Rejecting "religion" as a useful ontological category

2006-08-30T18:17:00.000-07:00

Defining the essence of religion is a notoriously difficult task in all fields, from philosophy to anthropology. One reason for the problem is that variances within the phenomenon can be rather broad. Religions and religious conceptions as they are commonly categorized can be theistic or atheistic, immaterialist or materialist, normative or positive, and so on. Any attempt at a formal and universalizing definition is therefore doomed to result in some level of ambiguity. This issue does not arise as sharply, however, when only discussing only religions of a certain context, e.g. the so-called great religions of the west (Christianity, Judaism, Islam) and their derivatives. At the turn of the century William James gave a fairly impressive and refreshing description:

Were on asked to characterize the life of religion in the broadest and most general terms possible, one might say that it consists of the belief that there is an unseen order, and that our supreme good lies in
harmoniously adjusting ourselves thereto. This belief and this adjustment are the religious attitude in the
soul (The Varieties of Religious Experience).

I think that this definition works quite well for the major faiths and even extends beyond them. It has the notable advantage of not necessitating any god(s). He also avoids the outlandish line of many Western scholars, that religion is primarily characterized by an omnipotent, omniscient, omnibenevolent God (see Louis Pojam's widely read text Philosophy of Religion: An Anthology, xii). James, ahead of his time, manages to restrict the definition to a general belief in something unseen and, more importantly, a kind of principled devotion to it.

However, even this definition presumes a normative element, that the supreme good of mankind is to harmonize with unseen elements. In this sense, James' definition would fail to describe more magic and ritual-based faith systems, where religious practice involves daily practicality (ancient mesopotamian magic is a good example, but one doesn't have to think very hard to come up with others). We tend to want to identify magic-based faiths as "cults" or "mythologies," although it is unclear why this is so. What distinguishes the act of casting evil into a loaf of bread from the act of, say, praying to a saint? I'd be interested in hearing any suggestions. We can't say that the casting of evil is "superstitious," because all we mean by that is that we think the action is based on falsity. The characteristic of being false does not confer the status of cult or myth.

I suggest that much progress would be made by abandoning the term "religion" altogether. Instead of relegating a set of claims to a suspicious and ambiguous category, why not simply include the beliefs in a person's total belief set? If this were done, we could merely analyze so-called religious beliefs in terms of truth, falsity, justifiability, and so on. This would place religious beliefs under the same scrutiny (and respect) as any other set of beliefs. So a person may believe that the earth rotates around the sun, that her mother is kindly, that Jesus was raised bodily from the dead and appeared to some folk, that torturing children is morally wrong, etc. There's no particularly good reason to send the Jesus-belief into some new category. It is an allegation about the world, in this case, a claim about historical reality. Similarly, reincarnation theology is an alleged description of reality, and is therefore either true or false, justified or unjustified, etc.

Perhaps the strongest objection to my approach is that it ignores the personalized and faith-based nature of religious beliefs. Religious beliefs, so the story goes, are not such that they require evidence, reasons, or anything similar to other beliefs I mentioned. I do not see much merit in this objection, because it demonstrates what I consider a grave and extremely damaging misunderstanding about religious beliefs. Whether we are discussing Christianity, Hinduism, Mesopotamian incantations, or Wicca, there is no such thing as faith-based in the sense which people intend. We can only have faith in something or someone after we know (or think we know) something about it. For example, I can't very well have faith that I will be reincarnated into such-and-such unless I portend to have some understanding of how reincarnation works. To take a more worldly example: I have faith that my friends will provide for me when asked, but only because I know (or think I know) that they are good. I could be wrong of course, but it wouldn't be a matter of faith. In foundational Christian texts this understanding of faith is made rather explicit, especially in some of Paul's commentary on the matter. Any "faith" must first be grounded in claimed historical or present reality. I would go so far as to say that it is impossible to base a belief on faith alone. How could faith ever arise if we are not even aware of what you are supposed to be having faith in? We must be presented with something first. And that does include the teachings of our parents and other elders, which we generally accept not in some religiou sense, but merely in the sense of trustworthy authority (from which we get the overwhelming majority of all our beliefs).

So I conclude that religion is not qualitatively different enough from other beliefs to deserve its own ontological category. There is nothing special about these beliefs. Like any belief, a religious belief follows one or another presentation to our minds (experience, reason, authority, pragmatic), and is itself followed by inferences which often include faithful attitudes.

Joshua Blanchard's Irrelevant Blog

Rejecting "religion" as a useful ontological category