Mr. Moderate

I am just a poor boy.
Though my story’s seldom told,
I have squandered my resistance
For a pocket full of mumbles, Such are promises
All lies and jests
Still a man hears what he wants to hear
And disregards the rest.
– The Boxer by Paul Simon

If you want to understand religion, just ponder the first verse lyrics for The Boxer a bit. It is the perfect allegory of mankind against the universe, and man’s inhumanity to our fellow creatures.

The preacher class always serves the political ruling class. If they don’t, then one or the other is rapidly discarded. A few centuries ago, the habit among the ruling classes was that the eldest son was trained to be the heir to the ruler (or “landlord” in some sense of that word), the second-eldest was trained for the priesthood (to become, eventually, a bishop of a rank befitting of his father’s status), and the third-eldest and any subsequent sons were trained for the army (officers, of course; and again, the ultimate rank achieved and the rapidity of promotion would frequently depend upon the rank of the father). Thus did the ruling classes of Western Civilization perpetuate their values to subsequent generations.

There are a large number of “angry atheist” books that have reached the best-seller lists in the past few years. Authors like Sam Harris, Daniel Dennett, Richard Dawkins, and Christopher Hitchens have each penned angry screeds denouncing religion in all its forms. Unfortunately for all those angry atheists, religion is a foundation of civilization and I frankly doubt that we could even have civilization without some form of religion.

Major historians who have undertaken to understand the vast sweep of human history, people such as Oswald Spengler, Arnold Toynbee, and Will Durant, have all concluded that religion is one of the attributes of each known civilization. Each, in his own way, has acknowledged somewhere in his writings that religion is myth. Thus, if we seek to understand religion, we must understand the hold that mythology has on humanity. Spengler had this to say:

A Culture is born in the moment when a great soul awakens out of the proto-spirituality of ever-childish humanity, and detaches itself, a form from the formless, a bounded and mortal thing from the boundless and enduring. It blooms on the soil of an exactly-definable landscape, to which plant-wise it remains bound. It dies when the soul has actualized the full sum of its possibilities in the shape of peoples, languages, dogmas, arts, states, sciences, and reverts into the proto-soul. But its living existence, that sequence of great epochs which define and display the stages of fulfillment, is an inner passionate struggle to maintain the Idea against the powers of Chaos without and the unconscious muttering deep-down within. It is not only the artist who struggles against the resistance of the material and the stifling of the idea within him. Every Culture stands in a deeply-symbolical, almost in a mystical, relation to the Extended, the space, in which and through which it strives to actualize itself. The aim once attained — the idea, the entire content of inner possibilities, fulfilled and made externally actual — the Culture suddenly hardens, it mortifies, its blood congeals, its force breaks down, and it becomes Civilization, the thing which we feel and understand in the words Egyptianism, Byzantinism, Mandarinism.

Spengler’s “great soul” is the religious urge common to all people, everywhere. The “ever-childish humanity” cannot really grasp “the Extended,” which is the ultimate space within which all possibile existences must either take place or not. To avoid insanity, humans cling to the myth of their particular Culture or Civilization. In the preachments of his own chosen religion, every “man hears what he wants to hear … And disregards the rest.” And therein lies the story of how seemingly-contradictory scriptural writings can justify virtually any course of action desired by the religious believer. And better yet, religion makes promises to mankind that cannot be collected until after it becomes impossible to collect (i.e., after death). Thus, we have the idea of religion as “a pocket full of mumbles, Such are promises.” Just how good is a promise where you are unable to go back to the promisor and claim you were cheated after you perform your part of the promise? If contracts were designed like religions, business as we know it could not exist.

Ultimately, it is the fear of the yawning “Chaos without” that keeps mankind bound to our religious ideals. Some might call fear cowardly, but the alternative for mankind would seem to be insanity, and that is not a good alternative at all. Still, the atheists would say that religion itself is a state of insanity, and in certain respects it is hard to argue with them on that point. The fear of Chaos and the Extended are so great that the vast bulk of weak-minded people cannot tolerate the least idea that their particular religion might not be exactly true after all. And I believe it is this fear, more than a mere lust for power, that drives some people to intensely persecute anybody who dares to be different in their religious views.

For all that he is one of the “angry atheist” writers mentioned above, Richard Dawkins is also the originator of the idea that best expresses what religion is: religion is a meme that is passed from person to person through linguistic communication. A meme does not survive based upon any particular truth-value. Instead, a meme survives because it has some particular quality which causes it to stick within our brains and be compulsively passed on to other humans. Clearly, jokes are one set of example memes. If you’ve heard a good joke, you will retain it and you will be in some way compelled to pass it on to your friends and family members. In that way, a good meme survives for a while as part of the meme pool that floats around in human brains.

But most jokes are uproariously funny only for a brief moment in time (relatively speaking). Religion is a meme that tends to last for hundreds or thousands of years, being passed down from one generation to the next. Religions by and large last until they are replaced by a “better” religion. In the way that genes compete for biological survival and propagation, so too to memes compete for survival within human minds and propagation to other human minds. Measured this way, religion is the best meme we’ve ever discovered as mankind seemingly cannot exist without maintaining some sort of a “religion meme.”

Both Islam and Christianity are religions that promote conquest of “unbelievers” and which, to one degree or another, castigate or punish apostates. From a standpoint of meme survival, those are good qualities, but from a standpoint of human peace, those are actually quite horrid qualities as they tend to lead to a great deal of intra-human violence. Christianity is actually conflicted on whether peace or conquest is its greatest goal. So, large groups of Christians pursue each of those contradictory objectives. Islam, on the other hand, has no commandment for peace to overcome when dealing with “unbelievers.” The good qualities of Islamic life are restricted to interactions with fellow “believers.” Thus it is the case that Christians have some right to feel threatened by Islamic nations who will sometimes express their goal to conquer Christians.

In essence, then, religion isn’t ever about discovering “real truth.” Instead, religion is all about obtaining “peace of mind” in some way, shape, or form. For the ruling class, it is a way of pacifying the masses of the ruled. And for those masses of ruled humanity, it is a way of being at peace in spite of needing to endure an inherently unjust existence. This is why preachers are best viewed as entertainers, even though they are ultimately spreading propaganda designed to keep order within the body politic. As entertainers, preachers are paid to make their audience “feel good” in some way. A “fire and brimstone” preacher makes his audience feel good that they are saved from that horrible consequence while all of their worst enemies are doomed to roast in Hell forever. Now, doesn’t just reading that give you a twinge of satisfaction? And other styles of preaching work to produce satisfaction within the audience in different ways, but ultimately the idea is still the same: the performance of the preacher is designed to make the audience feel good about themselves, if not right away, then after extirpating themselves from any guilt they might have over some wrongdoing, real or imagined.

And with all that said, maybe now you have a little better understanding of religion.