I know that Christians (or I should say evangelicals, because those are the Christians I’m most familiar with) are often wary of the word religion. They say things like “Christianity isn’t just a religion—it’s something much more than that.” I sympathize with the sentiment, but it’s still a religion. And for the non-believer, it is just one among many religions in the world. Honestly, I haven’t done a whole lot of reading in what you might call comparative religious studies, so I’m a bit naïve about what the criteria are for calling a belief system a religion. It seems that most religions have one or more personalized gods, but some only have a belief in a supernatural reality. It also seems that people can believe in supernatural phenomena, such as mental telepathy or astrology, and they wouldn’t think of themselves as believing in a religion. What are religions, why have they been so prevalent in human history, and why are they (or why are they not) so important to human civilizations?
In my opinion, if there is something beneficial about religions it must be their influence upon the behavior of people, not their ability to accurately communicate the truth about reality. For me, any religion that’s worth its salt will be a framework for leading a meaningful, ethical life. So, I guess another question I’m asking, from the perspective of the non-believer and the pluralist, is the following: Are there good religions and bad religions and how do we determine which is which? [I know I’m begging the question, by trying to judge a religion as “good” or “bad” from an atheistic stance. But I’ve got to start somewhere…]
In the email you sent out about this blog you asked: "how much are we historically indebted to religion(s) for our morality and how much are we dependant upon religion to live decent, meaningful lives today?"
ReplyDeleteThe locus classicus of the view that our conception of morality comes from religion comes from Elizabeth Anscombe's "Modern Moral Philosophy."
http://www.philosophy.uncc.edu/mleldrid/SzCMT/mmp.html
Dennett's definition of religion:
ReplyDelete"Tentatively, I propose to define religions as social systems whose participants avow belief in a supernatural agent or agents whose approval is to be sought" (Breaking the Spell).
Contrast with William James's definition:
"Religion, therefore, as I now ask you arbitrarily to take it, shall mean for us the feelings, acts, and experiences of individual men in their solitude, so far as they apprehend themselves to stand in relation to whatever they may consider the divine. Since the relation may be either moral, physical, or ritual, it is evident that out of religion in the sense in which we take it, theologies, philosophies, and ecclesiastical organizations may secondarily grow. In these lectures, however, as I have already said, the immediate personal experiences will amply fill our time, and we shall hardly consider theology or ecclesiasticism at all" (The Varieties of Religious Experience).
I think a lot turns on whether one thinks of religion as, at root, a social structure or whether one thinks of it, at root, as a individual affair. I have no doubt that for many (if not most) religious people, religion is nothing more than a social institution--and one through which many of those derive meaning and live decent lives. But there are also many religious people (evangelical or otherwise) who think that religion is ultimately a personal, individual affair. (This isn't to deny that there are religious institutions and that they can come to dominate religion--sometimes for the worse.)
So many questions. It is hard to sort through. I think I like your original questions in your email the best. However the problem in discussing religion is that there is not one definition or criteria. Historically religion is present as far back as we can find history. This, in itself, states its importance to humanity. Why do men seek religion? I don't think they seek it--they are seeking meaning,truth, hope, peace, reality, escape--so religion for the individual can be neither bad nor good as each person finds or creates a set of values that gives them that meaning, hope.... Why is an athiest and athiest--isn't it a search for truth, reality, peace... As long an humans are imperfect they will seek a religion will they not? As long as the goals of that religion are for the things mentioned above, religion will affect behavior both good and bad but not just good or just bad--a mix of both.
ReplyDeleteOne person who I have read who might be able to shed some constructive light on this discussion is currently a professor at Notre Dame, Christian Smith. On his website I found the following,
ReplyDelete"What we need is to face and embrace the fact that we human beings are moral, believing, narrating animals and to rethink our social theories and analyses in that light. Taking culture and morality serioulsy in this way, I suggest, will open up new and fruitful avenues of inquiry with significant implications for social research and for the living of life itself. Which of course is what scholarship is all about."
- Moral Believing Animals
Silentio—Thanks for the link to Anscombe's essay. I’ll definitely check it out.
ReplyDeleteI’m glad you provided those definitions from Dennett and James (now would be a good time for me to go back and read *Breaking the Spell* again). And I think the distinction you’ve made is helpful. So something like classical Greek and Roman religions would fit Dennett’s definition, but Buddhism would not. And those who believe in the truth of a particular religion today, and who are consciously and passionately “spiritual,” would consider the most important part of their relationship to the divine to be their personal experience. They would be the kind of religious person that is more likely to be positively affected by their supernatural beliefs in an ethical sense.
