The story perfectly illustrates how “my right interpretation” trumps “your wrong interpretation” by claiming my interpretation is not really an interpretation whereas your interpretation is “ignorant.” I’m not sure who is more ignorant here, the reporter or the minister:

The Bible is one of the most beloved books in America. Yet it is also one of the most misused, misinterpreted and misunderstood books in this country, according to the Rev. Jim Keck. And it is this dichotomy — a nation so devoted to Scripture and yet so ignorant of what the Bible truly says — that is the basis for Keck’s lecture, “The Bible in America.”

Keck, who holds a doctorate in ministry, said this complete devotion and ignorance of Scripture has long been a concern, but perhaps no more than today when churches and politicians use dueling interpretations of the Bible to vilify, justify and demonize those who hold other beliefs and values. Christian ignorance of its most revered book has left America in a divisive, dangerous and very unChristian-like place, Keck said.

“It’s an interesting disparity — we have this huge affective emotional embrace of Scripture and yet we are fairly ignorant biblically,” Keck said. That ignorance becomes dangerous as churches declare battle lines over the role — and words — of Scripture, he said.

It was not always this way. “Early colonial society was Scripture saturated,” Keck said. People read the Bible at home. Parents read the Bible to their children. Teachers taught it in the classroom. Bible stories were a central part of school primers, the McGuffey Reader and the Noah Webster spellers, Keck said. “People were so deeply immersed in Scripture and Bible knowledge that their view of the world through Scripture was central,” Keck said. “Learning the Bible was a moral underpinning for society.”

The 1880s brought the Bible wars. Bible education was removed from public schools and churches became the place for religious education. Different denominations offered differing interpretations — and those differences sometimes led to bloodshed.

“One would have thought Christians would dutifully read the Bible, but they didn’t,” Keck said. “Once society became secularized, Christians dropped the ball. Now there are a lot of biblically illiterate people who do not hear the high call of Scripture.”

People expect the church to teach and interpret the Bible for the congregation. The American entrepreneurial zeal drives churches to compete for members under the assumption that its interpretation of the Bible is correct and therefore they are especially faithful, Keck said.

Speaking bluntly, Keck calls it “marketing crap. That’s what happens when churches get into interpretive wars. Churches create scandals and controversies over Scripture, and people are not biblically aware enough to weed through it on their own. They can only hear the slogans. They cannot interpret it. That’s how you engage if you don’t have the biblical knowledge.”

And it is setting the United States down a damaging and contentious path. “These Bible arguments of American churches are a horrible diversion from what really matters in the Bible. The Bible, in its fullness, is calling us to the reality of God, the importance of personal morality and social justice, and how to be a better person.”

But the lessons of Scripture are lost in political issues of abortion, gay marriage, the ordination of women to the priesthood and more.

“It is an evasion of the real higher calling Scripture talks about,” Keck said. Far too often, political and moral stands are based on a single passage of Scripture interpreted in isolation.

“There is a high noble call in Scripture to love your neighbor, economic justice and love God. I deeply believe America needs that higher call,” Keck said. So what is the answer? “Churches have to do a better job of bringing people more deeply into a knowledge of the Bible,” Keck said. “At the very least, churches need to stop the slogans and competing with one another.”

“America has to get back to the Bible in a different way. In a way that honors the validity of other religions and the pluralism in our culture,” Keck said. “The only way to understand how to be a Christian is a higher fidelity to Scripture.”

There is so much wrong here it’s hard to know where to begin. While this is something perhaps better handled by my discourse-savvy friends over at Religion Bulletin, a few observations are in order:

– The minister imagines a time and place, the nostalgic old-timey days, where everyone read the bible without interpreting it. It’s as if the bible just inscribed itself on minds without being interpreted and there were no different interpretations. There was never such a time or place. All reading is interpretation.

– The minister, without irony, bemoans differing interpretations and then proceeds to offer his own interpretation which he anoints as authoritative with words like “true” and “real” and “fidelity” and “deep.” These are code words which mean only that the minister believes his interpretation is right and others are wrong.

– The minister repeatedly acknowledges there are different interpretations of the bible yet never acknowledges that his particular understanding of the bible is also an interpretation. His interpretive lessons (“we can’t read passages in isolation”) lead to interpretive conclusions (“the importance of personal morality and social justice”).

