A few years ago I saw John Caputo give a keynote at the North Texas Philosophical Association where he defended religion and argued that it was no different than great literature and comic books. My thought was that if this is true, why retain the category of religion and why not just go with comic books and literature (after all, they’re often better)? Recently I’ve heard people argue that Zizek is redeeming Christian theology. I find this very strange. He’s quite clear that he sees Jesus as a rather irrelevant figure who is– if memory serves me correctly –“a dime a dozen sage performing petty magic tricks”. He expressly says that Jesus literally dies on the cross and that there is no resurrection. The importance of Jesus dying on the cross, he says, is that god is dead and we now know it’s up to us. He then proceeds to give a rather standard Hegelian interpretation of Christianity based on Hegel’s Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion, where the Holy Spirit is nothing more than the activity of the community. He argues that Paul is where it is at, and that Paul is a psychoanalytic-political thinker. Paul is theorizing, he argues, a community without law and the work involved in forming such a community. Faith is not, in this framework, belief in the absence of evidence, but continued work even though the project looks impossible. This is his interest in Chesterton as well, I take it… Not Chesterton’s theology, but commitment even where things seem impossible. In short, Zizek’s project is thoroughly atheistic (and I mean that in a quite literal sense). He is Feuerbachian and understands himself as articulating what religion is really about (politics), when the fetish of religion is taken away.
I suspect that were we to talk to believers we would find that the vast majority of them would be deeply offended by these claims and see them as deeply wrong. So to the intellectual, religious apologists, this is what I’m wondering: Do you think Jesus walked on water, raised a man from the dead, turned water into wine, cured the blind, drove out demons, and himself rose from the dead? And I’m asking if you believe this literally. Do you believe there’s a transcendent God that can suspend the laws of nature to perform miracles? Or is it that you just believe that Jesus is just a potent myth with a powerful ethico-political philosophy? Do you believe that humanity has any special place in nature, that somehow evolution had to “culminate” in us, that evolution has “culminated” in us? And if this is what you believe, why call this religion at all (as religion necessarily involves the supernatural), why call it Christianity (which will only feed those supernaturalist pretensions and the ugliness that has stemmed from them), and why privilege Jesus when he’s not saying much that’s different from countless other ethical philosophers that made no claims to divinity or the supernatural? Why keep religion in the mix?
Now don’t get me wrong. Jesus and Paul are tremendously important figures for me. I can read them, enjoy them, and find valuable things in them. But I can read them, enjoy them, and find valuable things in them in the way I read, enjoy, and find valuable things in Hesiod, Homer, Kafka, Shakespeare, Dostoyevsky, etc. But I don’t organize a religion around Homer, or claim that we have to defend Homer as a social institution.
I get the strong sense that there’s a deep cynicism to some of the religious turn we’re encountering in folks like Eagleton. The idea seems to be that “the rubes find religion is important so we should present a leftist version of religion to get them on board.” If that’s what’s going on I find this idea absolutely atrocious and to indicate a deep lack of faith (yes, I realize the irony of using that word) in people and what people are capable of. The central problem with religion is that it ties us to authority– the authority of texts, figures, priests, and institutions –as the condition of political organization and what is right and good. As such, it inscribes servitude in the very structure of political action. Even in a leftist variant, such a structure is still, to use Deleuze and Guattari’s term, organized around micro-fascist desires. Why not instead envision community, collectivity, and action that arises from people themselves? I honestly don’t get it and am sure I’ll be beat up for asking whether such people literally believe the things two paragraph above. There will be weasel words, rationalizations, gymnastics, and all sorts of contortions as to how there’s something more going on here. But for the life of me, if you don’t believe there’s something supernatural here, why call it religion and why associate yourself with such a thing? The same goes for talk about “spirituality” too. Newsflash. I think things are interconnected too. I’m filled with wonder and joy at the beauty of this. I wonder at the vastness of the universe. Yet I wouldn’t describe any of this as “spiritual” or “religious”. So what’s this all about?
March 22, 2012 at 6:57 am
It depends on who you ask. The theologians will have a much more nuanced kind of response as to the dogmas you mention above. There is a continuum there. Roger Haight, a theologian and Jesuit priest, who wrote an excellent book on christology, Jesus Symbol of God, does not believe that a physical, corporeal resurrection is necessary when you look at the core doctrine of the resurrection. Many theologians agree and disagree on this point. (Haight, because of his work, is no longer allowed to teach theology at all. So, for many theologians, especially if they are in a religious order like the Jesuits, there are consequences to this kind of thing. Better than being tortured and burned at the stake, but, still not good.) The point being that, because an object is in a sense a reduction of its own elements, it will always be threatened by rogue forces within itself, because its internal construction is always less than the sum of its elements. I think there are always these dangerous elements within the religions. (This is my take on Tim’s point about a system being undone by a kind of “nothingness” at its heart: what is this nothingness for the system but its own inherent heterodox elements?)
But I think that you are on the right track before, when you say that the religions are much, much more than doctrine and dogmatic propositions. Very much like the sciences are hardly just the conclusions reached by the scientists, the religions are a vast network of heterogeneous elements and practices of which belief is only a part. My sense is that many Christians, Protestant, Catholic and Orthodox alike, attend church for these other elements and are not primarily motivated by intellectual considerations. For many it is first and foremost a kind of experience and encounter with something, and to experience it with others. Some really do care about the specific beliefs, and others care less about them. Or maybe you could say that the belief itself, not necessarily what it is of, is a practice or ritual. I suppose that is why I am less bothered by weird beliefs or superstitions because I see them as an actor or agent in themselves, not as intermediaries for theological propositions.
My personal experience of Roman Catholicism, the religion I was raised in, was very different in that I’ve always been more interested in the intellectual dimension than this social, therapeutic or collective dimension. I’ve always loved theology and I still enjoy it, while reading it is often very much like reading science fiction in a way—I can’t relate to the specific experience of God but I am fascinated that people have this experience in some way. In a stranger way, I think I finally abandoned the church, Christianity and the religions (like Whitehead says, abandoned, not necessarily refuted) not because I couldn’t get around the theology, but because I no longer felt any kind of presence of God. Or, to say it another way, I might still feel that “religious” or “spiritual” feeling, but it no longer had God as its object or referent. The opening chapter of Freud’s Civilization and Its Discontents is very instructive for me: Freud doesn’t deny that his friend has this experience at all, the “oceanic” feeling. He merely gives a different account of its genesis than his friend might. That is now my kind of tentative attitude toward the religions: in the Latourian sense they have survived many trials of strength because they obviously give people something, or mediate something, whether good or bad. It’s precisely because the religions are so powerful a reality that they have to be taken absolutely seriously. As you have said, there are many political and social implications of the religions, especially in the US, and many of the implications or effects are simply bad and should be resisted, absolutely. But in this fight you will still find many Christians, Jews, Muslims, Hindus, etc, on your side. This is just my perspective, not meant to be prescriptive, but living in Mississippi for a few years and having a family that is rather explicitly religious, I used to expend so much energy on theological disputes. But it was ultimately parasitical, at least for me. So instead of arguing about the absurdity or incoherence of their beliefs, I felt that I would instead talk about the positivity, the affirmation, that is philosophy and the sciences and the arts, etc. This was a much better offensive strategy (as opposed to defensive), to at least show that religion and nihilism are not the only two options.
Apologies for writing so much, I haven’t thought about this in some time and both yours and Tim’s dialogue about entropy has been very fascinating.
March 22, 2012 at 7:06 am
“I suppose that is why I am less bothered by weird beliefs or superstitions because I see them as an actor or agent in themselves, not as intermediaries for theological propositions.”
Rereading what I wrote above, I have to qualify this: some beliefs or superstitions are fairly innocuous or even good, but since they are agents themselves, the more dangerous ones are reasons for fighting against them. I suppose it is because they are not merely vehicles for some content that they have to be taken seriously.
March 22, 2012 at 7:18 am
Just one other thing: I agree with your reading of Žižek and his interpretation of Christianity. My hesitation, though, is that I think at some point Žižek says something like, it is only through the religious experience of Christianity that one comes to its perverse core or something similar. Radical atheism is certainly the end of this journey, though he seems to hold at times to this idea that Christianity is the only way to get there. It’s been awhile since I read him on this, though, so I could be completely wrong.
March 22, 2012 at 8:10 am
As, first and foremost, an academic engaged in religious studies, the question initially seemed too big, a dozen or more responses rose unbidden to mind, and quickly started jostling for space and a voice. One could easily begin with the notion that, yes, religion is a reification (“go on, point to the religion: is it the book, the ritual, the building, the mantra?” You can’t do it), or rattle through the many typologies and sets of religious definitions (from social scientific, functionalist ones to the more substantive ones, deploying ideas such as belief in a supernatural power, ultimate concern etc.). Religious studies scholars are just as good as any academics at deconstructing their own discipline and subject, the most common first year undergraduate activity being: “so, you think you know what religion is? Don’t be so sure” But then I calmed down, isn’t this simply best answered with a Latourian point from Irreductions: with suitable effort, yes, anything can be translated into anything else. While one might have some interesting results and successes translating religion into literature, economics, politics, neuroscience etc., I also know from many years of practice that I can run the translation process the other way, studying such things and many others as religion or religious. Similarly, I can also, and now prefer, to ontologically think of religions as objects (or hyperobjects), massive assemblages of actors and materialities in the ecological democracy of things (this seems just as easy as thinking of corporations and cities in this manner).
