On the Necessity of a Creation Myth
One of the accusations made against Socrates at the trial which ultimately condemned him to death was for heresy. He was said to have corrupted the youth into believing in and following gods that were not sanctioned by whatever governmental authority existed in Athens at that time. His response to this, in the Apology, was to concede that while he was almost certainly incapable of understanding deeper religious truths, he was better than his accusers, who were all equally as incapable as he was, but refused to admit it to themselves.
You know nothing, Jon Snow.
There's been an interesting evolution of my thoughts on this blog over the past few years. The posts haven't been exclusively about religion, and I haven't documented every thought about religion I've had in these few years, but peppered throughout, you can see the gradation from casual Christian believer who feels the faith has some utility, to cautious skeptic, to rabid non-believer who feels that all religion is based on unsubstansiated superstitions and that every individual (where civically permitted) is best served by abandoning all forms of faith.
I point out the progression here for a couple of reasons: one, to affirm to myself that my life is anything but stagnant. I often feel stagnant, like my life isn't progressing, and this causes me to have anxiety about the future. But when I look back, with an honest perspective, I can see that I've very clearly made a lot of progress. (Much of this has been driven by the very anxiety that stems from the feeling that I'm not progressing, and my reactive efforts to change that. More on this later.)
The second, and more important reason to the reader, is to point out that I wasn't born arrogant and faithless, and I don't insiduously assert my non-belief because I'm not open to changing my mind about such matters. So I'll start by defending the statement that a person is best served by leaving their faith. I'll end on a note that has far less certainty attached to it: that I don't know if a society is best served by abandoning faith. I speak what I know, as we all should, but we should all speak with curiosity about what we don't know, and I serve this latter goal further along in this post.
"Verily I say unto you, Except ye be converted, and become as little children, ye shall not enter into the kingdom of heaven." -Matthew 18:3 This seems to be the same proscription required to attain the Buddhist nirvana, which advocates the emptying of the self with the ultimate goal of quietude. The message is the same: if you would be content, turn off your critical reasoning faculties and accept reality as it is handed to you, ostensibly by ecclesiastical authorities.
The original reason I was drawn back into an exploration of faith was a drive for self-improvement, and the hope to quell the turmoil of my own inner anxieties. It was effective in this regard, for a time. I'll sometimes find myself mentally drifting to nostalgia for the days when I could just go to a certain building on a Sunday and immediately feel a kinship with all inside. Religiosity comes with a built-in social network, and its mindless propitiations do have the effect of reducing stress.
If religion does offer solace, if it does offer peace of mind, then why on earth should anyone abandon such a thing? Indeed, I found myself repelled away from religion at precisely the point in my life when I could have used it the most: my social network has just dissolved, I left the community that I had lived in for years, I learned I couldn't count on my family for the support I needed, and I moved to a new city where I didn't know a soul. In the wake of this, I ended up with a melancholy temperament and fragile personality that precluded me from being able to reach out and connect with other human beings. This was an inconvenient point in my life to have become disillusioned with faith; if ever I needed something like church, this would have been the time.
In the Coen brothers' film A Serious Man, a wise and elusive old rabbi is speaking in confidence to a young man after his bar mitzvah, to impart life advice to him, in a brief and singular encounter. He quotes, in part, from an old Jefferson Airplane song, in order to make a rhetorical point about coming of age: "'When the truth is found to be lies, and all the joy within you dies'...what then?"
There's an axiomatic notion that our goal in life should be to eliminate all suffering. This is the aim of Buddhism, where the ultimate goal is on attaining nirvana. On my morning commute to work on the train into Silicon Valley, I see a quote spraypainted on the side of an apartment building just south of San Francisco: "The point of life is to be happy." -The Dalai Lama. Sounds good, but he typically says this as part of a broader public relations campaign to get Western support for kicking communist China out of Tibetan regions and establishing Tibetan sovereignty. You don't sound happy, Mr. Lama. It's a mildly controversial point, but most of us in the Western world should be thankful that Martin Luther did not humble himself and become as a little child, lest we all still be purchasing salvation via indulgences from the Catholic church.
It's almost too easy to point to the fact that those who advocate happiness and love as the ultimate aims in life tend to have ulterior motives that subvert the well-being of those who are supposed to passively accept their fate and be content. But that doesn't mean I'm wrong.
