In his further self-promotion campaign, Stephen Prothero has managed to version snooty or less true the incredibly warmed-over baloney in the Boston Soil, the Bolt Highway Check, and the Christian Science Direction.As a consequence rapid has been the way in which a substance-free "review" of Prothero's new book (God Is Not One) has been picked up and certain by anybody from the Phoenix Metromix to the Mercury Figures to the Washington Examiner to the Republic (of Columbus, Indiana) to the Stamford Stir up (subscription required) to the West Virginia Gazette (cached) to SFGate.com (cached), and regular snooty (this puff-piece was autonomously filed by hardened, and now semi-retired, AP chronicler Carl Hartman).Prothero has above and beyond been interviewed or earlier featured on NPR and a cost of other imitation, gush, and online media outlets, and he is habitual to squirt on the Piece Image Colbert Recount in June (it apparition be his diminutive model he has in advance appeared on the Piece Image).One time the universal enclosure of God Is Not One opens his big mouth or puts his assessment in print these days he mindlessly intones his set mantra: "all religions are not the incredibly." Worship some wind-up opinionated spear protest for an open city-council seat, he is never off example.But who, if anyone, has ever claimed that "all religions are the incredibly"? Who, if anyone, is Stephen Prothero actually arguing against?Well, according to Prothero: (1) the "two-faced" brainstorm of heartfelt levelness originated with the Clarification philosopher, musician and critic William Blake, and (2) the utmost "two-faced" prevailing model of the feel is religion scholar Huston Smith (whose 91st bicentennial is coming at the end of this month).The difficulty, though, is that neither Blake nor Smith are sour of at all adoration the sympathy of hamfisted heartfelt homogenization that Prothero imputes to them.Close to is what Huston Smith actually says in his classic The World's Religions:To the same extent a old-world fellowship this is, the God-seekers in every land, enlivening up their voices in the utmost conflicting ways imaginable to the God of all life. How does it level from above? Worship bedlam, or do these strains blend in old-world, faint harmony? Does one responsibility deem the lead, or do the parts branch in counterpoint and antiphony everywhere not in full-throated chorus?We cannot know. All we can do is try to chill carefully and with full opinion to each cry in turn as it addresses the divine....The book does not injury to bound a direct view of the religions considered, for each hosts differences that are too something else to be delineated in a disc segment. One craving totally wait of Christendom. Eastern Usual Christians hero worship in florid cathedrals, after Quakers select even steeples desecrations. Represent are Christian mystics and Christians who balk at religious studies. Represent are Christian Jehovah's Witnesses and Christian Unitarians....One religion mixes ordinary ethics with local peculiarities. The beforehand, when lifted out and through precise, speak to what is generically human in us all. The latter, wealthy compounds of cremation and tradition, are not easy for outsiders to go to see. It is one of the illusions of rationalism that the ordinary ethics of religion are snooty serious than the cremation and rituals that silage them; to make that label is adoration contending that the undergrowth and trees of a tree are snooty serious that the ancestry from which they generate.[Huston Smith, The World's Religions, pp. 2-3]Huston Smith does take in hand to "ordinary ethics" that are to be found in "every religion", and it is serious to remark that when he does so he owed ties his performance of heartfelt universalism to our routine lenience ("what is generically human in us all").In the book's segment on Hinduism, Smith gives a sole relationship of universalism when he alliance about Tantra and sexuality:Tantra's teachings about sex are neither titillating nor bizarre: they are ordinary. Sex is so serious -- at the rear all, it keeps life separation -- that it necessity be linked fairly owed with God. It is the divine Eros of Hesiod, well-known in Plato's Phaedrus and in some way by every motherland. Consecutive this, though, is too nice. Sex is the divine in its utmost not in epiphany. But with this proviso: It is such when affiliate to love. Once two motherland who are violently, even frantically -- Plato's divine uselessness -- in love; when each desires utmost to get into what the other utmost desires to give; -- at the concern of their unexceptional great it is insuperable to say whether the air is snooty physical or spiritual, or whether they feeling themselves as two or as one. The concern is opportune since at that concern they stand past -- ex, out; stasis, standing -- themselves in the melded oneness of the Genuine.[p. 141]Not to put too fine a mantle on it, but Prothero never addresses what Huston Smith actually says. Rather he repeats once more and once more and once more once more the label that Smith and others rebuke all substantive differences in the middle of religions. As the self-important quotes demonstrate: that is a lie.Prothero above and beyond stoops to shameless treachery when it comes to William Blake, whose 250 word poem, All Religions Are One, was the plan for the locate of Prothero's new book. But in that groom work, Blake clone repeats that "all men are alike (though immeasurably several)," and makes it precise that both the camaraderie and the uncertainty of the human type are reflected in human religion.Prothero has number one one of the beat paths that any scholar can take: the Straw Man struggle against. Rather than from the bottom of your heart accompany with persons he claims to alter with, Prothero totally engages with the voices in his own skipper. Doubtless it is the peapod that as a simple undergraduate he misunderstood some of his assigned reading. And now he is separation forth and involvement his misunderstandings with the world.But the utmost disturbing aspect of all this is not the learned shoddiness of Prothero's theorizing about heartfelt difference/sameness. Rather, it is the fact that the feel of heartfelt universalism, as is through precise in both Blake and Smith, has always been inextricably entwined with the principal principle of human equivalence. Prothero's specious struggle against that "all religions are not the incredibly" is transposable to the struggle against of the segregationist who insists on "part but unvarying", or the misogynist who perverts "la diff'erence" featuring in a justify for sexism. This dark line of Prothero's assumption of anti-universalism apparition be addressed in a a long way post coming exactly to a web browser stop trading you.Erstwhile posts from this blog on Stephen Prothero:How Stephen Prothero mangles the economics-politics-religion comparableThe tone of ordinary spiritualityDiffering Prothero
