DEATH, DYING,

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DEATH, DYING, RELIGION

• REFlectionS
• DiRectionS

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Hate to Be a Downer on Day One

• But we will all die one daythat includes YOU

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Our Bodies will Decay and Fail Utterly

• Im not kidding, you knowDeath is a universal

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How Do We Come to Termswith This FATE?
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Religion constitutes one system for interpreting
lifes finitude
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Lets consider afew recent deaths
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Some Recent DeathsAlexander Solzhenitsyn (89),
Gene Upshaw (63), Hua Guofeng (87), Rep.
Stephanie Tubbs Jones (58)
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Sudden Death (with no overtime)

• Both Tubb Jones and Gene Upshaw died suddenly.
  Rep. Tubb Jones suffered an aneurysm. She had a
  full calendar of appointments.
• Gene Upshaw, head of the NFLPA (union), was
  diagnosed with cancer on Sunday, and died on
  Wednesday. He had a bit more time than Jones,
  but not much.

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Lingering Death

• Alexander Solzhenitsyn told the truth about
  Russias gulag labor camp prisons. He suffered
  declining health for years.
• Hua Guofeng succeeded Mao Tse-tung as leader of
  Communist China, before being supplanted by Deng
  Xiaoping. Despite being disgraced, he was
  allowed to continue as a member of the Central
  Committee even past mandatory retirement age.

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Violent Accidental DeathMadrid Plane Crash
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So how does religion, in general, answer the
questions raised by the brute fact of death?
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Religions construct COSMOLOGIES that ascribe
meaning to the universe, and interpretevents in
relation to that meaning.
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Micro- and Macro-Levels

• Religion functions at the level of organizing
  daily existence (micro), through such mechanisms
  as formulating codes of behavior, marking
  life-cycle events with rituals, and dictating
  community norms.
• Religion also functions at a larger ideological
  level by providing a framework for meaning,
  determining what is significant and what is
  inconsequential.

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SIGNIFICANCE

• The word significance is related to sign
• Religious world-views recognize life-cycle events
  as significant (birth, death, war, illness,
  coming-of-age, etc.)
• Each religious world-view also accords unique
  significance to persons/events/places that would
  not be immediately understood as significant -
  these instances of created significance form
  incommensurate differences between religions
• Examples who Jesus is to Christians, what Mecca
  means to Muslims, what Mt. Tamalpais means to
  Coast Miwok, etc.

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Hierophany

• Word derived from hieros sacred, phanos to
  see, know
• Means any manifestation of the sacred
• Grand hierophany defies our perceived rules of
  nature (i.e. a miracle)
• Intimate hierophany is a deeply-felt experience
  with cosmological dimensions and insights

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Hierophanies reveal the universe
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Cosmology

• In religious studies terms, all religions are
  socially-constructed cosmologies. A cosmology
  interprets the universe by providing organizing
  principles. These principles distinguish between
  what is significant and what is considered
  unimportant, accidental, or inconsequential.
• Astronomers, physicists, and philosophers also
  use cosmology, but do so in a less
  socially-constructed and behavior-motivating
  manner than religions. The use of the term in
  these fields is more descriptive than
  prescriptive. In religion, cosmologies often
  lead to normative regulation

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Examples of Cosmological Organizing Principles

• Afterlife
• Justice, Balance
• Hierarchy
• Stasis and Motion (Being and Becoming)
• God/desses, Supernatural Beings
• Distance between Humans and Gods
• Status of Animals and Nature
• Conflict or Harmony (War and Peace)
• Gender, Sex, Sexuality

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Example of a Cosmological Claim

• The Bible does not contain the Word of God, it
  is the Word of God.  It is supernatural in
  origin, eternal in duration, inexpressible in
  value, infinite in scope, regenerative in power,
  infallible in authority, universal in interest,
  personal in application, inspired in totality.
• This statement claims to explain the workings of
  the universe from a particular book.
• http//prayerfoundation.org/bible_translations_com
  parison.htm - an evangelical, born-again group of
  Protestant monks accessed 7/14/08

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Religious Cosmologies and Social Organization

• Religion can make a cosmology real when a given
  society decides to build institutions, articulate
  codes of behavior, and set social expectations
  based on the cosmology.
• Religion thus establishes and confirms social
  authority.
• Authority and social institutions seek to
  maintain the existing social order, rather than
  change it they are inherently conservative,
  meaning both that they conserve what exists and
  that they have a political bias toward
  maintaining traditional ways.

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Religious Cosmologies and Social Organization

• "Religion legitimates so effectively because it
  relates the precarious reality constructions of
  empirical societies with ultimate reality" -
  Peter Berger in The Sacred Canopy
• Meaning religion assures us that our form of
  social organization has divine sanction. But,
  the moment one begins to reflect comparatively,
  this assurance is under assault!

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Hierarchy

• Word literally means government by those who are
  closer to, or have access to, the sacred.
• The religious basis for authority of all kinds
  (political, military, familial, etc.) is deeply
  rooted - watch for examples in our current
  politics, despite the USA being an officially
  secular nation.

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Religions are NOT Identical

• There is genuine variety among religions.
• Some competing cosmological claims are
  irreconcilable, or at least incommensurate.
• There are some large family groups of religions.
  
• To differentiate among religions, you must be
  able to perform a taxonomy of religions

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Taxonomy of Religions

• Taxonomy the science or technique of
  classification.
• To create a taxonomy, one must develop a set of
  categories.
• The categories function as vectors of
  classification.

