Memetic Mutation

I am always surprised by the extant to which a religion can change without any alteration of the original source material.  I understand that evolution with the social structures of the time are vital for any religion that wants to survive past the nascent cult stage and become self perpetuating, but what tends to stand out most in my mind is the forced evolution undergoes when it is being twisted towards a political end.

Back towards the beginning of the course we talked about how religion is one of a number of categories (along with politics, nationality, and economic status) by which people order their lives to varying degrees of adherence.  In our modern society we strive to keep these circles separate, or at least we used to.   There was a time in the past when they overlapped considerably more, a time which is starting again as which are primarily economic in nature are being cast in a religious light.  The occupation and attempted liberation of Ireland, the war in the Middle East, etc.  Religion overlaps with political and social life so thoroughly that any alteration in them first requires an alteration to the overlaying religion.  It is from this process that the Crusades and the Jihad of the Sword were unleashed upon the world. (I will not attempt to categorize or define the various types of Jihad here but suffice to say that jihad can be both an external physical struggle and an internal spiritual one).  Most religions emphasis peace and harmony (they have to, in order to be able to provide a functional basis for society) but once they are the social norm they inevitably start to spit out warriors.

The dangerous thing to my mind about all of these situations is that they create feedback loops.  Politics in influenced by religion, which in turn is altered to fit political needs and both of them warp society correspondingly.

Where will it all end I wonder?

External Pressures

When I was reading about the life of Baha' u' llah, I noticed that most of the impetuous for the religion to declare itself  separate from mainstream Islam came in the form of outside persecution.

In the beginning,  the Babi faith (and the Bahai faith following it) were just reactions to perceived inadequacies or injustices in the way that the prevailing religious and political structures of the time.   They seem to be mostly nebulous at first, only gaining structure when the authorities started to crack down on it.  In fact, the faith seemed to grow even faster when it's adherents were getting rounded up or killed.

This seems to be a common feature with religious thought.  Judaism, Christianity, Islam, etc all seem to undergo the most growth (both in terms of number of followers and in terms of the strength with which they clung to their beliefs).

I think that an emerging religion needs two things:  First it needs a strong leader to act as a central focus for the attentions of the flock, since God only very rarely makes a physical appearance these days.  Second it needs external pressures and hardships.  If they lack the first then a budding religion crumbles when it is exposed to opposition, never being able to form a united front and provide a long-lasting continuity.  If they lack the second, on the other hand, they never really have the motivation to congeal into an organized group, rather than just a movement of people with similar ideals.

God gets better signal in the wilderness.

One thing that struck me about the video we watched for Wednesday was the Boboshanti's idea that physical isolation enhanced their abilities to perform those tasks which in their mind are required by God (or Jah, to use their term).

This is a tendency which has cropped up in religions around the world centuries, if not millennia. Hermits take to the wilds, taking nothing with them, in the belief that physical proximity to their fellow man somehow distances one from God, as though humans emit some kind of signal which interferes with God's messages.

The Christian hermits are perhaps the best known, but the same instinct can be found in Hinduism, Islam, Buddhism, etc.  And it goes even further than that.  When one actually examines the religious texts in question we find that the greatest prophets received their most important revelations while they where in the wilds, removed from society.  Jesus walked the desert, Buddha became a beggar, the great prophets of the Jewish tradition were vagabonds.

I really wonder where this disdain for our own society comes from, this conviction that our day to day life is somehow ungodly unless an attempt is made to distance ones self from its trappings.

Monastic Rastafari

The vision of Rastafari which is presented in this video seems to bear the same relation to the main religion that the monasteries in Europe bore to Christianity.  They follow a specific interpretation of the faith which emphasizes closeness to God in direct proportion to isolation from worldly concerns. 

Superficially it is the same, sharing the main symbols of the Rastafari faith (repatriation back to ethiopia, escape from the evils of the world, etc) but there is a fundamental difference in the approach to dealing with Babylon.

Marley's particular brand of Rastafari is very proactive, actively seeking to alleviate the conditions of Babylon by using music to alter the minds of the people, and thus by extension the society they live in.  Marley's Rastafari seeks to change the entire world.

The Boboshanti on the other hand seem to have a more inward focus.  They are concerned with extracting themselves (and their families) from the Babalonyian system and are prepared to do without the benefits of society in order to do so.  Within the context of their community they maintain a high level of social contact but the community itself imposes an isolation on them by simple virtue of geography.

Both of these approaches are valid ways for dealing with the corrupting influence of Babylon but I can't help but think that Marley's was more effective.  The Boboshanti may have achieved

their goal of a deeper connection with their faith but Marley's music has done far more to spread the message of Rastafari to those who would otherwise not have heard it.

Your Religion Leveled Up!

During my research concerning Ethiopia I happened to chance upon a relatively minor reference to a faith called the Baha'i, which had  a fair number of followers there.  Further research revealed that Baha'i is a religion with Islamic roots (in much the same way that Christianity has Jewish roots) that purports to being the most appropriate religion for the modern world (which is an odd way of putting it, but more or less in line with the claims of most other religion).

