A Way of Looking at Things No. 32: Religion and the Ways of Man

A Way of Looking at Things: No. 32 – Religion and the Ways of Man

James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© 2003

As those of you have read my stuff know that I was reared Irish Roman Catholic. I grew up in the insular community of Clinton, Iowa in the middle of the United States in the middle of the 20th century and at a time of war, and had no doubt as to the nobility of my nation or the veracity of my religion. It never occurred to me to entertain any doubts. I thought those in positions of trust, whatever their station, were to be respected, revered and followed.

In school I took what the teachers said to be true to be so, and in books that I read to be the unvarnished truth. It was axiomatic in my mind that goodness rose to the top, and evil sunk to the bottom no matter what the medium. My life was devoid of experience. I was an open bucket, a receptacle in which information was poured into me and accepted indiscriminately. Along the way I became acquainted with such names as Thomas Aquinas, Immanuel Kant, St. Augustine, and Descartes, and many more who I was told had pondered the hard questions of life and were in the know as to who I was, where I was, why I was, and what I should be about.

Religion was pushed aside to focus on mathematics, physics, chemistry and logic. As my education progressed from grammar to high school to college and then into life I found myself finally in touch with experience, experience no doubt different than all those I had read but at the same time very much the same. I discovered that I had a brain, a mind that had a capacity to wonder and yes wander, a mind that wasn’t an open bucket in which ideas poured into from knowers and were processed by my senses with little active participation of my own, but that I could think with my whole body and what we call our soul.

Religion found me entering a loveless marriage, and staying because its dogma insisted that I do, and I did, that is, until not only my mind wandered away from what was poured into it, but my body found itself in different places and spaces, in different countries and cultures, and in different circumstances in the realm of power, position, prestige and importance, and suddenly life made no sense to me at all. It was an upside down world and I was standing on my head.

Being born in humble circumstances, I learned matters of class by how my parents were treated, which was essentially that they were safe, non-threatening and of no account.

It is part of our British heritage that the order is first hierarchically described individualistically as an interlinked, finely layered and elaborately graded procession from the haves to the have nots, me being a member of the latter. The second evidence of class is triadic in which we are all divided into three collective constituencies, upper, middle and lower. The third is dichotomous in which society polarizes the two extremes of the haves from the have nots or “them from us.”

I thought these distinctions only existed in books, but found they even existed in my hometown. And of course, they existed in the church, which I was aware of but not concerned about when I was young. It was almost as if I expected it to be that way.

Likewise, I thought when I was a neophyte professional that as I went up the corporate tree I would find more magnanimity. I discovered less. Again by the accident of circumstances, I found myself rising quickly in a growth industry and a growth-minded company, when I was quite young, being dispatched about the world to accelerate this growth. In the course of this work I found my company’s banner was a kind of religion, not unlike the one upon which I was reared, a religion driven to conquer and exploit the infidels to enlarge our material coffers, all in the spirit of competitive enterprise. I saw it in Suriname, Jamaica, Venezuela, Italy, South Africa, Rhodesia, Lebanon, and many other places in the course of my work. It gave me pause, and ultimately led to my retiring in my early thirties. Having been trained as an athlete, I considered it a well deserved “time out,” which lasted two and one-half years, during which time I read greatly on religion and mythology and such off-the-wall writers as Gurdjieff, Ouspensky, Krishnamurti, Gibran, to name only a few.

I also wrote tons spending 18 months writing an unpublishable book on my take on Roman Catholicism, realizing now these many years later how naïve and uninformed my thoughts and angers were. It was a catharsis in a sense, but in another sense it made me aware of something that has mystified me ever since – the impossibility of escaping one’s conditioning.

Cultural programming is as indelible as a fingerprint or one’s DNA. I have read writers such as Joyce, Yeats, Shaw, Eliot, and many others that claimed they had escaped the noose of their upbringing, but I see it through their words, loud and clear. The wisest thing that I’ve ever done, and I’ve done many stupid things, is to accept myself as I am, which is surprisingly hard for many to do, given self-acceptance seemingly so foreign to their programmed natures.

This is preamble to a new book by David Sloan Wilson Darwin’s Cathedral: Evolution, Religion, and the Nature of Society (University of Chicago Press 2002).

