This source for part of the blog (i.e. me) must confess to being too pompous and argumentative in recent posts, so I’m hoping this will be mellower.
So, in diametric opposition to my normal posts, I am going to list what’s good in religions.
Almost all religions meet our need for a philosophy of existence. We all feel a sense of wonder at the universe. As far as I can see human beings will never grasp the nature of being, just because we only have our human capacity for thinking. This is not an argument against pushing our capacity to know things to its limit. From our perspective, the universe can only know itself through us.
The best of religion provides a language by which we can conceive of our existence. (In this sense only, I agree that science acts in the same way as religion.)
I suppose that’s saying the main value of religion is in its contribution to philosophy. There are plenty of other valuable things that religion can provide, such as a sense of community, rites of passage, rituals to help us deal with the unbearable. But we would barely be able to conceieve of anything in philosophical terms without concepts that have been refined over thousands of years.
Religion provides metaphors for the knowledge that is always hanging outside our grasp.
Thought alone is not enough to express the complexity of our experience.
Where religion – and any magical belief systems – are distinct from raw philosophy is that they let us interact with the knowledge. They can integrate wonder into our logical-thought knowledge of the nature of the universe. They offer ways to express this physically – good works, prayer, dance, song, exercise, observing fasts, taking part in pilgrimages, meditation or, even, fighting as in the case of kung fu.
Buddhism, taoism, hinduism, African pantheism and so on all seem to achieve this much more creatively than the God-of- Abraham religions. However, I suspect that may be partly because, in the West, we tend to know them only after any dubious social content has been filtered out (e.g. the caste system) and their philosophy has been interpreted for us. There are also plenty of brilliant things in the God-of- Abraham-style religions.
In that sense, even those of who can admire myth and metaphor without taking it as literally true can play with the ideas. This is a bit like being the kids who know there isn’t really a tooth fairy but will take the coin the tooth fairy leaves.
The problems with religion are to do with power and ideology. The more powerful the religion, the grubbier it becomes. Religions are not just collections of insights and myths. They are forms of social organisation. They amass resources. They hold power or provide support to the powerful.
I disagree with Dawkins where he treats religion as if it, in itself, has power to cause social effects. I feel that this ignores the ideological role of religion, i.e. the power to influence opinions in favour of particular social groups. (Just because something serves as ideology doesn’t mean it’s not true.) Social change and religion are inextricable, each feeding on and shaping each other. I don’t think it matters what we actually believe about the nature of the universe or morality. It matters what we do about it. Specifically, what we do to people who think using a different set of metaphors.
The trend towards fundamentalism in several religions can be explained in a million ways, and although i am obviously more than tempted, (Curse this hubris [note use of religious metaphors]) I’ll have to pass on that now, or this blog will never get published. The relevance here is that you can’t just dismiss it as silly nonsense (OK, you can) We need to think about what people are expressing when they hold to those beliefs and try to address the causes.
(Tough on religion, tough on the causes of religion, following Blair.)
Sorry, I was blatantly lying about not being so pompous and argumentative. I promise to try harder in the next blog.
