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Some time ago my wife and I were discussing the Northern Ireland conflict. Jane suggested that it could be analysed in neo-Marxist terms. Two classes, unequal share of power and access to wealth etc. The religious affiliations of the two tribes being incidental. Possibly. But Jane is a devout Catholic. The mainstream Catholic newspaper she buys frequently speaks out against anti-Catholic bias in the B.B.C. Jane has, on occasion, pointed out instances of such bigotry that would have passed my Unitarian notice. But I have, on B.B.C. television, witnessed descriptions of Catholic beliefs and practices that were profoundly condescending. Similar instances in other areas of the media have come to my attention. The recent King Arthur movie is a good example. Religion, strictly speaking, involves an individuals relationship with God. However one's religious affiliations usually have implications in one's dealings with Caesar. For example, I am not an expert on Islam, but a Sunni Muslim, I presume, has certain ideas on the nature of God and the appropriate ways to approach God. However in Iraq to be a Sunni places one in a particular niche within the political and socio-cultural spectrum; which niche has nothing to do with Sunni theology or, indeed, has nothing to do with Sunni-ism whatsoever. Let us call this the decadent aspect of religions. I strongly suspect that a quite widespread aspect of the various forms of Protestantism in their decadent forms entails a quasi-racist type of prejudice against Catholics. Of course this rarely takes the intense form of hatred that, say, the Ku Klux Klan directs against Catholics as well as Black people and Jewish people. Rather it is something akin to the class based snobbery that surrounds us all but rarely causes strife. Some time ago I was discussing class related cultural differences with a friend at work. We agreed that, of course, any such differences were bound to be superficial. I then began to relate a number of throwaway comments made in my presence by some of my more bourgeois acquaintances regarding the sorts of lives they believed the working classes lived. I remember the look of astonishment on my friends face that anyone could believe such nonsense about him and his peers. By the same token I have heard, perhaps occasionally on the B.B.C., perhaps elsewhere, opinions of the most bizarre and condescending nature concerning Catholic beliefs and practices. Imagine the following situation. One of us is on holidays in some different country and decided to go to church on Sunday. There is no Unitarian church. There is a Methodist church and a Catholic church. I would suspect that many, perhaps most, Unitarians, by virtue of their cultural baggage would, on balance, opt for the Methodist church. I would argue that this choice has more to do with, as I have termed it, the decadent aspect of Unitarian culture than anything real concerning the Unitarian approach to a relationship with God. My sister has a masters degree from the Irish School of Ecumenics. She has discussed with me the nature of a certain theological debate. There are basically two types of religions, Eastern religions and Western religions. The debate revolves around whether Eastern religions are different paths to the same salvation as Western religions or are different paths to a different salvation to that offered by Western religions. I will speak of the salvation offered by Eastern religions. Some time ago in the mid 1960's Dr. Dick Albert, a close associate of Dr. Timothy Leary, visited India, as all good hippies do. There he met a "holy man", that is one who has achieved the salvation offered by Hinduism, here in this world, before death, and indeed, in a certain sense, irrespective of whether there is an afterlife at all. Dr. Albert handed the holy man some 25 LSD tablets and began to explain that they contained the legendary "Soma"* which is spoken of in the Rig Veda and in the Gita. Albert explained to the holy man that if he was to take one of the tablets he would experience Nirvana. Much to Albert's dismay and alarm the holy man swallowed all 25 tablets. Albert stayed with the holy man for the entire day and to his utter astonishment the holy man showed absolutely no sign of intoxification. I would surmise that anyone in the Western hemisphere of this planet who took such a massive overdose of LSD would be profoundly and permanently psychologically scared by the experience. The point here is not that there are strange people in India who are impervious to the effects of psychedelic drugs. The point is that such people are impervious to negative thoughts and emotions of any sort. Holy men, as the term would be understood within this cultural context, live in a state of bliss more intense than anyone in the West would be able to imagine. Except, arguably, perhaps, in the transient glimpses sometimes said to be experienced under the influence of LSD. Holy men, it is believed will not be reincarnated but will remain in that blissful state forever after death. Recently I watched a television documentary on Eastern culture. A young man, still a boy, spoke of his decision to devote his life to the quest for enlightenment. And, in that particular culture he had a realistic chance, whatever the actual odds, of achieving his goal. Imagine a class of business majors beginning a course at the Harvard Business School. A professor might welcome them with a pep talk. He might speak of the rewards that would be theirs if they were diligent. Untold wealth. Both the business majors and the Indian renunciant are setting out on paths that have very different goals. But both goals, within their respective cultural contexts, are in principle realisable. Each goal has just as concrete and tangible a reality as the other. While I'm not suggesting that the salvation offered by Western religions is completely vacuous, the possibility of "imagining there's no heaven" is quite easily done within the framework of Western culture. Within the context of Eastern culture the existence of heaven is a completely true and uncontroversial fact. Some time ago Derek Gerrity of the Cork Buddhist Society spoke to the Cork congregation. He remarked that "your Buddha nature is just as good as the Buddha's Buddha nature". The essence of the Eastern spiritual path is that one seeks to get one's Buddha nature up to scratch. There is a verse, I think in Luke, which strongly suggests that the way of the Christian could be interpreted in a manner very similar to the Eastern model. But with the creation of Orthodox Christianity in the 4th century and the beliefs in the nature of God that came with this, a decision to follow a spiritual path of an Eastern type became next to impossible. And very little of this barrier would have taken the form of overt religio-political repression. It is simply culturally unthinkable for some one to conceive of a spiritual path with "Christhood" as its goal. To conclude, when separated from the socio-cultural and socio-political parlour games Western religious organisations tend to engage in, Unitarianism, in its purest form, has a profoundly revolutionary dimension. And the possible rewards associated with such a cultural revolution are of a concrete nature and are immensely valuable. * Eliade's Encyclopedia of Religion describes how Soma was most probably a sacremental drink made from psycedelic mushrooms the effect of which was similar if not identical to the effects of LSD. Brendan Burke MA(Phil) Cork October 2005.
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