War of Ideas against Islam Chapter # 6 Objectivity about Religion: Functionalism There is an entire literature about the basic elements of religion, any and all religions. This literature began in the 19th century and extends to our own time. This does not exclude the fact that many scholars of religion have a religion, but it does operate on the basis of objective research, as objective as anyone can make it, in which no single religion is privileged as 'above' scientific scrutiny. This is called "functionalism" and its "Ur texts" are William James' 1902 book, Varieties of Religious Experience, and Emile Durkheim's 1912 opus, The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life. A much more recent example is Pascal Boyer's 2002 volume, Religion Explained. There also are scholarly periodicals of the subject; best known is the Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion. A good example of someone who was both a functionalist and a sincere religious believer was Albert Schweitzer, the famous Lutheran medical missionary in tropical Africa and a scholar of Buddhism and Hinduism -as well as an accomplished musician and Bach expert. We might also add Alan Watts, the distinguished Zen Buddhist and scholar of world religions, psychology, and Christian tradition. There are others but to give you an idea. Jonathan Haidt, the social psychologist, might also be considered as a religious functionalist. What is clear is that although the traditional faiths of the world are very different in many details, functionally most (not all, most) are based on a large but limited number of moral teachings, a limited number of customs and rituals, a limited number of ideas classified as sacred, and a limited number of types of social organization. Hence religions can be classified various ways, not just one way. For example, there are religions that emphasize rituals and ceremonies vs. religions that are very informal and for whom rituals simply do not mean very much -and everything in between. Or you can classify religions on the basis of belief systems, a spectrum that features monotheism at one extreme and animism or polytheism at the other. Some faiths emphasize the role of a Divine Couple and their son or daughter, as does the Ishtar religion best known from Mesopotamia, and as did Canaanite religion at the time that the Hebrew Bible was being written; this is called "henotheism." Christianity is a hybrid, formally monotheist but with a Goddess-like role for the Virgin Mary -at least within Catholicism and eastern Orthodoxy. The concept of a divine son is henotheistic and dates to the Epic of Gilgamesh, which means some time before 2000 BC, in which the hero of that story is described as one third human and two thirds divine. The Epic was known in the time of Christ; part of the text was discovered among the Dead Sea Scrolls at Qumran. Or religion can feature a host of sacred beings (sprits, etc) while giving emphasis to a leading God or Goddess as does traditional Judaism with its "Sons of the Most High" and hundreds of angels and coterie of archangels. Zoroastrianism is similar. There are also very tolerant religions and extremely intolerant religions and those religions that are somewhat tolerant. You can also classify religions behaviorally, which is most relevant here, since certain types of behaviors are generally regarded as defining religion itself, such as rituals that rally the faithful around a common cause, rituals that give each gender special roles and sometimes even specialized
vocabularies, rituals that support a unique aesthetic outlook, and the like. Along with such things goes in-group / out-group dynamics, demand for conformity of belief, shared mythologies, rules of conduct, elevated hero worship that bestows divine status on dead exemplars of faith, and the like. What many Christians do not seem to realize -the idea never enters their minds- is that a classification based solely on whether a religion is monotheistic can lead to absurd results. Hence many Christians in India whose traditions are Anglican in one way or the other, are allied with Muslims because Islam is also monotheistic, as if belief necessarily is more important that morality and basic human decency. Which is a ridiculous point-of-view. And which explains why large numbers of Hindus resent the presence of Christians in their midst. Unfortunately, Hindus may not make basic distinctions between Anglicans and American Evangelicals or converts to Evangelical Christianity, who have no Church of England connections at all, and who may have views like those of E. Stanley Jones, who was more than willing to learn from Hindus, to work with Hindus as friends, and who strongly recommended openness to the traditions of India as compatible with Christian faith. Of course, not all Evangelicals share this outlook. Some, like the 7th Day Adventists, are accommodationist toward Islam. About which, personally, I regard this as a huge mistake. However, things are not so simple. The 7th Day Adventists also run a large orphanage in India for children born blind from birth. Does anyone seriously believe that their work for these boys and girls should be opposed? It is necessary to judge case-by-case and even then it may be very difficult to do so. None of this presupposes selected people wearing distinctive garments or making use of incense or many other things associated with various religions. This is pointed out because of a near-universal tendency for people to associate "religion" with their particular religion, whatever faith tradition they grew up with as a rule. But, to use an example, no-one would accuse Baptists as being irreligious