40. Bara Batra 16b, quoted in Denise Lardner Carmody, Women and World Religions, 2nd ed. (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1989), 147.
41. Richard Rodriguez, “The God of the Desert: Jerusalem and the Ecology of Monotheism,” Harper’s, January 2008, 45.
Chapter Eight: Daoism: The Way of Flourishing
1. Victor H. Mair, trans., Wandering on the Way: Early Taoist Tales and Parables of Chuang Tzu (Honolulu: Univ. of Hawaii Press, 1998), 33.
2. Again, I am forgoing the older Wade-Giles transliterations scheme, which rendered the subject of this chapter as Taoism and its most famous text as the Tao Te Ching, for the newer Pinyin system, which renders these terms as Daoism and the Daodejing.
3. Huainanzi 1, quoted in Thomas Michael, The Pristine Dao: Metaphysics in Early Daoist Discourse (Albany: State Univ. of New York Press, 2005), 130.
4. Mair, Wandering on the Way, 5, 7, 9, 21, 385, 35. Elsewhere, Mair writes that the Zhuangzi could be called “In Praise of Wandering.” See Victor H. Mair, “Chuang-tzu and Erasmus: Kindred Wits,” in Experimental Essays on Chuang-tzu, ed. Victor H. Mair (Honolulu: Univ. of Hawaii Press, 1983), 86.
5. Mair, Wandering on the Way, xiii. Over a hundred different English-language translations of the first chapter of the Daodejing can be found at http://www.bopsecrets.org/gateway/passages/tao-te-ching.htm.
6. Russell Kirkland, Taoism: The Enduring Tradition (New York: Routledge, 2004), 43.
7. Benjamin Hoff, The Tao of Pooh (New York: Penguin Books, 1982), 1–7. The Tao of Pooh is a favorite target of Daoist scholars, who dismiss its teachings as “New Age Daoism” and “Pooh Bear Daoism.” Coming from scholars deeply committed, both professionally and personally, to ancient Daoist texts, this criticism is understandable, but it ignores Daoist observations about the inevitability of change. Scholars’ determination to make Daoism serious seems to spring more from academic culture than from Daoism itself. Zhuangzi, whose sense of humor is well attested, would have loved The Tao of Pooh.
8. Kristofer Schipper, The Taoist Body, trans. Karen C. Duval (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1993), 1.
9. Cheng-tian Kuo, Religion and Democracy in Taiwan (Albany: State Univ. of New York Press, 2008), 56.
10. Sheng-chi Liu, “Religious Development in Mainland China in the Reform Era,” Studies on Mainland China 44, no. 12 (2001): 79.
11. See Jantzen, Becoming Divine.
12. Michael, Pristine Dao, 77.
13. Huainanzi 7, quoted in Michael, Pristine Dao, 134.
14. Mair, Wandering on the Way, 145.
15. Schipper, Taoist Body, 126.
16. Or, as my colleague Thomas Michael puts it in Pristine Dao, “human beings are not a kind of projectile attempting to shoot clear of their ontological reality in the effort to identify with an absolute principle standing somewhere outside and beyond” (35).
17. Alan K. L. Chan, “The Daodejing and its Tradition,” in Daoism Handbook, ed. Livia Kohn (Leiden, the Netherlands: Brill, 2000), 4.
18. Livia Kohn, The Daoist Monastic Manual: A Translation of the Fengdao Kejie (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 2004), 12.
19. Schipper, Taoist Body, 16.
20. Julian F. Pas, “Introduction: Chinese Religion in Transition,” in The Turning of the Tide: Religion in China Today, ed. Julian F. Pas (New York and Hong Kong: Hong Kong Branch of the Royal Asiatic Society in association with Oxford Univ. Press, 1989), 8–9.
