In the new issue of Prospect, Roger Scruton responds to the recent spate of atheist polemics from the likes of Christopher Hitchens, Daniel Dennett and Richard Dawkins. Arguing that these books fail to comprehend the human need for the sacred, Scruton draws upon the insights of the “anthropology of religion,” and in particular the French critic René Girard, to argue that religion is not, contra Hitchens et al, the cause of violence, but actually the solution to it. Let us know what you think below.
It isn’t enough to say that a religion involving some good people in its membership is proof enough that religion is the answer to the bad things in the world. What is evident throughout humanity is that you cannot pick and choose religions as good or bad - what people feel inclined or compelled to do is what defines it. Religion is not the answer, it is the question.
It seems to me that the origins of religion might have been a formalisation of the awe at the incomprehensible, but its entrenchment and survival are explained by its role as a tribal marker that might, as Scruton says, have the effect of suppressing resentment within the group, but does so by redirecting aggression at the out-group. Rather than seeing the Christ figure as the willing victim of resentment, a sacrifice to the good of the group, history suggests that the real effect was to galvanise the believers into resentment, discrimination and violence towards the Jew, and against other unbelievers. The resentment that Girard and Scruton see as resolved by religion has moreover persisted and served even to splinter religions themselves into ever more numerous and still murderous tribes when that universal resentment can no longer be contained within the group.
One of the areas that has so far been neglected in considerations of the experience of the sacred in all cultures is the phenomenon of human infancy: a time of (almost) total helplessness and a time of exponential growth. Those first two years from neonate to walking, talking toddler lay the foundation for the rest of an individual’s life.
This area needs to be explored from the research and theory of someone like, say, Wiifrid Bion, in order to both put to rest Freud’s dismissiveness and to build a constructive theory of the sacred based on the maturation of the human psyche. The basic fact that we exist only in relationship needs much more exploration and elucidation by psychologists and theologians working in tandem…and working with a good understanding of one another’s fields.
We need a synthesis that so far has not been forthcoming.
i don’t understand why anyone would argue that religion (or any other human endeavour, for that matter) could be “the” answer or “the” cause to anything. don’t we have enough proof to see that religion has informed BOTH good and bad?
Dear Roger Scruton,
Your article almost brought tears of joy to me. As a student I remember reading La violence et le sacre and being almost blinded by its clarity. I often wondered why his views on religion, violence and the human experience had not received a wider echo. Wrong timing could be one: when Girard’s books came out the Marxist worldview was still alive and kicking in France and a materialistic paradigm could live without discussing religion beyond its dismissal as ‘opium for the people’. Now that fanatical violence wrought in the name of religion has reappeared such questions have a new urgency. But I think another deeper reason could have to do with the shocking nature of what Girard has to say. I often find it funny that the same people who flock to watch CSI shows, who read the daily news about another bloodbath somewhere in the world (and it matters little that such bloodshed is caused by a deranged student on a US campus, a suicide bomber in Kirkuk or a counterinsurgency operation in southern Thailand) will have trouble realizing that the evil of violence is consubstantial with our human condition. And yes religion’s primary function has been to channel, regulate ad ultimately neutralize this violence in a symbolic way.
I agree with Roger Scruton and I respect science of Dawkins et al.
During every monsoon, hundreds of thousands of mostly poor, semi-literate people of all castes (including many Muslims) of Maharashtra, Karnataka, Andhra Pradesh India march to Pandharpur- seat of Hindu god Vitthal. They have done so every year- drought or floods, famine or epidemic- for hundreds of years.
Anyone who witnesses that is humbled by that sight because it always is a celebration of life, first and foremost.
This and events like this have sustained and nurtured composite culture of India for thousands of years.
If religion facilitates them, I am all for religion.
Why are you looking for the sacred? Don’t you understand? That’s exactly what Nietzsche DIDN’T want. People turn to religion because it gives them an easy way to assure themselves that their lives have inherent value.When Nietzsche said that “God is dead” he obviously wasn’t commenting about the lack of believers. He was excited–he foresaw a time where people didn’t turn to other people, or religion, to find meaning, to find the sacred.
We’re more than animals. We have the power to influence events as they unfold around us, through the choices we make. We can’t find the sacred in something like religion. We have to create the sacred, through something Nietzsche called the “will to power”. To sacrifice something as comfortable as the idea of god is such a difficult thing to do, but it has to be done. After all, what would be the point of free will if you let God tell you what to do with it?
Dear Roger:
A timely intervention. Still if we continue to examine the phenomenon of the religious sense before the mystery of the planet, as if it were a sort of Von Daniken effervescence of the Neanderthal in the cave, then we are in danger of becoming merely sociologians not theologians. Other philosophers felt it was the religious impulse that gave birth to the need to philosophise about our place in a larger cosmos. From Heraclitus to Aristotle and thence to Futurist philosophers such as Pierre de Chardin, we now have a grander perspective on this issue.
Dr RJ-B
There is generally a nasty, concealed shock for Christians whenever Scruton writes. He describes beautifully the action of Christian belief in the world and makes clear its deep and critical influence. And then he drops in a line or two that suggests he doesn’t really believe in God.
This article makes this rather more obvious as it’s premise is that religion or, lets simplify things, Christianity is really about the sacred not about God. The sacred seems to be those moments that bring us in from the edge of the world and ends our alienation and resentment. This demonstrates that at the centre of Scruton’s view is not a transcendent creator being, God, but man.
My main problem with this in the context of violence and Christ’s death is that it may reconcile us to each other and solve the problem of violence but does nothing to reconcile us to God and solve the problem of our sin. Violence is an expression of judgement even though it has been distorted. It involves the degradation and destruction of those that are percieved to deserve it. It signifies a change in status from accepted as worthy of existence and relationship to being not worthy of either. Thus it has its roots in God’s judgement and punishment, the latter being the violent bit. Judgement is the reflective action that decides and declares worthy or unworthy, justified or unjustified. Sanctification (which is peace,life,joy,growth and worship; a continuation and restoration of creation) or punishment (which is inevitably violent) are the deliberative options that result. Both judgement and punishment are inseperable providing there is an offence.
Thus, Christ’s violent attonement in place of us solves the problem between God and us which means it also solves the problem of violence between men. If Scruton’s view was the case Christ’s sacrifice would have to be repeated endlessly as violence and sin still persists, which is what happens in the Catholic Eucharist and in Jewish and Islamic practise. Instead, Christ’s injunction was to take bread and wine together to remember the once-for-all sacrifice that restored our relationship with God and announced the coming of His kingdom, the ‘last days’.
Without God at the centre of Christianity, religion becomes just an endless series of repeated rituals which have significance only in relation to the group. This misses the glory of those rituals (birth, coming of age, marriage, death) which is they tell us something about God’s creation and His character. Without God at the centre we can return only briefly to the centre of being before inevitably drifting to the edge again with its alienation and resentment. Christ’s death restores us to the centre…and keeps us there.
Although Roger Scruton’s piece is ostensibly a piece about the anthropology of religion, his focus, as is frequently the case in discussions of this type, tends to reflect his familiarity with the religions of the Book, as do the responses of most of those who have commented upon it. In historical terms, such religions are relative late-comers and are scarcely representative of what most anthroplogists today would consider as religion. As an antidote, may I suggest that all concerned look at the work of anthropologists like Pascal Boyer, Scott Atran and Justin Barrett, archaeologists like Steven Mithen and David Lewis-Williams or clasicists like Walter Burkert, much of which goes way beyond the knee-jerk responses of Dawkins and Hitchens, although Dennett, to his credit, is reasonably familiar with it. Like it or not, religion in the sense used by such scholars would seem to be an ineluctable part of what it means to be human.
