Iam no good at explaining things. This must be true, because the only alternative is that some of my readers are no good at reading. Hence when, in last Sunday’s column, I drew a direct contrast between shamanistic thinking and behaviour, and mature religious thinking and behaviour, and said that the latter is the only cure for the former, I got all these notes from people calling me a shaman.
Let us continue with this subject, for while it may be complicated and puzzling, I am convinced that it is very important. Religion itself is important, crucial, not only to the salvation of human persons, but to their general sanity and the peace of the world.
It does not follow that religion is an unqualified good thing. As surely everyone noticed, on the morning of 9/11, it is possible for religion to be a bad thing.
Nor does it follow that religion is an unqualified bad thing, as Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, Daniel Dennett and Christopher Hitchens—known affectionately as the “four horsemen of the apocalypse”—have argued in very aggressive bestsellers. The efforts of at least two of them to launch a movement called “Bright” (appropriating that word for atheists on the analogy of “gay” for homosexuals), shows indisputably religious intentions. They propose, in effect, some seriously bad religion: a purely negative cult to target, oppose and inevitably persecute all manifestations of belief in God.
It would help if the general public were better informed about the meaning of the word “religion.” It comes from Latin, as so many of our words; from “religio.” As Cicero suggests, in his treatise De Natura Deorum, about the competing religions of his day (the Epicurean, the Stoic, and the Academic or skeptical), it builds on “religere,” which means a gathering together.
He gives it the further connotation of “an obligation.” Other Roman writers, including the later Christian, Augustine, point directly to the antecedent “religare” which means to bind tightly, and is at the root of such English words as “ligature.” The idea of a religion founded on atheism could have been no surprise to our Roman (or Greek) forebears. The idea that even primitive tribesmen may be atheist is no longer a surprise to our modern anthropologists. Shamanism, in association with atheism, is a phenomenon to which anthropologists such as Mary Douglas have called attention.
The idea that human history consists in a natural progression from primitive religious beliefs, through an ever more thorough abandonment of them, is, like so many other confident modern assertions, itself “a sham.” Paradoxically, the thing that most shockingly distinguishes human beings from the other animals is our possession of religion, displayed in such weird habits as conducting funerals. Unless the observer is hallucinating, he will find no religious monkeys or dolphins. It follows, there are no atheist monkeys or dolphins. Animals didn’t have a category for that, until humans came along.
Humans, by contrast, have such a category—that of binding beliefs—and it is part of what defines us. So far as we remain human, we will be unable to dispense with that category. It is hardly dispensed with when all these “bright” people start their “church of atheism.” For human beings, religion is unavoidable, and our choice is not to accept or reject it, but rather to decide which kind of religion we want—when it has not been decided for us already by wise or unwise tradition, and our own laziness in accepting purported traditions (including atheist traditions) unexamined.
Last week, I drew a parallel distinction between “living to consume” (which is what all animals, including the human ones, do), and “living for salvation” (which only humans can do, and have been doing for some considerable time).
I hinted, but did not expressly say, that shamanism is primitive because it is oriented mostly to consumption. The higher and more mature the religion, the more it is oriented to salvation. This would be true in both ancient and modern times, because there is no necessary progress in religion, as there is no necessary progress in anything else.
Our “theology”—what we understand by God, or gods—may likewise be mature or immature. To the shamanistic mind, oriented to consumption, and at its silliest performing certain rituals in the hope of being given a banana, like an ape—the god is simply a banana dispenser (or rain maker). This view is not incorrect, but it is pathetically incomplete.
“God is never to be thought of as acting as a cause among causes.” This is a principle of “catholic,” or universal Christian theology, and I might hope of all mature religious views.
I’ve lifted the precise wording from Theology in the Context of Science
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