08-26-2009, 10:59 AM
<!--QuoteBegin-->QUOTE<!--QuoteEBegin-->*Â Religion is an account of the Cosmos that claims to be handed over to mankind by the Creator of the Cosmos. It is an explanatory account of the Cosmos in the sense that it claims that the universe is caused by God. But religion is more than a causal explanation of the universe. It is an account that makes the universe intelligible, that is, religion makes the universe into the embodiment of Gods Will. The universe (including all events) is not only caused by God, it is also the purpose of God: things do not only happen because God caused them, but because Gods wants them to happen. Or, in other words, things do not just happen, they happen because they were intended to happen.
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* Hence, to be religious requires more than the belief in God as the Creator of the universe, it requires faith in Gods Will as embodying the purpose of the universe.
* As an an explanatorily intelligible account of the universe religion turns the universe into such an entity. It inculcates the experience of the universe as embodying a particular kind of order. This order is hidden and consists of the fact that phenomena express a deep underlying constancy. This constancy is the Will of the Creator.
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* When religion states that everything in the universe is the expression of Gods purpose, this also holds for itself. In other words, religion is what it says about the universe and about itself. For humans this poses the problem of circularity - what someone says about himself is not necessarily what he is - but not for religion. Indeed, religion is not part of human reasoning, but an expression of the Will of the Creator. Hence, when studying religion human beings can not accept religion's self-description, or they will be engaging in theology. This is precisely what has happened in the study of religion untill now: the study of religion(s) has been fundamentally shaped by the Christian religion's self-description. The language of religion - Christian theology - has become the language in which is spoken of all cultures, and their "religions": religion has become its own meta-language.
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* As fundamentally requiring belief and faith, religion shapes our goings about in the world: it makes us see actions as expressions of belief. In this way, religion creates a specific way of going about in the world, and of learning to go about: religion generates a configuration of learning. It teaches (the need) to know before one acts: as creatures (of God) one can not just act, one needs to know about the world (or about Gods intentions with His Creation) before one can act. The underlying idea is that acts have to be coherent with what there is in the world - one has to be true to his faith, one has to enact the Word.
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* As embodying the Will of the Creator religion must become universal. Hence, religion is destined to proselytize. However, religion must also secularize. To accomplish its mission for mankind religion must not only spread horizontally, but also 'vertically'. Religion needs to acquire a less abstract form, it has to secularize its religious way of going about in the world. In short, the univerzalisation of religion is propelled by both proselytization and secularization. Balagangadhara calls this the double dynamic of religion.
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* Secularism is a typically Western, religious entity: it arose in the West in the context of rejection of the religious command that mortals should submit to Gods Wil. Moreover, secularism built extensively on the critiques of Catholic practice by the Protestant Reformation, and on the latter Protestant work ethic. True to the religious way of going about, Protestantism(s) accused Catholicism of having a false religious practice, that is, they were accused of having a practice that is not in accordance with true faith, i.e. with Gods Will as revealed in His Word. Protestantism(s) proceeded then to reform this false practice and proclaimed its/their own practice as the true Christian faith. Secularization then further de-Christianized Protestant faith and enabled religion to take another step towards universalization.
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* Not having received the explanatorily intelligible account of the Cosmos from the Creator, whatever there exist in the east are not religions. Hinduism, Buddhism and Jainism, though it is said they are religions, don't exist in India. They are products of Western academics and missionaries who took the religious account of the Cosmos for universal truth: as religion states that the whole universe is created by God, this implies that religion is a cultural universal. Yet, this reasoning is part of the account that is religion, and belongs exclusively to Abrahamic entities.
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* Religion is an entity that is not proper to Asia. The Hindu, Buddhist and Jain way of going about in the world was not shaped by an explanatorily intelligible account of the Cosmos or by a religious configuration of learning, but by the description of the Cosmos as ritual, offers Balagangadhara.
