"What Religion Do I Practice?" - Q&A 3

hi everyone welcome back to another q a video where i'll be asking or i'll be answering rather your questions and this time i'm actually including all of my subscribers so i'll be answering all of your questions not just my patrons although of course as always my patrons will be getting the priority here so i will be answering their questions first and then because i got so many questions on my last post i won't be able to answer all of them obviously so i'll pick a few ones out and i'll do my best to answer them for you now before we start i would just like to say that amazingly this channel has grown quite a bit recently we just a few weeks ago reached 10 000 subscribers and before i even had time to blink or make a video thanking you for that suddenly we're now at 25 000 subscribers that's just absolutely amazing i'm very humbled and thankful that so many of you seem to be enjoying the content that you are maybe spreading the content that you support me in various ways especially of course i would like to thank my patrons who support me over on patreon this is as i've said in most my videos this is really what's keeping this channel going um you know i'm working a full-time job i'm doing these videos at the same time i have a bunch of other projects so this is of course very time consuming even though it is something that i'm very passionate about but the fact that you guys support me so that i am able to buy the books for research or to all kinds of different things that i need to make these videos that is just incredible to me that you choose to support me and i'm very humbled and so thankful for that so thank you everyone for getting us to this place and i look forward to keep making videos and and keep growing this channel as we go forward so as i said i'll begin by answering the questions asked by my patrons so first of all uh yasir khan asks what which thinker philosopher sufi or religious figure that you have come across in your studies inspires you most hmm i don't know i mean i mean most of them inspire me in some way i guess a lot of these people are inspiring in a lot of ways none of them are perfect of course there's not a single person i think is you know the perfect person to to emulate in any way i don't know really who do i admire the most i think i've been asked this question before like which philosopher do i like the most and i really don't have an answer for that i tend to like philosophers who do you know put a lot of weight to reason and and and rationality i'm quite a sort of personally i'm a person who relies a lot on on reason and logic but i am also the kind of person who who is very adamant to recognize the limits of our intellect and of reason and so i guess i tend to sympathize with the philosophers who do put an emphasis on reason but to a degree and then sort of agree that well after that something else will have to to take over um you know philosophers like you even to fail or even sabain are examples of those kinds of philosophers i think generally people i'm not so much inspired or impressed by people's intelligence or how complex their metaphysics are usually i think what inspires me and what i admire the most in people historically or today is is rather what kind of a person they are in terms of you know if they're kind loving if they're humble so these kinds of things so i don't know if i can just come up with someone off the top of my head but people in history or today that showcases humbleness and kindness and a sort of loving attitude towards fellow human beings and other creatures generally those are the people that inspire me the most okay hanan fikri asks according to is creation an extension of god if not then does that mean that creation always existed with the existence of god uh saying that it's an extension of god seems to imply that it's somehow part of god and this is not what teaches at least teaches to him the world or creation is a manifestation of god it's a manifestation of his divine attributes like a mirror but it's also they take their existence from god's existence so it's that's the relationship that it has that these two have god in the world um it's not so much that it is a part of the world like a part of god's body or something like that that's that's uh that's not how uh should be understood um and when it comes to the eternity of the world uh ibn adabi was not in favor of the idea of the world's eternity um you know some of those who have been fans of him who have been abscribed to the idea of that has interpreted it in a way that allows for the eternity of the world but generally i think that school does not tend to hold this idea the eternity of the world is more commonly found in some of the uh peripatetic philosophers like ibn cena and ibn rushd al-farabi who would often indeed argue that the world was eternal with god and yet that he was the creator of them even cena uses a lot of great allegories to explain how this works but in terms of no that's i would not say that this is the case okay mikhail stankiewicz asks maybe you could say something about trends in religious studies and which ones inspire the most stuff like eliad everything is connected and the opposite views which ones were significantly more present in your university education than others so the place i studied was is a university called so the turn university in stockholm sweden and the program there the culture there is sort of very inspired by you say post-modernist thinking as well as a lot of post-colonial theories theories post-orientalist attitudes um and so because i'm taught in that environment i have a lot of that