It's attitude towards other religions is where it gets interesting, however.  Rather than denounce other faiths as false, they believe that each of them was a sort of update, a new covenant between God and the world which was socially and spiritually appropriate to that time and place.  Jesus, Buddha, Muhammad, etc, are each viewed as Messengers of God, who each arrived to teach a way of life which was closer to God's truth than the last one (since God is too great for a human to comprehend, all religions are just approximations which become gradually more correct with each successive generation.

Though they believe that their religion is the most correct, the still choose to trace their lineage to every other religion in the world, emphasizing the unity of human religious experience.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bahá%27í_Faith

Ethiopia

The origin tale of Ethiopia underscores the long-standing continuity of existence which it has enjoyed, both in terms of a nation and a culture.   The early Ethiopians adopted certain Judeo-Christian customs and adapted them to their own lifestyle.  This had the effect of making them more resistant to alteration caused by the influx of missionaries and religious invaders which other African nations had to contend with.

Since they were already following "civilized" religion, there was no excuse to invade "for their own good."  Thus, what they have done can be construed as some sort of spiritual inoculation, taking in something in order to become acclimatized to it and avoid being overwhelmed at a later date.

A Green God

Rabbi Zalman, a proponent of Eco-Kosher

With all of the fuss over the fluctuations in the economy, the political strife into which we have been embroiled abroad, and the passing of the political torch at home it cannot be denied that we are living in a time of changes, both good and bad.

One of the most eye-catching, at least for me, is the stance being taken by a large number of fairly conservative religious leaders on a subject which eventually has an effect on every man, woman, and child on the planet: the environment.

For a long time religious leaders have stayed quite on the subject or have followed their (usually conservative) politics on the subject, meaning that most advocate for environmental preservation were either more or less religious or in some way affiliated with New Age thought (a mode of spiritual expression which finds little traction with the more staunch proponents of religion in our country).  This, combined with their over the top demonstration tactics, had the side effect of relegating most of them to the status of crack-pots in the eyes of many Americans.

Now however, religious leaders from many different faiths are starting to speak up in favor of environmental preservation (or at least awareness) and starting to put their weight behind a lot of environmental reform.  Their rational for this actually makes a lot of sense and basically boils down to:  "God gave us stewardship over the Earth, so we should damn well watch over it."

This is a development which I find to be greatly positive, the bulk of the religious establishment utilizing their influence in a beneficial way that is helpful to all.

http://kosherfood.about.com/od/kosherbasics/a/ecokosher.htm

http://www.pbs.org/moyers/moyersonamerica/green/environment.html

That Voodoo That You Do

Reading the article on conceptual blending got me thinking about syncretism the blending of religion in general, the evolution that a faith undergoes when it encounters another.  Of particular interest to me is Voodoo, both the Haitian variety and that practiced in Louisiana. 

African slaves, faced with the destruction of their culture and their religion by their new masters found a way to blend their old ways with those of Catholicism and the local Indians, creating a religion which both met their spiritual needs and was able to pass undetected (or at least mostly unmolested) while surrounded on all sides by a hostile and alien faith.

This syncretism is the ultimate test of the strength of a religion.  Nothing in this world can remain static without eventually falling into stagnation and dying out.  Neither is it possible to avoid encounters with alien modes of thought or speech.  Thus, true long term survival demands adaptation and change.

A good metaphor for this phenomenon would be the composition of glass versus steel.  Glass is technically harder than steel, with stiffer molecular bonds.  But this makes it brittle.  When steel is struck with enough force to damage it, it bends and dents, becoming partially deformed but remaining essentially intact.  Glass, on the other hand, shatters at the first blow.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Syncretic

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Louisiana_Voodoo

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hoodoo_(folk_magic)

Toss it all in the Blender

The idea of conceptual blending is useful because it allows us to draw meaningful comparisons between otherwise unrelated or incompatible religious dialogues.  It also allows us to more easily transmit ideas from one person to another.

One of the most important aspects of religion is that it is self-perpetuating, with each new generation being inculcated in the religious beliefs of their elders.  This is usually the area where problems crop up, however, since as of yet there is no known method to transfer ideas directly from one head to another.  Our words, which serve us so well for real world phenomena, become less useful for discussing events and forces which are by definition outside of our frame of reference, a situation complicated by the differing values which are attached to some words by different people. 

Blending allows teachers to take large, difficult concepts and break them down into a simple format which is more readily comprehensible to their listeners.  This can eliminate much of the confusion associated with religious thought, which often deals with extremely complex ideas, which in term can serve to bring people of different creeds closer together, by showing them the similarities between their modes of thought.

The possible drawback, of course, is the fact that sometimes the message is over-blended, lost in whatever allegory or rhetorical formula is being used.  This is problematic to both the uninitiated, who are driven away by obscure or poorly explained dogma, and to the faithful, who can often draw the wrong message entirely from their sources.