As I described in the preliminary version of 49:49’s preface (see link below this post), its Postface grew to over 40% of the book.
I am now publishing the almost final version of its first three paragraphs. The title of this blog post is the same as the last of those three.
Within the category 49:49 are 40 blogpost now. Four of those have that same icon as ‘featured image’.
§71 Deities, divinities, principles
In addition to myth formation, tribal historiography and wars, divinities – in both senses of that word – were and still are created, -and above all, kept alive- in the context of the question of what makes people human: different from (other) animals .
Consciousness perhaps? Goal? Soul?
Gods also pop up in connection with questions about the meaning of life, one’s own life, the lives of all people, the existence of the universe.
When asking questions about life and death, when thinking about forms of survival after death. And not to forget: questions about good and evil.
The desire, the ability and also the opportunity 110) to think about these types of questions is not in itself a curse or a blessing.
I wrote “in both senses of that word”: that deserves further explanation. Dictionaries suggest only two different meanings: “quality or state of being divine” versus “a divine being” (often capitalized). However, the first meaning, that “quality or state of ..”, almost always refers to the second. It’s about the divinity of a divinity, so to speak.
Curiously, the dictionaries I consulted do not provide a ‘third’ meaning.
In my opinion it would be useful to use ‘divinity’ or ‘deity’ not only for such a creature (or quality) but also in the sense of a principle: something that in some way guides the history of humanity and everything that exists.
Thinking of a positive direction of evolution, a universe with a positive side, growing insight into what your humanity and mortality entails, a principle of creation; that kind of thing 111).
With that common aspects of course: hope and comfort.
Help in dealing with small and large or even inhumanly large setbacks, so to speak. With that meaning we are certainly talking about a different kind of divinity.
When you ask a search engine for references to ‘divine principle‘, the search results are unfortunately teeming with links to one specific ‘post-Christian’ sect, which started in Korea, named after a Mr ‘Moon’.
When I thought about that religion for a moment, I realized that it would be good to write something in this postface about something other than the three best-known ‘monotheistic’ religions.
I’ll spend two paragraphs on it. I’ll do it right away; before I formulate my criticism of Judaism and (especially) Christianity and consider the special relationship between those three ‘Abrahamic’ religions.
§72 Religious suicide
The third (Hinduism), fourth (Buddhism), fifth (Sikhism), seventh (Bahai) and eighth 112) (Jainism) religions of the world in number of followers, bear little resemblance to those three “Abrahamic” – Judaism (sixth), Christianity (first) and Islam (second) 113) – but have some similarities. I will highlight a special example of such an agreement. I came across this during a brief exploration. This is an exceptionally deplorable, if not inhumane, practice that has occurred/still occurs in both Buddhism and Jainism.
No misunderstanding: this is not a central doctrine in either religion. I am paying attention to it here for two reasons: to point out the existence of the many similarities between religions and to remind that religions have similarities with psychological problems. These similarities are just as many reasons that ‘respect’ for religions is misplaced, when it is assumed – or even demanded – that it should be shown for every practice and every idea for which its author or followers have managed to acquire the label ‘religion‘.
The phenomenon referred to here concerns religious suicide.
In my first book I already wrote about this practice among Buddhists. I copy the passage in question here in full. I have only added the italic of the word ‘because’ here.
Self-immolation as a protest expression is actually still a fairly normal, at least purposeful and in a certain sense effective human behavior 114) when you compare it with the phenomenon of the self-mummifying monks of Japan.
The American anthropologist Haslam 115) came across this phenomenon more or less by chance: Buddhist monks who were not mummified after their death, but started doing so during their lifetime and eventually died as a result of that ‘treatment’.
In the north of Japan there are twenty-four of these so-called ‘Sokushinbutsu’: they are referred to as ‘Buddha’ and are held in high esteem by some Buddhists.
This bizarre form of suicide required years of physical misery for the monks. In the first years they combined heavy physical exertion with a diet of seeds and nuts, after which virtually no body fat was present.
After that the diet became even more frugal: bark and roots from a certain tree species. At the end of this second phase, the body contained very little fluid and the men already looked like living skeletons.
In phase three, they also started drinking a poisonous tea, which, among other things, promoted vomiting and sweating, thus reducing the amount of fluid in the body even further and at the same time making it poisonous to maggots and insects, so that after death was less likely to be affected by it.
Finally, the monk sat up in a small, enclosed tomb. Contact with the outside world was then exclusively formed by a tube through which breathing could be done and a string to ring a bell. When the ringing stopped and death had apparently occurred, the tube and string were removed and the grave was closed.
At the end of the nineteenth century the Japanese government banned this practice, but earlier in that century many of those twenty-four Japanese had demonstrated their aversion to life and responsibility in this way.
However, the bodies of the majority of these men simply rotted after death. These failed self-mummifiers are held in much lower regard: they didn’t “make it” and they are not called “Buddhas.”
The anthropologist Haslam believed that these monks deserve respect because they are the ultimate expression of a specific Buddhist sect in Japan.
Misplaced respect.
Why respect this rejection of normal human life, this fascination with choosing non-life in thought, and then in behavior?
After scientific research, it turned out that the monks who ‘successfully’ completed the process of self-mummification did not ‘owe’ this to any greater or different effort, but to the presence of a relatively high concentration of arsenic in the water in their environment …
Within Jainism the comparable practice is called ‘Sallekhana‘, and that practice is considerably more current: an extra reason to pay attention to it here.
