Marjorie in Qatar

I was recently asked why I stopped considering myself Buddhist. My response:

The first answer that popped into my mind was the last few lines of a poem by the iconoclastic Zen monk Ikkyu:
To harden into a Buddha is wrong;
All the more I think so
When I look at a stone Buddha.

To answer the question more completely, I think I have to recount my whole progression from where I was four years ago (which was, to recap, a panentheist progressive Christian who practiced Buddhist meditation) to where I am now (an atheist), because I think being a Buddhist was just a brief way station along that path.

One of the main things I learned about myself by living in a Muslim country is that my worldview is fundamentally a naturalistic one. My Muslim friends' belief in jinn and witchcraft seemed painfully off-base to me, not because I thought they believed in the wrong set of supernatural forces while Christians believe in the correct supernatural forces, but because I really don't believe in supernatural forces at all. I've never believed in angels or miracles, for example; I haven't believed in an afterlife since I was 12; and I don't know how many years it's been since I believed in a personal God in the sense of a discrete, anthropomorphic being "out there" who influences the goings-on of our universe. I nonetheless believed in some sort of ineffable divinity, and in a Western, mostly secular country, it's fairly easy to overlay some vague belief in the Ground of Being on top of an otherwise naturalist metaphysic and call that Christianity.

Encountering religious people (both Muslim and otherwise) who really fundamentally believe in the existence and power of supernatural forces, though, made me come to terms with the fact that I'm not one of those people. And, to be honest with myself, I had to admit that the kind of worldview espoused by the Scriptures and church tradition was also a supernatural one, despite the efforts of Tillich, Robinson, Spong, et al. to update the Christian understanding of God in the light of a modern worldview that rejects supernaturalism. It began to bother me that I spent half my time in church affixing mental footnotes to every creed I recited or hymn I sang -- for example, mentally noting that by "Christ" I meant "the spirit of compassion and self-sacrifice" rather than "that dude named Jesus who lived a long time ago." I got tired of the mental gymnastics necessary for me to affirm the things Christians affirm.

One day I sat down in the library to read Tillich's "Christianity and the Encounter of the World Religions" and read the sentence: "It is natural and unavoidable that Christians affirm the fundamental assertion of Christianity that Jesus is the Christ and reject what denies this assertion." Even though I've certainly read more thoughtful and well-reasoned expositions of the relationship between Christianity and other religions (most notably Diana Eck's in Encountering God), somehow that sentence was my proverbial straw that broke the camel's back. Even Tillich claimed that "Jesus is the Christ" is the "fundamental assertion of Christianity," and that's just not something I could assert without all those aforementioned mental footnotes. I realized that if I was finding Paul "The god of theism is dead" Tillich impossibly conservative, I should really stop pretending the wide umbrella of Christianity could (or should) extend as far as where I now stood. In that instant, sitting in the religion section of the CMU library, I realized I wasn't going to call myself a Christian anymore. The thought felt like vertigo, but I also felt the weight of all those mental footnotes lift.

I didn't leave Buddhism in the same instant because reconciling Buddhism with my otherwise secular worldview didn't require the same mental gymnastics. I always appreciated that Buddhism focuses pragmatically on how to alleviate suffering rather than on metaphysics, that the Buddha doesn't seem to have cared about whether there was a god or not, that the Buddha taught that we should test his teachings against our own experience and reason instead of blindly following set doctrine. Because of these things, practicing Buddhism as a secular person didn't feel dishonest or disingenuous.

But as I started to practice meditation more often and listen to weekly dharma talks, it dawned on me that Buddhism is hardly free of dogma. Its teachings on the afterlife are both as central to its teachings and as implausible as Christianity's, for example. And, in practice, the vast majority of Buddhists in the world practice a supernatural religion, whether they are superstitiously chanting the name of the Amitabha Buddha or undergoing body mutilation in order to channel the emperor-gods -- or offering food to the hungry ghosts, as I myself did at a Zen retreat 3 years ago. It's possible to practice Buddhism without these things, just like it was possible for me to practice Christianity without believing in an afterlife, but then we're back to mental gymnastics.

Ethics is a good example of this. I think the Five Precepts are a better guide to ethical behavior than the Ten Commandments. But why do I think that? I am measuring both sets of rules against my internal sense of what kinds of behaviors do and don't cause harm to others, and the Precepts seem like a better approximation of what secular ethical reasoning suggests. But then, if my fundamental yardstick is the utilitarian one, then I don't need the Five Precepts any more than I need the Ten Commandments; I just need to employ ethical reasoning. So why not cut out the middleman, as Sam Harris puts it, and do what I think is right instead of trying to find a religion whose moral code approximates what I already think is right.

