Religion/Religions/Religious

A fellow sociologist (and friend!) reading my last two entries has suggested that I’m wrong to assume religion is a single monolithic phenomenon. He thinks that any given religious group’s material interests (say, the Church’s need to maintain power in the Middle Ages) are what we really need to analyze, and therefore it's material interests and not beliefs that make a religion “bad or good.” It’s a line of reasoning I’ve heard quite a few times before- and it shows an admirable flexibility of mind and willingness to take apart social objects and categories and see them as more complex than they look on the surface. Still, that dog won’t hunt. He won’t even come when called or refrain from wiping his butt on the carpet. Religion’s bad and good behavior stem from the same source, and that's what I’m really after here. Religion has a bad mechanism: the need to protect evidence-less beliefs and the social aims that follow from those unsupportable beliefs.

Restrictive and punitive sexual laws and standards, persecution and execution of agnostics/atheists/freethinkers, incitements to and justifications for wars and oppression, and stuffing science into the occasional straitjacket- even the most sympathetic person would grant that that the ol’ good time worship has played some role in these things. However, even when there's talk about the bad social policy that comes about as a result of a religion, it’s pretty rare for religion itself to ever be indicted for these painful wrong turns and obstacles to progress.

Many academics see religion as such a broad and differentiated thing that fundamentalist and liberal religions, or European and Asian religions, or past and current religions aren’t really thought to be the same type of entity at all. Now perhaps this is an understandable reaction to 19th century secularists who, in attacking Christian woo-woo, tended to equate Christian woo with all the world’s woo. But it’s just as silly as wanting to ditch the term “society” because patterns of human social interaction have turned out to be much more variable than most 19th century scholars assumed. There is an underlying commonality across all religions, whether we’re talking the “Fetch the stakes and kindling!” or “Jesus-supported-modern-human-rights!” varieties. All posit some set of entities not backed up by evidence- God, or Jesus and angels, or tree-living spirits, magical energy that can make one area “cursed” and another “holy,” or a fanciful story of creation. These beliefs are the core of the religion and, being so vulnerable to rational inquiry, have to be protected from critical examination. This is the source of all the sweet ecstatic praise of “faith.”

As a result of the kind of argument suggested by my colleague, social scientists have a recurring habit of divorcing a religion's practices from the cosmic myths that are put forward as justification for those practices. Yes, the practices of any religion might very well have become widespread and institutionalized because they were useful for powerholders in society- any look at the discriminatory treatment of women supports that. But when the Waldensians pushed for the end of the Holy Roman tradition of the single village priest as sole interpreter and leader of village religious life, they were advocating a difference in social policy for spiritual reasons. For both parties the social structural change was the assumed aftereffect of getting the correct religious doctrine, and that is the field in which conscious debate took place- wrangling over interpretations of scripture, advancing reasons why God's nature is one way as opposed to another.

Neither the heretical sects themselves nor the Church argued at all on the grounds of what kind of social, material results would occur under one policy versus another. After all, that would be debating using potentially real and checkable facts, versus the simulated facts of religious argumentation. And that's why I speculated that these sorts of debates tend to degenerate from open debate to violence: if both parties are opposed to each other on the grounds of equally unsupportable beliefs there's no way to adjudicate between them within the debate itself.

For religious groups, protecting their material interests is bound up directly with protecting their core ontological claims. There’s countless examples of religious individuals and groups choosing to save the latter over the former (martyrdom), but any religion that completely goes in the reverse direction and gives up all of its unsupportable claims is no longer a religion at all.

Heretics! Heretics!

Massacre of Waldensian children in
La Torre, 1655

Currently reading a great little book on minority groups in the Middle Ages: Sex, Dissidence and Damnation by Jeffrey Richards. Focusing on all the fun aspects of the Middle Ages; you know- lepers, heretics, homosexuals, jews, witches and sexual adventurers of all stripes. Basically all the groups that had trouble with giving mother Church what it wanted- total control over their minds and genitals.

The middle and late Middle Ages saw newly minted Christian sects popping up all around Europe, especially in south and east of France. The still hegemonic Catholic church was not amused. The major heresies of the period provide another nice example of how religious epistemologies are, at their core, fundamentally dependent on coercion and control of information in order to maintain their existence. Time and again the Church followed the same pattern when “dealing” with these heresies: first an attempt at open(ish) debate and “competition of ideas” followed by recourse to banning/killing/terrorizing their opponents when the debates didn't go their way or proved irresolvable.

It didn't matter that these competitors shared few attributes: some were stringent interpretations of the faith such as the Waldensians, who took the apocalyptic asceticism of the New testament seriously and denounced the bejeweled peacocks of the wealthy Church. After a short period of indulgence, the Church resorted to repression and execution of Waldensians and villagers that supported them, kicking off a few centuries of massacres. Others pushed the theological envelop until it was barely recognizable as Christianity. The Cathars, importing dualist and Gnostic ideas from Eastern Europe, held that the material world was the creation of the evil deity Rex Mundi (“King of the World”). The same pattern of attempted incorporation and persuasion transforming into slaughter followed. While the Waldensians survived clandestinely until the present, the Cathars were completely annihilated.

