Tag Archive for 'hermeneutics'

Notes on Techno-Religion

Published on 17 October 2009 ago in Religion and Theology. Closed Tags: , , , , , , , , , , .

I was involved in an ESF-sponsored workshop on technology and religion this past week. While the discussion focused on communicative technologies and media, we did drift at times beyond that. Here are some scribbles and notes of mine from the various sessions.

Mediation

Our first session started with Birgit Meyer and Bengt Kristensson Uggla. Conceiving of media as something external to religion makes questions regarding the intersection of the two unanswerable. However, if media is seen as being embedded within religion, these issues are transformed into understandable practices. Media, then, is able to mediate religious thoughts and beliefs. In this way, media become sacralised so that mediation is made immanent and the gap between and believer and the transcendent is significantly reduced. This immediacy, mitigated through semiotic ideology, denies media as media and leads to its being externalised. It may be a good idea to think of theology as a theory of mediation. Lastly, technology makes globalisation immediately local (again, mediation).

Identity

The second session was led by Siegfried Zielinski and Jan-Olav Henriksen (sorry, this one is in Norwegian). One important thing to keep in mind is that media as a generalised concept did not arise until the mid-20th century (i.e. the last 50-60 years). Communicative technologies existed prior to that (obviously), but these were particulars. Today’s globalisation is seeing the harmonisation and unification of media so that the different technologies appear seamless. Electricity has become the ’soul’ of ‘new media’, animating it as a machine. Machines always reduce complexity and mediate between two objects. It used to be that we humans had to believe in machines in order for them to work (i.e. by turning a switch, etc); but now machines have returned the favour by believing in us to animate them (e.g. interactive games, television, etc). On the other hand, religion provides a chain of memory–however fragmented and disjointed it may be. This is mediated by technology. However, technology can create a sensory excess that creates a feeling of divine presence without that chain of memory. In other words, technology has made it possible for one to participate in a religious community without ‘really’ participating in that community (e.g. Yoga videos in YouTube that provide simple instruction without the ‘full Yoga experience’). As Zielinski noted,  one is ‘always the same, never myself’ (his own reversal of the Calvin Klein tag line ‘Always myself, never the same’).

Secularisation

The third session was presented by Ola Sigurdson, Jayne Svenungsson, and Lieven Boeve. It is quite clear that religion isn’t ‘returning’ because it never left in the first place. The ‘privatisation’ of religion has led to a loss of body and particularity as religion loses its institutional form (c.f. Olivier Roy’s Globalised Islam). This ‘private religion’ turns religion into a fetish. In fact, this new ‘personalised’ religion has transformed religious pilgrimages such that the relics now go to the people instead of the people going to the relics. Technology isn’t showing us a ‘post-secular’ world (as in a ‘return of religion’) but rather a transformation of religion in the public space, particularly in the cases of extremist religious groups which have found new solidarity and strength in the techno-globalised world.

Revolutions

The fourth session was led by Caroline Vander Stichele, Ward Blanton, and Edmund Arens. Echoing the sentiment of the first session of technology being closely tied to religion, this session dealt with looking at religious revolutions based on technological revolutions. One example is that of Yoga in the West as a practice originally separated from its Hindu roots. However, it has become its own consumer-driven religion in which one can get meditative tranquility instantly. Another example, is Augustine’s discussion of the divine postal network (e.g. messenger angels, etc) in relation to his understanding of the Roman Empire’s postal network. Religion needs to be addressed as a communicative practice of memory and narrative. The danger of a consumer-driven religion is, as I mentioned above, the kind of (private) participation without (public) participation. Religion must occur in both the public and the private sphere.

Subjectivity

The final session was led by Arne Grøn and Anne Kull. Subjectivity is the key notion to formulate the problems above (between religion and society) as it gets directly at the concept of identity construction both in relation to the world and the self. In expressing oneself, one exteriorises oneself and bridges the divide between the public and private spheres. Public life is only possibile if it acknowledges a private life as well. Religion, as a public activity, is a meta-sphere of visibility of publicised figures (i.e. private individuals). However, one should be wary to use the term ‘virtual’ in describing religion in the new media (e.g. online churches) because in one very real sense, all churches are ‘virtual’ as they represent the ‘real’ church in a locality. There must be a hermeneutics of subjectivity as it is implied by a phenomenological ontology (a la Heidegger).

