As with the midterm, each essay will be at least two pages, double-spaced, 12 pt. font.

– References, in-text references

Question #1
Myth and sacred scripture we have seen are essential aspects of all religions. Yet believers seem to be uncomfortable with the category of myth when scholars apply it to their particular religion. And this is especially true in the three Western religions, Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. Even Hindus are now upset that a Western scholar would consider one of their great epics, the Ramayana, “myth.” Christians never had a problem labeling the stories in other religions myth, while strongly defending the historicity of every story in the Genesis narratives, even to the minutest detail. Orthodox Jews and Muslims would be offended if anyone suggested there is myth in the Torah or the Qur’an. How do we deal with myth? Even is a myth is historically untrue, can it still be true in a more important sense? Discuss the different views of myth in Chapter 4 of Livingston, and state with which view do you agree the most and why?

Question #2
As we have seen from the readings on Durkheim, Marx, Freud, and earlier key figures such as Feuerbach, the study of religion has emphasized the all-too-human nature of religious phenomena. Religion is seen as the creation of the human spirit or of society (or culture) in general, whether this is seen in a positive light (Durkheim and Geertz) or a very negative one (Marx and Freud). These sociological, psychological, or anthropological interpretations of religions can be seen as expressions of the ascendance of secularism and scientific naturalism (see Livingston, chapter 14) in the last two hundred years since the Enlightenment. Religion is being “explained away” as a human, natural phenomenon, with no basis in some transcendent, supernatural reality. Being pushed into the background are interpretations of religion, such as Schleiermacher’s, Hegel’s, Otto’s, and Eliade that saw religion as grounded in a transcendent reality, an object over-against-us (the Holy, the Sacred, God) and not reducible to merely human phenomenon. Question: In the light of these cultural developments, how can the rise of Fundamentalism be explained? Why is the world becoming more, not less, religious; and why is it that the belief that religion is not merely a human phenomenon but a reality grounded in some divine reality which is neither human nor man-made growing stronger instead of fading away into oblivion? Is Fundamentalism in the end a desperate attempt to preserve the old order by peoples, groups, or societies (in America and the Muslim world) that cannot accept the modern world and choose to live in discredited and obsolete worldview?

Question #3
Many people today still believe that there is only one religion that has “the truth,” to the exclusion of every other religion. Among these people are not only average conservative Christians (and Muslims for that matter) but also prominent theologians and philosophers, such as Karl Barth (see handout #2), perhaps the greatest Christian theologian of the 20th century, and Mortimer Adler, one the great intellectual figures of our time (read selection from Adler’s book, Truth in Religion, posted on Blackboard). Prominent philosophical theologians such as William Lane Craig, J. P. Moreland, Gary Habermas, et al., have formulated vigorous and defenses of religious exclusivism and a “propositional view” of religious truth-claims (watch W. L. Craig’s critique Islam on Youtube: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h51YwIMxtrQ before you answer the question). Others, such as Schleiermacher and Wilfred Cantwell Smith, strongly believe this view of religion is misleading and in fact represents a deep misunderstanding of what religion is all about (read Wilfred C. Smith selection from Smith’s book, The Meaning and End of Religion, posted on Blackboard). I have also posted an extended quotation from a speech by the American Indian Chief Red Jacket (1805) that you will find instructive in connection with the question: After taking this course and reflecting about the five religions we have studied, does the concept of one religion having the absolute truth still make sense? In what sense, for example, would you say a particular religion is “true” and every other is “false” (or at least, that only one can be true)? Does the study of religion itself in a comparative approach as we did it here force us to rethink what we mean by “religion” and by the concept of “truth” as it applies to religion?

TO HELP YOU THINK ABOUT THE QUESTION: Think about the ways we considered the concept of truth: e.g. (1) as propositional (statements that are true or false in the sense that they correspond to or are “factually” based on reality). In this view, a religious tradition can be regimented or systematized in a set of propositions or statements of which it can be asked “are they true?” In this view it is assumed that every religious tradition is reducible to a set of propositions that can in principle be compared to reality (perhaps only “at the end of history” or “eschatologically”), and that only one such set of propositions can correspond to reality since reality is one. By dint of logic, it can be further assumed that one such set of propositions (or equivalently, one religion) can be true or false; or at least, since the world religions contain propositions that are incompatible with the propositions of every other religious tradition, either one religious tradition is true or all of them are false. That is, no more than one religious tradition can be true, and this is in fact what religious exclusivism affirms (against relativism). The strength of this view is obviously its appeal to logic and to the intuitive view that any statement, whether religious or not, is true by virtue of some fact or state of affairs in reality to which it corresponds or which it “depicts” (picture). If religion is not about factual statements then it is not worth bothering with since it is not about truth (by definition), that would make it equivalent to fiction or make-belief. It might have emotive or artistic merit (maybe even psychological and sociological significance), but it cannot be taken seriously since it has nothing to do with reality.