In each case, it looks like the really crucial point was that there was no way to decide the truth or falsity of the claims of any of the combatants. Of course the Church couldn’t battle and win against either of these sects in the realm of debate- how could anyone say one of these doctrines was true and the other false, when they’re all equally bereft of any evidence? Remember that unlike science, unlike any form of evidence-based rational investigation, religious claims are proud to proclaim that faith in the absence of evidence is one of the supreme virtues.

Pessimistic about Pessin

Both Jerry Coyne and Jim at Apple Eaters have worked over a thoroughly confused article written for the Huffington Post by Andrew Pessin, chair of philosophy at Connecticut College. I want to attack it from a different angle, however. At first glance it seems to be a piteously easy target; Pessin unveils what he thinks is a panacea to religiously motivated political and social conflict. He somehow thinks the missing key is to have believers

Choose some important, life-governing, very controversial thing you happen to believe in with great fervor: the existence of God (or perhaps atheism), the truth of Christianity (or Islam or Hinduism, etc.), absolute morality (or relativism), etc. Focusing on religion as our example, you can now say, first, that you believe, with certainty, on the basis of reason and evidence and testimony, in the truth of, say, the various individual tenets of your version of Christianity, and thus believe, with equal certainty, in all the things entailed by that belief: that, say, all other competing religions and doctrines are simply false.

But then you can say, second, something else: that you may be wrong.

Got it? You can simultaneously be certain that Christianity is true and everything conflicting with it is false, and yet acknowledge that you may be wrong without taking away your certainty. You can thus keep your certainties without having to claim that you are, in fact, and grossly implausibly, infallible. It's what everyone (other than bakers) has yearned for since time immemorial: the proverbial cake, both eaten yet had!

Yup, that's basically it. Not only is it logically confused, it's not even that new. As Jim points out

He seems to think that if people admit to…well, not doubt, but being both certain and not-certain at the same time, that this will alter their actions in such a way that people of different religions can get along. But why would he think this? There are any number of people who admit to times when they question their religious beliefs, but that hasn’t stopped religious conflict yet.

Pessin's argument is truly embarrassing, not least because he completely misses the way in which religious violence is often predicated on just the sort of muddled mindset he wants us to adopt. Religions are, at core, a set of rationally indefensible beliefs that the believer is ordered to protect from all inquiry and doubt (Yes, the miracle of faith!). This means trouble of course; in their everyday lives every human is constantly using reason to make their way about the world. When I get up from my laptop and head to the kitchen to make more green tea I'm going to have to make countless judgments informed by past evidence to guide my actions: walk around that box on the floor and not through it, use the doorhandle to open the door otherwise it will be rather difficult to get to the next room, it's inadvisable to try and drink the tea faster by placing the teabag on my tongue and pouring the boiling water straight out of the kettle and into my mouth, etc. This applies just as much to believers, or else they would never be able to get out of their house in the morning in time to make it to their “Xtreme Teen Bible Reading”. All this (often unconscious) reasoning with regards to how to navigate our material environment predisposes us to prefer confirmation to uncertainty.

Thus, for the believer, having to quarantine and protect their unfounded beliefs from the sort of reasoning they use everyday makes them very sensitive to any sort of threat to their contradictory mental balancing act. Certainly the theme of “great doubt” and “the dark night of the soul” popping up interminably in religious literature tells us that this contradiction is alive and kicking in the hearts of believers, not to mention the ubiquitous praise of faith.

This tension is present in formal religious institutions no less than in each individual believer. Throughout history religions that have attained political power have found scriptural justification for executing heretics and doubters of all kinds. These are all examples of defense mechanisms that have accumulated in the ideological structure of religion. Comprehensive knowledge structures (ideologies) that must protect unjustified beliefs from critique and inquiry accumulate such little gems or perish. We can see these defenses at work most blatantly in religion but also in one other significant area- political ideologies! We don't see these sorts of “epistemological quarantine” as internal features of science and philosophy, but we do see them when science is distorted in the service of political concerns. Political ideologies that are dependent on covering up power relations or embarrassing facts in order to keep exploited populations quiet have these very same mechanisms. Ask any dissident who has been denounced for being “unpatriotic”, a “traitor”, “not a real american”, or simply “crazy”. Without these safety measures present, no religious knowledge structure would have lasted for long without being whittled down to a toothless deism.

What follows from this, I think, is that we must see the repeated history of vicious inter-religious warfare as deeply connected to this “epistemological quarantine” demand that is right at the heart of religion qua religion. The repeated attempts by religions, once they have attained hegemony, to "cleanse" themselves of heretical elements are partly an outgrowth of this unavoidable tension. Pessin, then, is mistaking one of the causes of disease for its cure. Encouraging believers to simultaneously ramp up their “certainty” while constantly encountering threats to that fragile, cherished certainty is a dangerous prescription.