Scruton is a philosopher which has, I fear, let him down when he studies anthropology. This subject almost died under the influence of post modernism and has only recently started to rejoin the sciences. That doesn’t make the neo-atheists right though. Their own discipline of evolutionary biology shows us they are wrong about religion being evil.
Dawkins suggests, in The God Delusion, the religion is a harmful by-product of something useful. He uses the example of a moth’s lunar navigation system causing it to circle in to a flame and incineration. Dawkins suggests that the propensity of children to believe what adults tell them is why they believe the religious ideas that they pick up from their parents. The main problem with this idea is that religion is not the result of a single factor, gullibility, but a wide complex of behaviours and beliefs. While it is possible that some of these are by products of something useful, it is vanishingly unlikely that they all are. Furthermore, because all these different religious traits gel so well together, it is likely that evolution has been selecting them as a piece to produce the human religiosity that we know today.
Besides, assuming that something is a harmful evolutionary by-product of something useful is assuming the exception before testing the rule. In general, we assume that a trait is an evolutionary adaptation that the organism has because it helps it out breed the opposition. It is premature to look for other explanations before we have done the leg work to discover whether or not a trait is adaptive and what its advantages might be. In the history of evolutionary theory there have been many cases where a trait’s advantages have initially escaped scientists’ notice. Further work has revealed how some forms of altruism, the peacock’s tail and the gubby’s spots are all evolutionary adaptations that increase the fitness of their bearers.
This suggests to me that the starting point for many atheist analyses of religion is their own basic dislike for it. They assume the religion is a bad thing based on their own prejudices and inadequate anecdotal evidence. They then construct a theory that appeals to their instincts but has not scientific value at all. Which, I think, is rather ironic.
http://bedejournal.blogspot.com/
I enjoyed this article and agree that Dawkins et al in their recent books have probably ignored some interesting insights from the anthropology of religion. Many of the comments above have similarly been interesting. However, I would just take up James Hannam who says “…the starting point for many atheist analyses of religion is their own basic dislike for it.” I’m note sure that’s right and I suspect that could be wishful thinking on the part of Mr Hannam. I think many (or most) atheist’s analysis of religion begins with the simple observation that there is no evidence that God exists. In the absence of any evidence, they conclude that it is therefore highly improbable that God exists. If some evidence were produced, they would change their mind. Observing a lack of evidence is not a prejudice. It’s possible that some atheist’s dislike of religion, as opposed to their disbelief in the existence of god, is based on “inadequate anecdotal evidence” but that’s a different thing.
In reply to Mr Greenwood, I think, in the context of my post, it was quite clear that I was not talking about whether or not God exists, but why religion exists. I continue to maintain that many atheist attempts to answer the later question are based on prejudice rather than consideration of the evidence. I continue to find this ironic and no less so in the light of Mr Greenwood’s reply.
http://bedejournal.blogspot.com/
I was particularly interested in Scruton’s definition of the sacred:
“moments that stand outside time, in which the loneliness and anxiety of the human individual is confronted and overcome, through immersion in the group”
For me that could also be called ‘the other’, and I think he is right to affirm that it is when we experience, find empathy with, or engage with that which is ‘other’, or outside of the Self, that we actually appreciate most fully what it is to be human.
I would even propose that it is this spark of feeling for the other that sets us apart from the rest of the animal kingdom - recent research ( http://www.nature.com/news/2005/051024/full/051024-7.html ) showing that many chimps don’t have an altruistic bone in their bodies.
This sense of the sacred/other is revealed at different levels: the ‘other’ within the community, the divine ‘other’. What cannot be debated that it is precisely our difficulty in dealing with that which is ‘other’, whether that be noisy neighbours, asylum seekers, immigrants, shias, sunnis, Christians, that lies at the centre of conflict at all levels of society. Which is why for me religion is not simply a saccharine pill to sooth our lonely lives and reinforce our prejudices. Quite the opposite. It is a challenge to engage with the other at both levels, the human and the divine. Which perhaps boils down to love thy neighbour, and love God. Indeed, it is when religions seek to purify themselves - harden their boundaries against that ‘other’ that seeks to dirty them - that they turn to violence and fundamentalism.
Unfortunately this has happened in my own Christian tradition for too long; my arguments for a Jungian re-invigoration of Christian dirt practice, seeing Christ’s passion as a divine ‘trickster’ event playing with dirt, I have set out in The Complex Christ.
It was a pleasure to read Mr. Roger Scruton’s article and his very sensible answer to dogmatic atheists.
For me religion is very much about the sacred. The sacred is by nature metaphysical, beyond the physical realm. This makes it individual. To communicate something that is beyond words and our physical world – the experience of the sacred – is difficult, not to say impossible. My experience is mine and cannot be shared. Organized religion, I believe, is an example of this dilemma. Christian, Islamic, and other religious organizations tend to focus on the practical, like rites or politics or theology. Few people are able to convey the experience of the sacred. As a result the religious officials chose the only possible way, to focus on the physical. Of course they pay lip service to the sacred, with words and rites, but even though rites can awaken a religious experience in a person, that experience is private. It is not a candle on the table for all to see, it is highly individual feeling. Since the physical is the realm of the profane, the profane is what organized religion mostly concerns itself with.
I believe Mr. Scruton could very well by right, that religion was an answer to violence rather than a cause to it. However, this is the case when religion is concerned with the sacred, not when it is concerned with the profane. And religious organizations’ tendency to focus on the profane is compounded when such an organization receives profane power, i.e. political power, and it is more likely to produce a legacy. When religious organizations have to compete for the attention of seekers they have to try harder to represent the sacred – because that is what people search and long for – but in a monopoly situation they are less attuned to the needs of their followers and rather more concerned with their rules and rites and building lasting proofs of their profane power, as enormous churches. Therefore I cannot agree with Mr. Scruton when he writes: “we should not be surprised if, when we turn away from our Christian legacy, as Nazis and communists did, the hecatombs of victims reappear.” The Christian legacy is a mixed one, sometimes good and sometimes bad, even very bad. Christians have killed each other and people of other faiths in large numbers and in the name of their religion (the 30 years war in Europe is one example, the killings of Muslims in Bosnia in the early 1990s another, the Spanish Inquisition a third), just as Muslims have killed other Muslims as well as Christians and other people. Even Buddhists, who in the West these days often are portrayed as exemplary peaceniks, can kill with religiously motivated zeal (for instance in Thailand and in Sri Lanka).
Organized religion is not an answer to violence, even though the sacred may be. Turning away from the Christian legacy is not a problem, turning away from the sacred, which by necessity is individual and private, is a problem.
I enjoyed the article and its basic thrust. I have read Girard and I see him as turning the idea that ‘religion causes violence’ on its head. Human beings are violent, for reasons that are best understood in psychological terms, and religion is one cultural form (along with the state) that we have developed to - channel, manage, control, tame, redirect, give meaning to - our violence. In this sense, violence causes religion. But there is a difference for Girard between religion and genuine faith in God. He makes comments, for example, about the Holy Spirit as the presence of God in history revealing the roots of human violence. I recommend Girard’s book I See Satan Fall Like Lightning to anyone who wishes to reflect on this topic further.
