The Peripatetic Philosopher continues to ponder:

Why is religion important?

PART TWO

Pilgrims on the Mayflower reach America!

James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.

© August 10, 2015

 "Humanity today is like a waking dreamer, caught between the fantasies of sleep and the chaos of the real world.  His mind seeks but cannot find the precise place and hour.  We have created a Star Wars civilization with Stone Age emotions, medieval institutions, and god-like technology.

"We trash about.  We are terribly confused by the mere fact of our existence, and a danger to ourselves and the rest of life.  Religion will never solve this great riddle."

Edward O. Wilson, “The Social Conquest of Earth"

READER’S COUNTER ARGUMENT:



The Pilgrims came to this continent to escape religious persecution by people who claimed to know the ultimate answer.  However, the Pilgrims were of the same persuasion because they were the people who had the ultimate answer and persecuted those who disagreed.

The reason that later religious freedom became a fact in the US was because all the religions in this country wanted to prevent dominance by any particular religion. Yet today many of these Christian sects make every effort to impose their interpretation of the truth on the rest of us of which the prevention of gay marriage is just one example.

When Christianity became the state religion under the Roman Emperor Constantine, it did unto non-believers or those who had different interpretation of Christianity what had been done to them for three centuries by pushing the idea that they were the only one with the ultimate truth.

Even if you find a positives in religion, for the most part it has caused a lot of pain. The Emperor of Japan was considered divine, and during WWII the population was willing like the Islamic suicide bombers to die in support of an ideology.

Religion may be critical in explaining the human journey but for the most part it has made a negative contribution to that journey.

The Catholic Church apposed science in many ways. Galileo is just one example. The church kept insisting the Ptolemaic interpretation was correct. Islam stopped people from scientific investigation around the 12th century because it was interfering with the religious beliefs.

Since Protestantism existed in the US it would be difficult to determine its effect without having the same situation without Protestantism as a comparison.

In all you have written here your response has not addressed the questions I have raised which is that religion is an ideology that like any ideology proclaims to have the key to the ultimate truth and does not question the behavior of the god who is the center of that belief.

DR. FISHER RESPONDS:

There is much that you say here that makes perfect sense if we are addressing a rational matter, which we are not when it comes to religion. 

Religion all the way back to the medicine men and witch doctors of the beginning of man’s journey on this continent have dealt with irrational fears with the semblance of what seems rational and believable to those terrified of what is not known or understood. 

Science attempts today to fill that void, but unhappily at the expense of disregarding the basic spiritual emptiness, the loneliness that can find no purchase with simply the rational and sensible of that which can be replicated and verified. 

The world has always been a hostile environment not meant for or conducive to the terror of that exists in the human soul, a soul that science denies it exists because it cannot be identified or isolated and therefore replicated and verified with instrumental or concrete values. 

Yet, the soul can be consoled with love and caring and self-forgetfulness, terminal values that comfort the soul to what it cannot understand or relate to that might have existed before, or beyond human knowing.  Alas, life is a lonely experience if one does not embrace the beauty and mystery of this enchanting planet.

All the things you charge religion for, charges that clearly have a history that verifies your assessment, can equally be seen to taint the wonders of science as it in its own way is dogmatic, absolute, unyielding and as aggressive as the ideologies of religion.  

Whereas religion felt duty bound to proselytize the infidels, science has its own inquisition of public opinion in that few if anyone challenges its authenticity, authority or relevance wherever its research might take it.

We have nuclear weapons of mass destruction and cloning and robotics and now we learn of the selling of body parts of fetuses “for science,” when science, blindly going forward, never considers what is lost for what is gained, or what the ultimate consequences might be.   Nature has no conscience and Nature is the god of science.

WHY THE PILGRIMS CAME TO AMERICA

Angie Mosteller posts a compelling article on the Internet regarding the pilgrims.  It is clear, as you point out, what they were escaping from but not what they were going towards. 

In 1534, England broke ties with the Roman Catholic Church. Protestant Reformers saw this as an opportunity to bring true reform to the church in England.  These reformers came to be called Puritans.  However, many Puritans felt little progress had been made toward true reform and that it was time to separate from the Church of England and start anew.

Unfortunately, at that time in England, the Church and State were intimately tied, and Puritans were considered treasonous and lived in danger of both persecution and imprisonment. For this reason, a small group of Puritans determined it was time to leave England. So, in 1609, they sailed to Holland (not America).

