7 posts tagged “religion”

Philosophy Talk is a radio show broadcast over KALW in San Francisco every Sunday morning.  It bills itself as "The program that questions everything ... except your intelligence."

It maintains an archive of every show it has broadcast since January, 2004, many of which were devoted to topics which overlap with discussions which have been conducted here at The Academy.  I will try to highlight shows I believe to be of particular interest in future posts but I wanted to start with this one: Religion and the Secular State (orginally broadcast in March, 2005).

This show addresses many of the questions which we have discussed here regarding tolerance.  The hosts are both philosophers and the guest, Robert Audi, is a philsopher who has written (or co-written) several books about  the intersection of religion, government, "the commons", and argumentation.  The discussion is lucid and jargon-free but these guys pack an amazing number of ideas into an hour, some of them fairly subtle. If you decide to listen to this program DO NOT try to multitask. 

Important distinctions are made between religion and dogmatism and between secularism as a worldview and secular justifications for particular laws, 

The page devoted to the episode, besides containing the streaming audio of the program, also has links to some very interesting websites and several books.  In the companion blog, John Perry (one of the hosts), writing before the program was recorded, briefly runs down some of the issues (ritual use of peyote, polygamy, display of the Ten Commandments in public buildings) which have been debated in recent memory, Ken Taylor (the other host) raises the question of our obligation to respect beliefs we consider irrational, and then, after the program airs, contributes a (slightly more technical) discussion of what he calls absence of dogmatism.

I reccommend this particular show (as well as its links and associated blog entries) to anyone interested in the subjects of tolerance, democracy, philosophical diversity, or the competing claims of religion and secularism.  I reccommend the Philosophy Talk site in general to anyone with a philosophical fram of mind; it is a gold mine!

from

Political Actors: Representative Bodies and Theatricality in the Age of the French Revolution 

By Paul Friedland

(Cornell University Press, 2003, pp. 17 - 19)

Throughout the early modern period, in France as in much of Europe, theatrical actors constituted something of a people apart.  Despite the monarchy's official patronage of the theater, the Catholic Church and a good portion of the public tended to regard actors, whether on or off the stage, as pariahs.  Repeated official decrees declaring that the actor was not infâme seemed to do little to combat religious and popular hostitility toward actors, a hostility that did not necessarily have an effect on theater attendance; it was apparently possible to attend plays and thoroughly enjoy the actors' performances while at the same time despising the actors for their profession.

 ...Despite the fact that ...opponents of the theater had a tendency to stress that their condemnation...was primarily due to the immoral content of the passions presented on the stage, one cannot help noticing that the very act of theatrical re-presentation seemed troubling to them, regrardless of its content.

 ...Underlying much of the hostility to the theatre...lay a ... deep-seated conviction that there was something inherently debased about the act of conjuring real passions within one's own flesh for the sole purpose of amusing a paying audience.  As far as [Bishop Jacques-Benigne] Bossuet was concerned , there was little that separated the actions of a prostitute and those of an actress who gave over her body to physical passions that were not properly her own...

Something of the logic that underlay the marking of the actor as profane can be seen in the particular sensitivity of the church with respect to theater around Passion Week and Christmas.  Actors, who so adeptly summoned passions at will and just as easily made them disappear the moment they walked off the stage, were so troubling to the church because they seemed to put into doubt the reality of Christ's Passion on the cross.  As Bossuet argued in his sermon "On the Passion of Jesus Christ," the profundity of Christ's Passion lay in his choosing to feel it, for as the son of God he could have chosen to feel absolutely nothing.  And here the similarities between Christ on the cross and the actor on the stage must have seemed painfully apparent...

...here was Christ at a moment that he knew would come to pass, and he chose to allow his body to feel every last passion that the events demanded.  For Bossuet, the parallel with actors on the stage must have been all too clear; they too chose to feel all the passions within their bodies; they too knew the script in advance.  If the actor's performance could be said to bear a resemblance to Christ's Passion, the the danger, of course, was that Jesus himself might, by corollary, be taken for an actor.

Wouldn't you know it...shortly after I finish my previous entry I run across an article which covers a lot of the same ground in a more entertaining and readable way than I did.  It is not strictly or exclusively Atran's view but it is close enough:

The Creation of God: What Adaptive Psychology Tells Us About the Evolution of Religion - by Matthew McFarlane

(this is a PDF file of an article originally published in the Fall, 2005 issue of the Harvard Science Review).

A comment by A VOICE on my last post has led me to understand just how badly it represented Scott Atran's book,  In Gods We Trust, The Evolutionary Landscape of Religiton. 

In Gods We Trust: The Evolutionary Landscape of Religion (Evolution and Cognition Series)

It will take many posts, I now realize, to rectify the situation.  I'll start with this one.