So for that reason, a religion that inspires its member to make belief a personal affair, to make it about something more than a dogmatic affirmation of religious doctrine, is the kind of religion that would do people a lot of good. And by that standard, I think Buddhism is the exemplar. But, perhaps paradoxically, a religion that lends itself to institutionalism and dogmatism to the singular effect of perpetuating its doctrines (regardless of how genuinely and innocently its members believe in the truth of such a religion) doesn’t seem to be a clearly valuable cultural system. I guess that’s how I answer my question, “How do we determine which religions are good or bad.”
Martilou—You may be right. If I understand what you’re saying, then it may be possible that some human beings have always and will always express their natural inclination for meaning and peace through religion. My question is, does *every* human being have to subscribe to a religion to have meaning and peace and moral grounding? Another way of looking at it, that may appeal to you, is this: If it’s *possible* for a person to find meaning and peace and moral grounding outside of Christianity, Islam, Buddhism, etc., are you comfortable (or committed to) calling that, whatever it is, religion? Can I be an atheist and still have those distilled benefits of traditional religions?
HVC—I like the Moral Believing Animals quote. Thinking about human beings as narrating animals could provide some insight into the aspects of human nature that have lead to religions, and religious experience. We know from developmental psychology that humans seem to be hardwired to experience the world in a way that leads to supernatural beliefs (*SuperSense: Why We Believe in the Unbeleivable* by Bruce Hood). We also may be hardwired for experiencing our conscious lives through narrative, by the very fact that we’re hardwired for language. And this may mean that we are in some sense inevitably predisposed to looking at the universe and seeing a cosmic story.
HVC When you say "hardwired" to what are you referring. A inborn inclination or ability?
ReplyDeleteNathan, to answer your three questions asked of me No -- I have observed people who experience Moral transformation without religion. Yes--In fact I think that is how I would define religion. Yes you can --can't you? But I still maintain that there is a difference between moral transformation which is what you are discribing and spiritual transformation which is what I feel my relationship with the creator supernatural creates in me. The difference I am thinking is action/behavior vs motive/supernatural change in our very being.
Martilou—
ReplyDeleteI think you may have actually been responding to me when you asked HVC about “hardwired.” I made use of that term in my last response.
I probably used that word “hardwired” too loosely. Infants aren’t exactly hardwired to have supernatural beliefs. They seem to be hardwired to have some basic beliefs about the nature of physical objects (which are called Spelke objects after the psychologist Liz Spelke). These beliefs are the following: 1) Objects do not go in and out of existence, like disappear on one side of a wall and reappear on the other, 2) Objects are bounded and don’t break up and come back together again, 3) Objects move on continuous paths that should be visible (no teleportation to the other end of the room), and 4) Objects move only when something else moves them. No one teaches these things to infants, but they seem to know it very early in life. These are similar to the grammatical rules that seem to be inborn.
Spelke objects are physical objects, and as children develop they begin to categorize their experience with the world into physical, biological, and eventually psychological stuff. Supernatural beliefs come into play when a child makes mistakes when categorizing the world, such as thinking that a toy (physical object) looks like a living thing (biological object) and actually treats it as a living thing with thoughts and feelings (psychological properties).
So, it’s not so much that we have an inborn set of supernatural beliefs, but that we have an inborn set of beliefs about physical objects and we are prone to begin making mistakes when we develop psychologically. And the mistakes, according to Hood, are the source of our supernatural beliefs, even when we are adults. He actually believes that we all exhibit behavior that reveal these persistent childhood supernatural beliefs…even atheists.
Also, it was accurate to say that we are hardwired for language, but it’s not accurate to say that we are hardwired “for experiencing our conscious lives through narrative.” Language provided the possibility for narrative.
And, I think you’re right to bring up the distinction between spiritual and moral transformation. That will be another post.
Of course, you could look at the same developmental psychology results that Hood is looking at and come to a different conclusion. The religious person wouldn’t consider the ‘supersense’ merely a product of mistakes in categorization during childhood, or even if it was it may not always be a mistake to perceive the world supernaturally. You might think that a god has prepared us to look for true supernatural causes of what may appear to be natural events. Either way, what Hood is saying is that we all have these proclivities that persist throughout our lives at one level or another, regardless of whether we are theists or not. [I’m a bit concerned that Hood’s ideas will be insulting to the religious. It seems a little condescending, I know. That’s not *my* intent, though.]