I appreciate that the ‘religious turn’ in contemporary philosophy and theory raises some different questions. Indeed, I find it odd, interesting and irritating in equal measure, by reason of my own methodological and teaching biases. But the Latourian point seems a fairly robust one to a couple of your queries.
March 22, 2012 at 9:01 am
In short, Zizek’s project is thoroughly atheistic (and I mean that in a quite literal sense).
Nonsense! Zizek’s project is thoroughly theological disguised as atheistic/Marxistic. He wants to restore the burning Wagnerian flame of Mitteleuropean supremacy. He reads Lacan’s Phallus as the Divine and speaks about Jesus wielding a sword, introducing divisions.
Why not instead envision community, collectivity, and action that arises from people themselves?
Yes, that’s the question: WHY? why do people LIKE authority? – that you haven’t answered at all, so you gotta do some more of that Texan head banging against the table I’m afraid.
March 22, 2012 at 9:07 am
Levi,
Have you read Foucault’s “The Hermeneutics of the Subject”? In the first two lectures, he develops a concept of spirituality that I think shares some affinities with your work. He views spirituality as the set of practices one has to undergo to be capable of having knowledge. In this way, one’s way of being conditions what type of knowledge is possible for that being. While he formulates this in subject-terms, I think this meshes very well with a lot of OOO given that it is attuned to ontological conditions of possibility for knowing. It also shows that knowledge is more than a question of epistemology, as the science of knowing, and points towards another facet: caring, or pedagogy (my term here, not his) as caring about knowing. That caring is practice, and thus doing is an integral part of knowing here, seems to mesh will with your concept of objects as acts.
While I think this formulation is valuable in and of itself, it’s possible that thinking in terms of spirituality is problematic. However, I don’t think that a concept should be rejected because it has been associated with religion in the past (and given the beginning of this post, I don’t think you do either). Perhaps there is another word that could be used instead, but I think there is also a very non-religious dimension to spirituality, seen this way.
Foucault also writes a little bit about this on p. 27, in a way that I think complicates a bit the quick association of spirituality as intrinsically religious:
“I think we should be clear in our minds about the major conflict running through Christianity from the end of the fifth century—St. Augustine obviously—up to the seventeenth century. During these twelve centuries the conflict was not between spirituality and science, but between spirituality and theology. The best proof that it was not between spirituality and science is the blossoming of practices of spiritual knowledge, the development of esoteric knowledge, the whole idea—and it would be interesting to reinterpret the theme of Faust along these lines—that there cannot be knowledge without a profound modification in the subject’s being. That alchemy, for example, and a whole stratum of knowledge, was at this time thought to be obtainable only at the cost of a modification in the subject’s being clearly proves that there was no constitutive or structural opposition between science and spirituality. The opposition was between theological thought and the requirement of spirituality thus the disengagement did not take place abruptly with the appearance of modern science. The disengagement, the separation, was a slow process whose origin and development should be located, rather, in theology.”
Best,
Thomas
March 22, 2012 at 9:09 am
Forgot to include this in the last post – I agree that attempting to associate with religion for strategic reasons seems problematic at best. I’m just not sure if dis-associating with concepts also present in religion for strategic reasons is also a good idea.
March 22, 2012 at 11:42 am
I appreciate your culmination of authority in this post. That is what I am currently working with as a religious leader within my religious community. I do so with a tentative eye on Zizek. I agree that many Christian intellectuals are happy to appropriate him up to a point and whether or not one is actually doing so is questionable. In any event I have just returned to reading your blog after a couple of years and appreciate the recent flurry of posts. With respect to transcendence I was greatly impressed with Daniel Barber’s recent work and I am still trying to process that. But yes in the end I have to say that I believe in a God who may or may not hear my prayers.
March 22, 2012 at 12:11 pm
No time to fully address your comments, but seriously, this parenthetical statement:
“And if this is what you believe, why call this religion at all (as religion necessarily involves the supernatural)”
…is just plain false, or confused, or does the lazy job of equating pre-twentieth century Christian theology with ‘religion’. A large number of Buddhist schools, some versions of Taoism, a good number of other Dharmic paths (including many in Hinduism) not to mention a significant number of obscure Christian sects and not-so-obscure Islamic sects (particularly Sufi) have no essential requirement on anything “supernatural”. Similarly, the idea that contemporary Unitarians – or for that matter Discordians – are dependent on the supernatural is just misrepresentative.
The claim that “religion = supernatural” is one accidentally offered by positivists who haven’t studied religion or pedaled by “New Atheists” who selectively studied religion solely to mount a form of scholarly bigotry. From what I’ve read of you, I think and hope that you are of the former kind,.
I know living in the US does tend to make all issues of religion pivot around a particularly antiquated form of Christian theology, but an intellectual of your stature can do better than this. If you want to get up to speed on religion, at least read some kind of broadstrokes introduction such as that offered by Ninian Smart or even Joseph Campbell, and if you want to know where contemporary Christian thought is situated I can recommend Charles Taylor’s “A Secular Age” (although its stupidly long!), which looks at the effects that disenchantment has had on Western faiths. Whatever you do, don’t use Fox News as an authority on contemporary religious thought! :)
The hallmark of most religions is a confluence between specific stances in metaphysics, ethics and certain mythic narratives. But supernatural elements, while historically common, have never been essential to this space and some traditions – Hinduism in particular – have not needed to even *ask* if their mythology was historical. Christianity, alas, has made it so very difficult for people in the West to fully appreciate religion.
Best wishes!
March 22, 2012 at 12:22 pm
Chris,
Fair enough, though I do find myself wondering if we call Buddhism a religion by analogy only. I think of it more as a sort of practice and have no truck with it in these remarks. I guess this is the problem with the word “religion”: as Paul Reid-Bowen suggests, none of us are quite sure what the term means or what it applies to. I don’t think talking about religion in terms of the supernatural is nearly as antiquated as you suggest. There are millions of people throughout the world that see their religion as necessarily being about the supernatural. I don’t think there’s any getting around that. On the other hand, I think Joseph makes some really good points that there are probably many in the pews that don’t take those things very seriously at all.
March 22, 2012 at 12:28 pm
The problem is without “religious” experience, we don’t know how to convince people for a common purpose. Let’ say ‘curiosity’, but that’s overly intellectual – I can think of no motivation but my own interests. But even in this case, what is really “me”? Why not my liver, stomach, kidneys but interests of a stupid fictional self?
If you take out the transcendental, what does remain to keep us or me together in 1 body? How can I continue my daily activities without putting an unknown X parameter to my equations: X can belong to past and future, but more importantly it persists an immanent existence. If you take out that, I really don’t know what I should survive for. May be consciousness is a too much of a thing to carry on our shoulders!
March 22, 2012 at 1:17 pm
1st even among buddhists the naturalists are a distinct minority.
2nd I think it is possible to work with people within their own orientations/vocabularies without being deeply cynical, I see this as a therapeutic approach (not unlike Wittgenstein) and a pragmatic one, I’m more interested in what people do than how they justify it (to the degree that these are separable) and increasingly aware of the limits of argument/debate in making differences that make a difference.
that said if people just mean something like bildung and not some variety of telos/Mind/spirit I wish they would drop ‘spiritual’ as it just confuses matters.
March 22, 2012 at 1:36 pm
Togliatti,
I hope you don’t really believe these things. Why not take Hume’s model of human nature instead? For Hume, humans are defined at the most fundamental level by sympathy towards others, not self-interest. This makes sense empirically in terms of what we actually observe, from an evolutionary perspective in terms of our closest primate relatives (bonobos and chimps), and psychogenetically in terms of how persons develop in a social world from infancy on. For Hume the problem isn’t “how can we overcome individualist self-interest so as to enter into cooperative relations?”, but rather “how can we break with the partiality of sympathies (tribalism/kinship relations) to form sympathies outside our immediate network of fellows?” Many religions here would be a part of the problem because they often reinforce tribalistic, exclusionary relations rather than opening on to broader communities. Taking another tack, there’s also Spinoza: “Nothing is more useful to man than man” (Ethics, Part IV). My fellows are my self-interest. The are part of my happiness, help me in my work, part of my safety, they are my prosperity in the world, etc.
