During the past century historians, anthropologists, paleontologists and philosophers have uncovered a bountiful treasure-trove of evidence that religions and spiritualities all over our world and in every age are closely related to each other. Since the nineteen-fifties people like Mircea Eliade and Joseph Campbell, followed by a whole host of specialists in many fields, have convinced most of the scientific and scholarly world that the human phenomenon of religion in its broadest outlines, and even in the sum total of its concrete forms, can and should be seen as a single whole. More recently, outstanding theologians, buddhologists, believing Islamic, Jewish and Hindu teachers have come to agree with this viewpoint, in ever increasing numbers.
A little more than two years ago a group of religiously committed scholars, teachers and artists, each agreeing with this view of religion in his/her own way, decided to try to counteract—in our Kyoto, Japan area and over the internet at least—the awful hatred and violence evinced by many religious believers. We founded an organization of friends who are open to all religious traditions. We simply “break bread together,” in a spirit of mutual respect for each other’s spiritual ways. We strongly feel that there are very solid religious and social scientific reasons for doing this. We decided to call ourselves “The Kyoto Cosmos Club” because we are a group of intellectually, artistically and spiritually oriented people who feel that our magnificent cosmos, evolving and expanding now for more than thirteen billion years, is the proper perspective from which to look at ourselves. It appears to us that religion in its many forms evolved along with the human species itself: that “God,” “the gods,” or whatever name is given to the Transcendent Dimension, has revealed Him/Her/It/them-self(s) to all us human beings. In the words of so many different sacred scriptures, the heavens or cosmos and the earth show forth the glory and love of this Transcendent. In a real way this makes us one. Though our members hail from all five continents and from most of the great, world-encircling religious traditions, we are essentially brothers and sisters. The Kyoto Cosmos Club is a small group of mature, educated people, with very big ideas and ideals.
We believe that the mysterious Source-Ground from which all religions have emerged has fired the inspiration of very different charismatic leaders in hundreds of different societies in every age. Each was deeply convinced that her or his understanding the world offered the best answer to what the cosmos and life, in its human and non-human forms, ultimately really is. These charismatic leaders each succeeded in convincing their listeners that her or his way of understanding the world best explained why their world was filled with both beauty, meaning and goodness, as well as with evil, suffering and death. Such religious leaders offered followers a “world story” carefully tailored to fit that particular society’s unique history, language, customs ethos, gifts and problems.
Religious expression in the form of song, dance, and other rituals aroused emotions which confirmed the sense of harmony which their prophet’s teachings about the nature of the world and its corresponding moral code had aroused. They felt and believed that they had found the Ultimate Truth on which their world rested. Thus, a particular leader might have proclaimed that the very early worldview that the great Mother Goddess gave birth to and continues to nourish and guide the cosmos and all of her—such a charismatic leader was more than likely a women—many kinds of living children. Such a powerful message most likely came to seize hold of the hearts and minds of neighboring tribes, and spread—perhaps around the world. In a similar manner, probably, the stories told in the Vedas, or those told by Shakyamuni, Abraham, Jesus and Mohammed spread with relative speed from one territory or continent to another—such was the depth of their resonance in the human heart.
Unfortunately, however, the politico-military leaders—from Amazon queens to male chieftains—were more than likely reluctant to share their power with such new charismatic religious leaders. In fact, they themselves were often considered divine or semi-divine, so they quickly grew jealous of the powerful competition. But, if the new prophet’s message captured enough hearts in the tribe or nation, this tribal leader might choose to co-opt her new rival’s religious influence by linking her governmental leadership with the new religious leader. In fact this may well have been the case when the Roman Emperor Constantine decided to become a Christian and begin to build the great Christian Churches that still grace the ancient Roman capital.
In such cases both religious and civil leaders came to hold even more power between them. Unfortunately, both kinds of leaders fiercely relished their power; they collaborated with one another to hold tightly to the total power over both civil government and the religious faith and moral code of the whole society. Likewise, the rich people—often the close henchmen to the kings and priests—also loved the power that wealth brings and were not willing to share their vast holdings. So, the rich men and women managed to pull off the same type of coup: allying themselves with both religious leaders and kings and thereby were able to even increase their wealth.
But the tribe on the other side of the mountain range may have had a different skin color, a different language, and/or different ways of seeing and doing all of the things that humans do: marrying, rearing children and dying. In fact—probably even before the human animal had emerged as such—already “birds of a feather” had “flocked together,” and so had fish and animals. So, by the time this new human animal came to be able to look in intelligent awe and wonder at its world and find symbolic religious stories to explain it all, the Gordian knot of binding “church” to “state” leashed religious and tribal leaders together. They proclaimed, “Our people and our gods must be special, so never should our really real people and goddesses be subject to miscegenation and dilution with other, “lesser people and divinities”. But times changed and slowly the world grew very small.
