People say things about religion all the time. (Laughter) The late, great Christopher Hitchens wrote a book called "God Is Not Great" whose subtitle was, "Religion Poisons Everything." (Laughter) But last month, in Time magazine, Rabbi David Wolpe, who I gather is referred to as America's rabbi, said, to balance that against that negative characterization, that no important form of social change can be brought about except through organized religion.
Orang berbicara tentang agama setiap saat. (Tawa) Almarhum Christoper Hitchens menulis buku "Tuhan Tidaklah Hebat," disertai keterangan, "Agama Meracuni Segalanya." (Tawa) Tapi bulan kemarin, Rabbi David Wolpe, yang dijuluki rabbi dari Amerika, diwawancara oleh majalah Time, berkata bahwa untuk menyeimbangkan sisi negatif dari agama tersebut, tidak ada satu perubahan sosial yang berarti yang dapat dibuat selain oleh organisasi agama.
Now, remarks of this sort on the negative and the positive side are very old. I have one in my pocket here from the first century BCE by Lucretius, the author of "On the Nature of Things," who said, "Tantum religio potuit suadere malorum" -- I should have been able to learn that by heart — which is, that's how much religion is able to persuade people to do evil, and he was talking about the fact of Agamemnon's decision to place his daughter Iphigenia on an altar of sacrifice in order to preserve the prospects of his army. So there have been these long debates over the centuries, in that case, actually, we can say over the millennia, about religion. People have talked about it a lot, and they've said good and bad and indifferent things about it.
Seruan mengenai sisi-sisi negatif dan positif dari agama semacam ini bukanlah hal baru. Di dalam kantung saya sekarang ini ada kutipan dari Lucretius dari abad kesatu S.M., yang menulis "On the Nature of Things": "Tantum religio potuit suadere malorum" -- seharusnya saya sudah hafal kata-kata ini -- yang berarti, sampai sejauh inilah agama mampu memanipulasi orang untuk melakukan kejahatan, dan beliau berbicara mengenai fakta bahwa Agamemnon mengorbankan putrinya, Iphigenia, di atas altar, agar tentaranya sukses di dalam perang. Selama berabad-abad, bahkan lebih dari satu milenia, orang berdebat panjang lebar mengenai agama. Ini merupakan topik yang sering sekali muncul, baik dari sisi positif maupun negatif, juga dari sisi netral. Saya ingin meyakinkan Anda hari ini akan sebuah penuturan sederhana.
What I want to persuade you of today is of a very simple claim, which is that these debates are in a certain sense preposterous, because there is no such thing as religion about which to make these claims. There isn't a thing called religion, and so it can't be good or bad. It can't even be indifferent. And if you think about claims about the nonexistence of things, one obvious way to try and establish the nonexistence of a purported thing would be to offer a definition of that thing and then to see whether anything satisfied it. I'm going to start out on that little route to begin with.
Semua debat mengenai agama ini terasa sangat konyol, karena tidak ada satu agama pun yang dapat diperdebatkan. Agama tidaklah ada, jadi kita tidak dapat berkata agama itu positif, negatif, ataupun netral. Sementara argumen mengenai hal-hal yang tidaklah ada, satu cara yang jelas-jelas dapat dipakai untuk mencoba dan mengukuhkan argumen tersebut adalah dengan mendefinisikan hal tersebut dan melihat apakah definisi tersebut tepat. Saya akan memberi contoh dengan cara ini.
So if you look in the dictionaries and if you think about it, one very natural definition of religion is that it involves belief in gods or in spiritual beings. As I say, this is in many dictionaries, but you'll also find it actually in the work of Sir Edward Tylor, who was the first professor of anthropology at Oxford, one of the first modern anthropologists. In his book on primitive culture, he says the heart of religion is what he called animism, that is, the belief in spiritual agency, belief in spirits. The first problem for that definition is from a recent novel by Paul Beatty called "Tuff." There's a guy talking to a rabbi. The rabbi says he doesn't believe in God. The guy says, "You're a rabbi, how can you not believe in God?" And the reply is, "It's what's so great about being Jewish. You don't have to believe in a God per se, just in being Jewish." (Laughter) So if this guy is a rabbi, and a Jewish rabbi, and if you have to believe in God in order to be religious, then we have the rather counterintuitive conclusion that since it's possible to be a Jewish rabbi without believing in God, Judaism isn't a religion. That seems like a pretty counterintuitive thought.
