Intoxicated On Inspiration

Having experienced both, I have come to believe that some religious experiences are just as intoxicating as alcoholic beverages. Let me explain. As is commonly agreed, drinking a certain amount of alcohol in particular circumstances often results in impaired judgment, reduced inhibitions, and a dulling of the senses alongside the feelings of euphoria. It's not the alcohol itself that creates these effects, but rather the way it is used, or as some might say, abused. Religious experiences affect people in much the same way. Let me just state that by "experience" I am referring to the various areas of religions that adherents encounter. Involvements might be a better word than experiences, such as being involved in the reading of holy books, involved in services and ceremonies, involved in educational meetings, etc. Regardless of the word choice, however, the fact remains that there are a number of similarities between the intoxication of religion and that of alcohol.

What got me started on this vein is a book I picked up earlier this week from an acquaintance of mine in the legal profession. He has a set of six books called Great Religions of Modern Man, and in the volume devoted to Islam (by John Alden Williams) I found a very interesting few lines:

The departure point of the Islamic religion, the central article of faith from which all else flows, may be stated as follows: God (the only God there is: al-Ilah, Allah in Arabic; El, Elohim, Jahweh in Hebrew; Khuda or Yazdan in Persian, Tanri in Turkish...Deus in Latin, God in plain English) has spoken to man in the Qur'an.
This divine communication is seen as the final stage in a long series of divine communications conducted through the prophets. It began with Adam, the first man, who was also the first prophet, because he was the first to whom God revealed Himself.

After Adam, God continued to address men through prophets, to warn them that their happiness lay in worshipping Him and submitting themselves to Him, and to tell them of the terrible consequences of disobedience. In each case, however, the message was changed and deformed by perverse men. Finally, in His mercy, God sent down His final revelation through the seal of His prophets, Muhammad, in a definitive form which would not be lost.

The Qur’an, then, is the Word of God, for Muslims. While controversies have raged among them as to the sense in which this is true—whether it is the created or uncreated Word, whether it is true of every Arabic letter or only of the message as a whole, that it is true has never been questioned by them.

The Qur’an was revealed in Arabic. It is a matter of faith in Islam that since it is of Divine origin it is inimitable, and since to translate is always to betray, Muslims have always deprecated and at times prohibited any attempt to render it in another language. Anyone who has read it in the original is forced to admit that this caution seems justified; no translation, however faithful to the meaning, has ever been fully successful. Arabic, when expertly used is a remarkably terse, rich and forceful language, and the Arabic of the Qur’an is by turns striking, soaring, vivid, terrible, tender and breathtaking. As Professor Gibb has put it, “No man in fifteen hundred years has ever played on that deeptoned instrument with such power, such boldness, and such range of emotional effect.” It is meaningless to apply adjectives such as “beautiful” or “persuasive” to the Qur’an; its flashing images and inexorable measures go directly to the brain and intoxicate it.

It is not surprising, then, that a skilled reciter of the Qur’an can reduce an Arabic-speaking audience to helpless tears, that for thirteen centuries it has been ceaselessly meditated upon, or that for great portions of the human race, the “High-speech” of seventh-century Arabia has become the true accents of the Eternal.”

In my opinion, this is a well-written introduction in the study of Islam, and especially telling is the recognition that the Qur’an plays such a pivotal role in Arabic society. I suppose each of the other six volumes in the set depict their various religious case-studies with much the same regard and fascination. To point it out again, religion is intoxicating.

So, in light of my previous studies, most notably of Dawkins’ book The God Delusion, and my conversations with the authors at Just Wondering and The Chimerical Mind, I’m inclined to welcome the thought that although religion has the potential to be just as destructive as the abuse of alcohol, prohibition is not the best way to prevent the damage. Instead, the decision for me at this point in my life is that religion needs to be taken with moderation and respect, much like alcohol. I’m motivated to look a little further into the Unitarian Universalist ideas of my friend Andy, for the thing I see most attractive in his embracing of that society is, in a word, tolerance.