What I try to embrace now is the very struggle we are told to eschew. I want the anxiety that comes with being alive, and being uncertain of how things are going to turn out. No one knows the future, either my own or that of the world at large, and so there's no reason to be led into any kind of false solace that everything is simply going to work out.
Is the corollary of this point true? If we can't count on everything being okay, can we count on everything falling apart? There's more probability that this will happen than everything working out. Our lives as humans are not closed systems, and we are not little bundles of air molecules subject to thermodynamics, but life in general does have a tendency to disorder. Remove all exertion and effort, and you most likely will cease to be employed in the near future.
Where these kinds of arguments so often fail is that they set themselves up as binary propositions, instead of establishing the nature of the gradient. Should the government allocate $0 annually on social spending, or its entire fiscal budget? Few advocate either extreme, but the public discourse centers on this either/or mentality, and not on the question of what the appropriate level of social spending should be. It's a matter of degree given a set of desired outcomes, not if.
And so it is with anxiety. Where religious practice almost certainly helps is to lessen the amount of suffering an individual feels so that it is not completely debilitating. Too much tension in your life and you can't get on with accomplishing anything at all. But I stop short of saying that complete and utter capitulation to a religious ideology, like total social spending, is a good idea. It's all a matter of degree. (And, let's not forget, religious devotion is not the only means available to us to lessen stress in our lives.)
I have a devoutly religious uncle who, as scripture advocates, has an ambition to "make disciples of all nations". Apart from this one character flaw, he is a hard-working man who is devoted to his wife and family, a contributing member of his community, and a general advocate for people not being jerks to one another. In his efforts to inculcate me with his stripe of Christianity, he offered a very salient point: "Becoming a Christian isn't supposed to make your life easier; if you're doing it correctly, then it will make your life harder." This is a brutally honest admission that I respect, and, to the extent that I understand what it means to "correctly" be a Christian, it's a point I agree with. Was being a child really all that easy for any of us, when we reflect on our experiences honestly?
My summary point was abrasively screeched out by Dexter Holland in a song by the Offspring in the 1990's: "If you take home anything, let it be your will to think."
I have argued that religious faith is not a prerequisite for human beings to act virtuously. I believe that this applies to most individuals, myself included. It was liberating to realize that I was capable of doing good things for myself and others (and had been for years) without a close daily study of any religious doctrine. I say "most individuals" because some people are sociopathic, meaning that they only abide by a morality to the extent that they feel they have something directly to gain from it, and they will ignore any morality which is an obstacle to them getting something they want. It's an interesting question to ask, to which I do not know the answer: how much, if at all, does religion help these ethically-bankrupt individuals?
Where I have less certainty is at the sociological level. As Agent Kay said in Men in Black: a person is smart; people are stupid. Group dynamics do have a tendency to subvert individual benevolence.
I can venture outside myself and say that we find people acting well towards one another because of something that has generally come to be called "the golden rule". It's found in Confucius's Analects, in Jewish law, and in the Beatitudes of the Nazarene. Loosely stated, it simply admonishes one to not do to others what you would not want done to yourself. Almost every single society we have found on earth has some form of this rule. It is found in civilizations that have never heard of any of the major religions, or in those that reject all of them. It's the closest thing that we, as humans, can claim as a universal moral truth.
Still, this leaves a gnawing question, because in practice, human beings do not apply it universally. Who should you treat as yourself? Your own tribe. You do not do evil to your fellow Israelites. You do not do evil to your fellow Americans. You do not do evil to your fellow Tibetans. But this courtesy does not extend to tribes outside of your own, with whom you are competing for limited resources. To respectively extend the preceding examples: you can do evil to the Moabites, to the Iranians, and to the Chinese.
So here's the question: how do we know who, among our fellow humans, we should apply the golden rule to?
There is another element of cultural identity that, like the golden rule, is found in just about every single society that has ever existed, from which we have written records: the creation story. Of the literally thousands of different religions that have ever been created by humans, they all have this one element. There is nothing, and then the world and the people in it, are conceived of by a god or set of gods. This is the cornerstone of any cultural identity. We are who we are, and we are the same, because we share ancestors who were all created together and then begat us.
