How are ideas created by minds? It might be by miraculous inspiration, or it might be by more natural means, as ideas are spread from mind to mind, surviving translation between different languages, hitchhiking on songs and icons and statues and rituals, coming together in unlikely combinations in particular peopleâs heads, where they give rise to yet further new âcreations,â bearing family resemblances to the ideas that inspired them but adding new features, new powers as they go. And perhaps some of the âwildâ ideas that first invaded our minds have yielded offspring that have been domesticated and tamed, as we have attempted to become their masters or at least their stewards, their shepherds. What are the ancestors of the domesticated ideas that spread today? Where did they originate and why? And once our ancestors took on the goal of spreading these ideas, not just harboring them but cherishing them, how did this belief in belief transform the ideas being spread?
The great ideas of religion have been holding us human beings enthralled for thousands of years, longer than recorded history but still just a brief moment in biological time. If we want to understand the nature of religion today, as a natural phenomenon, we have to look not just at what it is today, but at what it used to be. An account of the origins of religion, in the next seven chapters, will provide us with a new perspective from which to look, in the last three chapters, at what religion is today, why it means so much to so many people, and what they might be right and wrong about in their self-understanding as religious people. Then we can see better where religion might be heading in the near future, our future on this planet. I can think of no more important topic to investigate.
2 A working definition of religion
Philosophers stretch the meaning of words until they retain scarcely anything of their original sense; by calling âGodâ some vague abstraction which they have created for themselves, they pose as deists, as believers, before the world; they may even pride themselves on having attained a higher and purer idea of God, although their God is nothing but an insubstantial shadow and no longer the mighty personality of religious doctrine.
âSigmund Freud, The Future of an Illusion
How do I define religion? It doesnât matter just how I define it, since I plan to examine and discuss the neighboring phenomena that (probably) arenât religionsâspirituality, commitment to secular organizations, fanatical devotion to ethnic groups (or sports teams), superstitionâ¦. So, wherever I âdraw the line,â Iâll be going over the line in any case. As you will see, what we usually call religions are composed of a variety of quite different phenomena, arising from different circumstances and having different implications, forming a loose family of phenomena, not a ânatural kindâ like a chemical element or a species.
What is the essence of religion? This question should be considered askance. Even if there is a deep and important affinity between many or even most of the worldâs religions, there are sure to be variants that share some typical features while lacking one or another âessentialâ feature. As evolutionary biology advanced during the last century, we gradually came to appreciate the deep reasons for grouping living things the way we doâsponges are animals, and birds are more closely related to dinosaurs than frogs areâand new surprises are still being discovered every year. So we should expectâand tolerateâsome difficulty in arriving at a counterexample-proof definition of something as diverse and complex as religion. Sharks and dolphins look very much alike and behave in many similar ways, but they are not the same sort of thing at all. Perhaps, once we understand the whole field better, we will see that Buddhism and Islam, for all their similarities, deserve to be considered two entirely different species of cultural phenomenon. We can start with common sense and tradition and consider them both to be religions, but we shouldnât blind ourselves to the prospect that our initial sorting may have to be adjusted as we learn more. Why is suckling oneâs young more fundamental than living in the ocean? Why is having a backbone more fundamental than having wings? It may be obvious now, but it wasnât obvious at the dawn of biology.
In the United Kingdom, the law regarding cruelty to animals draws an important moral line at whether the animal is a vertebrate: as far as the law is concerned, you may do what you like to a live worm or fly or shrimp, but not to a live bird or frog or mouse. Itâs a pretty good place to draw the line, but laws can be amended, and this one was. Cephalopodsâoctopus, squid, cuttlefishâwere recently made honorary vertebrates, in effect, because they, unlike their close mollusc cousins the clams and oysters, have such strikingly sophisticated nervous systems. This seems to me a wise political adjustment, since the similarities that mattered to the law and morality didnât line up perfectly with the deep principles of biology.
We may find that drawing a boundary between religion and its nearest neighbors among cultural phenomena is beset with similar, but more vexing, problems. For instance, since the law (in the United States, at least) singles out religions for special status, declaring something that has been regarded as a religion to be really something else is bound to be of more than academic interest to those involved. Wicca (witchcraft) and other New Age phenomena have been championed as religions by their adherents precisely in order to elevate them to the legal and social status that religions have traditionally enjoyed. And, coming from the other direction, there are those who have claimed that evolutionary biology is really âjust another religion,â and hence its doctrines have no place in the public-school curriculum. Legal protection, honor, prestige, and a traditional exemption from certain sorts of analysis and criticismâa great deal hinges on how we define religion. How should I handle this delicate issue?
