In conjunction with this exercise, I have students read Andrew McKinnon’s pitch for a Wittgensteinian language game and non-essentialist approach to “religion,” and another by Ake Hultkrantz which contends that the key concept in “religion” is the supernatural. Because both articles deal with notoriously tedious definitions and theory, there have been complaints about how much time is spent on these matters. Like Justice Potter Stewart and porn, students sense they know “religion” when they see it.

Because spending the first week of class delineating the Western history and genealogy of “religion” is not an option, I’ve been searching for a solution and seem to have found one. A recent article by Jason A. Josephson, “The Invention of Japanese Religions,” makes most of the needed theoretical points simply by telling the story of how “religion” has been rendered in Japan. My sense is that students would prefer reading a concrete historical narrative or an actual case that deals with the category-concept of “religion.”

Josephson argues that the Japanese lacked not only a word but also an idea of “religion” that corresponded to the Western construct, so it had to be invented. During the late 1800s there was considerable debate about how “religion” should be rendered in Japanese:

Japanese intellectuals and policymakers proposed over half a dozen possible translations for “religion.” When faced with the European term, even Japanese scholars educated abroad had to go searching for equivalents, and they proposed several different contenders and tried to hang different understandings of religion upon them.

It seemed that “religion” could be a type of education, something fundamentally un-teachable, a set of practices, a description of foreign customs, a subtype of Shinto, a near synonym for Christianity, a basic human ethical impulse, or a form of politics (among other possibilities). This is clear evidence that it is glib to talk of Japanese religion projected back through the centuries.

What is more, not only did Japanese intellectuals produce different terms for “religion,” they also debated which indigenous traditions and practices fit into the category. It was not clear to them what religions there were in Japan. The sole “religion” on which everyone could agree was Christianity. More than anything else, this clearly demonstrates the foreign nature of the category.

This is a nice contribution from Josephson, whose “When Buddhism Became a Religion” I’ve long admired. I wanted to assign that article for my course last year but we simply ran out of time and never arrived at Buddhism in Japan.

Reference:

Josephson, Jason A. (2011). The Invention of Japanese Religions Religion Compass, 5 (10), 589-597 DOI: 10.1111/j.1749-8171.2011.00307.x

If we didn’t know anything about Iroquois and Plains supernatural beliefs-practices, but had read Ake Hultkrantz’s classic Religions of the American Indians, we could make several basic predictions which would in turn prove to be correct. There are fundamental shifts in religious practices based on mode of production. Wherever foraging people settle down and produce food, the fluidity of nomadic shamanism becomes more elaborate and systematic.

Iroquois religion is the subject of the much dispute owing primarily to the fact that European traders, missionaries, and colonists were in close contact with them for hundreds of years beginning in the 1600s. The Iroquois were not a homogenous group but a federation of five and later six tribes. Aside from basic internal differences, it would have been exceedingly strange if Iroquois religion had remained static over hundreds of years, especially when lifeways were being dramatically changed by trade and war.

There is in other words no essential or reified thing called “Iroquois religion.” We have only snapshots of Iroquois religion at particular times and places, with overarching themes continuously being renegotiated and reconstituted by individual Iroquois as active change agents. Like all religions, the Iroquois was socially constructed.

When analyzing these constructions, ethnohistorians have argued about two aspects of Iroquois religion: cannibalism and alcohol. The Iroquois apparently liked to eat war captives (and an occasional Jesuit). They also liked drinking to wild and sometimes deadly excess. For understandable reasons, later Iroquois have disputed these claims and a few historians have agreed with them.

In his well-intentioned but factually challenged book The Man-Eating Myth, William Arens asserted that claims of Iroquois cannibalism were simply made up by Europeans intent on othering the natives. Using the very sources that Arens cites, Thomas Abler found numerous contrary accounts and noted that “the practice of cannibalism among the Iroquois was not the gleeful activity of a nation of sadists, but rather a religious observance meant to ensure success in war.” Christians who consume the wafers of a symbolic body may at least have some conceptual sympathy.

Another conceptual point of contact, admittedly minimal, comes from the spiritual use of alcohol. Something close to an ethnohistoric consensus had arisen over Iroquois drinking, which by all accounts was always to excess but which supposedly differed from pedestrian binging because it was used to induce supernatural visions. If the Iroquois in fact used alcohol this way, it would have been unique. This anomaly piqued the interest of Maia Conrad, who traced the history of this idea and found it wanting. She traced the claim to a single source which does not show that alcohol was used for visions.

But as often happens in scholarship, the idea was adopted and repeated so often that it became accepted fact. Having uncovered the mistake, Conrad offers a different explanation for Iroquois imbibing and intoxication:

[T]he Iroquois were suffering from a loss of authority both internally and externally. Their social and cultural structure was under severe attack. Their ability to supply beaver skins to the Europeans and, therefore, to obtain the guns and ammunition they needed was threatened. Population losses weakened their ability to defend themselves in war and crippled their internal political leadership. Traditional religious ceremonies would have proven frustratingly incapable of addressing these problems.