This form of suicide has been litigated in India. In 2015, take note, this practice was banned by the High Court of the Indian state of Rajasthan.
In 2016, this decision was overruled by the Supreme Court of All India.
The American NPR published an article on this issue on September 2, 2015 with the intriguing title: ‘Fasting To The Death: Is It A Religious Rite Or Suicide?‘. Intriguing, especially because of that ‘Or’. As if suicide is not suicide when ‘religious motives’ play a role!
Do I need to remember the mass deaths in Jonestown? 116)
§73 The highly problematic position of the UN re religions
The aforementioned Moon sect is best known for the phenomenon of mass marriage.
The official name of this religion is Holy Spirit Association for the Unification of World Christianity.
That religion is also referred to as ‘Unification Church‘ or simply Moon sect.
Not so strange that last designation: not only did his followers call him ‘father’, but his wife was also called ‘mother’.
A few minutes of reading reveals that the founder claims in his book The Divine Principle (1952) that he was instructed in a dream by Jesus Christ to continue his work …
I initially only wanted to mention this sect, which has more than a million followers worldwide, as an illustration of the phenomenon that religions build on older ideas.
This continuation has happened in all kinds of ways over the past millennia.
With every doctrine of every religion one must ask oneself what is original about it and what is borrowed from previous religions: overt or covert, explicit or implicit, as plagiarism, ‘correction’, opposition to, as ‘heritage’ as return to ‘sources’.
However, during my brief exploration I learned that the political initiatives of this Moon sect are taken seriously by some national governments and – even more painfully – also in the context of that organization called the United Nations.
The sect sits at consultation tables of several UN organizations. Why? Because of that remarkable claim in their self-chosen name?
Representatives of the Baha’i group – number 7 in the list used here – can also be found at those tables. The introduction of their ideology on their own website is obvious. They simply start by claiming some kind of ‘seal status’:
Throughout history, God has sent to humanity a series of divine Educators—known as Manifestations of God—whose teachings have provided the basis for the advancement of civilization. These Manifestations have included Abraham, Krishna, Zoroaster, Moses, Buddha, Jesus, and Muhammad 119).
A little further on, the claim is further specified:
Throughout history, the great religions have provided the primary driving force behind the civilizing of human character, eliciting self-discipline, devotion and heroism from their followers. Many of religion’s moral principles have been translated into structures and patterns of conduct which have served to elevate human relationships and advance humanity’s collective life.
Every time a Manifestation of God 120) appears, a fuller measure of inspiration for the next stage in the awakening and progress of humanity is released into the world. A human being—ordinary in every outward respect—is called to be a mouthpiece for God. One may call to mind Moses standing before the Burning Bush, the Buddha receiving enlightenment under the Bodhi tree, the Holy Spirit descending upon Jesus in the form of a dove, or the archangel Gabriel appearing to Muhammad.
In the middle of the 19th century, God summoned Bahá’u’lláh—meaning the “Glory of God”—to deliver a new Revelation to humanity. For four decades, thousands of verses, letters and books flowed from His pen. In His Writings, He outlined a framework for the development of a global civilization which takes into account both the spiritual and material dimensions of human life.
Note the addition ‘great’ for religions in the first sentence: not all religions, but only the ‘great’!
I see it as a special illustration of the derailment of the UN. The Vatican’s ‘observer status’ as another 121).
Notes:
110) It would not hurt to note here that the aspect of having the opportunity – read: time – certainly partly explains why almost every religion is male-oriented or purely misogynistic. For a long time in many cultures, women not only had the job of bearing and caring for children, but also had to do the majority of the work in the fields.
111) An elegant idea in this context came from Teilhard de Chardin, both Jesuit priest, paleontologist and geologist. He wrote about the concept noosphere. He lived from 1881 to 1955.
112) I derive the ranking numbers from the Wikipedia overview List of religious populations. Sufficiently reliable for my purpose here (!). The list does not list Buddhists in fourth place, but atheists, but that is of course not a religion. After the Buddhists, three categories are listed, such as ‘Taoism + Confucianism + various traditional Chinese religions’. I also ignored that in my numbering.
113) Sorted by chronological order.
114) Five years after that famous Buddhist monk in Vietnam, Jan Palach set himself on fire to protest the Warsaw Pact invasion of his country, Czechoslovakia.
115) I found this story on the website http://anomalyinfo.com, where unfortunately it can no longer be found. However, the search term Sokushinbutsu returns many results, including images.
116) The end of this sect cost the lives of more than 900 followers of the American Jim Jones who moved to British Guiana: some of them committed suicide, the rest were murdered first. The expression ‘Drinking the kool-aid‘ comes from that massacre.
117) This religion does not appear in the List of religious population groups: its adherents are counted among the followers of the Christian faith!
Just as the well-known Ahmadiyya group does not appear in it. Apparently Ahmed’s followers are considered part of Islam, although the vast majority of Muslims certainly do not use these people as fellow believers.
118) Discussed in section Ahmadiyyaphobia in Chapter 7 of Part II.
119) All men. It may not surprise you, but I would like to remind you…
120) ‘Manifestation of (a) god’: how clear do you want the claim to your own (semi) divinity to be?
121) I remind you of the foreword in which a remarkable resolution of the UN General Assembly was extensively discussed.