Islamists aren't the only 'fundamentalists' to worry about . . .

Sadhvi Deva Thakur

. . . for there are ladies like this Hindu politician:

Sadhvi Deva Thakur is a leader of All India Hindu Mahasabha, a leading Hindu organization in India. On April 11, 2015, she demanded that Muslims and Christians in India be forcibly sterilized, as they were during Emergency Rule in 1975, when such forced sterilizations were carried out. The following are excerpts from a media report: A leader of Hindu Mahasabha on Saturday [April 11, 2015] stoked a controversy saying Muslims and Christians must undergo sterilization to restrict their growing population which was posing a threat to Hindus . . . . [Specifically, she said,] "The population of Muslims and Christians is growing day by day. To rein in this, [the] Center [the federal Indian government] will have to impose emergency [rule], and Muslims and Christians will have to be forced to undergo sterilization so that they can't increase their numbers," vice president of All India Hindu Mahasabha, Sadhvi Deva Thakur told reporters . . . . [and] also exhorted Hindus to have more children and increase their population so as to have an effect on the world. In another controversial remark, she said that idols of Hindu gods and goddesses should be placed in mosques and churches. Thakur also came out strongly in support of installing a statue of 'patriot' Nathuram Godse [the assassin of Mahatma Gandhi] in Haryana [state near Delhi ruled by the pro-Hindu Bharatiya Janata Party of Prime Minister Narendra Modi].

You can read even worse things by other radical Hindu nationalists in the same Memri Report (Special Dispatch No. 6033, April 26, 2015), e.g., "Today there is a need to dig up the [bodies of the Muslims' deceased] mothers, sisters and daughters from graves, and to rape them . . ."

What a horrifying thing to say! What's the world coming to?

Christopher M. Moreman on 'Self-less-ness'

A Non-Self Walked Here

Buddha's Footprint

With Dharmachakra and Triratna

1st century CE, Gandhāra

(Image from Wikipedia)

Sogang University's Death, Dying, and Spirituality Conference is not yet over, but I'll be staying home today to recover from an intense and intensive three days. I also have get back to my regular duties, such as grading papers...

Yesterday, I responded to a paper titled "Experiencing the Numinous in the Face of Death," which I've commented on before in this blog without identifying the speaker because he hadn't yet spoken at that time. I suppose that I can identify him now. He's a young scholar at Saint Francis Xavier University, in Antigonish, Nova Scotia, Canada, his name is Christopher M. Moreman, and he jokes that he's one of only three 'Moremans' in Canada -- which sounds like a claim that there are only three Mormans in Canada (an obvious untruth, of course, for there are at least 10 of them).

Anyway, Moreman gave a new twist to Rudolf Otto's Idea of the Holy, as readers of this blog may have noticed this new use of the mysterium tremendum a few days ago when I reported on this point in the entry "Death as the mysterium tremendum et fascinans?".

Today, though, I'm just going to cite a minor criticism that I made of a different point in Moreman's paper, one where he reaches for parallels about 'selflessness' across religions and religious experiences:

Moreman goes on to suggest a similarity between Buddhist and Taoist views of self-less-ness and the sort of selflessness that one finds in the thought of St. Paul and in the lives of people who have had Near Death Experiences, or NDEs. Moreman argues that when Paul speaks of dying to sin, one dies to self and is reborn sinless and therefore selfless. Similarly, those who have undergone NDEs live far more selfless lives, says Moreman, pointing to the results of a study by Cherie Sutherland (Sutherland, Reborn in the Light), as well as in other studies of NDE (e.g., Grot-Marnat and Summers, "Altered Beliefs"; and Greyson and Stevenson, "The Phenomenology of Near-Death Experiences"). This is an interesting perspective, but I wonder about it. While I can concede parallels in the de-emphasis upon self in Buddhism, Taoism, St. Paul, and NDE people, I nevertheless think that some equivocation in the meaning of the term "self" is slipping in. For the Buddhist and Taoist, the self is unstable, in flux, but for St. Paul and NDE people, the self is stable, even assured of existence after death. For the former, denial of self is an ontological issue, but for the latter, it is an ethical issue. The related term "selflessness" is thus also different, as is the implication of the term "selfish." Denial of self simply does not mean the same thing across the smorgasboard of religions.

That's enough for today, I hope, for I've got that grading to get to. Thanks to all who visit and read my musings...