Quote of the Day

Published on 29 September 2009 ago in Theology. Closed Tags: , , , , , .

To begin with the common Christian confession: the common confession is ‘We believe in Jesus Christ with the apostles’…The complexities intrinsic to any Christian theological interpretation of the scriptures becomes clear. For Christianity is not, strictly speaking, a religion of the book like Islam. And yet ‘the book’ does play a central role for Christian self-understanding. Christianity, in more explicitly hermeneutical terms, is a religion of a revelatory event to which certain texts bear an authoritative witness.

It is difficult to exaggerate the importance of this distinction between event and text for Christian theological self-understanding. To fail to grasp the distinction is to lead into two opposite difficulties…[T]he route to Christian fundamentalist readings of the scripture under the banner cries of ‘inerrancy’ soon take over. Here Christians believe, in effect, not with but in the apostles.

The opposite danger is equally devastating…The difficult is, rather, that since the scriptural texts are not allowed to play any authoritative role, the contemporary Christian community can never know whether its present witness to the Christ-event is in continuity with the original apostolic witness. The historical central Christian theological affirmation–’I believe in Jesus Christ with the apostles’–would then be narrowed into the affirmation ‘I believe in Jesus Christ’.

From David Tracy, ‘Reading the Bible’ in On Naming the Present, 1994 (originally in Concillium 1991/1).

Atheigulous

Published on 25 May 2009 ago in Current Events, General and Religion. Closed Tags: , , , , , .

I recently watched Bill Maher’s documentary Religulous. I had been interested in it for a while because I have a good deal of respect for Maher and both of his TV series (Politically Incorrect and Real Time). In one aspect, this show did a great analysis of the fundamentalist variety of religion. However, Maher also extends this analysis to all varieties of religion; and this argument follows the same reasoning that he criticises.

I take the main focus of the film to be that religious faith and objective science is incompatible. In fact, religious faith is now an absurdity in these modern times. Maher travels quite a bit throughout the US, Europe, and Israel interviewing people who would generally be classified as fundamentalists in their approaches to theology. At one point, he is interviewing Ken Ham (of Answers in Genesis and its Creation Museum fame). He takes Ham to task in resolving huge differences between scientific evidence and the “common sense” literal reading of creation espoused by young Earth creationism. From my perspective, Ham’s creationism here has already lost its sense of direction by adopting the language and system of scienctific observation that negates the teleological goal of creationism. In oversimplified terms, Ham’s creation science is much like trying to raise freshwater fish in salt water; the freshwater fish behave at the cellular/organic level differently than saltwater fish. The language and goals of the creation story in Genesis, much like the stories of Christ in the Gospels, are not meant to adhere to modern-day scientific (or biographical) literature. In this respect, Maher is spot on with his critique of faith. If one holds religious faith to be coterminal with empirical science, faith will always lose because it centers on phenomena that exceed the bounds empirical science has made for itself.

On the other hand, Maher’s critique is the the “atheist version” of the very thing he critiques. In one segment, he is asking a few Muslims (including an imam) about the Qur’an. His questions fall along the lines of “the Qur’an says to kill infidels, is this true?” Every Muslim asked answers the question along the lines of “that is not how we interpret that text because it was linked to a particular historical context that no longer exists.” Maher pushes his point by denying the possibility of interpretation, setting himself up as the more accurate interpreter than the believers who study the text! This is the same thing that he critiques people such as Ken Ham (and others). In other words, Maher wants religious/theological hermeneutics to be a closed event ripped from any context and made into an absolute ideological framework in order to reject religion. He then rationalises his work by claiming its standpoint of doubt is the best position.

Ironically, it is here that Maher again falls prey to the very thing he criticises. If doubt is the best place to stand, he hasn’t doubted enough! The “true” sceptic is the one that doubts everything, not just what one is prejudiced against. Maher emphasis empirical science as the strongest evidence for his position, yet he never doubts the framework of assumptions that undergird the empirical sciences. He never suggests that empirical evidence itself may be already tainted by a predisposition to certain beliefs (namely, that an external world exists and is discernable). Obviously, then, Maher should insist that some kind of belief is “acceptable” without entering into fundamentalism or scepticism. It seems, then, that the rational position is somewhere between the fundamentalism he decries while using and the scepticism he touts while evading.

