What Is a Zen Koan? An Animated Introduction to Eastern Philosophical Thought Experiments

in Philosophy, Religion | April 22nd, 2019

If you know any­thing at all about Zen, you know the famous ques­tion about the sound of one hand clap­ping. While the brain teas­er did indeed orig­i­nate with a Zen mas­ter, it does not ful­ly rep­re­sent the nature of the koan. Between the 9th and 13th cen­turies, when Chan Bud­dhism, as Zen was known in Chi­na, flour­ished, koans became wide­ly-used, explains the TED-Ed ani­mat­ed video above, as objects of med­i­ta­tion. “A col­lec­tion of rough­ly one thou­sand, sev­en hun­dred bewil­der­ing philo­soph­i­cal thought exper­i­ments,” koans were osten­si­bly tools to prac­tice liv­ing with the unex­plain­able mys­ter­ies of exis­tence.

The name, notes the les­son, “orig­i­nal­ly gong-an in Chi­nese, trans­lates to ‘pub­lic record or case.’ But unlike real-world court cas­es, koans were inten­tion­al­ly incom­pre­hen­si­ble.” Koans are “Sur­pris­ing, sur­re­al, and fre­quent­ly con­tra­dict­ed them­selves.” The lessons in ambi­gu­i­ty and para­dox have their ana­logue, per­haps, in cer­tain trains of thought in Medieval Catholic phi­los­o­phy or the ide­al­ism of thinkers like George Berke­ley, who might have first come up with the one about the tree falling in the for­est.

But is the pur­pose of the koan sim­ply to break the brain’s reliance on rea­son? It was cer­tain­ly used this way. Zen Mas­ter Eihei Dogen, founder of Japan­ese Soto Zen trav­eled to Chi­na to study under the Chan Mas­ters, and lat­er crit­i­cized this kind of koan prac­tice and oth­er aspects of Chan, though he also col­lect­ed 300 koans him­self and they became inte­gral to Soto tra­di­tion. Koans are not just absur­dist zingers, they are, as the name says, cases—little sto­ries, often about two monks in some kind of teacher and stu­dent rela­tion­ship. Many of the stu­dents and teach­ers in these sto­ries were patri­archs of Chan.

Like the say­ings and doings of oth­er reli­gious patri­archs in oth­er world reli­gions, these “cas­es” have been col­lect­ed with copi­ous com­men­tary in books like The Blue Cliff Record and The Book of Seren­i­ty. They show in snap­shots the trans­mis­sion of the teach­ing direct­ly from teacher to stu­dent, rather than through sacred texts or rit­u­als (hun­dreds of koans, rules, and rit­u­als notwith­stand­ing). That they are puz­zling and ambigu­ous does not mean they are incom­pre­hen­si­ble. Many seem more or less like fables, such as the oft-told sto­ry of the monk who car­ries a beau­ti­ful woman across a mud patch, then chas­tis­es his younger com­pan­ion for bring­ing it up miles down the road.

Oth­er koans are like Greek philo­soph­i­cal dia­logues in minia­ture, such as the sto­ry in which two monks argue about the nature of a flag wav­ing in the wind. A third steps in, Socrates-like, with a seem­ing­ly “right” answer that tran­scends both of their posi­tions. The longevi­ty of these vignettes lies in their subtlety—surface mean­ings only hint at what the sto­ries are up to. Koans force those who take up their study to strug­gle with uncer­tain­ty and irres­o­lu­tion. They also fre­quent­ly under­mine the most com­mon expec­ta­tion that the teacher knows best.

Often posed as a kind of oblique ver­bal com­bat between teacher and stu­dent, koans include extreme­ly harsh, even vio­lent teach­ers, or teach­ers who seem to admit defeat, tac­it­ly or oth­er­wise, when a stu­dent gets the upper hand, or when both con­front the speech­less awe of not know­ing. Atti­tudes of respect, rev­er­ence, humil­i­ty, can­dor, and good humor pre­vail. Per­haps under all koan prac­tice lies the idea of skill­ful means—the appro­pri­ate action to take in the moment, which can only be known in the moment.

In his short, humor­ous dis­cus­sion of Zen koans above, Alan Watts tells the sto­ry of a Zen stu­dent who tricks his mas­ter and hits him with his own stick. The mas­ter responds with approval of the student’s tac­tics, but the koan does not sug­gest that every­one should do the same. That, as Dogen would argue, would be to have an idea about real­i­ty, rather than a whol­ly-engaged response to it. What­ev­er else koans show their stu­dents, they point again and again to this cen­tral human dilem­ma of think­ing about living—in the past, present, or future—versus actu­al­ly expe­ri­enc­ing our lives.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Alan Watts Presents a 15-Minute Guid­ed Med­i­ta­tion: A Time-Test­ed Way to Stop Think­ing About Think­ing

Take Harvard’s Intro­duc­to­ry Course on Bud­dhism, One of Five World Reli­gions Class­es Offered Free Online

The World’s Largest Col­lec­tion of Tibetan Bud­dhist Lit­er­a­ture Now Online

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him

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150 Renowned Secular Academics & 20 Christian Thinkers Talking About the Existence of God

in Philosophy, Religion | April 18th, 2019

Of the many books released over the past cou­ple decades about the exis­tence or nonex­is­tence of God (and there were a lot) one of the best comes from philoso­pher and nov­el­ist Rebec­ca Gold­stein. Her 2010 36 Argu­ments for the Exis­tence of God is not, how­ev­er, a work of pop­u­lar the­ol­o­gy or anti-the­ol­o­gy; it is fic­tion, a satire of acad­e­mia, the pub­lish­ing world, the Judaism she left behind, and the bub­ble of hype that once inflat­ed around so-called “new athe­ism.”