The old boundaries of Iroquois social conformity had been severely undermined, allowing their expansion. Their traditional boundaries were under attack and they needed to create a new set of community-sanctioned limits that would allow their society to adjust to changing circumstances. The violence associated with the abusive consumption of alcohol was one such expansion of boundaries. Previously intolerable behavior became acceptable under the cover of drunkenness.

Although the Jesuits who witnessed Iroquois intoxication may have identified it with their own ritual drinking of wine-blood, in this case they seem to have been mistaken. The Iroquois weren’t drinking supernatural blood or seeking visions along the way. They were escaping and coping.

References:

Abler, Thomas (1980). Iroquois Cannibalism: Fact Not Fiction Ethnohistory, 27 (4), 309-316

Conrad, Maia (1999). Disorderly Drinking: Reconsidering Seventeenth-Century Iroquois Alcohol Use American Indian Quarterly, 23 (3/4), 1-11

I first became aware of “theological anthropology” while browsing the Evolution of Religion website, which is a Templeton funded project devoted to finding God’s plan in evolution. Here is the announcement for several nicely funded fellowships at Princeton in which scholars are to devote themselves to the discovery of God’s design in evolution:

The Center of Theological Inquiry welcomes proposals to explore how the explosion of new research in evolutionary biology, psychology, and anthropology is challenging and changing our understanding of human nature and development, not least in relation to religion and theological accounts of the human condition. Our field of inquiry encompasses these evolutionary and human sciences, theological anthropology, practical theology, psychology of religion, religious studies, and the history and philosophy of science.

There’s more than a bit of mumbo jumbo here but the project boils down to this: now that the Creation account of human evolution has been disproven and Intelligent Design been exposed as fraud, it is our job to interpret evolution through a theological lens; to wit, because God designed evolution and foresaw everything, there are no accidents and everything is adaptive.

Sounds like a horrible way to do science and search for the truth.

Before the Enlightenment, there was no need for such a theory. God served this purpose and everything was explained by the bible or theology. After the Enlightenment, philosophers began searching for the all-encompassing meta-theory. This search culminated in the gargantuan philosophical systems of Kant and Hegel.

Famously opaque, such systems betray a profound uneasiness with the messiness of the world and disorder of experience. Some people are comfortable with ambiguity, unintelligibility, and inexplicability. Others can’t tolerate contradictions, counterfactuals, and incompleteness. The latter, filled with insecurity, construct systems to compensate. It was this fact which caused Nietzsche to comment: “I mistrust all systematizers and I avoid them. The will to a system is a lack of integrity.”

While philosophers have largely given up on the idea of unified system, physicists haven’t. They are tying themselves in knots over string theories and imagining new universes whenever the tautology of math demands it. Only Neil deGrasse Tyson seems comfortable with the idea that there is one theory for big things and another for little things. The theories aren’t compatible but each works in its spatial arena. Does it really matter if the twain shall never meet?

Physicists are not, however, alone in this quixotic quest. There are some who believe that everything can be explained as a matter of evolutionary theory. Although evolution sensu stricto is a biological theory, there are some who see it as much more: a unified theory of everything. In a recent post I noted that because cultures are not organisms, extending evolutionary theory to everything is dubious and amounts to “Darwinian monism.” While this monism may satisfy the impulse to a unified system, it doesn’t work (even if the equations which purport to describe it “prove” that it does).

The Wilsons, Edward Osborne and David Sloan (no relation), weren’t the first evolutionists to espouse monism. Ernst Haeckel (1834-1919), the famous German naturalist, preceded them. In “Ernst Haeckel’s Monistic Religion,” Niles Holt describes some familiar sounding aims:

Haeckel presented Monism as a scientific movement which was based on Darwinism and which aimed to free science from the bonds of “dualistic” Christianity, “metaphysics,” and all “irrationality.” Supplementing the antireligious tenor of much of Haeckel’s writings was his assertion that natural science encompassed the totality of valid knowledge, that, as he later phrased it, “scientific research captures gradually the entire province of human intellectual effort.” In Anthropogenie (1874), Haeckel argued that the new theory of evolution was a “most favorable development to the growth of scientific unity.”

Having ushered metaphysics and religion from the scientific room by way of the front door, Haeckel promptly let them in through the back. The inexorable logic of monism or a unified theory demanded it:

Haeckel asserted that the irritability found in all organic matter progressed through evolution into the consciousness and organization of the human nervous system, the brain. This argument was the basis of Haeckel’s “chain of unity of sensation”: evolutionary history had proceeded from the “cell-soul” through “intermediary steps” to the “rational” human soul. The “chain of unity of sensation” were viewed by Haeckel as demonstrating that “natural science and evolutionary theory” were not to be used to degrade nature into a “soulless mechanism” which would “bar all ideals from the real world and destroy poetry.”

