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Essays, Opinion, & Commentary |
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by George J. Irbe
Introduction I have been busy during the last decade in pursuit of the evidence provided by the natural sciences, in tandem with what can be derived by rational reasoning, of what I prefer to call the natural Creator-God who is responsible for all creation; he is also known as the God of the philosophers. In declaring my belief in the natural Creator-God I have also had to declare my conviction that the conception of god of every religion that ever has been practiced or is being practiced now by men is absolutely wrong. I have also declared that believing in the Creator-God and his Laws is the natural genuine faith which requires no religion at all to sustain it. But it is well known that from his primitive beginnings onward to this day man has been beset by a psychological quirk that has always driven him to invent some kind of god or gods and practice some kind of religious ceremonies and rites of worship of these phantom gods of his imagination. In my mind it is the greatest puzzle why man has had such wide-spread addiction for this psychological aberration called religion, and at the same time I am equally mystified by the fact that man has not paid any serious attention to this obsession with the intention of at least controlling it, if not eradicating it, like he does with other defects and diseases that afflict him. Religion certainly fits in the category of man's debilitating afflictions; it has not only made him postulate every imaginable wrong god-idea, it has also been utterly harmful to man's own development by making him commit the most awful acts against fellow men and the natural world in the name of some contrived god or gods. This puzzlement of mine is reflected in the title to this essay. One of the main premises of my faith is that God -- the Supreme Intelligence -- has given us, Homo sapiens, a very powerful intelligence that far exceeds the intelligence of any other living being here on Earth; he has also given us the freedom to use this intelligence as we see fit. I further believe that God has done this so that we humans would have the ability to observe, understand, and voluntarily comply with, the Laws -- both the physical and the moral -- by and through which he manages the functioning of all aspects of his creation. Often the thought enters my head that perhaps Homo sapiens is an experiment in progress. In The Dark Side of Human Nature, I remarked that with regard to the challenge of living in accordance with his Laws, it is as if the Supreme Intelligence is saying: "You are largely on your own. It is very hard to do, but try your utmost to get it right." If I am wrong in my conjecture about this, then I have to ask this question: Why, then, has Homo sapiens been given this very powerful intelligence and the free will to use it if there was no real purpose behind doing so? It is very discouraging to consider the possibility that man's weakness for religion is a psychological flaw which he will never be able to shake off. If that is the case, Homo sapiens would appear to be the object of a failing experiment by the Creator-God. If the psychological flaw which always leads man to succumb to religion is incurable, it will forever prevent man from achieving a genuine understanding of the Creator-God, or of his Laws, or of how to live in compliance with the Laws. The purpose for which God has granted both intelligence and free will to Homo sapiens would never be satisfied. I have expressed my despair at the lack of any indication of meaningful progress by mankind in shedding the religious impediment in the essay God, His Laws, and Mankind. I can placate my despair at this gloomy prospect somewhat by reasoning that it is possible that I might be too impatient in my expectations. According to the most widely accepted estimate in the scientific community, Homo sapiens have only been around for some 40,000 years. We know that on the geological time scale, and on the time scale of the cosmos itself, this span of time is a mere twinkling. Looking at it from this perspective, I can speculate that perhaps the intellectual maturation of the soul of Homo sapiens needs considerably more time and that this process has been barely started during the first 40,000 years. Whichever is the case -- a failing experiment or one that has just begun -- I recognize religion as a major, stubbornly persisting, impediment that blocks man's access to a genuine understanding of God and his Laws. Evidently, it has beset man's mind since his primitive beginnings. I am quite confident that there has never been, nor could there ever be, evidence to indicate that "religion" has ever had any practical or intellectual utility that would serve to further man's understanding of the Creator or his creation, even though it has been practiced in myriad different forms and manners through the ages. My opinion on the great harm that religion has done to man's intellect is stated in Finding God in Three Stages: "My life's experiences, observations of mankind's behavior during my lifetime, plus the historical record of mankind's behavior back through the ages, convinced me beyond any doubt that, with few exceptions, mankind in general has a very poor and erroneous understanding of God and an even