“[Some] Hindu groups have protested that ‘The Love Guru,’ the latest Mike Myers movie, exposes their faith to ridicule. Where is the line between acceptable humor about religion and offensive disrespect?”
What to outsiders is acceptable humor may be, to insiders, offensive disrespect. But this applies to both insiders and outsiders to religion and of any religion: Having fun with religion is innocent, having fun at the expense of religion is not.
So is this movie having fun at the expense of Hinduism? I clicked all over its online site, sniffing for disrespect. Having taught Hinduism at the University of Hawaii, I have a fairly sensitive nose for disrespect; and I found none – though I might if I were to experience the movie.
But while I found nothing I would call disrespectful, I did find something offensive: the reduction of Hinduism to pop-culture “Love.” Not love in its full, rich sense of (Sanskrit) “bhakti” (centering in passionate devotion to a Hindu deity), but Hindu love as conceived in the woodstocks and communes of the 1960s youth culture. Back to the 1960s! “His Holiness Guru Pitka” is a sad retrogression. “Love, joy, and a Coca Cola chicken.”
The parallel to the abuse of my religion, Christianity, is painful to me. In many quarters for many years, Christianity has been reduced to “Love,” especially “Love thy neighbor.” As in Hinduism, the central word for love centers on love for the divine, not the human. “Agape” (with grave accent on the last letter, main accent on the middle syllable) means, as Jesus summed up good religion, the adoration of God and universal caring for humanity, including oneself: “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind....You shall love your neighbor as yourself.” (Matthew 22:37-39; also in Mark and Luke.)
When Christian “agape”-love is shallowed either by anthropocentric flattening (eliminating God) or by reducing God to a sentimental lover, why not see the love-sentiment as the kernel of the religion and throw away all else as mere husk? Long ago, that great Danish thinker Soren Kierkegaard called this the slump of religion into ethics, on the way to the slump of ethics into mere esthetics.
This diminished Christianity of sentimental love was properly panned by Yale professor H. Richard Niebuhr in a sentence many theologians can quote: “A God without wrath brought men [i.e., people] without sin into a kingdom without judgment through the ministrations of a Christ without a cross.” (“The Kingdom of God in America,” Chicago: Willett, Clark, 1937, page 193.)
A few days ago, we Americans lost a great journalist, Tim Russert, only 58 years old. In his Roman Catholic high school, a priest pinned his shoulders to a wall for bad behavior, and Tim cried out, “Father, don’t you have any mercy?” Replied the priest, “God takes care of mercy; my job is justice.” God is not only kind, but also – necessarily to his character as righteous – stern: “Note the kindness and severity of God” (Romans 11:22).
I commend "On Faith" for asking a question arising from sensitivity to an essential human value in this global world, namely, respect for religion and the religions.
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