At any rate, it strikes me as strange to suggest that religion is the only thing that can draw people together in a common project. I also find the idea of a “common body” a bit horrifying (so many ugly historical resonances with these desires vis a vis nationalism and religion). People are drawn together by problems. Problems can come from all sorts of places. Moreover, we see people drawn together all the time by politics, collaborative work, conversation, love, celebration, building, etc.
March 22, 2012 at 1:46 pm
dmf,
I’m generally sympathetic to your call to work with people within their own orientations/vocabularies. Throughout my personal life it’s seemed as if many of my primary interlocutors are deeply religious Christians. I’m not quite sure what to make of this and what it says about me that I always seem to have these types of friendships. My worry, however, is that orientations/vocabularies (call them “operating metaphysics”) aren’t just vocabularies. They make real differences in praxis or how one engages in the world.
March 22, 2012 at 2:05 pm
@LS #10
Certainly there is a current among some (the naturalsits in dmf #12?) western Buddhists to secularize Buddhism. What this frequently seems to mean is to rid it of its religious ie superstitous, unrational etc beliefs, which freqently means in a nutshell ridding it of the ideas of karma and rebirth
I find this approach confusing. Extracting various Buddhist practices for use in a secular contex can I think, help a lot of people with various challenges, and help them to improve their lives.
But I think several central Buddhist conepts become problematic without karma and rebirth. I think the remainder (while useful) can not accurately be described as Buddhism.
So if I am right, and thes ideas are part of the definition of Buddhism, then I think we must regard Buddhism as a religion.
March 22, 2012 at 2:08 pm
Levi, they certainly can and do have an effect but I don’t think they are (or really can be) literally operating metaphysics, as you have often pointed out religions (and really all orientations/doings) are more about what we do (in total, with a degree of improvisation, and largely un-consciously/non-conceptually) than any attempts to systematize/schematize what we do, and why I have argued that there are no necessary relations between ontology and ethics/politics, we need to give cognitive-behavioral psychologies the boot, no?
I think that our best bet is not to try and convert each other but to make the best (most rigorous/tested/fruitful) possible versions of our works (and to help each other along these lines) so that the number of quality live options is at a premium.
who knows what the coming circumstances will make possible and what alliances may serve?
March 22, 2012 at 2:14 pm
I think Deleuze provides a thought-provoking ‘answer’ to some of your questions, in his Cours Vincennes (25/11/1980). I think it deserves a lengthy quote:
“Why is philosophy so compromised with God? And right up to the revolutionary coup of the 18th century philosophers. Is it a dishonest compromise [compromission] or something a little purer? We could say that thought, until the end of the 17th century, must take considerable account of the demands of the Church, thus it’s clearly forced to take many religious themes into account. But one feels quite strongly that this is much too easy; we could just as well say that, until this era, thought’s lot is somewhat linked to that of a religious feeling.
I’m going back to an analogy with painting because it’s true that painting is full of images of God. My question is: is it sufficient to say that this is an inevitable constraint in this era? There are two possible answers. The first is yes, this is an inevitable constraint of the era which refers to the conditions of art in this era. Or to say, a bit more positively, that it’s because there’s a religious feeling from which the painter, and even more painting, do not escape. The philosopher and philosophy don’t escape either. Is this sufficient? Could we not make up another hypothesis, namely that painting in this era has so much need of God that the divine, far from being a constraint for the painter, is the site of his maximum emancipation. In other words, with God, he can do anything whatsoever, he can do what he couldn’t do with humans, with creatures. So much so that God is directly invested by painting, by a kind of flow of painting, and at this level painting will find a kind of freedom for itself that it would never have found otherwise.(…)
It’s true that there are constraints from the Church which operate on the painter, but there is a transformation of constraints into means of creation. They make use of God in order to achieve a liberation of forms, to push the forms to the point where the forms have nothing to do with an illustration. The forms are unleashed [se déchaînent]. They embark upon a kind of Sabbath, a very pure dance, the lines and colors lose all necessity to be verisimilar [vraisemblables], to be exact, to resemble something. It’s the great enfranchisement of lines and colors which is done thanks to this outward show [apparence]: the subordination of painting to the demands of Christianity.
Another example…a creation of the world… The Old Testament sets up for them a kind of liberation of movements, a liberation of forms, lines and colors. So much so that, in a sense, atheism has never been external to religion: atheism is the artistic power [puissance] at work on [travaille] religion. With God, everything is permitted. I have the distinct feeling that for philosophy it’s been exactly the same thing, and if philosophers have spoken to us so much of God?and they could well be Christians or believers?this hasn’t been lacking an intense sense of jest [rigolade]. It wasn’t an incredulous jesting, but a joy arising from the labor they were involved in.
Just as I said that God and Christ offered an extraordinary opportunity for painting to free lines, colors and movements from the constraints of resemblance, so God and the theme of God offered the irreplacable opportunity for philosophy to free the object of creation in philosophy?that is to say concepts?from the constraints that had been imposed on them…the simple representation of things.
The concept is freed at the level of God because it no longer has the task of representing something; at that moment it becomes the sign of a presence. To speak by analogy, it takes on lines, colors, movements that it would never have had without this detour through God.”
Latour argues has formulated a similar argument in his recent work (On the Modern Cult of the Factish Gods and his chapter in The Speculative Turn).
March 22, 2012 at 2:28 pm
niels,
I think the God of philosophers and theologians is something quite different than the God of popular religion. There’s always something a bit devious in the work of philosophers and theologians when discussing God. They turn everything upside down and inside out. I teach a lot of theology in my classes and have noticed over the years that my students are far more troubled by the theologies of Descartes or Thomas than the atheisms of Lucretius and Dennett (and remember I’m in an extremely religious part of the country). Why is this? These theologies are more corrosive to their religious beliefs than anything the atheists write. They can just take up a position of opposition with respect to the atheists, but with the theologians… Now there’s a challenge! Now suddenly their Biblically and Church inspired beliefs are challenged by a rational analysis of the essence of God and what would have to follow from this essence. Part of my point here is that we should take great care, I think, not to confuse academic discourses about God with religion. When discussing religion I think we should discuss what the people believe and do, not how the theologians and philosophers rationalize this.
March 22, 2012 at 2:57 pm
I also find the idea of a “common body” a bit horrifying (so many ugly historical resonances with these desires vis a vis nationalism and religion)
Dr Sinthome I would argue that it is precisely the idea of a common body that PREVENTS nationalism from destroying the world. It is not GODDAMN HYPOCRITICAL GLOBALISM that is preventing nationalism. Globalism is in fact the new nationalism. According to the Orthodox church at least, the ground can never and in no capacity be your home, because your home is the Kingdom of Christ and the brotherhood of ALL men (underlined – not ”groups of men”, but ALL men). As a Serb, you are only allowed into that many countries. As an Orthodox, you are welcome anywhere.
You’ve had a little bit too much Friskas with Texan beef jerky! A cup of catmint tea can do wonders for the nerves.
But I think your message is ultimately good, because the religion you describe, which is not all religion, but nevertheless a massive amount of religion, is indeed as Marx said an ”opium for the masses” because it promises deliverance in another life and in this way a good excuse not to deal with THIS LIFE for many people, which also includes the labor and the materiality of that life. It is in a way like a nationwide confession ritual, which as psychoanalysts know REMOVES the symptom, instead of seeing it as the code of the desire.
March 22, 2012 at 3:01 pm
ANd if you’re going to sit there with a straight face and lecture us on microfascism and submission to authority while RADICALLY UNABLE to give up on your status of Zizek’s fanboy, cumming up with all these stupid ”apologies” on his behalf, even after he practically endorsed a racist expulsion of Gypsies from Slovenia last year, you really deserve THE CANE.
March 22, 2012 at 4:02 pm
Dejan,
I wasn’t aware I was defending Zizek. All I was saying is that I’m perplexed by Christians that have jumped on his work about Paul and that I don’t think he’s up to what they seem to say he’s up to.
March 22, 2012 at 4:55 pm
Levi: well the odd thing is that the people who “believe in the supernatural”, as you put it, don’t necessarily see their beliefs as qualifying as “supernatural”. ;) But I take your point, nonetheless. Oh, and excluding Buddhism from this entirely would be premature – Mahayana Buddhism is wildly “supernatural” in your terms! :)
All the best!
March 22, 2012 at 4:59 pm
by and large the christians don’t get Zizek (Caputo does and so rejects him)
but than most atheist/communist/anarchist/OWS types don’t really get him either, he has a certain cultural cache (which I think confuses&bemuses him) that folks like to make use of, be identified with.
I’m not sure that our current state of higher ed. really allows for close readings of texts anymore which is a shame, some ideas take time and space to develop.
I think this is part of the problem with the confusion over the relationship between the history of ideas (philo as a subject) and thinking (philo as a project) as we have so few examples of ,and little chance of practicing, thinking something thru in depth and detail and too many chances to practice cutting and pasting.
March 22, 2012 at 5:18 pm
and that I don’t think he’s up to what they seem to say he’s up to.
