 Okay, I guess we should get started, it is after 12.15. Welcome, good afternoon and welcome. My name is, for those of you who don't know me, I'm Richard Schoenig. I'm a professor of philosophy here at SAC, and I'll be your host for today's presentation on world religions, facts, comments, and questions. And I expect my presentation to be 20 or 25 minutes, and at any time during the presentation, if you have questions or comments, just raise your hand and I'll entertain those. And when I finish, there will still be time for questions and comments. In fact, in the course of the presentation, I have highlighted certain areas that you might want to think about for asking questions. If you so desire. All right, so I have two goals in the presentation. I want to present eight general facts and four questions that I think are useful with respect to world religions. And also, I want to invite your comments and questions at any time, as I mentioned. So, some facts about world religion. Let's start with fact number one, and I think I need to. Okay, so fact number one, it's difficult to define religion. If you've ever taken a course in world religions, there is usually a section, sometimes a chapter, devoted to pointing out how difficult it is to get a definition that there is a consensus about. I'm not going to wrestle with it directly, but I'm going to suggest that one way of distinguishing those kinds of institutions that we want to call religions from others that are maybe like a religion is what I'm going to suggest here. So we would want to accept Christianity as a religion, Judaism as a religion, Hinduism as a religion, Islam as a religion. We don't want to accept vegetarianism as a religion, or rooting for the cowboys, or being a passionate stamp collector. We might say those are... I think there's a new religion that just came out where the lady can wear a... You know, to drain your... It's like a drainer, and she's wearing it on her license plate. Like, she took a picture of it. Okay, yeah, see, a colander. A colander, yeah. Some kind of religion about food. And so she wanted to take her picture with that thing on her head. Yeah, yeah. And then there's also free thinkers have introduced the notion of the flying spaghetti monster. It's called pastafarianism. Yeah. Well, at any rate, I think we can talk about finding a way to separate the two out so that we get a notion of religion has this particular characteristic and those that are like a religion don't. And what I'm going to say is religions have a two-world view of reality. As far as religions are concerned, reality is divided into two worlds. I'll expand on that momentarily. Non-religions then have only what we would call a one-world view of reality. So could you be more specific, Shurnik? And the answer is yes, I can. In fact, I will. All right, let's take a look at the religious view, the two-world view here. And again, I think maybe I need to make this a little smaller so it'll fit more comfortably. All right, so in this two-world view that religion has, the two worlds are the supernatural world up here in sort of the yellow or gold and then the natural world down here. The supernatural world, and by the way, up here, down here, that's not just a throwaway. Generally speaking, when religions talk about their two-world view, the supernatural world is always up there. And that's why, for example, worshiping on high places was initially very important to religion before they settled into using temples and so on. They would try to get higher, closer to the supernatural. And you see that in the Old Testament where the claim is that the Mesopotamians try to build a tower to get to heaven to battle. All right, so in the supernatural world, this is the world which contains gods or god, the supernatural, other supernatural beings such as angels, devils, ghosts, jinn, which is a Muslim supernatural being, and so on. The natural world is the realm of matter and energy and time and space. Virtually everybody who's not institutionalized acknowledges this world exists. The big question is whether the existence of this world. Notice also that from the religious world view, there is connections. There are communications between these two worlds. So the denizens in the supernatural world can communicate with the natural world by incarnations, by divine beings taking on bodies as either avatars or messiahs in some cases, revelation that somehow they can communicate to people down here, signs, miracles, those sorts of things. On the other hand, those of us who are down here, we can communicate and have contact with the supernatural world and prayer, ritual, meditation, sacrifice, those sorts of things. All right, so in this sense then, the religions, the institutions that I said we all kind of agree are religions such as Christianity, Judaism, Islam, Hinduism and so forth. They all have some version of this two world view. Whereas the institutions that I said are like a religion for some people but not religions would include vegetarianism and rooting for a particular sports team or a passionate stamp collector. Those have a one world view. Now there are some people, obviously if you're a stamp collector or a root for the cowboys or a vegetarian, you can still have a two world view. But I'm saying to be a vegetarian, the definition doesn't involve having a two world view. You could be someone who has one. All right, there are people as you probably know who reject the two world view and we can see that lined up here. So people who are atheists or agnostics will maintain that there's only one world, it's the natural world and it exhausts reality. The supernatural world is rejected on the basis of the claim that there's insufficient evidence to suppose that it exists. Where might a pantheist fit? Yeah, that's interesting. Pantheism is the view that, as I understand