Two centuries ago, due to complex political, religious and technical developments on our much smaller planet, church and state did –ever so slowly—come to be seen, legally and/or constitutionally, as separate entities, each with rights of their own. At the present time this separation remains only imperfectly true—and only in a relatively few countries. Separated in many countries of the world. Today, nevertheless, in more and more countries, people are legally forbidden to practice discrimination on the basis of race, creed, color, gender—and, finally, also on the basis of sexual orientation. The process seems to be only in the beginning stages of genuine realization.
Part of this progress was unquestionably due to scientific proof that human beings of whatever race or color are near enough to being equal in both body and spirit or intelligence that any discrimination is unethical. An important part of this progress was also due to the ease with which people of different races, nationalities and religions travel and mingle with one another. Today, millions of people from every area of the globe have been able to see and feel for themselves both how marvelously different and how equally human all peoples, nations, and religions—and unbelievers as well—really are. A little more than a half century ago the United Nations was founded on these principles of universal human equality and rights.
Alas, however, even though such laws are on the books in many countries, they cannot immediately uproot what is in the minds and hearts of people. And that old Gordian knot binding “church” and “state” has not really been severed, since some nations still retain subtle, or not-so-subtle, privileges for the predominant sect. This is true in India for Hinduism, in Israel for Jews, in many western countries for Christianity, and perhaps especially, in some countries with overwhelmingly Islamic populations for Islam. Why? The answer to this question carries us into the heart of the Kyoto Cosmos Club’s raison d’etre.
There is little if any question among the majority of scholars that religions do evolve. Before the age of discovery, of travel, of mass communication and mass education, Jews, Christians, followers of Islam, as well as most followers of Buddhism and Hinduism, were convinced that their teaching and their sacred books alone held the real, the ultimate, religious truth. Only in the nineteenth century did the pioneers of textual criticism begin to see more and more clearly that even inside the sacred Jewish, Christian, Hindu, Buddhist texts—and even subtly within the holy Koran that was written by the hand of a single person in a single lifetime—doctrinal and moral stances change and evolve. Sometimes this change becomes very clear; if one moves from the Hindu Vedas through the Upanishads and into modern Hinduism the change is unmistakable. Only the most determined fundamentalist can fail to see the evolution here. In the New Testament, there is clear evidence that the early writers thought that the Second Coming of Christ was imminent—sometimes it is expected within the lifetime of the sacred writer. Again, only those who cannot question the literal inerrancy of the sacred texts can find ways to believe that this is—was—literally true.
But the evolution that took place in the sacred canonical texts pales in comparison with the slow changes in the moral and doctrinal stance of the great religious traditions. This is because, in general terms at least, the original Story that gave rise to a new religion was told within the context of the natural knowledge and worldview in place at the time of the telling. When Shakyamuni Buddha declared the world-shattering fact that no such thing as an eternal “ego” existed, even though individuals might go through countless rebirths, he had no reason to change what everyone considered to be the shape of the actual, “natural” cosmos—with its many “worlds” and its countless Buddhas, bodhisattvas, demons and devas. Today the Buddhist who believes in the literal truth of this scriptural cosmos is rare indeed—at least from the perspective of this scholar and professor after spending thirty-four of his seventy-three years living in Japan. When the New Testament was written, no sacred writer taught that slavery was intrinsically immoral. Today, no Christian to my knowledge—and one can safely add in the great majority of contemporary believing scholars of Judaism, Islam, Buddhism and Hinduism—doubts that slavery is evil.
Most educated scholarly believers accept their own creation myths as just that: valuable symbolic stories containing much precious truth and beauty—but not literally true. Of course this rule is proved by many notable exceptions, even among scholars.
