Culture in the Blender

A friend of mine sent me a link to an opinion article in the New York Times by David Brooks on the effect of the cognitive revolution on discussions about religion. He argues that the materialist-religious debates about the existence of God will be replaced by debates in which scientists whose spiritual beliefs overlap somewhat with Buddhism who challenge specific cultural and social interpretations of religion. That would be people like me. Brooks says

“In their arguments with Christopher Hitchens and Richard Dawkins, the faithful have been defending the existence of God. That was the easy debate. The real challenge is going to come from people who feel the existence of the sacred, but who think that particular religions are just cultural artifacts built on top of universal human traits. It’s going to come from scientists whose beliefs overlap a bit with Buddhism.” 

The ideas he sees having come into existence and spreading are the following:

“First, the self is not a fixed entity but a dynamic process of relationships. Second, underneath the patina of different religions, people around the world have common moral intuitions. Third, people are equipped to experience the sacred, to have moments of elevated experience when they transcend boundaries and overflow with love. Fourth, God can best be conceived as the nature one experiences at those moments, the unknowable total of all there is.”  

This rather describes my ideas about religion.

I wrote earlier about my feelings for the forest and how my Christian mother and I have no particular religious or moral conflicts because we recognize the same spiritual experiences in the other and do not want to fight over essentially philosophically different interpretations of spirituality. That sounds an awful lot like “common moral intuitions”. Another part of that is perhaps the aforementioned dynamic process of relationships and the transcending boundaries and overflowing with love. One just doesn’t condemn people to Hell right after overflowing with love. We love each other, and do not see why dogma in an ancient (and sexist) book should change that. After all, if God is unknowable, how can we judge?

The main thing that gives me dyspepsia about most religions (some Buddhist ideas excluded) is that I have no idea of what properties such a deity would have nor what it would want. If those questions could be answered by observation and experiment, they would be within the realm of science. All that is left, then, is intuition and spirituality. This doesn’t particularly help, either. If I think God is talking to me, am I divine or insane? Even if you assume that God does talk to sane people, the odds seem much in favor of insane. Charles Manson thought that God was speaking to him, too. And then there’s serious projection problems - being human and therefore acutely irrational, (if only I was a Vulcan!) how do I know I’m not just seeing or hearing what I want to see or hear? It’s something we’re very prone to do, both individually and as societies. The Bible is full of misogyny because it was written by an even more sexist society than ours. There is nothing in the Bible about the Higgs boson because the society that produced it knew nothing about bosons, or any other elemental particles for that matter. Any deity would surely transcend the particularities of any particular time or culture. And so, the existence of a deity doesn’t by any stretch of the imagination make any so-called holy texts or religions true. 

As a feminist, I have to question misogyny in religion in particular. Why would a deity care about gender? Gender and sexual reproduction is simply a gene-mixing mechanism. It makes no sense for God to value one gender more than the other. The obvious reason anyone would say so is simply power. That’s not particularly divine. I don’t think God could possibly care about what I wear or what I cover or don’t. I don’t think God cares about how many sexual partners I’ve had or will have. As a third culture kid, I have to question jingoism and chauvinism in religion. Why would God choose a people? Why would some people be more special than others, just because they have declared themselves followers of a particular named God? If God really cared about big proclamations of allegiance and loyalty, God is about as mature and self-confident as a cult leader or narcissist. That seems to be attributable to worldly religious leaders rather than God, once again.

Ultimately, I believe that we are all individually responsible for our moral choices and ideas. Following someone does not abdicate your personal responsibility, and doing what “everyone” in your culture is doing is no excuse either. You really do have to make decisions for yourself. Perhaps you decide that enough of your ideas coincide with an existing mainstream religion and that you will join that religion. That’s okay, but that still doesn’t excuse you from questioning dogma.One compelling practical argument in favor of thinking for yourself and questioning dogma is the potential increased cooperation in the world community. Traditional religions tend to be very divisive. Anyone who’s spoken to a right-wing American Christian knows what I’m talking about. Many Muslim identities and dogma are similarly divisive. In order to not, say, blow ourselves up, finding new identities that do not divide us in the name of the divine are essential.

Sam Harris talks about how to proceed with religion and spirituality, past dogma and hate, in his book The End of Faith. He suggests that irrationality is a root problem, and that spirituality is something that can be systematically explored and learned.  I agree with Harris. Being religious or spiritual does not require being flat-out dedicated to irrationality, and sticking to dogma can be very dangerous. There are existing spiritual practices that use learning and experimentation with mental states and experiences that do not require dogma or irrationality. For the sake of the world community, we should adopt them more than we have.