I could go on but you get the point. The minister’s doctoral training apparently didn’t include lessons in interpretation or discourse. The credulous reporter failed to ask the minister why his interpretations are better than others and why those other interpretations are “ignorant.”

While I greatly admire Pagels’ work and understand this was a lecture setting, this answer won’t do. The emotional explanation for religion has been around for a long time and was most famously stated by Sigmund Freud in The Future of an Illusion (1927).

Freud explains religion as wish fulfillment, with emotional fear playing the major role. Humans faced with an inexplicable and cruel world create coping mechanism gods: “The gods retain the threefold task: they must exorcize the terrors of nature, they must reconcile men to the cruelty of Fate, particularly as it is shown in death, and they must compensate them for the sufferings and privations which a civilized life in common has imposed on them.”

This is a good explanation as far as it goes but the problem is that it doesn’t go very far. Many things contribute to religiosity, with emotions being only one of several contributing factors. There undoubtedly is a cognitive component to religiosity. Human brains have evolved in such a way that we naturally generate supernatural concepts.

At some time in human history, perhaps 60,000 years ago, minds became fully modern or capable of thinking as we think. Once this occurred, it would not have taken long for people to begin constructing stories about supernatural perceptions. Over tens of thousands of years these stories would have become increasingly elaborate. All modern religions are related, in deep time and through conceptual descent, to these early forms of religion or shamanisms.

Two more recent transformations altered the basic ancestral patterns of supernaturalism. The first was Neolithization or the domestication of plants-animals. When people settle down and begin producing food, shamanisms give way to the earliest organized religions. The second was the transformation wrought on these religions by Axial movements or the Axial Age. Today’s “world religions” all have Axial roots.

The entire history of religions, therefore, has a cognitive component and a cultural component. They work together and it is hard to say one is more important than the other. They are equally essential to explain the persistence of religion.

All cognitive and cultural activities have an emotional aspect to them. In this sense, one can say that emotions play a major role in religiosity even if this role is not (as Pagels suggests) mono-causal.

This is of course simply an abbreviated sketch of religious history. The emotional aspect of this history is treated with considerable sophistication by Robert Fuller in Spirituality in the Flesh: Bodily Sources of Religious Experience (Oxford 2008). Fuller situates these emotions within an evolutionary framework and shows how everything works together to produce what he calls “spirituality.”

Even if you don’t agree with Fuller, his body or emotion based approach to these issues deserves serious consideration and makes considerable sense.

• The Gnostic Gospels
• Adam, Eve, and the Serpent: Sex and Politics in Early Christianity
• The Origin of Satan: How Christians Demonized Jews, Pagans, and Heretics
• Beyond Belief: The Secret Gospel of Thomas

Pagels’ well-deserved appeal is a bit perplexing. Christians and non-Christians read her books. The former are invariably challenged and the latter always enriched. It is a rare kind of balancing act, impelled at all times by piercing and impertinent questions. I love reading her stuff and am looking forward to her forthcoming book, Revelations: Visions, Prophecy, and Politics in the Book of Revelations.

Pagels recently previewed the book in this splendid video lecture, which is long (over an hour). There is also a transcript, from which I have excised the following as a teaser:

——————————————-

I started with three questions. First, who wrote this book? And what was he thinking? Second, what other books of Revelation were written about the same time? How did this book, and only this one, get into the Bible? And what constitutes the appeal, whether you’re talking psychologically, literarily, politically, of this book?

The evidence suggests that John was a Jewish prophet. He was living in exile around the year 90 of the first century. We can’t understand this book until we understand that it was written in war time, or shortly after war. John was a refugee, apparently, from the Jewish war that had destroyed his home country, Judea, started, as you may know, in year 66 when Jews rebelled against the Roman Empire.

When John travelled through the provinces of the Roman Empire, particularly in the province called Asia Minor, which is now Turkey and Syria, John would have seen that every evidence that the kingdom that had come with power wasn’t God’s kingdom. It was Rome.

John says it was while he was in that area, right near Ephesus, that he first heard a divine voice, and had a terrifying vision in which Jesus said that Israel’s God is about to come and destroy the evil powers of the world once and for all. What John did in the Book of Revelation was draw on the cultural resources of his own people to create, if you like, anti-Roman propaganda.

