Authority: The Core of Religion

There are many reasons why humans are attracted to the idea of a spirit-filled Universe.

"Theory of mind", which gives he brain a perception (not just a "theory") that other beings are conscious and act with intent just as we do. These days, we see this as a brain function that does not reflect reality, just as the illusion that things get smaller as they move away from us. Even our modern, scientifically-trained minds make us see life where there is movement.

Another consequence of they way we are built is a survival strategy that involves manipulation of the environment (tool use being the most obvious aspect of it). We expect to control the world around us and we are frustrated at the limitation of our power to do so. It is easy to imagine that the world can be (or actually is) controlled by a mind and a mind can be persuaded to help us do things we can't do for ourselves.

The illusion of time is strong in the human brain. We don't remember the past as well as we think but we're pretty good at using what we do remember to sharpen our survival skills. Almost by accident, in combination with our language skills, this gives us a "racial memory" that we fill with a mythical past that stretches beyond what we remember as individuals.

We are also dimly aware of the future, which is full of peril, especially to our own lives, which seem to be pre-ordained to end as mysteriously as they began. Quite naturally, we think about this a lot and wrap our thoughts with myths and stories.

Finally, language us a curse as well as a blessing. Language is unable to effectively describe its own limitations. We are always susceptible to the fallacy of confusing words with the things they stand for or, in the big picture, confusing stories with life itself.

But all this doesn't explain the role of what we refer to as a "religion". It doesn't explain the idea of "heresy" or our willingness to kill those who tell different stories, perceive different spirits behind reality and expect a different future. What I have said about human psychology is far from controversial, yet "religion" uniquely sets itself against Science, vigorously and sometimes violently defending the view that the alternate reality it constructs is not a mere product of human creativity but an account of reality itself. To the "believer", the world we live in is the illusion.

Religion is a byproduct of "civilization". We generally date the rise of civilization (literally, people living in cities) from the approximately 4000 BC, where we start to see fortified towns, kings, armies and writing to tell us what was going on. For thousands of years, the story of civilization is a chronicle of endless war and destruction as the number of "civilizations" dwindled and their power grew, along with the destructive power of their armies. People started dying in these wars by the tens of thousands. Hereditary Kings started to loot their neighbors to increase the wealth and power of their families.

But still, the people in these city-states had the same psychological needs as they had had for at last 30,000 years. They still saw their fortunes controlled by spirits, often the local god of a city or town. Sometimes the spirit behind natural forces (such as the storm or the sea).  Reading the Old Testament, perhaps the oldest volume of ancient history in popular use, we see a new role of God: He is responsible for victory in war (along with the slaughter of the enemy) and, conversely, defeat in war is when we fail to please God by following priestly law. This is a neat equation that keeps the priests in business no matter what happens.

In this context, what was going on in the mind of the citizen - a mind that has not changed since the days when "philosophy" was stories you shared with close relatives around a fire?

"Theory of Mind" has evolved into a complex system of theology.  The alternate universe is populated with an "official" pantheon, including gods who need to be flattered into sponsoring human activity by paying a new class of citizen: the priesthood. Vocabulary expands, the stories are written down and assume the status of what we would now call "history" and "Science". Cultural "memory" is collapsed and simplified, creating the illusion that current mythology is what it has been "forever", obscuring the role of human creativity.

Ability to control the world has expanded in some ways but narrowed in others. Weapons of war have improved to the point where they are more of a threat to the average citizen than a guarantee of survival. While agriculture has provided more calories per person, it has also made the city-state far more vulnerable to natural forces, such as drought and flood. Concentration of wealth has made the city-state attractive plunder for neighbors. Plundering neighbors has become an attractive alternative to finding new "raw" agricultural land. And yet, the illusion of control along with the expectation of control has grown. The fortunes of the city state seem to be in the hands of Kings and Priests. Compared to the freedom of the hunter-gatherer, the control of the individual over his own life has been reduced to the vanishing point.