Tentatively, I propose to define religions as social systems whose participants avow belief in a supernatural agent or agents whose approval is to be sought. This is, of course, a circuitous way of articulating the idea that a religion without God or gods is like a vertebrate without a backbone.3 Some of the reasons for this roundabout language are fairly obvious; others will emerge over timeâand the definition is subject to revision, a place to start, not something carved in stone to be defended to the death. According to this definition, a devout Elvis Presley fan club is not a religion, because, although the members may, in a fairly obvious sense, worship Elvis, he is not deemed by them to be literally supernatural, but just to have been a particularly superb human being. (And if some fan clubs decide that Elvis is truly immortal and divine, then they are indeed on the way to starting a new religion.) A supernatural agent need not be very anthropomorphic. The Old Testament Jehovah is definitely a sort of divine man (not a woman), who sees with eyes and hears with earsâand talks and acts in real time. (God waited to see what Job would do, and then he spoke to him.) Many contemporary Christians, Jews, and Muslims insist that God, or Allah, being omniscient, has no need for anything like sense organs, and, being eternal, does not act in real time. This is puzzling, since many of them continue to pray to God, to hope that God will answer their prayers tomorrow, to express gratitude to God for creating the universe, and to use such locutions as âwhat God intends us to doâ and âGod have mercy,â acts that seem to be in flat contradiction to their insistence that their God is not at all anthropomorphic. According to a long-standing tradition, this tension between God as agent and God as eternal and immutable Being is one of those things that are simply beyond human comprehension, and it would be foolish and arrogant to try to understand it. That is as it may be, and this topic will be carefully treated later in the book, but we cannot proceed with my definition of religion (or any other definition, really) until we (tentatively, pending further illumination) get a little clearer about the spectrum of views that are discernible through this pious fog of modest incomprehension. We need to seek further interpretation before we can decide how to classify the doctrines these people espouse.
For some people, prayer is not literally talking to
God but, rather, a âsymbolicâ activity, a way of talking to oneself about oneâs deepest concerns, expressed metaphorically. It is rather like beginning a diary entry with âDear Diary.â If what they call God is really not an agent in their eyes, a being that can answer prayers, approve and disapprove, receive sacrifices, and mete out punishment or forgiveness, then, although they may call this Being God, and stand in awe of it (not Him), their creed, whatever it is, is not really a religion according to my definition. It is, perhaps, a wonderful (or terrible) surrogate for religion, or a former religion, an offspring of a genuine religion that bears many family resemblances to religion, but it is another species altogether.4 In order to get clear about what religions are, we will have to allow that some religions may have turned into things that arenât religions any more. This has certainly happened to particular practices and traditions that used to be parts of genuine religions. The rituals of Halloween are no longer religious rituals, at least in America. The people who go to great effort and expense to participate in them are not, thereby, practicing religion, even though their activities can be placed in a clear line of descent from religious practices. Belief in Santa Claus has also lost its status as a religious belief.
For others, prayer really is talking to God, who (not which) really does listen, and forgive. Their creed is a religion, according to my definition, provided that they are part of a larger social system or community, not a congregation of one. In this regard, my definition is profoundly at odds with that of William James, who defined religion as âthe feelings, acts, and experiences of individual men in their solitude, so far as they apprehend themselves to stand in relation to whatever they may consider the divineâ (1902, p. 31). He would have no difficulty identifying a lone believer as a person with a religion; he himself was apparently such a one. This concentration on individual, private religious experience was a tactical choice for James; he thought that the creeds, rituals, trappings, and political hierarchies of âorganizedâ religion were a distraction from the root phenomenon, and his tactical path bore wonderful fruit, but he could hardly deny that those social and cultural factors hugely affect the content and structure of the individualâs experience. Today, there are reasons for trading in Jamesâs psychological microscope for a wide-angle biological and social telescope, looking at the factors, over large expanses of both space and time, that shape the experiences and actions of individual religious people.
But just as James could hardly deny the social and cultural factors, I could hardly deny the existence of individuals who very sincerely and devoutly take themselves to be the lone communicants of what we might call private religions. Typically these people have had considerable experience with one or more world religions and have chosen not to be joiners. Not wanting to ignore them, but needing to distinguish them from the much, much more typical religious people who identify themselves with a particular creed or church that has many other members, I shall call them spiritual people, but not religious. They are, if you like, honorary vertebrates.