When John of Patmos asks, “How long is God going to allow evildoers to triumph over Israel?” he says Jesus told him what the earlier prophets had said, that God is about to come and finish the cosmic war he started in the beginning of time, and kill the dragon who embodies the forces of evil once and for all. John of Patmos triumphantly says that today’s Babylon, which is Rome, although it’s raging like Leviathan, is decadent as the whore, is about to fall as Rome triumphs.

Although, for over a thousand five hundred years, John’s book has been in the New Testament, John had no anticipation of a New Testament, because his only scriptures were the Hebrew Bible. John regarded himself as a Jew who had found the Messiah. And would have been shocked to learn that his future readers regarded him as a Christian. As far as he was concerned, Christianity hadn’t yet been invented. John never uses the term Christian.

[W]hat made this book so appealing, and for whom, that it was included in the New Testament and proved so influential? I mentioned this book was very controversial when John wrote it. And it’s not surprising that the people who championed this book during the next hundred to 200 years were followers of Jesus who were experiencing or witnessing Roman persecution first hand. They were living under threat of being arrested, tortured, executed, for atheism and treason. During those dangerous times, many of them found in John’s prophecy hope that Rome, which was of course indomitable, was going to just fall and collapse at the end of the world.

[W]hen Emperor Constantine shifted the Roman world toward Christianization, you might have expected that this book would get left in the dust, with other books of disproved prophecy. Many of them did. Over several decades, after Constantine and his successors became the patrons of the Christian Bishops, a lot of Christian leaders began to draw up a list, a canon, of authorized books. Canon means a standard. It’s a measure you hold up to see what’s a standard. And many of them drew up lists of books.

What’s interesting to me is that, well, the earliest account we have is by a friend and counselor of Constantine, Eusebius, Bishop of Palestine, Caesarea, and he says in a very early account, well, he has a list of the recognized books. And he says, and if it’s right, if it seems right to you, well, The Book of Revelation, we could add to that. Then he has a list of disputed books, and then it puts at the end of the disputed books, none of which are now in the New Testament. Well, if it seems right, maybe The Book of Revelation; because it’s one of the most disputed books. We don’t know. It’s very highly disputed.

We have only five lists that remain from the year 350 to the year 400 of canon books, and you can see that the Bishop of Jerusalem, the Counsel of Bishops in Asia Minor, Gregory of Nazianus, this one’s the Fathers of the Church and other bishops, they all have many books that are now in the New Testament. But every single list leaves out The Book of Revelation very deliberately, except the one list that happened to be the list that was adopted. And that book is included on Athanasius’ list, the Bishop of Alexandria, in Egypt.

[W]hat made Athanasius’ take on Revelation different? Was it that he could actually reinterpret all the prophecies. Instead of taking John’s prophecies as referring to God’s victory over evil powers embodied in Rome, he said, well, you can’t take it literally. We’re going to apply John’s vision of cosmic war to my lifelong battle, which is a lifelong battle to establish a Catholic church which is a Catholic church endorsed by the Roman Empire. This will become the church of what later becomes the Holy Roman Empire.

Athanasius was trying to create a Christian communion, which was supposedly universal Catholic, and he insisted that the war between the forces of good and the forces of evil is not against Rome, but it’s against deviance and Christians who oppose the new Catholic church, either Pagans, later against Jews, and also against those he called maniacs and heretics.

Athanasius says, well, the beast is really not about Rome. The whore is not about Rome. The beast and the whore represent heresy. And when Jesus divides the saved from the damned, it’s really the Orthodox Christians being divided from Pagans, Jews and heretics. And that is the way he pictures it throughout all of his writing. I mention this only because his spin on these prophecies shows us, gives a clue about how this book has survived for a couple thousand years.

It’s very clear that John had very specific targets in mind when he was writing. For example, if you read about a great mountain that suddenly erupts, and is thrown into the sea and pollutes the waters for days, he’s thinking about the eruption of Mount Vesuvius that happened in the year 79, about ten years before his writing. And everybody would know that. And if he’s writing about the great beast whose human number is six hundred and sixty-six, you know that he’s either thinking about the imperial name of the emperor Nero, who was the one you’d choose for the worst possible emperor, or Domitian, who was ruling at the time John wrote. He had very specific targets in mind.