One last thing of interesting note is that Maher suggests in his film that science has discovered a gene that is linked to belief in God. Ironically, the original researcher said that it was linked to spirituality and “feeling God’s presense” and not to simple belief in God. Further, these findings were never published in peer-reviewed literature. Even more striking is that this gene can also be associated with the feeling of beloning to a political party. In other words, it isn’t a very strong theory and it doesn’t suggest that belief in God is a genetic trait. Perhaps if Maher had utilised more of his “scepticism,” he would have noticed that.

The word is flat

Published on 30 April 2009 ago in Philosophy. Closed Tags: , , , , , , , , .
This is part 2 of 4 in the Logic of Sense series

In the “Second Series of Paradoxes of Surface Effects” in Logic of Sense, Deleuze turns the play between causes and effects to the surface (so to speak). The two are transformed into bodies and events that manifest on the surface. In Alice in Wonderland, the animals (which are deep) are usurped as “nobility” by thickless card figures (p. 9). Deleuze suspects that Alice isn’t about the adventures of Alice (as the original title suggested) but about the single adventure of Alice: “her climb to the surface, her avowal of false depth, and her discovery that everything happens at the border” (9). It is on the surface where bodies produce events and have effects and Lewis Carroll saw this clearly.  In Sylvie and Bruno, the character “[learns] his lessons in all manners, inside-out, outside-in, above and below, but never ‘in depth’” (10).

Manifestation is part of the hermeneutical cycle for Deleuze.  Unlike Heidegger’s hermeneutical circle, Deleuze suggests it is a Möbius strip.  This strip highlights the logical paradox of signification that “‘Z is true if A, B, and C are true…,’ and so on to infinity” (16). The truth of a proposition is much like the Snark in Alice. It is by unfolding and untwisting the Möbius strip that the dimension of sense appears as it animates the (truth of) the proposition (20). The image of the Möbius strip represents the hermeneutical cycle not as a circle but as “the coexistence of two sides without thickness, such that we pass from one to the other by following their length” (22). Sense is not an effect or a result but the extra-Being which inheres or subsists; it is an “event” but “on the condition that the event is not confused with its spatio-temporal realization in a state of affairs” (22). Language itself is the flat world of the sense-event.

Revitalizing Religion

Published on 16 April 2009 ago in Religion and Theology. Closed Tags: , , .

It is nothing new to say that the Hebrew Bible differs from the Christian Bible, however it is not simply because of the addition of a second testament (i.e. the NT).  In reality, even the set of common texts (I’ll use OT for simplicity’s sake) are radically different.  This is because the NT doesn’t just add new texts to the OT, but the NT also reinterprets the previous set.  For some, this is old hat as well because it is something that Brevard Childs, Richard B. Hays, and others have said to some extent.  As a result of this process, we can see that there is an overlap of interpretations that each are “correct” in some contexts while “incorrect” in others.

Look at the story of Abraham sacrificing his son (well, almost sacrificing his son).  The earliest reading of this, which I will call the “Jewish” one, saw Abraham’s actions as obedience to God or in terms of the Law.  The letter to the Hebrews in the NT reinterprets these actions as acts of faith, not obedience.  Kierkegaard takes this interpretation and makes the other one impossible by arguing (in Fear and Trembling) that Abraham’s actions were obedient to an absurd request/law and therefore must have been because of some illogical faith and not a logical submission to a Law.  With the same story, we have three interpretations, each “correct” in their own context: logical obedience, logical faith, and illogical faith. A second example could be given with Paul’s re-reading of Isaiah that re-inscribes the idea of “salvation” in the idea of the whole world, thus providing him with the hermeneutical argument that the gentiles need to be evangelized.  Without that re-interpretation, Christianity would have most likely died before it ever began because its reinterpretation of the Hebrew texts went beyond the limits Judaism of that day would have allowed.

Reinterpretation is a necessary practice in the development of theological/religious traditions because it inscribes the historical past in the present to create a future for itself.  When a tradition ceases to produce and recreate itself in the present, it tends to dissolve rather quickly because it no longer operates in the present.  Instead, the tradition becomes a preservation of a virtual past seen as some “golden era,” ignoring the very processes which kept it alive.  This “dead tradition” is transformed into a worship of the mummified tradition rather than a continuation of it.  If one goes back far enough in a tradition, one will find that there is no “pure beginning” where the tradition was created ex nihilo.  Theology has never been ex nihilo because there is no point in the past where there was absolute nothing.