Charles Darwin, Einstein, Heisenberg and their fellow scientists showed us unquestionable proof that our cosmos, as well as our solar system and the biological life on our planet, are continually evolving. Once these facts are digested it is not so hard to see that religion and spirituality also evolve. The next big question that we of the Kyoto Cosmos Club wrestle with is: How? With the well-known American sociologist of religion, Robert N. Bellah—and with his caveats—we humbly believe that religion is a very important kind of sui generis truth. Bellah wrote that,
If we define religion as that symbol system that serves to evoke what Herbert Richardson calls the “felt whole,” that is, the totality that includes subject and object and provides the context in which life and action finally have meaning, then I am prepared to claim that, as Durkheim said of society, religion is a reality sui generis [sic]. To put it bluntly, religion is true. This is not to say that every religious symbol is equally valid any more than every scientific theory is equally valid. But it does mean that since religious symbolization and the religious experiences are inherent in the structure of human existence, all reductionism must be abandoned.[i]
We feel in our gut and hold in our heads and hearts both our religious faith and the marvelous natural whole that is our cosmos. We know the cosmos naturally and scientifically, but we also are committed to faith in our cosmos’ invisible and transcendent “Ground” as described by the Protestant theologian and philosopher, Paul Tillich. So once again today, we possess a very important kind of truth in which our faith and our natural knowledge of cosmos basically coincide. We know all too well that some scientists—and non-scientists as well, feel with Richard Dawkins and his many fellow non-believers, that this faith in the transcendent dimension of our cosmos is a “delusion.” But we reject this judgment as itself a form of anti-religious faith. Along with those who dismissed Freud’s earlier prediction of the death of the religious “illusion,” we counter that religion is the outermost sphere of a whole context of many different kinds of truth: religion may be symbolic truth—none of us can know the Ground of being with our merely human mind—but it remains for believers the most precious truth of all, the truth that grounds all other truths in hope and love.
Yes, empirically grounded, falsifiable truth is also a precious truth-variety. So are the political, the financial, philosophical, artistic and literary varieties of truth. Religious truth embraces “the felt whole,” in which all other kinds of truth are integral parts. Religious faith humbly holds that these other many precious truths are not isolated, unrelated, modules; they form a whole that is filled with the beauty and love of a Transcendent Dimension, whether that dimension be teleological or a divine dimension of the process.
So what is religion? How can we justify this argument: Every religious system that has been adopted by a large part of some society, and has served to ground the values, hopes and limit the dark angst of absurdity for not just decades but centuries and millennia is really “true”? We could go with a branch of the linguistic and phenomenological philosophers such as Jacques Derrida, or Emmanuel Levinas to argue our point, but I personally—and some, but by no means all of my fellow Kyoto Cosmos members—prefer a different route. Our route is that of social scientists like Bellah (sociologist) and Clifford Geertz (anthropologist). They, and many in the school that has formed around them, begin with Geertz’s definition of religion. Religious truth is a kind of truth based on a system of symbolic stories that illuminate and ground the system of ethics and values—a system that has already been proved by test of long experience in that society. The Story grounds the ethical values. This kind of religious truth does not have to be empirically grounded; but it is symbolically grounded, and this is a very real kind of ground. On our web-site, www.kyotocosmos.org/, we cite Geertz’s definition as follows:
Religion is a system of symbols which acts to establish powerful, pervasive and long lasting moods and motivations in men [and women] by formulating conceptions of a general order of existence and clothing these conceptions with such an aura of factuality that the moods and motivations seem uniquely realistic.[ii]
On the surface, this definition seems almost cynical in its scrupulously empirical neutrality as to whether or not religion is simply a delusion or is in fact an extremely important truth that forms a part of literally every society. But that’s what anthropologists are expected to do. But Geertz unpacks his definition with his long and detailed analysis of things like his own field-work in the religion of Bali. During the frightening celebrations of the evil Balinese goddess, anyone who would dare to ask a native Balinese participant whether or not the goddess is really real would be considered somewhat mad. Of course she is real and true! And so it goes for the Christian, Jew or Muslim, especially in the midst of really serious rites of worship. Modern, intellectually sophisticated, believers might know that the truths of faith are of a symbolic variety—but they are, for these believers too, really true!
Which brings us to our last major point. The well-known American philosopher of science, Thomas S. Kuhn, in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions[iii] gave a name to this at-first-glance topsy-turvy new world of truth. He showed how even empirically verified scientific truth is not simply “true”; all truth changes as newly discovered facts slowly alter our perception of the very essence of things. Each new era of human understanding brings a “new paradigm of truth.”[iv] The ancient Greek notions of truth and how humans know reality, formed first by people like Plato and then brought to a new sophistication by Aristotle, slowly came to be proven inaccurate by Newton’s new laws of physics. And truth itself underwent a fundamental change! But then—shocking and absurd though it may appear to be at first glance—the “truths” that Newton established were themselves overturned by Einstein’s and Heisenberg’s insights into the relativity of time and space, and the degree to which the empirical measuring itself can alter the thing measured.