In a book with­in the book, Goldstein’s hero, Cass Seltzer strikes it big with his own pop­u­lar knock­down of reli­gion, The Vari­eties of Reli­gious Illu­sion, which ends with 36 refu­ta­tions of argu­ments for God in the appen­dix, which itself pro­vides the appen­dix for Goldstein’s book. If this sounds com­pli­cat­ed, there’s no rea­son it shouldn’t be. Con­ver­sa­tions about God, for hun­dreds of years the biggest top­ic in West­ern phi­los­o­phy, should not be reduced to syl­lo­gisms and stereo­types.

Yet over­sim­pli­fy­ing the big ques­tions is what many pop athe­ist books do, Gold­stein sug­gests. Seltzer’s book arrives when there is “a glut of god­less­ness” in book­stores. Such books “were sell­ing well,” writes Gold­stein, “some­times edg­ing out cook­books and mem­oirs writ­ten by house­hold pets to rise to the top of the best-sell­er list.” The two deep thinkers and reli­gious crit­ics Seltzer self-con­scious­ly draws on in his title make his project seem all the more iron­i­cal­ly triv­ial:

First had come the book, which he had enti­tled The Vari­eties of Reli­gious Illu­sion, a nod to both William James’s The Vari­eties of Reli­gious Expe­ri­ence and to Sig­mund Freud’s The Future of An Illu­sion. The book had brought Cass an inde­cent amount of atten­tion. Time Mag­a­zine, in a cov­er sto­ry on the so-called new athe­ists, had end­ed by dub­bing him “the athe­ist with a soul.” 

By embed­ding argu­ments for the exis­tence of God in each of the books 36 chap­ters, Gold­stein implies “the joke—or sort of joke,” as Janet Maslin writes at The New York Times, “is that Cass’s conun­drum-filled life illus­trates and affirms thoughts of the divine even as his appen­dix repu­di­ates them.” Dwelling per­sis­tent­ly on an idea grants it the very valid­i­ty one argues it should not have, per­haps.

This does seem to be an effect of cer­tain hard-nosed athe­ist writ­ing, as Niet­zsche rec­og­nized very well. “I am afraid we are not rid of God,” he once lament­ed, “because we still have faith in gram­mar.” Reli­gious ideas are embed­ded in the struc­ture of the lan­guage; lan­guage itself seems to have meta­phys­i­cal prop­er­ties. It is like ecto­plasm, slip­pery, opaque, made of metaphors both liv­ing and dead. It both enables and thwarts all attempts at cer­tain­ty.

Goldstein’s cre­ative approach to the God debate stands out for its ambiva­lence and humor. (See her dis­cuss faith, fic­tion, and rea­son with her part­ner, Har­vard psy­chol­o­gist Steven Pinker, in the video at the top of the post.) In the com­pi­la­tions here, Gold­stein and 149 more renowned aca­d­e­mics offer their agnos­tic or athe­ist thoughts on God. Some are less nuanced, some lean more heav­i­ly on sta­tis­tics, physics, and math; many come from the the­o­ret­i­cal sci­ences and from ana­lyt­ic and moral phi­los­o­phy. Some are sym­pa­thet­ic to reli­gion, some are con­temp­tu­ous. A wide breadth of intel­lec­tu­al per­spec­tives is rep­re­sent­ed here.

Yet oth­er than Gold­stein and a hand­ful of oth­er promi­nent women, the selec­tions skew almost entire­ly male (rather like the char­ac­ters in most reli­gious scrip­tures), and skew almost entire­ly white Euro­pean and North Amer­i­can. We can do what we like with this infor­ma­tion. It should not prej­u­dice us against the finest thinkers in the com­pi­la­tion, which includes sev­er­al Nobel Prize win­ning sci­en­tists, famous philoso­phers, Richard Feyn­man, Oliv­er Sacks, and Noam Chom­sky, as well as a few fig­ures who have recent­ly become infa­mous for alleged sex­u­al harass­ment, racism, and far worse.

But we might wish the less engag­ing con­trib­u­tors to this dis­cus­sion had giv­en way to a greater diver­si­ty of per­spec­tives, not only from oth­er cul­tures, but from the arts and human­i­ties. On the oth­er side of the coin, we have a small­er list of 20 Chris­t­ian aca­d­e­mics address­ing the ques­tion of God, below. These include respect­ed sci­en­tists like Fran­cis Collins and John Polk­ing­horne and many well-regard­ed (and some not so) Chris­t­ian philoso­phers. The line­up is entire­ly male, and also includes an apol­o­gist accused of fak­ing his aca­d­e­m­ic cre­den­tials and an apol­o­gist turned right-wing pro­pa­gan­dist who was con­vict­ed and jailed for fraud. At the very least, these details might call into ques­tion their intel­lec­tu­al hon­esty.

Here again, maybe some of these selec­tions should have been bet­ter vet­ted in favor of the many women in phi­los­o­phy, the­ol­o­gy, sci­ence, etc. But there are voic­es worth hear­ing here, from pro­fess­ing intel­lec­tu­als who can keep the ques­tions open even while in a state of belief, a skill even rar­er in the world than in this col­lec­tion of Chris­t­ian sci­en­tists, schol­ars, and apol­o­gists.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Athe­ism: A Rough His­to­ry of Dis­be­lief, with Jonathan Miller

Does God Exist? Christo­pher Hitchens Debates Chris­t­ian Philoso­pher William Lane Craig

In His Lat­est Film, Slavoj Žižek Claims “The Only Way to Be an Athe­ist is Through Chris­tian­i­ty”

Athe­ist Ira Glass Believes Chris­tians Get the Short End of the Media Stick

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness

 

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700 Years of Persian Manuscripts Now Digitized and Available Online

in Archives, Art, Books, Literature, Poetry, Religion | April 5th, 2019

Too often those in pow­er lump thou­sands of years of Mid­dle East­ern reli­gion and cul­ture into mono­lith­ic enti­ties to be feared or per­se­cut­ed. But at least one gov­ern­ment insti­tu­tion is doing exact­ly the oppo­site. For Nowruz, the Per­sian New Year, the Library of Con­gress has released a dig­i­tal col­lec­tion of its rare Per­sian-lan­guage man­u­scripts, an archive span­ning 700 years. This free resource opens win­dows on diverse reli­gious, nation­al, lin­guis­tic, and cul­tur­al tra­di­tions, most, but not all, Islam­ic, yet all dif­fer­ent from each oth­er in com­plex and strik­ing ways.