The trope of the creation myth is so universal, in fact, that I believe it to be an absolutely critical element of any society. Without this glue, there doesn't seem to be anything that allows disparate families to come together and establish a society that strives for the common good. It doesn't necessarily have to come from religion; when political pundits in a secular nation like the United States make appeals to what the founding fathers would have wanted, what is this but an appeal to a set of supposedly higher moral creators, or at the very least the ideology espoused by these creators?
We need to know where we come from, and who we belong with, and the hippie-esque idea from genetics that we all share kinship with all other humans on the planet has yet to fully take root and flourish in any society. I'd cautiously suggest that tribalism will never allow it to.
As an aside, Christianity is one of the only religions that has ever existed that does not have its own creation myth. If it's a controversial notion that the first groups of people who called themselves "Christians" were really just sects of Jewish individuals, one need only consider the Genesis creation myth. This served that very purpose in its early days, because Christians were really some varietal of Jew, and so there was no need to invent one. And when a few generations later Christianity ended up splitting completely from its Jewish roots, no one bothered to invent one because they could simply appropriate the Jewish one as their own.
A secular nation was established on this planet about 200 years ago; astonishingly, and contrary to all historical precedent, no religion or worship of a divinely-appointed monarch was mandated as part of its citizenship. At this, the humans living there did not immediately take to tossing off the shackles of religion, and instead continued as they always had. Part of this was likely due to cultural stigma; it has only recently become acceptable to admit openly that you don't believe in any particular religion, and in many circles it still remains a taboo that carries the risk of social shunning and shaming. It is against the spirit of the United States to forbid religion, and as long as this is the case, human beings will almost certainly go on believing, even as some of their fellow humans argue that they shouldn't.
The question remains, why do we have a tendency to be religious, even when not mandated by political or legal authorities? This doesn't speak to religion's veracity, because there is never consensus and the various religious groups don't agree with one another. But it's a question that cannot be easily dismissed. Imagine that the social and cultural acceptance of declaring oneself an atheist continues into the future, and secularism continues to spread as it has over the past few decades. What if we, hypothetically, reach a point where the situation is reversed, namely, that the majority of people are non-believers and it's a cultural stigma to call oneself a Christian? What happens to society then?
Secularism, defined as the absence of religious belief, has come up short in offering non-believers acceptable alternative solutions to the problems redressed by religion. People long for the community provided by church. Non-believers will send their children to faith-based schools, even when alternatives are available, because they teach a system of living and belonging in society that hasn't been matched outside religious schools. We all crave meaning and purpose to things, and religions have the irresistable attribute of making our own meager existence the central focus of the cosmos. The disappearance of religion from the United States will not happen overnight, and certainly not in my lifetime, if it ever happens at all.
There would not, as is so frequently speculated, be a complete and utter breakdown of social fabric and mores that guide good behavior, and civilization would not unravel without other contributing factors. My question is more about the vacuum that this development leaves behind. If human beings have always used some form of religious faith to bind themselves with other humans, then what other functions does it serve at the level of society? If our religious traditions and beliefs are swept into the closet, what creeps in and fills the void? Does anything? Does anything need to?
There are speculative answers to this question that come from evolutionary psychology, the social sciences, philosophers, and so on, but like most of the answers from these fields, they are based on data that is very difficult to gather without innate bias or flaws, and any conclusions are near impossible to verify experimentally.
There is a cognitive scientist named Donald D. Hoffman currently making the argument that given two otherwise identical organisms occupying the same niche, where one perceives reality with complete accuracy, and the other perceives reality with flaws that optimize for reproductive fitness, the latter will always outcompete the former and drive its clear-eyed counterpart to extinction. I'm not sold on this argument yet, and it might be irresponsible to extend this conclusion to religious belief...but maybe religious believers, for all their logical mistakes, will always outcompete the secular positivists in the struggle to reproduce. Perhaps delusion is favorably Darwinian.
What I do reject, without hestitation, is the conclusion that because we don't know what the effect of the disappearance of religion might be on society at large, we should therefore cling unwaveringly to our existing religious ideologies. Like Socrates, I'm more than happy to corrupt the youth and encourage them to heresy, to throw off the shackles of faith, to embrace free thought, to confront the stressful uncertainty of the future, and to go into death not knowing what, if anything, is on the other side. And to those religious believers who might tell me that I'm acting carelessly, because I don't know what the consequences might be, I can offer Socrates' same rejoinder and say that while I may be incapable of knowing, you are just as incapable and, in the embrace of willful ignorance, you don't know either.