All of a sudden we became aware that the ancient wisdom that “man is the measure of all things,” was itself only a limited truth. Kuhn taught us that one worldview: the truth of one age gets slowly worn away by contrary insights—until a new paradigm of reality comes into focus. And immediately that new paradigm begins to be chipped away by even newer insights and empirically proven facts. Now we know that the quantum world of sub-atomic physics does not obey Einstein’s brilliant insights into the truths of the macro-world, those available to our five senses. And now this contradiction is itself being hammered by “super-string theory,” and so it continues in our world of today.
Thomas Kuhn’s brilliant insight is not a reason for cynical relativism. Neither is the Kyoto Cosmos Club’s belief that many religions can be true at the same time. More than one contradictory symbolic truth can be really true at the same time—poetic and literary symbols show us the same kind of wonderful, but simultaneously incompatible, truth. Time can pass “like a snail” and “in a flash.” Both can simultaneously be true, albeit from two different people’s perspectives. Kuhn’s new insight just refines the age-old truth that we must make allowance for new discoveries—including our relatively new insight that the human brain is not necessarily the ultimate criterion for truth. Even empirical, hard-nosed scientific truth—the shibboleth of the Enlightenment and the scientific world—helped give birth to revolutions in which its own most basic truths were overturned or simply proven to be false. Is it any wonder that educated, thinking believers today might come to respect, and even love, the different religious truths of sisters and brothers of another culture? They all arose out of the same human body, as it perceived the same cosmos with the same five senses and the same human brain.
Theologians and historians of religion were not slow to see that Kuhn’s insight into the paradigms of truth applied to religion too, in a very special way. Leading theologians in both the Catholic and the Protestant traditions were not long in picking up Kuhn’s notion of new paradigms. John Hicks and Shubert Ogden in the Protestant tradition, and Hans Kung and Paul Knitter in the Catholic, seized hold of this new “paradigm” notion of truth. And they are but a few of many religious thinkers in various world religious traditions who have followed suit, each in their own ways. Protestant thinkers built on the earlier ground-breaking works of Paul Tillich and Richard and Reinhold Niebuhr, and Catholics on the thought of Teilhard de Chardin and Karl Rahner. Today, works by Roger Haight[v], by Brian Swimme and Thomas Berry[vi], John Hick[vii], Shubert Ogden,[viii] William Cantwell Smith and others deal with Kuhn’s insights indirectly, while Hans Kung and David Tracy and others—both Christians and other religions’ believers—apply them directly to the whole phenomenon of religion in human history.[ix]
Not all of the members of the Kyoto Cosmos Club—whether Buddhist, Christian or others—would be ready to subscribe to this application of Kuhn’s “paradigm-shifts” in truth to their own religion. However, it seems to me to be apt. If one looks carefully at Geertz’s definition of religion given above, and follows through in looking at Jesus, Shakyamuni Buddha, the Jewish authors of the Pentateuch’s creation story, and other great religious leaders’ creation stories, one can perhaps see how the symbolic teachings of each can retain their truth. They remain deeply serious and important truths for our world.
Nevertheless, I totally condemn the idea that “one religion is as good as the other.” Religion in every age and society is only as credible as the accompanying ethical commitments are credible. As explained above, each culture and society has an ethical tradition that has been tried and proven by generations of experiences. This applies also to the ethics of our budding global consciousness of our global world. Hans Kung and others have explored the parameters of a “Global Ethic”[x] This notion has caught the attention of many religions and religious traditions, and even of the United Nations. Whereas not everyone has gone this far to combine the insights of both the ancient religious traditions and modern secular thinkers as well, it certainly highlights the common ethical teachings at the heart of the many global religious traditions.
This global ethic includes the above insight that all human beings are equal in dignity. They all have a natural right to be free, including the freedom to believe or disbelieve, and to worship or not worship, as their conscience directs. No religion or sect that denies this right can really measure up to this global ethic that is now being born, or is already fully developed in many cases. Hence, any such religion or sect that denies this natural universal human right—from the point of view of the Kyoto Cosmos Club at least—is not “as good as” those who accept it. So one religion is definitely not “as good as the other.”
Looked at in a historical perspective, each religious symbol system of beliefs, practices, rites, and moral convictions arose independently of others which arose either in other times, or at least in other places, climates and cultural circumstances. Each religion or spiritual Way is true in the time and place in which it awakens faith and serious commitment in the hearts of many believers. Bellah, in declaring that religion itself was a valid symbolic form of truth, should be understood in this new framework. But we are ahead of ourselves. As a conclusion, let us now go back and trace Bellah’s argument carefully to see what he is and is not saying.