Apabila Anda cek di kamus dan coba pikirkan, satu definisi alamiah dari agama ialah yang melibatkan kepercayaan akan dewa-dewi atau hal-hal spiritual. Ini menurut kamus kebanyakan. Tapi Anda dapat menemukan definisi yang sama dalam karya Sir Edward Tylor, profesor Antropologi pertama di Oxford dan seorang antropologis modern pertama. Dalam bukunya mengenai budaya primitif, beliau menulis bahwa inti dari agama ialah animisme, yaitu kepercayaan akan hal-hal spiritual, yaitu roh-roh. Masalahnya, dalam novel modern karya Paul Beatty yang berjudul "Tuff," ada seorang rabbi yang tidak percaya adanya Tuhan. Ketika ditanya mengapa seorang Ateis menjadi rabbi, si Rabbi menjawab, "Inilah enaknya menjadi Yahudi. Anda tidak harus percaya Tuhan hanya karena Anda seorang Yahudi." (Tawa) Jika menjadi seorang rabbi Yahudi memerlukan kepercayaan akan Tuhan untuk menjadi religius maka terjadilah pertentangan karena dalam kasus ini, seorang Yahudi bisa menjadi rabbi meski ia Ateis. Yahudi bukanlah agama. Ini merupakan konsep yang bertentangan. Ada pula argumen lain.
Here's another argument against this view. A friend of mine, an Indian friend of mine, went to his grandfather when he was very young, a child, and said to him, "I want to talk to you about religion," and his grandfather said, "You're too young. Come back when you're a teenager." So he came back when he was a teenager, and he said to his grandfather, "It may be a bit late now because I've discovered that I don't believe in the gods." And his grandfather, who was a wise man, said, "Oh, so you belong to the atheist branch of the Hindu tradition." (Laughter)
Seorang teman India saya menemui kakeknya ketika beliau masih kecil dan berkata, "Saya ingin berbicara mengenai agama." Namun kata kakeknya ia terlalu muda. Maka teman saya kembali saat remaja, dan ia berkata, "Saya sekarang Ateis, jadi sudah terlambat untuk berbincang-bincang." Dan dengan bijak kakeknya berkata, "Oh jadi kamu adalah seorang ateis dari aliran tradisi Hindu." (Tawa)
And finally, there's this guy, who famously doesn't believe in God. His name is the Dalai Lama. He often jokes that he's one of the world's leading atheists. But it's true, because the Dalai Lama's religion does not involve belief in God.
Ada juga seorang pria yang terkenal sebagai Ateis, yaitu Dalai Lama. Yang sering bercanda dan berkata ia pemuka kaum Ateis. Tapi ini memang benar karena agama beliau tidak mencakup kepercayaan akan Tuhan. Mungkin Anda berpikir bahwa
Now you might think this just shows that I've given you the wrong definition and that I should come up with some other definition and test it against these cases and try and find something that captures atheistic Judaism, atheistic Hinduism, and atheistic Buddhism as forms of religiosity, but I actually think that that's a bad idea, and the reason I think it's a bad idea is that I don't think that's how our concept of religion works. I think the way our concept of religion works is that we actually have, we have a list of paradigm religions and their sub-parts, right, and if something new comes along that purports to be a religion, what we ask is, "Well, is it like one of these?" Right? And I think that's not only how we think about religion, and that's, as it were, so from our point of view, anything on that list had better be a religion, which is why I don't think an account of religion that excludes Buddhism and Judaism has a chance of being a good starter, because they're on our list. But why do we have such a list? What's going on? How did it come about that we have this list?
