Genealogy of Religion

Exploring the Origins, History and Future of Religion

Zion Petroglyphs

September 7th, 2010 · Archaeology and Religion, Shamans and Shamanism

A friend just visited Zion National Park in Utah and took some amazing photos of petroglyphs in the backcountry.  Given that these are carved into the rock, there really is no way to date them directly.  I am not sure of the occupational sequence for that area, but there seems to be no reason these could not be the product of cumulative efforts that began with Paleoindians and continued with the Anasazi and Paiute.  As you can see, several of the images are entoptic, and thus indicative of shamanic altered states of consciousness.

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No Hotline to God

September 6th, 2010 · Daily Devolutions, Philosophy of Religion

There are hotlines at 10 Downing Street, but apparently there is no hotline to God, at least while Tony Blair was Prime Minister.  In a recent interview with Spiegel, the former PM discusses his recently published memoirs:

SPIEGEL: Mr Blair, you write in your new memoir “A Journey” that religion has always been more important to you than politics. Yet you rarely mention in your book how religion has shaped your political views. Why?

Tony Blair: Contrary to some popular wisdom, I never thought God could substitute for political judgment. I was a political leader, not a religious leader.

SPIEGEL: So God never spoke to you directly?

Blair: Your faith gives you strength to do what you think is right and obviously it gives you values. But that’s it. You can’t go into the corner and ask God what the minimum wage should be next year.

If you ever watched Tony Blair perform each Wednesday during Prime Minister’s Questions in Parliament, you could not help but be impressed.  The contrast between him and the former US president could not have been more striking.

One gets the sense that Mr. Bush had a hotline in the Oval Office and supernatural sanction for his minimum wage proposals (i.e., lower or abolish it).

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The Big Bang without God

September 6th, 2010 · Atheism and Religion, Philosophy of Religion

Among scientists, physicists seem to be the most likely to believe in some version of an all powerful sentient being or force.  While very few of them are willing to say what such a being or force might be, religionists are always keen to claim such statements as “evidence” for their gods.

I have always understood why physicists — along with engineers — are mostly likely to perceive universal design: the former because their models depend on it and the latter because the built world is in fact designed.  Throw in the sense of awe that accompanies cosmological physics, and it is surprising that more physicists are not in the theism camp.

Stephen Hawking used to be considered an ally, if not friend, of the theism crowd.  His new book, however, makes clear that he sees no need for a prime mover when it comes to the Big Bang.  In fact, he asserts, the laws of physics necessarily entail the Big Bang.  As reported by The Economist, this is causing quite a stir.

Apparently not able to find a physicist to comment on these abstruse mathematical matters, “your correspondent” (my favorite British journalistic conceit) turned to Richard Dawkins:

Richard Dawkins, an evolutionary biologist and arguably the world’s most famous atheist, welcomed Dr Hawking’s apparent apostasy, telling the Times that “Darwinism kicked God out of biology but physics remained more uncertain. Hawking is now administering the coup de grace.” He quickly added that construing the physicist’s past proclamations as anything more than a handy metaphor was indulging in “wishful thinking”.

Our correspondent concludes with a remark that is music to my dissertation ears:

However, another fascinating question, hitherto absent from the current palaver, may prove more tractable. It concerns not how to explain creation without God, but how to account for the persistence of human religious belief without invoking its object. Evolutionary psychologists, anthropologists and neurologists are hard at work trying to figure this out.

This will indeed prove to be a more tractable question.

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Nietzsche’s Philosophy of Religion

September 5th, 2010 · Pagans and Polytheism, Philosophy of Religion

In this review of Nietzsche’s Philosophy of Religion by Julian Young, Weaver Santaniello provides some observations that — if true, are startling:

And while many simply regard Nietzsche as an atheist, Young does not view Nietzsche as a non-believer, radical individualist, or immoralist, but as a nineteenth-century religious reformer belonging to a German Volkish tradition of conservative communitarianism.

Concerning religion, Young’s fundamental argument is that although Nietzsche rejects the Christian God, he is not “anti-religious.” Rather, Nietzsche is a religious thinker precisely because he adopts Schopenhauer’s analysis of religion as an intellectual construction that addresses the existential problems of pain and death, and gives authority to community-creating ethos.

