Whatever you think of the question of God or Gods, religion is a real thing, for good or ill. In the quest for More and Better Democrats the question of fewer and less evil religious nutters has a prominent place. But does that mean trying to destroy all religion, or accepting that some religion is beneficial, and working with it?
In The Varieties of Religious Experience psychologist and Pragmatist philosopher William James set out to survey the psychological phenomena of religion as they were known more than a century ago. Both religion and science can agree in principle on the standard set by Jesus.
By their fruits ye shall know them.
Thus James set out to attempt an evaluation of their fruits in a non-dogmatic, non-theological, scientific way, which many of the churches concerned would of course not agree with.
Many of the particular ills of the modern Religious Right, such as the movements known as Fundamentalism, Dominionism, Theonomy and "Creation Science" had not been invented in their current forms in the time of William James, but their seeds had been plainly visible in Southern Baptist support of slavery and then Jim Crow, and denial of evolution. Biblical literalism and running societies on the basis of religious law are both of ancient origin, as are many other ills associated with one or another religion of ancient times.
Does religious theory (theology in theistic religions, or Abhidharma in Buddhism), practice, law, or specific events like radical conversions make people behave better? Sometimes, up to a point, with radically different evaluations according to the radically different criteria applied. I shall explain further below the Orange Cloud of Unknowing.
We cannot survey all of James's survey here. In particular, we do not have space to consider all of his thoughts on mysticism, to which he gave great weight, nor his thoughts on the connection of religion and philosophy. Mysticism includes the indescribable experiences of union with and comprehension of the divine, or with all of nature, or complete loss of self, but it also includes the sudden revelation of meaning in something that one has heard or recited for years on end. Buddhism has a special doctrine, practice, attainment, non-attainment, whatever, called the Bodhisattva Vow, representing a stage of spiritual development that goes beyond mysticism.
I have picked out some topics that bear most directly on our political problems today with the Religious Right. But you should read the rest, because its scope is so much wider than the narrow questions the Religious Right pretends to be the whole issue: Whether you believe in their intolerant God, and whether you have taken a version of Jesus as your personal Savior, one that he would not recognize. Of course, studies of the history and phenomena of world religion have gone much further since, and the scientific study of religion now deals in brain waves and Functional MRIs, and not merely autobiographies and personal interviews. Neurologist Jill Bolte Taylor has described her own year of helplessness combined with transcendent bliss following what she called My Stroke of Insight, followed by years of research into the neurology of others who have learned how to get into such states themselves.
There is no question, from the point of view of the victims, that the Crusades, the Inquisition, the various wars of religion around the world, and the Religious Right in the US are among the greatest disasters in human history, but it remains a vexed question whether religion is, on balance, more beneficial or harmful to humans. It may be that the evil acts of religion tend to fall away with their times, while the good examples of certain religious innovators live on and grow in influence, and so there is not a purely arithmetical balance between them. Certainly if we could stop killing and oppressing each other, we could say that the balance would shift to the good side over time. But we would still have to recognize that it was the opponents of religion as much as its adherents that changed things for the better.
Presumably it evolved with some survival value going back we know not how many tens of thousands of years. I would suppose that it began sometime after the start of the evolution of speech, and that they then coevolved along with song and other things, but I don't know how we could ever test that idea. Well, if we could find out the neurology of religion, and connect it to DNA, then maybe…
Well, leaving that aside, it is not religion in the abstract that has to answer for its crimes against humanity, going back at least to the prehistoric beginnings of human sacrifice, but particular religions. It is not generic Christianity or Islam or Hinduism that starts wars, but the warlike branches, while in every age on record there have also been pacific movements and whole churches, like the prophet Isaiah in Judaism, or Mahavira in Jainism or Shakyamuni Buddha in Buddhism way back when, or the much more recent Quakers and Mennonites, or the followers of Gandhi. Jains, Buddhists, and Daoists have in general been notably more pacific than the great majority of their Muslim, Hindu, Confucian, Shinto, and other neighbors. Atheists, too, have a mixed record, but have been doing better than average in recent times in the US and Europe.
Scriptures
[I]f our theory of revelation-value were to affirm that any book, to possess it, must have been composed automatically, or not by the free caprice of the writer [dictated directly by God or an angel holding the pen, for example], or that it must exhibit no scientific and historic errors [or that its manifest errors supersede science and history] and express no local or personal passions, the Bible would probably [sic] fare ill at our hands. But if, on the other hand, our theory should allow that a book may well be a revelation in spite of errors and passions and deliberate human composition, if only it be a true record of the inner experiences of great-souled persons wrestling with the crises of their fate, then the verdict would be much more favorable.