it, that the entire physical universe, all the matter and energy and time and space exhaust reality. So it's sort of like this, but that somehow or other this is divine in some sense. In some instances people may invoke that there's a personality involved with the universe. I think some of the Gaia theories are sort of like that or even when we talk about mother nature, we seem to be saying that there's something that is kind of a person but it's still not really a person. I confess that I'm not clear about pantheism because it seems as if the pantheism is true then virtually nobody is an atheist, right? I mean, who's going to deny the existence of the physical universe as such? But I think we get into trouble here because sometimes scientists who know an awful lot about the universe are very sloppy in their use of language. They start throwing the term God around when they really are just talking about nature and then it gets us all into knots and so forth. Hawkins does that and even Einstein did it to some degree and it's something that I hope is avoided in the future to get clear on this. Alright, so fact number one, it's difficult to define religion but I think the notion of a supernatural two-world view can separate out what is a religion from what isn't for the most part. Fact number two, historically, religions have been found in virtually all societies. Some notion of a two-world view or a supernatural kind of world view is something we find in all societies. We might want to at some point address the question of why that is the case. I'm not going to get into it right now unless you want to talk about it. Fact number three, we can sort out different types of religions. So we can talk about those religions that are monotheistic. Prefects mono is a Greek prefix meaning one and theos is the Greek word for God. So monotheism means that there's only one divine being or one major divine being in that supernatural realm. These religions then embrace that, the religion of Sikhism and sometimes it's called Sikhism but I've heard people who are close to that religion and they tend to use the word Sikh even though in English, of course, it leads to snickering, I suppose. By the way, I live out by UTSA and a Sikh community has built a nice place of worship and gathering there and they've been very friendly in the neighborhood. They invited people in for supper and explaining Sikhism and so forth and they are distinguished because the males wear turbans and they have beards and they also carry a ceremonial dagger and just recently the U.S. has allowed American Sikhs in the military to keep their beard and keep their turban as well as where they're uniform so they're given sort of a dispensation for that. Then, of course, Judaism, Christianity, Islam, or monotheistic. Some people have trouble with Christianity being monotheistic and the reason for that, of course, is the Trinity. The Trinity is a kind of metaphysical, difficult area to describe how you can have one god but three gods and so on and again, that'd be far beyond what we can get into here but Christians maintain very stoutly that they are monotheistic and that if you're having trouble with the Trinity they'll join the party. It's a mystery. One that I would mention here that is not often mentioned is Zoroastrianism which is essentially a religion that originated in what is today Persia and its importance is that there's a good case to be made that the kind of monotheism that Judaism eventually developed into had and borrowed a great deal from Zoroastrianism and I'll get to that a little bit later on in the presentation for you to think about more. Besides monotheistic religions, of course, there are polytheistic religions where the word poly means many in Greek. Traditional Hinduism, Mahayana Buddhism, Taoism, Shintoism and most indigenous tribal religions have many gods involved. What about Theravada? Theravada Buddhism is probably the original form of Buddhism probably what Siddhartha, whose title is the Buddha, really taught and it's not even clear that that's any kind of theism. It seems like it's almost a self-help sort of thing. We've got suffering in the world, it's a real downer but we have to live in this world. Let me tell you, I got a book here that if you were around today, in Beyond Oprah, I have a book here that tells you how to deal with suffering and this is the important question of our time and for 1495 you get the Kindle Edition for 995 and so on. It's more of a self-help thing, really. When it comes to that, did Siddhartha have a two-world view? It's not clear. Then there are oddly enough non-theistic religions and this is what I was just talking about. Besides the Theravada Buddhism, Brahmanic Hinduism might be in that category depending on how you understand Brahman but I don't want to get into details beyond the time we have here but Brahman is a kind of basic reality in other forms that might simply be called being with a capital B, existence or something like that. Original Taoism, likewise, the Tao is not supposed to be a person it's a kind of part of the furniture of the universe, it's there and we need to react accordingly to it. And then Confucianism, which once again seems to be more a remedy for a society that's not functioning well. Confucius comes along and says well this is what we need to do to get China back out of its chaotic state and it had very little to do with any kind of a supernatural realm. It's not clear if Confucius believed in that and if he did it was only because it helped cement us together and he didn't really make it clear that he believed in any of that stuff. Do these have a dual worth to you? I don't think... well again, if you think of the Tao as a sort of a supernatural thing then yes, if you don't then no. Likewise with Brahman. And Confucianism certainly doesn't. It's somewhat surprising that