Will Humanity Survive Religion?. W. Royce Clark
of a supporting group, combined with miracles, mystery, and authority easily entice a person to give up his or her freedom in the exchange. Eric Hoffer’s analysis in The True Believer, reiterated the same as characteristic of all mass movements.
6. This promise of “status” is operative not only in many political groups as well as national fraternal organizations, but even more so within most religions. It is a rescue from being unrecognized, not honored, perhaps even not known or considered as important by others, or a rescue from ineptness or one’s own feelings of being incapable of doing or being what one wants. In that sense, the “character” of which Whitehead speaks, is not always shaped by a social ethic as much as by the community’s ideals, and the status depends upon the distinction between the people of the community and all the outsiders. The inner circle is of believers, reasonable, enlightened, or good people, while the outsiders are considered as unbelievers, unreasonable, or basically evil people. The presence of this contrasting enemy is crucial to one’s status, therefore also to one’s identity. Its “paranoid” manifestations in politics, for example, comprise a simplistic disproportionate influence when compared with the larger complex agenda of the political scene, a position that may combine feelings of being persecuted with this social status anxiety, which manifests itself in an aggressive anti-intellectualism also preoccupied with uncovering conspiracies against oneself and one’s group. This is uncovered not only in Eric Hoffer’s The True Believer but also in Richard Hofstädter’s The Paranoid Style in American Politics, reissue (New York: First Vintage Books Edition, 2008).
7. If one is unfamiliar with this term, D. T. Suzuki, provided an excellent explanation of the experience in his Zen Buddhism: Selected Writings of D.T. Suzuki, ed. William Barrett (New York: Doubleday, 1956), pp. 83–108. It is an irrational, inexplicable, and incommunicable opening into one’s nature, or the simplest possible experience because it is the foundation of all experiences, beyond concepts and logical thinking, a matter of character rather than of intellect. To a degree, it preserves autonomy, but to engage that, one needs assistance of a Zen master.
8. This is starkly evident in William James’ recitation of the converts’ own descriptions of his or her conversion. See his Varieties of Religious Experience.
9. This is the reason Jacob Neusner refers only to “Judaisms” in the plural rather than singular.
10. Robert P. Jones, The End of White Christian America (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2016).
11. Lord Herbert, De Veritate, 3rd ed. (1645), tr. M. H. Carre (Bristol, 1937), pp. 117–18.
12. In compact form, the “chain” is “Ignorance is the cause of psychic constructions, hence is caused consciousness, hence physical form, hence the six senses, hence contact, hence sensations, hence craving, hence attachment, hence becoming, hence birth, hence old age and death with all the destruction of grief and lamentation, sorrow and despair.” In de Bary, ed., The Buddhist Tradition in India, China and Japan, p. 19, from the Majjhima Nikaya, I.256ff.
13. This was attempted in Wilfred Cantwell Smith’s well-informed studies. See Smith, Faith and Belief (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1979), and Towards a World Theology: Faith and the Comparative History of Religion (Philadelphia: The Westminster Press, 1981).
14. Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan, in Great Books of the Western World, Vol. 23: Machiavelli and; Hobbes, editor in chief, Robert Maynard Hutchins (Chicago: Encyclopaedia Britannica, Inc., 1952), esp. chs. XIII, XXX, XXXII, and XLII. In his prolonged argument he spends considerable space refuting Cardinal Bellarmine who had defended the Papacy as Supreme.
15. John Locke, Second Treatise of Government, ed. C. B. Macpherson (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Co., 1980).
16. See Toland’s specific comments in James C. Livingston, Modern Christian Thought: Vol I: The Enlightenment and the Nineteenth Century (Upper Saddle River: Prentice-Hall, 1997), p. 22.
17. I say “necessarily” since in the eighteenth century, even though one might not forfeit one’s life by challenging the state religion, one was almost certain to lose one’s job, especially if one was a professor. There are famous Protestant cases of such firings even into the late nineteenth century (David F. Strauss), and Roman Catholic firings in the mid-twentieth century (Hans Küng—not removed from the University but prohibited to teach or represent Catholic theology). Obviously, Strauss and Küng published while they were still living, unlike Reimarus’ study of Jesus.
18. Herman Samuel Reimarus, Reimarus: Fragments, ed. Charles H. Talbert, tr. Ralph S. Fraser (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1970). Talbert notes Reimarus’ most direct influence was on Lessing, Strauss, and Schweitzer, and later biblical studies as well as systematic through these three figures’ influence. For Lessing, the influence of Reimarus was in separating the truth of the Christ from a certainty of a historical event. Strauss did not agree with Reimarus about the fraudulent nature of the gospels and early Christianity, but he was motivated to find the mythological interpretation as the alternative between the extremes or rationalism and a supernaturalism, which embraced an idea of “sacred” history in addition to natural history. Reimarus had shown that there is only one “history” which is not “sacred.” Reimarus’ influence on Schweitzer was in seeing the delay of the imminent end as was depicted in the gospels and writings of Paul. These successors to Reimarus also stimulated other responses, some of which we will cover in later chapters. (See Reimarus, Reimarus: Fragments, pp. 29–43, and Strauss’ comments following.)
19. Kant, Religion Within the Limits of Reason Alone.
20. Ibid., ftnt. p. 69.
21. On Religion: Speeches to its Cultured Despisers, tr. Rudolf Otto (New York: Harper Torchbook, 1958).
22. Friedrich Schleiermacher, The Christian Faith, ed. H. R. Mackintosh and J. S. Stewart (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1960), translated from the 2nd edition of 1832, pp. 2–26.
23. Ibid., pp. 30–44.
24. This dialectic of history, moving away from “representation” in religions finally to pure concept or idea or Absolute Reason is the theme and plan of his three-volume Philosophy of Religion. See G. W. F. Hegel, Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion, tr. and ed. E. B. Speirs and J. Burdon Sanderson, 3 vols. (New York: Humanities Press, 1962). His ontological, psychological, and epistemological analysis of speculative reason is found in Hegel, Phenomenology of Mind, tr. J. B. Baillie (New York: Harper Torchbook, 1967).
25. Carroll, From Eternity to Here. If parallel universes existed, and quantum theory is accurate, it might help explain an equilibrium or mutual effect of creative and dispersing powers. However, as to the question of whether humanity will survive “religion” and its absolutes, which often prevent people from taking science seriously, Stephen Hawking, prior to his death suggested that we need to be looking for another planet to live on since within a century or so, we may need to begin such immigration for homo sapiens to continue to exist. Recent discoveries suggest that we may find some “exoplanet” such as “Ross 128b” as an answer, as an “Earth 2.0.”
26. For example, see St. Augustine Concerning the City of God against the Pagans, tr. Henry Bettenson (Middlesex: Penguin Books, 1972), Book XVI, chapter 9. But he thought his most clinching argument was, whatever the physical situation, if any human lived down there, it would have to have come from Adam, and since we have no record, and since the Bible gives us only truth, there cannot be any humans or “anthropodes” down there. (By the time he wrote, the earlier view of the earth being a globe had been exchanged for a flat disc!)
27. Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols, p. 482; also Beyond Good and Evil, in Basic Writings of Nietzsche, tr. Walter Kaufmann (New York: The Modern Library, 1968), p. 214.
28. Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, tr. F. Max Muller (Garden City: Anchor Books, 1966), pp. 52–96.
29. See Levitin, This Is Your Brain on Music, I use musical illustrations here for several reasons. First, I am very personally acquainted with its power and meaning, and agree with many people who have seen it as the most “religious” expression common to humans, not in being “absolute,” but in its apparent ability to help one transcend one’s situation momentarily in