Knowing World Religions

I was listening to an old (oct 11/08) podcast of NPR's To The Best of Our Knowledge last week, mostly because I find the topic very interesting: Finding Religion. You can listen to the whole thing here, but the first interview is probably the best bit.

They begin by talking with Stephen Prothero, chair of the religion dept at Boston University and author of Religious Literacy: What Every American Needs to Know - and Doesn't. It starts off with a quiz. Below are my honest answers in black and the ones I had to look up in red:

1) What are the first five books of the Hebrew bible, or the Christian Old Testament?

• Genesis
• Deuteronomy
• Numbers
• Exodus
• Leviticus
  

OK, one missing, not too bad.

2) Can you name the ten commandments?

I know that the first three relate to God, so:

• Thy shall not take the lords name in vain
• Thy shall not take false gods
• Do not make an image or any likeness of what is in the heaven's above
  

And the other seven have to do relations between people

• Thy shall not covet they neighbour's wife
• Thy shall not steal
• Thy shall not lie
• Honour the Sabbath
• Honour your parents
• Do not murder
• Do not commit adultery
  

oh man, I'm only at 5, but do I get a bonus point for knowing about the 11th:



3) What are the 4 Nobel Truths of Buddhism?

• All life is suffering (or diseased, if you like)
• Desire is the cause of suffering
• Eliminating desire eliminates suffering
• This can be achieved by the eight-fold path:

• Right mindfulness
• Right action
• Right speech
• Right practice (livelihood)
• Right view
• Right intention
• Right effort
• Right concentration

OK, that really is a shame when I can only list four, I have always had a hard time to remember them, there are way too many lists in Buddhism! Better to just have be a good practitioner :) Well at least I did get the four noble truths.

4) You've heard the saying "God helps those that help themselves"? Is this in the Bible? If so, where?

No clue.

5) What are the 7 sacrements of catholism?

• Baptism
• First communion (Eucharist)
• Confirmation
• Marriage
• Reconciliation (Confession)
• Holy Orders (Ordination)
• Anointing of the sick

6) Can you name one of the sacred texts of Hinduism?

• Bhagavad Gita

I also knew about the vedas, but I forgot just how many other texts there are.

7) George W. Bush spoke in his first innaugural address of the Jericho road. What bible story was he referring to?

I'm thinking this is the good Samaritan parable. If it is, that is too much irony, even for Bush.

ok, that was a tougher quiz than I thought, but to be be fair it was very Christian-orientated and I don't think I did half-bad. But what about the five pillars of Islam? The three schools of Buddhism? Taoism vs Confucianism? Jainism? Luther and the 99 theses?

In the interview they talk with Prothero about the importance of being religiously literate in order to understand our own and other cultures. I can't agree more with this point!!! Too often knowing about a tradition (i.e. religious) or philosophy or political/economic perspective is akin to accepting it as your own, and so people tend to shy away from it. In particular with religion because often times the education aspect is coupled with a recruitment drive.

One of my absolute favourite courses as a high school student was grade 11 World Religions, and that was in a Roman Catholic high school where we all wore uniforms. I can still remember the day our religion teacher came to Christianity and point blank asked us to put up our hands if we doubted the existence of God. You wouldn't believe how many hands went up in that oh so quintessentially Catholic school! In the same class we visited a mosque and a synagogue, not to mention having regular (albeit not intensive) meditation sessions and a visit by the Hare Krishna.

Most people are genuinely surprised that such a class is offered in a Catholic school and I have yet to meet a student from the public school board who had a similar class. The point was education about other traditions, because they saw the importance religion plays in many, many people's lives and the importance of understanding what those people believe in. I went on to take world religions in my first year at the University of Toronto and later took a second year Buddhism course, which complimented my learning about the tradition I got in temples, from monks and lay people.

So it's surprising to me that such a conversation as to the importance of religious literacy is even on the table. It is clearly important, the question is what is necessary to know and how is the best way to get that information across. It think it's in a similar problem as science communication. People find both topics intimidating (scary even) and so vast they they are afraid to delve in. The solution for both could lie in the integration of both information into everyday practice, where people are educated without even knowing they're getting a good dose of real information.