Deference to Religion

Cockfighting? Part of our “culture.”

Taking little girls out of school after the 8th grade? Part of our “religion.”

I’ve seen a couple of recent news stories (linked just above) in which people are defending practices that are condemned or disapproved in the larger culture, and the defense is “I do this because my religion (or culture) tells me to.” In many cases, those of us who are easy-going, tolerant, liberal types are inclined to want to defer to the religious and cultural practices of others. But we are torn, when those practices appear clearly to be harmful to other human beings, to the environment, and to other creatures. And, in a sort of an ultimate irony, there is a whole religious movement that uses extreme violence to punish those of us who live in cultures that wish to accommodate and tolerate their religious beliefs.

What is this all about? What are religions, that most of us wish to defer to them, even to religions that espouse and practice brutality?

[Caveat and Disclaimer: I am not a professional theologian. I do have a life-long interest in religion and spirituality, and I’ve done a lot of reading, and thinking, and conversing about religious ideas and practices. And a fair amount of practicing, as well.]

Here are my thoughts:

Religion arises out of the human desire to understand our existence, our experience, and our place in the larger reality that we perceive with our senses. We know about death, we experience the flow of time, we know love and grief and tedium, and our brains are designed to ask “why?” So, over the many ages in which there have been humans, ideas have arisen, usually first in the form of creation stories. We wonder: How the hell did we “get” here? Well, here’s one idea: we know that we create various things, so it seems reasonable to conjecture that someone created us. And stories are told about how this may have happened. The really good stories survive, are told and re-told. But this is not enough (nothing is ever “enough,” is it?): there is the desire to speculate about this creator. What might this creator be like? Big, certainly, and powerful! And what might be the preferences and wishes of this creator? Well, that is a difficult one to figure out, always has been. Life is very unpredictable, and if this creator is in any way interacting with us in our lives, it’s pretty hard to discern any reliable way to persuade him to help us out. Or to keep him from slamming us, again and again. Nevertheless, valiant efforts have always been made, and systematized. Do this, don’t do that, and remember to give generously to your parish. And if it doesn’t work out in this lifetime, don’t worry because there is the hope of heaven…

[Of course, even within the confines of all this reasoning, some voices have been preserved in which our ancestors are heard, throwing up their hands in despair, admitting that we just don’t know; read the Books of Job and Ecclesiastes, sometime!]

Why is all this so problematic, sometimes? I think that a major problem arises because, somewhere in this process, we forgot that this is all speculation, grandly dressed up in the form of “religion.” This is no longer just Joe’s idea, an idea that he cooked up one evening at the campfire while talking with Amelia and the rest of his family and friends. At some point it became important to declare that the creator (God, of course) actually told this true story to Joe. How do we know that? Well, because Joe said so… or his friends and his descendents said so… and because everyone in the community now agrees to believe (or, at least, to pretend to believe) that this is how it happened.

So easily, we forget that all religious formulations are provisional, partial truths (at best). All proclamations about the ultimate “meaning” of human life are speculative!

And here we are today, with our capacity to observe and learn about the many different religions that have been created, that are currently being espoused and practiced in different cultures and places. We know that people get very sensitive and touchy about their religions (we know this because humans torture and slaughter each other over religious differences). We want to live in peace, so we (in Western liberal democracies) try to accommodate and defer to each other in this regard. We have learned to nervously back off when someone says “Hey, bub, back off, this is my religion… my family… my child… None of your business.” Our own nation, which arose out of a social context in which religious persecution was normative, was founded in part to protect religious diversity, so this deference is deeply ingrained in us.

Some would say it is time to take a closer look at whether or not humanity can still afford this deferential attitude. This is the question Sam Harris takes up in his book The End of Faith. If you are a person of faith, I suggest you read it; it will challenge you. I’m a teacher, and I tend to recommend challenges, even if they involve matters of faith. Maybe, especially then…