Or that something might be true or false, and important or unimportant, regardless of who said it, because we can test its consequences.
The battle was joined nearly two thousand years ago between the Biblical literalists and those who prefer to sift meaning from context, knowing that religious teachers often attempt to communicate in parables and allegories, just as it in fact says in the Christian Gospel accounts. As in the allegory of the Tower of Babel, those most hot to storm Heaven are least able to understand anything said about it, not because God made it happen, but because that is the nature of karma. The record on Biblical literalism goes back to Augustine's condemnation its practitioners in his own time. First, on the positive side, he wrote,
When they are able, from reliable evidence, to prove some fact of physical science, we shall show that it is not contrary to our Scripture.
Just what Galileo was condemned for, more than a millennium later. Then, on the negative side, Augustine wrote,
Now, it is a disgraceful and dangerous thing for an infidel to hear a Christian, presumably giving the meaning of Holy Scripture, talking nonsense on these topics; and we should take all means to prevent such an embarrassing situation, in which people show up vast ignorance in a Christian and laugh it to scorn. The shame is not so much that an ignorant individual is derided, but that people outside the household of faith think our sacred writers held such opinions, and, to the great loss of those for whose salvation we toil, the writers of our Scripture are criticized and rejected as unlearned men.
The Religion of Healthy-Mindedness
James considers a wide range of religious opinion and practice that does not depend on the experience of being Born Again, or Twice-Born. These Once-Born religions recommend a variety of attitudes and practices on various grounds, including various theologies, the common-sense practicality of helping each other, and in some cases the fact that in the 19th century faith healing was about as efficacious as going to doctors or psychiatrists for a wide range of physical and mental ailments, and on the whole far safer than using patent medicines. (Disclosure: My parents both died in the end of Christian Science, after decades of staying away from and disbelieving doctors.)
A number of these churches are known today as Mainstream Christianity. Although any particular one of them may have fixed ideas on some points of theology and practice, they tend to be open-minded on some points, willing to consider evidence as to what earlier religious thought and practice might actually result in increasing suffering, and changing to do something about it. They vary greatly in the degree of social conscience that that results in.
Conversion
James describes Evangelical churches that emphasize being born again, and look to the most florid examples of conversion, such as Paul, Augustine, or Martin Luther, with seemingly supernatural elements, or where an overwhelming sense of misery, despair, and sin yields suddenly to feelings of the presence of Jesus or God or the Holy Spirit, or angels, overwhelming happiness, and a conviction that whatever doctrine they had been fed up to this point had been fully and absolutely confirmed by those events. The classic text on this transition from dark to light and the following stages for Protestants is The Pilgrim's Progress (from This World to That Which Is to Come; Delivered under the Similitude of a Dream), by John Bunyan. For Catholics who appreciate the mystical strand of their tradition, one of the standards is The Dark Night of the Soul, by St. John of the Cross (title parodied by Douglas Adams in The Long Dark Teatime of the Soul). A modern Zen version is How to Grow a Lotus Blossom, by Rev. Jiyu Kennett, Abbess of Shasta Abbey. I witnessed parts of her progress and others at the Abbey as one of her assistants.
It is agreed across all major religions that the essence of conversion is giving up self, or selfishness, although the terminology used can differ widely. Some say that one must recognize a higher power, but the facts say that that assertion has no actual content, because it is of absolutely no account what practitioners think that higher power is, except as what Buddhists call the 84,000 entrances of Skill in Means. It has to be said in a form that resonates with the person concerned.
Christians abandon themselves to God, possibly in the guise of Jesus or the Holy Spirit; Theravada Buddhists to Nibbana (Nirvana); Mahayana Buddhists likewise to Nirvana or to Emptiness (Śunyata), or equivalently Buddha Nature or the Bodhisattva Vow; Daoists to Dao. The word Islam means precisely submission (to the will of Allah). Advaitva Hindus say, "Tat tvam asi" (That art thou). Kabbalah, used by both Orthodox and Hasidic Judaism, says, allegorically, that we each bear a spark of divine light, and our goal is to merge with the original infinite light that we splintered from. Rinzai Zen says, "Mu" and Soto Zen says, "You must let fall body and mind." The Light of Asia puts it, "The dewdrop slips into the shining sea."
The authorities always emphasized that the conversion process is but one part of a long, indeed lifelong process. We can look at John Newton, the slave ship captain who converted to Christianity and wrote the hymn Amazing Grace, but did not give up slaving for several years more as he began to come to grips with the meaning of Christianity, and did not join the campaign against slavery in the British Empire for decades after that. Would that more Evangelicals could have such an evolution, no matter how long delayed.