Haeckel believed that Monism had established that the soul of man was a “purely mechanical activity.” Yet he wished to avoid, through pantheism, a “depressing materialism which reduced the universe to “dead matter.”

As he aged, Haeckel’s monistic ideas — always centered on the unifying logic of evolution — became increasingly elaborate and obscure. More than a few German intellectuals found the ideas attractive and sought to found a new “religion” on them. Although Haeckel disapproved of these efforts, which often involved ritual adornment and celebration of “unified scientific knowledge,” what had begun as strict monistic materialism grounded in evolution ended as another form of metaphysics or religion.

There is a lesson here for all systematizers.

Reference:

Holt, Niles (1971). Ernst Haeckel’s Monistic Religion Journal of the History of Ideas, 32 (2), 265-280 DOI: 10.2307/2708280

Although I have done a fair amount of reading on Scientology, a mysteriously lacking effect is that I’ve never taken the “religious content” seriously, or even seriously considered it. I’ve always had the idea that Scientology rather belatedly styled itself a “religion” when the organization realized the tax and other benefits that flow from the government’s decision that a particular set of beliefs do in fact amount to a “religion.”

Lafayette Ronald Hubbard may or may not have had such benefits in mind when (in 1953) he was reconstituting Scientology based on what he specifically identified as “the religion angle.” We may never know whether Hubbard was being sincere, cynical, or pragmatic, though it wouldn’t surprise me if Hubbard was being all three at once. He was complex that way and clearly understood that religion can captivate (or capture) people in ways that self-help therapies cannot. He also recognized that founding a “religion” was a great way to make lots of money.

I will confess to being ambivalent about taking Scientology’s “religious content” seriously. I’m not sure what that content is. If it is Xenu, Thetans, and Clear, I’m not buying it. However fuzzy, there is in my mind some kind of dividing line between the kinds of supernaturalisms associated with historic “religions” and straight up science fiction. I am inclined to agree with governments around the world that see official Scientology as a scam and pseudo-religion.

If there is in fact Scientology content that deserves serious study as “religious,” I haven’t seen it. As Perry’s review suggests, this may be because Scientology keeps it secret. Then again, it may be kept secret because the content doesn’t look, smell, or feel much like “religion.”

There is a difference between acknowledging something as a “religion” legally and considering something as a “religion” academically. Juridical recognition doesn’t compel intellectual recognition. I have yet to be convinced that Scientology deserves serious study as a “religion” rather than something else altogether more bizarre and difficult to categorize.

In “R” we find: “RELIGION, n. A daughter of Hope and Fear, explaining to Ignorance the nature of the Unknowable.”

For those not familiar with Bierce, this celebratory review of his Library of America canonization is a nice introduction.

Because this relationship works in two directions, we are immediately confronted with a classic chicken-egg problem. I may see a rock that looks like a person and this may trigger thinking about a person. Or, I may be thinking about a person and see in a rock the figure of a person.

Which came first doesn’t really matter. What does matter is that this conceptual capacity is essential for language. Rock symbols provide a foundation of sorts for word symbols. But the difference between the two is significant.

Rock symbols resemble something in the world; this resemblance triggers the conceptual back and forth between object and idea. Word symbols do not resemble things in the world; there is no natural or causal relationship between word and object. The relationship is arbitrary.

With this brief lesson in semiotics, we can understand why archaeologists get so excited about really old rocks that have been altered or worked to look like people. There are two leading contenders for the oldest known rock symbols. The first is known as the Tan-Tan figurine from Morocco and is believed to be 400,000 years old:

There are eight grooves on this rock and Robert Bednarik (2003) asserts that five were incised by human hand. Bednarik’s microscopic examination also revealed traces of what he believes to be pigment or red ocher. I am not aware of anyone else who has studied the Tan-Tan, so cannot say whether Bednarik’s claim has been accepted. Because the Tan-Tan was dated on the basis of surrounding lithics (Middle Acheulian), there may be questions about its age.

The second contender is known as the Berekhat Ram figurine from Israel and is believed to be 230,000 years old:

Here is an artist’s rendering which perhaps emphasizes certain features:

Because the Berekhat Ram was found in situ between volcanic layers, the dating is fairly certain. The controversy has been over whether the lines on it are the result of natural processes or human activity. The most recent study (d’Errico & Nowell 2000) suggests the Berekhat Ram was in fact deliberately modified.

If we assume for the sake of argument that both objects were in fact modified and curated by humans, I think it important to ask what they represent. The Tan-Tan has an anthropomorphic shape but not much else. The Berekhat Ram has an anthropomorphic shape and appears to be female.