How do you know what Zizek is up to, do you have a special telepathic bond with Him? Anyho what you write is a falsity. I read his Puppet and the Dwarf and you could clearly see that he sympathizes with the Platonic nature of (Western) Christianity, as well as admiring its militancy, showing via ”double negation” and ”post-modern irony” that it is inevitably a SUPERIOR road compared to the other religions.
Of course not one word about Orthodoxy, excluding in his usual slovenly Eurofascist manner the whole Eastern hemisphere and his direct neighbor Serbia from all discussion, the same way Angela Merkel erases Greece from the EU map.How you can even consider that RACIST OLD WHORE seriously is beyond me!
March 22, 2012 at 5:26 pm
Well Dejan, I think I have a good sense of what he’s up to by reading his texts. I outline the points where I think most mainstream Christians would strongly disagree with him in the post.
March 22, 2012 at 5:36 pm
The point is you talk as if the ”belief in the supernatural” is the important libidinal focus of this discussion, failing to see into the fairly obvious LABOR of Zizek’s rhetoric that is manically invested in defending Hegel’s Spirit over dead Matter, and how the fight between good and evil in Christianity that is to say Christianity’s COMBATIVE nature is the reason that Europa prevailed over the bottom religions, such as Buddhism, where people let cows walk in the streets, while in Ljubljana streets are as clean as in Austro-Hungaria. Although it is never mentioned explicitly, it is certainly implied that Serbia’s is another such BOTTOM RELIGION, unable to realize the Triumph of the Will that is Hegel’s active Spirit transforming Matter.
March 22, 2012 at 5:39 pm
When he then starts talking about Marxism and the like, he sounds just like Leni Riefenstahl saying ”I was not aware of Hitler’s activities around me. I had this enormous desire for innovation and progress.”
March 22, 2012 at 6:15 pm
I’m fully with dmf on this one where he writes:
“I think that our best bet is not to try and convert each other but to make the best (most rigorous/tested/fruitful) possible versions of our works (and to help each other along these lines) so that the number of quality live options is at a premium.
who knows what the coming circumstances will make possible and what alliances may serve?”
I think we all have our test cases that really try our nerves (I know I have mine). Ultimately, though, if we can ally with religiously-minded people towards worth-while causes then we are all the better off for it. I was a big fan of your notion of “strategic vitalism” you proposed some while back, Levi. In that same vein I can think of plenty of instances where religious/sacred impulses due plenty of good.
Ecuador’s constitutional protection of nature or the current indigenous movement in Oklahoma to stop a new oil pipeline from being built come to mind. Both of these movements are inspired by what we could only call animism or vitalism and in this case those belief systems are proving very potent in furthering ecological issues. This is a far cry from the type of religiosity you are interrogating above, Levi, but it just goes to show that, as you have recently commented, all ideas are geographically (i.e., ecologically) situated and so the ecology of ideas that does good in one place and time will be different than those in another.
All of this is to say that you may be asking your local community the right questions but they may not be the right questions for all communities everywhere. I don’t think you implied universality in your post, but this is what it stirred up for me.
March 22, 2012 at 6:26 pm
Adam,
I think on the balance sheets of history it has done far more harm than good.
March 22, 2012 at 6:52 pm
Is it not forced/militarized conversion that’s the issue, rather than religion per se? Neoliberalism isn’t a religion but it seems to be doing just as fine a job at colonizing/exploiting the world as Christianity ever did. In what sense then can we say that it is religion as such that leads to such atrocities, when the atrocities themselves seem to be able to shift context regardless of belief system? The twentieth century has enough well-known examples to demonstrate that secularity is prone to the same kind of oppressive behavior as religion. Christianity seems to have been the primary vehicle of domination throughout western history, but I wonder if we are not looking for something more elusive when we are trying to deconstruct this kind of power. Sure, there are still religious motivations behind US foreign policy, but I don’t think that international corporations like Shell are religiously motivated to exploit the people of Ecuador. In this case a sacred relationship to land becomes a point of spiritually motivated resistance. And its a point of resistance that we need right now. My point is not to come down for religion and against secularity, but to try and get a high-definition read on exploitative practices that don’t necessarily stop or start in conjunction with a metaphysical point of view.
March 22, 2012 at 7:04 pm
Adam,
Your argument is like saying “why you are blaming cigarettes for cancer, don’t you know the sun can cause it too?” the point is that it doesn’t help. And while I realize it’s a popular argument, it’s simply not true that it’s simply “a shell expressing other things.” people can, do, and have engaged in all sorts of violence and cruelty for purely religious reasons. A parent doesn’t kick his son out of the house for being gay because of neoliberalism.
March 22, 2012 at 7:11 pm
However, we’re getting off topic here. The question was whether leftist Christians really believe these things, not whether people should form alliances (which obviously they should…it’s a bit offensive that you’re even making this point given what it implies you think is being said).
March 22, 2012 at 7:12 pm
And one further point, no, it’s not just forced conversion that’s at issue. Have you been following American politics and the role religion is playing in that politics?
March 22, 2012 at 7:15 pm
In a political context like the US, I can think of few things more misguided than being a religious apologist as you’re doing here. Alliances sure, but actual apologetics that muddy the issue? No way.
March 22, 2012 at 8:36 pm
Levi,
just a quick follow up: I should have been more clear in my previous post, because what I meant to illustrate with this quote was that people (common people, populus, vulgus, whatever) just like the artist and the philosopher find a lot of freedom and value in their relationship to God. It allows them to think, feel, and imagine things that they otherwise couldn’t have; the “detour through God” allows for a line of flight that isn’t limited to science and common knowledge.
As Latour would have it, religion is a specific mode of existence that enables people to connect with a part of a plural reality not made available through other modes and – this is his main point, I believe – we should never try to justify or contest this mode in the language of other modes because it is irreducible to them. So in order to speak about religion, we should learn how to ‘speak religiously’, otherwise you can do it no justice.
I am still wrapping my head around his take on religion, but I really feel Latour is on to something here. It indeed seems misguided and arrogant to speak to people about (their) religion in terms of politics or science, like these modes of existence could somehow replace what people feel when they act religiously or persuade them to ‘change their ways’ based on ‘rational’ arguments. To do so would be to speak in the wrong key, a sort of category error.
(I know this is besides your main point, but I just wanted to make myself clear)
March 22, 2012 at 8:42 pm
My point is that we have to be more rigorous about how we understand oppression (gay people have been oppressed for non-religious reasons too). You’re too easily offended in these discussions for points to be heard and your presumptions about what you’re commentators mean gets the best of you sometimes, Levi. I’ll leave it at that.
March 22, 2012 at 10:53 pm
Adam,
And my point is that your making a fallacious argument when you say this. The fact that, for example, gay people are also oppressed for other reasons in know way changes the fact that there are signifying elements within many variants of modern Christianity that uniquely contribute to the oppression of GLBT people. Go to many church websites and you’ll find it stated right their on their website. What you in effect said in your previous post is that religion can never fail (it can’t do and believe things that wrong) it can only he failed. Yet this is also saying that the doctrines don’t matter, that they have no effects; in which case we should wonder why we should say there’s religion at all (the impaction of your remark about shifting contexts, as if doctrine and text don’t matter). These are extremely common diversionary ploys in critical discussions about religion. And no, I am not suggesting that religion is the only problem in the world as you seem to suggest in your remarks about the motives of Shell Oil. It’s possible to simultaneously believe that, say Catholic doctrine generates problems that are religiously motivated and that the dynamic of capitalism generate problems that are economically motivated. The fact that there are the latter does not negate the former or entail that we shouldn’t also seem to discuss the former (which is what you seem to imply and which is a tactic I think is diversionary).
March 23, 2012 at 3:23 am
Adam, leave my favorite cat alone! Whether his argument is valid or not, he’s putting up a ferocious intellectual and if you want ethical fight against these redneck ”believers” who don’t even respect the basic law of any Christianity which is forgiveness and tolerance!
March 23, 2012 at 4:34 am
Levi,
Instead of tying religion to belief/s in the supernatural, what about understanding religion as primarily rooted in non-ordinary realities and/or forms of experience? This is what Robert Bellah does in his most recent book “Religion in Human Evolution” (2011), drawing on Alfred Schutz’s notion of “multiple realities.” There is the world/reality of daily life, which is the world of working, of rational response to anxiety and need–but this is not the only reality humans inhabit. Indeed, no one can live in that world all the time, and as Bellah points out, some can’t live in it at all: we see them wandering city streets, homeless. Religious realities are not the only non-ordinary realities: football is a good example of how ordinary space and time can be transcended for the sake of a game. Then there are the realities of TV, movies, plays, music, daydreams…
Bellah writes: “the notion that the world of daily life is uniquely real is itself a fiction that is maintained only with effort. The world of daily life, like all the other multiple realities, is socially constructed. Each culture, each era, constructs its own world of daily life, never identical with any other. Even the meaning of ‘standard’ time and space differs subtly between cultures, and fundamental conceptions of person, family, and nation are all culturally variable. By this I do not mean that the world of daily life even in its cultural variability is not real–it is real enough. But it lacks the unique ontological reality, the claim to be perfectly natural, that it seeks to secure when it puts in brackets the doubt that it could be other. It is one of the functions of other realities to remind us that the bracketing is finally insecure and unwarranted. Occasionally a work of art will break its bounds, will deeply unsettle us, will even issue us the command ‘Change your life’–that is, it will claim not a subordinate reality but a higher reality than the world of daily life” (p. 4).