Nietzsche views Dionysian pantheism as a solution to the problems of pain and death, and argues for the flourishing of a new “festival,” based on a humanity-affirming religion modeled on that of the ancient Greeks.

Although I have difficulty agreeing with this interpretati0n, it is provocative and the book looks interesting.  Typological treatments of Nietzsche’s thought — those which hone in on a single idea such as “truth” and trace it through the entire corpus of his work, often pay large conceptual dividends.  At least one dissertation has been written which uses the famous opening lines from Beyond Good and Evil — “Supposing truth is a woman.  What then?” — in precisely this way.

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Myth as History — On Religious Texts

September 4th, 2010 · History of Religions, Methodology of Religion

Among scholars and historians of religion, there has long been an unfortunate tendency to treat myth as mere text — disembodied, free-floating, timeless, and ahistorical.  In such non-contexts, myth is considered to be something universal or essential, that which captures and expresses archetypes, or even worse, an archaic and tentative approach to monotheism.

In the fifth essay of Imagining Religion, Jonathan Z. Smith takes a close look at one such myth — the famous Maori creation story centered on the high god Io — and unravels the history of its making.  As is true of all native or indigenous myths that have been collected over the centuries, the Io story did not write itself.  It is an historical product, told and inscribed by particular persons in a particular time and place.  Such peoples, times, and places are never situated in ethereal or untouched circumstance — they are always thickly embedded in history.

After examining the particulars of the Io myth and detailing its all too human construction, Smith concludes:

I would draw only set of conclusions for the historian of religion from these preinterpretive investigations.  The 1907 Io cosmogony might be labeled a fraud.  It most certainly is not “neolithic,” it is not “the Polynesian creation myth,” and it cannot be used as evidence for Urmonotheismus or for the nature of archaic ritual, as has been done in previous scholarship.

This native work has been obscured by taking the text to be static, to be archaic, to be a myth.  By placing it back within its context, the historian of religion may begin to perceive its labors, its strains, its achievements.  Such a study may allow us to begin to interpret properly and appreciate Homo religiosus as being, preeminently, Homo faber.

It would be wise for us to remember that all religious texts are situated, constructed by interested humans who are not free to make their own history.

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Dolphins, Chimps & Japanese Religions

September 3rd, 2010 · Classifications of Religion, Cultural Evolution of Religion, Definitions of Religion, History of Religions, Magic and Religion

After recently watching “The Cove” and a Mad Men episode titled “The Chrysanthemum and the Sword” — a clever allusion to Ruth Benedict’s justly famous cultural study of Japan, I decided it was time to bone up on Japanese religions.  Japan is a multi-faceted nation and getting your head around its history, culture and people can be a daunting task.

Some people, like Roger in Mad Men, hate the Japanese as a result of their combat experiences in World War II, whereas others have a vague dislike of Japan because of things like the slaughter of whales and dolphins.  I can understand the unease, even if it is unfair and stereotyped.

There is also a double standard at work here, which is nicely illustrated by today’s New York Times article on the National Institute of Health’s appalling decision to “un-retire” a large colony of government owned chimpanzees — all of whom have been abused and fruitlessly infected with HIV and Hepatitis in the name of unproductive scientific research.  It is hard to cast stones at the Japanese government when the United States stands alone as the only developed nation to maintain chimp colonies and subject chimps to horrific experimentation.

But back to Japanese religions — I began reading Robert Bellah’s classic Tokugawa Religion, vaguely hoping it might provide some insights into my unease or something that would account for the fact that some segments of Japanese society see nothing special about cetaceans.  It seems strange, after all, that a nation so attuned to nature and harmony can simultaneously see cetaceans as oceanic pests and food.

I am not finding any answers, but am getting a nice overview of what Bellah asserts can be called “Japanese religion,” which usually is an amalgam of Buddhisms, Shintoism, Confucianism, and Taoism — all syncretically fused into something uniquely Japanese.  It makes for fascinating reading, and would probably strike most monotheistic Americans as utterly foreign.