21. Schipper, Taoist Body, 5.
22. Schipper, Taoist Body, 4.
23. Michael, Pristine Dao, 47; Fieser and Powers, Scriptures of the East, 186.
24. Schipper, Taoist Body, 158.
25. Lao Tzu, The Sayings of Lao Tzu, trans. Lionel Giles (Radford, VA: Wilder, 2008), 31.
26. Livia Kohn, ed., The Taoist Experience: An Anthology (Albany: State Univ. of New York Press 1993), 288.
27. Thomas Michael, Shadows of the Pristine Dao (Albany: SUNY Press, forthcoming). According to Michael, “The first line of the Daodejing is arguably the most famous line in the entire tradition of East Asian religion and philosophy, but also the most widely mistranslated line in the entire tradition of Western sinology” (1).
28. Paul Tillich, Systematic Theology (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1951), 1.238.
29. Schipper, Taoist Body, 188.
30. Alexander M. Bickel, The Least Dangerous Branch: The Supreme Court at the Bar of Politics, 2nd ed. (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1986), 71.
31. Victor Mair, “The Zhuangzi and Its Impact,” in Kohn, Daoism Handbook, 32.
32. Mair, “Chuang-tzu and Erasmus,” in Mair, Experimental Essays on Chuang-tzu, 86.
33. Mair, Wandering on the Way, 75, 21, 46, 57, 44, 42, 211.
34. Mair, Wandering on the Way, 274.
35. Zhuangzi, Zhuangzi, trans. Hyun Höchsmann and Yang Guorong (New York: Pearson Longman, 2007), 194. A later Daoist work, by “the Master-Who-Embraces-Simplicity,” tells of a fit women who had lived by foraging in the mountains for over two hundred years when she was captured, brought back to the city, and forcefed an urban diet. Her hair fell out, she aged rapidly, and died after two years (retold in Schipper, Taoist Body, 169).
36. Zhuangzi, Zhuangzi, trans. Höchsmann and Guorong, 188–89.
37. Zhuangzi, Zhuangzi, trans. Höchsmann and Guorong, 123.
38. Rumi, The Book of Love: Poems of Ecstasy and Longing, trans. Coleman Barks (New York: HarperCollins, 2003), 123.
39. Bob Dylan, “Love Minus Zero/No Limit,” Bringing It All Back Home, Columbia Records, March 1965, http://www.bobdylan.com/#/songs/love-minus-zerono-limit.
40. Mair, Wandering on the Way, 376.
41. Schipper, Taoist Body, 164.
42. Catherine Despeux, “Women in Daoism,” in Kohn, Daoism Handbook, 405.
43. Schipper, Taoist Body, 160.
44. James Miller, Daoism: A Short Introduction (Oxford: OneWorld, 2005), 115.
45. See Russell Kirkland, T. H. Barrett and Livia Kohn, “Introduction” in Kohn, Daoism Handbook, xiii-xiv.
46. Liu Xiaogan, “Taoism,” in Sharma, Our Religions, 238.
47. Zhuangzi, Zhuangzi, trans. Höchsmann and Guorong, 95.
48. Zhuangzi, Zhuangzi, trans. Höchsmann and Guorong, 195.
49. See Kohn, Taoist Experience, 291–92.
50. Sima Qian, Shiji, 63.2142, quoted in Fieser and Powers, Scriptures of the East, 179.
51. Huainanzi 1, quoted in Michael, Pristine Dao, 130.
Chapter Nine: A Brief Coda on Atheism: The Way of Reason
1. “Voice of the People 2005: Religiosity Around the World,” Gallup International, http://extranet.gallup-international.com/uploads/internet/Religiosity%20around%20the%20world%20VoP%2005%20press%20release.pdf.
2. See, e.g., Jeffrey M. Jones, “Some Americans Reluctant to Vote for Mormon, 72-Year-Old Presidential Candidates,” Gallup News Service, February 20, 2007, http://www.gallup.com/poll/26611/some-americans-reluctant-vote-mormon–72yearold-presidential-candidates.aspx.