For more than a decade, they enjoyed religious freedom in Holland and gathered openly for church under the leadership of Pastor John Robinson. So why not stay in Holland?  

These Pilgrims had deep concern for the well-being of their children. Life in Holland proved difficult. The only work available to immigrants was poorly paid, and despite their hard labor, they struggled constantly with poverty. Work was taking a toll on both parents and children. Furthermore, some of the children were assimilating into Dutch culture and abandoning their parents’ values.

William Bradford (a passenger on the Mayflower and governor of the Plymouth Plantation) explained:

“Of all the sorrows most heavy to be borne (in Holland), was that many of the children, influenced by these conditions, and the great licentiousness of the young people of the country, and the many temptations of the city, were led by evil example into dangerous courses, getting the reins off their necks and leaving their parents. Some became soldiers, others embarked upon voyages by sea and others upon worse courses tending to dissoluteness and the danger of their souls, to the great grief of the parents and the dishonor of God. So they saw their posterity would be in danger to degenerate and become corrupt.”

In addition, the Pilgrims longed to bring the gospel to people who had not yet heard the message of Jesus Christ:

“They cherished a great hope and inward zeal of laying good foundations, or at least of making some way towards it, for the propagation and advance of the gospel of the kingdom of Christ in the remote parts of the world, even though they should be but stepping stones to others in the performance of so great a work.”

So for the sake of their children and for the gospel, the Pilgrims made the historic decision to immigrate again – this time to America.

These Pilgrims were prepared to make tremendous sacrifices for future generations – and the sacrifices proved to be costly. By the end of their first winter in America, half of the passengers who had sailed to America on the Mayflower were dead. Yet, the Pilgrims persevered and remained faithful to their God. To use the words of Bradford, these Pilgrims indeed became the “stepping stones” in the formation of what has arguably become the greatest nation on earth.

So, beginning in 1620, according to Max Weber in his comparative religion sociological enterprise, the pursuit of the economic logic of extra mundane beliefs had given birth to a nascent rational ordering system that would ultimately reach fruition in modern capitalism.  Its existential consequences would find no other soil more fertile or no people more ready or resolved than those first Puritan settlers.   

OTHER VOICES OTHER VIEWS

  

Mahatma Gandhi (1869-1948) comes to mind, the preeminent Hindu leader of the Indian independence movement in British-ruled India.  He employed civil disobedience to lead India to independence and inspired movements for civil rights and freedom across the world.  The Sanskrit for Mahatma is “high souled.”

Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. took Gandhi’s model and applied it to the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s. 

The Founding Fathers of the United States of America were benefactors of the individualism, tenacity, resourcefulness of the Puritans who set the template of what became known as the difference between a European and an American. 

Sociologist Emile Durkheim (1858-1917) argued that religion defined by its separation of the sacred from the profane, was at bottom society’s worship in a set of collective representations assuring it moral cohesion.  He referred to it as a kind of “Catholic Ethic and the Spirit of Solidarity” to Weber’s Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Protestantism.

French political thinker Alexis de Tocqueville (1805-1859), and author of Democracy in America (1835), was convinced that the political stability of a country always requires a transcendental faith.  He found that in the United States with his Protestantism.  While noting America’s many society flaws, its cohesion was assured due to this fact.   

Whatever the merits or otherwise justifications for a civil religion, there is an insistence among distinguished minds that common presuppositions of any collective life, as you imply, is likely to inhibit scientific classification or taxonomic thrust. 

That said the state of the art of this relatively contentious and sometimes considered obscure branch of learning, religion in the last several decades has had a sharply up take in public consciousness and the public agenda.  How do we explain this?

COULD THIS BE THE “AXIAL AGE OF RELIGIOUS AWAKENING”?

The persistence or revival of assorted branches of Christianity is proof that faith in the divine in this Scientific Age is still surprisingly strong. 

Whatever you may think, religion still provides the spiritual springboard to the lives of the faithful, while a philosophy of disbelief informs them of the vital need for religion, even if they can dispense with god. 

Some religious observers have concluded that all major religious creeds are basically one, sharing a core of common values with liberal humanism in a post-secular age. 

Religion is thriving; religion is everywhere; religion is one, but not necessarily called “religion.”  It could as well be called “science.” 

TO BE CONTINUED