Why is religion necessary?
JAMES R. FISHER, JR., Ph.D.
© January 5, 2017
REFERENCE:
In my missive, “The Power of Self-Acceptance,” I referenced a reader’s candid expression of his religious faith and its central importance to his life. This is one reader’s response to the whole idea of religion with equal candor.
A READER WRITES:
In reading all this and many other things that involves religion what came to mind this morning is the idea of fake news. Fake news has been talked about recently as if it is a new phenomenon when actually it is quite an old thing. All religions claim they have the answer which they all claim as the ultimate truth.
However, in reality it is fake news that was made up by humans and proclaimed to have been dictated to them by a god. Just like today many people do not question the validity of the fake news, and today just as in the past, people killed and harassed anyone who disagreed with actions based on the fake news which is proclaimed as real.
We humans have the problem of making the same mistakes over and over again. The problem is the same in politics. It is the same merry- go- round all the time.
DR. FISHER RESPONDS:
I must confess at the outset that I’ve been
fascinated with religion all of my life.
At one point, up until I was a young man, I was a rather devout Irish
Roman Catholic, following all the tenets and dogmas, all the definitions and
disclaimers of Catholicism despite finding them less and less relevant to my
daily existence, and in fact, often inconsistent with that existence, and of
little solace to those daily demands.
As often happens when a person is caught up with “absolutes,”
which my Roman Catholicism claimed unapologetically with “the Roman Catholic
Church is the only true church established by Jesus Christ, the Son of God.”
I can still remember as a freshman at the University
of Iowa, attending my first lecture in Western
Civilization, a required core course no matter what your major, the
professor was already engaged in a vitriolic attack on Roman Catholicism as I
entered the amphitheater, the likes of which I had never heard before. I immediately dropped the course. Fortunately, with a modicum of maturity over
the next four years in university, I was able to take the course (again) my last
semester in order to graduate.
Earlier, when I was a boy in grammar school, and quite devoted to basketball, I would go to the YMCA of a Saturday and play basketball the entire day if St. Patrick’s gym was not available. My parish priest discouraged Catholic boys from going to the YMCA, why I could never understand, as I was the only one in my class who did. It was not unusual for me to defy the good Father when only a boy of nine or ten.
Clinton, Iowa had five Roman Catholic Churches along
with the same number of grammar schools, three high schools, one a
co-educational high school and two all-girls grade and high schools, one run by
the Sisters of St. Francis and the other by Sisters of the Blessed Virgin
Mary. Yet, in a small city of 33,000,
this represented only about 20 percent of school attendees as Clinton was very
much a Protestant town with the dominance of that form of Christianity. Today, Clinton has only one Catholic Church
and school in a town that has shrunk to about 27,000.
This should not be misconstrued negatively as
Clinton in my growing up years of the 1940s and 1950s was a vigorous community
of hard working people generous to a fault to those in need.
Christmas and New Year’s, Thanksgiving and Easter,
summer concerts in the park, high school football and basketball games, and high
school track meets, as well as industrial baseball games, the community
swimming pool and recreation complex, and three movie houses were our
entertainment outlets. For the adults,
there was the USO and modernistic ballroom, pageants of celebrity movie stars
coming through town, and celebrated bands performing during and immediately following
WWII.
Perhaps 80 to 90 percent of the women attended
church, while men were closer to 50 percent if not less. Religious zeal was not provocative but
observed in behavior. It was a time in
my small community that Jews, who were few, attended their synagogue or temple;
and Muslims, who were even fewer, attended their storefront mosque.
I played sports with Jews and Muslims as a boy and
never knew them as being exposed to a different culture than my own.
In fact, it wasn’t until I was in university that I discovered that they
had a slightly different culture. This
may seem incredible but true. Likewise, I had practically no acquaintance
with Negroes as Clinton had very few people of color and they kept to
themselves.
As a consequence, I was not prepared to find myself
one day working in South Africa as a young man where the 80 percent majority (Bantus
or blacks) were completely and draconically controlled by the 20 percent
minority (Afrikaner and British whites).