In these civilizations, we begin to see an alliance between the priesthood and the Kings, which ties the political fortunes of the ruling class to the mythology of the culture. Failure to observe religious rites becomes treason. Acceptance of priestly authority becomes equivalent to acceptance of Kingly authority. For dissenters, it is no longer possible to just pack up and leave, since the whole world is chopped up into territory controlled by Kings.  Challenge to this arrangement is relatively recent. It dominated world politics for the last 2,000 years at least, but the system is still with us. A visit to 21st century Saudi Arabia will provide a modern experience of this kind of culture. No time machine is required.

But the strange thing is that the ordinary citizen has lost his natural relationship with the "spirit world". He still craves some measure of control. He still has a deep urge to influence the future and is still in full possession of the illusion that the spirits may be bribed or flattered into bending he normal course of history. How can this urge be satisfied? Well, you go to the experts: those who claim to know the mind of God. Those who know the rituals that are effective to bend the sympathy of God your way. Why just one God? The reason is simple. More than one God would imply competition for the priests. Even so, minor competition is allowed through the proliferation of thousands of local "saints", who stand in for the ancient Gods who ruled the territory of a single city. You can pick your Saint to make your case before the "one" God. If you can't shake your instinct to plead your case before an idol, you can still get your "fix" by praying to the saint of your choice. Donations appreciated of course.

But how does this work? Why do people accept the dry formulae and wordy constructions as substitutes for their in-bred passion for spiritual experience? The simple answer is "authority". They go to someone who is guaranteed to have the right answer. Not surprisingly, this authority will make sure that you distrust your own judgment, even convincing you that following your own mind is a mortal sin. Priesthood is not a good choice for a small business start-up.

Where does the priest get his authority? The answer (ludicrous as it may seem) is that he got it by "laying on of hands" by priests who had the authority, who got it from other priests, going all the way back to Peter, who got is authority from Jesus. Assuming that "being right" can be passed on like a virus this way, we are left with the obvious question of why we should think Jesus was definitely right about everything.

For Jesus to be right about everything, he needs to be "divine", a God. For this to work, you need to believe in gods, specifically this god and particularly not other gods. That's a huge leap and, historically, it has been opposed literally as soon as it arose. It was heresy punishable by death in Judea (it's why Jesus was crucified) and the "Christians" were being put to death for treason and/or heresy for centuries. Eventually, the divine status of Jesus was decided by committee and enforced by the time-old alliance between the priesthood and the King (Roman Emperor Constantine in this case).

It is important to understand that Jesus needs to be divine so He can claim ultimate authority, not the other way around (i.e. Jesus is not "right" because he's God). Before the era of political religion, the Gods were much more fun. "Infallibility" was not among their powers.

A similar story can be told about Islam, where the authority of Mohammed comes directly from Allah, but requires frequent slaughter of dissenters to this very day.

What about Buddha, who is so innocently portrayed to Western readers as "just a man". Anyone serious about Buddhism will quickly discover that a "real" Buddhist or Zen master traces his authority all the way back to Buddha by a process that's not very different from laying on of hands. The "Dharma", the teachings of Buddha have been elaborated and expanded by these hereditary authorities to create enough variation to fit just about any lifestyle. The Dharma itself is claimed to be eternally true (i.e., not subject to discussion or verification), very much like the "Word" of the Gospel of John, which effectively claimed he teachings of Jesus to be on par with, say, the law of gravity. Buddhist masters don't tend to go around making war on dissenters, but they don't spare scorn for "Westernized" versions of Buddhism that sell books in the West. At least according to the Buddhist masters, heresy is still possible in Buddhism, even though Buddha himself told his followers to be skeptical of everything, including his own teachings.

But what if we reject "religion" wholesale? Are we then able to jettison the workings of our brains that make us see spirits behind every tree and impose "meaning" on every experience.

No.

Our propensity for religion is primary. We invented Gods to satisfy our need to make sense of the world and feel some slight measure of control. Especially for those not blessed with a creative mind, nation states, political leaders and political philosophy will do as well. Even Science can be twisted into a source of authority by those who say things like "the majority of Scientists agree ..." or "Science says ...".