stuff in me obviously it's funny when people accuse me and many others for being orientalists i think i feel like people use the word orientalist so much as a critique that has lost all its meaning a lot of what we do where i come from is to actually study the orientalists which would be the old sort of colonial scholars who often had an incredibly biased view of the middle east and a huge part of the studies of religion today where i come from is to look at those scholars and try to undo what they have messed up in the past so orientalist for us too is a very negative term and something that we basically strive very hard to go against and some people keep calling me and others orientalists just because we are i don't know because we're scholars from the west um or white scholars or white scholars who those people particularly don't agree with on a certain subject then we're all orientalists um in any case um there's a lot of stuff that we about the kind of culture where my educational context um i've always been a fan of the more sociological perspectives on religion you know durkheim and his kind of school religion is primarily a social phenomenon it's about you know group belonging about about personal identity and things like this but there's a lot of really fascinating stuff research being done also about uh psychological uh theories on religion like cognitive behavioral theories about how that affects our view of the world and why we believe in gods and things like this so there's a lot going on i think all of them have great things to teach and take a lot of good ideas from different theories and different schools and i think that was one of the things that that my educational circumstances were very good for which was that we of course study all different kinds of theories and perspectives on religion you know academically so it's been a it's been a melting pot of a lot of different things dan hill says i see you've covered coffee i wonder if it would be appropriate to discuss cannabis yes it's always appropriate to discuss cannabis um on a serious note i think um this is of course something that there's a lot to be said about and i will be tackling this in the future i think i got some other question from uh subscriber also about talking about the use of psychedelics and sufism for example so so yeah i will probably be tackling that subject uh pretty soon i hope lastly from my patron team is matija kurbanovic excuse the pronunciation do you plan to cover the is it bone or burn religion one day uh i'll be honest my knowledge about this religion is very limited i have even had to google it right now to you know of course i've heard of it but i had to google it to remember what it actually was um even though you know as a you know i hate that word but as a scholar of religions i obviously don't know everything and this is definitely a a gap in in my in my knowledge but that's a good thing because that just means i have a lot of fascinating research ahead of me so yes i would love to cover that at some point okay so questions from my regular subscribers um number one from fatima safa studying what religion had the most impact on your life i don't think any of them had a more of an impact on my life than any other um i've studied islam and sufism more than other religions so maybe just by that fact that has had a huge impact on me but other than that i don't think there is one who you know has impacted me more than any other really okay safe king 35 asks what religion do you practice and this is of course one of the most frequently asked questions what religion do i belong to what do i believe in am i muslim no first of all no i'm not a muslim what religion do i practice uh i and what religion do i belong to i might as well answer all these questions at the same time i consider myself culturally to be christian but i don't necessarily adhere to the um theological doctrines of the trinity and these things so on that basis maybe i wouldn't be considered a christian by many other than that i don't really adhere to any specific religion at all at the moment i've said previously that i i do believe in god it depends of course on how you define god but generally when people ask me do you believe in god i'll say yes and and i do have a way of relating to that i do have a way of practicing but it's not related to any specific religion in that sense not at the moment who knows where life takes you right but right now i don't belong to any specific religion in that sense so here's another very common question one of the most frequently asked answered most frequently asked question um in this post which is what do you think of the perennial philosophy and such figures as rene guenon and fitzger schwann many people asked questions relating to this so the perennial philosophy or the perennial school is a school of philosophy that emerged for the most part in the 20th century and it's associated with these thinkers that he mentioned renegade going on and friction also said jose nasser and many others very influential of course especially in scholarship about sufism they have been very prominent as as some of the greatest and most successful scholars and writers about sufi topics and the preamble philosophy is basically this idea that many of the world's religions like islam christianity hinduism buddhism has certain core features or essential features that are the same even though they're expressed in different languages that's a very simplified way of explaining it but but that's the sort of perennial idea this idea of perennial wisdom throughout the world's religions i think they have certainly they have some