“We nowa­days are pro­grammed to think Per­sia equates with Iran, but when you look at this it is a mul­ti­re­gion­al col­lec­tion,” says a Library spe­cial­ist in its African and Mid­dle East­ern Divi­sion, Hirad Dinavari. “Many con­tributed to it. Some were Indi­an, some were Tur­kic, Cen­tral Asian.” The “deep, cos­mopoli­tan archive,” as Atlas Obscura’s Jonathan Carey writes, con­sists of a rel­a­tive­ly small num­ber of manuscripts—only 155. That may not seem par­tic­u­lar­ly sig­nif­i­cant giv­en the enor­mi­ty of some oth­er online col­lec­tions.

But its qual­i­ty and vari­ety mark it as espe­cial­ly valu­able, rep­re­sen­ta­tive of much larg­er bod­ies of work in the arts, sci­ences, reli­gion, and phi­los­o­phy, dat­ing back to the 13th cen­tu­ry and span­ning regions from India to Cen­tral Asia and the Cau­cus­es, “in addi­tion to the native Per­sian speak­ing lands of Iran, Afghanistan and Tajik­istan,” the LoC notes.

Promi­nent­ly rep­re­sent­ed are works like the epic poem of pre-Islam­ic Per­sia, the Shah­namah, “likened to the Ili­ad or the Odyssey,” writes Carey, as well as “writ­ten accounts of the life of Shah Jahan, the 17th-cen­tu­ry Mughal emper­or who over­saw con­struc­tion of the Taj Mahal.”

The Library points out the archive includes the “most beloved poems of the Per­sian poets Saa­di, Hafez, Rumi and Jami, along with the works of the poet Niza­mi Gan­javi.” Some read­ers might be sur­prised at the pic­to­r­i­al opu­lence of so many Islam­ic texts, with their col­or­ful, styl­ized bat­tle scenes and group­ings of human fig­ures.

Islam­ic art is typ­i­cal­ly thought of as icon­o­clas­tic, but as in Chris­t­ian Europe and North Amer­i­ca, cer­tain sects have fought oth­ers over this inter­pre­ta­tion (includ­ing over depic­tions of the Prophet Moham­mad). This is not to say that the icon­o­clasts deserve less atten­tion. Much medieval and ear­ly mod­ern Islam­ic art uses intri­cate pat­terns, designs, and cal­lig­ra­phy while scrupu­lous­ly avoid­ing like­ness­es of humans and ani­mals. It is deeply mov­ing in its own way, rig­or­ous­ly detailed and pas­sion­ate­ly exe­cut­ed, full of math­e­mat­i­cal and aes­thet­ic ideas about shape, pro­por­tion, col­or, and line that have inspired artists around the world for cen­turies.

The page from a lav­ish­ly illu­mi­nat­ed Qur’ān, above, cir­ca 1708, offers such an exam­ple, writ­ten in Ara­bic with an inter­lin­ear Per­sian trans­la­tion. There are reli­gious texts from oth­er faiths, like the Psalms in Hebrew with Per­sian trans­la­tion, there are sci­en­tif­ic texts and maps: the Rare Per­sian-Lan­guage Man­u­script Col­lec­tion cov­ers a lot of his­tor­i­cal ground, as has Per­sian lan­guage and cul­ture “from the 10th cen­tu­ry to the present,” the Library writes. Such a rich tra­di­tion deserves care­ful study and appre­ci­a­tion. Begin an edu­ca­tion in Per­sian man­u­script his­to­ry here.

via Atlas Obscu­ra

Relat­ed Con­tent:

15,000 Col­or­ful Images of Per­sian Man­u­scripts Now Online, Cour­tesy of the British Library

The Com­plex Geom­e­try of Islam­ic Art & Design: A Short Intro­duc­tion

800 Illu­mi­nat­ed Medieval Man­u­scripts Are Now Online: Browse & Down­load Them Cour­tesy of the British Library and Bib­lio­thèque Nationale de France

800+ Trea­sured Medieval Man­u­scripts to Be Dig­i­tized by Cam­bridge & Hei­del­berg Uni­ver­si­ties

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness

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Tibetan Musical Notation Is Beautiful

in History, Music, Religion | April 4th, 2019

Reli­gions take the cast and hue of the cul­tures in which they find root. This was cer­tain­ly true in Tibet when Bud­dhism arrived in the 7th cen­tu­ry. It trans­formed and was trans­formed by the native reli­gion of Bon. Of the many cre­ative prac­tices that arose from this syn­the­sis, Tibetan Bud­dhist music ranks very high­ly in impor­tance.

As in sacred music in the West, Tibetan music has com­plex sys­tems of musi­cal nota­tion and a long his­to­ry of writ­ten reli­gious song. “A vital com­po­nent of Tibetan Bud­dhist expe­ri­ence,” explains Google Arts & Cul­tures Bud­dhist Dig­i­tal Resource Cen­ter, “musi­cal nota­tion allows for the trans­fer­ence of sacred sound and cer­e­mo­ny across gen­er­a­tions. A means to mem­o­rize sacred text, express devo­tion, ward off fer­al spirts, and invoke deities.”