“—in particular the truth that religion is not primarily about God…” We’ve been encountering such phrases with increasing frequency of late, and this is tribute to the new atheists. By offering a simplistic account of belief, they have challenged religious intellectuals to acknowledge their distance from theism. This is all to good, for reason and for honest spirituality.
Thanks to Tony Greenwood for such a clear and simple truth. “Observing a lack of evidence is not a prejudice.” Indeed.
Hi, Im from Melbourne in the land of Oz.
The trouble is that what is usually defended and promoted as religion in this day and age is only the most superficial and factional and dim-minded, and perverse expressions of inherently murderous ancient national and tribal cultism.
Please check out these 3 related references which discuss how/why what is usually called “religion” is very much a causative factor in the current (and always) universal insanity.
1. http://www.dabase.org/coop tol.htm
2. http://www.dabase.org/spacetim.htm
3. http://www.dabase.org/2armP1.htm#ch2 The Taboo Against the Superior Man
Plus critical essays on Christianity or why it is very much part of the problem—it is founded on the Taboo Against the Superior Man
1. http://www.dabase.org/proofch6.htm
2. http://www.aboutadidam.org/readings/parental_deity/index.html
This last reference is about the childishly nieve, and emotionally primitive “creator” god-idea—or the Parental Deity.
The two religions that have always caused the most trouble in the world are Islam and Christianity. They are both would be world conquering POLITICAL “religions” that presume to have a claim on the totality of the human family via their obnoxious one way/truth/revelation claims.
Fundamentalloy, among all the religious traditions of the world, ONLY Christianity and Islam are inherently and aggressively associated with an expansionistic ideal, and an attutude of not only cultural, but also social and political, superiority, that irreducibly intends,and actively pursues,the destiny,to which each of these traditions appoints ITSELF,of total world-domination, or global totalitarian “rulership”.
Likewise, by their very nature, these two religions (and their comprehensively and irreducibly cultural, social, AND political) traditions are, perpetually, in an intentionally performed state of competition, that always seeks, and frequently achieves, conflict, confrontation, and even aggressive warfare with one another—and even with all other religious, cultural, social, and political traditions, systems, or insitutions in the world.
Because of all of this, humankind as a whole must especially beware of these two religious, cultural, social, and political traditions, including all of their variant formulations, systems, and institutions–”free”-market capitalism being the most notable.
The total world of humankind can easily be drawn into a terminal state of conflict by means of the public theatrical exploitation of the benighted false-face of exoteric “religion”—only,in due course,and very soon,to find a DARK political, ocial,and cultural tyranny has been embraced by seemingly “lightest” means.
The “Powers” of nation-states that would exercise them-selves in the name of one or another of these two “great” religions, of the Middle East NOW PRESUME they can wage “final war” and, thus and thereby establish “final rule”—AND THEY ARE NOW ACTIVELY MOVING THEMSELVES ON THAT BASIS.
Have you read the news?
If there is one thing that history reflects more than any other, it must be that humanity cannot agree on what is truly spiritual or sacred. Thus from a dominant materialism does humanity continue in cycles of war and conflict, an environmental crisis looms, about to overwhelm the planet, and the world divides increasingly into rich and poor. And from this moral/spiritual confusion, competing versions of religion, under the pretense of what is sacred, compound all of the above by offering a rational of human nature that reality appears about to demolish. What value or future can a species have which not only destroys the planets own capacity to sustain life, but in the name of the ’sacred’ too often seeks to destroy each other?………… Not much!
Is Roger Scruton Hazel Motes or Leo Strauss or …?
In Flannery O’Connor’s Wise Blood Hazel Motes sets out to establish a “Church Without Christ”. There is something reminiscent of this in Roger Scruton’s article, ‘The Sacred and the Human’. Scruton’s defence of religion is based not on God, but on the ‘sacred’ and on religion’s socially useful function in alleviating ‘alienation’ and ‘resentment’. Nowhere does he profess a belief in religion, there is no Credo, no profession of faith. As I read him, I do not see any call for a Kierkegaardian emotional ‘leap of faith’ up to God. What are we to make of this?
That religion is related to alienation is one of the things that Marx and the Book of Genesis agree on. The real story of Genesis is a symbolic telling of our ‘fall’ in to self-awareness. It is only after Adam and Eve have eaten from the Tree of Knowledge that they experience the shame of their nakedness. And as Sartre quite rightly points out, we are never as alone, as alienated, as in our experience of shame. On the other hand, shame is only one aspect of self-awareness. The Gnostics turned the serpent in Eden into a hero who, like Prometheus, brought knowledge/self-awareness to mankind. This is quite reasonable; who would really want to exchange their consciousness, ‘become like little children’, for the salvation of un-awareness (be honest)? Perhaps ‘alienation’ is an inseparable part of the package of awareness. Is not our first awareness of ourselves? Of ‘I’ as distinct from ‘we’?
That we can ‘lose ourselves’ in religion is true; but it is also true of a football match or a love affair. Perhaps Scruton is right to remove God from the heart of religion and substitute ‘ritual’ and the ‘sacred’. You see, the problem with God is His multiplicity: there is the self-sacrificing Son of the Catholics, the Son-sacrificing Father of the Protestants, the unitary God of the Muslims and the Jews. God has the dialectic quality of simultaneously bringing unity and division. Scruton does not address this point. A ‘rational’ advocacy of religion totally misses the point that faith, like love, is a fundamentally emotional state. One cannot decide to be awe inspired by a ritual simply because a case can be made for its social utility.
This raises a further point: is all ‘resentment’ bad? Martin Luther King once remarked on the subject of being ‘socially well adjusted’, that there were things in society that he did not want to adjust to, such as poverty and racism. We can assume he resented social evils. Because Scruton is a conservative there is always the suspicion that this is, at least in part, exactly the sort of resentment he wishes to irradiate. The traditional religion of ‘All Things Bright and Beautiful’ was of exactly this sort. It celebrated the social order of the ‘rich man in his castle, the poor man at his gate’, and asserted that God ‘made them, high or lowly, and ordered their estate’. Is Scruton’s advocacy of religion similar to Leo Strauss’s, that it is a myth but a myth that is a useful means of social control? Is it a cynical form of post-modern manipulation?
Perhaps Scruton simply sees religion as the only safeguard against nihilism. It is true that Nietzsche said that man would rather choose the void for a goal than be void of a goal, but is religion the only possible goal or meaning? The existentialist psychologist Victor Frankl, in Man’s Search for Meaning, insists that the meaning of life varies from man to man, from day to day and even from hour to hour (as does the concept ‘God’ and what is held sacred). Unfortunately it is also true that religion and nihilism can coexist, they are not mutually exclusive. The best example of this is not suicide bombers, whom we see as inescapably ‘other’, but Christian fundamentalists who subscribe to ‘end time theology’ – and there are tens of millions of them in the US. They look forward, literally, to Armageddon, to nuclear war in the Middle-east, to plagues, famines and earthquakes. They long for the ‘rapture’ and the end of the world. (It has a secular equivalent in those who are waiting to be beamed up by aliens). What is this longing for the destruction of the world if not nihilism?
Finally, we must choose whether we are a democracy where the law is determined by the people and is ‘sacred’, or whether we are a theocracy where the ‘sacred’, somebody’s interpretation of somebody’s god, is the law.
