Will Humanity Survive Religion?. W. Royce Clark
of “who” we are, as we are torn between the superficiality of having “things” to excite our autonomy but feel a need for security, which the religious Absolutes offer. Curiosity can create Angst; release of Angst in security can cost one one’s freedom.
We who have lived through World War II to witness what some regard as the two most inhumane acts on masses of innocent people in recent human history—the Holocaust, and the nuclear bombs dropped on Japan—find the combination of religious resentment and racism rising to obscene levels in our twenty-first century, trying to justify any means to its desired end. But the end is not a reconciliation between different peoples, not a greater tolerance of difference, but a continuing sore that festers and infects human society, mixing religion’s absolutism with racist identities, justifying it by retrospective appeals to ancient ideologies, ancient people, and utopian schemas. The only answer to such use of religious absolutism is a genuine pluralism, accepted heterogeneity and globalization with authentic equality of voice. The fragile thread of a sense of unity that binds people to each other seems extremely narrow and exclusive, though there are moral voices against our vices.
How Can One Think or Speak of, or Relate to the Absolute?
Although perhaps few religious people today would identify themselves as “religious,” it is not uncommon for them to speak of “belief,” “faith,” or “spiritual” as designating only what people in their particular religious group have or are, and to figure that all others must therefore have no belief, faith, or no spirituality at all. So, assuming the worst of nonbelievers and despite the issues, the religion sticks with its Absolute and does so often with the sacrifice of real autonomy. Especially in the United States, as Richard Dawkins has noted in The God Delusion, religious people seem to have the advantage of being exempted or shielded from criticism, unlike many other countries, as though they had a belief worth protecting which others do not.17
Yet ironically, a trend has given to these most conservative religious in the United States a new identity largely of their own choosing, ironically a present identity that includes the role of “victims.” They have fought secularism and relativism for the past fifty years as strenuously as they fought Darwinism and Catholicism for the century before. When they discovered the secular nature of our government, which cannot simply relinquish its unity of the whole to adopt the theocracy these “victims” desired, they rekindled the earlier myth of the nation’s religious (that is, Christian) founding,18 even revising history as needed, and considered all those who differed as “infidels,” “atheists,” “agnostics,” and “secular humanists,” accusing the latter of hijacking the true government.
Many nonreligious in the United States, however, view themselves merely as inquisitive and questioning, as autonomous or “freethinkers,” or as skeptics or agnostics, and for any number of different reasons simply elect not to belong to a specific religion, as Susan Jacoby observes.19 Dawkins perhaps read this religious advantage too broadly since adherents of non-Christian religions in the United States certainly have neither experienced that same exemption from criticism, suspicion, or discrimination nor have they received the billions in tax dollars from the government for their religious schools as have the Christian groups since the Everson case in 1947. Such is the history of “established” religion even if unrecognized or denied by recipients of the public funds.
If we were to examine what the words really mean, there would not be such a clear-cut division between the “believers” and “unbelievers.” It would not carry a religious presupposition as its adjective. Every human believes many things, some more fervently than others, some with less credibility or reason than others. To “believe” does not rule out reason, but is a posture equivalent to “trust.” Humans, like animals in general, learn who, when, and what to “trust” through experience and empirically determined events. As they mature, they rely less on authorities of their past and more on their own experience and judgment as they decide what or who they can depend on as regards their future as they assess their past and present. They learn to trust their senses and reason more than imaginary causes, effects, or irrational presuppositions. That is humanization or interdependent human maturation.
Religious “faith,” in contrast, is often defined precisely in the terms used in the famous canonical book of Hebrews in the Christian Bible, as “the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction [or ‘evidence’] of things not seen” (Heb.11:1). Of course, one often hopes for some state of being that is not presently visible, but even those imaginative pictures usually consist of representations of visible things we have experienced. When one’s life is based on that which is “not seen” in the sense of “never seen” or never being perceptible, but nevertheless “hoped for,” and that is absolutized, the visible world and its “appearance” drops in value or falls into disrepute, just as it did with Plato. The visible is seen as only an inferior copy or imitation of reality, thus reversing any common understanding of the word “reality.” The irony, however, is striking that Plato used the visible or appearing world in the bright sunlight, in his “allegory of the cave” to illustrate freedom from ignorance. If the eternal Forms were not the visibly appearing world, then remaining in the darkened cave should have been the answer, to not see the truth but only somehow to feel it in that utter darkness and confining hole. The “eternal Forms” (Plato) or “metaphysics of infinity” (Foucault’s expression) can take over one’s imagination, and that can happen even within very materialistic or acquisitive or appearance-valuing cultures, even in the twenty-first century. It creates obvious cognitive dissonance, but it can exist. In fact, it does exist.
The narrowed use of the idea of “belief” or “faith” by the religious, pointing usually to a very temporally spatially bound conflated historical/mythical person, event, or power, occasionally elicits a comment from very conservative religious leaders who insist that without a belief in God such as they have, there would be no motivation to live morally. Thankfully, that is not true. One of the inexplicable wonders of the universe, as Kant said, is the “moral law within”—as much a wonder, as he put it, as the “starry universe above.” But it requires reason to operate. Rousseau long ago showed that even if people profess to live by “revelation,” that still requires a considerable use of human reason, even if not acknowledged or recognized, before one can even define what one means by “revelation” or “faith,” and long before one can decide that a certain morality passed down through a certain religious institution and embedded within a particular sacred scripture is really divine revelation and to be followed. Kant was quite satisfied that practical reason itself could arrive at the “categorical imperative” as a universal impetus to ethical behavior, and simply showed how that same moral sense could be found within Christianity if one were willing to neither take the scriptures literally nor Jesus as an actual embodiment of the moral ideal.
The appeal to a particular faith vis-à-vis reason is all the more vulnerable when one finally realizes that there are many different religions, most or all of which claim to have the only and Absolute answer to life’s greatest problems which includes ethics.20 We no longer live in the seventeenth century, so even John Locke’s obliviousness to non-Christian religions is no longer acceptable when he declared Christianity’s superiority to other religions because he was incorrectly convinced that Christianity alone had a supreme ethic and believed in an afterlife in which people would be rewarded or punished depending upon the degree of their following Jesus’ ethic. Even if one could finally decide “which religion” was correct, one would still have to exercise considerable reason to try to figure out which, if any, of the moral rules or laws actually require adherence by any “believer” or even nonreligious person today, and precisely how that would be known within our recent discoveries of the relativity of everything in the cosmos as well as the exponentially expanding universe in which we live?
Seeing a divine imprint or eternal truth or value on some religion’s sacred scriptures has no reasonable standard or method or even definition. It is simply an authoritarian position or cultural symbol, a tradition and canon whose content is less important than the adherents’ belief in its sheer authority. The proof of the authority is always a “discovery” in retrospect, long after the alleged event. Any ethic from ancient times therefore carries with it many ancient ideas totally abhorrent to modern morals, especially