Wilson attempts to give an evenhanded account of religion and the ways of man. I’m sure it will offend some even though it is not meant to, but will provide perspective to many others. I know it did for me. At this late stage in my life, I am finally coming to terms with the fact that man is essentially a comedic figure on this hostile planet and often acts less wise than a colony of ants.

To the paleontologist, our human ancestors diverged from our ancestors the chimpanzees around six million years ago. Whatever religion is we can agree the chimps didn’t have it. Apparently religion was practiced among our Cro-Magnon ancestors about 40,000 years ago. Were there different historical stages in the development of religions with creeds like Christianity and Buddhism or were tribal belief systems more representative?

Scholars, Wilson tells us, confess they don’t know but wonder in view of the recent terrorist attacks. Like us, scholars are struggling to understand the fanaticism that drives them. We tend to associate religion with humanity’s noble side, not with its evil side. Yet why does religion sometimes preach murder and suicide? Western man has had much bloodshed in his history and one wonders if early Christians went willingly to their deaths.

Wilson emphasizes the fact that religions are human institutions and belief systems evolved by the process of group selection. Religions offer practical, social, and motivational benefits to their adherents. But religions differ within these practices and even in matters of having and rearing children, not to mention converting or killing competing religions.

Wilson writes, “Religions exist primarily for people to achieve together what they cannot achieve alone.”

Demographics (birth, death, immigration) play an important part, as does proselytizing zeal. This places Judaism at a disadvantage as it is not a proselytizing faith, but has a high birth rate, low death rate, and low emigration.

Most engaging is Wilson’s pondering of why Christianity, when innumerable tiny Jewish sects were constantly competing with each other and with non-Jewish groups within the Roman Empire, was able to break away from the pack. The reasons he proffers are: (1) proselytizing zeal (unlike mainstream Judaism); (2) high birth and low mortality rate; (3) opportunities for women in the ministry (in contrast to both Roman paganism and contemporary Judaism); (4) social institutions resulting in lower death rates than Romans from plagues; and (5) the Christian doctrine of forgiveness. Regarding the latter, Wilson says it was far more complex and context-dependent than might be assumed as it also included the right for vengeance with cause.

Religion here is shown to encompass four different and originally unrelated elements which doesn’t lessen the contentious nature of the discussion, but does leaven it with ample material for discussion: (1) explanation; (2) standardized organization; (3) moral rules of good behavior toward in-groups; and (4) all too often moral rules of bad behavior toward out-groups.

In my fascination for these considerations I could not help but see parallels in the complex organization. Salient comments relative to this enchantment adorn this retrospective.



(1) Explanation

Most religions begin with belief in a god or gods, but that immediately, says Wilson, plunges us into difficulty:

“Religion is sometimes defined as a belief in supernatural agents. However, other people regard this definition as shallow and incomplete. The Buddha refused to be associated with any gods. He merely claimed to be awake (my italics) and to have found a path to enlightenment.”

Some Jews and Unitarians are agnostics or atheists but still consider themselves to belong to a religion. Conversely, many tribal societies believe in agents that we Westerners think of as spirits rather than gods.

An essential feature shared by the Judeo-Christian God, ancient Greek gods, and tribal spirits is a “supernatural agent for whose existence our senses can’t give evidence, but which our senses do give us evidence.”

Creationists invoke God to explain everything – including the existence of every plant and animal species, but most creationists wouldn’t invoke God to explain every sunrise, tide and wind.

Clearly, Wilson observes, in modern Western society religion’s explanatory role has gradually become usurped by science. Where Old Testament believers invoke origin myths like the Tower of Babel to explain linguistic diversity, modern linguists invoke historical processes of language change.

(2) Standardized Organization

Most modern religions have full-time priests, rabbis and ministers who receive a salary and life’s necessities. Modern religions also have churches, temples, synagogues, and mosques. Within these sects, all use standardized sacred books (Bible, Torah, Koran, etc.). They also have rituals, rites, art, music, architecture and particular identifying clothing.

These organizational features arose to solve a new problem emerging as ancient human societies became richer and more populous. We think of Europe as states today, but after 1492 AD, and the discovery of America, Europeans spread over the world. They encountered peoples living under simpler and less populous political systems – chiefdoms, tribes and bands.

