Science on Religion
Current Affairs, Religion April 8th, 2008Just to turn the tables on religious leaders who discuss the morality of various aspects of science, I was reading a short commentary on a project on studying the origin and nature of religion from a scientific view. Fortunately they seem to be aware of the inherent difficulties:
…”religion” and “religiosity” are very ill-defined terms. New Scientist
It seems one outcome might be to predict future trends in religious movements. The author also makes the point that Greek and Roman gods were viewed by their believers as part of the natural (i.e. empirical) world. Obviously the Abrahamic religious completely departed from this concept.
In other news, I saw another significant leak of Scientology’s documentation on wikileaks – the first time the entire system from clear to OT8 has been publically available. (And it is being suppressed by the church using copyright law.) I should get around to commenting on that movement…
AC1
April 8th, 2008 at 2:42 pm
There is also the difficulty in identifying non-self-definitional religions. Thus the term ‘religious’ and ‘religiosity’ can apply to forms of life and activities not traditionally associated with god/spirits etc.
Example: The Iban of Sarawak have a ‘religious’ cosmology that has been studied at length by anthropologists. It could be labelled “animist” (the belief in the multiplicity of spirit – i.e. humans, animals, plants, geophysical entities like mountains etc.)
It has a limited ritualistic emphasis, a naturalist morality (with no fixed canon). Oral scripture in the form of mythic poems.
It’s most curious feature is that the Iban do not consider it to be a religion so much as a way of life. Even then that term indicates the arbitrary or deliberate seperation of the “sacred” from the “profane”. A split that does not occur in Iban culture – so the Iban “way of life” is not so much “a” way as it is “the” way.
Anthropologists initially suspected the Iban to be non-religious, till eventually they realised that their entire way of being, that which defined their culture, was an inherently religious form of life. There was no split between sacred and profane and in their cosmology there was no doubt.
The other most curious factor in this “religion” or tradition is that much of its focus is on rice farming. Rice the staple food of the Iban is near sacramental in nature, their farming methods are ritual activities reinforced by mythic tales. These mythic tales are the trascendent retelling of essential empirical information, the gathered lore and wisdom of a hunter-gatherer society living in a volatile environment – a society fully aware of the fragility of their way of life.
Thus the “good” farmer, the one who knows best how to utilize his fields, harvest his crops, feed his family, is a “moral” man who obeys the “adat” the natural law that underlies much of the Iban religious cosmological view.
This is somewhat comparable to the Greco-Roman naturalist religions. But I would be suspicious of suggesting that the Abrahamic religions have lost that naturalism and empiricism – I would propose they are founded upon it.
In Christianity Jesus is proposed to have been really human (and divine). The star of bethlehem has fascinated astronomers for centuries – metaphor or phenomena?
Judaism believes in the literality of certain Old testament tales, the parting of the red sea, the plagues on egypt etc. The slavery in egypt, the exodus out of egypt to the promised land, the exile in babylon.
Along with the importance of natural phenomena, the humanity of the protagonists and historical events (like the slavery in Egypt and the Babylonian exile) the Abrahamic religions also had a strong sense of “place” and one can talk of geographical importance (Mount Sinai for example).
So I think its unfair to suggest that the Abrahamic religions are totally ethereal and supernatural (although I dont deny the transcendency of it as compared to animism). But perhaps some if its sense of naturalism has been lost by the historical division of the “sacred” and “profane” which has been mostly a product of european intellectual dualism. This dualism however has been challenged within european religious thought, the Puritans come to mind as an example echoing the non-dichotomous teachings of Buddhism.