However, there are those who claim that being Born Again is all there is to it, that you are then and there forgiven for the rest of your life, no matter how much you might fall back into sin. Theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer called that Cheap Grace. The novel Confessions of a Justified Sinner imagines a worst-case scenario in which the narrator goes completely off the rails under the delusion that nothing evil that he can do can undo his salvation.
We saw Cheap Grace in the 2012 campaign when Newt Gingrich claimed right on TV that his becoming a Catholic and going to confession meant that we can no longer bring up his cheating on his former wives, his ethical lapses in Congress, or indeed anything from his past ever. But those politicians who do not follow the prescriptions of the Evangelicals or the most Conservative Catholics by definition cannot be forgiven for anything, and must of course resign or be thrown out of office.
James notes that bringing children up strenuously in this sort of doctrine is fairly effective at getting them to have such conversion experiences as teenagers, and convincing them of the fallacy that the theology of their community is the only possible explanation of what happens to them. Nevertheless, today significant numbers fall away every year from the theology and from the racism, homophobia, misogyny, science denial, Mammonism, and other greeds, hatreds, and delusions (as described by Buddhism) that so many such churches purvey, even at the cost of being shunned thereafter by family and community.
Nothing is more striking than the secular alteration that goes on in the moral and religious tone of men, as their insight into nature and their social arrangements progressively develop.
Religion can no longer support slavery or Jim Crow in America, but it is still down with the War on Drugs and other oppressions. One day it will not be able to support the ills that the Religious Right today takes for granted.
I remember as a child having a supposed vision of infinity while going under ether for surgery. At least, that was how it presented itself to me. But I thought at the time, "No, you are not a vision of infinity. You are a meaningless, finite picture plus the thought of being a vision of infinity."
I concluded that part of my brain was lying to me, and began to study the phenomenon seriously, eventually including professional study of delusion in Zen Buddhist priest training. I have been immune to being misled by such things, called makyo in Japanese Zen, since. I also never had any interest in drugs after my experience with ether.
One of our more highly-evolved brain functions is to make up stories to make sense of our very partial view of the world, to fill in the evident gaps with sense or nonsense in part to alert us to possible dangers. Filling in the gaps correctly when there are predators about has obvious survival value, far more than enough to balance the problems from getting it wrong in other cases. In the pre-scientific world, this meant that societies created vast webs of superstition surrounding everything, mixed in here and there with effective folk wisdom.
Fruits
James claims that
The highest flights of charity, devotion, trust, patience, bravery to which the wings of human nature have spread themselves have been flown for religious ideals.
Well, if so, we must also recognize that the lowest depths of human depravity have also been plumbed for religious ideals. Lying, cheating, stealing, murder, human sacrifice, incest, polygamy and other systematic subjugation of women, temple prostitution, rape as a weapon of war, slavery, pogroms, genocide, forced conversions, false accusations, extremes of torture and violent death for supposed blasphemy or apostasy, terrorism…
But for thousands of years the histories of humankind have been written by or on behalf of priests and kings who were simultaneously heads of national churches. When did overt atheists and agnostics ever get a favorable mention in public in all of that, or a chance to speak for themselves? Of course, there are plenty of non-theistic Buddhists who don't care about anybody's Gods even enough to bother with denying them.
But in fact atheists and agnostics are among our strongest champions of human rights, and not only for themselves. James himself cites the Union pour l'Action morale in France, founded by Paul Desjardins, which was very active against anti-Semitism in the notorious Dreyfus affair of 1894. The Union followed many of the principles we usually associate with religion, and evokes similarly exalted mental states and behaviors, but is entirely neutral to organized religion, or even somewhat hostile, while the Catholic Church treated it, and Dreyfus's innocence, as the worst of bad news. (A little like Pat Robertson and our own Mikey Weinstein, leader of Military Religious Freedom Foundation: 'Little Jewish Radical' Responds to Pat Robertson: Religious Freedom & Feigned Valor in the Military) I have found almost nothing about the Union in English outside of James's book. The link above is to a French Wikipedia article.
James points out
One might therefore be tempted to explain both the humility as to one's self and the charity towards others which characterize spiritual excitement, as results of the all-leveling character of theistic belief. But these affections are certainly not mere derivatives of theism. We find them in Stoicism, in Hinduism, and in Buddhism in the highest possible degree.