yet there is no priesthood except the "priesthood of all believers", no rituals that are commonplace in Catholic or Greek Orthodox churches, no unique religious garments, only two sacraments, not seven, and so forth. We are talking about "essentials." Religions can turn out badly, of course. Not even counting Islam, there have been a large number of groups through the years which have been the worst possible examples of religion. This is to refer to the People's Temple of Jim Jones, Aum Shinri Kyo of Japan, Heaven's Gate, the David Koresh cult, the Thugees of colonial-era India (hence the word "thug"), the Krishna Venta cult in 1950s California, the so-called "Boxers" of 19th century China, the pretentious cult of personality of Father Divine in the 1930s, Scientology, Voodoo, and still other travesties of faith. Religion isn't always good; sometimes it may be damnable. But generally this is to discuss a phenomenon that does great good in society as it has as far back as the archeological record permits reasonable conclusions, which takes us to maybe 30,000 BC and possibly even 50,000 BC. Not to a pristine form of monotheism, there is no evidence of any such thing, but to a version of religion featuring shamans (holy men, sometimes holy women), musical performances, spiritual dancing, rites of passage, sacred objects, and creative use of symbols. Think of the traditional religion of American Indian tribes like the Cherokee, or think of Shinto. That is, the basic elements of religion are "hard wired" into us and have been ever since some time during the Paleolithic era. These elements in that remote time took the form of Shamanism; in the classical era they emerged as Hinduism, Judaism, Zoroastrianism, Buddhism, Christianity, and so forth. Which is not a comment about truth value. Yet you can plausibly argue that given human propensities "God" chose to reveal himself making good use of these things. Or that, as in Wisdom of Solomon in the Apocrypha, or Proverbs 7 and 8 in the Old Testament, God and his (female) Wisdom did so. How does anyone leave religion? That is kind of like asking how anyone can leave his or her psychology behind, over and done with. Conventional religion may be shoved aside but religion can take innumerable forms and no sooner does someone declare independence from religion he or she enters a world of alternative faith -where ideology becomes a substitute for religion or some philosophy takes this role -as in the case of Deep Ecology- or where a new religion per se eventually captures a wayward soul. Some of this is summarized quite nicely in comments made at the site able2know.org under the heading philforum. Here are two of the better ones: ----- I remember a quote in the beginning of a book about Freud about how so many of the ambitious new theories of the Moderns were not as new as they seemed but rather it was like an explorer sailing off in search of the New World but somewhere in the journey they get turned around somehow and end up arriving at a different shore of the same continent from which they began without recognizing it ----- [It seems] obvious to me that many have made Marxism an alternative to religious orthodoxy, but what can an alternative to religion be, but another religion? Marxism, scientism, and various other forms of secular religion could not have developed without the historical process that was initiated by the religious cultures. But you could say, they take many of the bad aspects of institutional religiosity, such as ideology, authoritarianism, and so on, with none of the spirituality or other positive virtues, such as they were. And you end up with the worst of both worlds, I think... ----- It has also been observed that religious imagery can be transferred to entirely secular phenomena without skipping a beat. What, in religion, is meant to be taken literally, or, anyway, taken very seriously as an approximation, may, in a strictly political context be regarded as a metaphor, nonetheless may be very much in evidence. Hence, during the Cold War the Soviet Union was seen -in Ronald Reagan's wording- as an "evil empire." Probably no-one in America took this figure of speech at face value but is nonetheless captured something of the feelings of Americans towards their sworn adversary. Within Marxism itself, the prediction that in the end there would be a great proletarian revolution which would finally overthrow the rotten Capitalist system had overtones of Armageddon, the last battle en route to establishing the Kingdom of Heaven on Earth. Within the United States there was frequent use of the idea of a "city on a hill" to describe the new nation as a beacon to all the world, an idea borrowed whole cloth from the Gospels. Hence America was also called a "New Zion," which means pretty much the same thing as "New Jerusalem," something still found as a common expression among Mormons. In Utah we find Zion National Park, Zion Mercantile Exchange, and Zion Canyon. But there is a Zion in Illinois (on the shores of Lake Michigan), Mount Zion (also in Illinois), a Mount Zion in Georgia, a town named Zion in Minnesota, and another Zion in Pennsylvania. Transference of faith takes place because it is functional; when we can no longer continue as part of one religion we automatically gravitate into another. The next religion may not be a formal faith at all. The point is that we will find something, anything, because we can't live without it. A number of theories have been developed in recent years to try and explain what is going on. Most well know is the "God gene" hypothesis, which has been criticized on various grounds and which is at best a tenuous view. The problem