Bellah goes on to suggest that science and religion in their own ways can issue such commands, as well. Religious realities in particular he connects to the feeling of an infinite Whole generated by a participatory relation (rather than manipulative, as in the world of daily life) to the Cosmos.
Of course, all these realities overlap and cut across one another at various points. This generates symbolism, the capacity for ordinary things to point beyond themselves, to remind us of other forms of consciousness, other realities.
Bellah ends up rooting religion in play and ritual. He argues that play has no biological significance, though it can of course be understood as adaptive in any number of ways. It primary significance, though, is that play is an end in itself, rather than a means to something else.
Bellah rejects the notion that religion can be understood primarily in terms of propositions and beliefs, which seems to be what you want to do. Instead, he connects it experience, expression, and again, to the way symbolism, once expressed, can feedback upon experience to reshape it.
I’ll probably post a response soon in regard to your questions of religious apologists. I just wanted to suggest there are other ways of approaching the study of religion.
March 23, 2012 at 5:39 am
The interlocutors above speak as though Christianity has NOTHING TO DO WITH NEOLIBERALISM. What profound misreading of reality. You needn’t look any further than Madonna, who is the Pope’s best friend. The ”soft fascism” that neoliberalism exercises via political correctness is directly enabled by Christian (Catholic-Protestant) moralizing, being as it is merely an abreaction to Old Testamental ethics instead of a credible ethics on its own, and the two systems feed off each other ideally in this climate. The Empire forced globalism on the world out of a clearly Puritan conviction that it is its duty and responsibility to educate the slaves, which has always been an excuse for exploitation. And Christianity’s so-called ”revolt” against the decaying of morality and the decline of symbolic efficacy in globalism, is in fact an extension of this Puritanism. Capitalism and Christianity work together – they always have. It’s a horrible bipolar system that breeds guilt. fear, and paranoia, which in turn breeds narcissism, which makes the Western Christian believe that he has the legitimacy to chastise others.
March 23, 2012 at 6:53 am
Just a small point, but I like Dejan’s (parody center) comments at #26. I agree that Hegel is doing a lot of work in Žižek’s conception of Christianity. Dejan’s comments reminded me of a very interesting book I read years ago in the seminary without really thinking much about at the time, The Incarnation of God: An Introduction to Hegel’s Theological Thought As Prolegomena to a Future Christology by Hans Küng. Near the end of the book he shows how much contemporary christology has been profoundly influenced by Hegel. It occurred to me that Žižek is really following a trend that has been going on for some time even in orthodox theologies.
March 23, 2012 at 7:04 am
I also like Dejan’s idea of Christianity as religion-at-war at its heart, pitting the spirit against the body where, in a grotesque form of Graham’s taxonomic fallacy, this always seems to translate into war against very specific entities—i.e., other religions/societies, peoples and animals that seem to embody the flesh more than others.
March 23, 2012 at 12:22 pm
Hi Matt,
What you describe here is more or less what I’m railing against in this post. I think things like this just muddy the waters. There are millions of believers out there that see the supernatural– whether in the moderate form of just positing and transcendent God or the strong form of demons, possessions, miracles, etc –as absolutely crucial and central to religion. Descriptions such as this, I think, are just attempts to sanitize religion. That is, I think the intellectual that is religiously inclined sets about cleaning up religion in theorizing it because they are embarrassed by this extremely common supernatural element. In my view, though, when analyzing a phenomenon we go with those beliefs that are statistically dominant in a population, not with rationalizations we’d like to be true. Moreover, if it is true that religion is just about “non-ordinary experiences”, then why call it religious at all? Certainly we all have non-ordinary experiences yet many of us feel no need to describe these things as religious.
March 23, 2012 at 12:59 pm
Adam,
Just one more thing. Given your views on how certain ugly things remain invariant despite shifting contexts and systems of belief (thereby indicating that you don’t think belief is important), I’m interested in hearing how you would analyze Catholic positions on condoms in the AIDS missionary work in Africa. Do you see these positions as being motivated by neoliberalism? What about the recent debate about birth control and transvaginal ultra-sounds in the United States? Do you see these positions as being in the best interests of conservative politicians from the standpoint of neo-liberal economic calculus? What is it that you think motivates these things?
March 23, 2012 at 1:00 pm
@Joseph C Goodson: …the religions are a vast network of heterogeneous elements and practices of which belief is only a part. My sense is that many Christians, Protestant, Catholic and Orthodox alike, attend church for these other elements and are not primarily motivated by intellectual considerations.
Yes. Last Fall I attended Sunday services at a local church and was deeply impressed with what happened over the space of two hours or so. What happened, on the ground, as it were, is all but untouched by rational argumention. If you take that away from the congregation because it entails some irrational beliefs, you will be harming those people in a way that makes it more difficult for them to live their daily lives.
Nor is it obvious to me that we can understand that by “translating” it into the languages of economics, sociology, political science, psychology, and neuroscience, at least not as those disciplines are currently constituted. It seems to me that such understanding is properly regarded as being reductive.
@Paul Reid-Bowen: Similarly, I can also, and now prefer, to ontologically think of religions as objects (or hyperobjects), massive assemblages of actors and materialities in the ecological democracy of things (this seems just as easy as thinking of corporations and cities in this manner).
Yes, assemblages, often quite large and complex.
Over the years I’ve given quite a bit of thought to certain high-pitched twittering sounds that emerged from a music rehearsal some years ago. Those sounds were, in my experience, rare and the music we were making at that time was quite special. If you consider just those sounds as you could record them well, then, they’re just sounds. But if you consider the assemblage required to produce them, perhaps they’re spirits.
March 23, 2012 at 1:21 pm
Bill,
I believe this takes a rather dim view of people:
It seems to suggest that they’re so fragile and intellectually bereft that they can’t find value and meaning in life without this. As a Stoic-Epicurean I find plenty of meaning and value in life that helps me live daily life. Why wouldn’t this be open to others? We give up beliefs all the time and find other means to do the work those abandoned beliefs did.
This, however, I agree with:
If religious communities are hyperobjects, then they are operationally closed. (I recently wrote about this basic framework here.) This entails that they will be their own autonomous domain, organized according to their own principles, organized around their own principles. This is the problem with the base/superstructure argument Adam seems to be advancing. He would like to explain religion in terms of an economic base, as a superstructural foam arising out of that base, such that it is the economic base that really accounts for certain things like colonial violence. But with an OOO framework that just can’t be the case because every entity is its own self-enclosed sphere. Sure, economics can perturb hyperobjects like religion, but these perturbations will always be converted into religious terms.
March 23, 2012 at 1:30 pm
Bill,
I guess I just wonder why religious claims should be treated any differently than we treat claims in philosophy. Here we discuss all sorts of ideas back and forth and don’t think twice about the possibility of persuading each other (thereby “taking away” beliefs they previously held). We don’t see this as a harm done to them. Why should it be any different with religion? Why should religion be special in this regard? (And here I think that part of loving your neighbor consists of giving reasons; saying “x is true because my faith says so!” is a way of abusing your neighbor). Further, I think irrationality makes a real difference in the world. If we allow the irrational and arguments made purely based on authority/faith, we’re ripping apart the social fabric because we destroy the means of arriving at consensus. This is why, following the Reformation, Europe was wracked with religious wars: there were no reliable means for adjudicating between various interpretations of scripture. All that’s left in such cases is violent resolution.
March 23, 2012 at 2:20 pm
It seems to suggest that they’re so fragile and intellectually bereft that they can’t find value and meaning in life without this.
No, it suggest they grew up in a certain world and learned certain behaviors. And those behaviors include attending a certain kind of church service.
As a Stoic-Epicurean I find plenty of meaning and value in life that helps me live daily life. Why wouldn’t this be open to others?
It is, no?
March 23, 2012 at 2:38 pm
Bill,
But why should growing up in a certain world and possessing certain learned behaviors be a criteria for continuing those behaviors? That’s the informal fallacy known as argument from tradition. By this logic, if someone grew up in a racist world characterized by racist behaviors it would be illicit to suggest alternatives to that. Moreover, learning doesn’t cease with childhood. Development occurs throughout the entirety of life. Why should religion be exempted from this? This gets to a broader issue in which religion, as a result of how the post-Reformation concept of faith developed, is treated as a private sanctuary that is off-limits. On the one hand, we get arguments such as yours where it is suggested that the religious are such delicate flowers that something horrible is being done by challenging their beliefs. On the other hand, we’re told that it’s rude to ask for strong reasons for claims because religion is a private matter or a matter of faith and therefore off-limits. But there’s nothing private or personal about religion. Religion is a socio-political phenomenon that directly impacts people outside the religion in a myriad of ways. And like any other public phenomenon, the religious should therefore be required to give reasons for their claims that could be shared by anyone regardless of religious background (or lack thereof), cultural background, etc., etc.