James also devotes some space to the various forms of asceticism. Dropping the myriad forms of material and social excess and simplifying one's life is commonly beneficial, although some forms have provoked persecution. Quakers were often thrown into prison for treating their supposed social superiors as equals. Inflicting pain on oneself, however, even in the limited form of occasional fasts, is more often an excuse to ignore positive duties to others than a method of improvement, because it comes to take up too much mental space and drive out other thoughts and motives. It is true that we must give up selfishness, but it is too easy for those with too lively a sense of either worth or worthlessness to fall into a selfish pride in self-denial, and to treat it is good in itself without regard to its consequences to others.
James notes the natural effects of conversion, which frequently result in heroic virtue on the individual scale, such as forgiving enemies, turning the other cheek, feeding the local poor, giving up alcohol or even in some cases having no more desire for it, and so on. However, general virtue, such as working on ending poverty worldwide, is mostly the province of a few particular churches and of secular organizations. Notable among such churches are the Quakers, with their Friends Service Committees. They have worked very hard on inculcating such virtues as duties, and not relying solely on the innate psychological effects of conversion. At the same time we see other churches work very hard against letting their members develop such notions.
Oppressions
Specifically, the following is what the Religious Right and its explicitly racist, even slavery-supporting precursors brought us to. We have had to have two Reconstructions (after the Civil War and in the Civil Rights Movement) and in response we are now carrying out the third, with GOTV to turn all of the former Confederate states Blue in the next several electoral cycles. Yes, even Alabama. We have the numbers, and Republicans are freaking out.
A fiery prophet for social justice and for why we must vote: the Rev. William Barber
Frederick Douglass castigated and excoriated the hypocrisy of Christians in the U.S. who supported slavery in his most famous speech, What to the Slave is the Fourth of July?, and in this appendix to his compelling autobiography, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, An American Slave, Written by Himself:
I find, since reading over the foregoing Narrative, that I have, in several instances, spoken in such a tone and manner, respecting religion, as may possibly lead those unacquainted with my religious views to suppose me an opponent of all religion. To remove the liability of such misapprehension, I deem it proper to append the following brief explanation. What I have said respecting and against religion, I mean strictly to apply to the slaveholding religion of this land, and with no possible reference to Christianity proper; for, between the Christianity of this land, and the Christianity of Christ, I recognize the widest possible difference—so wide, that to receive the one as good, pure, and holy, is of necessity to reject the other as bad, corrupt, and wicked.
I wrote about this distinction four years ago in my Diary
Let's be clear: We do want to destroy their culture. But I explained that we of course want to keep other aspects of Southern culture, notably pie. ^_^
What did the precursors of the modern Religious Right look like in James's time? What came before them? I'm glad you asked. Throughout his book James distinguishes religion proper in the experiences of the reformers and founders who have direct experiences, and corporate, institutional religion that takes over and perverts the original messages.
The basenesses so commonly charged to religion's account are thus, almost all of them, not chargeable at all to religion proper, but rather to religion's wicked practical partner, the spirit of corporate dominion. And the bigotries are most of them in their turn chargeable to religion's wicked intellectual partner, the spirit of dogmatic dominion, the passion for laying down the law in the form of an absolutely closed-in theoretic system…The baiting of Jews, the hunting of Albigenses and Waldenses, the stoning of Quakers and ducking of Methodists, the murdering of Mormons and the massacring of Armenians, express much rather that aboriginal human neophobia…
One of the more pernicious doctrines of several religions, discussed by James, is that blind obedience to human authority is a theological virtue. "I was just following orders," is taken by many, such as Ignatius of Loyola, as a complete vindication, claiming that God will wipe away any blame for following evil orders from the obedient servant, and lay it all to the account of the superior who gave the order. In the Crusades, the Catholic Church went much further, promising plenary indulgences with remission for all temporal and spiritual punishments for all previous sins to those who took the Crusader vow and went to kill infidels.
Of course, there are non-dogmatic churches that do not close themselves off to experience, but on the contrary found themselves on a requirement that new experience be allowed to contradict past teaching. Prominent among them are Quakers and Zen Buddhists. Chinese Zen went in one generation, in fact in the career of one teacher, Mazu (Baso in the Japanese Koan collections), from "This mind is Buddha" to "No mind and no Buddha". Of course, it turns out since the Reformation that no matter how dogmatic a church may be, new teachings can still sometimes arise, even if they have to go forth and start new churches, like Roger Williams leaving the Massachusetts theocracy to found a new, paradoxical theocracy in Rhode Island that required complete freedom of conscience.
The Future of Religion
Over a century ago, James wrote
What with science, idealism, and democracy, our own imagination has grown to need a God of an entirely different temperament from that Being interested exclusively in dealing out personal favors, with whom our ancestors were so contented.
We are still working on it.