Me too. I was brought up in CofE schools, and went to CofE churches, my brother and sister-in-law ended up being ordained in the CofE in their retirement. But somehow none of that resonates with me as anything more than another human work of art: and it’s as art that I appreciate its language and the music. I’d happily see public subsidy to keep cathedral choirs and services from the Book of Common Prayer going, because it’s part of our cultural and community heritage.
In the end, it’s the sustenance of community that matters. It’s when religion is used to divide and withdraw into self-congratulatory and self-righteous intolerance (quite against its own precepts) that it deserves to be opposed.
You are not expected to “understand” religion. You are expected to comply and obey. Religions are, first and foremost, control agencies, some worse than others.
Judaism, Islam and the Roman Catholic church are particularly adept at hiding the control aspects by ritualizing the religious behavior expected of their constituents. The more rituals involved, the greater the grip.
I think you’re missing the historical aspect. Religion was needed to provide structure, rules, meaning and morals to peoples lives. It kept the barbarians and savages in check, and was a better than the alternative of simply having whoever is the strongest do what they want. Of course NOW it’s a bit outdated… but it still has value, providing community, comfort, culture etc.
But essentially religion brings order, which is much better than chaos or the law of the jungle. Also, most of the religions tenets that we abhor today were progressive reforms at the time. For example “a tooth for a tooth, an eye for an eye” was to prevent people from taking TOO MUCH revenge. Same things with Islams polygamy. Before that, people could take as many wives as they wanted, without bothering to care for them, but Islam limited it to four and set up rules about it. So religion equals rules. Not necessarily rules that are very useful today, but that served a purpose when they were created.
Also, the flatland of scientific rationalism and atheism has a lot of flaws and fails to explain many of the important things to people, which is why religion or spirituality is still needed.
And this, right here, is one of those “at best, half-truths.” At least some branches of Christianity and Judaism have a strong tradition of study, debate, and argument as religious activities. If you want to understand religion (or a religion or a particular aspect of a religion), there are plenty of resources available. Yes, some of these are mere indoctrination or proselytizing, but some are reasonable and intellectually honest. If you’re going to deny the existence of things like this that I’ve seen with my own eyes, why should I pay any attention when you deny the existence of God?
The flatland of secular rationalism has produced a much better world and society than the theocracies of the past.
Also, religion is still trespassing on scientific grounds, such as churches making declarations about evolution.
If religion really is useful in guiding spiritual growth, it needs to stay on its own side of the fence, without making contra-factual claims about testable claims. As long as it’s solely a matter of personal faith, then fine: believe whatever you want. Just leave the rest of us free to dissent.
Yes… this is what I like to call a failure to communicate. I am not saying that religion is better than secular rationalism, I am saying that religious structure is better than no structure. We needed laws in order to become civilized, and those laws became our religion in order to suppress the narcissistic and barbarian aspects of human nature. As such religion has served a very valuable role, and without it we wouldn’t be able to HAVE secular rationalism. Nowadays most of us don’t need God to tell us to not simply murder people and take what we want, but there was a time in human history when we were not so civilized.
Secular rationalism is higher on the scale of evolution than authoritarian religion, but it also fails to address certain very important issues that religion actually could. Religion gave us an answer to who we are and why we are here, for example, secular rationalism doesn’t. Now those answers were deconstructed by rationalism which left us with a hole to fill, and there rationalism has failed. You can argue that it’s not up to science to provide us with those answers, and I might agree partly with you, but I actually think that science in the future might. Unfortunately much of the world still seem to be locked in the Science vs Religion battle, which is very un-constructive.
The way I see it there is an external/objective and and internal/subjective world, and currently science is limited to the external/objective. It talks about and investigates “things”, but can’t explain the subjective experience of things or the way the internal interacts with the external, because (most) science pretty much dismisses the existence or relevance of the internal/subjective, trying to reduce everything to external objects.