March 23, 2012 at 3:37 pm
I agree that Hegel is doing a lot of work in Žižek’s conception of Christianity.
Thanks Joseph; that is completely equal to Zizek being a believer in Christianity, regardless of whether or not he uses the word ”supernatural”. In any case Hegel’s Spirit is by default super-natural, since it comes from above, from the Heavens, innit?
But something else is more important for me. Much of Christian belief I see around me nowadays is motivated by guilt, fear, abjection, repulsion. Either people are clinging to God because the world around them is becoming increasingly like the last days of the Roman Empire, so they find solace in displacement or denial, or because they think if they mend their ways they will earn a ticket to Heaven. None of that I see as a good reason to believe. Christianity itself says that you’re only a true believer out of love. WHERE IS THE LOVE, then, as the Black Eyed Peas used to sing.
As for the Narcissistic Cat, his beef with supernatural comes from the fact that faith is dr. SInthome’s SINTHOME. The cat is deeply ambivalent about faith, which you can see by the scars on his forehead – he’s been banging his head against the table for weeks on end, over this issue. If the cat knew for sure that he’s an atheist, why would he INSIST on proving it to the Christians?
Ah the mores of obsession…
March 23, 2012 at 3:46 pm
But why should growing up in a certain world and possessing certain learned behaviors be a criteria for continuing those behaviors?
It’s a reason why enacting those behaviors is not evidences for being “fragile and intellectually bereft” and for why changing them is not simply a matter of reading, e.g. Why I am Not a Christian, and dropping those beliefs and behaviors over night.
Religion is a socio-political phenomenon that directly impacts people outside the religion in a myriad of ways. And like any other public phenomenon, the religious should therefore be required to give reasons for their claims that could be shared by anyone regardless of religious background (or lack thereof), cultural background, etc., etc.
OK. You win. Now that you’ve won, look around you and tell me how many people have actually changed their beliefs and their behavior.
Life as we (have to) live it is bigger than our reasons. And philosophy cannot change that.
March 23, 2012 at 7:52 pm
Bill,
I’m not sure why you’re getting irritated (and talking about winning). My only point is that religious claims should be subject to the same epistemic standards as any other claim and that it is not an injustice for those claims to be challenged and even occasionally changed.
March 23, 2012 at 8:43 pm
I have to disagree with this statement, “I think the intellectual that is religiously inclined sets about cleaning up religion in theorizing it because they are embarrassed by this extremely common supernatural element. In my view, though, when analyzing a phenomenon we go with those beliefs that are statistically dominant in a population, not with rationalizations we’d like to be true.”
There are a couple of points I would make. The first is a Nietzschean one and that is I think if you want to understand what religion means you need to inquire into the forces that appropriate it. There is, in my opinion, a huge difference between the homophobic Christian fundamentalist and the Zen master though we use the term “religious” when referring to both. It would be wrong to assert that there is an essence which is common to both or that remains the same in each case.
I know you said you did not consider Buddhism a religion but I think Buddhism is a religion because Buddhism is, like all religions, a doctrine of salvation. Soteriology is what separates religion from ethics or politics or literature or comic books. Buddhism is not just an ethical theory about how to live (though it is that as well). Buddhism is a religion because it makes claims about the ultimate nature of reality and it has a doctrine of enlightenment built upon those claims. Enlightenment does not, in my opinion, make much sense from a purely materialist standpoint.
I see no reason why we should take the statistical average as the determination of the essence of religion (if religion has an essence at all). There is no other field in which we would make this claim. If we wanted to know what science is would we take a vote a determine what most people think it is or would we ask a scientist?
Every religion has a folk aspect. If you travelled to a country where Buddhism was the dominant religion you would find a whole host of fairly strange and superstitious practices associated with Buddhism. Does that mean that Buddhism should be defined purely in terms of those superstitious practices? Is the Zen master merely an apologist for those superstitious practices?
Statistically Zen masters are a minority but it seems to me if you want to understand something like Buddhism it would be better to go to a Zen master as opposed to studying the folk aspects of the religion. Similarly, if you want to understand Christianity I think you should study the theologians and the mystics and not Fox news.
You may want to criticize the Christianity of the theologians AND the Christianity of Fox news but you will have to offer two entirely different critiques in each case. It is a mistake to imagine that the critiques you offer of Fox news Christianity will apply with equal weight to the theologian.
You seem to me to be saying something like, “You either have to believe in Fox news Christianity or denounce Christianity altogether. Any other position is untenable and intellectually dishonest”. I do not consider myself a Christian but I disagree with that claim.
Personally I think that religion is ultimately a matter of overcoming dualisms and so I do not believe we can understand religion in terms of natural/supernatural or material/spiritual dualisms. The poet William Blake said he was opposed to naturalism and supernaturalism and that, in my opinion, is the genuine religious position. There is nothing inherently religious about positing the existence of a transcendent Being called God just as there is nothing inherently religious about positing the reality of atoms. I do not consider the religious bigot religious in the genuine sense which means there are plenty of people who believe in God, in my opinion, who are not at all religious, and there are plenty of people (like me) who do not believe in God who consider themselves religious. But I am a Buddhist so non-Buddhists will almost certainly disagree with me. Take care.
March 23, 2012 at 8:45 pm
Levi,
A couple of comments ago I referred to a specific congregation of believers (and linked to an account of a church service). I have been talking about them, and others like them. I’ve asserted that they get something out of their religious practice that is/seems to be necessary to their lives. I’ve also asserted that that necessity trumps your criteria of rational belief. You can challenge their beliefs and argue with them point by point, and win every point.
And, come Sunday, most, perhaps all, of them will go to church and worship like they’ve been doing. That doesn’t make them”fragile and intellectually bereft.” It’s easy for you to say that they can be Stoics, like you. But you don’t have to live their lives; they do. It’s not at all clear to me where you get the right to calculate their lifeway costs and benefits for them.
March 23, 2012 at 8:54 pm
Bill,
I never disagreed that religious people get something out of their practice. Clearly they wouldn’t do it if they didn’t. Nor did I suggest that I’m particularly inclined to go and argue with people at the church you discuss. So long as they aren’t impacting the public sphere through legislation and supporting legislation and politicians that lead to the oppression of others, I could care less what people believe. Generally, however, that’s not the case. The issue here is not one of beliefs, but of the public sphere and how these beliefs impact the public sphere. You write:
Gimme a break. This is what we do all the time in public discourse. We evaluate the positions that others present and determine whether or not we think they’re legitimate. Religion is no different from this. Every position a person puts forward– including the ones you and I are putting forward –has lifeway costs and benefits. Right now, at this very moment, you’re in the process of “calculating the lifeway costs and benefits” of what I’ve said in this post and in my comments. You’ve done so on this blog repeatedly in the past. You’ve never thought that this was problematic in these discussions. Why would it be problematic with respect to religious groups? It shouldn’t be.
March 23, 2012 at 9:04 pm
Brian,
I think we should focus on what is statistically dominant in religion rather than what theologians say because I’m concerned with the social impact of religion. That social impact comes from religion as it is dominantly practiced, not from theologians. As a consequence, I think theologians just muddy the issue.
I strongly disagree with this:
My problem with this is that I don’t see any reason to treat issues like salvation, enlightenment, and the ultimate nature of reality as the exclusive domain of religion. These are all things philosophy is concerned with as well and can be pursued in a perfectly secular framework. For example, the Epicureans and Stoics outline a path– not unlike the Buddhist path –to “salvation” (your comment here is the first time I’ve ever heard a Buddhist speak of “salvation”, that seems like a very Christian concept in my own opinion). Your argument here is akin to those who say that ethics belongs to the domain of religion, as if anyone without religion is outside the domain of ethics. Not only do I think that religion often has very little to do with ethics, I also don’t see any reason to treat ethics as an exclusive domain of religion. I just think this concedes far too much to religion.
In saying that I don’t see Buddhism as a religion I worry that I might have come off as insulting. Yet for me, this is not a bad thing, it’s a mark in Buddhisms favor. I find the existence of things like Buddhism (in its rare variants without anything supernatural) extremely heartening because they show there’s an alternative to religion: that it’s possible to live a meaningful life, devoted to a particular set of practices and ethics, and form a community with others without need of the supernatural, a transcendent God, worship (directed to the divine), sacrifice (in the literal sense), etc. More of this please!