3. Stephen Prothero, Religious Literacy: What Every American Needs to Know—And Doesn’t (New York: HarperOne, 2007), 40.
4. President Barack Obama, “Inaugural Address,” January 21, 2009, http://www.whitehouse.gov/blog/inaugural-address/.
5. See http://the-brights.net. To his credit, Hitchens refuses to drink the “bright” Kool-Aid. In his God Is Not Great, he calls bright-ism “a cringe-making proposal” (5).
6. Richard Dawkins, The God Delusion (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2006); Sam Harris, The End of Faith: Religion, Terror, and the Future of Reason (New York: W. W. Norton, 2004). The chapter titles are from Michel Onfray, The Atheist Manifesto: The Case Against Christianity, Judaism, and Islam, trans. Jeremy Legatt (New York: Arcade, 2007). Onfray’s book first appeared as Traité d’athéologie in France in 2005 and then as In Defence of Atheism in the United Kingdom in 2007.
7. Richard Dawkins, “Is Science a Religion?” Humanist 57, no. 1 (1997), http://www.thehumanist.org/humanist/articles/dawkins.html.
> 8. Harris, End of Faith, 173.
9. Hitchens, God Is Not Great, 56.
10. Onfray, Atheist Manifesto, 134.
11. Hitchens, God Is Not Great, 58; interview with Christopher Hitchens and Ralph Reed, Hannity & Colmes, Fox News, May 16, 2007.
12. Hitchens, God Is Not Great, 280, 64.
13. “Has the World Changed?—Part Two,” The Guardian, October 11, 2001, http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2001/oct/11/afghanistan.terrorism2.
14. Harris, End of Faith, 15.
15. Harris, End of Faith, 52–53. Harris insists that this sentence has been widely misconstrued. See his “Response to Controversy,” http://www.samharris.org/site/full_text/response-to-controversy2/.
16. Richard Dawkins, A Devil’s Chaplain: Reflections on Hope, Lies, Science, and Love (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 2003), 117.
17. Dawkins, God Delusion, 306.
18. Chris Hedges, I Don’t Believe in Atheists (New York: Free Press, 2008), 6.
19. Quoted in Gustav Niebuhr, “A Nation Challenged: The Evangelist,” New York Times, November 20, 2001, B5. Graham first made this comment a few days earlier on NBC’s “Nightly News” on November 16.
20. Harris, End of Faith, 123. See, too, Martin Amis’s denunciation of “Thanatism” in his “9/11 and the Cult of Death,” Times Online, September 11, 2007, http://tiny.cc/wnlRw.
21. David Foster Wallace, “All That,” The New Yorker, December 14, 2009, 79.
22. In The Atheists Are Revolting! (n.p.: Lulu.com, 2007), Nick Gisburne contends that asking whether atheism is a religion is “the silliest question of all.” “You won’t find atheists praying to gravity, or to evolution,” he writes. “Atheism is simply not a religion by any recognizable definition of the word” (56).
23. Some of these practices emerged during the more Deistic Cult of the Supreme Being, which replaced the Cult of Reason under Robespierre in 1794. See Nigel Aston, Religion and Revolution in France, 1780–1804 (Washington, DC: Catholic Univ. of America Press, 2000); and John McManners, Church and Society in Eighteenth-Century France (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1998).
24. Karl Marx, “The Difference Between the Democritean and Epicurean Philosophy of Nature,” in Marx/Engels Collected Works (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1975), 1.30, http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1841/dr-theses/foreword.htm.
25. Brad Spurgeon, “Agent Provocateur,” The Star (Toronto), December 17, 2006, http://www.thestar.com/printArticle/157872.
26. Onfray, Atheist Manifesto, 57; Onfray (citing the eighteenth-century French aphorist Nicolas Chamfort) quoted in Andrew Higgins, “As Religious Strife Grows, Europe’s Atheists Seize Pulpit,” Wall Street Journal, April 12, 2007, A1.