[John] couches his meaning in images that could be easily deciphered by his contemporaries, but also hidden, because it was dangerous to attack Rome directly. In this kind of dreamlike image, those images, as you know, have been plugged in to almost any conflict ever since. They speak less to the head than to the heart, and to very intense emotions that shape our dreams.

(End of My Brief Excision)

———————————————-

My own reading of Revelation isn’t very dreamy, except to the extent that nightmares are dreams.

Isn’t it ironic that Athanasius made the case for canonization or inclusion in the Bible by arguing that Revelation should be interpreted metaphorically, and today there are many millions of people who interpret it literally?

Otherwise, there is a great deal more to Pagels’ lecture and I encourage you to watch the video in its entirety or read the whole transcript. It looks like Pagels’ next book will be another success.

• Exempted from military service;
• Exempted from work or employment;
• Arranged marriage at very young age;
• Supported by working wife; and
• Supported by working parents.

The “job” of ultra-Orthodox males in Israel appears to consist of two things: inseminate wife and study Torah. While they are considered “scholars,” these studies don’t include math, science, languages, and humanities. It isn’t scholarship when the only thing studied is Jewish religion.

While Gershom Gorenberg characterizes this as an “economic disaster” in his new book The Unmaking of Israel, the cultural and political implications are more profound. When non-working radicals out-reproduce the rest of the population, bad things happen.

The China Rule should apply with double force in the field of evolutionary religious studies or what could be called the bio-cultural history of religions. Although the field is vast and permeable, these studies can be divided into types and most scholars work within one of the following paradigms:

Mathematical: these abstract studies rely on rational choice and game theory developed by scholars firmly ensconced within Western intellectual, historical, and religious traditions.

Epidemiological: these studies focus on memory or cognitive constraints and the transmission of religious ideas which usually are Western but sometimes are based on small-scale societies that have been studied by ethnographers.

Experimental: these studies test Western subjects (usually undergraduates) using primes that are either religious or which evoke a response relevant to so-called “world religions.” The cognitive studies in this category are more general and typically test for apprehension of supernatural or invisible agents without reference to any particular religions.

Sociological: these studies rely on Western survey data to test relationships between “religion” and other variables; the religious concepts used in such studies are usually Western but sometimes derive from Western constructions of eastern “world religions.”

Anthropological: these studies revolve around an evolutionary-archaeological record developed mostly by Western scholars working in safe or accessible areas of the world; they often tell a chronological story about religion based on this limited record.

While all these kinds of studies are important, their relevance to the evolution and history of “religions” more generally is limited. Until we have all these kinds of studies which apply The China Rule, we cannot be confident that the results are generalizable. My sense is that China, past and present, looms as one giant counterfactual to conclusions that many scholars have drawn (or wish to draw) about the “evolution of religion.” No genealogy of religions is complete without China.

I mention these things because it explains my interest and coverage, over the past year, of Chinese supernaturalism and “religion.” My use of scare quotes here is particularly warranted, given that the Chinese didn’t until recently have a word for “religion” (they created one for purposes of translating Western ideas into Chinese) and most Chinese don’t conceive of “religion” as being a separate conceptual or historical category. It has long been part and inseparable parcel of everyday Chinese life, without the Western trappings of institutions, doctrines, hierarchies, or formalities.

While I sometimes hear that modern Chinese aren’t “religious,” this view derives largely from Western constructions and understandings of “religion.” Metaphysical ideas and supernatural agencies are alive and well in China. One of the most famous traditions, not nearly as old as others but still ancient, revolves around the famous sage Confucius (551-479 BCE).

There are debates about whether “Confucianism” is or is not a “religion.” As is true of debates about whether something is consonant with “true” or “authentic” Christianity or Islam or Hinduism, the answer depends on how the tradition is interpreted and constructed. When it comes to Confucian ideas, some prefer the philosophical-moral construction while others prefer the metaphysical construction.

