Confronting Religious Intolerance

Religious intolerance by the adherents of all of the major faiths are well documented. This is true for the Abrahamic faiths of Judaism, Christianity and Islam and also includes Hinduism and Buddhism amongst others.

Religious intolerance is rooted in the belief of the adherent that their specific belief system is the only path to salvation. This intolerance becomes overtly manifested when adherents commit intolerant acts and injustices against others in their service to God.

At the very root of the worst cases of intolerance, is the belief that the God worshiped by others is different than the God they worship.

There are three key steps for the adherent to conquer this deeply seeded religious intolerance:

1. The first step is to understand and accept that most religions worship the same God, the creator of the universe.
2. The second step is to understand and accept that each adherent seeks to curry similar favor and forgiveness from the same God through their respective worship practices.
3. The third step is to understand and accept that intolerance and injustice to other adherents comes at a perilous personal liability with God.

The path forward for the tolerant adherent is to embrace the diversity of worship as an opportunity to gain new perspectives that improve their relationship with God.

The challenge for all religious leaders is to rationalize this new tolerant perspective with the traditional superiority complex that disparages competing practices and beliefs.

The courageous adherents who embrace and promote this tolerant strain of their faith and actively confronts the traditional intolerant positions is the only way to evolve their belief system to be compatible with a modern multi-ethnic, multi-faith society. 

This is in fact the true path to serving God for every adherent and a better guarantee of success in this world and the hereafter.

Individualism, Truth and the Crisis of Modern Civilization

The following are selected passages from Rene Gueron’s, The Crisis of the Modern World, first published in 1942.  Guenon challenges our assumptions and provides an unparalleled perspective on the impact of individualism, our ability to perceive truth and the troubling crisis of our modern civilization.   No faith system seems to have been spared the corruption of this grand delusion and the path to understanding the truth of the cosmos seems only open to the most courageous aspirant armed with tools for dismantling the barriers that obscure real visibility. 

“By Individualism, we mean the negation of any principle higher than individuality, and the consequent reduction of civilization, in all of its branches, to purely human elements; fundamentally, therefore, individualism amounts to the same thing as what, at the time of the Renaissance, was called ‘humanism’; it is also the characteristic feature of the “profane point of view” as we have described it above. Indeed these are but different names for the same thing; and we have also shown that this “profane” outlook coincides with the anti-traditional outlook that lies at the root of all specifically modern tendencies. That is not to say, of course, that this outlook is entirely new; it had appeared in more or less pronounced forms in other periods, but its manifestations were always limited in scope and apart from the main trend, and they never went so far as to overrun the whole of a civilization, as has happened during the recent centuries of the West.

What has never been seen before is the erection of an entire civilization on something purely negative, on what indeed could be called the absence of principle; and it is this that gives the modern world its abnormal character and makes of it a sort of monstrosity, only to be understood if one thinks of it as corresponding to the end of a cyclical period, as we have already said.    Individualism, thus defined, is therefore the determining cause of the present decline of the West, precisely because it is, so to speak, the mainspring for the development of the lowest possibilities of mankind, namely those possibilities that do not require the intervention of any supra-human element and which, on the contrary, can only expand freely if every supra-human element be absent, since they stand at the antipodes of all genuine spirituality and intellectuality.

Individualism implies, in the first place, the negation of intellectual intuition – inasmuch as this is essentially a supra-individual faculty – and of the knowledge that constitutes the true province of this intuition, namely metaphysics understood in its true sense. That is why everything that modern philosophers understand by the word metaphysics – if they admit the existence of anything at all under this name – is completely foreign to real metaphysics; it consists indeed of nothing but rational constructs or imaginative hypotheses, and thus purely individual conceptions, most of which bear only on the domain of ‘physics’, or in other words of nature. Even if any question is touched upon that could really belong to the metaphysical order, the manner in which it is envisaged and treated reduces it to the level of ‘pseudo-metaphysics’, and precludes any real or valid solution.

It would seem, indeed, as if the philosophers are much more interested in creating problems, however artificial and illusory they may be, than in solving them; and this is but one aspect of the irrational love of research for its own sake, that is to say, of the most futile agitation in both the mental and the corporeal domains. It is also an important consideration for these philosophers to be able to put their name to a “system”, that is, to a strictly limited and circumscribed set of theories, which shall belong to them and be exclusively their creation; hence the desire to be original at all costs, even if truth should have to be sacrificed to this ‘originality’: a philosopher’s renown is increased more by inventing a new error than by repeating a truth that has already been expressed by others. This form of individualism, the begetter of so many ‘systems’ that contradict one another even when they are not contradictory in themselves, is to be found also among modern scholars and artists; but it is perhaps in philosophy that the intellectual anarchy to which it inevitably gives rise is most apparent.