27. Torcaso v. Watkins, 367 U.S. 488 (1961). Footnote 11 reads: “Among religions in this country which do not teach what would generally be considered a belief in the existence of God are Buddhism, Taoism, Ethical Culture, Secular Humanism.”
28. Kaufman v. McCaughtry, 419 F.3d 867 (8th Cir. 2005). This case concerned a prisoner who asserted a First Amendment right to create an atheism group. See Derek H. Davis, “Is Atheism a Religion? Recent Judicial Perspectives on the Constitutional Meaning of ‘Religion,’ ” Journal of Church and State 47, no. 4 (2005): 707–23. A sustained legal argument for atheism as a religion is presented in Douglas Laycock, “Religious Liberty as Liberty,” Journal of Contemporary Legal Issues 7 (1996): 313–356. Kent Greenawalt refutes Laycock in “Saying What Counts as Religious,” in his Religion and the Constitution, vol. 1: Free Exercise and Fairness (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 2006), 124–56.
29. Onfray, Atheist Manifesto, 215.
30. Quoted in Sidney Hook, From Hegel to Marx: Studies in the Intellectual Development of Karl Marx (New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 1994), 154. See also David Sloan Wilson, “Atheism as a Stealth Religion,” Huffington Post Blog, December 14, 2007, http://www.huffingtonpost.com/david-sloan-wilson/atheism-as-a-stealth-reli_b_76901.html.
31. Tillich, Systematic Theology, 1.11–12.
32. “FAQ,” Friendly Atheist Blog, http://friendlyatheist.com/faq/.
33. William Lobdell, Losing My Religion: How I Lost My Faith Reporting on Religion in America—And Found Unexpected Peace (New York: HarperCollins, 2009), 269, 271.
34. Nica Lalli, “Atheists Don’t Speak With Just One Voice,” USA Today, October 8, 2007, http://blogs.usatoday.com/oped/2007/10/atheists-dont-s.html. Another possible candidate for “friendly atheist” status is literary critic Harold Bloom. Shortly after the appearance of his book, Jesus and Yahweh: The Names Divine (New York: Riverhead, 2005), he was telling an interviewer about his dislike for Yahweh—“He’s as good an explanation for why everything goes wrong all the time as we could want”—when his wife interrupted and said that he was an atheist. “No, I’m not an atheist,” he replied. “It’s no fun being an atheist.” So what is the alternative, his interviewer asked. “Well, the alternative is to entertain all of these fictions” (Laura Quinney, “An Interview with Harold Bloom,” http://www.rc.umd.edu/praxis/bloom_hartman/bloom/bloom.html).
Conclusion
1. Irenaeus, Against Heresies, 4.20.7.
2. Tu Weiming, Confucian Thought, 63.
3. Lucy S. Dawidowicz, ed., The Golden Tradition: Jewish Life and Thought in Eastern Europe (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse Univ. Press, 1996), 93.
4. Schipper, Taoist Body, 158.
5. Nasr, Ideals and Realities of Islam, 73–74.
6. “Our Movement, Our Stories,” Interfaith Youth Core, http://www.ifyc.org/donate
7. Swami Nikhilananda, trans., The Gospel of Sri Ramakrishna (New York: Ramakrishna-Vivekananda Center, 1942), 191.
8. Nikhilananda, Gospel of Sri Ramakrishna, 191.
9. John Godfrey Saxe, The Poetical Works of John Godfrey Saxe (Boston: Houghton, Mifflin, 1882), 112. This story has also been put to use by Leo Tolstoy and Nikos Kazantzakis, and by recent children’s book authors. For a thorough review of this literature, and an intriguing application of this story to the world of computer science, see Edith Feistner and Alfred Holl, Mono-perspective Views of Multi-perspectivity: Information Systems Modeling and “The Blind Men and the Elephant” (Växjö, Sweden: Växjö Univ. Press 2006), http://www.informatik.fh-nuernberg.de/professors/Holl/Personal/Elefant_Acta.pdf.
