Video Transcript: Introduction to the Course Content

This course is comparative religion. Welcome. I think we're going to have some  fun here. What we're going to cover in this course, are five major world religions, Hinduism, Buddhism, Judaism, Christianity and Islam. It's a mere introduction to  each. Any one of those done thoroughly would take more than this course,  

devoted to it. But this will introduce you to the basic concepts and doctrines of  each of those traditions. This is not a course in philosophy of religion, we will not consider arguments for or against God's existence. Or we will not deal with  theological conflicts of that of a philosophical nature. What we are going to do is  focus on the teachings of each of these religions. And by teachings, I mean,  theological teachings, the teachings of the each proposes about how people are to stand in proper relation to the divine. If you want a course, that examines the  arguments for and against the existence of God, and comes to some conclusion about all them, then we have a course of the Korean in this curriculum called  philosophy of religion. And that's what happens there. That course does not  cover Hinduism, Buddhism, Islam, and so on. This one does. Now, I hope I've  made clear that we're not here going to consider the history of each religion,  there will be a lot of history and the covering of them. But mainly, it's doctrinal.  That's That's my focus. And there'll be enough there about the history though,  and to get you started on your own pursuit of any one of them that that interests  you, if you want to know more than you'll be well equipped to go ahead and dig  into the literature and get more, there's readings that accompany this course,  and parts of the scriptures of each other religions. readings, commenting on  them on the tradition, and scriptures of the tradition, both it's important that you  do those readings, I'd suggest that you do them this way, do the reading, listen  to the lecture, go back into the reading again, you'll find you understand a lot  more the second time than the first but doing the reading will help you  understand a lecture lecture will help you go back and understand the reading  better. The lectures are going to cover things that are not in the reading, the  readings are going to include things I don't cover in lectures. So you need to  understand that you need that you have to do both, you have to put both  together to get the full picture that you need in order to write the final exam. 

The course will be comparative. I've kept the old title comparative religion,  whereas a lot of it a lot of universities and colleges, this course has taught us  the history of religion, or just world religions and things of that sort. So they can  get away from any idea that a comparison is actually being drawn, that might be  unfavorable or favorable. But this is a Christian school here. And so we're going  to compare the other religions to Christianity, and we're going to take up  objections to Christian doctrine and answer them and argue that they can be  answered. We have that particular point of view here, as you all know. So the  first thing I think we need to do is start with the definition of religion. And I want  to shift that immediately to defining religious belief. Not a whole of religion, but 

what is what is a religious belief? And how do we know when we're looking at  one take for example, the following beliefs. Next Friday will be payday. Last  winter, it was unusually warm. One plus two plus three plus four equals 10.  There was an ice age about 13,000 years ago. Any of those sounds like  religious beliefs to you? Probably not but one of them was in the ancient world  and held by a very distinguished and influential group of people. Pythagoras and his followers, you remember him from the Pythagorean Theorem, geometry.  Pythagoras and his, his company, his group is commune did did mathematics.  And they worship numbers. The belief they thought was religious was one plus  two plus three plus four makes 10. And they had set that up in a figure called  Tetractys one plus two plus three, four. But no matter which way you add it up,  up or down or across, comes out to 10. And they had a prayer to the number 10  Bless us divine number. Now that generates gods and men. And it goes on and  on. Now, what made that a religious belief, however, was not that they worship  the numbers. It could have been religious, even if they didn't see what we need  is a definition of religious belief that's going to allow us to distinguish religious  from non religious beliefs. 

The this is an old difficulty that said, a lot of people have a go at it. There are  popular definitions of religion. And there have been scholars who have tried to  propose definitions as well. Some of the popular ones think it's any belief in a  god or gods but there are lots of religions don't have any gods. Brahman  Hinduism and Theravada Buddhism have no gods, for example. So that can't  be the definition. Some people think it's just enough to say that there's a higher  power. But a higher power doesn't need to be anything religious at all. I mean, if  it's if it's just you and a rhinoceros in an arena, is the right out rhinos, the higher  power doesn't make it have anything to do with religion. 