saya telah memberikan Anda definisi yang salah dan seharusnya saya menggunakan definisi lain untuk mengkontradiksi kasus-kasus serupa mengenai ateisme Yahudi, ateisme Hindu, dan ateisme Buddha untuk dikategorikan sebagai agama juga. Namun menurut saya itu ide yang buruk. Alasannya adalah karena menurut saya konsep agama tidaklah demikian. Menurut saya, konsep keagamaan yang sebenarnya mencakup daftar agama yang berparadigma dan denominasi-denominasinya, dan jika ada kepercayaan baru yang muncul seperti agama, kita bertanya apakah ada kemiripan dengan agama-agama ini. Ya, kan? Dan ini bukan sekadar konsep kita akan agama, dimana, menurut kita, setelah sekian lama, daftar ini adalah agama-agama yang sah; karenanya mungkin agama baru, kecuali agama Buddha dan Yahudi, dapat menjadi agama yang "sah", selain kedua agama tersebut yang ada di daftar ini. Tapi mengapa kita memiliki daftar ini? Apa asal muasal dari daftar semacam ini? Menurut saya jawabannya sangatlah sederhana,
I think the answer is a pretty simple one and therefore crude and contentious. I'm sure a lot of people will disagree with it, but here's my story, and true or not, it's a story that I think gives you a good sense of how the list might have come about, and therefore helps you to think about what use the list might be. I think the answer is, European travelers, starting roughly about the time of Columbus, started going around the world. They came from a Christian culture, and when they arrived in a new place, they noticed that some people didn't have Christianity, and so they asked themselves the following question: what have they got instead of Christianity? And that list was essentially constructed. It consists of the things that other people had instead of Christianity.
dan bahkan masih mentah dan kontroversial, tapi inilah kisah saya dan entah benar atau tidak, cerita ini dapat menggambarkan dari mana asal muasal daftar ini, sehingga anda dapat berpikir lebih jauh akan kegunaan daftar ini. Menurut saya, jawabannya bermula di para pelancong Eropa dari era saat Columbus mulai mengelilingi dunia. Mereka dibesarkan dengan tradisi Kristen, dan saat mereka tiba di tempat baru, mereka melihat orang-orang lokal tidak beragama Kristen. Maka mereka mulai bertanya-tanya: Agama apa yang mereka peluk selain agama Kristen? Maka daftar tersebut dibuat. Daftar tersebut berisi agama-agama asing selain agama Kristen.
Now there's a difficulty with proceeding in that way, which is that Christianity is extremely, even on that list, it's an extremely specific tradition. It has all kinds of things in it that are very, very particular that are the results of the specifics of Christian history, and one thing that's at the heart of it, one thing that's at the heart of most understandings of Christianity, which is the result of the specific history of Christianity, is that it's an extremely creedal religion. It's a religion in which people are really concerned about whether you believe the right things. The history of Christianity, the internal history of Christianity, is largely the history of people killing each other because they believed the wrong thing, and it's also involved in struggles with other religions, obviously starting in the Middle Ages, a struggle with Islam, in which, again, it was the infidelity, the fact that they didn't believe the right things, that seemed so offensive to the Christian world. Now that's a very specific and particular history that Christianity has, and not everywhere is everything that has ever been put on this sort of list like it. Here's another problem, I think. A very specific thing happened. It was actually adverted to earlier, but a very specific thing happened in the history of the kind of Christianity that we see around us mostly in the United States today, and it happened in the late 19th century, and that specific thing that happened in the late 19th century was a kind of deal that was cut between science, this new way of organizing intellectual authority, and religion. If you think about the 18th century, say, if you think about intellectual life before the late 19th century, anything you did, anything you thought about, whether it was the physical world, the human world, the natural world apart from the human world, or morality, anything you did would have been framed against the background of a set of assumptions that were religious, Christian assumptions. You couldn't give an account of the natural world that didn't say something about its relationship, for example, to the creation story in the Abrahamic tradition, the creation story in the first book of the Torah. So everything was framed in that way.