I’m not sure if Mr. Scruton would agree, but I think he echoes the real intent of Marx’s shopworn gag about religion and opium. As the philosopher Philip Kitcher observes in his book “Living with Darwin” “There is truth in Marx’s dictum…that religion is the opium of the people, but the consumption should be seen as medical rather than recreational.” As another great philosopher (Joss Whedon) observed, the hardest thing about this world is to live in it.
It is a noble truth that all life is suffering and we search for analgesics for this suffering in all manner of places and I’m not sure that religion can be dismissed as a poison as easily as Hitchens and Dawkins would like. Like all opiates, religion is indeed a poison if consumed in unhealthy ways, but in moderate doses it can and does ease the suffering of many. That’s not to say that its supernatural claims are true; one of the great triumphs of the Enlightenment was to remove the necessity for anyone to accept patently false supernatural claims as true as a condition for living peacefully in society. We need to fight off the Muslim and Christian Talabani who would turn that clock back but those of us who deal with life’s pain quite happily without gods should be cautious of trying to impose our views on those who are unable to do so.
What Ken is saying is very reasonable, but part of what he’s saying raises a question in my mind: if we accept that the ‘opium’ is medicinal, not recreational (Marx called it ‘the heart of a heartless world’) what malady is it a medicine for - if it is the treatment, what is the ailment? I assume that Ken is not taking Marx’s position that it was a medicine for the treatment of the alienation experienced under capitalism?
(BTW Marx position on religion is often vulgarised to make him mean that religion was simply a bourgoise ‘trick’ on the working-class - that wasn’t his position)
Ken, you say ‘those of us who deal with life’s pain quite happily without gods should be cautious of trying to impose our views on those who are unable to do so’. Fine, but why are some able to do without gods and others not - is it, for you, a difference in some people’s constitution or in the conditions under which they live?
What extraordinary waffle Dr Scruton writes, and succeeds in eliciting from his ’supporters’ on this blog. But then given that neither he nor they are constrained by any need for verifiable or falsifiable evidence, that is perhaps not surprising. Despite centuries of theological spinning, the facts remain the same. That in the bronze age, when the Abrahamic myths began, we were ignorant of where we were, ‘when’ we were and where we came from. That ignorance led to the arrogance of even speculating about the existence of a non-human, all powerful AND non-dying entity. Now that science has revealed the extent of this ignorance, the whole house of cards has tumbled down. Except for the credulous, the sentimental and those Casaubons unwilling to admit their hard won erudition is merely an accumulation of nonsenses.
There are two aspects of religion, the personal, which raises psychological questions as to why some believe and some don’t, and the social aspect of the role of religion in society. The latter point has political implications.
I think it is reasonable to ask Roger Scruton a direct question - do you believe in the Nicean Creed (or any creed)? If you do, then your defence off religion is understandable, but if you don’t it raises another question: - why do you advocate that people believe in something that you yourself disbelieve?
And a further question to Ken and others, if religion is beneficial or necessary for some individuals, what is the difference between these indiiduals and others - is it a difference of condition or of personality?
An interesting article.
Surprised that there was no mention of the works of Joseph Campbell who has probably written the most about the importance of myth as metaphor and rituals to the human condition and psyche(as opposed to religious dogma) and of its various pathways and developments for pre-history onwards - including works of literature, without in any way devaluing the huge leaps in scientific knowledge of the universe made in more recent years. But not a controversialist.
As usual it takes a philospher to complicate the simple:
either there is a God or there is not,
all the evidence is that there is not,
hence a human yearning for the sacred, and what Indian peasants do in times of need are both totally irrelevant.
Roger Scruton’s underlying argument is something like this - “The individual, normally sunk in his aggressive, egoistic desires, is brought up short by his encounter with birth, sex and death. These experiences underline his finitude and dependency, and fill him with awe. Religion draws on these mute natural responses, elaborating around them myths and collective rituals, which together constitute the ’sacred’ as a sphere of socially meaningful experience. The individual, alienated from his pure animality and egoism, becomes reconciled to himself and to his fate through a sacred ritual which he understands as intrinsically collective, and through which he identifies with his community. Thus are his aggressive impulses sublimated. So religion is the solution to violence rather than its origin”. Against this : (1) This would only apply to violence within a community, not to violence between communities, which it might rather exacerbate. (2) Is this the most effective way of containing violence? Modern societies have many other ways of sublimating aggression into non-violent forms, notably the competitive ethos of the workplace, the sports field, and political and cultural debate. Aren’t these more effective than transient experiences of redemption and love which barely last beyond the church walls? Isn’t this just the kind of sentimental feelgood fantasy that Scruton elsewhere condemns in Hollywood movies? (3) Is it credible to suppose that the efficacy of the sacred ritual is always independent of the participants’ holding certain factual beliefs? It is an empirical fact that many current Christians and Muslims do hold certain factual beliefs to be literally true, and to be essential to their faith. Polemical atheists are not making some kind of naive category mistake in attacking such beliefs. Why suppose that such factual beliefs are abnormal, and that the armchair philosopher or armchair anthropologist alone grasps the real nature of ‘religion’ or the ’sacred’? What matters is to find out what real people in the real world believe, and to criticise what is false or pernicious. Not to spin some philosophical fantasy of an idealised form of religion and offer it as a social cure-all. Still less to claim that this theory identifies some supposed constant of human nature, when it is actually highly historically-specific - perhaps even armchair-specific.
10 out of 10 to Richard Carr, who puts it very clearly. However I’d still like to raise a question as to the political context of this. that’s why I’ve raised the question of whether Roger Scruton is a Christian - or even a deist. I strongly suspect that he isn’t - so why is he advocating religion? Is this not really an attempt to foist a ‘noble lie’ which the elites know to be false but is useful in maintaining control over the masses? Yes, I think I would put it as bluntly as that, because I think that that’s what it boils down to.
Here’s an article for Dymphna and anyone else who wants to take this discussion to the next level: http://www.anthropoetics.ucla.edu/ap1301/1301vano.htm
What the Enlightenment did was to demonstrate religion’s failure to answer questions raised by those living in that epoch:
• Because Christianity could not explain evil, any offered explanation of Providence (God’s plan) became useless. To say that “God works in mysterious ways” just didn’t cut it with the new, inquiring minds of the age.
• Because of the advent of natural science which led to Darwin, all supernatural explanations became redundant. To posit God at the extreme end of a teleology seemed a bit silly to those who were in the midst of discovering how nature works in a more tangible sense
• Yet as Kant said, issues of God will always be those of the personal spirit; and to a certain extent I agree. Since no one knows whether there’s life after death or not, the resolution seems to be one of personal conscience.
Hence there emerged an immanent conflict between an inner sentiment and an exteriorized thought: our “crisis”. While once Providence and The Supernatural defined life itself, now, ostensibly, all that remained was faith, hope, and charity.
Atheism itself comes in two basic flavors. Passive vanilla accepts the spiritual premise as a possibility, but says, “No thanks, it’s just not my preference. Let’s live and let live…” A corollary to this position is perhaps best summed by the phrase, “(spiritualist) religion is nothing but secularism with a human face”.
On the other hand, chocolate takes issue with spirituality as a worthy endeavor on its own terms. Because spiritualism is devoid of content, it can mean anything at all—from, say, pyramids as sourcing energy to a President being told by God to invade Iraq. Far better, the chocos say, to abolish all spiritual references because they always seem to justify anything they want to with this “personal relationship” thing. ‘Funny, indeed, how the empowered always seem to be more in touch with god than the rest of us!