very interesting ideas i am you know my academic side is a little skeptical because i think of course we can find a lot of similarities between religions but there are also a lot of differences just like you know the theories of carl jung or some of his people from his school also tends to often i think simplify things to a large degree and and connect certain traditions and ideas from different cultures that aren't necessarily the same thing but they only become the same thing in the mind of the person who is theorizing about it but you know at the same time i have a lot of perennial tendencies myself you know when i talk about abnorbi and myself eckhart and adi shankara and the taoist writers like there's a you know it's hard to deny that somewhat the things they say are just fascinatingly similar to each other and that there are certain features of these different religions that sometimes seem to be completely unconnected to each other that have these very strong features and similarities to them and i am endlessly fascinated by that stuff too and i love to talk about why that may be why is ibn alabi and maestro record so similar is it because of a common influence from neoplatonism for example or is it some common human experience that they're both trying to grab at i don't know obviously but i think it's just so fascinating to to think about when it comes to the idea of the perennial philosophy this is something that i will be talking about more i'll be i'm planning on making videos on that in the future so i'll be talking about that more deeply later on so i'll keep this pretty short now but yeah so you can look forward to me talking about that more in the future ahmed bd asks which religion impressed you the most no in religion has really impressed me more than any other dortoka says outside of youtube and learning what are your favorite hobbies well i do i am a musician so i play music that's a huge part of my identity i guess i that was my primary primary occupation and well primary activity before this channel started to gain some traction so to say and that's still a huge part of my life i have a lot of different hobbies and interests i also studied film for a while which is very helpful when i make these youtube videos just arts and culture culture generally is something that always fascinates me so you know even though i'm not good at it you know i love visual art like painting poetry again this is not something that i do myself but i very much enjoy that watching movies um yeah you know i i've never been into sports or cars but other than that like i i'm basically interested in anything that you you know put in front of me uh benali bader asks did sufis ever use psychedelics probably um there are evidence uh or you know it's pretty well known that many sufis historically used substances like well cannabis for example uh and opium i haven't heard any direct prefaces to you know mushrooms or things like that depends on what you count as psychedelics but certainly cannabis and opium and things like this have been consumed by sufis as a way to help them in their spiritual practices we know this for example because of people who say for example the founder of the numatullahi sufi order nima ali he's famous for one of the things that he taught was that he told his students to not or to stop smoking cannabis right so this tells us that there were suffice who did because otherwise he wouldn't have to tell them not to so yes there are there are evidence that this is something that took place aliram asks what videos are you planning to do next for the two for the for the next two months would you consider traveling to places to study more about the topics you made videos about um i have different things planned i'm working on a video about meister eckhart which is a great christian theologian and mystic of the middle ages i am also planning to do one on abu lafia which is a jewish catalyst and mystic also i am working on some stuff on islamic occultism and magic i am doing some more on hinduism delving into some of those schools that i talked about in the last video yeah i have a bunch of different ideas but those are some of the ones that i'm working on currently matthias yeah oh graziac excuse me asks what religious or philosophical text is dearest to you why do you always ask me to take sites like this i don't i don't know there is a lot of beauty and wisdom in so many of these texts i think i revealed the secret that i very much love the text called drunza which is a taoist text i've always just absolutely loved that one i there are certain books of the bible that i'm very fond of i love the book of job i also love the book of ecclesiastes for example there are certain surahs in the quran that are absolutely beautiful yeah there's there's a lot of stuff those are the ones that just at the top of my head that i can think about but i see value in most of those kinds of texts there is always something to be learned or to to to be inspired by i think when you read these old texts i think they have survived for so long as important texts for a reason um and so for that reason alone there is usually something in there to to to learn from issa asks or says i appreciate that you share the original arabic terms for many topics and your pronunciations are quite good thank you very much do you speak arabic fluently no i wouldn't say fluently but i have studied arabic officially at university for a year which of course is nothing when it comes to arabic but it's enough that i have a general grasp of the grammar and the basics of the language i can read and write and speak arabic but not to the degree that