The classical way to put it would be The Big Three, where you have the Good, the True and the Beautiful. What is True is up to science to decide because it can be verified objectively, but what is Good is decided by interpersonal agreement, and what is Beautiful is entirely subjective. My issue with science is that it either doesn’t recognize the other two, or tries to colonize areas where it doesn’t belong. This leads to what is called “flatland” where everything is pushed into just one perspective, thus leaving out much of what life is actually about.
My current perspective is that there are four quadrants subjective/individual, subjective/collective, objective/singular and objective/plural, and that the universe we inhabit, as well as ourselves, are made up of holons rather than things or processes. A holon being a whole/part, rather than just a whole, a process or a part. For example a cell in my body is a holon, meaning it is both a whole in itself and part of a bigger whole. Looking downwards in the holarchy it in turn consists of molecules who are whole in themselves, but also part of the bigger cells. This holds true in both directions for ever. I am a whole individual, which is part of an eco-system, which is part of a biosphere, which is part of a solar system, which is part of a galaxy, which is part of the universe.
Another problem I find with rationalist secularism is that it is incredibly arrogant towards its predecessors. I think there is a lot of wisdom to be found in the contemplative traditions that preceded it. For example I find that buddhism has a lot to teach us about how our consciousness and awareness works that is often way ahead of where the scientific community is currently at, because buddhists have been investigating the interior/subjective quadrant for 2.500 years, something which the scientific community has almost completely ignored up until recently. If you automatically assume that only the external/objective reality has any value and that everything that preceded the advent of secular rationalism is nonsense, you are handicapping yourself and missing out on a lot of wisdom and insight.
In my perspective, both science and religion would fall under the heading of philosophy.
But once again, I’m not advocating what people commonly refer to as religion, meaning a suspension of critical thought in order to accept authoritarian rules. I do however appreciate “spirituality” which I define as an attempt to investigate and understand the experience of existence.
For example I think using buddhist meditation techniques in order to investigate the sense of self, raise the level of your cognitive abilities or achieve peace and happiness is a very good idea, but I don’t think it is necessary to adhere to any dogma or believe in any specific myths.
Religion per my definition doesn’t really have much of a place in a post-modern society, but spirituality very definitely does. And I think that if science can learn to separate between religion and spirituality, we can achieve greatness as we can apply scientific methods and technology to the investigation of the internal/subjective experience.
You think the strongest didn’t do what they wanted to anyway? It is to the benefit of the strongest to impose and enforce laws, and have people to back him up. Are you claiming that religion in the past successfully challenged this? No, religion usually enforced rule by the strong, who could claim that not only should he rule through power, but because the Gods wanted him to, backed up by the priests. Priests who had problems with this wouldn’t last long.
Limitations on revenge predate the Bible, and were more or less secular rules.
Perhaps Islam limited polygamy in Asia - but polygamy was an obsolete practice in much of the world before Islam began. And Roman monogamy had not much to do with religion. Greek and Roman gods were not big into enforcing morals.
Science does recognize them - it doesn’t get involved with determining what is good or what is beautiful since they both are subjective. It can and does get involved by measuring what kind of people do things considered good, and what kind of people consider what kind of things beautiful.
I’d say it is pretty evident that having rules is better than not having rules, and that is what religion gave us, they gave us rules and structures that allowed us to build societies. I am not aware of ANY society or civilization that did not start out as religious, and if I had to pick between living under an authoritarian regime or in complete anarchy, I would pick the regime.
The reason modern and post-modern people can’t see the benefits of religion is because they compare it to modern and post-modern ideas. Of course religion looks bad then. But at the time it was better than the alternative is one part of what I am saying, and the other part is that if it wasn’t for religion we wouldn’t have secular rationalism or anything post-modern. Every society has developed through these stages, just as we as individuals go through certain stages in our development.
I’m also saying that I’m a bit fed up with the arrogance of atheists who don’t seem to understand this, and who also don’t seem to understand that even today, religion offers things that are needed for some people.
Like when you’re a kid, you need rules set down from your parents, and you won’t always understand why those rules are needed, you may not even have the capacity to understand it yet. At that point your parents play the same role as religion does.