Robert Bellah was brought back to his early Protestant Christian faith primarily by Paul Tillich’s ideas, which took into account the scientific and philosophic thought of the twentieth century as they unfolded during his lifetime. This brought him out of his early anti-religious dedication to the Marxist-Communist worldview. Like Richard Dawkins’ faith in the “God Delusion,”[xi] this Marxist worldview inspires and continues to inspire a type of faith in the un-provable hypothesis that God does not exist; it combines this worldview with a set of noble moral values and commitments. Like Dawkins, Marxists and a host of other thinkers today, Bellah was in his early adulthood a believer in this anti-God brand of religious faith. With the help of Tillich’s and other believing thinkers, he returned to his earlier Protestant faith. It was in this context that he came to apply his friend Clifford Geertz’s ideas directly to his own and to others’ religious faith.
European thinkers—such as those in the tradition of the great Frankfurt School social theorist, Jurgen Habermas[xii] who argued against the soundness of religious modes of thought back in the 1970s—might be far less sanguine about this kind of daring break-through from the Enlightenment tradition’s rejection of religious faith. Both Bellah and I respect Habermas’ honest probing of the knotty problems that preoccupy the Kyoto Cosmos Club. Five years of living, studying, and teaching in Europe has taught me how different the European experience is from that of either the Americas or the Far East. Like so many of the intellectuals in Europe during the past decades, Bellah too has tasted the Marxist waters and existential absurdism of the past century. Bellah himself had enough admiration of Habermas’ own social scientific and philosophic thought to consider inviting him to join the sociology faculty at the University of California at Berkeley. Although we in the Kyoto Cosmos Club dare to once again unite the rational and scientific power of our world and ancient religious traditions, this does not mean that we deny that the ancient prophets and charismatic leaders who wrote or appear in religious texts and scriptures intended their revelations to be taken literally. Most of us simply believe that we now live in a world where the paradigms of truth—both scientific and religious—do change. And from within our own paradigm of religious truth we rejoice to know that most of these great religious heralds in fact agree on some extremely important moral and religious truths. The great world-encircling religious traditions generally agree that tolerance of the beliefs of others, mercy toward all who suffer, and love-compassion for all living beings are central truths. The bottom line, then, is that the human mind and heart needs both natural knowledge and a faith in a transcendent Ground of being in order to effectively hope and love.
[i] 1. Cf. Robert N. Bellah, in, Beyond Belief: Essays on Religion in a Post-Traditional World, “Between Religion and the Social Sciences,” 252-253, (New York: Harper and Row, 1970).
[ii] For Geertz’s best presentations of his ideas on religion as a symbol system, see, Clifford, Geertz, The Interpretation of Culture: Selected Essays,” Religion as a Cultural System,” p. 90, (New York:” Basic Books, 1973).
[iii] Thomas S. Kuhm, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, 2nd ed., (Chicago, Chicago University Press, 1970.
[iv] Ibid., Chapter Five, The Priority of Paradigms, 43-51.
[v] Roger Haight, Jesus Symbol of God, (Maryknoll, New York, Orbis Books, 2002)
[vi] Brian Swimme and Thomas Berry, The Universe Story, (San Francisco, Harper, 1994)
[vii] John Hick, A Christian Theology of Religions, (Louisville, Westminster/John Knox Press, 1995)
[viii] Shubert M. Ogden, Is there Only One True Religion, or Are There Many?, (Dallas, Southern Methodist Press, 1992)
[ix] Cf. For example, Hans Kung and David Tracy, Paradigm Change in Theology, (Edinburg, 1989)
[x] For an overview of the Global Ethic, see, Hans Kung, Global Responsibility: In Search of a New Global Ethic, (New York, Continuum, 1996), The United Nations and the World’s Religions: Prospects for a Global Ethic (Proceedings of a Conference held October 7, 1997 at Columbia University), eds, Michael Hays and Nancy Hodes (Boston: Boston Research Center for the 21st Century, 1995). See also, Hans Kung, A Global Ethc for Global Politics and Ecomonics, (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998.
[xi] Cf. Richard Dawkins, The God Delusion, (Boston & New York, Houghton Mifflin, 2006)
[xii] Habermas argued his point in a long exchange with Paul Ricour. This debate appears in the 1970 volume of the yearly journal, Continuum.
Morris J. Augustine, STD, Ph.D. is President of the Kyoto Cosmos Club. Recently retired Professor of Literature at Kansai University in Osaka, he holds doctorates in Catholic Theology and in History and Phenomenology of Religion with specialization in Buddhism. He spent thirteen years as a Benedictine monk and was ordained to the priesthood in 1960.