Just to get things back on track...
A more concise question might be “What danger does fundamentalism represent?”
In light of the events of 9/11, the answer becomes somewhat obvious, but what about the danger fundamentalism represents to religion?
When people feel that their backs are to the wall, they often lash out aggressively. Hence the hatred that continues to cause so much turmoil around the world.
Yet such religiously inspired hatred represents a major defeat for religion. That’s because, at their core, all the great world faiths—including Confucianism, Hinduism, Buddhism, Judaism, Christianity, and Islam—agree on the supreme importance of compassion. The early sages and prophets all taught their followers to cultivate a habit of empathy for all living beings.
Why, then, do supposedly “religious” leaders declare war in God’s name? And why do some people use “God” to give a sacred seal of approval to their own opinions?
I would argue that these people have forgotten what it means to practice compassion.The word compassion does not; of course, mean to feel sorry for someone. Like sympathy, it means to feel with others, to enter their point of view and realize that they have the same fears and sorrows as yourself. The essential dynamic of compassion is summed up in the olden rule, first enunciated by Confucius in about 500 B.C.E.: ‘Do not do to others as you would not have done to you.” Confucius taught his disciples to get into the habit of
shu: “Likening to oneself.” They had to look into their own hearts, discover what gave them pain, and then rigorously refrain from inflicting this suffering upon other people.
The Buddha also taught a version of the golden rule. He used to advise his monks and lay followers to undertake meditative exercises called
The Immeasurables. They had to send out positive thoughts of compassion, benevolence, and sympathy to the four corners of the earth, not omitting a single creature (even a mosquito!) from this radius of concern. They would thus find that once they had gone beyond the limiting confines of egotism and self-interest their humanity had been enhanced. They would even have intimations of infinity.
Rabbi Hillel, the older contemporary of Jesus, taught the golden rule in a particularly emphatic way. One day a heathen asked him to sum up the whole of Jewish teaching while standing on one leg. Hillel stood on one leg and replied: “That which is hateful to you, do not do to your neighbor. That is the Torah; the rest is commentary; go and learn it!” This is an extraordinary statement. Hillel did not mention any of the doctrines that seem essential to Judaism, such as belief in one God, the Exodus from Egypt, and adherence to the complexities of the Law of Moses.
Jesus taught the golden rule in this way: he told his followers to love even their enemies and never to judge or retaliate. If somebody struck them on the face, they must turn the other cheek. In his parable of the Last Day, when the King comes to judge the world, those who enter the Kingdom do not do so because they have adopted orthodox theology or observed the correct sexual mores, but because they have fed the hungry, given drink to the thirsts and visited the sick and criminals in prison. St. Paul agreed. Christians could have faith that moved mountains, but if they lacked charity it was worth nothing.
Islam is also committed to the compassionate ethic. The bedrock message of the Koran is an insistence that it is wrong to buildup a private fortune, and good to share your wealth fairly in order to create a just and decent society where poor and vulnerable people are treated with respect; On-the Last Day the one question that God will ask Muslims is whether they have looked after the widows, the orphans, and the oppressed, and if they have not, they cannot enter Paradise.
Why was there such unanimous agreement on the primacy of compassion?
Truly religious people are pragmatic. The early prophets and sages did not preach the discipline of empathy because it sounded edifying, but because experience showed that it worked. They discovered that greed and selfishness were the cause of our personal misery. When we gave them up, we were happier. Egotism imprisoned us in an inferior version of ourselves and impeded our enlightenment.
The safest way of combating ego was to dethrone ourselves from the center of our world and put others there. Perhaps one can explain it this way: we are programmed for self- defense; human beings completed their biological evolution during the Paleolithic Period, when they became hunters. Aggression is thus deeply written into our nature. If we make a consistent habit of countering this aggression, we probably do experience a change of consciousness.
Human beings by nature seek ecstasy, a word that comes from the Greek
ekstasis, meaning “to stand outside” the self. If we do not find ecstasy in religion, we turn to art, music, dance, sex, sports, even drugs, but such rapture can only be temporary
Religious leaders claim that the practice of the golden rule can give us an experience of ecstasy that is deeper and more permanent If every time we are tempted to speak unkindly of an annoying colleague, a sibling, or an enemy country we asked how we would like such a thing said of ourselves, and, as a result of this reflection, desisted, in that moment we would transcend our ego. Living in this way, day by day, hour by hour, moment by moment, we would enjoy a constant, slow-burning ecstasy that leaves the self behind. The late Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel once remarked that when we put ourselves at the opposite pole of ego, we are in the place where God is.
The practice of compassionhas to be consistent; it does not work if it is selective. If, as Jesus explained, we simply love those who are well disposed toward us, no effort is involved; we are simply banking up our own egotism and remain trapped in the selfishness that we are supposed to transcend. That, I think, is why Jesus demanded that his followers love their enemies. They were required to feel with people who would never feel affection for them, and extend their sympathy without expecting any benefit for themselves.
Does that mean that we are supposed to “love” Hitler or Osama bin Laden? The practice of compassion has nothing to do with feelings. According to the 13th-century theologian Thomas Aquinas, what we call love simply requires that we seek the good of another. If we allow our rage and hatred to fester, this would not hurt our enemies—it would probably gratify them—but we ourselves would be diminished. Anger is what the Buddha called an “unskillful” emotion. Feelings of rage are natural,and have a place in how we relate to the world, but if they are overindulged they are unhelpful, since they often proceed from an inflated sense of our own importance.