There is however no debate that a ritual cult devoted to Confucius arose shortly after his death and that the Confucian Cult was eventually incorporated into the Imperial Cult. In “Sacrifice and the Imperial Cult of Confucius,” Thomas Wilson details the history of this development. He sets the stage by noting that the Chinese state, which originated in 1776 BCE, has long been concerned with the supernatural:

A principal duty of the Chinese court was to provide ritual feasts for the gods and spirits at imperial altars and temples. From ancient times to the early twentieth century, the emperor regularly offered a ritual feast–or sacrifice–to Heaven and Earth, the royal ancestors, the gods of grains and soils, sun and moon, stars, and other gods and spirits that reigned over different realms of the cosmos.

Ritual officers stationed throughout the empire venerated local deities, such as wind and clouds, mountains and rivers, city gods and the spirits of the banners that hung at cardinal locations throughout the city. Sacrifice was part of a complex relationship between men and gods based upon mutual dependency.

Wilson then examines the rise of the ritual-sacrificial cult, which “began as a local cult celebrated by Confucius’ biological descendants and his doctrinal heirs.”

Although the Confucian cult had popular appeal, it was most closely associated with the classically educated. Because a classical education was required for civil service, it was not long before the state realized the need to incorporate Confucius into the official cult.

Because the Imperial Cult was rooted in more ancient tradition and made no reference to Confucius, the incorporation process was not without difficulty. Like all canonizations, some things had to be forgotten and others privileged.

This process, which is both history and social construction, was byzantine but it always cohered around the ritual that permeated all aspects of Chinese life. In most cases the ritual involved sacrifice, which in the Chinese context means a feast to feed the spirits. Although Wilson recognizes that this ritual symbolism is rich and rife with semiotic possibility, he rightly focuses on the instrumental goals of sacrifice:

[T]o take sacrifice seriously for what it purports to be–a ritual feast to feed the spirits–is to recognize that it was a technical activity requiring exacting ritual mastery aimed at achieving concrete results. The immediate aim of sacrifice was to venerate the gods, the long-term aim was to nurture them so that the cosmic order would be maintained.

Here we have a splendid example of one of the oldest supernatural practices in human history: offering spirits or gods something tangible in exchange for something both tangible and intangible.

Reference:

Wilson, T. (2002). Sacrifice and the Imperial Cult of Confucius History of Religions, 41 (3) DOI: 10.1086/463684

One of the world’s oldest supernatural practices, aspects of which can be found in all of today’s “world religions,” is divination sensu lato. It is no accident that the earliest organized religions, those which arose in conjunction with Neolithic city-states, revolved around divination. And as some city-states grew into empires, divination remained front and center. In China emperors interpreted the tortoise shells and oracle bones, while in Rome they consulted sacrificial livers and conferred with augurs or auspices. When things did not augur well or omens were inauspicious, plans were changed or put on hold. Around the world, the affairs of city, state, and empire were conducted in accordance with divination.

Attempts to ascertain (and by extension control) the future did not originate in classical antiquity. Noting that hunter-gatherers around the world divine the location of game or enemies by “reading” viscera and bones, anthropologists have surmised that the practice is more ancient. Because such inferences rely on ethnographic analogy and backward projection, what was a reasonable surmise long remained uncertain. The discovery of 14,000 year old “dice” and a divining scapula at El Juyo Cave in Spain make it almost certain.

Few Paleolithic archaeological sites are richer than El Juyo Cave. Used extensively by Magdalenian hunter-gatherers 14,000 years ago, it contains what may be the world’s oldest ritual sanctuary, highlighted by a large carved rock face or “spirit” at the entrance.

In “Coping with Chance: Animal Bones and the Aleatory,” Freeman and Echegaray (2005) report on two extraordinary finds from El Juyo. The first is a set of three worked bone pieces, similar in size and shape, which were found stacked on top of one another and which probably were bound together as a set. They greatly resemble “dice” sets used by Amerindians and the authors interpret them as such. The second is a deer scapula or shoulder blade that has been engraved with images of deer, incised, drilled, burned, and shattered. Because this kind of treatment precisely parallels divination practices among known hunter-gatherers, the authors’ scapulimancy interpretation is uncontroversial.

What I like most about the authors’ report is their extended meditation on the relationship between divination and chance:

In the specific cases to be discussed here, bone artifacts seem to reflect game-playing and/or divination, and to attest to early attempts by Upper Paleolithic humans to deal with chance: to cope with the seemingly “uncontrollable” randomness of natural phenomena. [Humans] find it hard to understand that many natural phenomena are simply random, a fact that is at least perplexing if not troubling, and that leads us to invent various means of coping with this randomness.