poorer, or non-existent, understanding of God's expectations of mankind. The three monotheistic religions which still dominate mankind's thinking and attitudes give the wrong answers. Just because they claim as "truths" the tales of hallucinatory experiences millennia ago, does not make them so. But by insisting on these "truths" (of so-called Divine revelation, no less) they have been the primary instruments of mankind's abysmal performance in every respect, because they have imposed their own primitive superstitions and fantasies on man's intellect, thus stifling development of a true understanding of God and his expectations from us. In one word, the three main religions, with a common root going back to Abraham, have been disastrous for mankind." As indicated by the title, this essay is an attempt to look into the characteristics, history and debilitating effects of religion. I confess that my inquiry will be negatively biased and quite deserving of the criticism that the anthropologist Morton Klass states on page 9 of his book Ordered Universes: Approaches to the Anthropology of Religion (Westview Press, 1995). Klass says that very often investigators into the origins of religion are really searching for evidence that would confirm their judgmental question, which is:
I also subscribe to asking of that question. Ironically, the above statement by Klass is, in my opinion, the most meaningful item in his book, even though I have taken its purport in a diametrically opposite sense to the uncomplimentary one which he intended to convey. As I stated before, men have not shown much interest to pursue and perhaps to answer the question: Why, indeed, did they have to come up with such absolutely silly and irrational conclusions? Man has sought for causes and explanations for many other flaws in his psychological make-up that exhibit symptoms of paranoia and hallucinations. Yet, although religious belief is characterized by the presence of these very same symptoms, man has never regarded it as a psychological weakness to drown his reason and mental functions in the depths of religious fantasies. Instead, it has been accepted as a normal and even a healthy component of his psychological make-up. What is Religion Understood to be? If one consults the various dictionaries one finds religion defined in several different ways, but all concern belief in some entity or entities who are endowed with some kind of supernatural powers and who demand respect and obedience from man in return for their cooperation and help. One of the broadest definitions of religion is given by Webster's (1913) online dictionary:
Religion can be considered in a commonsensical way or in the complicated and contorted way of the anthropologists. The anthropologists' inquiry into religion, or any aspect of culture in general, is made tortuous and timorous (and in many respects laughably ridiculous) by their fear of a mythical beast of their own creation called "ethnocentric predicament," which virtually paralyses their ability to draw any conclusions about anything that is not of their own immediate cultural environment. Therefore, I will not waste time with what the anthropologists have to say about religion, except to refer one more time, for a typical anthropologist's definition of religion, to the above-mentioned book by Morton Klass, where it is stated on page 38:
This definition may say something substantial about religion to another anthropologist, but it surely is without solid content for an ordinary commonsense individual like me. The same is true of Klass' book in general; it offers to me very little comprehensible information about religion. But, I was lucky to come across a book that was first published in 1895, written by Allan Menzies, D.D., Professor of Biblical Criticism in the University of St. Andrews. The title of the book is History of Religion; I have the fourth edition, reprinted by Charles Scribner's Sons, New York, 1922. This book describes and discusses religion in a straightforward and solid manner. I am drawing copiously on Menzies' work in this essay. Menzies gives "a working definition of religion" very simply as "the worship of higher powers." [p. 9] Although this definition is a terse one, it implies quite a lot. In Menzies' words:
Of course, the above definition avoids saying anything about the substance of the higher powers, because it is impossible to claim that they are anything more than phantasms of man's imagination. And if the higher powers are imaginary, then the "cultivating of relations with them" as "a practical activity" seems like nothing else but an auto-suggestive surreal process of make-believe. Further on, Menzies completes his definition by adding to it the words "sense of need":