And that has nothing to do with the experience itself, which is exactly my point. In your post you have confused the quadrants that I were talking about. A statistical report on how many people liked the Mona Lisa has nothing to do with my actual subjective experience of Mona Lisa.
And science has not (yet) been able to explain the interaction between consciousness and matter satisfactorily. Science can basically not explain how it is that my consciousness can cause my fingers to type out this message. You either end up with “the ghost in the machine” or cartesian dualism, neither of which is a good solution. Fortunately the scientific community seems to realize this problem and we can move towards a deeper understanding in the future, but that will eventually lead to discarding the materialist/physicalist paradigm which a LOT of people who consider themselves scientific are very attached to.
Yet…I’m not sure I agree. It seems to me that religion is the primitive attempt to explain things, which must be set aside as the true explanations become known. Religion becomes a kind of Band-Aid over ignorance. Ignorance hurts…but just making up a story and saying, “Zeus and Thor make lightning and thunder” seems to be a really bad alternative to “I don’t know.”
Now, this may just be an intrinsic limitation of human nature. We can’t handle “I don’t know.” If one guy says, “I don’t know,” and another guy says, “Zeus and Thor,” the latter guy is the one the crowds will listen to.
But, like a lot of other innate instinctive behaviors of our species, I think this one, too, is more self-destructive than helpful. Because the next step, all too often in history, has been “Those rotten Thor-worshipers! It’s their fault we had a hailstorm! Kill them and burn their church!”
You may be right. Perhaps it was a necessity…once. Is it any more? Do we still need intellectual swaddling clothes in the information age?
But if those answers are religious in nature, then they are also just “made up.” The Hindu answer is different than the Jewish answer, and they’re both different from the neo-Pagan answer. They fail (in my opinion) by being so very strongly mutually contradictory.
I’m not even sure I agree there. Psychology is a science, and so are other sub-branches, such as the cognitive sciences which investigate human perception. I would agree that there are questions science doesn’t have answers for – or even approaches – but that, in my opinion, is a bad reason to retreat to “Zeus/Thor” explanations.
Here, I’m willing to agree. So long as religion is austere, remote, and individual, then it no more offends me than anyone’s personal taste in cuisine, music, drama, and so on. If you like anchovies on your pizza, or prefer a monotheistic explanation to the cosmos, that’s your business, and I can’t possibly be bothered by either.
There is some leftover resentment from being burned at the stake a few times… More seriously, I cannot find the “wisdom” in making up stories and claiming they are “ineffably true.”
Science didn’t really have the tools until very recently – and, alas, much of what has been learned has come about from horrors. Warfare gave us our first insights into the structure of the brain – from head injuries. Cerebral strokes are also hugely informative (per Oliver Sacks) and also horrible beyond all horror.
Yet this kind of reductionism has given us answers that Buddhism has never dreamed of. While Buddhism is still asking about the Buddha nature of clouds, real medical science has developed medications to treat obsessive-compulsive and depressive disorders.
Again, I prefer an honest “I don’t know” to “Here’s an explanation I just made up,” even if the latter is more comforting or gratifying. Yet mankind is not constituted to agree with this on a large scale, and so religion continues in force, wherever ignorance (in a non vilifying sense) holds sway.
Only, in my opinion (and I apologize for being so offensive in so much of how I’ve phrased this) in those realms where subjectivity is the only valid viewpoint, such as cuisine, art, and other aesthetics. Science can’t tell us whether Rachmaninoff is “better” than Tchaikovsky. Everyone must make that choice for himself and herself.
The weak sister of both. It lacks the concrete approach of science, and shies away (usually) from the external revelations of religion. Philosophy is, by and large, a system of metaphoric and analogical reasoning, making generalizations on categorical bases.
(Example, the argument that there could not be an eighth planet, because there are seven metals and seven sensory apertures in the human head. This was a serious philosophical argument in the eighteenth century!)