It is a characteristic of [humans] to behave as though such random phenomena as the availability of game, the likeliness of success in the food quest, and other vagaries of nature could be controlled or, what is the same thing, “divined” or predicted, in the sense of determining their indeterminable future direction.

[W]e can show that there are artifacts such as “dice” and engraved scapulae in the bone inventory from the Magdalenian site of el Juyo (presumably other such pieces have been or will be found in other Upper Paleolithic sites as well) that are most effectively explained as devices showing an awareness of the effects of chance and as implements to predict the direction of the aleatory: to cope with the randomness of nature.

While some may dismiss ancient divination practices as mere “magic” or superstition, it would be well to remember that nothing is ever lost. It is but a short conceptual step from Paleolithic divination to the kinds of prophecy that are so characteristic of Axial or modern religions. If we are going to draw lines, they should not be conceptual lines of sand but rather historical lines of continuity.

Reference:

Freeman, L.G., & Echegaray, J.G. (2005). Coping with Chance: Animal Bones and the Aleatory Munibe (Antropologia-Arkeologia), 57, 159-176

In “Death and Deification: Folk Cults in Hinduism,” Stuart Blackburn addresses this concern and notes it is not limited to high-caste and literate Brahmins:

As a source of Indian religious thought, death is probably unsurpassed; no matter which historical period or cultural level one chooses to examine, concepts lead to or from the problems it presents. Beneath their cosmic purposes, Vedic sacrifices were designed to ward off death temporarily and attain a full life span for men….And even the process of samsira, the foundation of Indian thought, was first understood not as a rebirth but as continual “redeath” (punarmrtyu).

In the social world, if purity and impurity have anything to do with the way Hindus perceive and organize it, death is all the more central because it is the single most polluting human experience. And even if the pure/impure dichotomy is not the organizing principle of Hindu life, an opposition between death and life may be; this is the conclusion of several important studies of Sanskrit ritual and literary texts, and one confirmed by my own work with an oral tradition…[T]he popular streams of Hinduism, no less than the high-status ones, are centered on death.

Blackburn is not alone in his assessment. In The Origins of Evil in Hindu Mythology, renowned Indologist Wendy Doniger comments: “Much — some might even say all — of Indian religion is dedicated to the attempt to achieve immortality in one form or another.”

What is up with all this death obsession? Some, such as Ernest Becker in The Denial of Death, claim that humans are universally obsessed with death and all of life is governed by our attempts to deny or thwart it. Although Becker was a cultural anthropologist, he apparently did not read much ethnography or ethnohistory. Had Becker done so (and not immersed himself in existential psychoanalysis), he would know that death obsessions are not a human universal.

We are fortunate to have a substantial ethnohistoric and ethnographic record of hunter-gatherers. Although large portions of this record remain unpublished and languish in archives, anyone who has spent much time with this record knows that hunter-gatherers do not devote much time, energy, or thought to the fact of death and death’s supernatural concomitants: afterlife and/or rebirth.

There are reasons why late Neolithic and Axial religions are so concerned with death and are sometimes characterized as “world rejecting.” There likewise are reasons why hunter-gatherers are not so concerned and their “religions” (or more aptly, supernaturalism) are characterized as “world affirming.” I have several reasons in mind but am interested in your thoughts. Any ideas?

Reference:

Blackburn, Stuart H. (1985). Death and Deification: Folk Cults in Hinduism History of Religions, 24 (3), 255-274

These ostensibly disparate movements had much in common. Suffering and death are central concerns. Given these concerns, it is not surprising that all devise methods for transcending suffering and death. Such transcendence, whether in this world or life or the next, becomes an ethical matter and moral issue.

Why did these related ideas appear in several places in such short order? Because these traditions arose in widely disparate places and originated among people who were not in contact with one another, we know it was not a matter of cultural diffusion or idea migration. There are several competing (and complementary) hypotheses, most of which revolve around change, dislocation, and anomie.