Some of the scholarly attempts haven't been much better. One of them. It was  proposed by the Supreme Court in the United States and some findings that  held in the 1880s and 90s. That spoke of the US has not endorsing any one  particular religion, but that its laws certainly assumed a supreme being. But not  all religions have a supreme being either. Again, Brahmin Hinduism and Tera  Vaada Buddhism don't have a Supreme Being, that's not the way they think of  the Divine at all. So that can't be the definition. One scholar said it's the sum of  all higher feelings is what religion is about. I assumed he meant by higher  feelings above the belt rather than below. But I'm not sure. I don't think it has  just to do with feelings. At least the religions I know very few of them are  focused on people's feelings. Another scholar thought it was the highest value  that you held. Religion is the your esteem for your whatever you hold in the  highest value. That doesn't sound right either. For one thing in Christianity, God  is not a value. God's the creator of our of all values. And if you want to know 

what the Christians highest value is, I guess it's to please God. But that's  because the Christian believes that God is the divine reality God is real. God  has created the world. And God has offered us a covenant of love and  forgiveness and everlasting life. So we value doing good night in the eyes of  God, we value his approval. But the central belief of Christianity is in God. It's  not in what we value is it's God Himself, the creator of all values So that doesn't  fit Christianity. I think it doesn't fit other. There are other religions that doesn't fit  equally. I felt a lot of those attempts. A long, long time ago when I first started, I  think it was the third year I was teaching college. I got asked to do a course in  comparative religion that would be why won't tell you how long ago that was a  very long time ago. So I decided the way to start was at least find out how how  the field was viewed by the other scholars in it? How do they define the field?  What is religion? So I got went to a couple of libraries took out all their books of  comparative religion, I filled the trunk of my car, with these things, I took them  home and started going through them one by one by one, just look at the  beginning, how they define it. And I found that the real old books offered  definitions of religion, religious belief, so on. They all seem to be in the right  ballpark, but not quite precise. And then as I read, things that had been written  more recently than those oldest ones, it said, Well, those are in the ballpark, but  they're not quite precise enough. So here's what we're gonna do and and what  they did was take three or four of the definitions and say, religious belief is this  or this, or this, or this, just put, or in between four or five of them, and you've got  it. And it seems to me, that didn't work at all. Then around the middle of the last  century, the 1950s 60s people, the book started saying, You know what, those,  those older attempts, they just didn't work. And what they did was resort to  another view that said, it can't be defined at all. Can't be defined. So you pick up a book of comparative religion, the introduction, or the preface would say, well,  we don't know what the field is, but gee, there's a book on it. I didn't find that  funny or amusing at all. What do you mean, you don't know what it is. But here's another book on it. If you don't know what it is, you don't know, this is another  book on it. Anyway, several, several thinkers jumped on a comment by the  philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein, who said that we often use a word for a whole  bunch of things without those things, having any common property. So if you  think that by the fact that we use the same word for a number of things, to cover  a number of things, that that there has to be a common property, that's a  mistake. Sometimes they have only family resemblances. And that's what they  claimed for religion, these guys jumped on that said, there you are there are all  these different traditions. We can't find that they have anything in common. But  they have family resemblances. So they can't be defined. Now, we don't have to  worry about that problem. And it really hit me the wrong way. First of all, they  can find it and say, it's always true that when you use a word like religion, or  sport, or anything else that that it covers things that have only family 

resemblances even say they never, they never have a common property. Often  they do. We use terms like electron also, and water. In all instances of them  have common properties. Electron has a negative charge. That's true of all of  them. It's common property they have water the word how ever we find it has a  make of H2O. Okay, so you didn't say that? All the times we'll use were our word in common for a bunch of things. They don't have common property said, look  and see if it has a common property. I said, Yeah, that's what we ought to do.  Look, look at it again. And that's I kept looking at it and reading about all these  traditions, trying to get a bead on them for this course coming up. It seemed to  me that they did a lot of a common property. They all centered on what they  thought was divine. I'm going to use that term. We could use sacred or some  other term, but it wouldn't matter. They focus on a reality. that they took to be the absolute reality, the ultimate reality, the reality that generated everything else.  They didn't identify that the same one religion said, Well, it's this kind of thing  that does that. And another said, no, no, it's this. No, no, it's that. No, it's these  two over here. No, it's this whole realm of beings over here. They all had  different things they put into the slot but the slot was self existent reality. That's  what they called Ultimate or absolute. What they mean is it's unconditionally non dependent. This depends on nothing else, while everything else depends on it. 

