Response to a Friend (2)

“[M]ankind has been working on and refining his religious practices since the first people sat by a fire and gazed up at the stars and shared stories about great hunters in the sky and forest spirits. The religious practices of today are an incredibly well-tuned and marvelous achievement in man’s quest to bring some grand overarching meaning to his existence and to enforce a code of behavior on his society.”

I think you’ve almost got it with this first sentence, but then you walk away and give us the old Marxist line. It’s hard for me to imagine “primitive man” struggling to give meaning to his existence when his existence was pretty heavily occupied with trying to merely sustain his existence. And it’s equally hard for me to imagine fur-clad cavemen who lived in small bands going to the trouble of inventing a religion to “enforce a code of behavior on his society” as if he were some cynical, modern politico. Of course, it’s a bit much for either of us to speak definitively about the motivations of anybody, and slightly impossible to be very precise about the motivations of those that lived eons ago and first gave voice to their spiritual musings. But staring up at the stars has always produced in me a sense of awe, even in our modern light-polluted sky. This sense of awe seems to me to be a more credible explanation for the rise of stories about “great hunters in the sky and forest spirits”. I mean, why invent a religion to keep somebody in line when a sharp rock would have done a much more reliable job?

“When you look at religions today in a purely analytical light, their architecture is almost like that of a biological organism. They have complex facilities for the recruitment and retention of followers which include well-formulated answers to many of the recurring questions of human existence.”

And like a biological organism, they would have all faded away without the ability to reproduce and sustain life (though they may have left behind some nice Shaker furniture). So where does this line of reasoning get us?

I find it interesting that you liken religion to a biological organism. But while you obviously reject Intelligent Design of biological organisms, you embrace Intelligent Design of religion. Furthermore, you ascribe motives to these Designers which are dubious at best.

“Lastly, they each contain a code of conduct intended to not only protect the people involved but also protect the interest and livelihood of the church itself.”

So you’ve mentioned “the church” again in an essay that’s supposed to be about generic religion. Are you being sloppy, or are you really just aiming at Christianity?

”The primary means of recruiting new inductees for a religion is simply by having your existing members give birth. Religious parents live in dire fear that their offspring will leave the fold and be subjected to the punishments promised to the unfaithful."

First of all, it seems a little silly that you are trying to make it sound sinister that parents raise their children as if they really believed their religions. Secondly, not all religions have the whole “punishments promised to the unfaithful” bit. While Western Christianity does, not all Protestants and Catholics make much of a point of this. My Dad, as I pointed out in A Good Word , didn’t raise me to do the right thing for fear of being sent to Hell.

"Sometimes ritual mutilation is used to permanently mark children as initiates of a religion but generally the rites of induction are primarily ceremonial and educational for the child born into a religious home.”

Yes, I remember the haircuts with great fear and trembling.

Your next paragraph, on proselytizing, would carry more weight if you used some concrete examples. As it stands, it seems that you are simply generalizing from some bad experiences with some particularly sadistic brand of Protestant Fundamentalism.

“Once the initiate accepts the religion, retention is typically a much simpler matter. The threats ...are supplemented by a much more powerful positive force, a strong sense of community and fellowship. Humans require friendly contact with other humans so religions supply this fellowship...."

...the bastards!


You can find his entire original post here