Frankly I think you’re wrong. I think having a nice story that explains what the world is and how it works is a LOT better than having no explanation at all. Having a correct story is better than having an incorrect one, but I don’t think not having a story is much of an option. The ideas about Zeus and Thor created a culture, which gave us an ability to form bigger communities, set up rituals that serves deeper psychological purposes etc etc. Without a narrative you simply have anarchy. But my view on religion is kind of reversed from yours, I look at it as the rules and stories BECOMING the religion, not the religion CREATING the rules and stories. Having a religion gives us the chance to incorporate our own separate life stories into a grander scheme of things that gives sense and value to it. Having no story means that I am no better than an animal, and gives me no incentive to behave better than an animal. If I believe I have a soul and that God wants me to be good and follow the rules, I am much more likely to become a decent human being. If I don’t know what I am, how anything works or what the point of anything is, I will be reduced to simply trying to pleasure myself and obeying my lower impulses. It also seems to be a completely fundamental part of our nature, since there has never (ever) been an atheistic civilization anywhere. Every little tribe we’ve found has some sort of creation myth and a relationship to the spiritual world. Whether this indicates that there is a reality to it doesn’t matter, we come pre-programmed for religion and it seems to be a phase we HAVE to go through both as individuals and societies.
No I don’t think we need religion anymore, but I do think there is a value to it. I think we can remove the pathological parts of it and reform it, while still keeping (or even enhancing) the inherent values. Religion is responsible for most of our common cultural heritage for example, and I love much of it. From music, to paintings, to stories… this is our history as humans, and I don’t want to see it destroyed, I just want to see it updated.
Actually no, they are not just made up. Many religious myths hold incredibly deep truths about human nature. Your ”problem” here is that you are taking the myths literally (which is also a problem with many religious people). If you read the Hindu Bhagavad Gita for example it is an amazing exploration of the human psyche. If you look at Greek mythology it is once again filled with archetypes explaining different human traits, stories about moral dilemmas, and full of knowledge. The idea that they are ”just made up” is horribly unfair. Shakespeare also ”made everything up”, that doesn’t mean we can’t learn from it. You just need to learn how to read it. It’s poetry, not prose.
I agree that the avant garde in psychology today is doing a very good job of this, and it is also incredibly interesting that they are now drawing on and including realizations from the different contemplative traditions, mainly buddhism. If you look at transpersonal psychology, spiral dynamics or integral theory, it’s actually very spiritual and probably gives us the best current explanation of what humans are and what is going on. But some scientists don’t even recognize psychology as a science, so you have that problem…
Sure. You can just look at religion as a form of cultural expression. Going to church is no different from going to a concert or watching a movie. And just like listening to a certain kind of music it is a way for people to build and play with the concept of identity ”I’m a buddhist” or ”I’m a hipster” or ”I’m a death metal fan”… same same. It means you have found something you like enough to make a part of your identity. If it gives you value, that’s great. I actually think it is a very good thing in many ways because it doesn’t squander resources as much as some other activities do. As an environmentally concerned person I prefer people going to church and getting a feel-good experience from that rather than buying a bunch of useless stuff or over eating.
I already covered this, but I’ll clarify. From a religious perspective there is the exoteric and the esoteric. The exoteric is the rules and stories taken literally, and the esoteric is the ”hidden truth” behind the teachings. Most people are simply unaware of the esoteric aspect of most religions. For example the average Christian has no idea what Jesus was actually talking about, but are focused on the ”story aspect”. In reality Jesus basically taught the exact same thing as the Buddhas, because he had the exact same mystical experience. But over time the message which was spiritual was corrupted and turned into a religion.
Also, the vast majority of people who have been tortured to death by religious people have been other religious people, not secular atheists.
We have always had the tools for exploring the internal/subjective quadrant of existence, the tools only apply to the external/objective, and what Buddhists have actually been doing is applying critical thought to that very thing for 2.500 years. You don’t need a microscope to investigate you feelings, sensations, emotions and thoughts, you only need consciousness. The only relevant tool in that aspect are psychedelic medicines, and we have had access to them as well for thousands of years.
I’m sorry to say, but if you think Buddhists are busy talking about the nature of clouds you do not have a lot of insight into buddhism. They are busy investigating the mind, clearing up psychological issues and attempting to reach different states of consciousness through meditation. All extremely worthwhile and interesting causes. They are also going through a big reform (the fourth turning of the wheel) which will ensure that they are a “religion” that will still be valid after modernism and post-modernism is done beating up on the religions that are not evolving.