You know nothing, Jon Snow.
There's been an interesting evolution of my thoughts on this blog over the past few years. The posts haven't been exclusively about religion, and I haven't documented every thought about religion I've had in these few years, but peppered throughout, you can see the gradation from casual Christian believer who feels the faith has some utility, to cautious skeptic, to rabid non-believer who feels that all religion is based on unsubstansiated superstitions and that every individual (where civically permitted) is best served by abandoning all forms of faith.
I point out the progression here for a couple of reasons: one, to affirm to myself that my life is anything but stagnant. I often feel stagnant, like my life isn't progressing, and this causes me to have anxiety about the future. But when I look back, with an honest perspective, I can see that I've very clearly made a lot of progress. (Much of this has been driven by the very anxiety that stems from the feeling that I'm not progressing, and my reactive efforts to change that. More on this later.)
The second, and more important reason to the reader, is to point out that I wasn't born arrogant and faithless, and I don't insiduously assert my non-belief because I'm not open to changing my mind about such matters. So I'll start by defending the statement that a person is best served by leaving their faith. I'll end on a note that has far less certainty attached to it: that I don't know if a society is best served by abandoning faith. I speak what I know, as we all should, but we should all speak with curiosity about what we don't know, and I serve this latter goal further along in this post.
"Verily I say unto you, Except ye be converted, and become as little children, ye shall not enter into the kingdom of heaven." -Matthew 18:3 This seems to be the same proscription required to attain the Buddhist nirvana, which advocates the emptying of the self with the ultimate goal of quietude. The message is the same: if you would be content, turn off your critical reasoning faculties and accept reality as it is handed to you, ostensibly by ecclesiastical authorities.
The original reason I was drawn back into an exploration of faith was a drive for self-improvement, and the hope to quell the turmoil of my own inner anxieties. It was effective in this regard, for a time. I'll sometimes find myself mentally drifting to nostalgia for the days when I could just go to a certain building on a Sunday and immediately feel a kinship with all inside. Religiosity comes with a built-in social network, and its mindless propitiations do have the effect of reducing stress.
If religion does offer solace, if it does offer peace of mind, then why on earth should anyone abandon such a thing? Indeed, I found myself repelled away from religion at precisely the point in my life when I could have used it the most: my social network has just dissolved, I left the community that I had lived in for years, I learned I couldn't count on my family for the support I needed, and I moved to a new city where I didn't know a soul. In the wake of this, I ended up with a melancholy temperament and fragile personality that precluded me from being able to reach out and connect with other human beings. This was an inconvenient point in my life to have become disillusioned with faith; if ever I needed something like church, this would have been the time.
In the Coen brothers' film A Serious Man, a wise and elusive old rabbi is speaking in confidence to a young man after his bar mitzvah, to impart life advice to him, in a brief and singular encounter. He quotes, in part, from an old Jefferson Airplane song, in order to make a rhetorical point about coming of age: "'When the truth is found to be lies, and all the joy within you dies'...what then?"
There's an axiomatic notion that our goal in life should be to eliminate all suffering. This is the aim of Buddhism, where the ultimate goal is on attaining nirvana. On my morning commute to work on the train into Silicon Valley, I see a quote spraypainted on the side of an apartment building just south of San Francisco: "The point of life is to be happy." -The Dalai Lama. Sounds good, but he typically says this as part of a broader public relations campaign to get Western support for kicking communist China out of Tibetan regions and establishing Tibetan sovereignty. You don't sound happy, Mr. Lama. It's a mildly controversial point, but most of us in the Western world should be thankful that Martin Luther did not humble himself and become as a little child, lest we all still be purchasing salvation via indulgences from the Catholic church.
It's almost too easy to point to the fact that those who advocate happiness and love as the ultimate aims in life tend to have ulterior motives that subvert the well-being of those who are supposed to passively accept their fate and be content. But that doesn't mean I'm wrong.
What I try to embrace now is the very struggle we are told to eschew. I want the anxiety that comes with being alive, and being uncertain of how things are going to turn out. No one knows the future, either my own or that of the world at large, and so there's no reason to be led into any kind of false solace that everything is simply going to work out.
