"Religious Pluralism and the Upaniṣads

2008

A more developed version of this work has been published in 2023 as a the book: Religious Pluralism: Toward a Comparative Metaphysics of Religion (Lanham, Maryland: Lexington Books, Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group, Inc., 2023). "This study examines the plausibility of a genuine religious pluralism in the form of John B. Cobb, Jr.’s Deep Religious Pluralism. Working through a variety of conceptions of religious pluralism in analytic, process, and South Asian philosophies of religion the dissertation argues in favor of the authenticity of a plurality of the world’s major religious traditions. Cobb’s Whiteheadian-based hypothesis is argued to offer a plausible explanation of the compossibile veridicality of different religious traditions because the ontological pluralism he employs functions as a generic schema that serves to inform a sensible narrative of compossible religious ultimates, heretofore thought to be mutually exclusive. By shifting to a process metaphysics our horizons of pluralistic understanding shifts as well, because a Whiteheadian metaphysics allows for a multiplicity of efficacious religious praxes, soteriologies, and ontological cum religious ultimates—such as God, Dao, Brahman, and śūnyatā—to obtain simultaneously. What is more, these ultimates can co-exist in a non-hierarchical relationship, thereby avoiding inclusivist tendencies and enabling the claim that one’s own religion is a true tradition, rather than the true tradition. After arguing that neither ontological nor religious ultimates are axiomatically singular, the dissertation argues for the viability of Cobb’s Whiteheadian religious pluralism as a middle-path between relativist resignations and absolutist “solutions” to the philosophical challenges of religious diversity. Relevant aspects of process philosophy and process theology are then explained in detail in order to demonstrate how a Whiteheadian schema of multiple ultimates can serve as an adequate framework for a genuine religious pluralism. Pluralistic meta-theologies from classical and contemporary South Asian philosophy are also critiqued, and non-dualism is argued to be just as problematic a basis for a genuine religious pluralism as previously discredited Western attempts at formulating a viable pluralistic hypothesis. Within the context of the first English language philosophical critique of Pope Benedict XVI’s writings (as Joseph Ratzinger) in opposition to religious pluralism, an argument against religious absolutism is made by way of the need for faithful adherents of religious absolutisms to engage in open inter-religious dialogue, which, in turn, is argued to necessitate an assumed meta-theological position of religious pluralism."

ACTS Academy, 2007

In the late nineteenth century, European philosophical theologians concerned about the perceived threat of secularity played a crucial role in the construction of the category of ‘religion,’ conceived as a transcultural universal, the genus of which the so-called ‘world religions’ are species. By reading the work of the late John Hick (1922–2012), the most influential contemporary philosophical advocate of religious pluralism, through an historically informed hermeneutic of suspicion, this paper argues that orientalist-derived understandings of religion continue to play a significant (though often unacknowledged) role within the philosophy of religion today. Though couched in the language of pluralism, Hick’s later work in the philosophy of religion functions apologetically to maintain a version of the religious–secular distinction that, while theologically and politically loaded, is, I show, philosophically arbitrary. Moving the philosophy of religion beyond Eurocentrism, I argue, will require freeing it from the logic of the modern understanding of religion.

Religious Studies, 2020

In a tribute to the work of Alvin Plantinga, Nicholas Wolterstorff characterizes a form of the analytic tradition in philosophy of religion, which neither he nor Plantinga endorses, as a brand of Kant-rationality. What such rationality aims to achieve is, above all, a universality of rational agreement, or rather 'a foundation that is acceptable to all rational reflective human-beings', something that could be acknowledged by 'all cognitively competent adult human beings' who had access to the same relevant information or facts.  Is this a genuine possibility when we consider many of the classic problems in the philosophy of religion? For example, the search for a cognitive universality, if it is the sole objective, might be considered to be tone deaf when it comes to the problem of evil and suffering, where tone seems to be an important ingredient for constructing a cogent response. More pertinent for the purposes of this article, is the Kant-rationality likely to be a productive approach when confronted with the complexity of new data that characterizes global diversity? The philosophy of religion has been framed largely by a Judaeo-Christian discourse and by the classic problems and challenges that are relevant to theistic beliefs in particular. Even the question of religious pluralism, often called the 'problem of religious diversity', is configured as a challenge arising from conflicting truth-claims which reflects largely the anxieties of the Semitic traditions, especially Christianity and Islam. Searching for a new approach to the philosophy of religion that accurately accounts for the global dimension is becoming an important concern. For some it is a matter of finding a criterion that speaks to all religious forms, perhaps ethics or some form of ultimism; for others it may be a case of including multiple voices to address globally experienced challenges such as suffering and evil. Still others will contest Cartesian rationality and seek to bring practice or embodiment into the method of the philosophy of religion, perhaps following a quasi-Wittgensteinian understanding which sees belief and practice as closely entwined. Indeed, it is this latter emphasis that perhaps brings the traditions of phenomenology into the purview of the analytic philosophy of religion, often uneasy bedfellows. We shall return to this in the second part of this article. Religious Studies (2020) 56, 95-110

