How religions change their mind
Religions change :)
Men do not. They remain sinners in need of a Saviour. Also God's Word does not change - Matthew 5: 18.
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Tiny screen, old eyes, ham fisted hands. apologies for typos and formatting.
How religions change their mind
By William KremerBBC World Service
Once upon a time, animal sacrifice was an important part of Hindu
life, Catholic priests weren't celibate and visual depictions of the
Prophet Muhammad were part of Islamic art. And soon some churches in
the UK may be marrying gay couples. How do religions manage to change
their mind?
In 1889, Wilford Woodruff became the fourth president of the Church of
Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints - more commonly known as the Mormon
Church.
As president, he was seen as a living prophet, someone who could
receive wisdom and advice from Jesus Christ. And he was certainly in
need of advice - his church was in crisis.
For 40 years, Mormons had been at loggerheads with the US Congress
over the issue of polygamy, which was encouraged among male believers.
The government said it was illegal, and held that religious conviction
was no defence.
Woodruff in 1889 - he had seven wives across his life, and 33 children
Woodruff and others lived a precarious life, moving around in an
attempt to dodge marshals with arrest warrants for bigamy. In 1890,
the government brought things to a head by moving to confiscate all of
the church's assets.
It was then, Woodruff said, that Jesus Christ appeared to him in a
vision and showed him the future of the Mormon Church if the practice
wasn't stopped - and it wasn't pretty. Although he did not renounce
plural marriage, he issued a manifesto banning it.
If that sounds like a problem easily solved, it wasn't - according to
Kathleen Flake, a professor in American religious history at
Vanderbilt University, and a Mormon herself.
"It was a very difficult thing socially, personally and
theologically," she says. The change destabilised the entire church,
and led to deep reflection about what Mormonism's core principles
were.
History shows that any religion that refuses to change dies out, Flake
adds. But what about those religions that don't have living prophets -
how do they change?
For Muslims, the last prophet, the Prophet Muhammad, died almost 1,400
years ago. So it's the ulama, a class of legal scholars, who rule on
contentious points of Islamic or sharia law based upon a careful
scrutiny of fundamental sacred texts, including the Koran and the
Sunnah, a collection of stories relating the beliefs and practices of
Muhammad.
Radios, loudspeakers and telephones were forbidden for Muslims 100
years ago - one story relates how a Saudi king instructed a cleric to
recite the Koran down the phone to another scholar to prove the
invention was not corrupting There were figurative miniatures of the
Prophet Muhammad in both Ottoman and Persian art - the 14th Century
Turkish epic Siyer-i Nebi features many such illustrations, although
the Prophet's face is veiled In ancient times animal sacrifice was a
core part of Hinduism, as described in texts such as the Vedas and the
Mahabharata - it's widely abhorred now, but still practised in some
areas In the 10th Century most rural Christian priests were married -
the Catholic Church cracked down on this in the 12th Century
An obvious challenge here is how specific laws governing life in 7th
Century Arabia can be applied across the world in the 21st Century.
Perhaps it's no surprise that the ulama in different countries make
different judgements, and sometimes change their mind.
A century ago, using a radio or loudspeaker was haraam - forbidden.
Today, many observant Muslims have their own radio, TV and even
YouTube channels.
Similarly, at the time of the Iranian revolution in 1979, the ulama
there said that birth control was haraam, but now the use of condoms
is encouraged, with state-supported condom factories and pre-marital
family planning lessons.
"The assumption was that anything from the West was going to undermine
Islam," says Muqtedar Khan of the University of Delaware.
And quite often, he says, there is a tension between aspects of
Western daily life and Muslim teachings. One challenge for Muslim men,
for example, is the urinal.
"One of the traditions for Muslim men is to sit and pee," Khan says,
explaining that this was thought to be the best way of preventing
spillage that would defile devotees' clothes before prayers. This is
not always possible in the urinal-loving West.
Another challenge is the architecture of Western homes.
"These houses that are designed in the West have no gender
segregation. If you're having a Muslim-only party and then you have
women who want segregation, then it is very complicated," he says,
adding that he missed three or four of his son's birthday parties as a
result.
Medieval thinkers such as St Thomas Aquinas or Maimonides would be
astonished at the way we read, preach and pray today, says author
Karen Armstrong.
"We've tended to lose older, sometimes more intuitive patterns of
thought," she says.
"They would see some of the ways we talk about God as remarkably simplistic.
"We are reading our scriptures with a literalness which is without
parallel in the history of religion, largely because of this rational
bias of ours."
Sometimes Muslims in multicultural societies long for scriptures to be
reinterpreted, Khan says.