Is the corollary of this point true? If we can't count on everything being okay, can we count on everything falling apart? There's more probability that this will happen than everything working out. Our lives as humans are not closed systems, and we are not little bundles of air molecules subject to thermodynamics, but life in general does have a tendency to disorder. Remove all exertion and effort, and you most likely will cease to be employed in the near future.
Where these kinds of arguments so often fail is that they set themselves up as binary propositions, instead of establishing the nature of the gradient. Should the government allocate $0 annually on social spending, or its entire fiscal budget? Few advocate either extreme, but the public discourse centers on this either/or mentality, and not on the question of what the appropriate level of social spending should be. It's a matter of degree given a set of desired outcomes, not if.
And so it is with anxiety. Where religious practice almost certainly helps is to lessen the amount of suffering an individual feels so that it is not completely debilitating. Too much tension in your life and you can't get on with accomplishing anything at all. But I stop short of saying that complete and utter capitulation to a religious ideology, like total social spending, is a good idea. It's all a matter of degree. (And, let's not forget, religious devotion is not the only means available to us to lessen stress in our lives.)
I have a devoutly religious uncle who, as scripture advocates, has an ambition to "make disciples of all nations". Apart from this one character flaw, he is a hard-working man who is devoted to his wife and family, a contributing member of his community, and a general advocate for people not being jerks to one another. In his efforts to inculcate me with his stripe of Christianity, he offered a very salient point: "Becoming a Christian isn't supposed to make your life easier; if you're doing it correctly, then it will make your life harder." This is a brutally honest admission that I respect, and, to the extent that I understand what it means to "correctly" be a Christian, it's a point I agree with. Was being a child really all that easy for any of us, when we reflect on our experiences honestly?
My summary point was abrasively screeched out by Dexter Holland in a song by the Offspring in the 1990's: "If you take home anything, let it be your will to think."
I have argued that religious faith is not a prerequisite for human beings to act virtuously. I believe that this applies to most individuals, myself included. It was liberating to realize that I was capable of doing good things for myself and others (and had been for years) without a close daily study of any religious doctrine. I say "most individuals" because some people are sociopathic, meaning that they only abide by a morality to the extent that they feel they have something directly to gain from it, and they will ignore any morality which is an obstacle to them getting something they want. It's an interesting question to ask, to which I do not know the answer: how much, if at all, does religion help these ethically-bankrupt individuals?
Where I have less certainty is at the sociological level. As Agent Kay said in Men in Black: a person is smart; people are stupid. Group dynamics do have a tendency to subvert individual benevolence.
I can venture outside myself and say that we find people acting well towards one another because of something that has generally come to be called "the golden rule". It's found in Confucius's Analects, in Jewish law, and in the Beatitudes of the Nazarene. Loosely stated, it simply admonishes one to not do to others what you would not want done to yourself. Almost every single society we have found on earth has some form of this rule. It is found in civilizations that have never heard of any of the major religions, or in those that reject all of them. It's the closest thing that we, as humans, can claim as a universal moral truth.
Still, this leaves a gnawing question, because in practice, human beings do not apply it universally. Who should you treat as yourself? Your own tribe. You do not do evil to your fellow Israelites. You do not do evil to your fellow Americans. You do not do evil to your fellow Tibetans. But this courtesy does not extend to tribes outside of your own, with whom you are competing for limited resources. To respectively extend the preceding examples: you can do evil to the Moabites, to the Iranians, and to the Chinese.
So here's the question: how do we know who, among our fellow humans, we should apply the golden rule to?
There is another element of cultural identity that, like the golden rule, is found in just about every single society that has ever existed, from which we have written records: the creation story. Of the literally thousands of different religions that have ever been created by humans, they all have this one element. There is nothing, and then the world and the people in it, are conceived of by a god or set of gods. This is the cornerstone of any cultural identity. We are who we are, and we are the same, because we share ancestors who were all created together and then begat us.
The trope of the creation myth is so universal, in fact, that I believe it to be an absolutely critical element of any society. Without this glue, there doesn't seem to be anything that allows disparate families to come together and establish a society that strives for the common good. It doesn't necessarily have to come from religion; when political pundits in a secular nation like the United States make appeals to what the founding fathers would have wanted, what is this but an appeal to a set of supposedly higher moral creators, or at the very least the ideology espoused by these creators?
