The Peripatetic Philosopher ponders,

Why is religion important?

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

© August 8, 2015

REFERENCE:

We are in an age that seems to have forgotten how critical religion has been in man’s journey.  A reader’s attentive query – Why is religion important – prompts me to write a brief missive or two on that question.

Sociologist and economist Max Weber and Russian political scientist and sociologist Dimitri Furman are my guides, men known for their original and pragmatic approaches to the great religions of the world.

For the past several years, the subject of religion has progressed from a casual to a compelling interest, especially the roots and relevance of early Christianity to our times.

This is the nature of my "Jesus Story" or The Search for the Real Parents of My Soul.  It commences with Jesus and the Twelve Apostles to Paul and the New Testament, which includes the four Gospels of Matthew, Mark, Luke and John, as well as the apostate Gospels of Thomas, Peter and Judas.

The curious nature of these gospels is that none of the authors is actually known, although given recognizable names.  

Biblical scholars have devoted their lives to studying scraps of text and piecing them together into something resembling a montage that helps the general reader such as yours truly.  Ergo, I take no credit for expertise in theology or eschatology, disciplines far afield to my training. I do, however, confess to being something of an autodidact. 

A READER WRITES:

I fail to understand why you feel religion is so important.

For me the only importance of religion is that it illustrates the acceptance by many people of ludicrous ideologies without submitting them to examination and questioning their reality. 

The three religions that arose out of the mid-east portray a god with the characteristics of idiots like Hitler, Stalin, and Moa.  All these men believed that they had discovered an ideology that explained everything, and that their particular ideology was the only correct one. 

These men were responsible for the deaths of millions in their pursuit of their ideology.  The god portrayed in the Old Testament has the same idiotic outlook. He destroyed humanity with the flood and committed other atrocities because he was in charge and everyone better comply with his demands. 

In the New Testament he required a human sacrifice in the form of Jesus and condemned every non believer to hell which is equivalent to the behavior of any dictator. 

Also you have written how you personally witness the ideology of apartheid in South Africa.  Such behavior continues to be currently exhibited by Al Qaida, ISIS and all the other Muslim nut groups who once again are proclaiming that they have the only answer and anyone who rejects that answer must die.

Or look at the adulation the Pope receives in St. Peter’s square as if he has the answers.  It reminds me of the unquestioning adulation of Hitler at those well documented rallies. 

Today I read in the Wall Street Journal that Hindus in India want to prevent the eating of beef because cows are sacred to them.  Religions are ideologies which originated in the past to explain the unexplainable and to control the population. 

People no longer believe in the Greek and Roman gods and call them myths, but they continue to believe that the myths of Judaism, Christianity and Islam are real. 

No one knows how the universe began or why. There are speculation and scientific theories of how it all started but no answer of why.  All our invented gods are autocrats because they were invented in a time when autocrats controlled societies. 

If a citizens of the US today were required to bow and adore their leaders like the god of the Middle East requires, we would be upset.  However, religious people find it acceptable even those who live in a democratic society. 

Paul, Augustan and many other religious pontificators are read and admired, but they all suffer from the same disease as Hitler, Stalin and Mao.  They suffer from the delusion that they know the answer and that any other answer has no validity.  There is no hope for our species because our dumb behavior is redundant.

DR. FISHER RESPONDS:

Dear Reader:

You, like all of us of European or African stock, are immigrants to this great country of the United States of America.  So it was equally true of the Pilgrims of the Puritan Christian faith who crossed the Atlantic Ocean in the Mayflower and landed the Plymouth colony in America in 1620 on what would become the State of Massachusetts.

Religion is so fundamental to the story of man that it may be useful to cover the subject in a few brief missives as to why I think this is so.  This is the first.  

For Max Weber (1864-1920) and Dimitri Furman (1943-2011), religion is the essential if not the critical linchpin to that story.

We have Max Weber's comprehensive sociology of religion, which started with the essay The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (1905). 