i would be able to hold a conversation with someone for example and i basically only know fusa which is classical or modern standard arabic and not really any of the dialects and a little iraqi dialect because my wife's family is from iraq but other than that like no so i i want to of course increase my knowledge in arabic but that's where i stand at the moment okay you seem like always have a superb list of sources to dig deeper before the video making how do you choose your sources to learn primarily read so a few people have asked this question too where do i get my sources from um so my criterium for sources is that they are scholarly sources so that they are scientific sources and peer-reviewed academic sources so i get a lot of the kind of comments that will say that you know i should be you know why am i using western scholars as you know sources and not muslim scholars or islamic scholars it's not that i'm not using islamic scholars if you look through these sources there's always a list to begin with there is always a list of sources in the descriptions of my videos if you want to see where i get my sources from or you want to you know find things to read yourself but i also see a lot of people criticizing that i use non-muslim sources that's not necessarily the case a lot of the sources i use is by muslims the fact they're muslim or not does not make a difference to me the difference is if they're scholarly if they're scientific if they're academic if they are you know objective at least as objective as possible um that they are operating from within an academic context which makes them scientifically reliable i am not interested in using polemical texts as sources you know certain my videos are made on shia islam or ibadi islam people have said that i should you know look into islamic sources and what they say but you know if i were to only look at sunni sources for describing shia islam that would be ridiculous i do take sources from many different places if i'm writing about a certain philosophy for a person i always try to read their own words if i'm if i want to represent them properly and if i'm writing about a certain religious group i'll try to get the perspective of that religious group but not necessarily from groups who are critical of them that's so my when i made my video on manichaeism for example i did not rely on christian sources or you know as in like medieval polemical christian sources or muslim sources because honestly they are usually not reliable because they're polemical they're critical so it's much better to rely on you know sources from inside that tradition itself or from you know academic scholarly scientific sources jennifer grove asked how many different traditions did the platonic philosophy get around to influencing and when oh boy um you know platonism obviously one of the most probably the most well at least one of the most influential philosophical schools of all time there is this saying that all philosophy al well all western philosophy problematic term of course but this is how the saying goes all western philosophy are basically footnotes to plato and there is something to that statement because plato is such a foundational figure for all of the traditions that follow to some degree who were either followers of him or at least commented on him to some degree platonism is a hugely important for some of the world's major religions christianity islam also certain forms of judaism and many others like central ideas in these religions like the fact there's a soul like the soul that is separate from the body very platonic idea so the influence of plato can really not be overstated when well all the time um yeah plato very very influential abdul rahman shokri asks why are you hiding your beliefs while you are doing a channel about religions i think we have to know from which perspective you are viewing at other religions i i don't think i'm hiding my beliefs you know maybe they just don't shine through that much i always try to keep the content on this channel as unbiased as possible as objective as possible now you know i also recognize that it's impossible to be completely objective it's impossible to be completely unbiased my personal views whatever they may be on a subject will always shine through in some way so when i talk about a subject you'll probably notice in some way if i'm excited about it or not for example but i don't think i hide my religious identity i've already talked about in this video that i don't really know ascribe very much to a certain religious identity uh consciously so and so it's not something that i consciously hide it's just that this is the way i've been also taught to talk about religions from this unbiased and an academic perspective and that's what i do at on this channel this is not a religious channel i am not you know i'm not a religious scholar i'm a scholar of religion there's a difference there right so i'm not here to to talk about who is right or who's wrong or what religion is better than some other religion i'm just here to talk about religions as they are from an academic perspective well that's that's the purpose of this channel to not let those things affect what i say the most what i think what uh what what annoys me with this kind of question you know i'm not annoyed with you specifically of course but this seems to be this underlying feeling that when people ask me are you muslim or what perspective do you view this from it's like they're trying to check if they can trust me right well they need to they need to know which perspective i am talking from so they can know that you know if they agree with that