Nah, kesulitannya berawal dari sini: Kekristenan, bahkan dalam daftar tersebut, merupakan tradisi yang sangat spesifik. Di dalamnya terkandung banyak hal yang sangat, sangat spesifik yang merupakan hasil dari sejarah panjang agama Kristen. dan inti dari agama ini, inti pemahaman Kekristenan yang paling mendasar, yang telah melalui sejarah demikian panjangnya, adalah kepercayaannya yang kuat. Bagi para pengikutnya, mempercayai hal yang benar sangatlah penting. Sejarah dari kekristenan itu sendiri penuh dengan pembunuhan karena kepercayaan akan hal-hal yang berbeda. Sejarah mereka juga dipenuhi dengan konflik dengan agama-agama lain, yang jelas-jelas dimulai di Abad Pertengahan: konflik dengan agama Islam, yang lagi-lagi berhubungan dengan kepercayaan kaum Muslim yang berbeda, yang dirasa telah menyinggung dunia kekristenan. Sejarah kekristenan sedemikian spesifik dan istimewa, dan belum tentu kita dapat menemukan hal serupa di dalam daftar kita. Ada pula masalah lain. Sesuatu yang istimewa terjadi di masa lalu tapi ini terjadi dalam sejarah kekristenan yang kita lihat di sekitar kita. Kebanyakan di Amerika Serikat masa sekarang. Ini terjadi di akhir abad ke-19. Hal istimewa yang terjadi di akhir abad 19 adalah adanya pemisahan antara ilmu pengetahuan dan agama, melalui pengorganisasian otoritas intelektual dengan cara baru. Apabila kita melihat ke abad 18, misalnya mengenai cendekiawan sebelum akhir abad 19, segala sesuatu yang Anda lakukan dan pikirkan, baik tentang dunia nyata, dunia manusia, dan dunia alam terlepas dari dunia manusia, ataupun moralitas, semuanya selalu dikontekstualisasikan dengan asumsi-asumsi yang religius, asumsi-asumsi kekristenan. Anda tidak dapat berbicara mengenai alam semesta tanpa menghubungkannya, misalnya dengan kisah penciptaan yang dimulai dari tradisi Abraham sampai ke kisah penciptaan dalam buku pertama Torah. Semua hal selalu ditempatkan dalam konteks serupa.
But this changes in the late 19th century, and for the first time, it's possible for people to develop serious intellectual careers as natural historians like Darwin. Darwin worried about the relationship between what he said and the truths of religion, but he could proceed, he could write books about his subject without having to say what the relationship was to the religious claims, and similarly, geologists increasingly could talk about it. In the early 19th century, if you were a geologist and made a claim about the age of the Earth, you had to explain whether that was consistent or how it was or wasn't consistent with the age of the Earth implied by the account in Genesis. By the end of the 19th century, you can just write a geology textbook in which you make arguments about how old the Earth is. So there's a big change, and that division, that intellectual division of labor occurs as I say, I think, and it sort of solidifies so that by the end of the 19th century in Europe, there's a real intellectual division of labor, and you can do all sorts of serious things, including, increasingly, even philosophy, without being constrained by the thought, "Well, what I have to say has to be consistent with the deep truths that are given to me by our religious tradition."
Namun hal ini berubah di akhir abad 19. Untuk pertama kalinya, orang-orang dapat menempuh jalur karir intelektual secara serius sebagai ilmuwan seperti Darwin. Darwin mengkhawatirkan adanya koneksi antara perkataannya dengan kebenaran versi agama, namun beliau dapat terus menulis buku mengenai subyeknya, tanpa harus menghubungkannya dengan klaim-klaim agama. Hal yang sama terjadi juga pada kaum geologis. Di awal abad 19, sebagai geologis yang ingin menakar usia bumi ini, Anda harus menjelaskan apa atau bagaimana klaim anda sejalan dengan usia bumi di kitab Kejadian. Di akhir abad 19, Anda dapat menulis buku dan sekadar menjelaskan usia bumi kita ini. Maka terjadilah pembagian ini, pemisahan di bidang intelektual, dan menurut saya hal ini terkukuhkan sehingga di akhir abad 19 di Eropa, pemisahan kaum cendekiawan terjadi, dan Anda dapat melakukan berbagai hal termasuk berfilosofi tanpa dibatasi oleh pemikiran, "Apa yang akan saya katakan harus sejalan dengan kebenaran yang diberikan kepada saya melalui tradisi keagamaan." Jadi bayangkan saja seseorang yang berasal dari dunia semacam itu,
So imagine someone who's coming out of that world, that late-19th-century world, coming into the country that I grew up in, Ghana, the society that I grew up in, Asante, coming into that world at the turn of the 20th century with this question that made the list: what have they got instead of Christianity?
kemudian memasuki negara asal saya, Ghana, di Asante, lingkungan darimana saya dibesarkan. Mereka memasuki dunia asing di pergantian abad ke-20 dengan pertanyaan: "Apa yang mereka peluk selain agama Kristen?"