South Africa shattered the false idealism of my upbringing which I took
to be reality. Suddenly, those early
years of insouciant innocence clashed with the world outside my experience.
I am now in my eighties, and look back on my time
and the lessons learned, along with the heartaches felt, and realize that I
have had to constantly rebound in my life by taping my spiritual foundation,
flawed as it may be. It was not the
science and mathematics of my profession that rescued me, but the good Sisters
of St. Francis who taught me the fundamentals of resilience, and for that I am
eternally grateful.
At no time did I ever feel that the teachings of the
Catholic “Baltimore Catechism” were fake news but symbolic lessons and a guidance
system to daily life. So, St. Paul and the
Church Fathers through time have made the Jewish peasant, Jesus, the benefactor
of their theology with more than a billion souls claiming to be Christian. Jesus, as Dostoyevsky and others have pointed
out, had no idea he was creating the Gentile religion of “Christianity,” a word
he never spoke, when the Nazareth Jew was actually committed to reforming
archaic Judaism.
We don’t blame mathematicians for the absolute arrogance
of their methodology which is dependent and germane to fallible algorithms,
laws and modalities. Yet mathematics,
like religion, are inventions of man and not the equivalent of nature, but a
way of dealing with and interpreting nature.
Mathematicians, to be sure, are rigorous in the exercise of the power of
numbers, but seemingly less inclined to express the limitations of numbers much
less that of man’s genius.
It is no accident that great philosophers through
time have often first been mathematicians.
Nor is it any accident that psychology is the godchild of philosophy. Philosophy deals with ideas; religion deals
with the word; and mathematics is a language that sublimates ideas and words
into the symbols of numbers in an attempt to get the mind around to what it envisions
and experiences and can be replicated.
It is always a struggle between the concrete and the
abstract for mathematicians and philosophers.
With religion, as you correctly point out, religion deals primarily in
the abstract, or what cannot be proven in a laboratory. But does that make it “fake” news because
what it expresses cannot be held in one’s hand?
Most behavior is driven by the unconscious which has never been seen,
quantified or measured as it is as evanescent as the soul.
Religion, all religions, deal with symbols that
approximate what is man’s understanding of what is his soul, what is the mind,
and alas, what is existence. Again, it
is not a coincidence that mathematics, philosophy and psychology were all pruned
from this same ephemeral turf.
In this age of collective madness across the globe, progress
is aptly expressed in the metaphorical electronic rabbit being chased around an
eternal mindless track by the equally mindless collection of greyhounds with the
mindless collective conceit that this all has some meaning.
What tempers the mind is not ambition; nor is it
pride. It is love, and religion with all
its flaws – despite the abuse to the contrary including Islam – is about love:
love of self; love of others; love of life; love of being; and love of God, which
is the ultimate variable in the scheme of things as God includes all the other
forms of love.
If you believe in love, you cannot but believe in
God. Conversely, if you don’t believe in
God, and claim you believe in love than the test for you is a simple one: can
you look past gratuitous violence to see that this does not apply to 99 percent
of all people. If this is not possible
for you, then you may ask yourself another question: what do you believe in?
Yes, all religions are guilty of gratuitous
violence, but equally true science and mathematics are as well, but not
necessarily directly. Weapons of mass
destruction were not created in a vacuum, but through the application and tools
of science and mathematics for a humanity consumed with paranoia.
Most recently I have been reading mathematicians and
philosophers down through the ages, many of whom thought they had an absolute
lock on wisdom. This confraternity
includes Newton, Descartes, Diderot, Leibniz, Russell, Wittgenstein and
Voltaire, Locke, Berkeley, Hume, and Hamann, among others.
My conclusion is that religion is necessary to make
life worth living. If this sounds
cavalier or a cliché, so be it. In
reading these giants of Western
Civilization, I have come to realize how limited we are as a species with
an inability to see into our own hearts, and therefore to understand our human
existence. Religion can provide comfort
if not definitive answers to this inevitable conundrum. Thank you for reading this and bearing with this
old man.
Jim
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