In his comment, A VOICE quite rightly comments: "Given the survival value of making sense out of what went on around humans and what they could do in response, I would think it not unusual for man qua man to eventually wonder about the meaning of his own existence, and from there the why of it all."

Yup, I blew it. 

Atran more or less takes as a given that "man qua man" will "wonder about the meaning of his own existence".  That comes with "metarepresentation", which I touched on in far too cursory a manner. 

The puzzle is more why such individual propensities should nearly universally ramify into collective beliefs in supernatural worlds and beings; into community rituals and practices (often involving chants/music and magic charms/places); and into the requirements of such sacrifices as scarification/circumcision, animal slaughter or tithing. These elements co-occur too widely in cultures around the world, throughout history, to be merely coinicidental clusters.  There is something to be explained here. 

What Atran is saying (and I'm afraid I will be putting words into his mouth, to some extent) is that the very abilities that make us human, that separate us from other species, and thereby make us successful as evolutionary players, introduce unique threats to our survival.  He is principally talking about "metarepresentation".  If we can imagine the future and play out alternative courses of action in our minds we can organize and compete to a degree of complexity and on a scale impossible for other species.  On the other hand that same facility allows us to imagine our own deaths, become paranoid, envy, deceive and plot against each other.

The real world does not provide us with any way of collectively preventing these destructive elements from tearing us apart.  Any ideologies derived from the real world can be changed as we discover new facts.  Any proposition about the real world is refutable.  It is necessary for groups of people to share beliefs which will guide their lives collectively, which are stated in quasi-propositions and which are, therefore, irrefutable.

I'm not stating this so well.  Let me quote Atran on a point that, if not exactly the same, is related (pp. 267-268):

By now it should be clear that supernatural agency is the principal conceptual go-between and main watershed in our evolutionary landscape.  Secular ideologies are at a competetive disadvantage in the struggle for cultural survival as moral orders.  If some truer ideology is likely to be available somewhere down the line, then, reasoning by backward induction, there is no more justified reason to accept the current ideology than convenience -- either one's own or worse, someone else's.  To ensure moral authority transcends convenient self-interest, everyone concerened -- whether King or beggar -- must tryly believe that the gods are ever vigilant, even when one knows that no other person could possibly know what is going on.  This is another way that the conceptual ridge of our evolutionary landscape connects with the ridge of social interaction, in particular with the evolutionary imperative to cooperate in order to compete.

This gives rise to the need for ritual and revelation (p. 173):

Religion arises when (1) hard-to-fake emotions (2) all with thought content whose truth implications are logically and factually impossible to evaluate (3) but that together convincingly evoke commitment to cultural mores.  Religious beliefs and experiences cannot be consistently validated by social consensus either through deductive or inductive inference.  Validation occurs only by satisfying the very emotions that motivate beliefs and experiences.

Intense religious episodes -- severe limitation, sudden conversions, mystical revelations -- combine aspects of personal memory for stressful events (e.g. an unforgettably traumatic, life-orienting occurrence) and socially widespread cognitive schema (scripted coactivation of publicly accessible categories and connecting pathways) to ensure life-long effect.  The culturally manipulated, or God-given, sentiment of religious experience affectively stirs and assuages the same existential anxieties that incite religious belief in the first place.  Even more frequent, less emotionally intense rituals -- daily prayer, weekly services, yearly festivals -- affectively manipulate and rhytmically coordinate actors' minds and bodies into convergent expressions of public sentiment: a sort of N-person courtship.

Humans, it appears, are the only animals that spontaneously engage in creative, rhythmic bodily coordination to enhance possibilities for cooperation (e.g., singing and swaying as they work together). Rituals intensify these natutral movements to emotionally validate, and sanctify, any number of different cultural sets of moral sentiments.  These religious sentiments feel right and good, and the religious quasi propositions that express them become truly held.  No human society has long survived without such seemingly arbitrary but sanctified sentiments.

It will perhaps have occurred to you that aspects of what Atran says above apply to cultural institutions other than religions -- to nations, and constitutions, and anthems, and pledges of allegiance, for example.  Atran's book is rich with implications which reach far beyond his immediate subject.  I spent a couple of months reading it in little bursts.  It was fruitful, if not easy reading.  I hope to say much more about it in future posts.

Books by Scott Atran

I am just about finished reading Scott Atran's book In Gods We Trust: The Evolutionary Landscape of Religion.  It was published in 2004, almost twelve years after his first book Cognitive Foundations of Natural History: Towards an Anthropology of Science.  I haven't read the latter but I gather that it, like the first, is concerned with an aspect of culture which manifests itself nearly universally and which seems to arise from domain-specific cognitive processing.  There is little talk of "mental modules" in the first book, judging by the index.  By the second book mental modules have been incorporated into the arguments.

To give away the ending I need only cite the title of his concluding chapter: Why Religion Seems Here to Stay.