In fact, "Science" only tells us what is not true. Science is perpetually in the business of overturning authority. Attempts to co-opt Science for political reasons tend to come to a bad end, as do political movements that systematically deny Science.

What Science has done is to shoot down all support for any particular version of "God" put up by endless defenders of the concept.  Beginning with the Greeks, philosophy has provided us with an impressive tool kit to defend ourselves against fallacy. We are now able to use language more carefully than ever before if we chose to do so. World Religions, based as they are on a vast tissue of fallacy, cannot survive logical analysis, let alone "real world" verification.

Perhaps for the first time in human history, we can enjoy a complete divorce between what we know about the real world and what is claimed by human authority, especially what is claimed by political authority. We are also more aware than ever about the difference between what we "know" and what is actually happening in the Universe. Paradoxically, this can free our creativity, enjoy our lives and deal with our fears without paying a tax to priests for the privilege. There is no longer a need to judge the fantasies of other people as "false" or worthy of suppression.

In spite of the official claim of Science to provide only negative information, it turns out that we know an incredible amount about the world. So much, in fact, that we are amused by the world view of the "ancients" who, somehow, are regarded as authorities on everything except what turned out to be observably false. What is noticeably different about what we know now is that our knowledge is so impersonal. It's not as useful or apparently relevant as what, for example, the authors of the Bible thought they knew about creation (Genesis is a moral fable. The Big Bang is disturbingly impersonal). For example, astrology pretends to tell us about ourselves and our future but astronomy is almost entirely irrelevant. This illustrates my point that we have divorced knowledge from human fantasy. We are no longer in a position to determine truth by decree or authority.

Truth is now discovered "out there", not in the mind of some creative theologian. But there is also a uniquely human "truth" about our shared hopes and experience. It's important to know and appreciate the difference.

Of Dawkins and Isaiah

A friend writes ...

You know that I am an atheist, or at best, an agnostic, ...I should like to go back to the simple belief I had in childhood, ... I am a product of a 'church' primary school, and the knowledge base, plus the experience of ritual is there. Nevertheless, I find that my mind has rejected Christianity, along with organised religion en mass

Because I place myself in what I call the "Christian Tradition", my readers often assume that I'm obligated to defend "Christianity" and they expect me to attempt to "convert" them. This is very far from the case. I was born into this tradition. I cannot change that any more than I can transform myself into a zebra.

The Christian Tradition goes back at least 3,500 years. We find ourselves at one particular point in its unfolding history. Because it is the very nature of "religion" to pretend that it is the guardian of eternal truth, the historical nature of its dogma is routinely swept under the carpet. Ordinary people often assume that current dogma is the same as dogma of 2,000 years ago and will remain the same for the foreseeable future.

This is far from the case, as I will illustrate in a moment.

The other thing that people often fail to appreciate is that most of us in the Western democracies are born into the Christian Tradition. We have no choice about this. We absorb the assumptions and priorities of the Tradition with our mother's milk. We dig ourselves more firmly into the Tradition as we grow up, even by our choice of the elements of the Tradition that we chose to reject.

My dear friend assumes that her skeptical attitude toward God excludes her from the Christian Tradition. Not so. The idea of God was certainly the central idea in the Old Testament and it still looms large. However, it has long since lost its central importance in the history of Western thought.

Personally, I regard belief in God or doubt about His existence as totally unimportant. Readers of this blog will have no problem determining what I do regard as important, but I digress ...

Our idea of God (as opposed to the one in may other worthy traditions)  appears in the Old Testament as an innovation in many respects:

• The number of Gods is reduced to just ONE
• The One God is responsible for everything including what we would now call physics, cosmology, biology and even human morality
• God appears in history in contrast to other gods who appear "once upon a time"
• God is chiefly concerned with the doings and fate of Israel
• Gods favors are dispensed and punishments meted out to Israel as a whole because of the special relationship God has with Israel. God does not concern himself with private morality except possibly in the case of Kings. Entire societies are viciously punished by God for the simple sin of not being Israel.
• Israel's relationship with God is the number one priority. THE most important thing going on in the Universe. Appeasement of this God has a lot do do with ritual sacrifice -- an idea we will find in may other traditions, including the Aztecs, who thought that the gods required massive human sacrifice.

