Recently, I had a bit of a discussion with a couple of folks on Facebook. They were slamming religion in general and, as they thought (erroneously, it turned out) Christianity in particular. I was trying to point out that they were simply ranting about things they knew nothing about, which didn't stop them, but it did get me thinking.
These guys were claiming, in their own way, that "religion" is responsible for the world's ills. This is obviously ludicrous on any number of levels, but ludicrousness never stopped anybody from making fools of themselves. That we have large, multinational corporations and businesses raping the environment, heating up the planet, exploiting and oppressing those too weak and poor to defend themselves seems to have escaped them, as has the blind belief in rapacious capitalism that "justifies" those corporations' actions. The fact that we have national governments (some of which claim to be democratic) which are autocratic, dictatorial and oppressive, which will use any means at their disposal to suppress dissent, curtail freedom and, for all intents and purposes, brainwash and enslave their populations seems to have escaped their attention, too. But, to them, religion's the problem. And I got to thinking that for all the delusion in their arguments, maybe they have something of a point.
The first question we have to ask, of course, is "What is (a) religion?" and our first task here is to come to some kind of consensus as to what we mean when we use the term. In simplest terms, a religion is some kind of cultural system, or set of beliefs, that includes behaviors and practices (many formalized as liturgy and ritual), which are based on mythologies (or highly revered stories) that may or may not be contained in what they consider to be sacred texts, which provide some kind of societal, organizational guidance. I know that's a mouthful, but if you go through there carefully, it becomes a bit clearer why, say, Christianity is generally accepted to be a religion, but why the Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster or a periodic Star Wars or Star Trek conference aren't. Some religions try to make clear to us how we got here, almost all try to explain how we should be, and all of them are based on faith; that is, a blind, if not unquestioned belief in certain tenets of the given religion. It is estimated that around 85% of the world's population ascribe to one of the five major, and perhaps 10,000 folk religions; the rest are free agents, if you will, though I would maintain that many of them, particularly those in the West, belong to what I would call quasi-religions, a topic I'll come back to in a moment.
Religions (and I include the quasi-religions here as well) serve two basic functions: they give people hope and in their own ways, they provide their adherents with a sense of belonging. Let's face it, life's tough, and when everybody around you sort of sees the world the way you do, you get the feeling you're not necessarily alone and that somehow, given enough communal effort, things just might get better. What is more, religions, some more clearly than others, provide us some kind of meaning in our lives, whether it is stories about how others overcame adversity, or that there is simply some reason why we're all here in the first place. Also important is the fact that all the major and most of the better-known minor religions have what I like to call a "", some variation of the Golden Rule that admonishes you to, well, just not be an asshole. This particular tenet, of course, is the one that is forgotten and ignored most often. If most people are lucky, they'll apply it to those who belong to their immediate sub-group, but beyond that, well, it starts getting lost.
If we just recognized and understood that much, we'd be a long ways toward reducing the amount of ill in the world, but there are two tendencies that religions have that thwart this: the first is the notion of "exclusivity" and the second is "fundamentalism". Exclusivity -- the idea that my way is the only way -- ruins everything. I don't know how people come up with this, but it's particularly, but not exclusively, prevalent among the so-called Abrahamic religions (Judaism, Christianity, and Islam). In a way it's related to the second tendency, fundamentalism. By this I mean that there is some tenet, law, rule, belief, article of faith, or whatever that an adherent believes is literally and universally true. It could be that any given fundamentalist has more than one, but there's at least one. It might be the literalism of the Bible (though very few people can read it in its original language), it might be the belief in the Trinity or the divinity of Jesus, it might be the inviolability of the person of the religion's founder, it might be anything really, but it is this one thing, this one belief, this one statement that the "true believer" hangs all his or her faith on. If this one little part turns out to be not "true", everything literally falls apart. Believers will die for this and are too often more than willing to kill others (thereby violating the don't-be-an-asshole clause) if it is challenged seriously in any way. And though I've not done a valid study to find out, I would strongly suspect that the more fundamentalist a believer or group of believers is, the more rabid their defense of their belief's exclusivity. What's so unnerving about these tendencies, however, is that they are accepted on pure, blind faith; they cannot be proven, there is no real evidence to support them ... they are basically assumptions upon which everything else is based.
What I've just said about religions applies, mutatis mutandis, for quasi-religions as well. A quasi-religion is a system of cultural beliefs, just like a religion, but one that is not generally recognized as one. Examples include capitalism and scientific materialism. Both of these belief systems include all the elements we identified in our general definition of "religion" above. They include beliefs, behaviors and practices that provide insight into why we exist and how we should live our lives. And the tendencies just described apply as well. Thatcher, one of the "patron saints" of a particularly aggressive form of fundamentalist capitalism, most often known as neoliberalism, stated flatly that "there is no alternative" (to this economic system of belief). Its fundamentalist tenets include low taxes for the rich and austerity for the poor, both of which are the golden path to economic salvation ... even if there is not a shred of evidence for them; and if you don't want to believe me, as the Chileans, the Argentinians, or the Greeks. Or take the particularly rabid form of scientistic belief that this making itself known: Richard Dawkins, a "holy figure" in this last camp will tell you in no uncertain terms that spirit and consciousness don't even exist, though it is life, an unidentifiable and unquantifiable force, that animates him and his own consciousness that allows him to make his silly claims, even though he'll be one of the first to tell you that this consciousness doesn't exist, it is a mere illusion. These quasi-religions, just like the "real" ones we considered above, are based as well on some fundamental , literal "fact" that turns out upon closer examination to be just an assumption, and their exclusivity is tied very closely to that assumption. The reason they only qualify as quasi-religions is that neither of these two examples includes a don't-be-an-asshole clause. All the worse for us all.
We are all on their earth and are in the same boat. It lies in our nature as human beings to want to know where we come from, why we are here, and where we are going. Most of the world's religions, large or small, try to provide answers to these questions. Their answers cannot be proven nor disproven, but the additional interpretations and claims made by specific adherents and groups of adherents may complicate the matter as they go above and beyond those generally acknowledged as being part of the religion in general. (For example, there are an estimated 2.2 billion Christians in the world; almost 60% of those are Roman Catholics and around 40,000 different "Christian churches" share the remainder among themselves.) What I am advocating is that perhaps we need to be a bit more open for and tolerant of religions. Good and bad has been done in religion's name, but if you are going to condemn something you should at least know what you're talking about and tailor your criticism appropriately. Prejudice is prejudice regardless of whether it is regard to race, religion, creed or whatever. Religion per sé is not the problem, fundamentalism and false notions of exclusivity are. It's not what you believe that matters as much as how you believe and what you do with that belief.
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