So what is religion for, anyway?

[liv]

I'm going to do something that's rare for me and talk about actual religion, rather than just community stuff. If you hate reading about that kind of thing you're very welcome to skip.

I got buttonholed by some Mormons when I was in town yesterday. I decided to be polite to them, because I wasn't in a big hurry, and because Mormon missionaries these days look like bar mitzvah boys to me, so young in their big grown-up suits and shiny shoes, I kind of took pity on them. Though in retrospect they would probably have rather talked to someone who doesn't get a kick out of driving salesmen off-script. The conversation didn't actually go very well, because every time I said anything interesting they got all flustered and returned to their scripts anyway. And perhaps I shouldn't have been polite to them after all, perhaps I should have been righteously angry about their church's homophobia, racism and execrable habit of posthumously converting Holocaust victims and other distinctly non-Mormon people. But I think those things are basically not the fault of a couple of young missionaries, and I like to set a good example to proselytizers by taking a polite, respectful interest in their religious traditions and not trying to convince them they're wrong.

Anyway one of their stock questions on discovering that I'm a theist but not a Mormon was "what do you search for from God?" I tried to answer this concisely, thinking on my feet, and without using religious jargon that wouldn't mean anything to people from a different tradition. I don't think I really succeeded, but setting myself the challenge was thought-provoking. What I actually came out with was something like: I seek to discover how God wants us to act in the world and how to treat fellow human beings who I believe are created in the divine image. This got an almost comic reaction: sage nod, platitudes about yes, I quite underst... no wait, I have no idea what you just said!

And then a friend posted (locked) about her difficulties in choosing a church, and I was primed by the conversation with the missionaries to be thinking about what religion is for. So I came up with a theory, which I'll copy over from my comment to this other discussion, because I hope it's of interest to at least the religion geeks in my circle, and I'd like to pull it apart and come up with something better:

(Using "church" here to mean a religious community that meets regularly in a fixed location, so I don't have to keep typing "church or synagogue or mosque or temple etc".) I think a successful church needs three things, and how relatively important they are will vary between individuals and over time. I'm going to call them intellectual, spiritual and pastoral domains.

Intellectual: the church should teach things that are in line with current, evidence-based understanding of the world. It should be open to scholarship, both religious and historical-critical approaches to religious texts and beliefs, and secular scholarship and scientific advances. It should have room for doubt and be open to reinterpret stuff to fit into its social context. It can't afford to ask its congregants to check their critical faculties at the door.

Spiritual: the church needs to provide a moving, uplifting emotional experience of religion. This could beautiful music or architecture, it could be a charismatic, inspiring minister / leader / preacher what have you. It could also be simply time-honoured traditions which connect to a sense of shared culture and humanity. In most cases, for a church to be successful in the spiritual domain it needs to be somewhat conservative, because the things that press people's emotional buttons are atavistic and don't work well with lots of change and innovation and not knowing what to expect every week.

Pastoral: the church needs to function as a community. Members need to feel a connection to eachother, need to be able to turn to the community in times of crisis. This has to happen without becoming an exclusive, inward-facing clique, because the church also needs a constant stream of new members with fresh ideas. There needs to be space for kindness and outreach to people who aren't part of the inner circle, either because they're new to the community or because they aren't able to commit fully or because they're going through a theological crisis.

Ideally, a community which is successful in all three domains will also have some kind of shared external goal, making the world a better place, if you will, or social action, or actually mediating a relationship between worshippers and the divine. Otherwise it's just there to be a self-perpetuating meme machine, and that can be effective in the short term but eventually people will see through it.... (Yes, all of these needs can be fulfilled outside religion, I'm well aware, but the genius of religion is that at its best, it combines all three in one institution.)

I also clarified in the comments that it's a three-legged stool metaphor, no church can concentrate purely in one domain, you do need all three to an extent, though some communities do min-max things a bit. And of course they're not completely separate, all three domains will influence eachother to a great extent. Eg a person may not be able to have a spiritual experience unless they are at least somewhat intellectually satisfied by their church's teaching, while moving, meaningful services may well be a big factor in creating a sense of community, and so on.

I was also trying to connect my shiny new theory to the ongoing discussion about how one ought to respond to members of religious traditions whose teachings are homophobic. In some ways homophobia can be seen as a serious failure in the Pastoral domain, since (obviously) it excludes people who are in any way not straight or have friends who are. But there's probably a reason for it to do with strengthening the Spiritual domain, because a church than control its members' sexuality has a very major emotional hold on them. (I should add that I think this kind of approach is emotional manipulation and therefore false religion, but that's not a very useful statement because everybody thinks that their brand of spirituality is genuine and meaningful and other approaches are false and manipulative, and atheists may well think that all religion is manipulative or laying a claim to aesthetic experiences when there's no such thing as "spirituality".)

Obviously this doesn't make it ok for a religious org to behave like this. But it's possibly the beginning of an explanation for how come some otherwise perfectly lovely people may remain loyal to homophobic religious denominations: perhaps what they're looking for from religion is more about the Spiritual than the Pastoral domain? Or perhaps I'm talking complete nonsense, that usually happens when I make up classifications on a whim!

