UNDERSTANDING RELIGIOUS PRACTICES:
GOING BEYOND PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION
[Theme note for the workshop]
The growing awareness of religious diversity seems to have triggered a radical rethinking on the very legitimacy of prevalent models of understanding religious phenomena. The legitimation crisis of disciplinary frameworks appears to be due to their methodologies, conceptual categories, which derive out of absolutist and isolated abstractions. They, irrespective of being either from the point of believers or of atheists (non-believers) are also found to be sharing an assumption that that religion is an area of human activities or behaviors that pertains to experiences and entities that can be distinguished as having a transcendental ‘other- worldly’ existence as against the immanent ‘this-worldly’. This follows the usual dichotomies such as divine/mundane, sacred/profane, spiritual/material, religious/secular, mystic/scientific, or to be more general; religious/non-religious. An understanding of religion on the basis of such divides can be a misleading one on various grounds. Apparently, it might be one of the ideological sources of tendencies either to undermine or to highlight unduly many aspects that go under the rubric of religion, spirituality, or whatever it may be. Consequently, much of their significance and insignificance for the changing society seems to be inadequately accounted and assessed. The conceptual devices that are being generated out of this divide make further complications in the efforts of understanding religion. It is to this matter that the disciplinary legitimation crisis points to. So the crisis generated by the awareness of religious plurality seems to be marking a historical moment whereby the conceptual pertinence or theoretical appropriateness of many disciplines and methodological perspectives are called into question. This workshop is, thus meant for deliberating on the various ways in which the religion/non-religion divide becomes problematic, and how does the assumption of such a divide lead to legitimation crisis in the disciplines and other discourses that are concerned with religion and spirituality.
As far as philosophy of religion is concerned, the legitimation crisis appears to have emerged from two sets of problem such as conceptual and historical. This might be seen following from what can be termed as “internal” and “external” crises of the discipline of philosophy itself. However these reasons are not exclusively unrelated. It is fact that the wide range of intellectual and political responses, which have been emerged out of the exposure of the reality of religious diversity, has been targeted towards the widely received conceptions of religion advanced by the westerners. As many western scholars themselves have come to admit, meaning of the term ‘religion’ has a ‘conceptual co-incidence’ with ‘Christianity’, which has a theological origin in the west. This points to the co-existence of both “conceptual” and “historical” reasons that has conditioned the legitimation crisis of philosophy of religion. Therefore, this could be taken as the launching pad from where the present enquiry can take off by way of a critique of philosophy of religion. The critique, which is envisaged here, need not be taken as a matter of overcoming the crisis within the framework of the discipline of philosophy or philosophy of religion. It may rather be viewed as the attempt to bare further their illegitimacy and incompatibility vis a vis the crisis of understanding the diversity of religious beliefs and practices, if not religious doctrines. This point itself may attract a debate. Further, it may also examine how does disciplines other than philosophy imbibe its visions, and especially, what are the ways in which they have inherited the fore-said ‘conceptual co-incidence’ religion and Christianity.
Despite many changes from within, the philosophy of religion, as conceived in the western traditions, has remained more or less as an onto-epistemic-theology (philosophical theology). Philosophy of religion is, thus, an area devoted to the questions such as: ‘does at least one divinity exist?’ ‘What is it (are they) like?’ ‘What arguments are there for or against its (their) existence?’ Thus its basic preoccupation has been either to justify or disprove the existence of god, especially with respect to the status of theistic religion. However, with the increasing awareness on non-western religious traditions, philosophers of religion in recent years have become interested in the problems generated by non-theistic religions of Afro-Asian regions as well as the phenomenon of religious plurality. As against the traditional parochialism of equating religion with theism, scholars have turned their attention to non-theistic religions (like Buddhism, Jainism, and Advaita Vedanta) and non-westerns forms of theism. With the increasing exposures to alternative religious systems, the focus of philosophy of religion has been shifted from what may be called a strictly ‘ontological theology’ (as the enquiry into the nature and existence of god) to the questions regarding the epistemic validation of institutions of religion and its ideals. In spite of the periodic changes in the focus, philosophy of religion, consistently in tune to the philosophy in general, has maintained, its core questions on the lines of metaphysics and epistemology, and thereby has kept formulating the classical project of giving ‘defensible answers to the questions what is there? and How can we know what there is?’
Even those questions related to the validity of truth claims of other religions which have been raised in recent decades, in response to religious diversity, are themselves have been tackled by accommodating within the frame of an enquiry what of what is ‘the most real of all realities.’ Thus, irrespective of the characteristic differences in the direction and emphasis of the questions, they all have an equal presumption of having or arriving at a higher order of reality-cum-knowledge principle that could only be rendered within the conceptual structure of philosophy. However, the postulation of the divine noumena as the rationale or ultimate ground for all the historical manifestations has not been corroborated by the historicity of religious diversity, except the in the case of theologized forms of the major world religions. Even in the case of world religions, what is conceived to be their ‘universal ultimate’, has not been found in their cultural-historical expressions in any uniformity. This shows the historicity of the dynamics of these world religions itself does not attest for a consistency of adherence on an equal basis within the divinity framework of the same religion. Therefore, it is against the above stated context of philosophical/theoretical postulations of something as ‘religious reality’ or ‘religious knowledge’ that a proposal is made before the present workshop for a debate on the possibility of understanding (theorising or conceptualising) the phenomena of religion and spirituality in terms of their functional modulations. The functional mode might be including anything that is done, talked about, signified, represented, symbolised as being so-called religious, spiritual, mystical, divinely, transcendental, profane, providential, sacred, and whatever the terms so very well fit into them as their conceptual cognates. This is meant for understanding the spiritual or religious reality is purely in terms of their historical actualisations that are taken as ever be subjected to get conditioned by spacio-temporal contexts. As the human praxis or response (both at individual and societal levels) being the primary consideration, instead of any postulations, for the analysis of religious phenomena, the term praxiology is preferred here to characterise this methodological perspective.
