The Same Continued

 

Let’s take another stab at this. People have theories and people have good enough for now theories. One good enough for now theory about religion states that religions may have a range of twenty or so attributes and a cultural system becomes a religion when it has, say, four or five of them. This is probably arbitrary at the end of the day but it is the kind of arbitrary judgment we employ with other fuzzy concepts and it is good enough for ordinary communication. Thus, religion may involve intense feelings of devotion. It need NOT involve this and lazily mumbling a prayer is still religious activity. Religion may involve a speculative search for the absolute but of course many religious people have no such concern and some are profoundly hostile to it. Religion may involve ritualized activity centered on a deity, ancestor, saint or paradigmatic human being like Siddartha Gautama or Jesus. It can also involve private meditation in a forest. As for deities they also seem optional as North American Buddhism does not typically bother with them.  Thus, we might say that a woman who prayed with her family at set times of the day to a deity would definitely be religious. What we could NOT say is that a woman who did NOT do these things was NOT religious. She might have other attributes on the spectrum! This would also account for those activities that take on a religious intensity but do not fully qualify as religious. A rave has some qualities of an ecstatic ritual but not enough to land ravers on the religious spectrum. So does fanatic devotion to Arsenal football club or the Yankees. Religious intensity is an identifiable  attribute even though not all religion is intense and not all intensity religious! This means there can be cultural, or at least sub- cultural space that is not religious space.   

This is, of course, arbitrary at bottom. How many attributes make something a religion and why that number as opposed to another? It really comes down to saying “I have studied religions and that looks like a religion to me.” Of course, we have people whose business is to say things like “I have studied Van Gogh and that looks like a Van Gogh to me” so the study of religion may be in no worse a case than the study of visual art! Again, this is vague business but good enough for task at hand. It elides the question of how we formed the concept in the first place but it does explain how, having the concept, we apply it. Of course how we in the west formed the concept ‘religion’ DOES have a history and in part a colonial one. A western scholar might go to visit a culture in the Amazon and ask about their religion. The Amazonian, puzzled by the question, might start talking about a basket he is making causing the scholar to say ‘No, no it’s your RELIGION I am asking about!”.  Part of the problem is that religious signs can be encoded in things that on their face are purely secular.  A pertinent example, according to a colleague of mine, is Disneyland. The religious dimension of Disneyland is implicit not explicit. Surely this applies to a great range of religious phenomena. It is in its implicit moments, perhaps, that the word religion threatens to swallow the word culture.

However, this observation seems to me to contain a glimmer of light: the implicit is conveyed largely by the symbolic and the symbolic and the attempt to banish it may be the dividing line between the religious and the irreligious. When a man like Telltale speaks about natural selection as if it embodied some kind of intentionality he insists that it is a ‘mere’ metaphor. It is not a dense, saturated metaphor and the difference between he and I lies in the fact that he would likely not even understand the distinction I just drew. If he did he would certainly reject it. A non-religious person might be someone who believes that symbols are mere contrivances that function as a shorthand for things that are complicated to say. I doubt this even of scientific symbols and metaphors but that aside I think it is definitely untrue of poetic and religious ones. As another colleague of mine asked once “if you take the metaphors away what exactly is left of the science?”.  As I said elsewhere I suspect the answer to this is “a lot of empty math.”  Of course, as with the ancient Pythagoreans, even number can take on a numinous quality. That aside, perhaps what makes Telltale an unreligious atheist (and anyone with Jewish friends knows there can be some very religious atheists) is his belief (implicit or explicit) that the symbolic can be dispelled and replaced with purely descriptive or quantitative terms. That is my best guess at any rate.