahatma Gandhi, Mother Teresa, and Martin Luther King, Jr. Studying religion in an objectively oriented academic setting can help us to understand why there has been such a bifurcated response to it throughout history. Such a study can also help us to learn about each other, our beliefs and our practices, so that we can better understand each other and hopefully learn to get along.
Unfortunately, most Westerners have been raised in only being aware of Christian concepts about God. Moreover, the religion has long claimed to have sole possession of truth about and access to God. All other religions are wrong, even evil. Therefore, the followers of many conservative Christian preachers and denominations have been warned not to learn about the other "false" religions. It is natural, then, that conservative practitioners tend to avoid knowing about any other religion, while those who are not followers of such an approach are more likely to learn about or take a college course that deals with other religions. It is not necessarily their study that has made them less religiously narrow. The lack of narrow religious beliefs in the first place is what makes them open to study other traditions. In doing so, many further come to realize that the "one way" approach to understanding religion that is so commonplace in conservative Christianity belies the fact that most religious traditions actually have a great deal in common, and those that claim to have the only truth tend to be more focused on labels than reality and actually know little about the other religions they so quickly condemn. This, too, causes some to question the value of any religious belief and to simply reject religion altogether. Thus, atheism and agnosticism can have several causes. However, these are not the only routes for those who reject religious narrow mindedness. The non-Abrahamic approaches to religion can offer alternative views and understandings.
I grew up Catholic but became an atheist when I was a teenager. At the time, I saw Christians' denunciation of each other and everyone else as being more about their own obsessions with power and numbers than about God and truth, so I walked away from Christianity altogether. Living in Hawaii where there are many Buddhists, I began to study about that tradition, which in turn rekindled a childhood desire to visit India. After a few years, I got the opportunity to go, and that opened up a whole new world with diverse understandings of divinity. I found in the Hindu tradition an open-ended approach to conceptualizing the divine that had more to do with rational understanding and inner experience than external dogma...and it had nothing to do with external sectarian labels. My teachers encouraged me to study and learn about the various concepts and philosophies so that I could come to my own experience based understanding. None of them told me what I had to believe.
In teaching the academic study of religion, I encourage my students to do essentially the same: study the various traditions, learn the different ways that peoples and cultures have conceptualized the divine, and if you find something worth adopting, do not be afraid to do so. If all of us opened our minds enough to learn from each other, not only would we have a lot less strife in the world, but we would all be a lot happier in the process.
By
Ramdas Lamb
|
September 28, 2010; 6:06 PM ET
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Posted by: youngj1 | September 30, 2010 3:25 AM
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In my opinion agnostics and atheists tend to look at organized religions as sources of the world's history. This brings about the open and curious minds to learn about any number of religions. Fundamentalists, whatever the religion, are the most dangerous groups in the world. They are dangerous because they refuse to look at the world and the people in it without the dark glasses of their fundamentalism. A person who has studied many religions in a scholarly way will unquestionably be more tolerant of other faiths or no faiths because they view the world without religious "glasses" on that strain out everything but their own fundamentalist's beliefs. Being a fundamentalist retards your ability to absorb and understand differing beliefs, resulting in the millions of deaths attributed to religion. It is my opinion it is not the religion that causes the violence but the lack of knowledge of other people's belief systems that creates a chasm that literally cannot be crossed until a person is capable of a more reverant and tolerant worldview. Imagine a world where the Abramic religions, Islam, Judaism, and Christianity would stop and consider they all have the same patriarch, Abraham. They all have holy sites in common. They have angels in common. If all of these people would study each other's religions and worldviews in a "scholarly" fashion, much of the hate or distrust could be avoided. One of my favorite talks that Gandhi had with the press described how in his home city the holy man would read from Hindu texts and then Islamic texts and back again. But when the fundamentalists of Islam who did not study the Hindu faith in a scholarly fashion, distrusted the majority Hindu's upon England's exit from India, thought they had to create two countries instead of living together as they had for centuries. Hence the tension and turmoil of Pakistan and India and many other areas of the world. Unbiased knowledge of one another is key to relieving the stresses of differing religious beliefs.
Posted by: beherenow | September 29, 2010 9:04 AM
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Mr. Lamb, I submit that every child should be taught the scriptures of each religion most objectively if that were done we would be able to eradicate the disease of delusion. Who could read the story of Abraham and still believe that pond scum is anything but pond scum. Now coming to your own delusion, please tell em what moral lessons have you learnt from the story of Mohini Avatharam or Vamana Avatharam, or Rama Avatharam? Pray tell. I have found these four avatharams to be the most grotesque of the stories and they are nothing but filth. Even as a child I was shocked by them and now I am repulsed by them.
Posted by: Secular | September 28, 2010 8:55 PM
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Professor thank you for a reasoned and modestly presented view of the impact of religion in modern society. My lay studies have led me to conclude over and over again that the world's religions have more in common than most believers imagine. For myself I have taken to the study of world religion in an effort to clarify my own belief system and it is my opinion that many rabbis, pastors, priests and other leaders in the monotheistic faiths don't require their flocks to apply critical thinking to considerations of the revered texts. But rather prefer to plant a fully formed idea of the "will" of God and his/her relationship with the world. To me this is more a form of, for lack of a better phrase, crowd control that does a disservice to the congregants and sets up the conflicts we now see between and among religious traditions.