Some of these fea­tures may be alien to sec­u­lar West­ern Bud­dhists focused on mind­ful­ness and silent med­i­ta­tion, but to vary­ing degrees, Tibetan schools place con­sid­er­able val­ue on the aes­thet­ic expe­ri­ence of extra-human realms. As Uni­ver­si­ty of Tul­sa musi­col­o­gist John Pow­ell writes, “the use of sacred sound” in Tibetan Bud­dhism, a “Mantrayana” tra­di­tion, acts “as a for­mu­la for the trans­for­ma­tion of human con­scious­ness.”

Tibetan musi­cal nota­tions, Google points out, “sym­bol­i­cal­ly rep­re­sent the melodies, rhythm pat­terns, and instru­men­tal arrange­ments. In har­mo­ny with chant­i­ng, visu­al­iza­tions, and hand ges­tures, [Tibetan] music cru­cial­ly guides rit­u­al per­for­mance.” It is char­ac­ter­ized not only by its inte­gra­tion of rit­u­al dance, but also by a large col­lec­tion of rit­u­al instruments—including the long, Swiss-like horns suit­ed to a moun­tain environment—and unique forms of poly­phon­ic over­tone singing.

The exam­ples of musi­cal nota­tion you see here came from the appro­pri­ate­ly-named Twit­ter account Musi­cal Nota­tion is Beau­ti­ful and type­face design­er and researcher Jo De Baerde­maek­er. At the top is a 19th cen­tu­ry man­u­script belong­ing to the “Yang” tra­di­tion, “the most high­ly involved and regard­ed chant tra­di­tion in Tibetan music,” notes the Schoyen Col­lec­tion, “and the only one to rely on a sys­tem of nota­tion (Yang-Yig).”

The curved lines rep­re­sent “smooth­ly effect­ed ris­es and falls in into­na­tion.” The nota­tion also “fre­quent­ly con­tains detailed instruc­tions con­cern­ing in what spir­it the music should be sung (e.g. flow­ing like a riv­er, light like bird song) and the small­est mod­i­fi­ca­tions to be made to the voice in the utter­ance of a vow­el.” The Yang-Yig goes all the way back to the 6th cen­tu­ry, pre­dat­ing Tibetan Bud­dhism, and “does not record nei­ther the rhyth­mic pat­tern nor dura­tion of notes.” Oth­er kinds of music have their own types of nota­tion, such as that in the piece above for voice, drums, trum­pets, horns, and cym­bals.

Though they artic­u­late and elab­o­rate on reli­gious ideas from India, Tibet’s musi­cal tra­di­tions are entire­ly its own. “It is essen­tial to rethink the entire con­cept of melody and rhythm” to under­stand Tibetan Bud­dhist chant, writes Pow­ell in a detailed overview of Tibetan music’s vocal and instru­men­tal qual­i­ties. “Many out­side Tibetan cul­ture are accus­tomed to think of melody as a sequence of ris­ing or falling pitch­es,” he says. “In Tibetan Tantric chant­i­ng, how­ev­er, the melod­ic con­tent occurs in terms of vow­el mod­i­fi­ca­tion and the care­ful con­tour­ing of tones.”  Hear an exam­ple of tra­di­tion­al Tibetan Bud­dhist chant just above, and learn more about Tibetan musi­cal nota­tion at Google Arts & Cul­ture.

via @NotationIsGreat

Relat­ed Con­tent:

The World’s Largest Col­lec­tion of Tibetan Bud­dhist Lit­er­a­ture Now Online

Free Online Course: Robert Thurman’s Intro­duc­tion to Tibetan Bud­dhism (Record­ed at Colum­bia U)

Leonard Cohen Nar­rates Film on The Tibetan Book of the Dead, Fea­tur­ing the Dalai Lama (1994)

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness

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It’s Official: The “Nones”– People Who Profess No Religion–Are Now as Big as Catholics & Evangelicals in the United States

in Politics, Religion | April 3rd, 2019

The usu­al irreg­u­lar­i­ties and shenani­gans notwith­stand­ing, the vot­ing pat­terns of the U.S. elec­torate may under­go a sea change in the com­ing decades as the num­bers of peo­ple who iden­ti­fy as non-reli­gious con­tin­ue to rise. One of the biggest demo­graph­ic sto­ries of the last few decades, the rise of the “nones” has been inter­pret­ed as a threat and as an inevitable reck­on­ing for cor­rupt and scan­dal-rid­den insti­tu­tions dri­ving mil­lions of peo­ple out of church­es across the coun­try.

Pol­i­tics and social issues are hard­ly the only rea­sons, though they poll sec­ond in list from a 2017 Pew sur­vey. At num­ber one is “I ques­tion a lot of reli­gious teach­ings,” at num­ber three, the slight­ly more vague “I don’t like reli­gious orga­ni­za­tions.” It’s maybe a sur­prise that non­be­lief in God appears all the way at num­ber four. Which speaks to an impor­tant point.

Not all of those exit­ing the pews have renounced their faith or con­vert­ed to anoth­er, but huge num­bers have joined the ranks of those who claim “no reli­gion” in sur­vey and polling data. Their num­bers are now equiv­a­lent to Catholics and evan­gel­i­cals, the two reli­gious groups most in decline behind main­line Protes­tant church­es. Polit­i­cal sci­en­tist Ryan P. Burge of East­ern Illi­nois Uni­ver­si­ty is not sur­prised. “It’s been a con­stant steady increase for 20 years now,” he says, point­ing to data from a Gen­er­al Social Sur­vey visu­al­ized in the graph above.

