Photo by Hulki Okan Tabak on Unsplash

The attitude with which I believe one should approach religion and the religious community in general is one of respect and humility. As Nietzsche did, I am advocating for the creation of new values in the wake of the death of Christian values as being universal, and in doing so, I think first of respect and humility. Not unconditionally and not without proper reciprocation, but I will argue here that these are the necessary starting points for one to approach religion with intellectual honesty and proper deference to truth and the sacred.

Religion both confounds and inspires me. It’s a remarkable and beautiful aspect of human nature, something which expresses the full breadth of our imagination, which calls us to the furthest extent of our abilities, and which necessitates the most rigorous application of our faculties. And yet on a day to day basis I find myself more angry about it than anything, angry about the arrogance displayed on all sides of every debate and about the hypocrisy and the rejection of pluralism and empirical truth when ideas of the infinite must necessarily be inclusive of such things. And I feel sorrow as well that many of the best ideas of religion have been appropriated and corrupted by a hegemony intent on using their power not to further human understanding but to empower themselves and control others. Both religious and secular ideas being intrinsically valuable and intrinsically human, conflict between the two seems as well to be inevitable and hopeless.

In trying to address these concerns, however futile that might be, I’ll first have to say what I think religion is. This is something I probably should have clarified in one of my earlier pieces; after all, it’s the main subject of my writing, and I don’t think I’ve ever set down exactly what I think that religion is in the first place. There are many ways to define things that all have their advantages and disadvantages. For religion, I like the “family resemblance” approach. Two members of a given extended family may both have the family’s “look” without looking much like each other. Similarly, there is no one idea that is central and foundational to all of religion. Two religions may plausibly have nothing at all in common, but may nevertheless be justly called “religion” because, on the balance, they resemble other religions in general. But some generalities can be made, and those generalities have been set forth by, among others, Rudolf Otto, William James, and Paul Tillich. Under their definitions, religion is a framework around which all thought and activity is structured. Paul Tillich called this kind of framework “ultimate concern” (Dynamics of Faith, 1956), which I like. It’s clear and to the point. But there are certain other notions that are common among religions, though not every religion exhibits all or even most of these concerns: a belief in the supernatural, a belief in a supreme being which might be called God, a belief in an afterlife, and a system of values and normative behavior, among others.

I’ve seen religions spoken of as being largely monolithic and uniform, and this is one of the first artifacts of antiquated thinking that should be retired. Every religion is a complex network of ideas that are believed to varying degrees by different people, and so a religion could be modeled as a network of relationships between people and ideas. Let’s take just a sample of some of the ideas of one particular religion. I’m going to go with Christianity because it’s the one I have the most experience with, but that’s just a matter of convenience. And I’m going to look at Christianity in a broad, thin sense just by way of demonstrating how many different possible worldviews might make up a single religion.

God exists. God created the world. Jesus of Nazareth is the son of God. Jesus Christ was crucified by the Roman government of Jerusalem. Humans exist in a default state of damnation. The default state of damnation in which humans exist is the result of the original humans having disobeyed God’s command not to eat of the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil. The crucifixion of Jesus Christ allowed a means by which people may absolve themselves of a default state of damnation through an acknowledgement of doctrine.

I could go on like this. Some of these are already combinations of multiple propositions that could be parsed out individually. It wouldn’t be at all difficult to conjure a hundred of these, and I’ll do so on request if anyone doubts me. So, let’s look at a minimal solution where there are exactly one hundred propositional beliefs that constitute Christianity and that every person either fully believes or fully rejects any given proposition. That’s two possible values per belief, for one hundred beliefs, for every Christian. Now, one might immediately object that someone who believes only one of the hundred possible Christian beliefs is not really a Christian. Fine. So let’s assume that 99% of such marginal cases don’t qualify as Christians. There will remain more possible versions of Christianity than there are atoms in the human body, and remember that this is a minimal solution. I don’t see a way in which something so complex can be rejected wholesale. Even given that some beliefs are dependent on other beliefs, I’ve never seen a successful reduction of religion or of any one religion to a few core ideas simple enough to be wholly rejected, which would then allow all dependent beliefs to be rejected as well. That said, there are certainly conflicts between many of these religious propositions and empirical observations. For example, we could add to the above list the belief that the Earth is somewhere between five and ten thousand years old. This is demonstrably false.

