The Religious Questions I Care About

Clearly, my interest in and concern with religion is not limited to Christianity; it also includes other religions, and even the concept of religion itself.

Tracing it back to its source, I first began to care about religious questions in high school. Back then I had already been thinking about the “crisis of faith” in contemporary society. At the time, I lamented the absence of faith in contemporary China—Confucian culture had been destroyed, and Marxism was also being neglected. Then I still styled myself a Marxist (strangely enough, to this day I still style myself a believer in Marxism; in a few days, if I get the chance, I’ll come back to fully restate and reinterpret how I understand myself as a believer in Marxism~). But from the very beginning, I tried to interpret Marxism as a religion as well. I realized that if Marxism was to survive healthily, it would have to retreat into something purely academic, existing as a philosophical school or position—but that would not be enough to satisfy Marx’s demand to transform the world; originally, it ought above all to have existed as a critical force, questioning what already exists and driving revolution. Yet once Marxism moved from the margins to the mainstream, it also had to play, at certain times, some sort of stabilizing and conservative role. Although what present-day China lacks most is precisely the critical dimension of Marxism, that still cannot be the whole story. In the end, the only possible path I could think of for Marxism to endure forever was this: treat it as a “religion” and shape it accordingly.

In fact, Chinese Marxism had long since been shaped into a “religion,” but that shaping has been extremely clumsy; all I can see in it is the superstitious and crazed side of religion. The real reason is that any human civilization needs “religion,” and there must inevitably exist some meaning of “religion”—either in tangible form or as an “invisible religion” (Luckmann), because religion is an indispensable dimension of human civilization, just as any civilization must have “art” as well. Once Confucianism was overthrown, the gap left in the religious dimension was bound to be filled by someone: either Marxism, or scientism, or money worship… (Note: I am not saying that any “-ism” is religion. For a doctrine to be called religion in the broad sense, certain conditions have to be met; for example, it needs to become a core value, enter people’s patterns of thought, and also become some sort of ritualized practice of worship, thereby entering people’s way of life, and so on.) The question now is not whether Marxism should be shaped into a religion, but that it has already become a certain kind of religion. The fatal problem is that it has not become conscious of itself as religion; instead, it styles itself as “science,” and this makes it, like all those religions in history that styled themselves as science, something rigid, overbearing, self-contradictory, and in bad taste. In particular, any religion that styles itself as science will find that it can never keep up with science’s ever-changing development; so in the end, the doctrines constructed to suit outmoded science become empty slogans and colorless claims that nobody believes, yet everyone must keep repeating aloud—this is exactly the predicament facing Marxism in China today.

Of course, my wish that Marxism become consciously religious is after all just fantasy, so I’ll stop here. In any case, the first reason I care about religious questions is: “How should one respond to the crisis of faith?”

The greatest difficulty within this perspective is that, for contemporary China, we lack faith; Chinese culture has historically lacked religious spirit even more. In short, we need religion. But which religion? Confucianism? Buddhism? Christianity? Marxism?… It seems that none of them can really play the leading role. Perhaps we should return to the tradition of ancient China—embracing all rivers, coexisting in diversity?

Speaking of which, this brings up my second concern regarding religion—“How is religious pluralism possible?” This concern arises partly from my interest in religion itself, and partly from my concern with issues such as globalization and cultural conflict. I am a self-styled pluralist (so far, the only “-isms” I can clearly “style myself” as are just these two), and I already have some preliminary positions regarding pluralism in science and pluralism in culture. But when it comes to religious pluralism, I have always been uncertain—religion seems inherently contradictory to pluralism.

Compared with the Confucian-Buddhist-Daoist traditions of the East, the religions of the Judaic line are obviously much more troublesome. For Eastern religions are mostly mild, whereas Western monotheistic religions are especially intolerant of heresy; even whether to use wine or grape juice in ritual can become an irreconcilable conflict, and between two sects of the same religion there is always a fight to the death, let alone tolerance toward other religions.

But from a theological standpoint, whether in Christianity or in Confucianism, Buddhism, and Daoism, the obstacles to pluralism are equally enormous. For even if a certain religion can “tolerate” the existence of other religions, that does not mean pluralism; such “tolerance” at most is merely “forbearance.” Certain strands of modern Christian theology can also accept other religions, but only by claiming that Christ is hidden within those religions, and that the philosophers and saints of other civilizations were also inspired by the light of revelation—anonymous Christians. Because Christ’s redemption occurs only in one specific time and one specific place, the other religions are merely temporary expedients from before the Gospel had reached them; in the end, all religions are still supposed to merge into Christianity.

However, this is not pluralism. The pluralism I insist on is not pluralism by “toleration,” but pluralism as praise of diversity (see the article “Preserve the Same, Seek the Different”), and such pluralism is difficult to reconcile with religion. I have not yet thought of a strategy for properly coordinating the two.

I personally have a very strong fondness for Kant’s philosophy, and what I admire most is not transcendental philosophy, but Kant’s moral philosophy and philosophy of religion. (See the paper “The Same Starry Sky”) Yet this raises another difficulty—“How can Kant’s religious ideal be connected with reality?” Kant’s religion can be accepted neither by Catholicism nor by Protestantism (despite its enormous influence), and the key point is that it is difficult for ordinary people to accept. Although Kant did not reduce Jesus to a moral teacher, he certainly purified religion while also making it too abstract and too simple. Thus, Kant’s religion may only be suitable for philosophers, a bit like early Buddhism, or elite Buddhism within Buddhism, which is actually a kind of atheistic religion. But such a highly purified so-called religion then becomes part of philosophy, while the social dimension of religion is weakened, to the point that elite Buddhism and the popular folk practice of worshipping bodhisattvas for blessings become almost two entirely different religions. There is also this problem with Christianity—not only Kant’s theology, but nearly all the religions discussed by those deeply thoughtful philosophers, seem to be a different thing from the acts of faith and worship found among the common people in real life. The tension between the religion of philosophers and the religion of the masses has existed from the very beginning. But before modern times, before the rise of mass media, human culture was always dominated by the “elite”; and with the so-called “mass culture” that emerged in modern times, the dominant right to discourse no longer belonged to the so-called intellectual elite, but rather the masses came to control discourse. This in turn marginalized the theological discussions of philosophers, making the problem of the disjunction between elite religion and folk religion even more acute.

My field is philosophy of science, and in college it was precisely reflection on science that led me to turn my attention toward religion. What, after all, is science? — In pursuing this question, I discovered that science, as a shared human enterprise or cultural dimension, is extremely complex; it cannot be separated from the elements of culture and religion. At the same time, I even discovered that science itself bears certain similarities to religion (see the article “Science—Seen from the Perspective of Religion”). What is the relationship between science and religion? What should it be? What could it be? — This is one of the most important concerns in my academic work. I feel that science and religion are, first of all, opposed to each other in essence, but this “opposition” is not an all-or-nothing, life-or-death relation, just as science and art, reason and nonreason, intellect and emotion, and so on, are all mutually opposed categories. A difference in starting point does not mean they cannot mutually promote one another, much less that they cannot coexist. My basic position is: science and religion can and should coexist. Then I need to argue how and why science and religion coexist. On this issue, I of course already have many preliminary ideas, but none are mature enough yet. I have found that in order to expand the discussion of science and religion, I need to accumulate more in philosophy, philosophy of science, philosophy of religion, history of science, and history of religion.

January 1, 2007, 21:15

Yangroupaoju

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Translated from the Chinese original with AI assistance. The original text is authoritative.