Well, here's one thing he would have noticed, and by the way, there was a person who actually did this. His name was Captain Rattray, he was sent as the British government anthropologist, and he wrote a book about Asante religion.
Inilah satu hal yang akan ia perhatikan, dan memang sudah ada orang yang melakukannya, yaitu Kapten Rattray, antropolog yang diutus pemerintah Inggris, dan ia menulis buku mengenai agama Asante.
This is a soul disc. There are many of them in the British Museum. I could give you an interesting, different history of how it comes about that many of the things from my society ended up in the British Museum, but we don't have time for that. So this object is a soul disc. What is a soul disc? It was worn around the necks of the soul-washers of the Asante king. What was their job? To wash the king's soul. It would take a long while to explain how a soul could be the kind of thing that could be washed, but Rattray knew that this was religion because souls were in play.
Ini adalah lempengan soul disc. Ada banyak koleksi serupa di British Museum. Saya dapat menjabarkan bagaimana barang-barang serupa dari komunitas saya sampai berada di British Museum, tapi kita tidak punya waktu. Ini adalah lempengan soul disc. Apa itu soul disc? Lempengan ini dikalungkan di leher para pencuci-jiwa raja-raja Asante. Mereka menyucikan jiwa raja-raja. Untuk menjelaskan mengapa jiwa dapat disucikan akan cukup lama, namun Rattray tahu ini adalah agama lokal, dengan melihat korelasinya dengan jiwa orang-orang.
And similarly, there were many other things, many other practices. For example, every time anybody had a drink, more or less, they poured a little bit on the ground in what's called the libation, and they gave some to the ancestors. My father did this. Every time he opened a bottle of whiskey, which I'm glad to say was very often, he would take the top off and pour off just a little on the ground, and he would talk to, he would say to Akroma-Ampim, the founder of our line, or Yao Antony, my great uncle, he would talk to them, offer them a little bit of this.
Dan ada banyak hal lain, banyak praktek keagamaan lain yang serupa. Misalnya acap kali seseorang minum, mereka menumpahkan sedikit air di tanah sebagai air persembahan bagi para leluhur. Ayah saya melakukannya. Sering kali saat beliau membuka botol wiski, ia akan menuang sedikit wiski di lantai, dan ia akan berbicara pada Akroma-Ampim, leluhur kami yang pertama, atau Yao Antony, paman buyut saya. Beliau akan berbicara pada mereka dan menawarkan sedikit wiski.
And finally, there were these huge public ceremonials. This is an early-19th-century drawing by another British military officer of such a ceremonial, where the king was involved, and the king's job, one of the large parts of his job, apart from organizing warfare and things like that, was to look after the tombs of his ancestors, and when a king died, the stool that he sat on was blackened and put in the royal ancestral temple, and every 40 days, the King of Asante has to go and do cult for his ancestors. That's a large part of his job, and people think that if he doesn't do it, things will fall apart. So he's a religious figure, as Rattray would have said, as well as a political figure.
Ada pula upacara publik besar-besaran. Ini merupakan lukisan upacara itu dari awal abad 19 yang dibuat oleh seorang tentara Inggris. Upacara ini melibatkan raja dan tugas raja, salah satu tugas penting raja selain merencanakan perang dan semacamnya, adalah menjaga makam para leluhurnya, dan ketika sang raja mangkat, tempat duduknya dicat hitam dan ditaruh di kuil leluhur para raja. Setiap 40 hari Raja Asante harus melakukan ritual untuk leluhurnya. Itu merupakan tugas pentingnya. Orang-orang berpikir apabila ia lalai, bencana akan terjadi. Karenanya raja adalah pemuka agama dan pemerintah, seperti klaim Rattray.
So all this would count as religion for Rattray, but my point is that when you look into the lives of those people, you also find that every time they do anything, they're conscious of the ancestors. Every morning at breakfast, you can go outside the front of the house and make an offering to the god tree, the nyame dua outside your house, and again, you'll talk to the gods and the high gods and the low gods and the ancestors and so on. This is not a world in which the separation between religion and science has occurred. Religion has not being separated from any other areas of life, and in particular, what's crucial to understand about this world is that it's a world in which the job that science does for us is done by what Rattray is going to call religion, because if they want an explanation of something, if they want to know why the crop just failed, if they want to know why it's raining or not raining, if they need rain, if they want to know why their grandfather has died, they are going to appeal to the very same entities, the very same language, talk to the very same gods about that. This great separation, in other words, between religion and science hasn't happened.