My only complaint about Bellah’s treatment is that he, like so many other sociologists, considers early historical forms of these traditions to be “primitive” and “magical.”  This kind of normative, categorical thinking is deeply embedded in progressive evolutionary schemes, and was properly jettisoned by most anthropologists long ago.  It is time for sociologists to do the same.

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Phylogeny of Religions

September 2nd, 2010 · Classifications of Religion, Cultural Evolution of Religion, Definitions of Religion, History of Religions, Religion as Evolutionary Adaptation, Religion as Evolutionary Byproduct

Sooner or later any serious student or historian of religion will encounter Jonathan Z. Smith, he of the infamous quip — “there is no data for religion.  Religion is solely the creation of the scholar’s study.”  A curious statement indeed coming from one of the most prominent historians of religion, whose entire career and oeuvre is dedicated to the study of religion.

I am working my way through Smith’s writings, beginning with the collection of essays from which the quip comes, Imagining Religion: From Babylon to Jonestown.  As is Smith’s wont and method, each essay is anchored in some aspect of religious history or text which is in turn used to demonstrate a larger point.  I have decided to examine most of the essays here and highlight some of these larger points.

The first essay, “Fences and Neighbors: Some Contours of Early Judaism,” deals with the ways in which we classify and create phylogenies of religions: “All of the issues raised with respect to biological classification recur in the study of religion and its taxonomic agenda” (p. 5).  This is a threshold and foundational issue; anyone who purports to explain the origins of religion must confront this problem ab initio — those who do not (and they are many) usually miss the mark by a wide margin.

Simple classification schemes — e.g., from shamanism to polytheism to monotheism — implicitly deal in unilinear evolution and fail to capture the several lines of descent that culminate in what we today consider to be religions.  Smith thus observes:

It would be possible as well, in principle, to construct a satisfying evolutionary classification of religions.  But this would have to eschew the impossible presupposition of a common ancestor, replacing it with a model of multilinear evolution.  But I know of no such attempt.

Smith asserts that classification is a necessary first step but for religious history to be a science, “explanation is required.”  More than a century ago, the philologist and historian of religion F. Max Muller insisted on something similar: “all real science rests on classification, and only in case we cannot succeed in classifying the various dialects of faith, shall we have to confess that a science of religion is really an impossibility.”

This will be no easy task, Smith observes, given that we habitually and wrongly essentialize faith traditions, creating static and unified entities where there are none:

What has animated these reflections and explorations is the conviction that students of religion need to abandon the notion of “essence”…as well as the socially impossible correlative of a community constituted by a systematic set of beliefs.  The cartography appears far messier.  We need to map the [varieties of each tradition], which appear as a shifting cluster of characteristics which vary over time.  (p. 18)

This is precisely the case and is something I assayed in Fractured Faiths — The Myth of Unified Religious Traditions.  The explanations that account for religions will result in phylogenies considerably more complicated than the simply so stories of group level selection, costly signaling, social cohesion, moral glue, and increased fertility.

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Hitchens on Anti-Semitism

September 2nd, 2010 · Axial Age Religions, History of Religions

Provocative and thoughtful as he usually is, Hitchens opines on anti-semitism for The Atlantic:

There is, probably first and certainly foremost, religious anti-Semitism. Unlike other nations or peoples, Jews were among the witnesses to the alleged lives and preachings of Jesus and Muhammad, and turned away from men they deemed false Messiahs. It is inconceivable that they will ever be quite forgiven for doing so.

There also is a continuation of the video interview, in which Hitchens makes some interesting observations regarding insular “organic societies” and how they are perturbed by the presence of alien and questioning Jews.

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“Islam Is Not a Religion”

September 1st, 2010 · Axial Age Religions, Civil Religion, Definitions of Religion

So says J.R. Dieckmann, an electrician and writer who runs a website that I will neither name nor link.  He did, however, post this startling proclamation over here, one of the many bizarre and paranoid websites that are making so much fearful noise in American politics.