Belief in the self existent reality, that's the origin of all else. Now I've already  mentioned. And I hope you caught it. That doesn't mean there can be only one  of these. Some religions there are two. And one part of reality depends on one  on one part of reality depends on the other. Or they could have two self existent  divine realities. And all things depend on both of them in different respects. Or  you could have a whole realm of divine beings. Many Native Americans, Native  American Indians hadbelieved that a realm of divine beings or their self  existence, and the rest of reality isn't it depends on self existent reality. I find that works. It certainly works in the five religions we're going to cover, but it works in  dozens and dozens of others as well. I've combed through the tribal religions in  Africa, of the South Sea Islands, ancient religions in Babylonia, Egypt, and the  Near East. We've checked out the traditions among the Inuit, and around the  polar ice, North Pole. Everything that we can, that we can check. And there has  not been an exception yet. And there's a very impressive list of thinkers that  have arrived at the same conclusion in your reading includes William James,  Paul Tillich, Robert Neville, and quite a number of others very distinguished  people that have all come up with the same thing. Religious belief is focused on  self existent reality, what is it that everything else depends on? And it doesn't  depend on anything? I think then if that is right, and I'm taking it that it is and in  your reading, you'll have the arguments for it, you'll see the objections against it  and the objections answered and so on. If this is right, then there are two  secondary senses of religious belief depending on the first the second is belief. 

About how the non divine depends on the divine, That would be a religious belief too in a secondary sense, you've got a divinity, you have something's not divine,  how does it depend on it? The non divine the divine generates it. Okay. How, in  

Christianity the how is a very mysterious kind of answer. It's God has called  everything into existence out of nothing. There was nothing whatever there was  only God and then God. There's creation. So God calls into existence, space,  time matter, all the laws that govern the universe. That's a belief about that's a  religious belief. It's a belief about how the non divine depends on the divine. And thirdly, it's also used the it being The expression religious belief is also used to  mean belief in belief about how humans can come to stand in proper relations of the Divine. I hope you can see that. But it's in your reading, you've got it. So  these are two secondary senses of the term religious belief. They depend on the first obviously. And this I found worked, no matter what religion I ever  encountered, something was the divine reality, they didn't always call it that they  didn't see in some tribal religions, there are traditions that say, everything is to  goes back to the the Great heavens, and the heavens were generated this and  this, and this and the bump bump. And this is how people got here and so on.  And it doesn't say, and those heavens were self existent. And therefore we we  regard them as divine, but it just assumed they were any myth that traces  everything back to something and then ends has left you with wherever it ended. What it traces everything back to is can't be explained, and is the self existent  reality. Sometimes they say, so sometimes they don't. For the high, more highly  developed religions that have a theology, almost they all end up saying. So in  the religions, we're going to cover Hinduism and Buddhism, Judaism,  Christianity, Islam, they're all going to say, this is the divine reality, they're going  to identify it, because they tell you how they know that and tell you how you  need to live in proper relation to the divine. So I hope that's clear. I hope they  that I've thought of most all the objections that you might that might occur to you, and I've answered them adequately. I will say that this is a rather old definition.  To give credit where credit's due, the first person I know of whoever held this  view, was Anaximander , philosopher in ancient Athens, lived about 650 BC. And Anaximander held that notice that people had different ideas about what was  divine, but they all had the same idea about what it meant to be divine. It meant  that it was uncaused. It meant that it was eternal. It meant that it was that which  everything else was generated by and so on, and Anaximander said all of that  through this. Werner Yeager documents that in this book, the theology of the  early Greek philosophers. So I guess he's the first person to have noticed this.  And we have to give him credit for it. Don't we? Yes, yes, we do. So I think this  one works for the others though. It doesn't commit anyone to having to believe  in a Supreme Being, something's divine, but it doesn't tell you what that is. The  different religions all agree on what's what is meant by divinity. They all agree on this. But they don't agree on what it is. What is divine. Think of it this way, if we 

had a really close election in a particular country, for the president of the country. People would disagree about who the president is. If the elections close and in  dispute, but they don't disagree on what it means to be the president, the office  of the presidency, they can acknowledge while disagreeing about which  candidate for office actually won the election. And that's an analogy here. What  it means to be divine is clear in each of these traditions, What that divinity is  they dispute. It's like who won the election, the Office of divinity is clear. But  which candidate is the one that properly belongs in the office is another issue  and one that they do not agree. So, although some people have said in the  study of comparative religion that it's what you see when you examine these  religions is that they're all paths up the same mountain, that they're all taking a  different route, but they're all getting to the same place. I don't find that to be  true at all. What I see is they don't even agree on which mountain to climb.  They're certainly not aiming at the same thing at the same place. They're not  thinking of the same divinity. They can't all be right because where they're,  where they disagree, where their beliefs are, logically contrary, they can't all be  true. at most one could be, they could all be false, but they can't all be true.  Because they're contrary. So do the reading. Listen to the lecture, do the  reading again and we're going to have some fun.