Editor's Note:  We often introduce Citric Acid as "Orange County's unlikeliest literary arts journal." In an embrace of unlikelihood, we're pleased to surprise and delight even ourselves (!) by sharing three entries from UCI Religious Studies Lecturer Dr. Joseph McKenna's unpublished lexicon, An Opinionated Dictionary of Religion. Look for more entries in future issues. 

Afterlife

"Our earthly prisons do not overtly esteem torture. Why should the next world's?"

Virtually all religions and all people have afterlife beliefs, but some do not, and that's noteworthy because, as with non-belief in God, the fact that some beliefs are not ubiquitous proves that those beliefs are not innate to our species as a whole. Some people do not hold certain beliefs and never did, and therefore no one can claim that all humans are born with those beliefs.

We can say only that afterlife beliefs are nearly ubiquitous in the world's religions and that our post-mortem careers are nonetheless very different in varied eschatologies.

Since every sentient creature in good health craves living and detests the cessation of life, it is plain that mortality impressed itself on stout imaginations of ancient religious theorists who first proffered afterlife beliefs.

Immortality has its allure, but afterlife beliefs are not principally about a desire for immortality. Afterlife beliefs are about the desire for justice. Descriptions of afterlife destinations differ in the religions, but there is general agreement about dichotomous ends, one good, one bad. Apparently not enough people were getting their just deserts in their mortal, earthly lives, and the reckoning was to be set straight after death: some to happiness, some to sorrow. These two destinies apply both to the life of a reincarnated person returning to the world stage in yet another body, and to a person arriving after death in heaven or hell.

Anyone may sympathize with descriptions of post-mortem bliss. But how can we justify someone’s hope and expectation of post-mortem torment? Yes, yes, we all hate the idea that some felon, under the cloak of night, has gotten away with murder. But why do we devise post-mortem agonies the likes of which no one should really wish upon the vilest psychopathic killer?

There are many bilious and grotesque descriptions of hell’s torments in all hell-believing religions (East and West): the damned are burned in fires that will never be extinguished, boiled in oil, mauled by animals, flayed by demons, pierced by red-hot pokers, blinded and choked and tormented in every conceivable and inconceivable way, with body parts enlarged so as to feel pain more acutely, with endless scatological references and continuous and creatively perverse tortures administered to male and female genitals for sexual sins (scholars call this last bit ‘pious pornography’).

Are hell’s described torments merely sadomasochistic revenge fantasies and the product of sick men’s dreams?  Our earthly prisons do not overtly esteem torture. Why should the next world's? And why go even further and add infinity to the dreary mix? Everlasting torture? Torture of an endless duration?

The entire company of humanity is damned to eternal torment in one religious afterlife scenario or another. This squad thinks that squad is doomed, and vice versa.

Nota bene: The belief that post-mortem torture exists for the deserving Other (and not for me and mine) is intensely self-revealing and worthy of inspection.

Bittul ha-tamid

"Where lies the origin of a social conscience?"

There has always been an element of protest in Hebrew religiosity. We can picture ancient biblical prophets like Nathan or Amos or Jeremiah ranting at someone or no one or everyone about even small injustices to seemingly unimportant people. We can imagine their grim visage on such occasions, illuminated paths of sweat scoring their dusty faces, hair held akimbo over penetrating eyes.

How did they cultivate such moral acuity?  Where lies the origin of a social conscience?

Wasn't it Amos who said that one slight act of justice for the weak, one reckoning in their favor perhaps performed in a half-morning's time, was better religion than a half year of pious temple-going psalmody? Better to right a wrong than sway in the holy of holies.

Bittul ha-tamid is the Jewish practice of ceasing liturgical worship in order to emphasize and publicize a wrong.

This is an idea and practice that could be exported to all religions and to the secular world too.

We are not holding services (or office hours) today. "Why?" asks the jangled assembly?  The reply could describe any one of a thousand committed wrongs, and some of these wrongs could have been performed by the very religious (or secular) institutions that temporarily shut their doors.

Could a religious body carry out bittul ha-tamid for long-ago injustices performed by that religious body?  If so, what would be a suitable length of time to discontinue services to call attention to those wrongs? Is there some calculus to gage the degree and duration of harm caused and then recommend a length of time for bittul ha-tamid? Are any wrongs so egregiously offensive that a religion (or a stock exchange) might shut its doors for an entire lifetime in order to advertise and atone for that wrong?

Cult

"Hold your ponies! Some new religions have been harmful, hateful, distasteful, and downright wacky."

The word cult is never benign in religious terminology as it is in the world of art, where Johnny Stonenoggin Filmster extraordinaire may cult-ivate a cult following for his eccentricity in artistry.

Eccentricity in religion, if recent enough, is rarely welcomed with approving nods.

Eccentricity in an old or ancient religion is no longer perceived as eccentric, proving that, no matter how implausible and bizarre a religious idea might be, if people are raised (indoctrinated?) with that idea from youth, that idea will become as believable, as commonplace, as immune to critical thought, and as obvious as a simple statement of fact about the color of summer grass.

When eccentricity is welcomed by followers of a novel religion, those followers never designate the new religion as a cult. Such is the denigrating power of the word cult.

In the late twentieth century some scholars of religion offered the phrase new religion as a benign substitute for the word cult.

These scholars had grown weary of encountering a bias that is found in every stratum of society from nickel-plated broom pushers to nickel-plated Ivy League scholars. It is a bias that may be put into bumper-sticker brevity: Old Good, New Bad; Familiarity Good, Strangeness Bad; Old-Time Religion Good, New-Fangled Religion Bad.

Or, as old-moneyed religionists say, "I have a religion, she has a sect, and you have a cult."

Prejudice against idea innovation should not be found in the higher arts of intellection, said the scholars extending the new unharmful term new religion.

After some decades, new religions caught on in higher education, doctorates were granted in the study of such things, and academic journals were established and entitled with that name. As the new term gained acceptance, there was an attending decrease in bias against novel religions.

However, the term cult got mislaid in the shakeup since almost all new religions were deemed as worthy as any other religion.

Hold your ponies! Some new religions have been harmful, hateful, distasteful, and downright wacky.

Cult is a needful term still.

There are cults out there, and they do not deserve benign inclusion in the new religions taxonomy.

If a new religion resorts to coercion, to adoration of human personalities, to sexual favors for its leaders, to isolation from family and friends, to money-making schemes—then call a pickaxe a pickaxe: the new religion is a cult.

Trouble is, a few of the older religions have at certain moments in their histories met the cult criteria, and no one ever called these pickaxes pickaxes.

Dr. Joseph McKenna has been teaching religious studies at UC Irvine since 1999.