is that this theory tries to locate a sort of religious instinct to a specific gene in human biology, namely, _vesicular monoamine transporter 2_ (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vesicular_monoamine_transporter_2) (VMAT2), which, as the Wikipedia article on the subject tells us, supposedly "predisposes humans towards _spiritual_ (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spirituality) or _mystic_ (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mysticism) experiences." Among other things this gene is supposed to imbue people with a sense of optimism, a quality that, unlike pessimism, has survival value. People who are naturally optimistic do better, are more successful in life, and have better track records in the mating game. The gene in question "acts by altering _monoamine_ (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monoamine) levels; " as such it could be measurable with sufficient experimentation. However, as a variety of researchers have noted, this mechanistic model of religion is hopelessly naive and doesn't begin to account for the complexities of religion and the obvious fact that matters of faith are conditioned by culture, psychological propensities, sexual relationships, and so forth. And it assumes that a biological tendency toward religion is the product on one gene alone rather than a combination of genes or even as a byproduct of a small number of biological processes acting in concert. Still, the idea that religion is "hard wired" into us because of the forces of evolution has proven to be increasingly suggestive to scientists and others, if for no other reason the ubiquity of religion and the obvious fact that "God won't go away" or at least religion won't go away inasmuch as something very much like religion keeps popping up in entirely non-religious contexts as if human nature is telling us that some kind of faith is vital to our best interests and is part of who we are. On the subject of manifestations of religion in American popular culture see William Dean's 2002 book, The American Spiritual Culture. The text discusses how various pastimes like movies and Jazz have religious elements, especially sports like football. And having lived in Kentucky I know from experience that the joke about how basketball is the official religion of the commonwealth isn't much of a joke at all. And anyone familiar with Chicago can tell you about the religion of the Chicago Cubs National League team which had not won a World Series in 108 years, until 2016. Cubs fans never stopped being believers all that time, theirs has always been an unshakable faith unlike any baseball team in US history. During the past 15 years or so a considerable literature on the subject of neurotheology has arisen, sometimes called "spiritual neuroscience." This field is a recognized part of conventional neuroscience; there is nothing delusional about it, and it is unrelated to pseudo-science. The Wikipedia article on this topic tells us that the discipline is predicated on the view that "there is a _neurological_ (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neurological) and _evolutionary_ (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evolutionary) basis for _subjective experiences_ (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Subjective_experience) traditionally categorized as_spiritual or religious_ (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Religious_experience) . " There is, in fact, a "neurological basis for religious experiences." Still, there are limitations. Mostly this is about what Abraham Maslow called "peak experiences," inner mystical phenomena, and the like. Hence most research to date has focuses on such things as: _Spiritual_ (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Supernatural) awe a feeling of o_neness_ (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monism) with the universe ecstatic _trance_ (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Altered_state_of_consciousness) , and a_ltered states of consciousness_ (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Altered_states_of_consciousness) Hence laboratory experiments with Catholic nuns at prayer, Buddhist monks during meditation, devout Mormons at prayer, and so forth. Sure enough, parts of the cerebrum light up on brain scan equipment when people are in the midst of spiritual practices. Spirituality, in other words, is "associated with activation in _nucleus accumbens_ (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nucleus_accumbens) , _ventromedial prefrontal cortex_ (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ventromedial_prefrontal_cortex) , and frontal attentional regions." Which doesn't tell us what we most would like to know but does tell us that religion is no illusion and that it is linked to real world brain activity. And that fact, in turn, says that much else of a religious nature in addition to mystical experience is connected to brain architecture and processes. Indeed, work on identifying innate religion is well under way. Although neuroscience is basic to this research other fields of study are part of the picture, like developmental psychology. Hence Marc Hauser's 2006 volume, Moral Minds, that tells us that a suite of moral propensities surfaces in children around 4 or 5 years of age. This is before anything like culture outside of the family has any chance of having an effect. Regardless, for example, pre-schoolers and kindergarteners develop skills at learning all about lies, why they are told, and what the intentions of those doing the lying actually are and whether the motivations are good or bad. Especially