The last decade has seen the sharpest upturn yet, with “nones” now esti­mat­ed at 23.1 per­cent of the pop­u­la­tion. If this rise—and sub­se­quent plateaus and declines in the major reli­gious groups sur­veyed (and the batch of non-Judeo-Chris­t­ian “Oth­er Faith”s dis­mis­sive­ly lumped together)—continues, the shift could be dra­mat­ic. In 2014, 78% of the unaf­fil­i­at­ed, accord­ing to Pew polling, were raised in and walked away from a reli­gion. The shift in iden­ti­ty among young peo­ple tends to cor­re­late with a shift in pol­i­tics.

The “ris­ing tide of reli­gious­ly unaf­fil­i­at­ed vot­ers,” writes Jack Jenk­ins at Reli­gion News Ser­vice, is “a group that a 2016 PRRI analy­sis found skews young and lib­er­al.” It’s one that might off­set the over­sized influ­ence of white evan­gel­i­cals, who now make up 26% of the elec­torate and 22.5% of the pop­u­la­tion.

Any such con­clu­sions should be drawn with sev­er­al caveats. “Evan­gel­i­cals punch way above their weight,” says Burge. “They turn out a bunch at the bal­lot box. That’s large­ly a func­tion of the fact that they’re white and they’re old.” And, he might have added, many are in less eco­nom­i­cal­ly pre­car­i­ous straits than their chil­dren and grand­chil­dren, more sus­cep­ti­ble to mass media mes­sag­ing, and less prone, by design, to find­ing their vote sup­pressed. A 2016 PRRI report not­ed that “reli­gious­ly unaf­fil­i­at­ed Amer­i­cans do not vote in the same per­cent­ages as evan­gel­i­cals, and are often under­rep­re­sent­ed at the polls.”

Addi­tion­al­ly, and most impor­tant­ly to point out any time these num­bers come up: “the nones” is an entire­ly overde­ter­mined cat­e­go­ry full of peo­ple who agree on lit­tle, but they’re not sign­ing up for any church com­mit­tees any time soon for a hand­ful of loose­ly-relat­ed rea­sons. If herd­ing athe­ists, only one part of this group, is like herd­ing cats, try­ing to cor­ral 23% of the pop­u­la­tion with­out any shared creed or spe­cif­ic ide­ol­o­gy is cor­ralling an even less pre­dictable menagerie. We need to know far more about what peo­ple affirm, as well as what they deny, if we want a clear­er pic­ture of where the country’s politics—if not its gov­ern­ment or policies—might be head­ed.

via Kot­tke

Relat­ed Con­tent:

A Visu­al Map of the World’s Major Reli­gions (and Non-Reli­gions)

Ani­mat­ed Map Shows How the Five Major Reli­gions Spread Across the World (3000 BC – 2000 AD)

Does Democ­ra­cy Demand the Tol­er­ance of the Intol­er­ant? Karl Popper’s Para­dox

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness

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Isaac Asimov’s Guide to the Bible: A Witty, Erudite Atheist’s Guide to the World’s Most Famous Book

in Books, Literature, Religion | March 28th, 2019

Paint­ing of Asi­mov on his throne by Rowe­na Morill, via Wiki­me­dia Com­mons

Every­one should read the Bible, and—I’d argue—should read it with a sharply crit­i­cal eye and the guid­ance of rep­utable crit­ics and his­to­ri­ans, though this may be too much to ask for those steeped in lit­er­al belief. Yet few­er and few­er peo­ple do read it, includ­ing those who pro­fess faith in a sect of Chris­tian­i­ty. Even famous athe­ists like Christo­pher Hitchens, Richard Dawkins, and Melvyn Bragg have argued for teach­ing the Bible in schools—not in a faith-based con­text, obvi­ous­ly, but as an essen­tial his­tor­i­cal doc­u­ment, much of whose lan­guage, in the King James, at least, has made major con­tri­bu­tions to lit­er­ary cul­ture. (Curiously—or not—atheists and agnos­tics tend to score far high­er than believ­ers on sur­veys of reli­gious knowl­edge.)

There is a prac­ti­cal prob­lem of sep­a­rat­ing teach­ing from preach­ing in sec­u­lar schools, but the fact remains that so-called “bib­li­cal illit­er­a­cy” is a seri­ous prob­lem edu­ca­tors have sought to rem­e­dy for decades. Promi­nent Shake­speare schol­ar G.B. Har­ri­son lament­ed it in the intro­duc­tion to his 1964 edit­ed edi­tion, The Bible for Stu­dents of Lit­er­a­ture and Art. “Today most stu­dents of lit­er­a­ture lack this kind of edu­ca­tion,” he wrote, “and have only the hazi­est knowl­edge of the book or of its con­tents, with the result that they inevitably miss much of the mean­ing and sig­nif­i­cance of many works of past gen­er­a­tions. Sim­i­lar­ly, stu­dents of art will miss some of the mean­ing of the pic­tures and sculp­tures of the past.”

Though a devout Catholic him­self, Harrison’s aim was not to pros­e­ly­tize but to do right by his stu­dents. His edit­ed Bible is an excel­lent resource, but it’s not the only book of its kind out there. In fact, no less a lumi­nary, and no less a crit­ic of reli­gion, than sci­en­tist and sci-fi giant Isaac Asi­mov pub­lished his own guide to the Bible, writ­ing in his intro­duc­tion:

The most influ­en­tial, the most pub­lished, the most wide­ly read book in the his­to­ry of the world is the Bible. No oth­er book has been so stud­ied and so ana­lyzed and it is a trib­ute to the com­plex­i­ty of the Bible and eager­ness of its stu­dents that after thou­sands of years of study there are still end­less books that can be writ­ten about it.

