Will Humanity Survive Religion?. W. Royce Clark
so long examining in order to present his Gifford Lectures at Edinburgh in 1901–1902, which were published as The Varieties of Religious Experience. These people all wanted “MORE life” and were persuaded that a major element of their lives was so “wrong” that it prevented their attaining that better life. It was not just quantitatively “more” life they sought. They wanted a “better” life, in most cases with the suffering and problems extracted, as the reward of reshaping their character. At least they thought they wanted these removed.
They also became persuaded, either through being born with this positive offsetting idea or by being “converted” to the idea, that their powerlessness to change that which was “wrong” with their lives could be exchanged for a better life if they could just access this higher Spirit, which links humans to itself. Otherwise, he noted, they do not seem to really care about this “God” at all—He is simply something to “be used” to get “MORE life.”27 James finally concluded that this “higher” power of Spirit need not be “God” or “Absolute,” but anything or person that enables one to “take the next step.”28
Alfred North Whitehead, in his Religion in the Making, emphasized that “[r]eligion is what the individual does with his own solitariness . . . if you are never solitary, you are never religious.”29 He further said that religion “is the art and the theory of the internal life of man, so far as it depends on the man himself and on what is permanent in the nature of things” (Ibid). It is “force of belief cleansing the inward parts. For this reason the primary religious virtue is sincerity, a penetrating sincerity,” to shape one’s character sufficiently to find this better life. “Your character is developed according to your faith. This is the primary religious truth from which no one can escape” (15). This does not mean there are no social dimensions to it, but that what it should produce is “individual worth of character” (17).30
“Character” may involve what one thinks, but it ultimately has to do with ethics, how one actually relates to others. So if it comes from an inner determination of one’s will, it is not “character” unless it manifests itself in one’s acts with regard to others and the world in general. Whitehead’s understanding also seems to imply that if the motivation to shape one’s character does not come from within one’s inner will, it would not be moral, but mere subservience.
Yet even religion cannot guarantee these good relations or ethical behavior, despite its apparent focus on character. Whitehead insisted that religion is inherently ambiguous; it may be a very good influence or it may be very evil. He further conceded that this religious solitariness necessarily involves social dimensions, which at times can be very inclusive and not discriminating between peoples, while at other times confining to a select group vis-à-vis all other competing groups. In its rationalizing process, he notes, religion expands beyond a mere concern for the tribe or religious community and shows a world or universal consciousness. In the latter, it can still be exclusive, but whether it is regarding the group that embraces it or not, it still proposes to shape people’s character. This, of course, is not unique to religion. Most people come to realize that to find relationships meaningful, they must manifest a character conducive to that.
Whitehead suggested that religion manifests itself in four different ways—ritual, emotion, belief, and rationalization. He thought these were sequential historical stages though often overlapping mixtures (18). Many scholars who have posited different descriptions of the development of “religion” among cultures have admitted that the earlier forms were less rational than the much later developments and understandings, whether one follows Whitehead’s scheme of specific stages or even Hegel’s earlier idea of the development from “representation” to “pure concept.” This general admission is obvious enough, that a religion usually becomes more rational the longer it exists. But this does not imply an inevitable conceptual development, nor that all irrational ideas are left behind, nor even that there is a parallel development during a certain era between geographically separated and different religions. While Karl Jaspers and others have noted eras of tremendous ethical/religious ferment (he called such periods “axial”) such as the middle of the first millennium BCE—the Upanishads’ monism, the Krishna devotional form of salvation, the emergence of Buddhism, the classical prophets in ancient Israel, and great thinkers in Greece—they did not have similar messages at all. So to speak of a period of a more intense rationalizing process does not in itself suggest any specific ends or uniformity.
This introduces the whole issue of a reasonable “philosophy of religion,” which is aware of the differences in actual religions throughout the world as well as the historical changes that occurred within any apparent single religion, so that a religious person’s approach to religion should be both comparative or elucidating rather than merely justifying. The plethora of religions recognized today in “comparative religions” or “history of religions” programs in higher education suggests that to make generalizations from such diversity is not easy, but that somehow the very term “religion” must mean something that can be justified as well as elucidated without oversimplifying, misrepresenting phenomena, or reading concrete specifics as general or even Absolute.31
When one is influenced to regard something—whether a god, idea, an ontological structure or some element or power supposedly behind it, a moral principle, an economic value or method, a racial identity, or anything else—as unchallengeable or Absolute or incommensurable, therefore beyond one’s reason/judgment, at that point it becomes what at least many people in Western cultures treat as they would a formal “religion.” Even with a focus on quite specific entities it becomes “metaphysical” when it is turned into the Absolute, being raised beyond all questions.
If we understand that despite the fact that human brains carry within them somewhat similar computational systems from their long evolution, we also know that since no two people’s experiences are ever exactly identical, this is certainly true of different cultures as well. A mere grouping together does not signify an obvious uniformity of understanding or values whatever except in the very broadest terms,32 not unless the majority either are simply not thinking or they are merely imitating others. It would be incorrect to assume that every human who is religious stands at precisely the same place in his or her understanding. Some may be unable to articulate a reason why they engage in certain rituals or have particular emotional responses to them. An even greater number may not be able to defend precisely why they believe what they say they believe, or why they belong to one certain religion rather than another or none.
Yet if Whitehead is correct, they are all trying to shape their character not just for the sake of character, but so as to experience a fuller, more authentic life, even if they do not accept all of the traditional rituals, symbols, emotions, myths, and statements of belief in that specific religion, or even if they believe its particular identity is not really so important as an institution. But if they have absolutized something, accepted the notion from others that it is beyond question or doubt, to that degree they are “religious.”
I am persuaded that most people try to figure out reasonably what the flourishing life they desire will require of them as regards their character and attitude. I think this is one of the major points of Steven Pinker’s How the Mind Works (1997) 33 that the human mind has evolved with the “natural selection” process pointing to reproduction and survival, which means, of course, maximizing the life that is to survive and reproduce. This focus on maximizing that life is not simply an unconscious dependence upon what we have inherited genetically, but with the developing brain, it becomes a continually conscious process of analysis, assessment, reshaping, re-formulating, anticipating the future in interdependence with the “givens” that are already determined by other forces. This is certainly as true of nonreligious or “secular” people as it is of religious people.
Of course, the “character” Whitehead alleged as the goal of religion to direct one toward that better life has not remained statically defined. Otherwise human sacrifices, human slavery, and the spoils of a religious war would still be part of the desired character assumed. Some people even in the twenty-first century may still be tied to ancient forms of ritual, emotion, or belief. But for most, the process of rationalization of religion has begun a process of humanizing the character desired, progressively