In a traditional civilization it is almost inconceivable that a man should claim an idea as his own; and in any case, were he to do so, he would thereby deprive it of all credit and authority, reducing it to the level of a meaningless fantasy: if an idea is true, it belongs equally to all who are capable of understanding it; if it is false, there is no credit in having invented it.  A true idea cannot be ‘new’, for truth is not a product of the human mind; it exists independently of us, an all we have to do is to take cognizance of it; outside this knowledge there can be nothing buy error: but do the moderns on the whole care about truth, or do they even know what it is? 

Here again words have lost their meaning, inasmuch as some people – for instance contemporary pragmatists – go so far as to misappropriate the word “truth” for what is simply practical utility, that is to say for something that is quite foreign to the intellectual order. The logical outcome of the modern deviation is precisely the negation of truth, as well as of the intelligence of which truth is the object. But let us knot anticipate further, an on this point, merely say that the kind of individualism of which we have been speaking is the chief source of the illusion about the importance of so-called ‘great men’; to be a ‘genius’, in the profane sense of the word, amounts to very little, and is utterly incapable of making up for the lack of true knowledge.

As we are speaking of philosophy, we shall mention some of the consequences of individualism in this field, though without entering into every detail: first of all there was the negation of intellectual intuition and the consequent raising of reason above all else, this purely human and relative faculty being treated as the highest part of the intelligence, or even as coinciding with the whole of the intelligence; this is what constitutes rationalism, whose real founder was Descartes. This limitation of intelligence was however only a first stage; before long, reason itself was increasingly relegated to mainly practical functions, in proportion as applications began to predominate over such sciences as might still have kept a certain speculative character; and Descartes himself was already at heart much more concerned with these practical applications than with pure science. 

More than this: individualism inevitability implies naturalism, since all that lies beyond nature is, for that very reason, out of reach of the individual as such; naturalism and the negation of metaphysics are indeed but one and the same thing, and once intellectual intuition is no longer recognized, no metaphysics is any longer possible; but whereas some persist in inventing a ‘pseudo-metaphysics’ of one kind or another, others – with greater frankness – assert its impossibility; form this has arisen ‘relativism’ in all its forms, whether it be the ‘criticism’ of Kant or the ’positivism’ of Auguste Comte; and since reason itself is quite relative, and can deal validly only with a domain that is equally relative, it is true to say that ‘relativism’ is the only logical outcome of rationalism. 

By this means, however, rationalism was to bring about its own destruction: ‘nature’ and ‘becoming’, as we said above, are in reality synonymous; a consistent naturalism can therefore only be one of the ‘ philosophies of becoming’, already mentioned. Of which the specifically modern type is evolutionism; it was precisely this that finally turned against rationalism, by accusing reason of being unable to deal adequately, on the one hand, with what is solely change and multiplicity, and, on the other, with the indefinite complexity of sensible phenomena.

…

The digression into which we have been led by our review of the manifestation of individualism in the religious field does not seem unjustified, for it shows that the evil, in this domain, is even more serious and widespread than might at first sign be supposed, moreover, it is not really foreign to the question we are considering, upon which our last remark directly bears, for it is individualism that everywhere sponsors the spirit of debate. It is difficult to make our contemporaries see that there are things, which by their very nature cannot be discussed.

Modern man, instead of attempting to raise himself to truth, seeks to drag truth down to his own level, which is doubtless the reason why there are so many who imagine, when one speaks to them of ‘traditional sciences’, or even of pure metaphysics, that one is speaking only of ‘profane science’ and of ‘philosophy’. It is always possible to hold discussions within the realm of individual opinion, as this does not go beyond the rational order, and it is easy to find more or less valid arguments on both sides of a question when there is no appeal to any higher principle. Indeed, in many cases, discussion can be carried on indefinitely without philosophy is built up on quibbles and badly-framed questions.

Far from clearing up these question, as it is commonly supposed to do, discussion usually only entangles or obscures them still further, and its commonest result is for each participant, in trying to convert his opponent, to become more firmly wedded to his own opinion, and to enclose himself in it more exclusively than ever.  The real motive is not the wish to attain to knowledge of the truth, but to prove oneself right in spite of opposition, or at least, if one cannot convince others, to convince oneself of one’s own rightness – though failure to convince other nevertheless causes regret, in view of the craving for ‘proselytism’ that is one of the characteristic features of the modern Western mentality.  