Kings emerged from chiefdoms around 3500 BC as bands and tribal societies were too small and unproductive to generate food surpluses that could feed full-time priests, chiefs, tax collectors, potters, or specialists of any sort.

The inevitable happened as a result of the confluence of three factors: (1) heavily populated societies defeated small societies; (2) these societies required full-time leaders to manage them; and (3) bureaucracies to run them.

Wilson again: “(From) purely the group-level functional standpoint, societies must become differentiated into leaders and followers as they increase in size. Thirty people can sit around a campfire and arrive at a consensual decision; thirty million people cannot.”

But here comes the rub. Leaders and managers, bureaucrats and priests are not productive citizens in the sense that they are hunting, gathering, harvesting or making anything. Wilson asks, how does the chief get the peasants to tolerate what is basically the theft of their food by classes of social parasites?1 How indeed!

The problem obsessed Marx and is familiar to citizens and workers to this day, who ask themselves the same question each election of politicians and each time they cross the threshold of their employ:

· What have incumbents done since the last election to justify their fat salaries and all the perks that they pay themselves out of the public coffers?
· What have executives and managers done to justify their perks, privileges, bonuses, stock options, salaries, and incomes that often are multiples of 200 to 500 times normal incomes of working wage earners who produce the goods and services?

The successful selling of executive omnipotence is based on the epithet that CEOs are a breed apart and as rare as Hooping Cranes. It takes tenets of faith to embrace this myth. The Cathedral of the Fortune 500 entertains few doubters among its ranks.

Corpocracy, however, took its cue from organized religion. The solution devised by every known chiefdom and early state societies, from ancient Egypt to the Inca Empire, was to proclaim an organized religion with the following tenets:

· The chief or king is related to the gods (religious).
· The man-in-charge or CEO has economic power over you (secular).
· The chief or king can intercede with the gods on behalf of the peasants (religious) to ensure a good harvest.
· The man-in-charge or CEO can make you redundant, move your place of employment or intercede to see that you have a job and can afford to eat (secular).

In return for these services, the reasoning goes, the peasants should feed the chief and his priests and his tax collectors (religious), while the worker should work for 1/200th of what his main bosses receive so that they can live in a style to which they have become accustomed (secular) without complaint or redress.

Standardized rituals, carried out at standardized temples, serve to teach these religious tenets to the peasants so that they will obey the chief and his lackeys. Likewise, standardized policies and procedures, carried out at standardized workplaces, serve vaulted corporate principles to which workers are expected to subscribe in abeyance to the corpocracy of the management class.2

As early theocratic states evolved into the empires of ancient Babylon and Rome and commandeered more and more food and labor, the architectural trappings of state religions became ever more elaborate. Likewise, in an economic sense, as job shops turned into tool and die guilds and then into small factories, and finally into giant corporations such as General Motors, General Electric, AT&T and so on, the ivory tower became disconnected from the secular life of the workers who were light years away.

An assumption was made. It was assumed that the duty and loyalty owed by workers to their feudal lords was sacrosanct; that those in charge knew best. Thus was created the compelling temptation to treat corporate wealth as its own, and to do with workers what it may. Likewise, the clergy became obsessed with their own apotheosis and came to behave in a spiritual sense the way CEOs behaved in a material sense, or without constraints.

Within recent centuries in the Judeo-Christian world, this trend has been accentuated in a secular sense. The civil religion of society is money and class, and this is not the class of fine manners, haute cuisine, broad knowledge of art and artistry, but the pursuit of happiness, greed and the insatiable desire for more. The green goddess of wealth has corrupted in ways that have skewered society in particular and the world in general into camps of few haves and many have-nots. This has also sown the seeds that have enriched the soil of fanaticism. Why does no one ask the question: How did my actions or the actions of my society and nation contribute to this terrible social disease of fanatical behavior?

(3) Moral Rules of Good Behavior the In-Group

We take for granted that our moral rules of good behavior fit all. It justifies our enforcement of moral precepts. True, all major world religions teach what is right, what is wrong, and how one should behave.

