An Incomplete Education

by Judy Jones

  Behavior therapy has an infinite variety of applications. In sex therapy, partners learn how to express, and reinforce, what each finds pleasurable; in assertiveness training, you may be taught to walk into a coffee shop and ask for a glass of water without ordering so much as a corn muffin. You will be expected to do reading, keep a journal of your homework assignments and their consequences, and, most of all, behave the way the therapist and you have decided you should. How you feel at the moment doesn’t matter; whether you’ve succeeded in changing the way you act does. But, because of the way feelings and behavior tend to dovetail, you’re expected to start feeling better, too.

  A variant of behavior therapy is cognitive therapy, although what it sets out to modify isn’t so much behavior as thought and attitude. A relatively short-term (six weeks to three months) treatment developed by Aaron Beck of the University of Pennsylvania, it’s based on the premise that a person’s thought processes (and the linguistic structures that underlie them) go a long way in determining psychological disturbances. In Beck’s view, a depressed person, for instance, through a process of distortion and exaggeration, has misinterpreted reality. The resulting thoughts (e.g., that he has nothing to offer anybody, that he’s the lowest of the low) have become automatic and entrenched. Solution: Make the person aware of the automatic—and ultimately the invalid—nature of his “cognitions.”

  Doubtless you’re longing to retreat to a discussion of some less messy subject, such as Art or maybe the Politics of Philosophy. Fine, but don’t think that means there’s no such thing as family therapy, in which whole families allow their actions to be scrutinized, sometimes videotaped and then rearranged. Or art, music, dance, video, and biblio therapies, in which painting, singing, dancing, watching TV, and reading books, respectively, serve as the catalysts for the releasing of emotion.

  Probably, too, you’ll want to skip such retro fashions as transactional analysis, which involves figuring out what kinds of “scripts” you might be “buying into,” and primal scream therapy, in which large numbers of screamers congregate on mattresses and throw themselves against padded walls. Instead, focus on the American tradition of self-betterment, the problem of moving into a postindustrial world, and the pragmatic idealism that has in the past produced better can openers, taller basketball players, and more amendments to the Constitution. And, during working hours, anyway, do your best to keep the lid on.

  Those Old-Time Religions

  Have you ever noticed how prophetic revelation seems to give some people a new lease on life at about the same time others their age are gearing up for midlife crisis? Buddha, Jesus, and Zoroaster all got the Message when they were hovering around thirty, a birthday that signals middle age in any culture where people start begetting as teenagers. True, Muhammad was forty when he first chatted with the Angel Gabriel, but then Islam as a whole was a late bloomer. So to those of you who find, after scanning the great faiths outlined here, that the monotheisms of the West and the polytheisms of the East all leave you cold; that you can’t really get behind karma, nirvana, yin and yang, the Holy Trinity, or separate dishware for meat and dairy; and that you’re as depressed and alienated as ever, our advice is: Stay loose and keep your eyes fixed on the heavens.

  JUDAISM

  14 million believers, mostly in Israel and the United States.

  It’s c. 1700 B.C.E.(Before the Common Era, a designation considerably less irritating to Jews than the Christian b.c., Before Christ). Heaven is crowded with divinities of the moon, sun, stars, trees, and irrigation, as well as with various celestial dog-and-pony acts. Enter, below, a Sumerian named Abraham, who insists that there’s only one God and all the rest are wannabes. Acting on direct orders from this God, whose name is Yahweh (but for pete’s sake, don’t say it out loud), Abraham has packed up his kin and his kitchen utensils and relocated to the Promised Land, on the other side of the Euphrates, thereby earning his entourage the name “Hebrews” (from an ancient word meaning “the other side”) and establishing an exhausting pattern of Jewish migration that will repeat itself for the next four thousand years. Pleased with Abraham’s obedience and general salt-of-the-earth comportment, Yahweh promises him offspring galore (Abraham is ninety-nine at the time), along with rights to the Promised Land—a place called Canaan, later renamed Palestine, after the Philistines, who occupied part of it—in perpetuity. The agreement is oral but binding; it simultaneously marks the debut of monotheism in the world and sows the seeds of future unrest in the Middle East.