Of those books, the vast major­i­ty are devo­tion­al or the­o­log­i­cal in nature. “Most peo­ple who read the Bible,” Asi­mov writes, “do so in order to get the ben­e­fit of its eth­i­cal and spir­i­tu­al teach­ings.” But the ancient col­lec­tion of texts “has a sec­u­lar side, too,” he says. It is a “his­to­ry book,” though not in the sense that we think of the term, since his­to­ry as an evi­dence-based aca­d­e­m­ic dis­ci­pline did not exist until rel­a­tive­ly mod­ern times. Ancient his­to­ry includ­ed all sorts of myths, won­ders, and mar­vels, side-by-side with leg­endary and apoc­ryphal events as well as the mun­dane and ver­i­fi­able.

Asimov’s Guide to the Bible, orig­i­nal­ly pub­lished in two vol­umes in 1968–69, then reprint­ed as one in 1981, seeks to demys­ti­fy the text. It also assumes a lev­el of famil­iar­i­ty that Har­ri­son did not expect from his read­ers (and did not find among his stu­dents). The Bible may not be as wide­ly-read as Asi­mov thought, even if sales sug­gest oth­er­wise. Yet he does not expect that his read­ers will know “ancient his­to­ry out­side the Bible,” the sort of crit­i­cal con­text nec­es­sary for under­stand­ing what its writ­ings meant to con­tem­po­rary read­ers, for whom the “places and peo­ple” men­tioned “were well known.”

“I am try­ing,” Asi­mov writes in his intro­duc­tion, “to bring in the out­side world, illu­mi­nate it in terms of the Bib­li­cal sto­ry and, in return, illu­mi­nate the events of the Bible by adding to it the non-Bib­li­cal aspects of his­to­ry, biog­ra­phy, and geog­ra­phy.” This describes the gen­er­al method­ol­o­gy of crit­i­cal Bib­li­cal schol­ars. Yet Asimov’s book has a dis­tinct advan­tage over most of those writ­ten by, and for, aca­d­e­mics. Its tone, as one read­er com­ments, is “quick and fun, chat­ty, non-aca­d­e­m­ic.” It’s approach­able and high­ly read­able, that is, yet still seri­ous and eru­dite.

Asimov’s approach in his guide is not hos­tile or “anti-reli­gious,” as anoth­er read­er observes, but he was not him­self friend­ly to reli­gious beliefs, or super­sti­tions, or irra­tional what-have-yous. In the inter­view above from 1988, he explains that while humans are inher­ent­ly irra­tional crea­tures, he nonethe­less felt a duty “to be a skep­tic, to insist on evi­dence, to want things to make sense.” It is, he says, akin to the call­ing believ­ers feel to “spread God’s word.” Part of that duty, for Asi­mov, includ­ed mak­ing the Bible make sense for those who appre­ci­ate how deeply embed­ded it is in world cul­ture and his­to­ry, but who may not be inter­est­ed in just tak­ing it on faith. Find an old copy of Asimov’s Guide to the Bible at Ama­zon.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Isaac Asi­mov Pre­dicts in 1983 What the World Will Look Like in 2019: Com­put­er­i­za­tion, Glob­al Co-oper­a­tion, Leisure Time & Moon Min­ing

Intro­duc­tion to the Old Tes­ta­ment: A Free Yale Course 

Chris­tian­i­ty Through Its Scrip­tures: A Free Course from Har­vard Uni­ver­si­ty 

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness

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A Visual Map of the World’s Major Religions (and Non-Religions)

in Maps, Religion | March 26th, 2019

Images by Car­rie Osgood

“The nones are grow­ing,” we hear all the time, a ref­er­ence to the huge increase in peo­ple who check the “none” box in doc­u­ments that ask about reli­gious beliefs. In the U.S., at least, the response to this news seems to be five­fold: fear, denial, anger, cel­e­bra­tion, and spec­u­la­tion that can seem to go beyond what the data war­rants. Nation­al Geo­graph­ic, for exam­ple, trum­pets “The World’s Newest Major Reli­gion: No Reli­gion,” though it’s not exact­ly clear what no reli­gion means.

Check­ing “none” does not sig­ni­fy hold­ing spe­cif­ic con­vic­tions or affil­i­a­tions. It can be an irri­tat­ed reac­tion from those who find the ques­tion intru­sive, an eva­sion from those who refuse to think about the issue, a response from those whose beliefs are not reflect­ed in any of the choic­es offered, a con­fi­dent state­ment of thor­ough­go­ing philo­soph­i­cal nat­u­ral­ism…. One way to look at the data is that it’s incon­clu­sive.

But it could tell some big sto­ries as well, such as “the sec­u­lar­iz­ing West and the rapid­ly grow­ing rest” (a sto­ry com­pli­cat­ed by Chi­na, the coun­try with the largest “atheist/agnostic” pop­u­la­tion). While the inter­net has made it eas­i­er for athe­ists and agnos­tics to con­nect and orga­nize, these labels do not name any con­sis­tent set of beliefs or non-beliefs, and they can apply to sec­u­lar human­ists as well as to cer­tain adher­ents of forms of Bud­dhism, Tao­ism, pagan­ism, etc., who may not explic­it­ly iden­ti­fy as reli­gious but who have some spir­i­tu­al prac­tices…

But who­ev­er they are, the “nones” do appear to be grow­ing, account­ing for around a quar­ter of the pop­u­la­tion in the U.S. and Europe—where in some coun­tries, such as the Czech Repub­lic, clos­er to half the pop­u­la­tion iden­ti­fies as non­re­li­gious. The sto­ry of the nones is coun­ter­bal­anced by the mas­sive spread of reli­gion, most­ly Chris­tian­i­ty but also Islam, among the “rest” of the world. Design­er Car­rie Osgood of the world trav­el site Car­rie On Adven­tures has giv­en us a handy visu­al ref­er­ence (view in a large for­mat here) for the glob­al sit­u­a­tion in the info­graph­ic above.

