(A work in progress, I will be updating the course outline regularly.)
Thomas Hobbes (1588-1679) famously argued that the only difference between religion and superstition was that the former had state sanction while the latter did not. Fredrick the Great expressed a similar sentiment in a letter to Voltaire dated September 13, 1766.
Believe me, if the philosophers founded a government, within half a century the people would create new superstitions. …The object of adoration may change, like your French fashions; [but] what does it matter whether people prostrate themselves before a piece of unleavened bread, before the ox Apis, before the Ark of the Covenant, or before a statue? The choice is not worth the trouble; the superstition is the same, and reason gains nothing.1Durant and Durant 1996
The Ark of the Covenant or the Apis Bull… it is all the same! The making of equivalences between religions became the primary means by which Enlightenment thinkers discarded religion in favor of reason—so called. It was an easy argument to make as long as the discussion was confined to the outward appearance of things. However, once the weapon of equivalence was unleashed, it could not easily be contained. The very weapon used by them against religion would eventually be turned on culture and even on reason itself. “One thing every professor can be sure of,” writes Alan Bloom, “is that every student believes that truth is relative… The study of history and of culture teaches that all the world was mad in the past; men always thought they were right, and that led to wars, persecutions, slavery, xenophobia, racism, and chauvinism. The point is not to correct the mistakes and really be right; rather it is not to think you are right at all.2Bloom 1987, 26
The reason every student in Alan Bloom’s classroom believes truth is relative is because this is what they are taught everywhere. Thus the scholar of Hebrew and Ugaritic Mark S. Smith recommends that students of religion “abandon the notion of ‘essence,’ of a unique differencetium… as well as the socially impossible correlative of a community constituted by a systematic set of beliefs.”3Smith 2002, 18 Rather than make distinctions, Smith urges student to map variety “which appears as a shifting cluster of characteristics that vary over time.”4Smith 2002, 18 Religion and morality are viewed in this context as mere social constructs. But there are essential differences between cultures and religions which cannot be explained by simply mapping variety. Our task for what follows is to highlight these differences and try to understand them.
Bloom, Allan.
The Closing of the American Mind : How Higher Education Has Failed Democracy and Impoverished the Souls of Today’s Students.
New York: Simon and Schuster, 1987.
Durant, Will, Ariel Durant.
“Rosseau and Revolution,” in The Story of Civilization. Vol. X vols.
New York: Simon and Schuster, 1935.
Smith, Mark S.
The Early History of God : Yahweh and the Other Deities in Ancient Israel. The Biblical Resource Series vols.
Grand Rapids, Mich.: William B. Eerdmans Pub, 2002.