10. Rilke, Rilke on Love, 25.
11. Fadiman and Frager, Essential Sufism, 82.
Index
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Abraham: biblical story of, 73, 255; as Jew by adoption, 262; Judeo-Christian-Islamic sharing of, 26–27; Kabah shrine (Mecca) built by, 34
Absolute Truth (Mahayana Buddhism), 195, 200–201
Abu Bakr, 51
Adam and Eve story, 71, 72–73, 243, 246, 255, 279
Adefunmi, Efuntola Oseijeman Adelabu, 227–28
Adefunmi, Oba, II, 228
Ade, King Sunny, 229
adhan (call to prayer) [Islam], 27–28, 30–31
Advaita Vedanta (Hindu philosophy), 166
Africa: estimates of Yoruba practitioners in, 220–22; Yoruba religion spread by slaves from, 222–23. See also Nigeria; Yoruba religion
Agee, James, 294
Agnes, St., 82
Agni (Vedic god), 142
ahimsa (noninjury) principle, 10
Ali (Muhammad’s son-in-law), 51
Allah: adhan (call to prayer) to, 27–28, 30–31; as author of Quran, 40–41; description, names, and nature of, 36–37, 45–46; total submission to, 31–32. See also God
Alliance for Jewish Renewal, 276
All Religions Are One (Blake), 1
“all religions are one” belief, 3, 4, 8
al-Qaeda, 19, 52–54
American Atheists, 325
American Idol (TV show), 84
American Muslims: Nation of Islam (NOI) and, 29; popular culture influence of, 29–30
American politics: American Jewish influence in, 246; Bible used in, 18; growing influence of U.S. Muslims in, 20; Religious Right impact on, 8, 320, 338; role of religion in, 6–11, 18. See also United States
American popular culture: American Muslims’ influence on, 29–30; Buddhism influence on, 176–77; Daoism revival through, 281–85; Jewish influence on, 246–47; Yoruba religion adopted by, 229. See also United States
Amida Buddha, 191
Anabaptists, 79
Analects (Confucius), 102, 104, 106, 113, 114, 115, 116, 117–18, 119, 121, 128, 281
anatta (no soul) [Buddhism], 184–85
Anglican Church in North America, 96
Anglican Communion, 79
Ansari of Herat, 58
Aristotle, 98, 123
Armstrong, Karen, 2, 6, 166
Arnaz, Desi, 229
Aryans (“Noble Ones”), 143
asceticism, 66
ashe (orisha power) [Yoruba religion], 88, 156, 205–6, 207, 209, 212, 219–20, 234, 235
Ashkenazi Jews, 247
Ashoka (Emperor of India), 175
Asian-American “model minority,” 105, 133
atheism: crossroad facing New Atheists, 328–29; debate over creed of, 323–26; ethics of, 325; Friendly Atheists, 327–28; Harvard University atheism rally (2009), 327–28; historic tradition of, 317; New Atheists attacks on religion, 9, 66, 317–26
Atheist Alliance International, 325
Atheist Manifesto (Onfray), 319
Atman (self/soul) [Hinduism], 149, 150, 151
Augustine, St., 24, 92–93, 98
Auslander, Shalom, 258
Autobiography of a Yogi (Swami Yogananda), 168
Avalokiteshvara, 190–91
babalawo (father of secrets), 204, 205, 206, 235
Babylonian exile of Jews, 254–55, 261
Baha’i faith, 15
Barks, Coleman, 60
Bascom, William, 222
Bayazid Bistami, 58
Beastie Boys (“Bodhisattva Vow”), 176
Bebbington, David, 84
beliefs: atheists on man-made religious, 318; Buddhist tradition on experience over, 172–73; by Christians on sin, 71–72; Islam on sin, 37; Mormon, 83, 184; orthodoxy (right thought), 70; Pentecostalism disinterest in, 91; religion and role of, 69. See also faith; religion
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