perspective they can know if they can you know trust me or not if my knowledge is is worth listening to and so i think that's not the way i like to look at things i'd like to examine ideas as they are of course people's opinions and perspectives are going to play a part in that and i get the idea that knowing what perspective a certain person is talking from is helpful and we try to do this as much as possible as academics as well at least in the modern or post-modern perspective that's part partly what i think that whole thing is about is to be self-reflexive to to realize that our personal biases and personal opinions and stances on things my background my nationality my upbringing everything will affect what i do academically if i'm doing i'm writing a paper i'm doing some research project or if i'm doing a youtube video my personal opinions are always going to be there they can't be completely just shoved under the rug that's that's impossible that's the mistake that a lot of the you know scholars of the earlier 20th century made for example and what we try to do today is to be self-conscious about our background and our biases and be open about them and try to see you know how do these influence our research and what can we do about it so if it seems to you that i am hiding my religious identity or my beliefs then i guess i am not doing my job properly in a way because i think that's important for us to be a transparent even as academics um but that it's not something i do consciously at all i think it's just just a natural result of my sort of very neutral stance on on this subject generally dc asks does religion justify preeminent violence which religion um no yes and no i mean look as i said in my videos about um essentialism religions don't really do anything or you know it's people who do things and there are always different people in different religions so when it comes to things like you know violence does religion support violence does christianity support violence do islam support violence no yes and no but the religion itself doesn't it's the people who do certain christians do certain christians don't for example so to say something that generalizing about just a religion i think is is is unhelpful um so yeah that's my sort of cop-out answer for that question so last question for today pat the rao asked what will you see what do you see the future of religion being will it continue to fade away generation after generation or will it forever be part of human identity um you know it depends on how you define religion generally i don't think religion's going anytime anywhere anytime soon um you know the research shows that in one sense religion is declining at least it was a couple of decades ago but what that means is that the big religious institutions like you know the christian church and then you know the big religions right are to some degree decreasing in in numbers and popularity that the this group called the nuns that is not affiliated is one of the fastest rising groups of or demographics in the world today but at the same time that does not mean that people have stopped believing in things associated with religious beliefs believing in an afterlife and god or gods um magic or any of these things right and of course a lot of new religious movements uh are also becoming increasingly popular so um even though maybe some of the big religions or i think let's put it like this i think it's possible that religion as we know it is changing or that religion as we know it might be decreasing in popularity it's not going to go away anytime soon at all but that what that means is that it's only going to take new forms i think it is some kind of human trait some kind of human maybe not need but but it's a very human thing to have these kinds of things have these beliefs have these rituals and to relate to the world or the universe and our fellow men in a kind of structured and organized way some religion often offers so i think i don't think religion defined in a broad sense is going anywhere i think that's very much something that is part of a human nature that will stay that way but that maybe you know the religious big religions or religions as we know it might um not be as prominent in the future as they are now but that's very hard to say because a lot of other research also shows that religion has become more popular and more prominent in society in the last few decades so i don't know i think these things fluctuate a lot we'll see you know i'll maybe i'll probably make some videos on subjects like this when i'm more prepared to talk about it more more fully researched so that was last question uh thank you all so much for asking your question this was a lot of fun i'd love to do this more in the future i know there was one question or one person asked when am i when am i doing a live stream q a i don't know uh that sounds like a fun idea i would love to do some live streams in the future um i'll just have to you know make some time for it because right now my my schedule is quite f packed uh but yeah that's also something i'm looking forward to doing in the future and uh yeah i'll see you in the comments and thank you all so much again for your support and for subscribing and for getting this channel to what is now 25 000 subscribers it's uh yeah that's just crazy uh thank you so much again i'll see you next time [Music] you

Channel: Let's Talk Religion

Views: 283,332

Keywords: Filip Holm, Let's Talk Religion, Q&A, Questions and answers, personal, academic, religious studies, academic study of religions

Id: oMxwRzVxS_k

Length: 33min 39sec (2019 seconds)

Published: Sun Dec 06 2020