Atran offers a rough definition (or, let's say, characterization) of religion in the first few pages of his book.  Religion is:

1. a community's costly and hard-to-fake commitment
2. to a counterfactual and counterintuitive world of supernatural agents
3. who master people's existential anxiety

I think that, except for relativists, even people who don't accept this definition with respect to their own religion will accept it as a characterization of other people's religion.

Given this definition it is a puzzle, from an evolutionary standpoint, why religion should exist.  It is materially costly (demanding, at least, time devoted to prayers and rituals which might be spent otherwise), emotionally expensive (populating the world of the believer with gods and demons who offer hope and strike fear), and cognitively burdensome (because the believer's head must be full of creature's that cannot be seen, magics and miracles that are in the eye of the beholder, and phantom forces of all descriptions).

Atran's book is 280 pages long, with nearly 1,000 items in his bibliography and footnotes which sometimes run for more than a page.  I cannot possibly do justice to the book in this space.  I will, instead, only briefly mention a few elements which enter into his answer.

Atran rejects any theory which is "mindblind". Explanations which hold that religion (or culture, for that matter) is simply the passing on of "norms" or, more recently, the self-replication of memes either overstates the fidelity with which the "message" that is religion is "transmitted" on and/or the randomness with which it changes.  There are minds and inferences at work here; modifications tend to be within certain limits, of certain recognizable sorts.

Atran rejects neurobiological explanations of religion which, by comparing patterns of brain activity, liken it to mystical states and/or mental pathologies.  These explanations underplay the role of agency (and, Atran adds, the role of "prefrontal cortical activity" -- which may mean more to you than it does to me).Atran also rejects that religion is an adaptation, in an evolutionary sense.  There is, therefore, no single thing such as religion from an evolutionary standpoint.  Instead, what we call religion involves a variety of cognitive and affective systems.

Religions are necessary because the very abilities that make us distinctly human introduce the possibility of distinctly human terrors.  Our enhanced ability to detect agency is wired to yield many false positives.  That helped us survive dangerous environments but it also inclines us to see purposeful activity where there is none.  Our enhanced ability to make out faces and human forms means that we will easily envision cinnamon buns as nuns -- and persist if we are so inclined. 

We are so inclined because of metarepresentation, the ability to conceive alternate states of affairs and alternate states of minds.  Metarepresentation confers enormous advantages on us, giving us abilities to plan far greater than that of any prey.  It allows us to deceive, a two-edged sword.  It allows us to imagine, including supernatural agents and counterintuitive worlds.  Since it also allows us to conceive of our own deaths this can be a useful thing to do.

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I see that I have not adequately covered Atran's thinking in even skeletal form but I must stop here and promise to pick it up sometime soon.  Sorry for the fragmentation (and for the somewhat rushed character of this post).

When I lived in Baltimore for a few years in my childhood I attended Talmudical Academy; Religious/Hebrew studies in the morning and state-mandated English studies in the afternoon.  Our school day was longer than was the public school day.

Morning studies were devoted to the Torah and to various commentaries and elaborations.  I can remember discussions about all sorts of fascinating topics.

For example:

• What physical deformities would prevent a man ( a Cohen) from serving as a priest (for lack of a better translation) in the Holy Temple? 
  
• Just how egregious did your offenses have to be before you were stoned to death? 
  
• How exactly was a sacrificial animal's blood to be sprinkled on the altar when, someday, the Holy Temple was restored and the practice of offering sacrifices to God was resumed?
  
• Would there be television after the Messiah came?

That last question was one I contributed.  We weren't encouraged to talk about it much, our faith wasn't based on the coming of this Messiah, but it was something we were supposed to know about, at least.  The Messiah would usher in  the Olam HaBah, the World to Come.  I'd come to be concerned that "Rocky and Bullwinkle" might not make the cut in this brave new world about which we were told very little.

So I raised my hand and asked, one day, "Rebbe, will there be television when the Meshiach comes?".

The Rebbe, who really did have a long, flowing beard, paused for a few seconds to ponder the question.  I swear I remember him stroking his beard.

Finally, he said "Yes, but only educational."

That used to be a pretty unimportant fact about me.  I'm not, for example, a Richard Dawkins-style atheist who feels that religion must be opposed at every turn; my wife attends church regularly. 

I've been content to be relatively quiet about my beliefs but maybe that has to change.  People don't understand atheism.   They casually toss off offensive and erroneous  catch-phrases and seem to believe that, deep down, atheists aren't sincerely atheists. Atheists are misunderstood and even  casually demonized by even well-educated people.

I don't want to make too much of this but I don't want to make too little of it, either.  I'm not about to launch into a Richard-Dawkins-like full-frontal attack on believers but I believe I will start proclaiming my atheism and try to explain it  in many more situations than I used to.

Maybe even here, in future posts.