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Throughout our evolutionary history, human consciousness has used language to grope into the intellectual darkness. Of course, we have always used language to explain what we already knew, but, more importantly, we have also used it to reach towards what we did not yet know or understand. Like children who are always reading above their grade level, we human beings are always stretching our language into the still unarticulated and unexplored areas of our own consciousness and our interaction with the world. That gives us hope that someday our God-language may be used to unite us rather than divide us. As we strive to understand the dynamics of God-language, and its use in the contemporary world, perhaps we will come to see that all of us—Christians, Jews, Muslims, Buddhists, Hindus and even atheists—are engaged on the same quest, that is, to find the name of the unnamable and to understand our existence in its light.
The following chapters set out to re-examine several “troublesome” religious words and to rescue them for use by everyone, not just religious extremists. At this point in history, it is vital to examine the nature of our religious discourse and see if we can find common ground, for if we cannot then we risk bringing the whole tower of our world civilization down around our ears.
Religious language is powerful and capable of rousing us to act out the best or the worst of our human nature. A quick look at the headlines will show us how horrifically we can behave in the various names of God, but, usually on the back pages, we find that religious language can also inspire us to rise to the heights of human compassion and understanding. It can send us off to the far corners of the earth to alleviate hunger and disease, and it can lead us to life-long growth in the spirit. Religious language has the power to overturn lives and hearts for good or ill.
Today, the consequences of continuing to talk past each other instead of to each other are very high. With modern explosives, modern methods of travel and weapons of mass destruction that will inevitably include nuclear weapons as part of terror’s arsenal, the time has come to talk with each other again or face even more slaughter in the names of our gods.
We live in a strange time. The 20th century, with its modernism, attempted a bold experiment. For the best of reasons, brilliant thinkers advocated a purely rational life in which the religious or spiritual realm was either invisible or terribly truncated. Rational life, modern life, grounded in reason and science, would rid us of superstition and provide a solid foundation for building an ideal future. One hope among many others was to avoid religious wars like those that had afflicted the past. As we can now see, the experiment, while noble, was, in many ways, a failure. Secularism was not enough to stop religious wars. If for nothing more, we must thank the fundamentalists for helping us to see that. The tremendous upsurge of fundamentalism in Christianity and other religions is evidence that people have a hunger for the life of the spirit, and that they are not satisfied with mere materialism or an improved material standard of living. But, given the events of the past ten years both at home and abroad, it should be just as clear that religious fundamentalism is not a type of religion the human race can afford to live with for very long. Religions of fear, based on hatred rather than compassion, founded on seeing other human beings as different from us and therefore worthy of slaughter, simply cannot be allowed to become the future of world religion.
This book will attempt to present a new—or actually very old—way of talking about God and the gods that may provide a starting point for further, more peaceful conversation. We cannot continue to live in the post-Babel world. We must learn to speak the same language again so that we can help one another reach out to that ultimate Being which will bring us to our full potential as human beings. That is simply another way of saying we must all turn to God and address God by all God’s many names.
Religions are, above all, constructed of words, and wars of religion are, in many ways, wars of words. In the following pages, we will examine, in turn, several words that seem particularly troublesome today. In the end, perhaps thinking about these words will move us that much closer to naming what, finally, will be unnamable.
This cultural debate is taking place in countries where the modern world is coming into conflict with traditional worlds, and the world’s religious fundamentalisms seem united in their opposition to modernism, so it is with that strange and troublesome word that we will begin.
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