Observably, not every Christian is unaware of the apparent conflict between religious truths and empirical truths, and although many among those would dismiss this conflict without consideration, there are those who would rather acknowledge it and reconcile it. The works of Søren Kierkegaard and Paul Tillich, for example, are oriented around exactly this, and they demonstrate that the conflicts are not irreconcilable. Whether or not you accept their reconciliations is another matter, but they nevertheless demonstrate Christianity as a viable religion for the intellectually honest, provided one is willing to really think about what its propositions must entail. That there is an unwillingness among Christians to do this is not something I blame Christianity itself for; some have found it very much to their advantage to claim that thinking is dangerous for one’s faith and something to be avoided. I don’t find much of that in the texts, and what I do find can be safely ignored, but many Christians forgo the reading and interpretation of the Bible for themselves and instead leave that task to others. Given the authority placed in these texts, this is an act of considerable trust, one of which not all who claim the authority to interpret the texts are worthy.

There are problems with the texts, but the last thing I want is to throw them away. I haven’t found one yet that isn’t, on the balance, deeply and powerfully beautiful. One of my recent favorites is the work of the one commonly known, in the Latin alphabet, as Rumi, the 13th-century Persian poet. His Mathnawi is sometimes called “the Qur’an in Persian,” which is a remarkable compliment.

The work of real religion is bewilderment;

But not a bewilderment that drives you away

From Him, no, but bewildered like this —

Drowned and drunk with the Beloved. I:311-315, from the translation of Kabir and Camille Helminksi, The Rumi Daybook, 2012

The Mathnawi is extensive, and beyond it in Islam there is the Qur’an itself, and the Hadith (a collections of the sayings of the Prophet Muhammad beyond those that were revealed to him by God), and this is before we get into the Hindu religions and the Mahabharata, an epic poem half the length of The Wheel of Time, and that being one among hundreds of other texts, and those religions still among the myriad of history, all together more than one person could ever read in a lifetime. Provided that one reads these sacred texts either as fiction or history or poetry or spiritual allegory or anything other than purely literal metaphysics, there’s an enormous wealth of literary value to be found therein. And we have their historical and anthropological value as well; these texts have played an immensely significant role in the unfolding of history, and it is interesting and valuable to see how different people have thought of and written about God and religion over the millennia. Our religious texts are a significant and voluminous cache of data about who we are as humans, and anyone who would seek a better understanding of the world would approach this wealth of information with due deference.

And as to the religions themselves, I would no more see the world cleansed of them than I would see it cleansed of its sacred texts. As much as the texts that have inspired and shaped our religions, the religions themselves are reflections of our nature. As Daniel C. Dennett explores extensively in Breaking the Spell (2006), religion is a natural phenomenon that may have deep evolutionary origins. Religion seems to be unavoidably a part of our human nature, and as such, to extract it would necessitate some great force of tyranny against us. Better, in my view, to look at what of ourselves we can learn from it and how it can be made to work in our favor.

It seems that, on the balance, religion isn’t working very much in our favor at the present time. Violent religious extremism and various forms of religious oppression are widespread, along with a general culture of anti-intellectualism. Various thinkers arguing from the atheist position, most prominently Sam Harris, have argued that doing away with religion entirely is the best approach to solve these problems. There are three problems with that. The first is that such a thing is not at all practical or realistic. I’m entirely in favor of a more robust and universal education system, which I believe will turn people away from religious fundamentalism and zealotry on its own, but religion is too much a part of human nature to be entirely excised. My second concern is that doing away with religion would deprive us of valuable and meaningful ideas and expressions with which I believe we are capable of coexisting peacefully. Mostly, though, I think that attempting to rid the world of religion would just make the problem worse. Attacks on religion (by which I do not at all mean criticism of religion, about which more later) will isolate religious communities, which will increase their insularity and in turn amplify their radicalism.