Maka menurut Rattray ini adalah agama, tapi saat anda tengok kehidupan mereka, anda dapat melihat betapa terlbatnya para leluhur dalam setiap kegiatan mereka. Setiap pagi saat sarapan, Anda dapat pergi ke depan rumah dan mempersembahkan sesaji ke dewa pohon, Nyame Dua, dan berbincang dengan mereka, dengan dewa tertinggi dan terendah, juga para leluhur. Ini bukanlah dunia dimana agama dan sains telah terpisahkan. Agama belumlah terpisahkan dari aspek-aspek kehidupan, dan terlebih lagi, hal penting yang harus dimengerti tentang dunia itu adalah peran sains di sini diambil alih oleh apa yang disebut Rattray sebagai agama. Karena jika mereka mencari penjelasan sesuatu seperti kegagalan panen, datangnya hujan, ataupun kemarau, jika mereka butuh hujan, jika mereka ingin tahu mengapa kakek mereka meninggal, mereka akan bertanya ke entitas yang sama, dengan bahasa yang sama, dan berbincang ke para dewa yang sama mengenai itu. Dengan kata lain, pemisahan antara agama dan sains belumlah terjadi.
Now, this would be a mere historical curiosity, except that in large parts of the world, this is still the truth. I had the privilege of going to a wedding the other day in northern Namibia, 20 miles or so south of the Angolan border in a village of 200 people. These were modern people. We had with us Oona Chaplin, who some of you may have heard of, and one of the people from this village came up to her, and said, "I've seen you in 'Game of Thrones.'" So these were not people who were isolated from our world, but nevertheless, for them, the gods and the spirits are still very much there, and when we were on the bus going back and forth to the various parts of the [ceremony], they prayed not just in a generic way but for the safety of the journey, and they meant it, and when they said to me that my mother, the bridegroom's [grandmother], was with us, they didn't mean it figuratively. They meant, even though she was a dead person, they meant that she was still around. So in large parts of the world today, that separation between science and religion hasn't occurred in large parts of the world today, and as I say, these are not -- This guy used to work for Chase and at the World Bank. These are fellow citizens of the world with you, but they come from a place in which religion is occupying a very different role.
Ini mungkin sekadar hipotesis sejarah, namun di sebagian besar tempat di dunia, ini merupakan kebenaran. Saya menghadiri pernikahan di Namibia Utara suatu hari, sekitar 32,19 km ke arah selatan dari perbatasan Angola, di sebuah desa berisi 200 orang. Mereka cukup modern. Oona Chaplin juga hadir. Anda mungkin tahu siapa dia. Satu orang dari desa menemuinya dan berkata, "Saya melihat Anda di 'Game of Thrones." Mereka tidak terisolasi dari dunia kita, namun bagi mereka para dewa dan roh sangatlah nyata. Ketika mereka naik bus untuk menghadiri upacara di tempat berbeda, mereka sungguh-sungguh berdoa untuk perjalanan yang aman. Dan ketika mereka berkata kepada saya bahwa ibu saya, nenek dari mempelai wanita, juga hadir, mereka berbicara akan rohnya. Meski beliau telah meninggal menurut mereka beliau masih ada. Jadi di kebanyakan tempat di dunia sekarang ini, pemisahan antara sains dan agama belumlah terjadi, dan ini bukanlah -- pria ini dulu bawahan dari Chase di Bank Dunia. Mereka orang-orang modern yang berasal dari tempat dimana agama memiliki fungsi berbeda.
So what I want you to think about next time somebody wants to make some vast generalization about religion is that maybe there isn't such a thing as a religion, such a thing as religion, and that therefore what they say cannot possibly be true.
Jadi acap kali seseorang ingin membuat penyamarataan mengenai agama, coba pikir bahwa mungkin yang namanya agama tidaklah ada, karenanya apa yang mereka katakan tidak mungkin benar.
(Applause)
(Tepuk tangan)