ReplyDeleteSub-sub,
ReplyDeleteI think you have idealized Buddhism into something that you would like to exist, but actually doesn't. Take, for example, the most prominent form of Buddhism in the West: the Dalai Lama's Tibetan Buddhism. This form of Buddhism practices a very complex series of external rituals (prayer wheels, mandala painting), depends on a strict hierarchy of priests, monks, and lamas, and went hand-in-glove with traditional Tibetan social structures as much as the medieval Catholic Church existed symbiotically with medieval European feudalism. While it has elements that are internal and nondogmatic, reducing it to those elements does injustice to the religion.
I would argue that talk of "religion" in the abstract is not very helpful, because the most important aspects of religious belief and practice are those which are specific to particular religions, and which are easily misunderstood when one tries to correlate them to beliefs and practices from other religions that look similar on the surface, but which have very different meanings and implications.
Robert Webber, in his last book Who Gets to Narrate the World?, argued that beliefs - religious, atheistic, what have you - can't be fully understood outside of their narratives about the world. Before trying to distill the essence of religion-in-general, perhaps we ought to start with the narratives that each religion tells about the world. In fact, if we start with narrative, rather than with a concept called "religion," other narratives that aren't normally considered religious, such as, say, Soviet-style Communism, can be profitably included in the discussion. Otherwise, we'd be left with the misleading impression that only "religious" people and cultures have beliefs about reality.
This excellent discussion thread reminds me of the twentieth-century Protestant theologian, Paul Tillich, who addressed the question of whether being "religious" requires having a god. He defined "God" as the Ground of being:
ReplyDelete"The name of this infinite and inexhaustible depth and ground of all being is God. That depth is what the word God means. And if that word has not much meaning for you, translate it, and speak of the depth of your life, of the source of your being, of your ultimate concern, of what you take seriously without any reservation. Perhaps, in order to do so, you must forget everything traditional that you have learned about God, perhaps even that word itself. For if you know that God means depth, you know much about him. You cannot then call yourself an atheist or unbeliever. For you cannot think or say: Life has no depth! Life is shallow. Being itself is surface only. If you could say this in complete seriousness, you would be an atheist; but otherwise you are not. He who knows about depth knows about God" (The Shaking of the Foundations, pp. 63 ff).
I suggest, with Tillich, that only the absolute nihilist is nonreligious. My favorite science writer, Chet Raymo, does not believe in the existence of a supernatural God-figure, but is one of the most religious writers I know. He clearly stands in awe of the Ground of our being.
Michael—
ReplyDeleteYou’re probably right about the need to look at specific religions. It might be helpful to make a thread for Buddhism alone. I think I’ll do that. I also have a tendency to be abstract, which can be counterproductive sometimes.
But I actually think it’s also helpful to start this sort of discussion with a broader question about the nature of the terms we’re using, like ‘religion’ and ‘morality’. Because, for example, there are people who do not consider Buddhism a religion, for some of the reasons that we’ve discussed already. It’s helpful to have those issues in mind before getting into a discussion about the religion called ‘Buddhism’. We would be making an assumption that others may not share.
As far as me idealizing Buddhism—I should probably wait to fully address that in the forthcoming post. I’ll just say that what I meant to claim about Buddhism is that it obviously “inspires its members to make belief a personal affair, to make it about something *more* than [just] a dogmatic affirmation of religious doctrine.” This is not to say that Buddhists can’t be dogmatic. I mean, I can be dogmatic. That’s not just a religious thing. And I’m sure it has a complex social history in Asia. But, as I already admitted, I’m making this assessment from outside of belief with little actual experience with religious people other than Christian evangelicals. So, from that limited standpoint, it seems to me that there are no Buddhists flying planes into buildings, no Buddhists shooting doctors who perform abortions, no Buddhists who are trying to keep homosexuals from having the same civil rights as everyone else. I’m not even sure if Buddhists are that concerned about other people believing in their god, because their concept of the divine isn’t like an Osiris or Zeus or Yahweh or Christ or Allah. It’s more like the Ground of being, as Ken put it in his comment. And their religious practices seem to be based entirely on attaining psychological peace and living an ethical life. Yes, at this point in my life with the limited knowledge I have of world religions, I think Buddhism is the ideal religion for encouraging people to live meaningful, ethical lives.
Sub-sub,
ReplyDeleteThank you for explaining what you find appealing about Buddhism. I'm not sure if your generalizations are accurate, though. For example, Buddhism has been a missionary religion from its beginning, so they are definitely concerned with the beliefs of others; there have been several military empires founded on Buddhism, so I don't think the comparison to Muslim or Christian violence will hold; and most schools of Buddhism view their ultimate goal as attaining freedom from the cycle of reincarnation and suffering - mental peace and ethics are merely means to that end. (And in some schools, not even that - Zen Buddhism, for instance, favors absurdity, shock, and menial routines as paths to enlightenment.) For that matter, as I read Augustine's City of God, his description of Greco-Roman religion (i.e. "Osiris and Zeus"), especially among the educated classes, sounds VERY similar to Buddhist and Hindu conceptions of the divine.
