15:35-17:15 | Room 708 Saturday Onsite Presentation Session 4

Interdisciplinary Religion

Session Chair: Dmitry Usenco

15:35-16:00

66886 | Sin Before the Fall: Understanding the Doctrine of Original Sin in the Light of Laudato Si

Revenendo Vargas, University of Santo Tomas, Philippines

The ‘sin’ and the ‘fall’ in this paper illustrate two conditions, which according to tradition, have been inherited by the human race. The former is the sinful condition human beings are born into, and the latter is the biblical account in Genesis 3 which recounts the story of the fall of Adam and Eve through their disobedience. From the Christian standpoint, both narratives essentially establish the foundation of the doctrine of Original Sin. All men are implicated in Adam’s sin (CCC, 402). “By one man’s disobedience many (that is, all men) were made sinners” (Rom 5:12). But history reveals that humanity existed before the story of the fall, and prior to the prohibition from eating the tree of knowledge of good and evil (Gen 2:17), is the positive command to care for creation, our common home. Man’s freedom is put to the test, not alone by prohibition, but primarily by friendship and free submission to God (CCC, 396). This essay, “Sin before the Fall” appropriately exudes an understanding of the doctrine of Original Sin in the light of Laudato Si. While it contextually implicates the human race to the sinful structure, it significantly reminds God’s original justice and man’s responsibility toward the harmony of creation.

16:00-16:25

67683 | Identity Exploration Processes in Intergroup Dialogue for Jewish Students in Israel

Lipaz Shamoa-Nir, Zefat Academic College, Israel

Intergroup dialogues can create a safe environment that encourages individuals to engage in self reflection. This article has examined identity exploration processes among undergraduate students (N=99) who have participated in a dialogue course. A content analysis was undertaken on final papers submitted by students at the end of the course. The summary papers, written as part of their obligations for academic credit, included a description of student experiences during the course. Findings have pointed out several factors that have enabled self-exploration in the group and the dialogue course was fulfilling for most students. The participants felt that the dialogue had helped them form a greater understanding of their identities through two levels of discourse: with the 'self' and with 'the other'- however, findings also indicated a process that appears to disrupt a 'deep' and authentic discourse and can be considered as a contestation of identity. The contribution of this research lies in investigating how identities are shaped within a context of intergroup dialogues and in proposing several hypotheses and questions to advance the research in this field.

16:25-16:50

68800

| Western Diplomacy’s Ineffective Iconoclasm: Conflict Resolution with China and the West’s Forgotten Rhetorical Tools Iain Cowie, Thammasat University, Thailand

The Alaskan talks of China and America point to the need for a new style of Western diplomacy. The limitations of a bland diplomacy, without pomp and spectacle, become apparent when faced with a party unwilling to display fealty to the current World Order. The renunciation of pageantry points towards a deeper issue of the disavowing of old cultural beliefs. The wager here is that conflicts can only be resolved in these seemingly outdated rituals of excess dependent on cultural symbolic relics. Despite Western diplomats’ beliefs, they like others around the World, must rely on symbolic relics (fetish-idols) in patching together peace in times of intractable conflict. The failure of many programmes of peace (e.g. TRANSCEND, ARIA) can be partly blamed on a dismissal of the value of beliefs in idols, and the inherent value of idols to expose and work with antagonisms to enact positive change. This article relies on homologous theories in Burkean rhetoric, Durkheimian anthropology, Hegelian metaphysics, Ramsbotham’s conflict resolution ideas and Lacanian psychoanalysis, to pave the way for an acceptance of the derided tools of the old for a fresh perspective on finding peace. Broadly, this is a rejection of a popular but vulgar postmodernism warned about by Kenneth Burke in 1945, with a more nuanced post-foundationalism of the transhistorical, transsubjective and the transsubstantive.

16:50-17:15

66926 | Polytheism and Monotheism: Mutually Exclusive or Interdependent?

Dmitry Usenco, Independent Researcher, United Kingdom

Although it is common to assume that monotheism is a natural and logical outcome of polytheism’s intrinsic development (praeparatio evangelica), the author of this paper believes that they constitute two distinct and sustainable branches of spiritual evolution. The watershed between them seems to be impenetrable: while polytheism (=traditional / primal / tribal religion) proceeds mostly on collective / inductive experience of the numinous, monotheism relies chiefly on a priori intuition / philosophical abstraction / deduction / moral imperative. Yet, because it is impossible to substantiate that abstraction (=prove the existence of God) from experience, as Kant has convincingly shown, monotheism has to turn to polytheism for substratum, trying to reconcile the inevitably partial / finite nature of the available experience with a claim to universality, infinity, and all-inclusivity. This results in a compromise where polytheism’s finite but experience-based spiritual entities and their attributes are recycled into symbols of the infinite / perfect but ultimately ungraspable Supreme Being. The above relation bears a striking resemblance to that between the two major kingdoms of living organisms of Earth – plants and animals. Like animals, who are unable to assimilate inorganic matter and have to consume plants for subsistence, monotheism, unable to experience the infinity of its postulated deity, has to ‘consume’ the abundant but imperfect experiences of polytheism, 'feeding' with them its own spiritual substance. The above analogy, although not absolute, nevertheless gives rise to many interesting inferences on the interdependence and potential convergence of the two spiritual phenomena.