Sometimes individualism, in the lowest and most vulgar sense of the word, is manifested in a still more obvious way, as in the desire that is frequently shown to judge a man’s work by what is known of his private life, as though there could be any sort of connection between the two. The same tendency, combined with a mania for detail, is also responsible for the interest shown in the smallest peculiarities in the lives of ‘great men’ and for the illusion that all that they have done can be explained by a sort of ‘psycho-physiological’ analysis; all this is very significant for anyone who wishes to understand the real nature of the contemporary mentality. “

  

Al-Ghazali's "The Ninety Nine Beautiful Names Of God - Aim Of The Book"

Al-Ghazali's 12th century treatise on the ninety-nine names of God is unrivalled in its purity of analysis and explanation where each name is analyzed and described consistently according to strict criteria. Below is his explanation and preface to this 180 odd page work from the philosopher and writer who has shaped Judaism (Maimonides), Christianity (St Thomas Aquinas) and Islam's understanding of man's relationship with his Creator. 

"In the Name of God the Infinitely Good, the Merciful. 

Praise be to God, alone in His majesty and His might, and unique in His sublimity and His everlastingness, who clips the wings of intellects well short of the glow of His glory, and who makes the way of knowing Him pass through the inability to know Him; who makes the tongues of the eloquent fall short of praising the beauty of His presence unless they use the means by which He praises Himself, and use His names and attributes which He has enumerated. and may blessings be upon Muhammad, the best of His creatures, and on his companions and his family. 

Now, a brother in God - great and glorious - to answer whom is a religious duty, has asked me to elucidate the meanings of the most beautiful names of God. His questions were incessant, and made me take one step forward and another backward, hesitating between heeding his inquiry and so satisfying the duty of brother lines, or declining his request by following the way of caution and deciding not to venture into danger, for human powers fall far short of attaining this goal. 

How else could it be? For two things deter a discerning person from plunging into such a sea. First of all, the matter itself represents a lofty aspiration, difficult to attain and uncertain of accomplishment. for it is at the highest summit and represents the farthest of goals, such that minds are bewildered by it and the sight of intellects falls far short of its principles, not to mention its farthest reaches. How could human powers follow the way of investigation and scrutiny regarding the divine attributes? Can the eyes of bats tolerate the light of the sun?

The second deterrent: declaring the essence of the truth all but contradicts whatever the collectivity has hitherto believed. Now weaning creatures from their habits and familiar beliefs is difficult, and the threshold of truth is too exalted to be broached by all or to be sought after except by lone individuals. The nobler the thing sought after the less help there is. Whoever mixes with people is right to be cautious; but it is difficult for one who has seen the truth to pretend not to have seen it. For one who does not know God - great and glorious - silence is inevitable, while for one who knows God most high, silence is imposed. So it is said: 'for one who knows God, his tongue is dulled'. But the sincerity of the original request, together with its persistence, overcame these excuses. So I asked God - great and glorious - to facilitate what is right and be liberal in rewarding by His graciousness and His benevolence and His abundant generosity; for He is the liberal and generous One, indulgent to His servants."

Translation by David B. Burrell and Nizeh Dahler. the Islamic Texts Society. 1992. 

Truthfulness will set you free

Truthfulness, and not the truth, will set you free.  Truthfulness starts with being truthful to one's self internally.

"the "unconscious" is the locus of the all the ways I have lied to myself…my unconscious is the locus of my insincerity, of my being less than truthful with myself, less than truthful about my subjective depth, my interior status, my deep desires and intentions.  The unconscious is the locus of the lie.

The example we used was "sad" and "mad" about an absent father. What that means is that at some point early in my life, I started interpreting anger as depression. Perhaps I was enraged at my father for not being around. This rage, however, is very dangerous for a child. What if this rage could actually kill my father? Perhaps I had better not have this anger, because after all I love my father. So I'm angry at myself instead. I beat myself up instead.  I'm rotten, no good, wretched to the core. This is very depressing. I started out mad, now I'm calling it sad.

One way or another, I have misinterpreted my interior, I have distorted my depth. I have started calling anger "sadness". And I carry this lie around with me. I cannot be truthful with myself because that would involve such great pain - to want to kill the father I love - so I would rather lie about the whole thing. And so this I do. My "shadow", my "unconscious", is now the locus of this lie, the focal point of this insincerity, the inner place that I hide from myself.