The few thousands of years preceding the Axial Age were an especially turbulent time in human history; warfare, urbanization, disease, and famine were operating full-tilt and on a scale never before seen. People everywhere were at a loss and legitimacy was in short supply. Under such conditions, it would be surprising if something like the Axial movements did not appear. During times of immense and protracted crisis, intellectuals will often generate new and paradigm shifting ideas.

But before such breakthroughs can occur, the ground must be prepared. Although Axial movements were innovative, they did not simply appear sua sponte. To the extent they were reformist or reactionary, they were backward looking and dependent on the past for comparative appeal. In “Ancient Mesopotamian Religion: The Central Concerns,” renowned ancient historian Thorkild Jacobsen summarizes that past by dividing it into three thematic and millennial epochs:

Fourth Millennium BCE — Famine

“Give Us This Day Our Daily Bread”

The fear at the very roots of existence that long ago, down through the fourth millennium, gave to the religious response in Mesopotamia its major direction would seem to have been a simple one: fear of starvation. Early Mesopotamian economy was unquestionably a remarkable achievement, able for the first time to provide sufficient food so that large numbers of humans could congregate in cities. But it was also a precarious and uncertain economy, for it was based on artificial irrigation, the most touchy and tricky basis imaginable, nervously reacting to vagaries of nature and man alike.

And the character of their religion as we know it bears this out. The powers to whom they turned were powers in and behind their primary economics on which life depended: fishing, herding, agriculture, as even the briefest look at the character of the chief gods of their cities will show. [T]heir cults were to insure the presence of these essential powers for fertility, produce, and food.

Third Millenium BCE — War

“Preserve Us From Evil”

As the settled areas of the country grew and joined, the protection that had been afforded by relative isolation was no longer there and fear of enemy attack, death or slavery, became a part of life ever present in the depth of consciousness. The intensity of the danger and of the fear it engendered can be gauged by the great city-walls that arose around the towns in this period and the staggering amount of labor that must have gone into them.

For a shield against danger men looked to the now vitally important institutions of collective security, the great leagues and their officers, and particularly to the new institution of kingship as it took form and grew under the pressures of these years. The new concept opening up, as it did, a possibility of approach to the element of majesty in the divine, was early applied to the gods and it profoundly influenced the religious outlook. The gods, seen as kings and rulers, were no longer powers in nature only, they became powers in human affairs — in history.

Second Millennium BCE — Guilt

“Forgive Us Our Trespasses”

[W]ith the beginning second millennium the personal fortunes of the individual worshiper, his fears of personal misfortune, anxieties in illness and suffering, begin to be voiced adding a personal dimension to the relation with the divine. [Because of famine and war, it appears this personal] god has abandoned the worshiper and lost interest in him. He realizes that the blame lies with himself-pleading, however, that no man is perfect and asks to be shown his faults, his transgressions, that he may confess them before his god and be forgiven. And the god is moved by his contrition and takes him back into favor.

There is here the beginnings of a searching of the heart: the insight gained in the preceding millennium that the divine stands for, and upholds, a moral law is now bearing fruit in a realization of individual human responsibility, but also of innate human inability to live up to that responsibility. [T]he question of man’s acceptability before his god — the problem of the righteous sufferer — led on to realization of man’s finiteness and the altogether finite character of his insights and his moral judgments.

During the first millennium BCE Mesopotamian religions stagnated, perhaps because for thousands of years they had always been concerned with that which was immanent or present in this world. If the divine was present in the world, few (other than the rich and powerful) seemed to be feeling it. It was time for something new. The stage was thus set for Axial transcendence.

References:

Strathern, Alan (2009). Karen Armstrong’s Axial Age: Origins and Ethics The Heythrop Journal, 50 (2), 293-299 DOI: 10.1111/j.1468-2265.2009.00413.x

Jacobsen, Thorkild (1963). Ancient Mesopotamian Religion: The Central Concerns Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society, 107 (6), 473-484

While Weber surely was right to argue that religion and economy influence one another dialectically, few scholars accept his argument that capitalism was made possible by Calvinism. Although the Protestant Ethic remains a classic, its reputation has dimmed. Few have been more scathing in their criticism than Rodney Stark, who takes Weber to the woodshed in “Putting an End to Ancestor Worship“:

[E]conomic historians long ago dismissed Weber’s monograph as anti-Catholic nonsense on the irrefutable grounds that the rise of capitalism in Europe preceded the Reformation by centuries. Weber was aware that economic historians rejected his thesis on the basis of time order. Consequently, he progressively made his definitions finer in an attempt to restrict capitalism to “modern” Reformation business organizations. Clearly, Weber inserted the adjective “modern” in order to confound those who argued that capitalism was far older than Protestantism.