it's included in books on world religions because I think a good case can be made for the fact that it's more an ethical and a political statement than a religious one. Alright. Fact number four, religious demographics for those of you who might be interested, Christianity has the most adherence today. It comprises about 30% of the world's population. Islam is fairly close behind at 24% and it seems to be catching up. The reason for that in part is because Islam is most prevalent in developing countries where the population is growing rather rapidly. Christianity is growing but more as we'll see in a minute in certain parts of the world. In the developing part of the world Christianity seems to be declining in numbers. And then you see Hinduism has over a billion. Hinduism is, basically you're not too far wrong to say it's the religion of India. And so as the Indian population grows Hinduism will grow. It's not as much of a widely spread religion as Christianity or Islam. And then you've got the others there. What is spiritism? I'm not sure. I don't know. I could speculate but... Probably not. Is it sort of being non-religious or spiritual? That could be. I'm not religious but I am spiritual. You've been here before. It seems so. Don Dylan? Does that African angelicism have anything to do with Protestant evangelicalism? Yeah. Yes. Well, it does to some extent. As you may know Britain or the United Kingdom had numerous colonies throughout Africa. And the official religion of England at any rate is the Anglican church. Because Anglican is just another word for English. And so where the English colonies were they brought their churches and to this day you find in places like Nigeria, Uganda and other of those areas there they have an Anglican presence. But that Anglican church presence is much more evangelical meaning it's much more emotional it's much more a matter of witnessing and converting others whereas the English Anglicanism the kind of Anglicanism that you find in England is much more subdued and laid back and isn't quite so evangelical. So I don't know if that answered your question or not. I think the answer to your question is yes it's very evangelical with a small E. It's still calls itself Anglican so it has priests. Why did they change it Why is there a difference? Between English and Anglican? Well I think England originally comes from the word the land of the Angles Anglos land, Anglos land, Anglican it just was easier for some tongues to get around that I'm guessing. Alright so that's the demography how about the geography of the religions you can't quite see the colors it's dramatically here but this gives you the broad outline there are some mistakes on this but by and large this mustard color represents where Christianity is the predominant religion it doesn't mean everyone there is Christian it doesn't even mean that a majority of the people there but it means whatever religions are there Christianity is a plurality and in some instances a large plurality so you can see how widespread it is compared to the others The next biggest religion, Islam is the green here and by the way that's not an accident Islam is a religion that has an unofficial color associated with it and it's green for various reasons OACs are very nice places and it includes Indonesia North Africa West Asia Central Asia I think that's a mistake Muslims are a majority there the line goes more across here below here is either Christian or animus meaning tribal religions and above it is Muslims and then you've got Hindus here in India you've got Buddhism here Shintoism appear too and then Taoism and Confucianism here and of course alright, fact number six I mentioned Zoroastrianism and the fact that when you study world religions it isn't often the case that Zoroastrianism is studied and one of the reasons for that is today the number of Zoroastrians in the world is probably only about the population of Corpus Christi or thereabouts but that notwithstanding it is important I think to study Zoroastrianism because I believe scholars have made a pretty good case that Zoroastrianism had a profound effect on Judaism and if so, that's important because Judaism of course had a profound effect on Christianity and Islam so to know something about Zoroastrianism is important in this respect so what is the case just laying it out in general what we can do is we can identify writings in Judaism that were produced before the so-called Babylonian exile you may remember from your biblical history that in the year 587-586 Nebuchadnezzar and his Babylonians came and conquered Judah, the kingdom of Judah remember the northern kingdom of Israel that had been conquered by the Assyrians 150 years earlier and the 10 tribes were lost to history they were probably incorporated and spread around the Assyrian Empire and basically just became the religion that they lived around but Judah, the kingdom of Judah hung on for another 150 years but by 587 they were overtaken by Nebuchadnezzar and the Babylonians and the Babylonians did what they usually did when they conquered a people they selected out anyone who could be a focal point for resistance and in their mind that meant anybody who had wealth or power or prestige or high standing or learning those people were oddly enough you would think they both wanted to just execute them but they didn't do that they took them and they migrated them over to Babylon and settled them in around the city so and it was sort of like a house arrest it wasn't they were in prison or anything like that they were able to set up their own community and they did and they were there for about 47-50 years when the Babylonians were overthrown by the new strongmen country on the block and that was the Persians under Cyrus the Great and so Cyrus told the Israelites or the Jews if you wish they could go back if they want and