"How would a pragmatist argue that religion isn't a good tool?" Good question,
Steve. I guess that the first thing to do is get a lot more specific about what
we mean exactly by the term "religion". Despite the pragmatic theory of truth,
the MOQ rejects beliefs based on faith, tradition and authority and yet, in
another sense of the word, there is an important "religious" element. In other
words, the mysticism of the MOQ is very different from the conventional forms
of theism, to which the vast majority of today's Christians subscribe, and yet
they can both count as religious in some sense. The there is the matter of what
makes a good tool? If we take it to mean anything that helps us cope or makes
us feel better then we can get into some very hot water. Among psychologist and
sociologists there is a thing called the deprivation theory of religion, which
claims that religion caters to those who have been deprived of certain
emotional and psychological needs. You know, the sigh of the oppressed, the
opiate of he masses, the expression of infantile wishes and the fear of death
and, less grandly, people who just need love, acceptance, certainty and a sense
of meaning or purpose. I don't think the deprivation theory of religion
explains everything but it pretty well describes the psychological motives of
many, if not most, religious people. The Christian myth no longer functions the
way it is supposed to. The symbols have been literalized, concretized and have
lost their meaning AS symbols. So the people who continue to subscribe, for the
most part, have more or less agreed to believe lots of things that just aren't
believable, actual virgin births and literally coming back from the dead, etc.
And these are the people that the New Atheists are talking about. Sadly, they
take the symbols literally too and fail to understand that "the promised land
is not about real estate", as Campbell puts it, anymore than the
fundamentalists do. Sam Harris is my favorite of the new atheists because he
does not dismiss the value or validity of meditation or of religious experience
per se, as you know. Carl Jung disagreed with Freud almost entirely. Where
Freud thought that religious belief indicated an unhealthy mind, Jung thought
spiritual development was essential to human health. (Campbell was mostly a
Jungian but he takes Freud and other psychologists on board as well.) At the
same time, however, Jung saw a serious failure in the conventional forms of
Christianity such as in his own father's church. Even as a child, he saw that
his father and uncles preached sermons without having any actual religious
experience. He could see that they didn't know what they were talking about and
that they only believed on basis of faith rather than knowing from their own
experience. In that sense, he thought, religion often prevents spiritual
development. His stance was empirical in a way that is similar to radical
empiricism. He considered religious experience to be a psychological fact. His
religious claims begin and end with those facts and he insists we can't go
beyond that to assert supernatural entities as the cause of such experience.
The archetypal images that present themselves in such experience will always to
images that the experiencer can relate to, depending on one's particular
context, but this is not taken as proof of anything beyond the experience
itself. I mean, it doesn't matter if you have a vision of Jesus, Buddha or Bob.
The hero can wear any number of a thousand different faces but it's essentially
the same vision, the same experience and is not taken as a legitimate reason to
make any ontological claims. And the test of the "truth" of these kinds of
experiences comes in subsequent experience. Did the experience result in some
kind of growth or transformation of consciousness? Does this change lead to a
difference in the quality of life? I think these sorts of questions are a
better way to get at what it means to have a good tool, a belief that proves to
be good in terms of how we live with it as opposed to a more casual, hey,
whatever works for you kind of thing. Otherwise people who fit the deprivation
theory can say religion "works" for them simply because it provides emotional
comfort. Opium feels good but it will take over your life and eventually kill
you.
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