On a deeper level, though, I think I stopped practicing Buddhism because I stopped craving the things that I had looked to it to provide. I was initially drawn to Buddhist practice because it seemed to hold out the promise of inner peace and the power to still your own chattering monkey mind. To a naturally anxious kind of person like me those sound heavenly. Another way of saying this is that I wanted to use Buddhism as a tool to help me become the person I felt I ought to be. (I think now that this is a very un-Buddhist reason to practice Buddhism -- although I'd still like to hear an answer to the question I asked of that Zen monk three years ago: isn't the desire to extinguish our cravings itself a craving?) Somehow, perhaps as I've gotten older and a little less insecure, I feel less need to fight the way my mind works on its own. I no longer feel like I *ought* to have one-pointed mind; I have monkey mind because I am descended from monkey ancestors, and on the whole a distractable psyche has served our lineage well. One day I realized that cravings and attachments bring me most of the joys I experience as well as most of the suffering, and that I'm actually not all that interested in extinguishing them after all. So I took off my dharmachakra necklace and prayer beads and stopped calling myself a Buddhist. I still have warm feelings towards Buddhism: my dharmachakra and fo zhu are still at the top of my jewelry box; I'm reading Confessions of a Buddhist Atheist right now; just yesterday I idly looked up the closest zendo to my new house. But I don't want to harden into a stone Buddha; I just want to be a flesh-and-blood Marjorie.

Which somehow reminds me of another poem I love, Mary Oliver's "Wild Geese," which I think comes closest to summarizing my current perspective on spirituality:

You do not have to be good.
You do not have to walk on your knees
for a hundred miles through the desert, repenting.
You only have to let the soft animal of your body
love what it loves.
Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.
Meanwhile the world goes on.
Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain
are moving across the landscapes,
over the prairies and the deep trees,
the mountains and the rivers.
Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air,
are heading home again.
Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,
the world offers itself to your imagination,
calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting--
over and over announcing your place
in the family of things.

"Every religion has its share of extremists," said the speaker at a lecture I attended today, arguing against the idea that Islam is particularly supportive of extremism or terrorism. It's a common platitude, especially around here. The audience nodded along.

I can understand the desire to defend Islam from such accusations, but this particular defense always seems a little feeble to me. Every religion? Really? Where are the Shinto extremists, then? Where are the Tibetan Buddhist suicide bombers? The Baha'i jihadis?

It seems to me that proponents of Islam have to come up with a better story of why 90% of organizations involved in suicide bombings self-identify as Muslim. There are a number of explanations out there (including the one in that article) that don't hinge on Islam itself being responsible. Some of those explanations might be interesting to hear about and discuss. But "every religion has its share of extremists"? -- that's just a cop-out.

So what do you think: are there circumstances in which it's fair to hold a religion responsible for the misbehavior of its adherents? If so, what are those circumstances?

Today is the first day of Ramadan. I wish fortitude to all my fasting friends!

My favorite Ramadan moment was the first day of Ramadan two years ago; it's one of my quintessential Doha memories.

On the morning of the first day of Ramadan I made myself tea in the faculty kitchen and then ducked into my friend Paul's office to drink it in secret. A few moments later Doug walked in, looking nonchalant, his hands thrust deep into the pockets of his fleece jacket. After kicking the door closed behind him, he carefully pulled a large mug of coffee out of his pocket.

We were laughing at the lengths we were going to to hide our haram consumption of liquids when there was a knock at the door. John Barr, a CS professor, poked his head in. His trademark hat was in his hands, with the brim held together like it was a purse. Cautiously looking left and right, he opened it with a flourish. It was full of homemade chocolate chip cookies.

Ramadan, at least as practiced by an almost-entirely Muslim society, is all about building a sense of fellow-feeling among those who are enduring the same hardships together. That morning, sharing furtive cookies and tea with my friends behind closed doors, I got a little of that Ramadan community spirit too.

A friend asked me for a recommended reading list on religion. That's a daunting task, and I'm sure there are a lot of great books I've forgotten to include -- not to mention all the great ones I've never even read. Some of the religions are woefully underrepresented, too. However, of the books I've read on religious studies and theology, here are my favorites.

(Ones I don't have with me in Doha are grayed out. I also can't find Faith and Belief or Remedial Christianity -- did I lend them to one of you?)

( Cut for extreme length )

So what about you guys -- if you had to recommend a handful of books on religion, what would you recommend?

Over 200,000 people have recently signed an online petition asking for pictures of the Prophet Mohammad to be removed from Wikipedia.

The petition says:

"In Islam picture of Prophet Muhammad (PBUH) and other Humans are not allowed. But Wikipedia editors are showing illustrations with face illustrated and face is veiled or white washed. But still they are offensive to Muslims. I request all brothers and sisters to sign this petitions so we can tell Wikipedia to respect the religion and remove the illustrations."