There is an aporia to finitude: if I am limited as a finite being, I cannot know what the limits of my finitude are, because if I knew what those limits are, then I would have transcended them. I refer to this aporia as the "hard problem of finitude," interpreted through Graham Priest's work on inclosure paradoxes. Here I offer an interpretation of François Laruelle's theory of the Philosophical Decision in terms of his attempt to resolve this aporia through his suspension of standard philosophy's form of ontological dualism. Next, I apply non-standard philosophy to the problem of religious pluralism, presenting a novel theory of "standard religion" and the "Hierophanic Decision" through a non-standard reading of Mircea Eliade's philosophy of religion, and end by pointing towards what a consistently performative and finite form of religious pluralism might look like from within the "democracy-of-thought," here rendered as the "parliament of religions."

2020

1. In The Idea of the Holy (1917), Rudolf Otto identifies the numen as the non-rational core of every religious phenomenon. According to him, there is a universal human yearning for transcendence/radical alterity, which is at least partially filled by the experience of the nu- minous – this experience can be found in every historical religion, from the ancient ones to the perfect Christian Revelation. Otto’s ‘Hegelian’ system could be taken as a theoretical response to religious diversity, alternative for instance to John Hick’s one. 2. Otto does not mention the process of secularization. Today, his main point is inadmissible in itself, if not transformed. Given the secularisation, one of the two: either it is not true that there is a universal human yearning for radical transcendence/otherness, or this yearning can be found not only in the pos- itive historical religions, but also in extra-‘religious’ phenomena. 3. Our proposal aims to prove the second hypothesis. Numenology is the philosophical research of sacred/numinous features within various social, political, economic, anthropological, cultural phenomena. This approach moves from a recalibration of Otto’s and Max Scheler’s stances, through the critique of the per se existence of the objective pole of the experience of the Holy. 4. In this sense, the problem of religious diversity itself is reformulated: the yarning for transcendence is universal and therefore potentially pluralistic, and ‘religion’ is the name of a historical/social way to rationalize it. Final- ly, the open epistemological question is whether there can be any criterion for determining the truth (or even the reasonableness) of a specific numinous phenomenon, or not.

Horizons, 2010

The paper defends ‘agatheism’, a pluralistic interpretation of religious worldview, which identifies the ultimate reality (theós or to theion in Greek) with the ultimate good (to agathon in Greek), and postulates that a proper alignment with ‘Agatheos’, fostered by religious practice, facilitates actualisation of human potentialities for good, resulting in the sense of human fulfillment understood as the 'rest of the mind in the good' (agatheia). Agatheism can thus be construed as an ‘agathological interpretation of religion’, since it theorizes that (a) the persistence of religion is explained by its agathological function, and (b) diverse religious traditions are ultimately products of human ‘agathological imagination’, i.e., this dimension of practical reason, which - intentionally directed towards the ultimate good - guides our mental activity leading to the choices of worldview by imagining and evaluating various agathological visions of the ultimate end of all human pursuits, thus making sense of the irreducibly teleological good-directedness of human axiological consciousness.

Th e question to what extent the putative mystical experiences reported in the variety of religious traditions contribute to the confl ict of religious truth claims, appears to be one of the hardest problems of the epistemology of religion, identifi ed in the course of the ongoing debate about the philosophical consequences of religious diversity. A number of leading participants in this debate, including the late W.P. Alston, took a strongly exclusivist stance on it, while being aware that in the light of the long coexistence of seemingly irreconcilable great mystical traditions, mystical exclusivism lacks philosophical justifi cation. In this paper I argue that from the point of view of a theist, inclusivism with respect to the issue whether adherents of diff erent religious traditions can have veridical experience of God (or Ultimate Reality) now, is more plausible than the Alstonian exclusivism. I suggest that mystical inclusivism of the kind I imply in this paper may contribute to the development of cross-cultural philosophy of religion, as well as to the theoretical framework for interreligious dialogue, because (1) it allows for the possibility of veridical experience of God in a variety of religious traditions, but (2) it avoids the radical revisionist postulates of Hickian pluralism and it leaves open the question whether the creed of any specifi c tradition is a better approximation to the truth about God than the creeds of other traditions.

Poligrafi, 2017

In this paper I discuss the pluralistic religious science and theology of multiplicity as proposed by Wilfred Cantwell Smith and Lauren Schneider. The article first focuses on the question of monotheism and the ontological as well as historical understanding thereof within religious science as proposed by W.C. Smith. In the second part an idiosyncratic theory of monotheism (Urmonotheismus), proposed by Wilhelm Schmidt, is presented in order to be able to conceive of monotheisms in the way of pluralistic theology. In the third part, based on Smith's methodological credo, I explore the relation between the idea of religious pluralism and the contemporary theology of multiplicity, as proposed by Schneider in her insightful study Beyond Monotheism.