And because I lie to myself - and then forget it is a lie - then I will lie to you without even knowing it. I will probably even seem very sincere about it.  In fact, if I have thoroughly lied to myself, I will honestly think I'm telling the truth. And if you give me a lie detector test, it will show that I'm telling the "truth".  So much for empirical tests.

Finally, because I have misinterpreted my own depth, I will often misinterpret yours. I am cutting something off in my own depth - I am dissociating it, or repressing it, or alienating it - and so I will distort interpretations from that depth, both in myself and in others.  My interpretations will be laced with lies, nested in insincerity. I will misinterpret myself, and I will often misinterpret you."

- Ken Wilber, A Brief History of Everything. 2nd Edition. 2001

Shirk Alert: Pope's Brother Confirms Pagan Practices Widespread Amongst Catholics and Society

In a recent article quoting Monsignor Georg Ratzinger's new book, My Brother The Pope, he remarked that “an almost pagan way of life has taken root” amongst many of today’s Catholics and others in society.

The observation was that remembering and thanking God for His daily gifts were absent in most people’s lives today. “It starts with sitting down at table and beginning a meal without even thinking about prayer, an it ends with no longer coming to church regularly”.

The article includes another interesting personal fact that Monsignor Ratzinger and his brother grew up in a devoutly Catholic household where the family would pray daily to St Dismas, a “good thief” who allegedly died alongside Jesus on the cross, to protect their father, a policeman.  Praying to some other entity than God for protection is a clear instance of major Shirk.

Many of us are guilty of taking God’s daily gifts for granted. What does God have to do with getting paid for being smart and having a great life? We are blind to God’s mercy and grace in our success, much less be thankful to him.  Herein lies the path to minor shirk for the unaware.   

The illustration of a family praying to some other entity for protection, a former thief in this case, is an illustration of major Shirk and a clear violation of the First Commandment.  Many who pray to saints and entities other than God will not dispute the supremacy of God but argue that their lowly spiritual station in life as a result of sinfulness requires a spiritual intermediary who is a more keen and sympathetic listener than God and would make their case better heard with God. 

These beliefs assume that the once human saint’s spirit was conferred extraordinary powers by God to match the desires of the humans who conferred sainthood on him. The very idea of this is a clear example of major Shirk.

There is a place for great men and saints in our prayers. We ask God to bless them and have mercy on them and their families for the great and good things they did in their lives.  If those great souls are informed of our prayers, they may reciprocate a request to God in our favor.  

There is no disputing the good and great deeds of the saints or prophets and the desire to remember and honor them. The issue is not if but how it should be done in our prayers where the major caveat is to avoid committing shirk.

To those whose religious traditions include the mention of saints, prophets and holy men in your prayers, please take care of your intentions and beliefs before God. Beware violating the First Commandment.

Aspirancy, the Preliminaries of Spiritual Stuggle, and the Path of Discipline

“Be it known unto you that the man who has in all certainty beheld the harvest of the Afterlife with his heart must needs aspire to it, and must long for it and follow its ways, despising thereby the pleasure and delights which this world contains. For the man who has a bauble will lose all desire for it when he spies a precious gem, and will long to make an exchange. Lack of desire for the harvest of the Afterlife and the meeting with God (Exalted is He!) is the outcome of a lack of faith in God and in the Last Day. Now, I do not mean by “faith” the discourse of the soul” and the movement made by the tongue when pronouncing the Two Testimonies in a way which is devoid of any sincerity or single heartedness, for this would be equivalent to believing that the gem were better than the bauble while knowing its name alone, and not its reality. Such a believer will not renounce the bauble, having grown accustomed to it, and will harbor no passionate yearning for the gem.

The obstacle which bars us from attaining to God is therefore our lack of wayfaring, and this in turn proceeds from a lack of aspirancy, this being the result of an absence of faith, which is in turn the consequence of a lack of guides and of people who might remind one, and who know about God (Exalted is He!) and will lead one along the path to Him, who give men to realize the baseness and impermanence of this world and the great import and everlasting duration of the next. Mankind is in a state of heedlessness, having plunged into the desires of this world and fallen deep into slumber, and there is not a single scholar of the Faith who is working to arouse it from this plight.

Should anyone happened to awake he will find himself incapable of following the Path because of his ignorance, when he questions the scholars about it he finds them to be far removed from it and disposed instead towards their own whims. Thus it is that weakness in aspirancy, ignorance of the Path, and the self-interested discourses pronounced by the scholars, are the causes of the present absence of wayfarers on the Path of God (Exalted is He!). If the objective be veiled, the guide absent, worldly desire predominant and the seeker heedless, then attaining unto him is an impossibility and the Paths must needs fall into desuetude.