  But all that’s family history. Judaism as a more or less coherent religion didn’t really get rolling until Moses led a group of transplanted Hebrews out of slavery in Egypt and trekked with them back to the Promised Land. Moses took his orders directly from Yahweh, who was quite clear about what He expected from His Chosen People, issuing directives on everything from ethical conduct (“Thou shalt not kill,” “Thou shalt not covet thy neighbor’s wife,” etc.) to diet (“Hold the bacon”). The shalts and shalt nots were recorded, along with much divinely revealed history, in the Torah, later compiled and edited into the first five books of the Bible.

  If this is beginning to seem like an awfully long story (and we’re only up to about 1300 B.C.E.), so much the better. In the absence of a homeland, a strong national identity, or even passably tolerant neighbors, history is about all the Jews had to rely on to keep their traditions alive through the next several millennia of persecution, exile, and general tsuris. History, that is, and the law, as embodied in the Torah and buttressed by the scholarly commentaries on same, were later collected in the Mishnah and the Talmud, Judaism’s next-most-important books.

  Because Jewish law and tradition evolved as a kind of survivor’s guide to life on a hostile planet, Judaism is somewhat more practical and here-and-now oriented than many other religions. (The childhood trauma that might explain Judaism’s you-only-live-once mentality: the Diaspora, which originally referred to the destruction of the Temple of Jerusalem in 586 B.C.E. and the subsequent exile of the Jews to Babylonia, known as the first Babylonian Captivity, later to the chronic dispersion of the Jews across the face of the earth.) Jews don’t believe in the doctrine of original sin, for instance, or in a devil powerful enough to instigate anything worse than a parking violation, and they spend considerably less time fantasizing about a blissful afterlife than planning for a comfortable retirement in Florida. It’s true that ethical conduct—especially helping anyone worse off than one is—is an almost obsessively big deal in Judaism (it’s no accident that so many liberal Democrats, social workers, and shrinks are Jewish), but morality isn’t hitched to a system of rewards and punishments, the way it is in Christianity. A Jew is required to do the right thing, just because. “The right thing,” by the way, can be loosely defined as any action that would put a smile on God’s face if He should happen to be looking. (And if He had a face; Judaism posits a God who can’t be adequately pictured or conceptualized. In this, Jews are a little like physicists.) Such obligatory good deeds are called mitzvahs and can range from faithfully lighting the Sabbath candles every Friday night to saving a life or picking up after your dog.

  Other key terms: Orthodox, Conservative, Reform, and Reconstructionist, the four branches of modern American Judaism, which differ mainly in the degree to which they adhere to tradition—Orthodox, 100 percent, no excuses; the other three, anywhere from about 75 percent down to about 10 percent, depending on the congregation, the individual, and/or the zeitgeist—although occasionally they’ll agree to disagree about a core belief, such as whether God is a personal entity or, as many Reconstructionists insist, a natural force, like gravity. Then there’s Zionism, the political movement born in reaction to European anti-Semitism in the nineteenth century (and in particular, to the Dreyfus Affair), that aimed at making good Yahweh’s original offer of a Jewish homeland in Israel; and Kabbalah, Judaism’s complex mystical tradition, based on esoteric reinterpretations of Scripture and currently enjoying a vogue among Hollywood
celebrities. Holocaust you already know. CHRISTIANITY

  1.5 billion followers: 1 billion Roman Catholic; 170 million Eastern Orthodox; 370 million Protestant. Dominant in Western Europe and the Americas.

  The first Christians weren’t Christians at all, of course, but Palestinian Jews who, smitten with Jesus of Nazareth’s notions about universal love, the brotherhood of man, and redemption through faith, saw nothing particularly disloyal or disruptive in regarding themselves as Jews for Jesus. It wasn’t until Jesus’ followers began recruiting non-Jewish converts, who insisted that circumcision was weird and Christ divine, that Christians and Jews started giving each other dirty looks across the bazaar.

  Although it’s never easy to launch a new world religion, the early Christians had a particularly tough time of it, beset, as they were, by a lot of internal bickering over who, exactly, Jesus was, and by any number of competitive pagan religions bent on co-opting the Savior for their own nefarious purposes—notably the Gnostics, with their salvation-through-revelation occultism and their predisposition to see Good and Evil in very black-and-white terms. In fact, most early Christian doctrine was formulated as a defense against total incoherence; hence its tendency toward dogmatism and the Christian establishment’s later habit of excommunicating anyone who didn’t toe the party line. There was also the problem of the ruling Romans, who, not in the least obsessed with distinguishing true Christians from false ones, simply declared open season on all of them.