Various empirical retorts will be likely be raised as well, and not without good reason. There are certainly some religious notions so lacking in empirical grounding that they would best be done away with, but to deny that religion, in all its complexity, is entirely devoid of truth, is to assert that we know exactly how the world is, which is arrogant and fundamentally mistaken. To assert that any one religion has an exclusive claim to truth is just as arrogant and also nonsensical: returning to the mathematical model of religion I posited earlier, which Christianity among the uncountably vast number of possible Christianities is the one that is exactly correct? If we were to say that there is one at all, then there must be nothing about it that would make all believers converge on it as the one true Christianity, because this demonstrably hasn’t happened. And so strictly as a probabilistic matter, it is almost certain that, if there is a true Christianity, no one is actually practicing it. Maybe God has some leeway in what Christianities They’ll accept, but it remains that an exclusive claim to truth is arrogance on an astronomical scale.

This is chief among the religious views that are unworthy of any degree of respect or humility. I would extend this into the realm of what might be called religious critical exceptionalism, the notion that religious ideas should be free from criticism. In The God Delusion (2006), Richard Dawkins quotes a speech by Douglas Adams in which he discusses this matter (which I’ve trimmed just a bit for length, and Dawkins has done the same, so some of the ellipses are mine and some are his):

Religion… has certain ideas at the heart of it which we call sacred or holy or whatever. What it means is, ‘Here is an idea or a notion that you’re not allowed to say anything bad about; you’re just not. Why not? – because you’re not!’ If somebody votes for a party that you don’t agree with, you’re free to argue about it as much as you like; everybody will have an argument but nobody feels aggrieved by it… But on the other hand if somebody says ‘I mustn’t move a light switch on a Saturday’, you say, ‘I respect that’… Why should it be that it’s perfectly legitimate to support the Labour party or the Conservative party, Republicans or Democrats, this model of economics versus that, Macintosh instead of Windows – but to have an opinion about how the Universe began, about who created the Universe… no, that’s holy?… We are used to not challenging religious ideas but it’s very interesting how much of a furore Richard [Dawkins] creates when he does it! Everybody gets absolutely frantic about it because you’re not allowed to say these things. Yet when you look at it rationally there is no reason why those ideas shouldn’t be as open to debate as any other, except that we have agreed somehow between us that they shouldn’t be.

Religious ideas shouldn’t be automatically rejected, but nor should they be considered off-limits for any sort of criticism. To the contrary, critical examination is a necessary component of religious respect. How much could one say that they respect an idea they’ve never properly examined? One might as well say that they have a deep and abiding respect for a book they’ve never read (and that example manifests in a very literal sense with Christians who have never read the Bible, or who have perhaps read a verse here in there but never in their proper historical or literary contexts; it can’t be said that they have any real respect for the Bible at all).

Part of the reason for religious critical exceptionalism is indoctrination. Many people believe what they believe not because they’ve reasoned their way into it through a careful and faithful reading of the text and a contextualization of that reading in terms of their empirical experience, but rather through simply having been told, repeatedly, from a young age, by trusted authority figures, that certain things are factually true, and that one cannot be Christian (Muslim, Jew, etc., but in any case a member of the desired community) or even a good person at all if one does not accept these things as true. This approach to religion is entirely unacceptable; I can barely bring myself to see it as religion at all, given the definitions I’ve posited. How can something be an ultimate concern if one has never put the whole weight of their natural faculties into thinking it through?

The work of real religion is bewilderment, but there are those who would take that away from us. Bewilderment can be an uncomfortable thing because it means uncertainty, but those who would deny us our uncertainty would deny us our humanity. The texts themselves are bewildering, confusing, ambiguous, and I think that, more often than not, the authors understood something which could only be properly expressed in terms of bewilderment but whose ambiguity is now being weaponized against us. The poets are the ones who deserve our deference, as are those who allow their thinking to be expanded by the poets’ words rather than narrowed; those interpreters who make their interpretations into doctrine deserve only our admonition.

Thanks much for reading. I hope you’ve found this piece interesting and informative. If you’ve enjoyed it, I encourage you to look at some of my other essays, and to sign up for my mailing list (form on the sidebar) so you can stay current on my latest work. And if you find my approach to philosophy and religion at all valuable, I hope that you’ll stop in at my Patreon page, which features bonus content for patrons, and that you’ll stop back by to check on my new content. I’ll be publishing new work every Friday evening. I also have a reading list, which contains links to the books I used to research this and all of my other stories. Clicking through and buying books is a great, easy way to support my work.