But let’s not kid ourselves. Dennet, Hitchens, and company are pissed off about Creationism, which seems to crop up every thirty years of so in another disguise. For more on this, by the way, I recommend Kitcher’s new book, Living with Darwin.
I suppose all atheist rhetoric would fall silent if creationism would just go away; and there would be no extrinsic consequence to personal notions of who created what.
Said Atheist rhetoric, so to speak, makes two slippery slope arguments worth pondering:
• The insidious nature of creationisms makes it impossible to firewall from the internal-spiritual realm. Psychologically, the spiritualist position constitutes a bunkerism just waiting to explode upon the world with new-fangled notions of supernatural cause. Today, Intelligent Design; tomorrow, perhaps, a Quantum God—with or without dice?
• Alternatively, spiritualism itself sounds the death knell of any organized religion because, ultimately, it’s Gnostic in nature. Spiritualist people yearn to know god, but more or less accept the reality that he/she/it can never be accessed by either scientific means or from a standard doxology of any organized religion. In this sense, atheists use Hume’s observations as a point of reference: by “looking inside”, one only finds a cauldron of desires, and normally only those highly influenced by social forces. The only truly spiritual thing is thought itself.
Lastly, as Dumont does not speak for Anthropology, please quit suggesting that what he does has anything to do with what “Anthropology of Religion” studies. It’s moreover interesting, indeed, that he can turn Nietzsche on his head and insist that religion’s a guilt trip for us having acted… sooo Nietzschean….and I somewhat agree.
But the more salient issues are about Will to Power and Christian resentment versus guilt, but rather of how religion plays an active, observable role in advocating socially-accepted violence. To this end, religion and state are intertwined as rose to briar: states cause religion in the sense that they organize social thought to justify their own ends—which includes warfare.
Abolishing religion, then, would not necessarily stop war; but does, indeed, deprive the state of a strong ideology for doing so. To this end, we can easily assess the Twentieth Century to be that of fascism in both its Hitlerite and Stalinst varieties. Rejecting the pre-established religious raison d’etre, they simply made up one as they went along.
Indeed, this is a hard lesson to learn; and one well worth pondering when questions about “human nature” arise. In any case, who needs the Pope when one can derive inspiration from Wagner? Listening to Ride of the Valkeries make me want to invade Poland—and Vietnam, too!
“Myth”, of course, means “stories” in Greek. And nation-states always tell stories about themselves to justify who they are, don’t they? And if religions are about states then…hummm… In any case, what’s really important is whether or not Joe Citizen should actually believe this acknowledged nonsense for his own good. Leo Strauss sez yes, and probably so does the Catholic Dumont. I say no.
This is to say that while my training as an Anthropologist offers me a Weberian understanding (verstehen) of how myth qua belief system holds mental pictures together sufficient to form a “culture”, it likewise informs me that much of what we call economics is engrained in story-telling and superstition, too. Indian cattle are sacred because they provide milk, dung and traction (Harris: 1965). Entire Amazonian economies can be codified in what the creators prescribed (Reichel-Dolmatof’s Desana). Regrettably, stories can also refer to better times (Levi Strauss’ Tristes Tropiques), or even Native American migrations across the Bering Straight as in Na-dene narratives of black, green, brown, red.
In all these societies there’s an agreed-upon story for what happens when you die. And what so obvious to the participant observer is how what we call “religion” is so seamlessly interwoven into economics and history. But things being the way they are, developing societies are asking the same sort of questions that Europeans began asking around 1720 (and Indians always have, by the way; we just want to think of them as hidebound to Arjuna’s chariot!).
Faced with starvation, fathers in upland New Guinea will still eat their younger daughters under tribal mores, but will send their eldest son to Papua U’s School of Finance. Islamic males, perhaps, will fail to invoke clan custom of honor killing to the extent that they’ve read de Beauvoir. But Dumont tells us to cling to our old opiates because it makes us feel good. So where’s Marx when we need him?
Bill Harris
Truepeers
Van Oort states that the fundamental difference between man and animal is that man can learn by watching others. He also insists that there is not sufficient genetic time between man and chimp to explain this difference between them. Thus he implies that there is no genetic explanation for this difference. The difference is in the memes, not the genes.
This is absolutely not my field, but 2 thoughts occur to me:
Firstly isn’t the difference between man and chimp in this regard, the ability to learn fom others, explained by the ‘mirror neurons’ in the human brain which are lacking in chimps? There is substantial research on autism which deals with this.
Secondly the genetic differences need not be as great as was previously thought in order to explain big differences. For example, the differences between dogs and wolves (their ancestors), such as dogs tails standing up and their ears flopping, seemed inexplicable in genetic terms. However they are indirectly genetic and are explicable in terms of the different levels of adrenaline in wolves and dogs and its influence on other hormones. The difference is ‘genetic’ but arises from huan breeding of dogs over the millenia. People favoured the more passive (domesticatable, with lower adrenaline levels) over the more wild.
This is not to adopt a position of genetic determinism (which is an over simplification of life) but to show that the ways in which genes operate is more subtle than was previously thought.
Bill Harris - brilliant contribution.
Hi Sean,
Thanks for the complement!
By raving coincidence, dear friends of mine have parented two wolves from puppyhood: Loki and Smoki, respectively; and this, briefly, is their story:
Ten years ago their daughter took home these two guys from a film project in Idaho, and because of her totally (self) occupied life simply dumped them onto mom and dad. Summer home in the Santa Barbara Mountains seemed ideal as, after all, they might play with the horses and protect them against the less- friendly of their own kind. Said parents quickly sought advice– and caveats forthcoming.
* Wolves are impossible to house train because pee-and- go- quickly seems to be the call of the wild.
* Wolves have huge jaws that have been selectively bred down in every breed unknown to Michael Vick.
* Feed them puppy chow. A low protein diet seems to inhibit release of fight- or- flight mechanisms. In this sense, it might be said that nurture works with nature to insure a high-degree of owner-survivability.
* Wolves need constant affection and assurance, so be prepared to slobberkiss. Is this evo-adaptive in someway; or just a spandrel?
Re mirror neurons, that they develop is ultimately genetic in the sense that some code has to pass through the formation of the nervous system in order to form them.
All great apes possess mirror neurons to a certain extent, but h sapiens possesses extensive networks of same in the language areas–Wernicke and broca, respectively.
In this sense, I believe that you’ve nade an excellent point is suggestingthat small differences can effect huge outcomes.
Ciao, Bill
Hi Bill,
As I said, this is not my area.
Re the wolves, I bet the ones you mention still don’t cock their tails and that their ears don’t flop. Some russians started breeding Arctic foxes in captivity ( for fur). They deliberately bred from those animals that were less nervous/agressive (the ones that didn’t ither cower back or seek to attack when their cages were opened). Over surprisingly few generations of this they had foxes that not only did not cower/attack but welcomed human attention - but what really surprised them was that these foxes becan to cock their tails and their ears flopped. This is normal for dogs, but is unknown in Arctic foxes (or wolves) and had not been selected for in the breeding programme (it couldn’t have been, because these traits were absent in the original animals).
That dogs have smaller jaws than wolves is easy to explain through breeding selection, that they have smaller brains is a not unexpected result of the difference in life-style over millenia (dogs have it easier), but the difference in tails, ears (and I THINK, spots) was a mystery until the role of lower adrenalin levels (which had been selected for in choosing more docile animals to breed from) and its knock-on effects on other hormones, was examined - but nobody expected that a gene controlling adrenaline levels would have had so many secondary effects on the animals physionomy.