Leaving aside the ridiculousness of petitioning a wiki to remove content, and of asking non-Muslims to abide by the Sunnah, let's focus on the ridiculousness of the petitioners' choice of targets. The picture specifically mentioned in the petition, reprinted above, is from an 11th century book by al-Biruni, an 11th century Muslim scientist. Apparently the petitioners are unaware that Shi'a Islam has a long and vibrant history of depicting the Prophet. (And al-Biruni wasn't himself even Shia.)

Of even more interest are the bogeymen implicated by the outraged Muslims. In his blog, the originator of the petition blames this portrayal of the Prophet on "west European and Atheist" Wikipedia admins. In the associated Facebook group someone commented, "THIS IS DEFINATELY THE ACT OF JEWS FUCK U MOTHER FUCKER ASSHOLES."

Apparently Jews and/or atheists are traveling back in time to eleventh century Persia to produce Muslim devotional artwork. Funny old world, isn't it?

A cache of photos of very early Qur'ans manuscripts containing the Qur'an [see comments], thought to have been destroyed in World War II, has just come to light, according to the Wall Street Journal.

Apparently, in the 1920s and 30s, European scholars of Arabic traveled around the Muslim world, painstakingly photographing the oldest Qur'ans they could find. The oldest of these apparently dates from 700, which is pretty dang old for a Qur'an, given that the form of the book was standardized under Caliph Uthman in 650. German scholars are now undertaking a several-decade-long research project to compare these texts and see what they find out.

The Christian world has a longstanding tradition of textual criticism -- comparing ancient manuscripts against each another and coming up with heuristics about which variant is more likely to be original. Some of these heuristics include: early manuscripts are more reliable than late ones; readings that appear in geographically diverse manuscripts are more reliable than readings that appear only in one region; passages are more likely to be simplified than obfuscated; explanatory passages are more likely to be added than removed. To see textual criticism in action, check your nearest Bible for John 5:4. Unless you've got a King James Version, you're not going to find it: since that verse only appears in relatively late, Byzantine manuscripts, translations more recent than the KJV have decided it isn't an authentic Bible verse at all.

Such textual criticism doesn't exist in the Muslim tradition. It's an article of faith in Islam that the Qur'an is uncreated and unchanging, and thus that a Qur'an from 700 AD would be absolutely identical to the Qur'an sitting on my bookshelf, except that it would lack the dots that disambiguate many letters, e.g. ب from ت from ث, and also of course all the short vowels. I suspect the average Muslim would see the very existence of textual criticism in the West as evidence that the Bible is a corrupted scripture (silly Christians can't even agree on what their scripture says!). The application of these methods to the Qur'an is generally rather unwelcome.

So it will be interesting to see how this new find plays out. It's obviously going to be plenty controversial; you can tell that simply from the fact that more recent attempts by non-Muslim scholars to undertake a similar photo project resulted in the Yemeni government confiscating all the photos. The WSJ article quotes a Moroccan scholar as saying that this research investigating the Qur'an "is like telling a Christian that Jesus was gay." I think that's probably an underestimate.

A Peninsula article gives more info on the building of churches in Qatar than I had previously read. Various Christian churches exist in Qatar, but thus far they have been meeting in private homes and schools. A couple years ago the emir provided land for the construction of church buildings, and it sounds like they will soon be done. Within a year or so, Qatar should boast physical Catholic, Anglican, Orthodox, Coptic, and Indian churches.

More interestingly, the article puts the number of Christians in Qatar at a little over 140,000. That's around 15% of the population of Qatar. Official statistics always say that Qatar is over 95% Muslim, but those stats must only take Qatari citizens into account. I often wonder what percentage are Hindu and Buddhist, given the large Asian communities living here.

In other news, a panel discussion at the American Academy of Religion's annual conference this weekend will focus on the Flying Spaghetti Monster. I heartily approve.

Visiting the States always provides an interesting opportunity to think about the many ways that living in Qatar has changed me. For example, I'm a lot more gregarious than I was when I lived in Pittsburgh, and generally a lot less fearful -- or at least a lot better at ignoring my fear.

A more obvious example is that I didn't drink before I moved to Doha, and indeed viewed drinking as immoral, whereas now I don't mind drinking. This is actually indicative of a larger shift in my thinking about ethics. Islam is willing to condemn a lot of behaviors which may or may not be inherently harmful, simply because it is believed that God disapproves of them. Of course, plenty of Christians do the same, but my increased familiarity with another religion's list of disapproved behaviors has thrown into sharp relief the problems with divine command theory. It no longer seems reasonable to argue that an action may be unethical simply because one culture's version of God has taken a disliking to it. If an action is unethical, it seems to me, it must be so because it causes harm (is likely to cause harm, has a tendency to cause harm; let's not get too utilitarian here). On a more personal level, seeing Muslims avoiding actions that seem morally neutral to me (like falling asleep on one's stomach) for fear of offending God has made me realize the extent to which my own "moral" stances were motivated by the same desire to be "good enough." I wasn't avoiding alcohol because it has deleterious effects on society; I was avoiding it because doing so allowed me to think of myself as A Good Person. That no longer seems like a good motivation, and thus, I no longer avoid alcohol.