important, kids of this age also develop that sensitivity known as empathy. Robert Wright takes the view, discussed in his 2009 book, The Evolution of God, that reciprocal altruism is central to all religion. Such altruism depends on a well developed sense of empathy, not just in one person, in entire populations. This is the "scratch-my-back-and-I'll-scratch-your's" effect. Yes, it feels right to do something nice for a fellow human being; it feels good. It is a virtue. At the same time it would be swell, maybe not immediately but sooner or later, if the person you helped out would reciprocate and do something nice for you. _Frans de Waal_ (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frans_de_Waal) , cited in Wikipedia, argues that "all social animals have had to restrain or alter their behavior for group living to be worthwhile. Pre-moral sentiments evolved in primate societies as a method of restraining individual selfishness and building more cooperative groups. For any social species, the benefits of being part of an altruistic group should outweigh the benefits of individualism. For example, a lack of group cohesion could make individuals more vulnerable to attack from outsiders. Being part of a group may also improve the chances of finding food. This is evident among animals that _hunt in packs_ (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pack_hunter) to take down large or dangerous prey." To return to Robert Wright we also know that because of reciprocal altruism, people are “designed” to settle into mutually beneficial relationships with other people, people whom they can count on for things ranging from food to valuable gossip to social support, and who in turn can count on them. We enter these alliances almost without thinking about it, because our genetically based emotions draw us in. We feel gratitude for a favor received, along with a sense of obligation, which may lead us to return the favor. We feel growing trust of and affection for people who prove reliable reciprocators (aka “friends”), which keeps us entwined in beneficial relationships. This is what feelings like gratitude and trust are for —the reason they’re part of human nature. This makes perfectly good sense to Pascal Boyer, someone who takes the view that something fundamental about religion, perhaps its most important characteristic, should be explained as maximizing the value of reciprocal altruism by reinforcing incentives to be altruistic. That is, we evolved as a species to not only be altruistic as much as possible but to believe in whatever makes sense that reinforces altruism -which we very much need as an interdependent species. My success depends on your success, your success depends on mine, and so forth for everyone you know. With the caveat that free riders need to be punished so that everyone contributes his or her fair share. One very effective way to do this is to believe in spirits or other invisible beings -gods or goddesses- who can know your thoughts and intentions, who monitor your every move, and mete out justice at the appropriate time to those who do not behave morally. Hence religions featuring divine beings are systems to enforce 'contracts' -either between human and human or between humans and deities. There are at least two other methods of creating a society based on mutual helpfulness. One is the Buddhist system whereby the highest value is personal integrity. You know -as a result of learning Buddhist ethics- what is morally right and what is wrong. If you do not do what is right you destroy yourself, this is the nature of human reality. Maybe not all at once but eventually all the evil you may do catches up with you and there may be nothing left of yourself, you have no remaining self-respect or pride. Much better to do the right thing, always, not only to have a clean conscience but for the sake of your integrity, your self worth. The other method is outlined in George Orwell.s book, 1984. Create a society where it seems that state authority, or some kind of powerful authority, follows you wherever you go, monitors everything you say, and never quits. Maybe this authority cannot literally monitor you 100% of the time but all that is necessary is that you believe this is happening. To reinforce the idea everyone you know has this belief and corrects you verbally at any time you say the wrong thing or step out of line. Religions can take any of these forms regardless of metaphysics. In addition to Buddhism, there is another example, that of spiritual beings who judge human intentions and conduct and who set the best possible examples of moral conduct. This is the pattern for Christianity, Confucianism, Hinduism, Zoroastrianism, Judaism, and so forth. Secular religions may follow the third option, with one major religion, Islam, setting the pattern for a deity who is basically malevolent but mystical and sometimes merciful, a sort of hybrid between most traditional faiths and the kind of nightmare system outlined by Orwell. Which should make it clear why religion is inescapable in life even if the form it takes may be very different than what you may be used to from your experiences in modern society. But is Leftism, specifically, a religion? -- -- Centroids: The Center of the Radical Centrist Community <[email protected]> Google Group: http://groups.google.com/group/RadicalCentrism Radical Centrism website and blog: http://RadicalCentrism.org --- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Centroids: The Center of the Radical Centrist Community" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to [email protected]. 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