The Peripatetic Philosopher ponders:

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