The praxiology of religion aims to reveal what could be termed here as the praxiological reality of religion. In contrast to the religious reality as divine noumena, the praxiological religious reality simply refers to the religious reality that is actualized in or signified by the functional modes of religion. The praxiological mode of religion is the one, which is mediated through human activities in relation/response to what he/she conceives to be the divine. Unlike the theoretical/speculative modes of reality projected through the doctrinal schema and institutional ideals, the praxiological mode of religious reality keeps changing in response to the needs of those who want the divine has to be actualized. This way the doctrine and institution of religion themselves would be taken as forming part of the praxiological reality emerged out of the contingencies of man. The so-called’religious belief’ and ‘religious experience’ are the ones that would find their expression and signification in the religious practices. The dynamics character of religious practice shows that praxiological reality is characterized by the mutual incompatibility of different religious as well as by the different moments or stages of the same religion. As the praxiological reality is constituted or determined by the synergetic of multiple factors, conditions, forces, etc that are rather natural and social, the wealth of these resources would contribute a better understanding of human behaviors. However, if they were explained from a transcendental framework of reality, the complexity of the religious phenomenon would rather be reduced and minimized. Thus the transcendental reductionism is the context against which the praxiology of religion wants to be introduced as a counter-philosophical perspective for overcoming or going beyond the philosophy of religion.
As it is evident from the above, the anchoring of the workshop is on the specificity of religious practices, rather than on religious doctrines, theological interpretations, or institutional structures as abstract ideas. Therefore, the specificity of religious and spiritual practices within the context of Indian sub-continent would require more attention and focus in the deliberations of the workshop. In contrast to the onto-epistemic question of philosophical theology, following are some of the questions, which would fall under the broad concerns of the present workshop:
Do all that we call religion or religious belief and practice entail a notion of god or transcendental being? Do the expressions ‘religiosity’, ‘spirituality’ mean anything more than linguistic derivatives of ‘religion’? Do the possibility of religion without god or of spirituality without religion amount to a triviality of the divides like religious and secular, religious and political, and religion and science? If non-religious concerns, which are political, social, cultural, technological and scientific in nature could be seen forming part of religion, and vice versa, why should they be privileged or degraded as insulated from each other? If religion and spirituality are mediated by politics, and vice versa, how does the notion of secularism necessarily involve a sense of non-religion and atheism? If both science and religion are addressing the mysteries of the world, why should their methods are excluded each other? Does the emergence of ‘new-religions’ or ‘new-spirituality’ involve processes like over-religionising (of what is not religion) and de-religionising (of what was religion)? Is the notion of ‘folk religion’ antithetical to that of national and global religions? Is the so-called folk religion a religion at all? Are folk religions an appropriation of high religions at the popular level? Does the integration of folk religion with high religion imply an acculturation? Can the interplay thesis of great and little traditions solve or implant the conflicts between high and folk religions? Does the religious integration mean anything to a cultural expansionism/imperialism? Can folk religion endanger cultural diversity? Can folk religion pose any challenge to globalisation?
Areas and aspects to be focused on (within the ambience of the theme-note):
Models:
Eurocentricism of philosophy of religion.
The conceptual and historical critique of philosophy with respect to religious reality.
Beyond the Orientalist construction of religion.
Theologisation of religious practices.
Global religion, National religion, and Folk religion: Problem of identity.
Secular modes of religious practices: Availability and prospects.
Practices:
Religion: doctrines and practices.
Religion, religiosity and spirituality.
Determinations and negotiations of religious and spiritual practice.
Religion as form of life.
Definitional paradox of religious practices.
Religious practices and social consciousness
Context:
Specificity of Afro-Asian belief practices.
Diffusion and patterns of ‘Hinduism.’
Semitic conception of religion: Influences and transformations
Religious diversity and cultural relativism.
Religious plurality and religious relativism.
Change:
Modernity and the changing conception of religion and spirituality.
Religion and rituals.
Religion and public sphere.
Religion and technology.
The liberative powers of religious symbols.
New religious movements and colonial market.
Metamorphosis of ‘greater religions’ and ‘folk religions’
Politics:
Conflicts and dialogues between religions traditions.
Religious communalism and identity politics.
Religious pluralism: Argument for democracy or Imperialism?
Theologies of social liberation.
Ecology of religion and religious ecology (Eco-spirituality)
Academics:
Philosophy of religion or religious studies? Politics of academics.
Problems with Philosophy, Sociology, Anthropology, History etc of religion.
Toward a Critical Theory of Religious Insight
Religion and social theory
Transcending religion or transforming religion?