Some 7,500 years ago Wilson tells us, when tribal societies evolved into chiefdoms comprising thousands of individuals, tribal rules of behavior, which were unstated but understood, no longer sufficed. Likewise, a man’s word was once as good as his bond, and most everyone once struggled within the limits of what they could and would do. No longer. Secular society echoing the problems of religious governance has seen the modern world turn inside out with a kind of barbarism that has become as common as rain with cascading conflict, smoldering dissension, murderous brawls and even sabotage and murder in the workplace. It is as if society has returned to prehistoric barbarism.

The solution to this dilemma were rules ordained by chiefs, kings and priests, rules applied to all members of the society (religious) and enforced by political leaders (chiefs, kings) and their agents who justified these rules as a new function of religion. On the secular side, in the modern world the axiom exists: the greater the chaos the more the need for rules & regulations. We find managers applying these rules as corporate decrees with the implication that they are inviolable.

With religion, the gods or supernatural agents are presumed to be the authors of the rules. With secular society, all that had to be said was that the “rules came from the top.”

Wilson is correct. People are taught from childhood onward to obey the rules, and to expect severe punishment for breaking them because now an attack on another person is also an offense against the gods, or the venerated CEO in the workplace. Prime examples familiar to Jews and Christians are the Ten Commandments, while for workers, they are orientation, a short film and a little blue book that leaves no doubt what goes and what doesn’t.

Nonbelievers scoff at religious accounts of moral authority emanating from some code of supernatural origin. This is hard for a Christian or Jew to reconcile – who can doubt Moses and the Ten Commandments?

Yet that same Christian or Jew may have severe doubts about Joseph Smith’s claim that the angel Moroni appeared to him on September 21, 1823 to reveal golden plates buried on a hilltop near Manchester Village in western New York State awaiting translation. Non-Mormons also doubt the sworn statements of eight witnesses (Christian Whitmer, Hiram Page, and six others) who claimed to have seen and handled the plates. But what is the difference between this and the biblical accounts of divine revelations to Moses and Jesus, except for millennia of elapsed time and our differing skepticisms derived from differing upbringing?

As Wilson points out, the success of a religion’s moral code depends on whether the code motivates the religion’s adherents to function effectively. Its veracity or fiction has little relevance: “Even massively fictitious beliefs can be adaptive, as long as they motivate behaviors that are adaptive in the real world. Factual knowledge is not always sufficient by itself to motivate adaptive behavior. At times a symbolic belief system that departs from factual reality fares better.”3

This is also true in the corporate sense. Some companies are successful in creating a hagiographic portrait of the CEO that wouldn’t stand up in the light of day, but if such an image rallies the troops and results in collective motivation than it demonstrates the CEOs apotheosis.

Moral rules first ordained in the religious have a way of touching secular society. The reason atheists as well as many believers don’t kill their enemies derives from values instilled by society, and of course from the fear of the potent hand of the law rather than fear of the wrath of God.

(4) Moral Bad Behavior of the In-Group toward the Out-Group

Tribes used relationships by blood or marriage, not religion, to justify moral rules. The killing of members of other tribes represented no moral dilemma. But once the state invoked religion to require peaceful behavior toward fellow citizens who have no relationship by blood or otherwise, this all changed, that is, with the exception of war.

The state permits; indeed the state commands its citizens to kill citizens of other states once it exercises a declaration of war.

Imagine the moral dilemma. The state teaches a boy for 18 years, “Thou shalt not kill,” and then turns around and says, “Thou must kill, under the following circumstances.” Why is it such a surprise when young boys are trained to kill, and then experience the killing, and bring back that confused state into peaceful society, and then are expected to fit and forget and no longer be inclined to express that animal rage against the wrong people (e.g., fellow citizens) when they lose it?

Likewise, the wonder is the same for 18-year-olds indoctrinated into a behavior system of being polite, obedient, obsequious, conforming, reactive, passive, and dependent in school and on the job, and then castigated, demoted, or let go for not being more creative, self-initiating and proactive. Equally, they are bombarded with the virtues of honesty, frugality, generosity, temperance and good will only to see their authority figures – teachers, priests, parents, employers, politicians, and educators -- indicted for embezzlement, corruption, malfeasance, sexual misconduct and moral turpitude. Small wonder young people withdraw into themselves.

Wilson tells us religion comes to the rescue with the last of these four elements – the Ten Commandments apply only to one’s in-group.