This would have been just one more crazy tribal idea except that the Israelites started writing everything down in about 1,200 BC. There is good reason to suppose that the stories we read in the Bible are much older, with echoes all the way back to the Babylonians in 2500 BC, but I digress ...

In the subsequent 3,500 year history of the tradition, all of the above ideas have been thrown overboard.

• The number of Gods has been reduced to zero or, in some cases, a tiny shadow of a spirit that hides in unexplored places.
• God has been successively kicked out of responsibility for everything. Galileo tossed the Church out of Astronomy. Darwin kicked the Church out of biology and relegated Genesis to "once upon a time" and so on. When it comes to His authority over moral conduct, His mention has been flushed out of the legal codes that govern our conduct. 
• Jesus expanded God's concern from Israel to all mankind and made it personal. This completely revises the theory of morality in our Tradition.
• The God of Jesus was no longer interested in ritual sacrifice or rituals of any sort. He was interested in calling forth the best in each individual. Of course, many people just could not let the idea go without one last, big sacrifice.
• Those who now regard their personal relationship with God as their number one priority are now regarded as a quirky minority by the rest of us. God is no longer important.

When, for many, the New Testament overshadowed the old, the importance of Israel was also demoted in the grand scheme of things. It is sometimes missed that the God of the Old Testament is imagined to be the creator who holds special regard to Israel. In effect, the fact that Israel regarded itself as special among nations created the God of the Old Testament (see Truman Show for more about this idea). The New Testament imagines man (in general) to be in centre stage and, not surprisingly, God as the supernatural being who looks down upon the stage and cares about what happens to human beings, especially individual human beings. As our ideas about what is important in the Universe shift, so do our ideas about what, if anything, we mean by God. These days, we see ourselves as a tiny phenomenon appearing in a blink of an eye on the cosmic scale. It is not surprising that our image of God is undergoing a corresponding adjustment.

During the past 2000 years, there have been many twists and turns along the way, such as the ongoing attempt of the Catholic Church to substitute itself for God and the attempt by the Reformation to substitute worship of the Bible for worship of God, along with the slaughter of millions of innocent people in the last 3,500 years who found themselves praying to the wrong God. I have also skipped over the important influence of the Greeks and Romans, but this is not a history lesson.

The point here is that, out of everything that has happened on the planet, we select a certain thread of history as "ours".  "Christian" is not a bad name for the thread I was born into. You may pick a different name for your thread. The most significant event in my history was the arrival of Jesus. There are still a lot of people who cannot really accept that He was a human being like the rest of us. Although it has taken a long time to sink it, He signalled the beginning our our realization that, for better or for worse, we are on our own.

But THIS realization is also part of our tradition! Dawkins and Darwin are as much part of our tradition as Moses and Isaiah. Hiroshima is our Jericho  Our tortured attempts to answer the ultimate questions of life continues beyond the New Testament into the history of Europe and our painful attempts to confront our needs for justice, wisdom and purpose as the ideas of the "Book" became less and less relevant.

I sometimes fantasize that at some time in the far distant future, somebody will add a history of America to the sad tales of the Old Testament. This nation was born squarely in the centre of our tradition and had a chance to re-think all our values and assumptions from the ground up. In spite of this, its Constitution recognized no individual human rights whatsoever but did recognize the property rights of slave holders to their human farm machinery. Like Israel, the people of this nation see themselves as "exceptional". Like Israel, they inflict terrible harm on others for the crime of not being American. Americans themselves have paid a ghastly price for their inability to find the moral footing they had every right to expect in their Christian Traditions.

There is no "right" and "wrong" in history. There is only participation.  We can only make the attempt to grasp how we got here and what we can do to shape our future. If we refuse to see ourselves as fellow travellers along this particular journey, we are doomed to repeat the mistakes of the past instead of facing up to the unique circumstances we face. Our traditions should teach us that wrong choices can be lead to terrible consequences. Even if everybody has the best of intentions, catastrophe may lurk around the next corner.