Raimon Panikkar vs. The New Atheists: The Ultimate Smackdown

In honor of Fr. Panikkar's recent passing, I am resurrecting an old blog on his work that I wrote several years ago.  I wrote the blog in the context of an ongoing blogosphere debate, at the time, around the work of the so-called New Atheists and the role and value of religion in the modern world.  The original discussion took place on the Gaia website, which has been closed, so you will not be able to follow the links that were in my original blog to the other discussions mentioned, but I believe you will still be able to follow the main points of the piece -- which was to honor the work of a remarkable inter-religious pioneer and multi-tradition contemplative, and to look at what Integral practitioners might draw from his approach to deepen our understanding of cross-tradition and cross-level communication and exploration, and to refine and improve our rhetorical skills.

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Several months ago, reflecting on the discussions about the New Atheists I've been involved in with members of the Gaia website, and thinking back also on my earlier blog series on intersubjectivity and Integral Deep Dialogue, I decided it was time to write something in honor of the work of Raimon Panikkar.  I first came across his work about four years ago while researching and writing on interfaith dialogue, and I was immediately impressed by his erudition, his prodigious intelligence, and his ability to masterfully navigate different worldspaces and to draw deep nourishment from them without (it seemed to me) compromising their integrity or merely appropriating them for ulterior aims.  What wasn't immediately apparent to me, especially in his scholarly works, were his equally impressive warmth, humility, and humanity, all of which shine through in the video below.

Panikkar, as a Catholic priest who considers himself equally a Hindu, Buddhist, and postmodern secularist, exemplifies the new dialogical, transcultural consciousness that is emerging in our age.  His appreciation for the demands (and limitations) of pluralism; his belief that we are urgently called, at this point in history, to create new forms of consciousness, and new forms of spirituality, through deep dialogical encounter with individuals and cultures who are truly Other; and the fact that he sees this not only as politically necessary but as imbued with the potential, spiritually, to be truly revelatory and transformative, put him in stark contrast, in my view, with the Four Horsemen of the new atheism (and, of course, with apologists for most traditions, religious and secular).  To explain why I think so, I will first quote from myself (this is something I first posted on Hokai's blog):

This is not to say that the insights and criticisms of atheists and secularists are without value, or that they do not, in fact, serve a powerful corrective function, helping to dismantle mythic-level fixations and compensatory beliefs.  Panikkar himself refers to the secular movement as a sacred one:  he finds great value in the secular critique of traditional religions, agreeing with their diagnosis that these traditions have tended historically to exacerbate human alienation, fragmentation, and pathology.  Theologically, as well, he believes the West took a wrong turn when it identified God, the depth dimension of reality, with a particular personality or entity.  Panikkar's theology moves in the direction of non-theism, or what Wilber would call evolutionary panentheism.  As Gerard Hall writes, "The mistake of Western thought was to begin with identifying God as the Supreme Being (monotheism) which resulted in God being turned into a human projection (atheism). Panikkar moves beyond God-talk to speak of the divine mystery now identified in non-theistic terms as infinitude, freedom and nothingness..."