If Protestant ideals didn’t create capitalism, this doesn’t mean religion had no impact on the mercantilism and mindset that led to it. It simply means we should shift our temporal focus and look for earlier possible influences.

In “The Protestant Ethic and the Parsis,” Robert Kennedy does just this and suggests that Zoroastrianism — an ancestral monotheism — set the stage for Modernity, which encompasses not only capitalism but also science. Kennedy identifies five abstract values associated with Modernity: (1) an underlying order in nature, (2) sensory standard of verification, (3) material work is intrinsically good, (4) maximization of material prosperity, and (5) accumulation rather than consumption of material goods.

Zoroastrian and Parsi Symbol-Motif

Using historical data on the Parsis or Zoroastrian Persians who fled from Iran to India after the Islamic conquest in the 8th century AD, Kennedy examines their beliefs, culture, and society for correspondences. Finding many, Kennedy suggests that modern economy and science may have roots in Zoroastrian religion.

It is an unfortunate fact that we know less about Zoroastrianism than we would like. Although it was the official state religion of the Persian Empire for nearly seven centuries, the conquering Muslims attempted to eradicate every vestige of the faith. One thing is certain: Zoroastrian ideas and influences can be found in Judaism and Christianity. This raises an interesting possibility.

Nietzsche asserted that modern science arose in the West because the West was Christian. To make a long intellectual history short, Christianity’s obsessive search for sacred “Truth” turned on itself and (paradoxically) gave rise to a profane search for truth, which we now call science. If there is in fact a connection between Christianity and science, there may be an even deeper (or older) connection between Zoroastrianism and science.

References:

Stark, R. (2004). SSSR Presidential Address, 2004: Putting an End to Ancestor Worship Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion, 43 (4), 465-475 DOI: 10.1111/j.1468-5906.2004.00249.x

Kennedy, Jr., R. (1962). The Protestant Ethic and the Parsis American Journal of Sociology, 68 (1) DOI: 10.1086/223262

It will be the latest in a string of books over the last decade which purport to explain the origins and development of what we today call “religion.” These books can be roughly divided into two types.

The first usually revolves around a particular author’s research specialty and generalizes from this focused research to religion as a whole. While these books contribute something of importance to evolutionary religious studies, religion is not going to be explained monocausally. The second type is an adaptive design metanarrative, in which religion holds the (magical) key to human evolutionary success. These books usually amount to mere storytelling.

If Bellah’s 1964 article on “Religious Evolution” is any indication, his forthcoming book may transcend this tired typology. While my hopes are high, I am not sure what to expect. I know that the Templeton Foundation gave Bellah a large grant for the book and Templeton grants are not disinterested.

In a recent interview with The Atlantic, Bellah confesses he is a practicing Episcopalian and metaphysical idealist (i.e., “Kantian-Hegelian”). This is the sort of sophisticated belief much beloved by Templeton grantors. It remains to be seen how Bellah’s a priori commitments affect his evolutionary account of religion.

Aside from Bellah’s grudging admiration for Nietzsche’s genius, this part of the interview caught my attention:

But dealing with a complex band of people you don’t know if you can trust or not, and you love some of them and you hate some of them—that’s a pretty high demand on your cognitive growth. I think the brain grows fast when groups get larger and more complicated and maneuvering yourself in a social world starts to be at the heart of what your life is all about.

This suggests there is a correlation between bigger brains and bigger groups. While there is some support for this idea, we have little or no evidence to suggest that hominin group size increased during the course of the Paleolithic in conjunction with increases in brain size.

Hunter-gatherer group sizes seem to be fairly consistent across time and space (varying primarily in accord with local environments and ecology). Group sizes increase only when people settle down and become agriculturalists. This began to occur about 12,000 years ago during the Neolithic Transition and was an uneven process. One thing is certain: this increase in group size was not triggered by an increase in brain size. In fact, human brains appear to have been getting smaller over the past 15,000 years.