How would you like to be remembered?
I think my biggest desire is to see a revival of the Islamic tradition of learning. And the way I see that tradition of learning is that it was deeply rooted in the two primary sources of Islam, and it produced a holistic approach to everything. So that's my desire, that's how I would like to be remembered, as someone who continued to do the process of revival of their tradition of learning, which was holistic.
Is religious extremism confused with political extremism?
We're not talking about a religious war in the sense of having no connection with the politics, with the social oppression. So those people are fighting -- people who are fighting, for example, in the Middle East -- they're not just bringing it up on the basis of what Islam tells them. They also bring it on the basis of other things among them. If I am a 13 year-old boy living in Jerusalem, and my father and mother have been killed by a bomb, and I see no other future and no other means of doing anything, and I only have my own body and a few little nails and some explosives, that's what I have. You know that we are dealing with a magistrate, we are not just dealing with a religious phenomenon then.
Talk about ritual in modern society
I think it's part of human construction that we require ritual. When they're religious rituals, they are a helpful orientation for something deeper. Prayer, for example, by itself is a ritual which involves stating certain sentences, making certain movements. But that's only the painted aspect of it. The inner aspect of it is that it makes us ready for something deeper than that. And everything is ritual. When you turn on your computer, the computer goes through some rituals, it tests the memory, it tests the RAM, it goes through the kinds of the video cards, it displays all that. I mean, there's the ritual of the technology. so there's nothing which is not ritual in that sense.
Will technology become increasingly disruptive?
I don't think technology's destructive anyway. I think we virtually all embrace it, even the technophobes who lambast in op-ed pieces in the Los Angeles Times and New York Times themselves are able to do so under the very blanket of freedom that technology provides for them, and I think it's terribly hypocritical. Everybody uses the technology. Automobiles and planes and medical technologies that have allowed them to live long enough to write op-ed pieces against technology. I think it's just anything that's new is foreign and scary to people, and that will always be there, but it's just a question of getting used to it. Take cloning, for example. It's going to happen. And it doesn't matter if Congress bans it or not, it's going to happen. It's going to happen somewhere outside of America. It'll happen in America stealthily. It's going to happen. And then everyone will get used to it, then it'll be no big deal. Then there'll be some other thing to rail against.
Would you welcome cybernetic implants?
Of course. Who wouldn't? You know, again, it's just what you get used to. I mean people say oh, I wouldn't want to live past my natural age, it just wouldn't be right. Oh really? Well, let's say you're 70 now. Okay, tomorrow your time is up. "Oh, no, wait a minute, I'll go another year." Oh, okay, so in another year, all right, tomorrow we're going to pull the plug. "Oh no, no, no, give me another year." And of course there's no point at which, as long as you're reasonably healthy, if you're in absolute miserable physical state and you want to die, that's understandable. But I just can't imagine anybody going along with it, and of course, you would use whatever technologies you could, implants or explants, to stay alive.
Do you think the general public properly appreciates science?
Well, I think that there is a lot of awareness that technological breakthroughs are really creating strong challenges to traditional notions of religion. And so technology in some ways is polarizing the religious audience into people who want to keep it the way it was, and people who are saying we definitely need to reconceptualize our religious beliefs in order to account for these technological changes.
Who do you most admire and why?
In terms of my own field of study, I keep going back to a lot of the classic theorists, people who were writing around the turn of the last century. And so this would be theorists a lot of people may or may not have heard of, such as Max Weber, Sigmund Freud -- which a lot of people of course have heard of -- Emil Durkheim, a French sociologist. And actually going back a little further, I've been heavily influenced by Karl Marx. Now all of these people had critiques of religion. And they've actually influenced me in seeing the potential negative and even pathological side of religion. And I think the reason I admire them is there was a certain intellectual honesty to the way that they approached religion. At the same time, my own personal criticism of them is that in many ways, they always looked at a limited slice of religion and I think -- with the exception of people like William James, another one of my heroes -- they had it wrong. But that doesn't mean that I don't read them, and it doesn't mean that I don't appreciate the brilliance of their insight. Because I think, even today, we're still looking at religion through their lenses.
What are the key developments in your field?
Well, the major development in the sociology of religion is that the classical theorists were convinced that religion was going to decline and disappear. But somewhere about 15 years ago, when religion was supposed to be dead and dying, it was obvious that these theorists were going to have to reevaluate their conclusions. And so the major switch that's happened in the last decade or two is really from the secularization of religion to theories about desecularization. That is, that while some of these trends related to religion that were predicted, such as increasing privatization, the fact that people would be making choices about this religion versus that rather than simply adopting an inherited religious tradition, some of that is definitely true. It's particularly true if we think of Gen Xers and Baby Boomers. But that's the way in which they also differ from their grandparents, who were much more likely, if they were born a Catholic, to be a Catholic for life. Or born a Methodist, to be a Methodist for life. Right now, a huge percentage of people, irregardless of what they were born into, they end up switching and making choices.
Are there "good" and "bad" religions?
We can't just dichotomize religion as being something, as Freud would say, that is infantile. Or as Marx would say, religion is an opiate for the people, it's a compensation. And then on the other hand, there is good religion, which is religion that is challenging us rather than comforting us. So I really refuse to sort of make these radical dichotomies because I think it's often times possible that there is religion which is comforting, is a compensation for the stresses and strains of life, and yet at the same time, actually empowers people to try to go beyond their own individual self-interest and try to pursue higher goals. So my own sense is while we like to dichotomize and sort of label things this or that, that I'm not convinced that that's actually very true to most people's experience.
What is your concept of God?
I think the moment that we name who God is we're involved in some act of idolatry. And I definitely do not see God as someone who is out there riding the clouds. I don't see God as up there. I actually tend to have much more of a sort of depth notion of God as someone who is within us. And I have probably a little bit of a pantheistic view that God is somehow the source of life, the source of energy. And I think, however, that God is a concept that we invent. And not in necessarily in a negative way, but we need to acknowledge that we have dependencies and that we are not self-sufficient.
Why do you think people are religious?
It probably doesn't have that much to do with abstract notions of truth. It probably has a lot more to do with the fact that religious communities are places where people can gather, where they can socialize with each other, where they can feel affirmed, where they can share their needs and burdens. And I'm not trying to downplay the issue of truth, but I don't think most people come to religion out of some kind of abstract speculation about [whether] God is real. I think that is something that is typically more often born out of their own experience. And so I tend to take a more experiential approach to religion and my analysis of religion.