But should it happen that a man awake, either of his own accord or by virtue of the activity of another, and aspire to the commerce and harvest of the Afterlife, he should be aware that there are diverse requirements which must be observed at the outset of aspirancy, and that there exists a place of refuge and a fortress within which he must defend himself if he is to be safe from those highwaymen who would obstruct him, and likewise that there are duties which he must perform while on his journey without cease.

The requirements of aspirancy which must be observed pertain to the lifting of the veil and the barrier which lies between one and the truth. For mankind has been deprived of the Truth by reason of a successive establishment of veils and the presence of a barrier on the Path.  God (Exalted is He!) has said, And We have set a barrier before them and a barrier behind them, and have covered them so that they cannot see (Quran XXXVI:9)

Now the ‘barrier’ which lies between the aspirant and the Truth is constituted of four things: wealth, status, imitation, and sin. The veil of wealth can be lifted only by divesting oneself of it so that no more than the necessary quantity thereof remains.”

 ~ An excerpt from Al-Ghazali’s 12^th century treatise on Disciplining the Soul, 22.11, translated by T.J. Winter, University of Cambridge. 1995.  

The Simple Believer - Purifying Man's Relationship with God

The following is a simple view of monotheism and the belief in a single God, the Creator of the Universe and all things since and after.

Politics, competition, bigotry and bias aside, we believe that it is important to have a pure relationship with God regardless of which worship system you were born into or choose to adhere to.

In an age of confusion, seeing and understanding the truth is elusive. Understanding the fundamental truth, that we are all a creation of a single God and given an opportunity to exist in our own moments in time on this tiny yet perfect rock in the midst of a grand explosion, is the critical starting place.

We will never understand it all. How could a three dimensional brain comprehend and see a universe with eleven or more dimensions? Even if we figure out the math, we would be a long way off from making sense of the whole picture. The part of reality we can comprehend is clouded with the fantasies and speculations of selfish human agendas.

How do we know we are not an accident? Well we've had repeated messengers and prophets bearing the same message from the Creator with scriptures that resonate logically with everything we can observe and describe scientifically and mathematically.  Yes, we have also corrupted most of the messages and scriptures to suit our own selfish agendas but lots have been and is being said about this by others.

With this macro perspective, the following is an attempt to focus on and purify a person's relationship with God, his Creator in an effort to be a simple believer who lives according to Gods' natural laws.

We need to be cognizant about the politics and corrupt agendas of men that manifest itself in every conceivable way. We must be able to distinguish between our personal, direct relationship with our Creator from the culture of the "faithful", from the corrosive politics of religion and from those that seek to profit from religion.

All of these detract from man's real relationship with God which is a very personal process that improves the way a person relates to their family, community, colleagues and society.  It is important to note that while many follow different worship systems, each person's faith is a reflection of their particular interpretation of the worship system of their choice.  The enduring nature of many of the world's worship systems is a testament to the eternal truth revealed to them by the same Creator.

Getting closer to God and purifying this relationship requires the embracing of a pure theology of simple monotheism that looks past the competitive politics of the different worship systems.

 From the perspective of the Abrahamic faiths, Judaism with the Old Testament can be considered Version 1.0. Christianity and the teachings of Jesus Christ with the New Testament would be Version 2.0 and Islam with the Koran revealed to the Prophet Muhammad would be the Final Testament and Version 3.0.  God's natural laws can be understood from them all.

God has sent humanity many righteously guided Prophets and Messengers as conduits for His knowledge and guidance which has always been the same:

1. Believe in God
2. Be thankful to Him
3. Be just to others
4. Be charitable to the needy

Pure theology is concerned with man's relationship with God and relies on divine Scriptures for guidance. The objective is to be a simple believer whose primary objective is to live a free, happy, successful and peaceful life in accordance with God's natural laws.

The real worship is mostly individual, private and meditative. It is manifested in our daily conduct with family, colleagues, community and society.  Guidance and an understanding of God's natural laws can be found in all of the Scriptures. It's interesting to cross check the Old, New and Final Testaments on rulings.

So next time you get disheartened by the conduct and opinions of members of your own faith and are subject to the corrosive politics of faith, focus on what really counts - your relationship with God. Don't throw the baby out with the bathwater. Its people that are the problem and your relationship with God that really matters to you succeeding in life.