Draw­ing on data from the Unit­ed Nations Pop­u­la­tion Fund—which she pre­vi­ous­ly used to cre­ate a series of pop­u­la­tion and urban­iza­tion maps—and from the World Reli­gion Data­base, Osgood visu­al­izes the rel­a­tive pop­u­la­tions of each coun­try by siz­ing them as pro­por­tion­al pie charts, with their major reli­gions rep­re­sent­ed by dif­fer­ent col­ors. (These num­bers are based on 2010 fig­ures and may have changed con­sid­er­ably in the past decade.) Chris­tian­i­ty is still the world’s largest reli­gion, at 32.8%, with Islam close behind at 22.5%.

Yet as Frank Jacobs points out at Big Think, such sweep­ing generalizations—like those about the “nones”—miss crit­i­cal details need­ed in any dis­cus­sion about world reli­gions. “The map bands togeth­er var­i­ous Chris­t­ian and Islam­ic schools of thought,” writes Jacobs, “that don’t nec­es­sar­i­ly accept each oth­er as ‘true believ­ers,’” and may even view each oth­er as ene­mies and heretics. Large, thriv­ing reli­gious groups like Sikhs are lumped in with “oth­ers,” a cat­e­go­ry that can include numer­i­cal­ly mar­gin­al or dis­ap­pear­ing belief sys­tems.

Like­wise, “there’s that whole mine­field of nuance between those who prac­tice a reli­gion (but may do so out of social coer­cion rather than per­son­al­ly held belief), and those who believe in some­thing (but don’t par­tic­i­pate in the rit­u­als of any par­tic­u­lar faith).” Espe­cial­ly in coun­tries with a major­i­ty faith—and with painful social or legal penal­ties for those who don’t subscribe—the ques­tion of how many peo­ple real­ly iden­ti­fy out of true con­vic­tion can­not be ignored.

Which brings us back to the “nones,” a cat­e­go­ry, how­ev­er fuzzy, that may be far larg­er than the num­bers show, and could include mil­lions more in major­i­ty-faith coun­tries, if those peo­ple lived under a sec­u­lar gov­ern­ment, in a plu­ral­is­tic soci­ety, and felt free to speak their minds. The “nones” have maybe always been around. Only now, in much of the world at least, they’re far more vis­i­ble. But that’s just one pos­si­ble sto­ry among the many we can tell about this data.

View and down­load a larg­er ver­sion of the info­graph­ic map at Osgood’s site and see a detailed break­down of the data at Big Think.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Ani­mat­ed Map Shows How the Five Major Reli­gions Spread Across the World (3000 BC – 2000 AD)

Take Harvard’s Intro­duc­to­ry Course on Bud­dhism, One of Five World Reli­gions Class­es Offered Free Online

Chris­tian­i­ty Through Its Scrip­tures: A Free Course from Har­vard Uni­ver­si­ty 

Intro­duc­tion to the Old Tes­ta­ment: A Free Yale Course 

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness

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Watch Seder-Masochism, Nina Paley’s Animated, Feminist Take on the Passover Holiday: The Animated Feature Film Is Free and in the Public Domain

in Animation, Gender, Law, Religion | March 25th, 2019

Seder-Masochism, copy­right abo­li­tion­ist Nina Paley’s lat­est ani­mat­ed release, is guar­an­teed to ruf­fle feath­ers in cer­tain quar­ters, though the last laugh belongs to this trick­ster artist, who shares writ­ing cred­it with ”God, Moses or a series of patri­ar­chal males, depend­ing on who you ask.”

Bypass­ing a com­mer­cial release in favor of the pub­lic domain goes a long way toward inoc­u­lat­ing the film and its cre­ator against expen­sive rights issues that could arise from the star-stud­ded sound­track.

It also lets the air out of any affront­ed par­ties’ cam­paigns for mass box office boy­cotts.

“The crit­i­cism seems equal­ly divid­ed between peo­ple that say I’m a Zion­ist and peo­ple that say I’m an anti-Zion­ist,” Paley says of This Land Is Mine, below, a stun­ning sequence of trib­al and inter-trib­al car­nage, mem­o­rably set to Ernest Gold’s theme for the 1960 epic Paul New­man vehi­cle, Exo­dus.

Released as a stand-alone short, This Land Is Mine has become the most viewed of Paley’s works. She finds the oppos­ing camps’ equal out­cry encour­ag­ing, proof that she’s doing “some­thing right.”

More both­er­some has been Uni­ver­si­ty of Illi­nois Asso­ciate Pro­fes­sor of Gen­der Stud­ies Mimi Thi Nguyen’s social media push to brand the film­mak­er as trans­pho­bic. (Paley, no fan of iden­ti­ty pol­i­tics, states that her “crime was, months ear­li­er, shar­ing on Face­book the fol­low­ing lyric: ‘If a per­son has a penis he’s a man.’”) Nguyen’s actions result­ed in the fem­i­nist film’s ouster from sev­er­al venues and fes­ti­vals, includ­ing Ebert­fest in Paley’s home­town and a women’s film fes­ti­val in Bel­gium.

What would the ancient fer­til­i­ty god­dess­es pop­u­lat­ing both art his­to­ry and Seder-Masochism have to say about that devel­op­ment?

In Seder-Masochism, these god­dess fig­ures, whom Paley ear­li­er trans­formed into a series of free down­load­able GIFs, offer a most­ly silent rebuke to those who refuse to acknowl­edge any con­cep­tion of the divine exist­ing out­side patri­ar­chal tra­di­tion.