BTW Heidegger would be relevant to the wider debate
Sean Swan,
“Van Oort states that the fundamental difference between man and animal is that man can learn by watching others.”
- No, he says that the difference is that man learns from watching others’ intentions - even intentions that are practically “irrational” but symbolically important - and not simply from watching their behaviours; animals certainly learn behaviors from watching others but they are focussed on what this behavior can achieve pragmatically (in relation to the environment) and not what it can achieve ethically (a question they cannot ask).
“He also insists that there is not sufficient genetic time between man and chimp to explain this difference between them. Thus he implies that there is no genetic explanation for this difference. The difference is in the memes, not the genes.”
- No, he says the difference cannot be solely explained in biological or genetic terms. What he is interested in is the co-evolution of man’s phsyiological (mental) and cultural capacities. I doubt he finds the notion of “memes” helpful, btw, because talking of memes avoids or begs the real question of how memory is produced in a shared human consciousness of events or scenes, and it is this question that it is the purpose of his discipline, Generative Anthropology, to explain.
“This is absolutely not my field, but 2 thoughts occur to me:
Firstly isn’t the difference between man and chimp in this regard, the ability to learn fom others, explained by the ‘mirror neurons’ in the human brain which are lacking in chimps? There is substantial research on autism which deals with this.”
-Yes, our mirror neurons are important in understanding our mental capacities. But, again, van Oort argues that a solely biological explanation cannot explain, or serve an hypothesis of, the origin and evolution of human language. Are you sure chimps don’t also have mirror neurons? We are both mimetic creatures, though to differing extents.
“Secondly the genetic differences need not be as great as was previously thought in order to explain big differences.”
-that may be true, but the difference between humans and chimps is not akin to the difference between dogs and wolves. The first difference is not fundamentally a genetic one. It is the difference that emerges with symbolic language. Chimps have a capacity to learn human signs if they are taught (though it’s tough work) but once they learn them they don’t then go back to their fold and expand their repertoire of signs when interacting with other chimps. So, in some sense, chimps have the minimal genetic basis for symbolic language but they don’t have the social need for it and so their brains have not evolved in co-evolution with language/culture to maximize their brain’s linguistic abilities. Only humans have this need to continually expand symbolic language, presumably because our somewhat greater capacity for mimesis led, in our proto-human forebears, to a degree of competition or disorder that could not be contained by an animal pecking order and so required instead the emergence of a new kind of order centred on the sacred.
Human beings are fundamentally religious, in the sense that we are from the start and will always be dependent on the sacred. Anti-religious polemicists, like those Scruton criticizes, who miss this essential point - who simply dismiss humanity’s deeply rooted relationship to religion - have very little of interest to say about our shared humanity. Strictly biological arguments cannot explain many key things.
A most interesting discussion. I am struck by the fact that almost everybody wishes to read my article as a defence of religion. It is in fact an attempt to point out that there is more to religion than its current critics seem to recognize, that religion is a permanent feature of the human condition, and that René Girard has an interesting theory about it, and one that we need to grapple with. For the record, I am a Christian, I do believe in God, and I accept the reality of Christ’s sacrifice and the great benefit that comes from pondering and rehearsing it. But my article was addressed to the secular and sceptical readers of Prospect magazine, who ought to be mature enough to recognize the distinctions between faith and philosophical reasoning, and between arguing and preaching. Incidentally Nietzsche may be right to think that we create the sacred: but that is only another way of saying how remarkable we are, that we can create THIS. As with so much of Nietzsche, the genealogy presupposes what it must explain.
Thank you to everyone for taking such an interest.
RS
Re chimps and mirror neurons. Bill clarified that above - “All great apes possess mirror neurons to a certain extent, but h sapiens possesses extensive networks of same in the language areas–Wernicke and broca, respectively.”. So perhaps that explains the linguistic difference - you say that the difference between man and chimp “is not fundamentally a genetic one. It is the difference that emerges with symbolic language.” But the difference in linguistic ability IS genetically based.
You say “Only humans have this need to continually expand symbolic language, presumably because our somewhat greater capacity for mimesis led, in our proto-human forebears, to a degree of competition or disorder that could not be contained by an animal pecking order and so required instead the emergence of a new kind of order centred on the sacred.”
You imply that the evolution of higher symbolic language caused problems that could only be solved by the evolution of higher symbolic language - does this not make the cause the effect? This seems a rather circular argument to me. It is not that only humans have this NEED, it is that only humans have this ABILITY and your “presumably” should read “possibly”. As to the claim that human society for the last 500,000 years (the time since the emergence of modern h. Sapiens) was an order centred on the sacred … this is a massive over statement. The shaman was only one aspect of human society.
You conclude that “Human beings are fundamentally religious, in the sense that we are from the start and will always be dependent on the sacred”.
Modern Sweden is probably the most secular (truly secular as opposed to societies like the USSR which were ‘officially’ atheist but whose population remained religious) societies in the world - it is also one of the most peaceful. How can that be if the sacred is required for social order?
And as to what human beings are ‘fundamentally’, I’m afraid we aren’t as readily reductable as that, we are neither defined by the ’sacred’ nor solely by our genes. The only ‘defining’ thing that can truly be said about man is that we are all descended from a woman who lived in Africa 200,000 years ago.
Sorry to barge in again on what is clearly a cosy little game of definitions and polite amateur philosophising…But I wanted to thank “truepeers” for his/her last paragraph, especially the bit “humanity’s deeply rooted relationship to religion”. And to thank Roger Scruton for his reply which includes “religion is a permanent feature of the human condition.”
Because it’s a long time since I’ve heard such sweeping and unsubstantiated wishful thinking deployed in what I take to be an attempt at serious discussion. I cannot be bothered to essay a detailed response - RS must have read the key works underpinning the past 25 years of the cognitive revolution and which now set the academic standard, but has clearly opted to remain in denial. But perhaps “tp” has overlooked say Daniel Dennett’s work? Can I therefore recommend ‘Darwin’s Dangerous Idea’ and ‘Freedom Evolves’. He/she would quickly see that his/her hopeful closing assertion “Strictly biological arguments cannot explain many key things” is quite exploded!
Roger Scruton
Sorry, our postings must have crossed. I am grateful for your answer, by the way. You say “But my article was addressed to the secular and sceptical readers of Prospect magazine, who ought to be mature enough to recognize the distinctions between faith and philosophical reasoning, and between arguing and preaching”
Perhaps I’m immature but I do not think one can be a philosopher part time - that is, a philosophy cannot be seperated from the philosopher. This is an existential position, obviously, but I make no apologies for that. There are two reasons for making a point - either it is because one believes it or because one does NOT believe it but finds it utilitarian in some way. I just like to know which case applies as it makes it easier to judge the point being asserted. Wicked and malicious people will, of course, suspect that my intent was to lure you back on to grounds that are more open to attack, but ’tis not so…
STUV
“polite amateur philosophising” - and your contributions are what, exactly? I can’t speak for anybody else, but I have a doctorate, which means I have been anointed with the holy oil and charism of the academic establishment by members of that same establishment who have been similarly annointed in apostolic succession back to the begining of the academy. I also work at a Jesuit run university, so this stuff is my daily bread. This does not mean that I cannot be talking bollocks, just that it’s not amature bollocks.