Comments

[liv]

Hmm, thank you for answering that question. I think I would not want to ask it of a non-theist because I would expect the answer "Nothing, God doesn't exist!" But it seems like you've answered the question along the lines of, what would you like God / religion to provide, which is a perfectly reasonable interpretation.

This also gives some insight into what might be attractive about CICCU-style Evangelical Christianity. It's always seemed a bit mysterious to me that a religion I basically associate with anti-intellectual American rednecks would have such a strong following among students at elite universities.

The things you describe figure very very small as religious motivations for me; I firmly believe that purpose and meaning are something you have to create, not something that's as it were out there. Religion and theism don't really help to give me a sense of purpose, partly because I find it reasonably likely that God created a world that is (from our non-omniscient point of view anyway) purposeless and random. Likewise fear, I do fear mortality to some extent, but again, I don't think my religious views really alleviate that very much. I definitely don't fear making mistakes in the sense of holding wrong beliefs; I expect to be judged on my actions, not on how close I am to aligning myself with the Truth (and I'm not even totally convinced there is a singular, objective truth to be found.) Conversely you put beliefs, rituals and community as sort of minor side-benefits, whereas for me community is primary, with rituals and shared beliefs helping to strengthen communities.

Or do you mean fear of hellfire, as in Pascal's wager? I find myself absolutely unable to take the idea of eternal damnation seriously as a threat, so that particular line of argument from Christian missionaries is extremely ineffective for me!

[ptc24]

Literal hellfire is too silly to have any emotional resonance for me, let alone be anything that may play a part in any rational thought. However, it seems my brain is capable of coming up with ideas which have some emotional sting (mostly involving loneliness), although again, nothing that manages to reach anywhere rational. Of course, you could imagine the idea of a Cosmic Naughty Step as being silly too; and that gives a suggestion of where it might be coming from.

(Random side note; apparently Pascal didn't think you could will yourself into belief as such - more that if you went through the motions of religion, belief would follow.)

Truth, as a value (intrinsic, rather than instrumental), as a moral or quasi-moral sentiment, is interesting - I don't really have the perspective of being judged. On the one hand, contra Kant, I that think lying to a murderer who's asking you where their intended victim has gone is a good thing to do. On the other hand, it does seem important; to the extent that thinking about promoting socially useful but untrue doctrines makes me realise I'm not a utilitarian. On the other other hand, I often see it (mainly?) in terms of attempt rather than success; truthfulness and honesty rather than being right. On the fourth hand, there's a whole pile of issues to do with meaning (in the semantic sense of the word), that make the whole thing complicated; in particular one of these is speech act theory.

I think, with truth, there's a triangle, with dogmatism in one corner, uncertainty in a second corner, and postmodernism in the third. I find myself close to or on the edge between corners 1 and 2. From this point of view, the thing about CiCCU-style Christianity is that it does at least make definite comprehensible claims; it does avoid the problem of being "not even wrong" from time to time.

[liv]

Pascal was wrong in his assessment of the odds for his wager, but I think he was right about the method to follow once you've taken the wager (yes, I have read his Pensées). It's absolutely true that you can choose belief to some extent, you can follow mental and practical habits which then set up a psychological attitude. I think this is similar to falling in love; there is an involuntary element, but you can absolutely choose behaviours that enhance and sustain your feelings for the beloved, or not as the case may be. My feeling about eternal torment (and yeah, you can imagine examples more plausible than literal fire) is that there logically could be an evil or capricious deity who might punish me arbitrarily, but I have access to basically no knowledge about what such a deity might want, so there's no point trying to run my life based on not offending such a hypothetical being. I don't find any reason at all to believe that the Christian version of the great Punisher is any more likely than any other option.

I do think truth has moral value value, yeah. I mean, hey, I'm a scientist, I'm all about the empiricism. I think seeking truth is somewhat different from honesty and avoiding lying, though. On the holding opinions which reflect reality level, I think there's a whole lot we don't have access to. Not just metaphysical stuff, but I also don't believe that we can make a complete, true model of physical reality which is any less complex than reality itself. I do definitely think it's worth putting effort in to examining the evidence and making valid predictions and so on, but I don't think that using the scientific method to refine your perceptions so that you have useful expectations of what will happen next is quite the same as actually knowing The Truth. And yes, you're right about meaning as well, I know just enough about the field to know it's not that simple.

On the not-lying side, I am not a Kantian absolutist about it either, but it's still a value and a goal I strive for. Sometimes it comes into conflict with other values, such as protecting people from getting murdered, in your example! But I think statements about God are mostly unknowable rather than true or false, though that in itself is a kind of meta-claim about the nature of God.

And that probably does make me sound like I'm in the post-modern or not even wrong corner of your triangle. Basically I think truth (or humanly knowable truth, anyway, I'm not willing to commit to statements about reality as it actually is) is contextual rather than absolute.