The Religious Impulse

I have given short shrift to the role of religion in human affairs, but that's not because I don't regard it as important—a person can't cover everything. But yesterday's post was about the unconscious, and surely the religious impulse which has always dominated human beliefs and behavior is something which springs from it.

I don't have some Big Point to make today, at least a new one. I've got other posts to prepare, and I merely wanted to jot down a few things about religion today.

When we think about religion, we all have the same prejudices. The common conception of religion involves some (random?) combination of God, or Gods, holy books, heavens, hells, spirituality, ethical/moral injunctions, invisible entities, and so forth. We think of religion as a faith-based approach to things we don't understand; there are mysterious forces out there kicking our ass and we better placate them before they tap dance in earnest all over our sorry selves.

There is an astonishing amount of self-deception in all this. For example, it easy for humans to make the leap from placating some invisible entity in the sky to knowing what that entity wants from us, and enforcing His Will. This invariably results in some kind of war between the Good—those on God's side—and the Evil—those who have turned their back on the Holy Truth, which is known only to the Good. Or vice versa, where the Good are Evil and the Evil are Good. Things certainly can get ugly, as any glance at the historical record reveals.

But the main confusion for many modern people is that they don't have or require religion. This is self-deception of the most exquisite sort. They do have a dominant religion, called Humanism, which is organized around a boundless faith in Progress. These are the humans who think of themselves as highly Rational, guided at all times by the bright, perfect light of Pure Reason. They worship the science gods, the technology gods, the economic growth gods, the social progress gays-can-get-married gods.

They retain high priests like Paul Krugman. Ask an Arbitrarily Chosen Economist, and he will never fail to tell you that the future looks better than the shit we're putting up with right now.

And aren't we all better off for all this Progress? I mean, except for the fact that 17 people own all the land and have all the money.

These Humanists are also the ones spearheading the push to destroy the biosphere, and it seems that they can not stop themselves from doing so. Tell me, could anything be more Rational than that?

I know I have talked about this quite a bit on DOTE, but, really, you can't say it often enough.

And when I say Humanism, which includes Capitalism, you can throw Socialism and Communism in that same basket. Humans can't exist without an _______ism.

British Philosopher John Gray is very good on these points. He locates the roots of Progress in the Judeo-Christian tradition, which inserted God and purpose into history. That's when human beliefs became teleological, i.e. human history not only has a purpose but also has an end-point. Human history certainly does have an end-point, but it's not the one humans think it is

Before the Judeo-Christian tradition, humans thought of the world as going through a series of Grand Cycles. The same shit happened over and over again. The cycle was eternal. Now, in the Age of Progress, we get teleological bullshit like Teilhard de Chardin's noosphere and Ray Kurzweil's singularity.

But what Gray usually neglects to mention is that the Progress religion was a natural outcome of the discovery of Science, Technology and Fossil Fuels. If that stuff hadn't happened, there would have been precious little Progress and nobody would be talking about perpetual economic growth. People would be arguing about God's Will instead.

Well, Gray's main interest is the world of ideas, as befits a political philosopher. He has little interest in the physcial world—you know, the one going to hell in a handbasket.

Also, when you see radical atheists (like Richard Dawkins or Bill Maher) go after traditional god-fearing religionists, you should see a war between two religions, not a righteous conflict between rational people and irrational people.

So it is a very bad mistake to take the world of humans and divvy them up into two piles—those with religion and those without it. I'm sorry to tell you that they've all got religion, be it secular or the ordinary type in line with our common preconceptions (with Gods, holy books, etc.)

In fact, the war on an abstract noun (terrorism) is nothing less than a thinly disguised Holy War between two world religions, Islam and Humanism. I think it's high time we brought Democracy to the Middle East, don't you?

The Middle East also happens to be where most of the world's remaining easily accessible crude oil is.

Even within the United States, there is a low-key Holy War going on between certain Christians and Humanists, though nobody wants to call it that.

Whenever we find a Universal Behavior (the religious impulse in this case) we also have a rock-solid case for locating the source of that behavior in the Human Unconscious.

Religion (gospel music, spirituals) did give us the Blues, so we can definitely put that on the plus side.

That's pretty much all I have to say today.

A Few Related Posts

Economics As Religion

The Crooked Timber Of Humanity

The House That Fossil Fuels Built

This Is Progress?

The Failures Of Progress — What Has Been Lost

The Failures Of Progress — What Will Be Lost

 

Comments

[Mike]

Years ago I was approached by someone concerned to know if I had been "saved". I let her know that I was brought up Catholic, and attended Catholic school through 8th grade. Having attended Catholic mass at least 2 times per week for 12 years, probably averaged closer to 3x with holy days, I let her know that I was as “saved” as I was ever going to be.

Of course I wasn’t “saved” for her purposes and she wanted me to listen to her faith. I remember her saying she’d pray for me as I quickly walked away. This exchange maybe lasted a minute but decades later still seems fresh to me. Perhaps she prayed and I was indeed “saved”. Or not. But the need to convert others is a powerful part of being "saved".