Clerics faced with these decisions have a choice between a literal
interpretation of the Koran, or attempting to look beneath the surface
for a deeper message.
The key, according to Tariq Ramadan of Oxford University is to
distinguish "principles" that are immutable and "models" that are a
product of the time and place the stories were told. From this
perspective, changing our inferences from the Koran is not just an
option but an obligation.
"There is no faithfulness to the message of Islam without evolution in
our understanding," he says.
So, while there is a verse of the Koran which appears to permit
beating a woman, "the best example was the Messenger himself never
beating a woman," Ramadan says.
Arvind Sharma, a professor of Comparative Religion at McGill
University, relates an incident which seems to show how it's possible
to update models at the same time as underscoring the principles that
form a religion's continuity. His anecdote centres on the moment
Mahatma Gandhi discussed the principle of karma - the Hindu doctrine
that you will pay for your actions, or be rewarded for them, perhaps
in a future life.
"Karma was used to justify untouchability in classical Hinduism," says
Sharma. "A person is born an untouchable because in a previous life he
performed certain foul deeds, so he should accept the status quo as it
is."
Sharma says Gandhi pointed out that all castes of Hindus had been
treated as untouchable by the British in India, who would post signs
outside their clubs saying "Dogs and Indians not allowed".
"Gandhi's argument was: 'You see how karma works? You treated people
as untouchable on the basis of their birth, and you have also been
treated as untouchables on the basis of your birth.'" In criticising
Indians' traditional interpretation of karma - and showing how they
were paying for their poor treatment of untouchables - Gandhi was at
the same time invoking and restating the principle of karma.
A famous story from the Talmud, one of the Jewish holy books, seems to
foresee that future generations will interpret holy law in their own
way.
A mid-19th C engraving of Moses receiving the 10 commandments on Mt Sinai
In the story, Moses goes to Mt Sinai to receive the Torah - another
Jewish holy book - from God. Moses spots God embellishing the letters
with little crowns.
The whole area of genetics, molecular biology and evolution in general
are quite a challenge to the church”
"Moses, who was a humble man, says 'Well, really you know, I'll take
it plain,'" relates Rabbi Burt Visotzky from the Jewish Theological
Seminary in New York.
"And God says: 'No - many generations from now there will be a rabbi
by the name of Akiva, and he will actually derive Jewish law from the
very crownlets on the letters.'"
When God shows Moses a vision of Rabbi Akiva teaching, Moses is
dismayed because he can't understand anything.
"Built within the Talmud itself - that repository of great law and
wisdom of the rabbis - is a notion that things change but it's still
all part of revelation," says Visotzky.
One of the forces exerting pressure on religion to change is science.
The Copernican Revolution - when scholars grasped that the earth
revolves around the sun, rather than vice-versa - is an obvious
example.
This clashed with the church's own teaching on the subject. The
Inquisition found Copernicus's successor Galileo "vehemently suspect
of heresy" and he spent the last decade of his life under house
arrest.
As well as his works on physics and astronomy Galileo wrote two tracts
on the interpretation of scripture.
Absolving the Past is a two-part documentary from the BBC World
Service, presented by Imam Khalid Latif (above).
"He essentially said the scriptures were written to tell us how to go
to heaven and not how the heavens go," says George Coyne, a Jesuit
priest who ran the Vatican's own observatory for 28 years.
The Catholic church now admits that Galileo was right and in 1992 Pope
John Paul II formally exonerated him. But science continues to raise
difficult questions for the church.
"The whole area of genetics, molecular biology and evolution in
general are quite a challenge to the church," says Coyne. "Does the
ghost of Galileo come back to speak? Yes it does. My loving church!
What you did in the Galileo period was not listen to science."
For Coyne, it is the role of scientifically trained believers to throw
themselves into the muddy, difficult process of squaring the church's
teachings with the discoveries of science and the opportunities they
offer for humanity.
The question of what to believe - or who to believe - falls, in the
end, to believers rather than teachers.
"We ultimately have to make that creative effort to think for
ourselves and puzzle things out for ourselves," says Karen Armstrong,
the author of a History of God, and more than 20 other works in
religious studies.
While the answer to the question of how to live might be found using
scripture, it won't be in scripture, she says, just as the ability to
drive is not found in a car manual.
But she admits that this is hard for those people who, in a world of
rapid change, look to their religion for something steady and fixed -
an easy-to-access pot of answers.
"People often think religion is easy," says Armstrong. "In fact it
requires a great deal of intellectual, spiritual and imaginative
effort. It's a struggle that never ceases."
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