March 23, 2012 at 9:10 pm
So what you object to, Levi, isn’t religious belief itself, no matter how irrational it may be. What you object to is the use of religious belief to oppress others. So why not confine your argument to that instead of making a general argument against religious belief?
March 23, 2012 at 9:17 pm
Brian,
In other words, we get people saying “that’s not what religion x says because theologian y says z” and we wrinkle up our brow in confusion and say “but what about all those millions of members of religion x who say that?” I just don’t think this is any way to honestly discuss religion. Religion is there in the practices of the people and in what they predominantly believe, not in the intricate texts of the theologians. As for your argument about going to the Zen Master or the theologian, I might be inclined to agree in the case of the Zen master because I think there can be real knowledge there and expertise. However, in the text-based interpretive religions, it’s difficult to see why the theologians are any more experts than anyone else. I can see why I should listen to the word of a doctor, stock broker, or climate scientist because there are clear criteria for evaluating their expertise. Yet we don’t have these criteria in the case of text based religions. Even though their readings might be more hermeneutically informed through an understanding of the history of the texts and whatnot (though often I think theologians bring all sorts of things into religion that are nowhere to be found in the sacred text in question), it’s not clear why this establishes that their position is somehow more true than that of the average layperson. And again, this is because the epistemic criteria by which we would evaluate having true knowledge of these text based religious claims are entirely unclear.
March 23, 2012 at 9:28 pm
Bill,
Well there are a few different issues here. First, insofar as I’m interested in truth and strong/valid argumentation, I will, of course be concerned with irrationalism where I find it. However, there’s simply not enough to energy or time to tilt at all windmills. Where religious community x is doing no real harm and where their ethical values are aligned with mine, then I don’t see much point in railing against them. That said, I do think that religious belief is structurally damaging to society in that it is based on authority (sacred texts, religious leaders, prophets, etc) and because it corrodes basic epistemic standards upon which civil society relies. This is structurally or essentially built into the very fabric of religious belief (at least in the text based variants). Those religions structurally cultivate authoritarianism (x is true because sacred text y says so), exclusionary structures (person y doesn’t belong to tribe x), and leads us to flaunt epistemic standards of what can be shared between people from different backgrounds (reason and observation). Yet clearly there will be all sorts of gradations on a scale here from the deeply disturbing and fascistic to the fairly innocuous. And there will even be those that fall out of the scheme altogether like Unitarian Universalists where you can be an atheist and still be a member of the group (one wonders why it should be called a religion then). Clearly, there’s no point in getting bent out of shape by the fairly innocuous, but I also don’t think this should lead me to abandon my strong commitment to immanence, refusal of authoritarianism, and commitment to forms of reason giving that can be shared between people based on reason and observation. And yes, I understand that persuasion rarely takes place in real time, but I do think we’ve made massive strides in the process of secularization in the last 300 years. It looks entirely possible for religion to disappear altogether in the next few hundred years. Demographics already appear to be trending this way in the developed world. I’m curious, if you had a choice between a world without religion and a world with religion, what would you choose?
March 23, 2012 at 9:54 pm
I’m curious, if you had a choice between a world without religion and a world with religion, what would you choose?
I find it a very odd question, Levi. I don’t know what it entails.
In Beethoven’s Anvil: Music in Mind and Culture I argued that animist belief was an inevitable intimately intermeshed aspect of the process by which a bunch of clever ages became human beings. Given that, I could interpret “a world without religion” as implying a world without humans. Would I prefer THAT to the world we’ve got? Given that I exist, what are the implications of such a choice? Of course, I could easily opt for a world with religion without having confront such an odd question.
Or, we could say, OK, religion was a necessary aspect of the human project in its earlier stages. But now that we’re up and running, perhaps we can get rid of it. But how? If we imagine doing so by snapping our fingers and shazam! religion’s gone, well, that seems to imply some kind of superpower. And that sort of defeats the purpose of a world without religion, no? Or do the superpowers disappear right after religion’s gone down the cosmological drain? If there are no superpowers, then religion’s go to disappear through whatever means we’ve already got. Is that doable? Would it have any negative consequences? What about the deeper power invoked in 12-step meetings? Does that go as well?
What I can say, however, is that I’d like to have the enthusiasm of that 2-hour religious service without the conservative social views that sometimes go along with such fervor. I think that’s possible. A Unitarian friend of mine tells me that some Unitarian ministers are discussing that issue on a listserve.
March 23, 2012 at 9:59 pm
So you think there are certain things that ONLY religion can do, as per your 12-step example? Don’t think conservative social views sometimes accompany religion, but often accompany religion.
March 23, 2012 at 10:10 pm
I just believe that religion tends towards violence because of it’s inability to ground itself. Where something cannot be grounded through the use of shared capacities among people (reason/observation), and where people still insist on it, violence becomes almost inevitable. Take the example of Burkas. We can’t give any necessary reasons that women ought to wear Burkas. The absence of a burka does no social harm nor personal harm. Yet people still insist, even though clearly Burkas fall entirely in the realm of custom. And in the absence of being able to provide reasons, the absence of a burka becomes a site of violence against women. We see the same thing in the contraceptive debate, the abortion debate, gay marriage, and on and on. Moreover, we again and again see it used as a cudgel to exclude one group and privilege another.
March 23, 2012 at 10:19 pm
“I find the existence of things like Buddhism (in its rare variants without anything supernatural)”
I’m not sure what this means. As I mentioned in #15, what people frequently mean when saying this sort of thing, is Buddhism without karma or rebirth. If so, then I asseert the remainder (whatever it’s merits) is not Buddhism in it’s historical sense, and in the sense you use above,what most of it’s adherents believe. Without these concepts a number of other imprortant concepts become problematic. ertainly there may be usefulness to using some Buddhist concept in a sycretic psychology, but again this would not be Buddhism.
Sometimes this kind of satement may refer to the “deities” of Vajrayana Buddhism. This entails a complicated discussion I’m not up for now on the nature of these deities ranging form existent beings to projections of one’s own Buddha Nature.
Finally “salvation” is close enough to what many may refer to by Enlightenment or Nirvana that it is used sometimes in Buddhist philosophy.
March 23, 2012 at 10:22 pm
I think it’s entirely possible to give a secular interpretation of karma: what goes around comes around. Treat people like shit, they’ll treat you like shit. Treat the world around you terribly and you will end up suffering from that (through pollution, etc). Rebirth need not be reincarnation but just the transformation you undergo through meditative practice.
March 23, 2012 at 10:24 pm
And I’d just add that I think salvation is a radically different concept from enlightenment. They exist in very different ethical universes and refer to very different problems. If it’s used in the literature it shouldn’t be.
March 23, 2012 at 10:33 pm
Certainly, you can define words the way you wish, but again karma and rebirth in Buddhism do have historical, and current meanings in Buddhism that differ from what you propose. The Buddhist use of karma does not include the pop cultural use you propose here.
Where I have seen “salvation” used the most is in discussions of the Two Truths debate. Here it seemed entirely appropriate to me.
March 23, 2012 at 10:38 pm
I base my reading of karma on the Tao, not pop culture. At any rate, I was very specific in my comments that I was referring to secular forms of Buddhism, not those that contain supernatural elements. As for salvation, the concept of it refers to the impossibility of escaping sin and God nonetheless forgiving us. There’s just nothing like that in the concept of enlightenment which is about overcoming ego and desire, not the inescapability of sin.
March 24, 2012 at 1:20 pm
And Tao and Buddhism are not the same. Up until now, you did not indicate this usage. I don’t know enought about the Tao to comment.
Back to the “secular forms of Buddhism”. As you put it: “Religion is there in the practices of the people and in what they predominantly believe, not in the intricate texts of the theologians.” By creating a “secular Buddhism” you are fuctioning as a theologian. This secular Buddhism, in denying karma and rebirth, denies the historical and lived experience of te vast majority of Buddhist. Again the belief system you propose has much to recommend it. It just isn’t Buddhism.
The salvation issue is a side one to me. I’m only noting that I’ve read Buddhist philosophy that has used it in a way that made sense. But perhaps you’r right. Maybe they are redifining “salvation” in much the same way you redefine karma.
March 24, 2012 at 2:10 pm
I’m sure I’m putting too fine a point on this, but I will anyway.
Isn’t the project of creating a “secualr Buddhism” pretty much what you criticize Zizek for doing with Christianity. Doesn’t Buddha, and his actual teachings become a “rather irrelevant figure”.
And I guess I want to expand on the Tao reference. I characterized your rendition of karma as “pop culture” because of your use of “what goes around comes around”. There was no mention of Taoism there, but rather a pop culture cliche.
March 24, 2012 at 9:56 pm
Atomic,
That’s a fair point. I wrote about this in a more sophisticated way here and here:
https://larvalsubjects.wordpress.com/2010/09/03/tao-te-ching/
https://larvalsubjects.wordpress.com/2010/09/30/conditioned-genesis-questions-about-squaring-the-circle/
My only point was that there are possible meaningful ways of life that don’t require the supernatural.