What I’m not is an elitist. The idea of the professional philosopher only really begins with Hegel. Most philosphers were ‘amatures’, what is relevant is the value or interest of a comment, not whether the speaker is ‘amature’ or not. As for being ‘polite’ … since when was that a perjoritive term?
Sean,
“you say that the difference between man and chimp “is not fundamentally a genetic one. It is the difference that emerges with symbolic language.” But the difference in linguistic ability IS genetically based.”
-I would say it probably has evolved a genetic component (though, as I say, chimps can learn human signs, just not as readily as us) but the difference is ultimately based in the moment or event of the birth of symbolic language. And that event, which must have happened, cannot be reduced to a genetic mutation. If a mutation were necessary for the event to emerge it still wouldn’t explain why or how that event took place. Whether or not religions get it anywhere close to right, the advantage they have over the scientist looking for a purely evolutionary theory is that religions remember the fact that there must have been a moment of human creation. This, of course, is not to solve, but just to insist on the question of whether God creates man or vice versa.
“You imply that the evolution of higher symbolic language caused problems that could only be solved by the evolution of higher symbolic language - does this not make the cause the effect? This seems a rather circular argument to me.”
-no, i am suggesting that the problems that led to the emergence of symbolic language existed before language first emerged. The problem of proto-humans’ advanced mimetic capacities would have had a biological basis. The problems of mimetic rivalry did continue after the event of language origin, which explains why we have a cultural history fuelled by the need continually to rework our sign system.
“As to the claim that human society for the last 500,000 years (the time since the emergence of modern h. Sapiens) was an order centred on the sacred … this is a massive over statement. The shaman was only one aspect of human society.”
-I am not suggesting that cultural man ever loses his biological nature. We are always both. But if we are going to talk about human societies being centred on anything, well they can only be centred on something that is sacred (in the sense that the profane is just another stage of the sacred). Of course the Shaman is but one representative of the sacred. We all represent the sacred to some extent, starting with our mothers pointing to things and saying “dog”, “father”, “shaman”. The “dog” is sacred in the sense that he can serve as a collective centre of attention for the human community, he can take on symbolic significance, and be important even when he is nowhere in sight, but long dead. Indeed, historically, it seems (from cave paintings and such) that the sacred first takes animal before human form.
In contrast, animal societies are based on one-on-one relationships and hierarchies. No alpha animal ever has to address his con-specifics as a whole; there are no dog pack speeches or rituals (and let’s not misread, say, elephant behaviour here). The alpha only has to deal with immediate rivals/mates. SO there is no shared centre of attention in animal societies, only sometimes the appearance of such (to human minds) when we look at centres of attention that are biologically evolved (e.g. the “queen” bee)
“You conclude that “Human beings are fundamentally religious, in the sense that we are from the start and will always be dependent on the sacred”.
Modern Sweden is probably the most secular (truly secular as opposed to societies like the USSR which were ‘officially’ atheist but whose population remained religious) societies in the world - it is also one of the most peaceful. How can that be if the sacred is required for social order?”
-Well I have a broad conception of the sacred; it is not just what the official church priests are able to convince us it is; it is also what socialist politicians or artists or intellectuals are successful in centering socialist politics around. In Sweden, I dare say the welfare state is sacred for a lot of people. To some extent the individual, as such, is also made sacred in Sweden, even if she is not as free and sacred as he is in, say, America. This then takes us to the question of whether the sacred can be defined and understood in strictly rational terms. I don’t think so. Politics in Sweden involves all kinds of leaps of faith, whatever the technocratic pretenses.
“And as to what human beings are ‘fundamentally’, I’m afraid we aren’t as readily reductable as that, we are neither defined by the ’sacred’ nor solely by our genes. The only ‘defining’ thing that can truly be said about man is that we are all descended from a woman who lived in Africa 200,000 years ago.”
Well, why have we all descended from a single woman, which I agree may well be the case? Presumably because the speciation that created the human only happened once. So, it seems fair to ask what that speciation entailed, what made us different from the chimps. And here, I think you have to return to the question of language and the sacred, as I’ve already suggested. None of this is to deny that we are not also animal, but that is not what is specifically human.
Stuv,
I’ll promise to read Dennett if you promise to read Rene Girard. As for,
“He/she would quickly see that his/her hopeful closing assertion “Strictly biological arguments cannot explain many key things” is quite exploded!”
I really doubt it. I certainly know there are many “just so” stories out there that try to explain everything human in biological terms, e.g. the “god gene”. Generally, these make me laugh. But if you have the courage to bother to essay a detailed response, have a go at me. Give us any “just so” story you choose, any strictly biological explanation of a fundamental human trait: e.g. religion or ethics, language, the esthetic, economics, marriage, and I’ll tell you what it doesn’t explain and what you need to read the likes of Girard to understand.
Just a brief note about the use of the phrase ‘in denial’. This is used by Stuv to denote the inexplicable nature of someone who disagrees with him - or who seems to disagree with him. But it might be wiser, and also more polite (and I agree with Sean Swan that politeness is a useful attribute, especially in people who react aggressively to disagreement)for Stuv to question his own certainties. It is surely possible for someone to have followed recent developments in cognitive science and evolutionary biology without concluding either that they stand in direct contradiction with the tenets of some theologically sophisticated religion, or that they answer the kinds of question put before us by the thinkers whom I discussed - namely Nietzsche, Wagner and Girard. My complaint about the current generation of village atheists is not that they are mistaken in their scientific beliefs, but that they have not looked as deeply as they ought into the human psyche, and have not therefore identified the questions to which religion is addressed.
RS
Truepeers
I must be brief, but one quick point
“Well, why have we all descended from a single woman, which I agree may well be the case? Presumably because the speciation that created the human only happened once. So, it seems fair to ask what that speciation entailed, what made us different from the chimps. And here, I think you have to return to the question of language and the sacred, as I’ve already suggested. None of this is to deny that we are not also animal, but that is not what is specifically human.”
The one woman in Africa was “Mitochondrial Eve”, but there’s absolutely nothing special or unique about her. she just happens to be our last common ancestor. At least our last common FEMALE ancestor, it’s not as easy to trace the male line. But we are also descended from her mother, her father, her grand-father, etc. To illustrate the point, Thatcher and Blair have a common ancestor seven generations back (their cousins many times removed) but there was nothing special about this person, just the coincidence of turning out to be, generations later, the last common ancestor of both Thatcher and Blair. It doesn’t mean that we’re not also descended from other people, just that our last common ancestor was M. Eve. What I like about making descent from her the ‘defining point’ of being human is that it is the only thing that all humans share in common - not all humans have language (babies, the mentally impaired, etc), not all humans share the same genes (genetic disorders, Downes Syndrome, etc), but all have this common ancestor in common.
A more interesting point might be that non sapien Homos, such as Neanderthal, also had religion and art - mental constructs resulting from an ability for abstract thought, in other words. And ‘abstract’ is probably the key term - the ability to abstract from what is. If the definition of ’sacred’ is stretched much beyond religion, it quickly ceases to be a concept that can be used to explain religion. In fact it runs the risk of merging with concepts like ‘awe’ and ‘respect’ - that is, it runs the risk of losing any definite meaning at all.
Here’s the link to the wiki entry for M. Eve - I’ve slightly simplified the story, you can get more detail here -> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mitochondrial_Eve
Oh Dear. Now I know I have stumbled into a Christian debating society meeting. So before I beat a hasty retreat…..
