CoursesCourse 24
The religious gaze: how religious thinking works
Why do human beings turn toward something beyond the world they can touch? This course looks at religion as a way of seeing: what makes thought religious, what faith is, how religions look at the whole and think in pairs, why wisdom is the road to salvation in the Christian and Buddhist traditions, and what the religious gaze adds and what it can hide.
Start lesson 1Lessons
- 1 Why religious thinking beganStone pillars raised before there were farms, a working definition of religion, and the main theories of why people turn to it: need, the group, and the mind.
- 2 Faith, the whole, and the pairA scroll that says “thus have I heard,” a fruit and a mirror, a photograph of the Earth taken from the Moon, and the habit of thinking in pairs.
- 3 Wisdom as the roadA book named for a verse nobody explained, a house with seven pillars, and what the Christian tradition has said wisdom is, from Proverbs to Augustine and Calvin.
- 4 Beyond the pairThe Heart Sutra’s 260 characters, the Buddha as a physician, emptiness as interdependence, and what the religious gaze adds to ordinary looking.
You’ll be able to
- Explain this course’s working definition of religious thought (a transcendent and a remedy), name the main scholarly definitions and theories of why religion arose, and say why a theory of origin does not settle whether a belief is true.
- Describe faith as “believing in,” compare how traditions describe their sacred words, and read the story of the fruit in Genesis 3 and the Buddhist mirror and dust poem as two pictures of how far the transcendent is.
- Describe the holistic view and the habit of thinking in pairs, and tell duality from dualism.
- Say what the “seven pillars of wisdom” of Proverbs 9:1 have meant to different readers, and explain emptiness as dependent arising in the Heart Sutra’s “form is emptiness.”
About this course
This course covers 宗教的凝视 (The Religious Gaze). It is the second course of Dao Academy’s humanities strand. It treats religion as a way of thinking, not as a creed to be defended or attacked: it asks what makes thought religious, why human beings turn to it, and how two of the great traditions, Christianity and Buddhism, understand wisdom, salvation, and the way beyond opposites.
The argument is an essayist’s, and it is bold: it says that religions share a structure, a transcendent, a remedy, a view of the whole, and a way to wisdom, expressed in pairs. We keep that argument and mark it as an argument (“in this reading”), separate from what we have checked against sources: history, scripture, and doctrine, which we describe as believers hold them (“Christians hold,” “Buddhists teach”), and the scholarly theories of religion’s origin, which are given as theories with authors and dates. We neither endorse nor mock any faith. Where scholars disagree, each lesson has an “Another view.” Two earlier courses prepare some of the ground: Course 2 follows how learning moved into the medieval university, and Course 10 studies the quick, automatic thinking that some accounts of religion rest on.