Rethinking the role of religion in ethics made me rethink religion generally, and about six months ago I came to the conclusion that I am no longer Christian. My allegiance is fundamentally not to a Christian worldview but to a secular one. (Thought experiment: if I could choose between a universe in which the Muslim world universally accepted Jesus' messiahship, or one in which it universally accepted the principles of tolerance, free inquiry and rationalism, which would I pick?)

I'm not sure what else to say on this subject, so I'll end here.

I will, however, note that I wrote a long post on secularism a year ago, but never polished it enough to post it publicly. Since I'm unlikely to make any further changes to it now, it is now publicly viewable here.

The Fifth Doha Conference of Interfaith Dialogue is going on right now. It's mostly during work hours, so I haven't been able to go, but there are lots of news reports coming out of it.

Judaism has apparently been a hot topic so far, with "angry outbursts being witnessed at the conference against the Jews." A rabbi felt the need to remind the Peninsula that not all Jews are Zionists. This is only the second year that Jews have been invited to the interfaith dialogue, and once again Qaradawi boycotted as a result.

Western misconceptions about Muslim women have been discussed, with a Swiss Muslimah noting that Westerners believe that "Islam does not give women equality with men; woman is considered as half of man; Islam has given the right to man to buy a woman giving her a dowry (Mahr); Muslim women are confined in their houses and not allowed to go out and mingle with the larger society; Islam does not give woman the right to divorce" and that "Muslim women who wear Hijab (head cover) are doing so under compulsion from their husbands or other members of the family."

Muslim-Christian relations are also discussion, with Lebanon and Jerusalem being upheld as examples of interfaith unity. (The Peninsula can't quite resist discussing "Israel's sinister plans" in the latter article, though.) A Syrian Orthodox archbishop and a Kuwaiti Catholic bishop also commented on the value of interfaith dialogue.

For reference, these are the nine recommendations agreed upon by the previous interfaith dialogue: ( Recommendations )

Last week, the issue of hell came up at an interfaith dialogue between Muslims and Christians at Education City. One of the participants explained hell by saying that God loves people so much that God punishes us when we hurt another one of God's beloved servants. And, in fact, God loves us so much, God even punishes us for hurting ourselves. As happens every time the subject of hell and divine retribution comes up, I was struck by how little sense this concept makes to me.

I've never formally studied theories of justice, but when I worked in corrections, it seemed like there are a couple of different justifications given for punishing wrongdoers, for example:

• incapacitation: wrongdoers should be prevented from being able to commit further crimes against the community.
  
• specific deterrence: wrongdoers should be punished in order to discourage them from committing further crimes.
  
• general deterrence: wrongdoers should be punished in order to discourage other people from committing similar crimes.
  
• rehabilitation: wrongdoers should be helped to become more productive members of society in future.

All these justifications are essentially utilitarian: they say that punishment is justifiable only when it serves a purpose. As a pet owner, I can relate to this. If I smack my cat for biting me in the (vain) hopes that this will dissuade her from biting me in the future, this is punishment. If I smack my cat simply because I am angry, knowing that it won't change her behavior, then IMHO I am not punishing her; I am abusing her.

But hell can't possibly serve any of the functions we accept as possible justification for punishment. It can't incapacitate or even deter people from committing further sins, since, well, they're dead. It can't rehabilitate them (this may be debated if, like Muslims, you believe hell may be temporary). I suppose you could argue that hell provides a general deterrent, since people might abstain from sins for fear of going to hell. But if that's the real justification for hell, then God is effectively sacrificing some people's eternal happiness in order to make an example of them for others, and it's hard to imagine God being so... well, un-Kantian.

When you've ruled out the utilitarian justifications for punishment, it seems like the only one left (to my knowledge) is retribution. The retribution theory of justice says that it is moral to punish someone for wrongdoing even if the punishment won't improve the situation, simply because wrongdoing merits punishment. This doesn't make a lot of sense to me, for the reason discussed above in the kitten example. There may be circumstances in which it is ethical to harm someone, because that harm is necessary for a greater good. But if no greater good is served, then harming someone is wrong, even if they've previously harmed someone else. Two wrongs don't make a right.

So, readers, what do you think? Is there any utilitarian justification for the existence of hell? Is retribution an adequate justification? Or is there some other justification entirely? (Of course, if things are virtuous because they are godly and not vice versa, there is no reason to justify God's actions whatsoever -- but, then we also shouldn't advance arguments like the one that came up at the interfaith dialogue.)