Sean Swan - Thanks for telling me you have a doctorate, work in a “Jesuit run university” and do not indulge in “amature bollocks”. You are clearly admirably qualified to continue the sort of discussion that Roger Scruton wants.
truepeers - I hope you do find time to read Dennett. I have read Girard but find his, at times relentless, Christian propagandising tiresome and a disqualification to objective, evidence-based thought.
Roger Scruton - “For the record I am a Christian…” Well for the record I am a fundamentalist agnostic. Given what science has revealed about our position in space/time, both organised belief in, or complete denial of, a supernatural entity is sheer arrogance.
Still, good luck with the discussion…..
See how he totally disdains this discussion - yet for some reason keeps coming back to it. Now what was that about ’sheer arrogance’ again?
The “benefits” of “christ’s sacrifice”.
In this day and age how can any reasonably intelligent being possibly believe or subscribe to such a statement.
The Process that is True Religion begins with the moment to moment enquiry into the three irreducible facts of human existence.
What are we as conscious beings—Consciousness
What is the nature of all of THIS that arises to (or in) our Consciousness—Energy.
Consciousness and Energy—-is there really any difference?
What about the world as Conscious Light?
This Process has nothing whatsoever to do with any mythological story re the “historical” Jesus.
Exactly “when” and “where” did this “historical” “event” occur?
And besides which who, what, and where are “you”.
Where (at what time) did “you” begin?
To truly account for your appearance here you would have to take into account the entire history of the cosmos and how all the seeming “elements” somehow coalesced into the mortal ever changing form that you call “you” in any and every moment.
Implicit in such a descriptive process of your body you would have to describe all of its constituent elements from the most gross to the most subtle energy levels right “down” to the primary fundamental level of pure energy. Einsteins famous equation (E=MC2) tells us that everything is a modification of Light—or rather Conscious Light. Einstein and others also tell us that Light or Energy is never destroyed—it only ever ceaselessly morphs into other forms.
Perhaps then we are always already immortal light beings?
At another tack we do not even begin to understand what we are as human beings by studying or comparing us to to animals and the way in which animals become “socialised” by their pack, herd or whatever. How dismally reductive can you really get!
Then again the non-humans are quite capable, and indeed are fundamentally urged or motivated, to enter into profound states of Spiritual Contemplation—and readily do so.
So it is with human beings except that have become so agitated that it is not even considered to even be a possibilty within our “advanced” western “culture”—we are to busy destroying the world. Such a natural an inherent urge was/is dismissed within the academy via the term “the failure of nerve”.
And then there is always the gigantic elephant sitting in the corner of the room—the stark fact odo death which when it occurs ripps off ALL of everyones comforting illusions—all of them—and nobody goes to “heaven”—with rare exception everyone just “reincarnates” and plays out the same self-possessed destiny in another equally terrified mortal human form—and so on forever until Divine Grace breaks the spell. And truly the fairy tale story of “jesus” REALLY just doesnt take death into account.
In Truth and Reality right human life only begins to begin when each person, one at a time, truly understands the meaning and significance of death. An understanding which inevitably involves the “sacrifice” or ripping off of ALL of ones consoling illusions, beginning with the child-hood fairy-tale “jesus”.
Sean,
“not all humans have language (babies, the mentally impaired, etc), not all humans share the same genes (genetic disorders, Downes Syndrome, etc), but all have this common ancestor in common.”
-well, leaving aside the question of when an embryo or fetus becomes human, all humans have at least some development (however disordered the individual) of a kind of (big)brain that has co-evolved over the millenia with language, in order to serve the development of language. So in bringing up the question of our common ancestors we can’t escape the language question by clinging to DNA. Our DNA, at least some small part of it, assumes the existence of a uniquely human language.
-yes I think the evidence is that Neanderthal had religion and hence language, so the common linguistic origin we all share (I presume monogenesis of the human, of language) goes quite far back and no doubt gave birth to various branches of early humans; but the more dominant pushed out or assimilated groups like Neanderthal.
“If the definition of ’sacred’ is stretched much beyond religion, it quickly ceases to be a concept that can be used to explain religion. In fact it runs the risk of merging with concepts like ‘awe’ and ‘respect’ - that is, it runs the risk of losing any definite meaning at all.”
-I can understand how a person of faith may want to keep a firm grip on what is and isn’t deemed sacred in his society. But for an anthropologist, a “genetic” understanding of culture is best. If, according to our best hypotheses of what must have been involved in the origin of the human (of language and religion), we must locate the sacred at the origin of the human (as I think we must), then it and everything else involved in the origin is implicit or explicit in any and every cultural representation that has since emerged, just as you and I both share DNA from M. Eve. Attending to the true minima of what is universally human does not risk the loss of real meaning in human society or anthropology, whatever difficulties it raises for defenders of conventional boundaries. It just helps us understand the original unity from which a great diversity of culture has since developed. For an anthropologist, Nike shoes are sacred, as is the Koran, though of course there are all kinds of differentiations we need further make. For example, language is not as sacred as religion, even if both share a common origin in “cultural Eve”, i.e. in the first shared scene of human consciousness, a scene centred on the first sacred thing as represented by the first sign.
STuv: “Oh Dear. Now I know I have stumbled into a Christian debating society meeting. So before I beat a hasty retreat…..
I have read Girard but find his, at times relentless, Christian propagandising tiresome and a disqualification to objective, evidence-based thought.”
-these are apotropaic gestures, evidence of a mind that is bound to the sacred but in a way it doesn’t understand. Many non-Christians have read and observed, qualified and contended, the truths in Girard’s work. It’s quite clear that, whatever your particular difficulties with this great thinker, one need not be a Christian to see his achievement in furthering our understanding of the human. This is widely recognized.
“for the record I am a fundamentalist agnostic. Given what science has revealed about our position in space/time, both organised belief in, or complete denial of, a supernatural entity is sheer arrogance.”
-are you not aware how silly this sounds? You are just going to dismiss the many evident purposes of organized religion because certain things can only be taken on faith? (and why is it that the “agnostics” always fail to see that the believer takes belief in God, not as a certainty, but as a question of often challenging faith, so where exactly is the ground on which an agnostic distinguishes himself)? My guess is that you, stuv, are what is known in certain intellectual circles as a Gnostic (Which is a faith in the magical powers of the modern, rational “enlightened” socially -transforming intellectual, though often the faith in magic is not seen as such by its practitioners.) If correct, this puts you in company with many modern people; and no doubt to some extent the organizations to which you belong - e.g. the dominant forms of modern liberal bureaucracy, education, etc. - are organized forms of Gnostic religion. I find Gnostics to be highly arrogant people, but then that’s what we always think of our intellectual opponents when we’re being lazy. Humility entails taking up challenges to find out what is true, potentially using all the tools of intellectual inquiry.
Sue,
“Einsteins famous equation (E=MC2) tells us that everything is a modification of Light—or rather Conscious Light.”
Oh God! Please, please, please!
Energy = Matter x the Constant speed of light travelling in a vacuum squared.
It means that, at the atomic level, matter can be changed in to energy (as in nukes) and, conversely energy can be changed into matter - which is why it is impossible to travel faster than the speed of light - if your doing C and you put your foot down the extra energy transforms into mass, so you just get more massive, not faster. Nowhere is there anything about ‘conscious’ light - in fact light itself is not that significant, it just happens to travel at C (the fastest possible velocity) in