March 25, 2012 at 11:05 pm
Levi,
Two questions:
1. When you say that “we should focus on what is statistically dominant in religion rather than what theologians say,” why should this be true of religion but not, for example, or science? Surely many non-scientists (and many of them non-religious) have less-than-accurate comprehension of the current state of scientific knowledge. And this incomprehension (or sometimes downright ignorance) certainly can and does have wide social and political effects, independently of the willful obfuscation brought to the public sphere by some forms of religion. (On this point, I am put in mind of the value of Latour’s treatments of both science and religion as not *radically* distinct forms of knowledge – as some of the other comments here have suggested.)
2. You said “It looks entirely possible for religion to disappear altogether in the next few hundred years. Demographics already appear to be trending this way in the developed world.” – I’d be wary about statements like this. Jefferson said something to that effect in the early 19th century, before religion rebounded; Time magazine famously made a similar pronouncement in the late ’60s, before religion rebounded.
Anyway, what I really wonder about is when you ask the question, “if you had a choice between a world without religion and a world with religion, what would you choose? what exactly would a world without religion be? I know you’ve already clarified this once, but what I wonder about specifically is how you take religion to be easily separable from other spheres of the world. This kind of separation in our way of thinking about religion is largely the product of modern European political and epistemological thinking, and it’s not entirely clear that the concept of religion that accompanies this distinction adequately describes the actual, concrete practices of many people even in the contemporary West, let alone outside it. Couldn’t asking a question like this be sort of like asking “Would you rather live in a world with or without politics?” The question is only possible with a view of “politics” that makes of it a narrow set of institutions and practices that are a priori separable from the rest of society.
March 26, 2012 at 1:01 pm
Michael,
I already addressed your first question in comments. First, we should focus on religion as it’s actually practiced because the issue is one of how religion functions, not how theologians would like it to function. I think this is far closer to Latour than going with the theologians. Second, because, unlike science, there’s nom way of measuring the veracity of one religious claim over another, the theologian has no more right to legislate religion than anyone else.
March 26, 2012 at 6:07 pm
Levi,
I actually agree that we should focus on religion as it’s actually practiced, although I don’t see this as being (necessarily) opposed to the way theologians conceive of it. That is to say, I think it’s helpful to examine beliefs as a particular kind of practices, and even within beliefs I don’t think it’s necessarily the case that we’re faced with the choice of inquiring into either the unsophisticated (and often incoherent) beliefs of lay adherents or the more systematic beliefs of theologians – and I don’t mean to imply that this is exactly what you’re saying, but merely that it’s worth pointing out.
But I think it’s wrong to say there’s no way of measuring the veracity of one religious claim over another – only that the way of weighing the strength of various religious claims against each other rests on a different set of associations than that of science. I would argue that what Christian theology, for instance, has been engaged in for almost 2000 years is precisely the weighing of the relative strengths of various religious claims, and while there remains wide disagreement over some, there are others that were settled a long time ago. And these settlements have happened in a variety of ways that have ranged from rational debate to, regrettably, outright war.
March 26, 2012 at 8:57 pm
Michael,
What interests me is actually existing religion. I am interested in the beliefs of those that actually practice the religion and the practices of those that actually practice the religion. In my view, theologians tend to muddy these discussions because they present religion in a way that doesn’t reflect actually practice the religion. Thus you’ll get a theologian saying “but that’s not what x believes”, when in fact there are millions of people that actually do believe that very thing. An actor-network analysis of religion is going to go with the dominant beliefs and practices of the religion, not with sanitized versions of religion presented by theologians. Likewise, an actor-network theorist will look at how science is actually practiced by scientists, rather than taking an armchair approach to science as you find it in figures like Karl Popper.
It’s difficult for me to see how there’s any consensus among Christians, nor how there could be. There are vast doctrinal differences between Catholics and Pentacostals. There are major differences between Jehovah Witnesses and Anglican’s. There are major differences among Episcopals themselves. Thus you get one group arguing that gay bishops are fine and dandy and another group arguing that they’re absolutely wrong. Likewise you get Bishop Sponge arguing that the world functions purely according to the principles of natural science such that there was no virgin birth, resurrection, or any miracles whatsoever while you get all sorts of others arguing that miracles are absolutely vital to the religion. How do we decide who’s right? By reference to scripture? First, half the things found in Church doctrine can’t even be found in scripture. Second, which translation, which version of scripture, which interpretation, etc? I just don’t see how we can measure veracity in this case. Liberal Christians focus on Jesus’s claim that our moral duty simply consists in loving God above all other things and loving your neighbor as you love yourself, as well as the Sermon on the Mount and the Beatitudes. Radical Christians focus on Paul alone, seeing Jesus as largely irrelevant. Conservative Christians focus on Paul and Leviticus. Who’s right? All sides can give compelling arguments for their positions. I personally think that fundamentalist Christians (of both the Catholic and Evangelical variety) have the most accurate understanding of Christianity in that they’re the ones that are least selective about scripture and who recognize that insofar as we’re talking about our immortal souls it’s necessary to make no apologies about what one believes or to tolerate other variants of religion (orthodoxy is closer to Christianity than laisse faire Christianity), but again that’s based on a reading or interpretation.
March 26, 2012 at 10:04 pm
I completely agree that what should be addressed is actually existing religion as it is practiced, but I don’t grant that this excludes theology as somehow outside of and antithetical to the practices and beliefs of non-theologians. Yes, theological formulae and lay expressions of belief are sometimes at odds, but not always and certainly not necessarily. So I don’t accept that theology is simply a sanitized version of actual religion. An actor-network analysis of religion would look at the all ways in which a religion is practiced by its adherents (and how these ways are related) both the (statistically? demographically?) “dominant” practices and those of its experts. And the same is true for the sciences, where what is important is certainly the practices of actual scientists, but also the ways in which science is treated by philosophers of science AND the non-scientist public (especially, for instance, those involved in science-related politics). Also, in the analogy between religion and science, I would tend to match up practicing scientists with those engaged in a religion occupationally (which would include theologians but also clergy, etc.) and the Karl Popper position with those talking about religion from the outside (like you or me).
Regarding doctrines, there are plenty of points of consensus, just as there are plenty of points of difference. For one, though there are those who today would call themselves Christian despite having given up this belief, almost all Christians take it as settled that Jesus is fully divine. This was not always an uncontroversial point among Christians, but it more or less is now (again, aside from those you refer to as Radical Christians). Also, while Catholics and Pentecostals may have widely divergent theologies, Catholic theology itself it heavily systematized. Now, of course you could say “But even actual practicing Catholics don’t all agree about what they believe, even if they’re all supposed to believe everything the Church says!” And that’s true, but this actually just emphasizes the importance of (1) focusing on practices instead of only on beliefs, and (2) recognizing that, again, religious ways of proposing and evaluating claims do not work the same way as scientific ones. I disagree with your point that fundamentalist Christians have the most accurate understanding of Christianity for a variety of reasons (and it would be tangential to get into this – though I will say that saying that they’re least selective about scripture is way off), but here’s one reason that’s germane to the point: to say, as some Christian fundamentalists/literalists do, that the universe was created in 4004 BC is not to make a religious claim, but rather to make a scientific claim on religious grounds – and therefore to make a mistake both scientifically and religiously. You can say, “but some religious people actually believe that,” and you’d be right, but (aside from the fact that a much larger number of religious people don’t believe that) there remain strictly religious arguments against this belief which are stronger than strictly religious arguments for it. Some will nevertheless remain unconvinced, and a purely descriptive account of religions would do well to include them, but it’s a mistake therefore to conclude that as long as there is disagreement regarding religious beliefs all religious beliefs have equal (or equally little) value.
March 26, 2012 at 10:18 pm
Michael,
By and large I just don’t find the majority of teachings of theologians representative of the lay. There’s always been this tension between theologians and lay. Given that I’m primarily interested in the politics of religion, I just don’t find the works of theologians very relevant.
March 28, 2012 at 8:45 pm
Robert Wright over at The Atlantic, with video clips of his discussion w/ de Botton:
April 1, 2012 at 10:21 pm
It is odd to me that Spinoza is mentioned here only once — by Levi — and then for what might be deemed his humanism, not his take on religion. I do not think he is lying about being religious and further his version appeals to me. His is a religion without a personified god and that too suits me. So what is religious about it? It has an ethics, it has a role for human endeavor, it has a constitutive humility, it is holistic, it has responsibility, it is in its orientation non-human, its affects are wonder and tranquility, etc. That is not just an ethics for its immanence is open. This does not agree with Levi’s assertion “religion necessarily involves the supernatural.” I think it involves becoming broadly understood and that may not be subject to naturalization but I do not think it is thereby supernatural.
April 2, 2012 at 12:49 pm
Dan,
There’s no supernatural causation in Spinoza’s metaphysics.