In the case of Assis­tant Pro­fes­sor Nguyen, per­haps the god­dess­es would err on the side of diplo­ma­cy (and the First Amend­ment), fram­ing the dust-up as just one more rea­son the pub­lic should be glad the pro­jec­t’s lodged in the pub­lic domain. Any­one with access to the Inter­net and a desire to see the film will have the oppor­tu­ni­ty to do so. Called out, maybe. Shut down, nev­er.

The god­dess­es sup­ply a depth of mean­ing to this large­ly com­ic under­tak­ing. Their ample curves inform many of the pat­terns that give motion to the ani­mat­ed cutouts.

Paley also gets a lot of mileage from repli­cat­ing super­nu­mer­ary char­ac­ters until they march with ant-like pur­pose or bedaz­zle in Bus­by Berke­ley-style spec­ta­cles. Not since Paul Mazursky’s Tem­pest have goats loomed so large in cin­e­mat­ic chore­og­ra­phy…

Paley’s use of music is anoth­er source of abid­ing plea­sure. She casts a wide net—punk, dis­co, Bul­gar­i­an folk, the Bea­t­les, Free to Be You and Me—again, fram­ing her choic­es as par­o­dy. “Hail, Hail, the Gang’s All Here” accom­pa­nies the sev­enth plague of Egypt (don’t both­er look­ing it up. It’s hail.) Ringo Starr’s famous “Hel­ter Skel­ter” aside (“I’ve got blis­ters on my fin­gers!”) boils down to an apt choice for plague num­ber six. (If you have to think about it…)

The ele­ments of the Seder plate are list­ed to the strains of “Tijua­na Taxi” because… well, who doesn’t love Herb Alpert and the Tijua­na Brass?

Paley’s own reli­gious back­ground is of obvi­ous inter­est here, and as with her pre­vi­ous fea­ture, Sita Sings the Blues—also in the pub­lic domain—the auto­bi­o­graph­i­cal ele­ment is irre­sistible. A 2011 audio record­ing pro­vides the excuse to por­tray her father, Hiram, who died the year after the inter­view was con­duct­ed, as a Mon­ty Python-esque God. The senior Paley was raised in an obser­vant Jew­ish house­hold, but lost faith as a young man. An athe­ist who want­ed his chil­dren to know some­thing of their her­itage, Passover was the one Jew­ish hol­i­day he con­tin­ued to cel­e­brate. (He also for­bade the kids from par­tic­i­pat­ing in any sort of sec­u­lar Christ­mas activ­i­ties.)

A wist­ful God with the com­plex­ion of a dol­lar bill, Hiram is at times sur­round­ed by put­ti, in the form of his par­ents, his con­tentious Uncle Her­schel, and his own sweet younger self.

For these scenes, Paley por­trays her­self as a spir­it­ed “sac­ri­fi­cial goat.” This char­ac­ter finds an echo at film’s end, when “Chad Gadya,” the tra­di­tion­al Passover tune that brings the annu­al seder to a rol­lick­ing con­clu­sion, is brought to life using embroi­der­ma­tion, a form Paley may or may not have invent­ed.

Per­haps Paley’s most sub­ver­sive joke is choos­ing Jesus, as depict­ed in Juan de Juanes’ 1652 paint­ing, The Last Sup­per, to deliv­er an edu­ca­tion­al blow-by-blow of Passover rit­u­al.

Actu­al­ly, much like Audrey Hep­burn in My Fair Lady and Natal­ie Wood in West Side Sto­ry, Jesus was ghost-voiced by anoth­er performer—Barry Gray, nar­ra­tor of the mid­cen­tu­ry edu­ca­tion­al record­ing The Moishe Oysh­er Seder.

As you may have gleaned, Paley, despite the clean ele­gance of her ani­mat­ed line, is a max­i­mal­ist. There’s some­thing for every­one (except­ing, of course, Mimi Thi Nguyen)—a gleam­ing gold­en idol, a ball bounc­ing above hiero­glyph­ic lyrics, actu­al footage of atroc­i­ties com­mit­ted in a state of reli­gious fer­vor, Moses’ broth­er Aaron—a fig­ure who’s often shoved to the side­lines, if not left out­right on the cut­ting room floor.

We leave you with Paley’s prayer to her Muse, found freely shared on her web­site:

Our Idea

Which art in the Ether

That can­not be named;

Thy Vision come

Thy Will be done

On Earth, as it is in Abstrac­tion.

Give us this day our dai­ly Spark

And for­give us our crit­i­cisms

As we for­give those who cri­tique against us;

And lead us not into stag­na­tion

But deliv­er us from Ego;

For Thine is the Vision

And the Pow­er

And the Glo­ry for­ev­er.

Amen.

Watch Seder-Masochism in its entire­ty up top, or down­load it here. Pur­chase the com­pan­ion book here.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Sita Sings the Blues Now on YouTube

Cel­e­brate the Women’s March with 24 God­dess GIFs Cre­at­ed by Ani­ma­tor Nina Paley: They’re Free to Down­load and Remix

Watch Nina Paley’s “Embroi­der­ma­tion,” a New, Stun­ning­ly Labor-Inten­sive Form of Ani­ma­tion

Intro­duc­tion to the Old Tes­ta­ment: A Free Yale Course 

Ayun Hal­l­i­day is an author, illus­tra­tor, the­ater mak­er and Chief Pri­ma­tol­o­gist of the East Vil­lage Inky zine.  Join her in New York City for the next install­ment of her book-based vari­ety show, Necro­mancers of the Pub­lic Domain, this April. Fol­low her @AyunHalliday.

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