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* (Comparative) Religious studies can only have Abrahamic religions as their object of study: religious studies dealing with non-Abrahamic cultures are de facto theological. To break out of this theological trap, the study of different societies will have to be pursued from the viewpoint of culture, taking into account that some peoples' culture is shaped by the dynamic of religion, and other peoples' culture is not.
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* Hence, to be religious requires more than the belief in God as the Creator of the universe, it requires faith in Gods Will as embodying the purpose of the universe.
* As an an explanatorily intelligible account of the universe religion turns the universe into such an entity. It inculcates the experience of the universe as embodying a particular kind of order. This order is hidden and consists of the fact that phenomena express a deep underlying constancy. This constancy is the Will of the Creator.
 Â
* When religion states that everything in the universe is the expression of Gods purpose, this also holds for itself. In other words, religion is what it says about the universe and about itself. For humans this poses the problem of circularity - what someone says about himself is not necessarily what he is - but not for religion. Indeed, religion is not part of human reasoning, but an expression of the Will of the Creator. Hence, when studying religion human beings can not accept religion's self-description, or they will be engaging in theology. This is precisely what has happened in the study of religion untill now: the study of religion(s) has been fundamentally shaped by the Christian religion's self-description. The language of religion - Christian theology - has become the language in which is spoken of all cultures, and their "religions": religion has become its own meta-language.
 Â
* As fundamentally requiring belief and faith, religion shapes our goings about in the world: it makes us see actions as expressions of belief. In this way, religion creates a specific way of going about in the world, and of learning to go about: religion generates a configuration of learning. It teaches (the need) to know before one acts: as creatures (of God) one can not just act, one needs to know about the world (or about Gods intentions with His Creation) before one can act. The underlying idea is that acts have to be coherent with what there is in the world - one has to be true to his faith, one has to enact the Word.
 Â
* As embodying the Will of the Creator religion must become universal. Hence, religion is destined to proselytize. However, religion must also secularize. To accomplish its mission for mankind religion must not only spread horizontally, but also 'vertically'. Religion needs to acquire a less abstract form, it has to secularize its religious way of going about in the world. In short, the univerzalisation of religion is propelled by both proselytization and secularization. Balagangadhara calls this the double dynamic of religion.
 Â
* Secularism is a typically Western, religious entity: it arose in the West in the context of rejection of the religious command that mortals should submit to Gods Wil. Moreover, secularism built extensively on the critiques of Catholic practice by the Protestant Reformation, and on the latter Protestant work ethic. True to the religious way of going about, Protestantism(s) accused Catholicism of having a false religious practice, that is, they were accused of having a practice that is not in accordance with true faith, i.e. with Gods Will as revealed in His Word. Protestantism(s) proceeded then to reform this false practice and proclaimed its/their own practice as the true Christian faith. Secularization then further de-Christianized Protestant faith and enabled religion to take another step towards universalization.
 Â
* Not having received the explanatorily intelligible account of the Cosmos from the Creator, whatever there exist in the east are not religions. Hinduism, Buddhism and Jainism, though it is said they are religions, don't exist in India. They are products of Western academics and missionaries who took the religious account of the Cosmos for universal truth: as religion states that the whole universe is created by God, this implies that religion is a cultural universal. Yet, this reasoning is part of the account that is religion, and belongs exclusively to Abrahamic entities.
 Â
* Religion is an entity that is not proper to Asia. The Hindu, Buddhist and Jain way of going about in the world was not shaped by an explanatorily intelligible account of the Cosmos or by a religious configuration of learning, but by the description of the Cosmos as ritual, offers Balagangadhara.
 Â
* (Comparative) Religious studies can only have Abrahamic religions as their object of study: religious studies dealing with non-Abrahamic cultures are de facto theological. To break out of this theological trap, the study of different societies will have to be pursued from the viewpoint of culture, taking into account that some peoples' culture is shaped by the dynamic of religion, and other peoples' culture is not.
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