We need to know where we come from, and who we belong with, and the hippie-esque idea from genetics that we all share kinship with all other humans on the planet has yet to fully take root and flourish in any society. I'd cautiously suggest that tribalism will never allow it to.
As an aside, Christianity is one of the only religions that has ever existed that does not have its own creation myth. If it's a controversial notion that the first groups of people who called themselves "Christians" were really just sects of Jewish individuals, one need only consider the Genesis creation myth. This served that very purpose in its early days, because Christians were really some varietal of Jew, and so there was no need to invent one. And when a few generations later Christianity ended up splitting completely from its Jewish roots, no one bothered to invent one because they could simply appropriate the Jewish one as their own.
A secular nation was established on this planet about 200 years ago; astonishingly, and contrary to all historical precedent, no religion or worship of a divinely-appointed monarch was mandated as part of its citizenship. At this, the humans living there did not immediately take to tossing off the shackles of religion, and instead continued as they always had. Part of this was likely due to cultural stigma; it has only recently become acceptable to admit openly that you don't believe in any particular religion, and in many circles it still remains a taboo that carries the risk of social shunning and shaming. It is against the spirit of the United States to forbid religion, and as long as this is the case, human beings will almost certainly go on believing, even as some of their fellow humans argue that they shouldn't.
The question remains, why do we have a tendency to be religious, even when not mandated by political or legal authorities? This doesn't speak to religion's veracity, because there is never consensus and the various religious groups don't agree with one another. But it's a question that cannot be easily dismissed. Imagine that the social and cultural acceptance of declaring oneself an atheist continues into the future, and secularism continues to spread as it has over the past few decades. What if we, hypothetically, reach a point where the situation is reversed, namely, that the majority of people are non-believers and it's a cultural stigma to call oneself a Christian? What happens to society then?
Secularism, defined as the absence of religious belief, has come up short in offering non-believers acceptable alternative solutions to the problems redressed by religion. People long for the community provided by church. Non-believers will send their children to faith-based schools, even when alternatives are available, because they teach a system of living and belonging in society that hasn't been matched outside religious schools. We all crave meaning and purpose to things, and religions have the irresistable attribute of making our own meager existence the central focus of the cosmos. The disappearance of religion from the United States will not happen overnight, and certainly not in my lifetime, if it ever happens at all.
There would not, as is so frequently speculated, be a complete and utter breakdown of social fabric and mores that guide good behavior, and civilization would not unravel without other contributing factors. My question is more about the vacuum that this development leaves behind. If human beings have always used some form of religious faith to bind themselves with other humans, then what other functions does it serve at the level of society? If our religious traditions and beliefs are swept into the closet, what creeps in and fills the void? Does anything? Does anything need to?
There are speculative answers to this question that come from evolutionary psychology, the social sciences, philosophers, and so on, but like most of the answers from these fields, they are based on data that is very difficult to gather without innate bias or flaws, and any conclusions are near impossible to verify experimentally.
There is a cognitive scientist named Donald D. Hoffman currently making the argument that given two otherwise identical organisms occupying the same niche, where one perceives reality with complete accuracy, and the other perceives reality with flaws that optimize for reproductive fitness, the latter will always outcompete the former and drive its clear-eyed counterpart to extinction. I'm not sold on this argument yet, and it might be irresponsible to extend this conclusion to religious belief...but maybe religious believers, for all their logical mistakes, will always outcompete the secular positivists in the struggle to reproduce. Perhaps delusion is favorably Darwinian.
What I do reject, without hestitation, is the conclusion that because we don't know what the effect of the disappearance of religion might be on society at large, we should therefore cling unwaveringly to our existing religious ideologies. Like Socrates, I'm more than happy to corrupt the youth and encourage them to heresy, to throw off the shackles of faith, to embrace free thought, to confront the stressful uncertainty of the future, and to go into death not knowing what, if anything, is on the other side. And to those religious believers who might tell me that I'm acting carelessly, because I don't know what the consequences might be, I can offer Socrates' same rejoinder and say that while I may be incapable of knowing, you are just as incapable and, in the embrace of willful ignorance, you don't know either.