he would even help them rebuild the temple which Nebuchadnezzar had destroyed not all of them they went back oddly enough they kind of liked it there it was like what go back to to Nebraska when we've been living in Manhattan I'm not sure I want to do that but okay some of them did anyway they did go back so then we see the writings that occurred after they were in Babylonian captivity and compare the two and we can see maybe the influence of being in Babylon and of course that the major religion in Babylon at the time when they were in captivity was a form of Zoroastrianism so let's put it together in a quick form here before the Babylonian captivity Judaism lacked a significant satan figure it lacked a resurrection of the body after death it lacked much of a concern at all Jews basically used to talk about going to Sheol which is very similar to the Greek notion of Hades it was some dark dank cavern down below the earth and your soul went there flitted about in the shadows and the darkness and eventually just like a plain candle that went out but that will change after they get back from Babylon they didn't have a real notion of heaven or hell before they came back there was no reference to God's plan to end the world there was no final day of judgment there wasn't much mention of angels and demons however once they come back from the Babylonian empire Judaism did start having references to these things in their writings and by the time of Jesus it was an important part of Judaism at least for some versions of Judaism and most importantly for the phariseic versions remember the pharisees it's kind of ironic that the pharisees get very bad press in the New Testament they're always fussing with Jesus and Jesus is always sparring with them and he has some very accurate things to say about them they're whiteed sephalicas they're all white and shiny on the outside but inside they contain filth and degradation and that sort of thing but it turns out that phariseic Judaism is the kind of Judaism that eventually permeated Christianity probably in part because of the great influence of Paul of Tarsus who probably declared himself a pharisee and having been educated that way so all of these kinds of things then go into post Babylonian Judaism and then from Judaism into Christianity and also later on into Islam so the Zoroastrian connection is a very fascinating one and it's one that very few people in the West know a whole lot about and yet it is important I think alright fact number 7 of the 8 facts worldwide Christianity is becoming and I'm corning the term here forgive me Southernized so what does that mean Christianity in terms of numbers of adherence and vitality is relatively stagnant or slumping in the northern or developed tier of countries such as Canada Australia, New Zealand and most of the countries of Europe notice I didn't include the United States in there some of these are not in the northern hemisphere but they are considered the developing countries and somehow or other the term northern is used alright on the other hand Christianity still does well in the southern or developing tier of countries such as the poorer countries of south and central America and the Caribbean countries of black Africa and the Philippines now the US outlier here to some degree we are obviously a developed country but we still have a pretty robust Christianity however if you peek behind the curtain it turns out that of the indigenous Americans the numbers of Christians are dropping the reason why in aggregate it doesn't show is because we're bringing in lots of immigrants basically from the Philippines and from central and south America who are religious and who are Christians and so the number of Christians is maintaining in the United States but that's mostly due to immigration that has a lot of I think important ramifications given that religion plays such an important role in our country in terms of domestic and foreign policy if indeed religion is diminishing then that might change how the US interacts with the rest of the world spoke a little bit about that in a presentation I gave earlier in the semester alright the last question here is or fact is that the US is much more religious than any other developed country in the world so when you compare compare even the US with Canada which is probably culturally the closest to us and there is a discernible difference in the number of adherents the number of people who pray daily the number of people who say that religion is important in their lives and when you move over to Europe it's even more dramatic especially northern Europe and part of the quality we sometimes have with our European friends is that they think we're a little bit religiously and we think that they are craving secularists who lost all their values and guided so there is that kind of attention especially with the French oddly enough because the French consider themselves very secular and for religious people in this country they tend to look at the French and think that's what happens when you go away from religion while the French don't seem to think their country is all that bad alright so those that essentially completes the facts that I wanted to share with you by the way if you want to contact me more to talk about any of these things but you'd rather not do it in this communal environment my office is upstairs at 2.30 and my email is there and I'd be happy to meet with you in any way as philosophers have mouth, we'll talk and that operates with me all the time so I pointed out certain questions that you might want to pursue here including this last one I'll end there and I'll let you guys start getting involved here and participate who would like to start anybody? yes good question what about Catholics as it turns out and this is a kind of a misconception that students not just students but