However, expanding the definition of religion with the addition of the "sense-of-need" clause does not do for it what Menzies thought it does. According to Aristotle (and Mortimer Adler), "need" itself must be qualified with the adjective "apparent/imagined" or "real/natural." Adler designates apparent needs as "wants". Now, a man might have a universally recognized natural need for an essential of life, but it is disputable whether religion (i.e., appeal to a higher power) ever has or ever could fill that need. As a rule, essential needs are met through the efforts of man himself. If "sense-of-need" is taken in the narrower meaning of being only a sense of need to worship a higher power, then the need is again only an imagined one, because there are entire societies -- the Confucian and Buddhist, for example -- who show no signs of psychological deprivation of any kind by not worshipping a higher power. Therefore, I am going to modify Menzies' definition of religion once more by adding the word "imagined", so that it reads: religion is the worship of higher powers from a sense of imagined need. This definition immediately raises the next problematic question, which is: why does man have this particular imagined need for -- depending again on the interpretation -- either for (a) religion, per se, or (b) to appeal to "higher powers" to satisfy his apparent/imagined or real/natural needs? Menzies dodges the question in the passage from p. 14, when he says: "the belief having arisen within him, in what way we need not now inquire, that higher powers exist who can, if they will, defend and prosper him," and similarly on p. 27: "We cannot go into the philosophical question of the basis of religion in the human mind. It would seem to be a psychological necessity." To which one can respond that the absence of religion defined as "worship of higher powers" from the Confucian and Buddhist societies disproves that it is a psychological necessity. I have highlighted a revealing statement by Menzies in the passage from p. 13, i.e., if man could help himself he would not need religion. It is generally recognized as a fact that man prospers only by helping himself. There is no evidence (but of course, there are many myths) that mankind has ever experienced great blessings or perished in great disasters that have had other than natural causes. Of course, these causes are all instruments of the Creator's Laws, but they certainly are not of supernatural origin as claimed by the religious. We know that great natural blessings can come indiscriminately to those who pray as well as to those who do not; and we know that of those who pray for deliverance in a natural disaster, just as many are liable to perish as survive, and that the outcome for any particular individual is determined by their own tenacity and endurance and the random specific circumstances of their predicament. Let us consider the following: Is it not true that most of the time a man can and will help himself, and in the few instances when all the odds are against him he will still never stop trying to help himself? And is it not true that this is so whether the man worships a higher power or does not? Perhaps, then, the imagined need to worship a higher power has a less than a lofty reason. Is the reason perhaps man's characteristic indolent nature itself? It is very natural to all the more developed animal species, and especially so to Homo sapiens, to avoid exertion, particularly the exhausting physical kind, as much as possible. At its worst, this avoidance of labor has produced slavery, and in its milder form it leads to procrastination and to wishing that a real or imagined need will somehow be provided for without the exertion that it would take for a man to provide it by himself. So, a man will pray to God or several gods to provide for his needs. What man is actually praying for is that the higher powers will change the conditions and circumstances in which man finds himself so as to diminish the toil and sweat that man must expend to eke out his existence. However, there is still more to be drawn from the definition of religion as the worship of higher powers from a sense of imagined need. In The Dark Side of Human Nature I have described the more unpleasant innate characteristics of man. Man is capable of construing false justifications for bad desires and actions by seemingly rational reasoning; that is how he justifies his envy, greed, and lust for power. Man often does his best to disguise these unsavory desires as genuine needs. In actual fact they are only apparent (to him) needs, more specifically they are his "wants." It is clear that we can now draw another conclusion from the definition of religion given above. Man can appeal to higher powers for assistance in fulfilling his imagined needs, which in actual fact are often his selfish wants. Religion can now be seen as a tool for auto-suggestive self-justification that man uses for various purposes, some good, some quite bad and some at times actually very evil. In the next passage Menzies explains the development of what he calls the "psychological necessity" for religion. He provides the motivational elements which certainly also include man's imagined needs and wants:
In the above Menzies concedes that primitive man had desires for things beyond what he could ordinarily attain and in frustration often called upon "a being which had sympathy with his desires" for help in attaining them. These desires were, by and large, selfish wants. In light of the above, I think that I can now expand the definition of religion one more time and state that religion is the worship of imagined higher powers from a sense of imagined need or want, good or bad. I must repeat again that this kind of religion has nothing at all to do with recognition and acknowledgement of the one Creator-God.
Questions/Comments? Post them in The Radical Academy Forum Mr. Irbe's Website: Classical Liberal George E-mail Address: George J. Irbe |
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