I think I agree with you that a working definition of "religion" is useful, but it should be lightly held and readily discarded. Above, you refer to the 9/11 terrorists. "Religion" motivated them out of a sense of moral duty, and yet "religion" condemns their acts as morally heinous. Having a common working definition can be helpful for avoiding confusion (though Dennett's and James' definitions beg more questions than they answer), but I would argue in favor of moving toward examinations of specific religions quickly (with an emphasis on the narratives they tell and the claims they make about themselves) rather than dwelling in the abstract.
A number of different comments have suggested that we focus on the specific details of different religions. But it all depends on what your purpose is. Fact gathering is important, yes, and knowing the details of different religions may be intrinsically interesting, yes, but that doesn't mean that a theory of religion "in the abstract" isn't useful. Scientific theories, in general, help us understand phenomena by unifying them within a common framework. Sometimes these phenomena are superficially diverse but turn out to be deeply connected. Theories that reveal these deep connection can be useful and satisfying, like other scientific theories.
ReplyDeleteAlso, sub-sub is free to adapt certain aspects of Buddhism to his naturalistic framework. There are plenty of naturalists and other intellectuals who do this. One is no more required to take on whatever vestiges of Buddhism exist in other traditions than a Christian is required to take on every vestige of that religious tradition. Some forms of Buddhism certainly are non-theistic and compatible with a kind of naturalism, as well as not doctrinally heavy. But, then, so are some forms of Christianity.
Finally, some comments suggest this hyper-ecumenical move which ends up making just about everyone religious (except nihilists!) by defining God as something so general that no one can deny it. That seems problematic to me. The interesting phenomena of religion, after all, is the supernatural part. If we define God so generally as, for example, that which is responsible for the origin of the universe, then everyone believes in God. But this seems like a degeneration of any interesting discussion rather than a furthering of it.
I realize that I should also address something that may be bothering some readers. I am aware that it's not PC to characterize particular religions as good or bad. But I think there's a little bit of an inconsistency on the part of some believers. On the one hand, some of the religious claim that their faith and practice are a source (and maybe *the* source) of morality. So, according to these people, their religion requires reverence and assent because it's good and leads to a good life and salvation. Well, ok, if that's the case then these religious people must accept the cost of such a claim. The cost is that we, the rest of civilization, will asses your standing in the world based on your moral behavior. You are asking us to make value judgements about your cultural system of beliefs and practices.
ReplyDeleteBut then, as I said, that's not very PC. How can I judge a religion? It's not fair to characterize a religion as good or bad, because all religions are cultural phenomena that do not deserve to be ranked from high to low, from good to bad. Well, I would agree if religions were *just* cultural systems that don't claim any special standing for themselves. But of course, many of them do. Or, I should say, many members of these religions do. So, many religious people want it both ways. They want to claim that their religion is special as the only way to god and the only source of morality, and at the same time say that it's unfair to judge their cultural system. I'm sorry, but you can't have it both ways.
I can appreciate why Micheal would question my knowledge of Buddhism and Buddhist history. At the same time, I can't help but wonder, if I had said that Christianity was an exemplary religion, would anyone have challenged me? I'm pretty sure that most of my readers so far have been Christians. And it's not surprising that some might not appreciate this idea of deciding what's a good religion and what's a bad one, as I explained above. So, in the interest of not offending anyone while at the same time critically assessing the pros and cons of religion, I'll change the approach here. Let's put it this way. What is it about Buddhism that encourages people to make religion a personal affair which provides meaning and moral guidance, and at the same time discourages them from conflict with other people who are members of a different religion? Whatever it is, it is something good. It's something that I feel comfortable giving a moral value to, in the same way that I'm comfortable saying that there is something about religious extremism that's bad. There is something about certain religious communities and practices that have encouraged the kind of violence and close-mindedness that I wrote about in my previous comment.
I think a better way to put it is that, when I say Buddhism is an exemplary religion, I mean that there are things about Buddhism that we can all learn from. That doesn't mean that everything about Buddhism is peachy keen and all other religions are dysfunctional. I just mean that Christians and Jews and Muslims can learn a few things from Buddhists. But many members of the Abrahamic religions don't see it that way, from what I gather. Yet, I also gather that Buddhists are much more likely to recognize that they can learn something from the Abrahamic faiths. Now, why is that?