people down in this part of the world this part of the country they'll say something like well I'm not a Catholic I'm a Christian and the fact of the matter is that Catholics consider themselves to be Christians and they have a good case for so you can talk about Catholic Christians you can talk about evangelical Christians you can talk about intercostal Christians it's all in the same vein and it turns out too that Catholic Christians comprise about half of all Christians so they're not to be forgotten as being a part of the house of Christianity anybody have any ideas about 3 and 4 why is it that Christianity is flourishing in the developing countries but not in the developed countries? anybody have any thoughts on that? I think there's a lot of hope in Christianity and so I guess in the poorer country you kind of need that type of hope whereas here we're more about ourselves and we already have luxury so yeah well but it's not so much here because the United States still has a pretty high level of religiosity but it would be those other areas Europe and Australia New Zealand, Canada but still I think your point is on target I think like you said Christianity is more evangelical so they're going to go out and spread the word and they're going to go to those countries that are hurting because Christianity is a faith of hope and so they're going to go out there and reach out to those people why am I going to go to someone who's already established and has a way of thinking trying to change their mind and they won't whereas I can go somewhere that someone's looking for hope and then Islam I'm sure I mean I'm sure they're spreading their word but I don't think it's as evangelical as Christianity yeah they don't have the formal apparatus that Christianity has but they're also still pretty effective the main battle area by the way between trying to get converts between Christianity and Islam is Africa the rest of the world is pretty well settled in one way or the other but in Africa there are still a lot of tribal religions and the western religions see them as potential customers and so they kind of scramble and it causes trouble because the two are competing against each other it's like two sales people in the same mall trying to sell the same thing or similar things it becomes a real problem that way both of what you said are backed up by studies that claim to show that religion tends to be more prevalent as you especially pointed out where people are in need when you look at most of Europe especially northern Europe when you look at Canada, Australia New Zealand you find that those countries have political and social institutions that pretty much allow people to live a free and prosperous life and so religion doesn't seem to be nearly as necessary there's also a connection between amount of education and religion even in the United States if you survey people you see that the most religious groups are those who have only an elementary school education when you move up to those who have a high school education the number of strong adherence diminishes when you get to a college education it diminishes more when you get to graduate it diminishes more and so in the developed countries where the formal education is more readily available you have more formally educated people I'm not saying they're smarter people I'm just saying they have a more education and therefore generally they'll have less religious connections Is that because science is now an education of studying now? I think that there's something to that Dylan that when it's a combination of when your needs are being taken care of by the social and political institutions and your intellect is aware of scientific explanations that very often seem to eclipse the religious explanations it's pretty hard for most educated people for example to accept a literal interpretation of a sub 10,000 year old universe when science is virtually unanimous that the universe is 13.8 billion years old and the earth is 4.6 and they've got plenty of evidence so that diminishes people's that and also their willingness to put their credibility into organizations that contradict science People like with math degrees I guess it goes lower and lower than percentage of people that believe in religion but we're just so used to having empirical evidence because you see studies after studies proving this or that and Christianity is a religion based on faith so that's why it's hard for people to accept Well it's hard for some people to accept for sure and I think as I was saying and you indicated too again as long as there's food on the table and you have freedom in your life there's not a whole lot to pray for and furthermore again you've got the education to see that some of the more restricted interpretations of religion are untenable with science now I will add that many Christians, Jews and Muslims try not to pick a fight with science and try to reinterpret the earlier scriptures well it's not really 10,000 years old it's just that a day is a thousand years for God but of course notice by the way that doesn't get you out that means it's still going to be less than 4.6 18 years old but they'll do that reinterpretation and say it was a metaphor or poetry or something like that and that's helpful to people who have a good understanding of the physical world but still want to be religious they can say you know that's it I don't have to believe it literally but that causes a problem because the literalists then think that those people are not really true Christians if they're going away from understanding dynamics going on with respect to all of that okay again I thank you for being here and if you want to contact me once again feel free to do so I love to talk about this stuff and I hope you have a good rest of your day enjoy the weekend and do well for the rest of the semester