How Many Klingons Can Pray Toward Mecca?

Sometimes, a story becomes so useful to people with a philosophical or ideological axe to grind that it manages to continue in circulation no matter how unbelievable it may seem and no matter how thoroughly and repeatedly it has been disproven.  The best case in point is the much-repeated rumor that the phrase "rule of thumb" derives from an archaic English law allowed a man to beat his wife as long as he used a stick no thicker than her thumb, an idea first bandied about by feminists in the 1970s.  In the sphere of religion, the best example of this phenomenon is the widespread but misinformed belief that Scholastic theologians used to sit around debating how many angels can dance on the head of a pin (Thomas Aquinas did in fact discuss whether several angels can occupy the same space in his Summa Theologica, but this was in the context of a discussion of what it meant for angels to be incorporeal).  This particular belief about the Scholastics circulates, I believe, because it serves the ends of people who need to stereotype religious leaders as hairsplitting harebrains out of touch with the real world.  So it does not surprise me that in recent years, people intent on arguing that religious people are out of their minds have started hypothesizing about what would happen if people concerned with otherworldly matters had to face the existence of other kinds of creatures who are from beyond our world in a more concrete way.

This week, theweek.com published an opinion piece by David A. Weintraub speculating on what will happen to our religious beliefs when human beings make contact with sentient life forms on other planets.  Setting aside Weintraub's misuse of the word "sentient" (cats and dogs are sentient beings as much as humans are--though I suspect Weintraub is not terribly concerned about our contacting a cosmological canine), Weintraub's assessment of what will happen when humans encounter intelligent extraterrestrial life is shot through with absurdities that ignore the past and present realities of the traditions he examines. To whit:

Weintraub asserts that Christians will have to deal with the question of whether there can be intelligent life that is not susceptible to original sin and thus of whether Jesus is the savior only of humankind.  While noting that there is no answer this question that currently satisfies all Christians (not surprising, since even belief in the Trinity is not held by all self-defined Christians), Weintraub ignores that Christianity has dealt with this question before, when Christianity had to face the question of whether Native Americans were fully human.  There is no reason to suppose that the Church would reach a different conclusion about intelligent extraterrestrials--though as with the Native Americans, it might take a lot of time, a lot of sorting out of conflicting reports about these extraterrestrials, and a lot of contact before the question became settled.

As humorous as this question is, Weintraub is at his most hilarious when he speculates about how Muslims on another planet will manage to pray five times a day in the direction of Mecca on a planet light years from earth, where determining the direction of prayer would be difficult.  In fact, rabbis have had to deal with similar questions.  Traditional Judaism requires the faithful to pray three times a day--at sunrise, in the afternoon, and at sunset--in the direction of Jerusalem.  Rabbis have fielded questions from Jewish astronauts about how they should handle their prayers in St. Petersburg, Russia, where the sun does not set for part of the year, and in outer space, where the sun neither rises nor sets.  Muslims have also long dealt with the question of what to do when the direction of prayer cannot be determined--not surprisingly for a religion born in the Arabian desert, where traveling Muslims could easily find themselves lost.  In fact, the astrolabe, one of the Islamic world's great contributions to the Age of Exploration, was developed not to help sailors lost at sea, but to help the Muslim faithful figure out how to pray toward Mecca when they were in the middle of nowhere.

Weintraub is on firmer ground when he posits that, after the discovery of extraterrestrial life, adherents of many faiths will have to ponder whether their God is the God only of earth or of the entire universe, but this is also a question religious traditions have had to ask before; indeed, the question has been asked every time one faith has come into contact with another.  If history is any guide, Weintraub is right that the experience will be discomfiting at first, but not that it will be disruptive.  Judaism, Christianity, and Islam have all survived the shock of having to determine whether they were particularistic faiths meant for particular groups of people, or messages meant for all of humanity.  If the accepted definition of "humanity" comes to include intelligent life forms from other planets, there is no reason to suppose the myriad faith of mankind will not survive.

And they will do so with a clear answer as to how Muslims on Klingon can pray toward Mecca.

One Denomination or One Direction?

Sometimes, writing on religion gets basic facts--not just what is written in creeds, catechisms, or codes of religious law, but facts of what actually happened when a religious figure spoke or acted--so horribly wrong that it can only properly be considered entertainment, not news.  A good example of this is this piece on Inquistr.com about Pope Francis's most recent message for World Day of Peace (known to non-Catholics as New Year's Day).

Inquisitr begins innocuously enough by noting, accurately, that Pope Francis chose to focus his speech this year on the continued existence of slavery in the world, despite its having been outlawed by the laws of nearly every country as well as by the United Nations' Universal Declaration on Human Rights, and by noting, equally accurately, that the Pope urged the leaders and laity of other world religions to work together with Catholics to bring an end to enslavement and human trafficking.  Later, however, Inquisitr veers off into the deep end by suggesting that the Pope urged the formation of one world denomination--a suggestion that was not made in the Huffington Post piece Inquisitr directly quotes and that is equally absent from the Vatican's webpage publication of the Pope's speech.  Inquisitr even quotes--but does not name--"responses" (presumably readers of the Huffington Post) as asking "how [members of other faiths[ would...feel if someone suggested that al [sic] people become a different religion…like say Buddhism" and stating that "Muslims in general will never agree to anti-slavery, at least not in practice, else they’d have to edit their [holy] book[, the Qur'an]."

Quoting this reader, without raising any questions about his or her comments, is doubly troubling because it implies that Inquisitr accepts at face value the idea the Qur'an unambiguously endorses slavery, or at least that all Muslim clerics accept interpretations that validate slavery.  In fact, the issue of slavery has had as long and complicated a history within Islam as it has had within Christianity.  While the Qur'an does contain passages that can be read as supporting slavery, this is within the context of the enslavement of prisoners of war, and in fact all Islamic countries have abolished slavery--the most recent being Mauritania, in 1981. Clearly, no alteration of the Qur'an, which traditional Muslims regard as a God-given and thus unalterable miracle--was necessary to make this happen.

Thus, the Pope was not suggesting that the world ought to become one denomination--only that it ought to continue moving in the one direction of ending, in fact as well as in law, the enslavement and trafficking of human beings.