  It wasn’t until the fourth century, when the Emperor Constantine himself converted to Christianity, that Christians were transformed from persecuted underdogs into imperial pets. After the construction of Constantinople as Christian capital and arts center, a new yuppie constituency began replacing the original slave, peasant, and humble-laborer devotees. In A.D.325, the church was rich enough to host its first ecumenical council, out of which came the Nicene Creed, which affirmed, mainly, belief in the Holy Trinity and which is still the basic statement of faith for most Christians. By the end of the century, Christians had put together a testament of their own, comprising the four Gospels, the Acts of the Apostles, twenty-one epistles, and the Revelation of St. John the Divine. (They’d already appropriated the entire Hebrew Scriptures, which they renamed the Old Testament, plus the Apocrypha, a collection of writings retrieved from the cutting-room floor, whose authorship was more than ordinarily dubious and which were later rejected as uncanonical by Protestants.)

  Success didn’t eliminate dissent within the ranks, however. In 1054, after a few centuries of squabbling over such issues as whether or not art was OK (remember the biblical injunction against graven images), the Pope of Rome excommunicated the Patriarch of Constantinople, and the Church was henceforth split into Roman Catholic and Eastern Orthodox divisions. Today, the two Churches differ mainly in decor (the Eastern Orthodox Church got the Byzantine domes and the elaborate mosaics; the Roman Catholics got the Gothic cathedrals and the Renaissance art collection), style (the Eastern Church still goes in for interminable masses, showstopper rituals, and the burning of extravagant amounts of incense), language (Greek and local vernacular in the East; Latin, and lately, local vernacular in the West), their attitudes toward the Immaculate Conception (not bloody likely, according to the EOC), and, of course, the infallibility of the pope.

  More fussing and fighting in the West led, in the fourteenth century, to the Great Schism, during which two rival popes ruled simultaneously, one from Rome, one from Avignon; and in the fifteenth century to the Reformation, when Luther, Calvin, Zwingli, et al., fed up with Church corruption, split Western Europe into Catholic and Protestant factions.

  Today, Protestant sects (there are about 250 of them) dominate much of northern Europe and the old British Empire, and maintain a slight edge over Catholicism in the United States, while the Catholic Church has pretty much cornered the market in France, Italy, Spain, and Latin America. The modern ecumenical movement hopes, someday, to put all the pieces of the Church back together again. In the meantime, the combined Catholic-Protestant head count still matters, since Christianity, as anyone who has ever opened the door to a Seventh-Day Adventist knows, is one of the great missionary religions of the modern world. ISLAM

  More than 1 billion believers (and growing fast), only about a fifth of whom are Arab. Indonesia is the world’s largest Islamic country. Islam is also the dominant religion in Turkey, Iran, Pakistan, and Afghanistan, in addition to the Arab world.

  Oops. Did we say it’s never easy to launch a new world religion? We overlooked Islam (you can bet it won’t happen again), the youngest of the monotheistic megafaiths. In A.D. 622, its official birth year, Islam was little more than a gleam in the prophet Muhammad’s eye; less than two hundred years later, it was the power behind an empire that stretched from Spain to India. Of course, Muhammad didn’t really start from scratch; as a Bedouin trader (and a direct descendant of the prophet Ishmael, the first son of the prophet Abraham) living on the outskirts of Mecca, he’d already picked up a lot of gossip about Judaism and Christianity by the time he began having divine revelations of his own. As a result, Islam bears an uncanny likeness to its two predecessors, though with variations that, from the beginning, made it highly appealing to the common man (and we do mean man) as well as to certain fierce desert tribes prepared to appreciate Muhammad’s policy of winning through decapitation.