He continued it with the analysis of The Religion of China: Confucianism and Taoism (1915), The Religion of India (1916): The Sociology of Hinduism and Buddhism (1916) and Ancient Judaism.  It was published in 1952 thirty-two years after his death in 1920.

Weber’s sudden death prevented him from following Ancient Judaism with studies of Early Christianity and Islam.

The three main themes in these essays were the effect of religious ideas on economic activities, the relation between social stratification and religious ideas and the distinguishable characteristics of these ideas on Western Civilization.

Weber saw religion as one of the core forces in the society of man.  His goal was to find reasons for the different developmental paths of the cultures of the Occident and the Orient without judging or valuing them.

Like some of the contemporary thinkers who followed the social Darwinist paradigm, Weber wanted to explain the distinctive elements of Western Civilization primarily from an economic point of view.

In this analysis, Weber maintained that Calvinist (and more widely, Protestant) religious ideas had had a major impact on the social innovation and development of the capitalistic economic system of the West, but noted that these religious ideas were not the only factors in that development.

Other notable factors mentioned by Weber included the rationalism of scientific pursuit, merging observation with mathematics, science of scholarship with jurisprudence, rational systematization and bureaucratization of government administration with economic enterprise. 

His paradigm on bureaucracy shows how early Christianity was assimilated into the Roman culture and its bureaucratic structure by Emperor Constantine.  This gave Roman Catholicism a bureaucratic impetus early in the fourth century (305 C.E.) that assured its stability, continuity and sustainability over next twenty centuries despite many false steps.

In the end, the study of the sociology of religion, according to Weber, focused on one distinguishing part of the Western culture, the decline of beliefs in magic, or what he referred to as "disenchantment of the world" and the rapid rise of science in man’s consciousness. 

*     *     *

Russian Dmitri Yefimovich Furman studied the sociology of religion more from a political than an economic perspective.  His analysis complements rather than refutes that of Max Weber. 

He was called in The New Left Review, "Russia’s leading comparative scholar on the political systems of the post-Soviet states.”  His PhD thesis was on "Religion and Social Conflicts in USA" (1981).

In recent years, he has been editor or author of a series of studies of the former Soviet border states including the Ukraine (1997), Belarus (1998), Chechnya (1999), Azerbaijan (2001), and the Baltic States (2002).  He wrote a monograph on Kazakhstan (2004)., and dozens of separate essays and articles.  

Isolated as he was in Soviet Russia of exchange with scholars abroad, Furman once remarked that Russian thinkers of his generation had no choice but to be autodidacts, which meant they were always liable to reinvent the bicycle. 

Furman was noted by temperament as a pragmatic researcher with little interest in intellectual genealogies or engagement with parallel bodies of work.

His thesis Religion and Social Conflicts in the USA (1981) turned into a book and focused on the role of Protestantism in American history and society. It offered a detailed empirical sociology of American churches, denominations and sects in the 20th century.

This remarkable study became the hallmark of his comparative work with the emphasis on the influence of religion on the political life of society rather than the prominence of economics on religion favored by Max Weber.

Why, Furman asks, at the outset, had France known four revolutions since the 18th century, and some 15 constitutions, and the United States just one of each?

Bourgeois society in America, he argued, had from the beginning combined exceptional dynamism with extreme stability, a combination that could not be understood apart from the peculiar salience of Protestantism in its formation.

America, he claimed, included both the unfettering of a drive for knowledge and a biblical respect for the immutability of the constitution. 

Though officially church and state were separated, the reigning ideology of the nation mingled religious rituals and symbols with secular forms and themes in a promiscuous potpourri whose very lack of clear divisions or borders was permissive of continual economic and social change.

UCLA professor Perry Anderson profiles Dimitri Furman in a long essay titled “One Exceptional Figure Stood Out” in The London Review (July 30, 2015) in which he reveals the clarity and originality of Furman's scholarship.  

My next missive will be to share Furman’s analysis of religion along with appropriate references to that of Weber's as well.  In that offering, I will attempt to show why his ideas appear so compelling.  Unfortunately, it is hard to acquire information on him.  His book is currently unavailable on Amazon.com.