Even the Dalai Lama, who is the head of one of the more conservative and religious sects of buddhism, has invited science to criticize and investigate their findings. You also have communities like “Buddhist Geeks” that are very much into updating buddhism and combining it with current technological and scientific advances. Buddhism is probably in many ways ahead of the secular humanists when it comes to science because they are way more dedicated to finding out the Truth and combining all of humanities insights into a more coherent whole.
I’m not so much concerned with the subjective judgements which result from experience, but the actual experience and qualia of existence itself. What is the nature of consciousness itself? How are my different cognitive abilities interacting with each other? What do I mean when I use the word I? Questions like that. They are unlikely to be answered by looking through a microscope or by getting a CAT scan.
For example I watched a video where Ken Wilber plugs himself into a machine that measures different wavelengths in his brain, and then goes on to manipulate those wavelengths completely. Basically at will making his brain produce more alpha or theta waves depending on what he wants. That proves that consciousness manipulates the electrical charges, not the other way round. So he basically disproved the materialist idea that we (meaning consciousness) are a result of biological processes, since his consciousness is controlling the processes, not the other way round. That was a pretty cool stunt and shows how much we can do with our mind once we start investigating it.
Well, I was mostly following you, right up to that last point. Up to there, I merely disagreed with you, but, shrug, opinions are like gloves… “On the one hand…”
But the idea that you require a myth to behave appropriately is, I think, extremely shoddy ethics, and sells humanity short. If people only refrain from murder and theft because they’re afraid of a deity’s vengeance, then we aren’t a moral species at all, only an enslaved one.
Besides, the facts suggest otherwise, in the form of democracy, where people can govern themselves, by laws they create themselves, for themselves, without any need for a religion.
Anyway, alas, I fear our viewpoints are too alien, each to the other. I couldn’t live in your world, I think.
Well I think you need a narrative, and if you want to call that a myth then that’s fine. That is what all cultures provide, a narrative for you to fit your personal little story into. No matter if you’re an atheist, a jew or a christian you live within a mythology or culture. You have an idea about what “being a good person” is that is constructed by that culture. I am not saying you need a religion to be a good person, I am saying you need a narrative to be a person, and that in essence, the person is a sub-narrative that is part of the bigger meta-narrative of the culture.
If you say “I am a good person” there needs to be a context. Without a context or narrative you’re not a person, you’re just a hairless ape trying to survive. The idea that atheists or post-modernists don’t have one is silly, they do, it’s just not a religious one.
Without a narrative there is not even any such thing as a “murder”, and without culture there is no such thing as “theft” because the very idea that someone owns something or that taking something from someone could be wrong is part of a narrative. And what really separates us from most animals is our ability to create and spread these narratives. Without it, no art, no science, no morals, only instincts and survival (i.e. animals).
You say that as if it troubled you: as if you had higher impulses, and wanted to do more than simply trying to pleasure yourself. But if you’ve already got that, and you already think of yourself as being “better than an animal”, and you already want to “behave better than an animal” as “a decent human being” – with no reference to religion; you just think like me anyway – then can’t you just work with that?
With or without religion, you’re in favor of art and science and morals, right?
Sorry, maybe I was not very clear about something. I never said you need religion to be a good person, I said you need a narrative to be a person at all. Culture, religious or not, provides that narrative. Without some sort of encompassing story there is no way for you to know what or who you are.
I know there is a common meme among religious people (and once again, I am not religious, but I do understand and appreciate the phenomena) that you need religion in order to be a decent or moral human being, but that is not my position. My position is that what we call a person is dependent on language and culture providing a context for the persona to emerge.
Uh, okay. So if, as you say, we’ve got “language and culture” providing that context and that narrative – and if, as you specify, ‘culture, religious or not, provides that narrative’ – then I honestly have no idea why you’re going on and on and on about religion; you should just go on and on and on about ‘culture, religious or not’.