There are many other variants to be considered in due courseâfor instance, people who pray, and believe in the efficacy of prayer, but donât believe that this efficacy is channeled through an agent God who literally hears the prayer. I want to postpone consideration of all these issues until we have a clearer sense of where these doctrines sprang from. The core phenomenon of religion, I am proposing, invokes gods who are effective agents in real time, and who play a central role in the way the participants think about what they ought to do. I use the evasive word âinvokesâ here because, as we shall see in a later chapter, the standard word âbeliefâ tends to distort and camouflage some of the most interesting features of religion. To put it provocatively, religious belief isnât always belief. And why is the approval of the supernatural agent or agents to be sought? That clause is included to distinguish religion from âblack magicâ of various sorts. There are peopleâvery few, actually, although juicy urban legends about âsatanic cultsâ would have us think otherwiseâwho take themselves to be able to command demons with whom they form some sort of unholy alliance. These (barely existent) social systems are on the boundary with religion, but I think it is appropriate to leave them out, since our intuitions recoil at the idea that people who engage in this kind of tripe deserve the special status of the devout. What apparently grounds the widespread respect in which religions of all kinds are held is the sense that those who are religious are well intentioned, trying to lead morally good lives, earnest in their desire not to do evil, and to make amends for their transgressions. Somebody who is both so selfish and so gullible as to try to make a pact with evil supernatural agents in order to get his way in the world lives in a comic-book world of superstition and deserves no such respect.5
3 To break or not to break
Science is like a blabbermouth who ruins a movie by telling you how it ends.
âNed Flanders (fictional character on The Simpsons)
Youâre at a concert, awestruck and breathless, listening to your favorite musicians on their farewell tour, and the sweet music is lifting you, carrying you away to another placeâ¦and then somebodyâs cell phone starts ringing! Breaking the spell. Hateful, vile, inexcusable. This inconsiderate jerk has ruined the concert for you, stolen a precious moment that can never be recovered. How evil it is to break somebodyâs spell! I donât want to be that person with the cell phone, and I am well aware that I will seem to many people to be courting just that fate by embarking on this book.
The problem is that there are good spells and then there are bad spells. If only some timely phone call could have interrupted the proceedings at Jonestown in Guyana in 1978, when the lunatic Jim Jones was ordering his hundreds of spellbound followers to commit suicide! If only we could have broken the spell that enticed the Japanese cult Aum Shinrikyo to release sarin gas in a Tokyo subway, killing a dozen people and injuring thousands more! If only we could figure out some way today to break the spell that lures thousands of poor young Muslim boys into fanatical madrassahs where they are prepared for a life of murderous martyrdom instead of being taught about the modern world, about democracy and history and science! If only we could break the spell that convinces some of our fellow citizens that they are commanded by God to bomb abortion clinics!
Religious cults and political fanatics are not the only casters of evil spells today. Think of the people who are addicted to drugs, or gambling, or alcohol, or child pornography. They need all the help they can get, and I doubt if anybody is inclined to throw a protective mantle around these entranced ones and admonish, âShhh! Donât break the spell!â And it may be that the best way to break these bad spells is to introduce the spellbound to a good spell, a god spell, a gospel. It may be, and it may not. We should try to find out. Perhaps, while weâre at it, we should inquire whether the world would be a better place if we could snap our fingers and cure the workaholics, tooâbut now Iâm entering controversial waters. Many workaholics would claim that theirs is a benign addiction, useful to society and to their loved ones, and, besides, they would insist, it is their right, in a free society, to follow their hearts wherever they lead, so long as no harm comes to anyone else. The principle is unassailable: we others have no right to intrude on their private practices so long as we can be quite sure that they are not injuring others. But it is getting harder and harder to be sure about when this is the case.
People make themselves dependent on many things. Some think they cannot live without daily newspapers and a free press, whereas others think they cannot live without cigarettes. Some think a life without music would not be worth living, and others think a life without religion would not be worth living. Are these addictions? Or are these genuine needs that we should strive to preserve, at almost any cost?
Eventually, we must arrive at questions about ultimate values, and no factual investigation could answer th
em. Instead, we can do no better than to sit down and reason together, a political process of mutual persuasion and education that we can try to conduct in good faith. But in order to do that we have to know what we are choosing between, and we need to have a clear account of the reasons that can be offered for and against the different visions of the participants. Those who refuse to participate (because they already know the answers in their hearts) are, from the point of view of the rest of us, part of the problem. Instead of being participants in our democratic effort to find agreement among our fellow human beings, they place themselves in the inventory of obstacles to be dealt with, one way or another. As with El Niño and global warming, there is no point in trying to argue with them, but every reason to study them assiduously, whether they like it or not. They may change their minds and rejoin our political congregation, and assist us in the exploration of the grounds for their attitudes and practices, but whether or not they do, it behooves the rest of us to learn everything we can about them, for they put at risk what we hold dear.
It is high time that we subject religion as a global phenomenon to the most intensive multidisciplinary research we can muster, calling on the best minds on the planet. Why? Because religion is too important for us to remain ignorant about. It affects not just our social, political, and economic conflicts, but the very meanings we find in our lives. For many people, probably a majority of the people on Earth, nothing matters more than religion. For this very reason, it is imperative that we learn as much as we can about it. That, in a nutshell, is the argument of this book.
Breaking the Spell Page 2
