Using God As A Weapon?
Gandhi once wrote that “the Satyagrahi’s only weapon is God.” (A Satyagrahi is one who practices Satyagraha, Gandhi’s peaceful and powerful version of civil disobedience.)
Some of religion’s most vocal (I do not say best) contemporary critics argue that religion is either irrelevant or dangerous. It’s irrelevant, they say, because it is just an evolutionary holdover that we no longer need. It’s dangerous, they say, because it allows people to use God as a weapon.
Gandhi and many others remind us that there are two ways of using God as a weapon. If we use God to justify using other weapons to kill or oppress people, we turn God into a tool or an idol. At that point, religious people would do well to ask just what it is they’re fighting for, since it can no longer be piety.
Gandhi illustrates the other way, in which God is that which can never be taken away from us, and that which is ultimately worth living and dying for. In this way, God is not a “weapon” we wield to harm people, but one that serves to fight against injustice.
Tyrants set themselves up as gods on earth; belief in a God above the tyrant can deflate the tyrant’s power and give the Satyagrahi the necessary soul-force to “do justice, love mercy, and walk humbly with her God.” Against such things, it seems to me, only would-be tyrants and their servants will argue.
Russell Frank and the 4/40 Program
Frank wrote a weekly column for the Centre Daily Times. At the time, he was an untenured professor in the Department of Communications at Penn State. Even though he did not know me, and surely had many demands on his time, Frank offered to meet me for coffee.
We met for three hours that day, during which I took pages of notes and basically wrote my syllabus for the course. He also gave me a stack of textbooks from his office, offered to guest-lecture in my class (which he later did, several times) and then, to top it all off, he paid for the coffee.
I protested that I was getting all the benefit from this and that I should pay. He replied, "My rule is this: the student never pays." Instead of paying him back, he said, I could "pay it forward" to some of my students.
So I began what I now call The 4/40 program. Whenever I meet students for a meal or coffee, I explain this to them: during their four years of undergraduate study with me (and if they visit me while they're in grad school) I pay. If they want, then they can visit me sometime in the next forty years and take me out for a meal or, better yet, they can use the next forty years to take someone else out for a meal.
I find these meals are always worthwhile. Much of the best learning in college happens outside the classroom, in informal conversations, often while breaking bread together. I teach because I love teaching, and these meals or coffees have provided me with some of my favorite classrooms: coffee shops, restaurants, the dining room table or kitchen in our home.
So to any of my students who may be reading this: don't thank me, thank Russell Frank (you can find his email at the link above or right here if you want). And if you benefited from the coffee, or the meal, pay it forward to someone else.
And come back and visit sometime.
Philosophy and Empty Deceit
From today’s Lectionary, a reading from Colossians 2:
“See to it that no one takes you captive through philosophy and empty deceit, according to human tradition, according to the elemental spirits of the universe, and not according to Christ."
Good advice and sound. Of course, one of the best ways to make sure no one takes you captive through philosophy and empty deceit is to study philosophy yourself so you can learn to distinguish bad thinking from good. At any rate, I am not aware of anyone ever successfully and consistently avoiding bad thinking by avoiding thinking altogether.
Latin American Philosophy Online
Soon I hope to be able to point you to the online presence of the Inter-American Philosophic Review, edited by Gregorio Pappas at Texas A&M. For now, I’ll begin with two other sites of interest: La red filosófica de Costa Rica, edited by Jethro Masís, and Cognitio Estudos, published at the Pontifical University of São Paulo.
Pappas has been instrumental in putting together an upcoming conference in February of 2010, the First International Conference on Pragmatism and the Hispanic/Latino World. It looks like it will be especially good.
Here’s a link to the Centro de estudios de filosofía analítica.
And while this doesn’t count as Latin American, the Grupo de Estudios Peirceanos at the Universidad de Navarra, in Pamplona, Spain, does a nice job of linking together other Spanish-speaking philosophers, especially those interested in Pragmatism.
I welcome comments making additions to this list.