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Vectors of Religious Taxonomy

• Distance between Sacred and Human Realms
• Number of Deities
• Philosophic Cosmology
• Scope of Membership and Recruitment
• Social Organization (Basic Types)
• Social Identities and Locations (class, race,
  status, gender, education, etc.)
• Types of Practices and Modes of Knowledge
  (literate/oral, legal/mystic, ritual/philosophy)

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Family Groups of Religions

• Monotheistic, Revealed, Abrahamic Traditions
  Judaism, Christianity, Islam
• Karmic Monistic Traditions Hinduism, Buddhism,
  Taoism
• Indigenous, Nature-Based Traditions Native
  American, Australian, African Traditional
  Religions

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Five Heuristic Relationships Between the Sacred
and the Human

• Transcendent the sacred is much more powerful
  than we are, it is separate from us, and it is,
  at best, apathetic toward us
• Interventionary the sacred is much more powerful
  than we are, it is separate from us, and it is
  deeply concerned with us. This concern leads to
  its intervention on our behalf in the form of
  revelation or direct contact
• Overlapping the sacred realm and the human realm
  overlap in some places/people, in other ways the
  sacred extends beyond our knowing, and there are
  also areas in the human realm which are
  dangerously void of sacrality
• Immanent/Pantheism the sacred realm and the
  human realm are co-terminous with each other
  everything is sacred
• Panentheism the sacred realm entirely contains
  the human realm, but the sacred realm is much
  larger than the human realm.

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Five Heuristic Relationships Between the Sacred
and the Human

• Transcendent
• Interventionary
• Overlapping
• Immanent/Pantheism
• Panentheism

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Philosophic Categories of Cosmology

• How Many Things Exist in the Universe? - Answer
  1, 2, or lt 2 !
• Monism - belief/theory that there is a
  fundamental unity to the substance, energy,
  and/or structure of the universe. Synonyms
  include "singularism" and "henism" ("hen" is a
  Greek root meaning 'one' - it is also present in
  the words "kathenotheism" and "panenhenic")
• Dualism - belief/theory that there are two
  fundamentally irreconcialable, polarized
  oppositional structures in the universe
• Pluralism - belief/theory that there is a
  thorough-going diversity of substances, energies,
  and/or structures in the universe
• Complimentarity - belief/theory which understands
  seeming opposites in a unified way, as two sides
  of the same coin, as equally necessary and
  characteristic of the nature of reality.
  Understands the coexistence of life/death as
  paradoxical, as part of a continuum, or as
  transformative. Minoan labyrs and Taoist
  Yin-Yang are examples of duality expressed
  symbolically. Also called "duality"
• The One and the Many (Hen/Plurra) - the
  phenomenon - and philosophical conundrum - of
  unity in multiplicity, of a shared essence within
  great (apparent) diversity, of the temporal
  existing within the infinite.

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Metaphors of Religious Pluralism

• Buffet
• Describing an Elephant
• Garden/Eco-System
• Genres of Music
• Carnival

• Lottery
• Chess
• College Admissions
• Shoes

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Number of Deities

• Monotheism - a religious system which postulates
  that there is a single deity. Normally it is
  understood that this deity is a universal deity,
  whose acts and judgments affect the entire world,
  not just those who worship this deity.
• Polytheism - a religious system which has a
  multitude of deities, related to one another in a
  pantheon. These deities can be understood as
  universal or local, depending on the philosophic
  outlook of the religious system.
• Kathenotheism - a special case of polytheism,
  loosely translated as "one-god-at-a-time-ism."
  Here the deities' heirarchic relation to each
  other is fluid, as the god or goddess who is
  being invoked or prayed to at a given moment is
  given precedence and supremacy over all others at
  that time. Also called Henotheism.
• Pantheism - means "all-is-god" a religious
  system which postulates a one-to-one unity
  between sacred being/deity/deities and the
  universe.
• Panentheism - the understanding that the universe
  is a partial manifestation in unity with the
  sacred being/deity/deities. The name loosely
  means "all-is-god-and-god-is-more."
• Transtheism - a system which includes deities,
  but maintains that they are not ultimate. For
  example, in Jainism and Mahayana Buddhism the
  existence of deities is acknowledged, but human
  beings can transcend these deities by reaching
  various forms of enlightenment.
• atheism - no deity (atheism ? no religion there
  are forms of Buddhism and Ethical Culture which
  are religions without deities)

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Guidelines for Studying Religion

• All religions look absurd from the outside,
  because they are total systems that make
  (seemingly) arbitrary editorial choices.
• We all operate from within some totalizing
  system. One persons superstition is another
  persons religion. Avoid terms like
  superstition, fanatic, zealot, which are
  judgmental.
• Respect other views, and seek to understand the
  integrity of their logic. Do not treat our
  predecessors with disregard and contempt they
  faced the same existential situation as you do.
• Respect ? Agreement you do not need to agree
  with or condone any system of thought, if you
  have taken the trouble to understand its logic.

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Human Beings are not the only animal that exhibit
agitated behavior around death
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Grieving Gorilla in Germany, carrying dead baby
on back
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Crows in Mourning, Circling Dead Body of another
Crow
This phenomenon has been seen more often lately,
due to mortality in corvids from West Nile virus.
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Elephants Compassion for the Dying has been
Documented
The dead female elephant is shown here her
diseased trunk was separated posthumously from
her body by park rangers in Kenya. The young
elephant was her female calf, who died three
months later.
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The Natural False Naturalisms

• Religious cosmologies often declare what is
  natural as well as what is out-of-harmony with
  the natural order.
• For instance, is death a natural given? Or can
  death be overcome through resurrection, after
  life, or reincarnation? (this is a deeply
  cosmological question)
• If you function in a system that thinks animals
  are cosmologically less important than human
  beings, how do you interpret the previous
  pictures of animals seeming to understand the
  tragedy of death? The idea that human beings are
  infinetly and eternally more important than other
  species could be critiqued as a false
  naturalism