Beyond this, not much can be said. They may have been ritual objects or nothing more than pleasing reminders. Their importance lies in the fact they may be symbols, not what those symbols may speculatively represent.

References:

Bednarik, R. (2003). A Figurine from the African Acheulian. Current Anthropology, 44 (3), 405-413 DOI: 10.1086/374900

d’Errico, Francesco, & Nowell, April (2000). A New Look at the Berekhat Ram Figurine: Implications for the Origins of Symbolism. Cambridge Archaeological Journal, 10, 123-167 : 10.1017/S0959774300000056

Postscript: For those wondering, we don’t really know the name of the hominins who would have modified these rocks. For both, the answer would generally be Homo heidelbergensis, which may however be a wastebasket taxon. You could call them late Homo erectus or archaic Homo sapiens. There is a muddle in the middle.

The study authors relied on census data which asks about a person’s religious affiliation. While it is a well known fact that fewer Europeans formally identify themselves with particular religions, this is not a measure of religiosity or “spiritualism.”

As the sociologist Rodney Stark has demonstrated in several papers (including this classic), religiosity is alive and well in these countries and the secularization thesis is “well and truly dead.” Census forms are too crude an instrument to measure things like beliefs in the supernatural and non-standard religion.

If you have ever attended a Star Trek Convention, you will not be surprised to learn there are people who actually profess belief in what they call Jedi religion. They have gotten together and formed The Church of Jediism. Their beliefs sound vaguely familiar:

In Jediism, we believe in the Force. The Force is a unifying energy which exists around us, in us, and is always present. It is the catalyst for life – it is the power that keeps the universe together. The Force is not something Jedi worship, rather it is something we concentrate on, and can relate to. The Force exists in many forms, but it is not something which can be seen. It flows through everything in existence as neutral energy, and according to the way we see, treat and act in life, can change it from neutral to positive or negative Force.

We believe the mind is like a sponge. As sponges, they soak up information daily – we are constantly learning new things. But not all of this information is stored as positive thoughts. There are always negative thoughts and information which can contaminate the mind, whether that is for a short time or a life time. We believe the practice of self enlightenment helps clear the mind, rinsing the sponge of all negative thoughts. This therefore makes more room for positive thoughts, and also changes one’s thought process and ability to take in and learn more information.

Our aim is to bring all of the world’s believers in the Force together for the power of good. We will form a community that does not have bias or any type of prejudice. A community that does not reject other religions, but in fact encourages their positive teachings. It is through positivity that we shall thrive, for that is the Light side of the Force.

The Force sounds suspiciously like something that theoretical physicists study and Jedi doctrine reminds me of westernized Buddhism. The master Jedi encourages everyone to study the Star Wars movies for additional insights.

This religion will not get very far without sacred texts and I am not sure that George Lucas’ original 13 page script will work. On the other hand, Scientologists have done far more with considerably less.

Copyright Illustration by John Perlock

If you are wondering whether this is all in jest, so is a Danish scholar whose study of Jediism will appear in a forthcoming issue of the International Journal for the Study of New Religions.

1. The Plaintiff is Thomas J. Ritter, Jr., an adult individual residing at 320 MacArthur Drive, Orwigsburg, PA 17961.

2. The Defendant is The Blue Mountain School District, 685 Red Dale Rd., Orwigsburg, PA 17961.

3. Logically, The Blue Mt. School District does teach that evolution without the possibility of a Creator is the only explanation for the existence of life.

(The Blue Mt. SD does teach evolution. See BMHS biology teacher Anne Creyer’s website @ http://cryerbio.wikispaces.com/. Kitzmiller v. Dover SD forbids any teaching of evolution that includes a Creator: “ID Policy violates the Establishment Clause of …the Constitution”. -ID is Intelligent Design).

5. This teaching in unscientific.

6. This teaching is actually Atheism (no Creator = no God).

7. Objectively, Atheism is a religion, albeit a silly and unscientific one.

8. This is like teaching Jesus is Lord.

9. Defendant wants to tax Plaintiff to support its scheme. (See exhibit A)

10. Plaintiff does object to supporting this scheme in any way.

Wherefore, Plaintiff does ask this honorable Court to find the Blue Mt. School District is an illegal body so long as it teaches Atheism, and is thus not entitled to pursue any further actions.

Although Ritter appeals to logic, the logic of his complaint is more than a bit muddled. I have always been baffled by the argument that atheism is a religion. Atheism/religion is a binary of opposition — atheism is the absence of religion.

Because Ritter filed the complaint without an attorney (i.e., pro se), the judge is required by the rules of pleading to try to make some sense of the complaint and given him some leeway. Even if the judge draws all conceivable inferences in Ritter’s favor, I fail to see how the complaint can survive a motion to dismiss for failure to state a claim.