Most religions claim that they have a monopoly on the truth (companies do as well) and that all other religions are wrong. Too often we see in recent times that believers are permitted or even obliged to kill and steal from believers in those wrong religions. That’s the dark side of all those noble patriotic appeals – for God and country (substitute company as well) – for they are often at the expense of the out-group. This in no way exonerates the current crop of murderous religious fanatics, but it does point out the basic hypocrisy of religions when it comes to in-groups and out-groups.

I am an Irish Roman Catholic and I cannot deny the Spanish Inquisition, the Crusades, or the dark periods of church history. There have been many evils perpetrated in God’s name by every religion known to man. The Koran is often mentioned as having scripture citing hatred of Westerners or infidels, but so is the Bible guilty of the same, especially the Old Testament.

The Old Testament is full of exhortations to be cruel to heathens - Deuteronomy 20:10 – 18, where it explains the obligations of the Israelites to practice genocide: when your army approaches a distant city, you should enslave all its inhabitants if it surrenders, and kill all its men and enslave its women and children and steal their cattle and everything else if it doesn’t surrender. But if it’s a city of the Canaanites or Hittites or any of those other abominable believers in false gods, then the true God commands you to kill everything that breathes in the city.

The Book of Joshua describes how he became a hero by carrying out those instructions.

The Talmud analyzes the potential ambiguities arising from conflicts between those two principles of “Thou shalt not kill (believers in thing own God)” and “Thou must kill (believers in another god).” In fairness, this outlook is more characteristic of the Old Testament than of the New Testament. Similarly, the Koran is too often interpreted in terms of millennia before instead of in terms of today’s world.

Not to put too much of a blight on the Old Testament, the New Testament in Revelations 9: 4 – 5 says that it is okay to torture heathens for five months, but not to kill them.

In war God is always on our side. The religion-supported ideologies that accompanied the rise of states instilled into their citizens the obligation to obey the ruler ordained by God, to obey the moral precepts like the Ten Commandments only with respect to fellow citizens, and to be prepared to sacrifice their lives while fighting against other states (i.e., heathens). Imagine what that must have been like when the North faced the South in the Civil War, and families often fought against each other by the accident of their circumstance.

Wilson’s book is contentious to be sure, and covers subject matter not usually presented to a broader public. But these are unusual times and if we don’t understand them in the context of the times then there is little hope for any of us.

Wilson is saying that the ambiguity of the moral doctrines of the world’s major religions, placing one set of moral behaviors for the in-group and justifying a whole other set for the out-group has solidified a small contingent of religious fanatics to die for a cause in which thousands of innocent members of another society have their lives snuffed out (e.g., 3,025) because they are perceived enemies.

These religious fanatics are motivated by the fictitious belief that they are to be embraced by a heaven populated by beautiful virgins awaiting those that die for the cause.

It pleases me that Wilson doesn’t dodge the bullet. He admits religion is important to society, and that as society has moved away from religion and toward modern science the vacuum created has not been filled, not only has it not been filled, but he goes on to say, “There is no evidence that scientific understanding replaces religious beliefs in modern cultures. America has become more religious over the course of its history, not less, despite the influence of science and engineering. A very high proportion of scientists themselves professes a belief in God and participates in organized religions. Clearly, we must think of religious thought as something that coexists with scientific thought, not as an inferior version of it.”

Wilson’s thought-provoking book will stimulate you and enrich your own personal views of how you see and interpret your life. He makes it clear that religion is human and filled with the foibles and follies of human beings.

It is no accident that the moral fiber of society is being strained in all its orchestrations at this moment in our history. We know of the ethnic cleansing in Bosnia, the more than million killed in bloody civil wars in West Africa, the starvation in Ethiopia, not because food and medicine were not available but because of rebel forces withholding its distribution. We know of how the white landowners have been driven from their land in Mozambique or murdered by the state for resisting the takeover. And now most recently we know of a man and a teenager killing ten innocent people in the Washington DC area with sniper bullets, for what reason it is impossible to speculate. Perhaps there is none. In some ways it seems that we are retrogressing to primitives.

What Wilson never states in his scholarly work is the one word that holds all religions true if they would but practice the tenets of their faith equally with out-groups as well as with in-groups and that word is love.

Be always well and always kind. That is the true wealth of the individual and his society.

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Check out Dr. Fisher’s new website: www.peripateticphilosopher.com