Decoding Dieckmann’s assertion is easy — what he means is that Islam is not Christianity:

What legitimate religion would demand that its members either kill or convert people of other faiths? What legitimate religion is intent on imposing its own laws on the rest of the entire world? If Islam were just about praying to Allah and worshiping Mohammed and nothing more, we would not be having a problem with Islamism and Islamic terrorists. Islam has a global mission to take over and run the world according to Islamic Shariah law. How can we call that a religion?

What legitimate religion in this country comes with its own civil laws that take precedence over national, state, and local laws? No, Islam is not a religion. It is a governing doctrine that not only dictates religious beliefs, but also social behavior that includes laws, penalties and punishments, not by God, but by people if the laws are not obeyed. Islam is a form of government, not a religion. It does not belong here. We already have government under our Constitution (sort of).

As is apparent, Dieckmann understands that Islam is a religion — it simply is not in his small mind a “legitimate” religion.  Why?  Because it does lend itself readily to separation of the sacred and the state.  Dieckmann would of course find it perfectly legitimate if Christianity merged with the American state.  And indeed this is what he wants.

Between his wiring jobs and writing gigs, it seems that Dieckmann does not have much spare time for reading history.  If he were to do so, I am sure he would learn that in the West there is a venerable tradition of forcefully imposing Christianity on others, forming Christian governments, and citing Christianity as a governing doctrine.  He would also learn that after centuries of Protestant/Catholic warfare in the West, some wise people decided it might be best to separate religion from politics.

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African Witchcraft & American Religion

August 31st, 2010 · Classifications of Religion, Definitions of Religion, Ritual and Religion

Over at Live Science, Benjamin Radford stereotypically reports — with no irony and little thought — that “Belief in Witchcraft Widespread in Africa” is prevalent:

A new Gallup poll found that belief in magic is widespread throughout sub-Saharan Africa, with over half of respondents saying they personally believe in witchcraft. Studies in 18 countries show belief varies widely (ranging from 15 percent in Uganda to 95 percent in the Ivory Coast), but on average 55 percent of people polled believe in witchcraft.

The article has so many problems I am not sure where to begin.  Let’s start with Africa, which is the world’s second largest continent and has 1 billion residents living in 61 countries.

This means that the poll (n=18) surveyed less than a third of African nations (n=61).  You cannot extrapolate from this third to reach the conclusion that on average 55% of Africans believe in magic-witchcraft.  As Radford notes, the variation between countries is substantial, ranging from 15% in Uganda to 95% in the Ivory Coast.

Now let’s consider the terms “magic” and “witchcraft.”  Because magic and witchcraft always entails belief in supernatural beings or forces, coupled with the belief that humans can do certain things to influence those beings or forces, the alleged distinction between magic-witchcraft and religion is tenuous and often arbitrary.  Most anthropologists who have considered the matter reject any distinction between “magic” and “religion.”  One person’s magic is often another’s religion.

We can illustrate this issue by looking at some of Radford’s comments on the poll:

One likely explanation is that those who believe in witchcraft feel they have less control over their own lives. People who believe in witchcraft often feel victimized by supernatural forces, for example, attributing accidents or disease to evil sorcery instead of randomness or naturalistic causes.

A cultural belief in witchcraft has wider implications for Africans as well, from law enforcement to aid donations to public health. In Africa, witch doctors are consulted not only for healing diseases, but also for placing curses on rivals. Magic (or at least the belief in magic) is commonly used for personal, political, and financial gain.

This is a fairly accurate description of certain people in the United States and religious people in other countries; we can substitute terms to demonstrate this:

One likely explanation is that many Christians feel they have less control over their own lives. Christians often feel victimized by supernatural forces, for example, attributing accidents or disease to Satan, demons, and sin instead of randomness or naturalistic causes.

A cultural belief in Christianity has wider implications for Americans as well, from law enforcement to aid donations to public health. In America, priests and pastors are consulted for healing diseases, and in times of war God is called on to smite rivals. Christianity (or at least the belief in Christianity) is commonly used for personal, political, and financial gain.

Radford concludes his article by commenting that while “personal belief in magic and witchcraft may seem harmless, the actions some people take based on those beliefs clearly are not.”

I will conclude my post by observing that “while personal belief in religion may seem harmless, the actions some people take based on religious beliefs clearly are not.”

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