  One of the main attractions of Islam (Arabic for “submission to the will of God”) is its practicality. Your average Muslim (Arabic for “one who submits”) can get to Heaven not by striving for some quasi-mystical and pretty much unattainable state of grace but simply by honoring the Five Pillars of Islam. First and most important of these is the affirmation of faith, in the words “There is no God but Allah and Muhammad is His prophet.” Say this with real feeling just once in your life and no one can accuse you of not being a true Muslim (although only you and Allah will know for sure). Two: Pray five times a day, turning toward Mecca (no need to check your watch; just listen for the call of the muezzin and hit the ground when everyone else does). Three: Fast from sunup to sundown throughout the entire month of Ramadan (and, if you’re a well-to-do twenty-first-century Muslim, binge-eat into the wee hours). Four: Make the hajj, the pilgrimage to Mecca, at least once if you can afford it (luckily, you no longer have to travel on foot or by camel; flights leave daily from most major cities). Five: Give alms, unless you’re so poor you have to beg them. And if you want to earn bonus points to ensure a smooth entry into Heaven, simply contrive to die while fighting a holy war.

  In case you get confused, you can look up the essentials in the Koran, the one and only sacred text of Islam, which contains the words of Allah as revealed to Muhammad. You may find the going a bit tricky, however, since Muhammad wrote in a rhythmic Arabic that’s completely untranslatable. Join the club; three-quarters of the Muslim world is now composed of non-Arabs, and none of them can read their own Scriptures, either. Anyway, most of the Koran is devoted to retelling the stories of the Old and New Testaments from the Muslim—that is, the correct and uncorrupted—point of view. (For instance, the five great early prophets were really Adam, Noah, Abraham—the first Muslim—Moses, and Jesus. Alexander the Great was a prophet, too, and Muhammad was the last to carry Allah’s divine word to man; and that’s Allah, by the way, not Yahweh, which must have been some sort of typo.) The Koran won’t give you much detail about ethical behavior or daily ritual; for that, you’ll have to turn to the Hadith, the collected sayings of Muhammad, which, almost everyone acknowledges, are probably not authentic.

  The Muslim world (and remember, that’s not synonymous with the Arab world) is meant to be a theocracy, and it’s in the who’s-running-the-show department that Islam splits into its two major sects, Sunni and Shi’a. Sunnis, who make up about 85–90 percent of all Muslims, believe that Muhammad’s old friend Abu Bakr, who was elected the first caliph after the Prophet’s death, was the latter’s legitimate successor. The minority Shi’ites insist that th
e Prophet chose his nephew and son-in-law Ali to succeed him; they trace the line of succession through Ali and Fatima, Muhammad’s daughter. They believe in rule by twelve imams or perfect leaders, under whom the ayatollahs compose a sort of middle-management cadre. Over the years, politics widened the rift between the two camps, which tend to regard each other as heretics, although they agree on most of the religious fundamentals.

  From its inception, Islam has had great success in winning converts in hot, arid, impoverished countries where the locals are susceptible to a lot of shouting and sword-brandishing, and to the promise of a Heaven that, unlike home, consists of green meadows and babbling brooks. Another bonus: Traditional Islam is basically egalitarian and flexible; follow the simple rules and nobody is going to torture you for heresy or shun you because of the color of your skin. Feminists, pacifists, and drunk drivers, however, need not apply. ZOROASTRIANISM

  150,000 believers, mostly Parsis living in India.

  You pretty much had to be there—Persia, in the sixth century b.c., that is—to get the full flavor of Zoroastrianism as Zoroaster conceived it. (Actually, as he conceived it, it was called Zarathustrianism; Zoroastrianism is the Greek translation.) By the time it became the state religion of Persia, in aA.D. 226, Zoroaster’s own mother wouldn’t have recognized it. But use your imagination. Picture yourself trying to settle down and run a peaceful little ancient farm while surrounded by a zillion nature gods perpetually vying for your attention. You could spend half the day sacrificing to gods of twigs and pebbles and the like just to get in a decent harvest, and you still wouldn’t have a clue as to how to behave nicely or raise your kids. Zoroaster eliminated a lot of the time-wasting twig worship while adding a relatively coherent moral dimension to daily life. It’s true that Zoroastrianism, in its earliest form, was mainly concerned with increasing the harvest and ensuring the happiness and well-being of various farm animals; nevertheless, it was as subtle and sophisticated an ethical system as anything you’ll find in … well, wherever you look for ethical systems nowadays.