Bibliography:

Greyson, Bruce and Ian Stevenson. "The Phenomenology of Near-Death Experiences." American Journal of Psychiatry 137. 1980. pages 1193-1196.

Grot-Marnat, G. and R. Summers. "Altered Beliefs, Attitudes, and Behaviors Following Near-Death Experiences." Journal of Humanistic Psychology 38. 1998. page 110-125.

Sutherland, Cherie. Reborn in the Light: Life After Near-Death Experiences. New York: Bantam, 1995.

Death as the mysterium tremendum et fascinans?

Rudolf Otto

Author of The Idea of the Holy

(Image from Kelley L. Ross)

Still working on my prepared responses to several scholar papers scheduled for this week's upcoming religious studies conference at Sogang University on Death, Dying, and Spirituality, I have written the following couple of paragraphs as part of my response to a paper about experiencing the numinous in the face of death (albeit reworked for this blog to leave the scholar unidentified):

The scholar offers the interesting perspective that the world's religions provide a panacea for our fear of death, by which he may mean to imply that this is their primary function, but we will have to see on this point. What strikes me about his point is that he argues that even Hinduism and Buddhism affirm continuation of the self after death through reincarnation or translation to a heavenly realm and that this affirmation of the continued existence of one's self is what helps these religions provide consolation to the average believer. Even more striking, because surprising, is his observation that even science, or perhaps 'Scientism', seeks to deny death and aims to overcome it by achieving physical immortality. Yet, he wonders if fear of death is common to humans in every epoch, and he cites the possibility that our early ancestors didn't fear death as we do today. If this is correct, he suggests, then the world's religions have developed alongside a rising sense of self-importance. This would suggest that as the individual has grown increasingly in importance, so people have grown to see themselves as individually important, and perhaps all-important, which is somewhat counter-intuitive since the great world religions claim to diminish the significance of the individual. At this point, I would note the remark by Dorothee Soëlle quoted in the paper, namely, "never are people so self-involved as when they fear death" (Soëlle, Mystery of Death, page 5), which suggests the ironic possibility that belief in immortality reduces self-involvement by removing the fear of death. Moreover, if Hinduism and Buddhism have proven attractive for many people for so long because -- despite what they may affirm about dissolution of the self as an ultimate aim -- they offer personal immortality in their popular forms and have long done so in cultures not noted for their individualism, then I wonder about the thesis that fear of death undergirds religion and that the great religions have developed along with a growing fear of death as the self grows in significance. There is at least some complexity to this issue, and perhaps even an ironic counter-argument, as I've suggested.

At any rate, the possibility that death might end not just our earthly life but even our entire being remains troubling to many of us, and the scholar cites Martin Heidegger's description of the sort of anxiety stirred up by the realisation of one's impending demise as unheimlich, or uncanny, which is understood in the sense offered by Rudolf Otto for the experience of our encounter with "The Holy," for Otto describes our encounter with the numinous in the sense of the sacred as the mysterium tremendum et fascinans, a mystery both terrifying and fascinating (Rudolf Otto, The Idea of the Holy). In such a sense as this, death itself seems to take on the qualities of a fearsome deus absconditus who is not so much the ontological ground of our existence as an existential threat to our being. For most of us, however -- suggests the scholar -- perhaps as a sort of Freudian reaction formation (cf. Freud, Reader, page 295 et passim), rather than directly confronting our mortality, a belief arises in us that we shall become like the Wholly Other and live forever, the Wholly Other being a God who has not absconded but who offers a reliable promise guaranteeing the survival of our self.

Such is the current state of these remarks as I try to develop them. They sound a bit awkward to me now, partly because I've had to rework them to avoid quoting or mentioning the scholar whose paper I'm responding to, for the conference has yet to take place.

Perhaps I'll be reporting on this sort of topic over the next several days, for the conference begins tomorrow.

Bibliography:

Freud, Sigmund. The Freud Reader. Edited by Peter Gay. W.W. Norton and Company, 1995.

Heidegger, Martin. Being and Time. Translated by John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson. Oxford: Blackwell, 1962.

Otto, Rudolf. The Idea of the Holy. Translated by John Harvey. NewYork: Oxford University Press, 1968.

Soëlle, Dorothee. The Mystery of Death. Translated by Nancy Lukens-Rumscheidt and Martin Lukens-Rumscheidt. Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2007 (Mystik des Todes: Ein Fragment. Stuttgart: Kreuz Verlag, 2003).