Do we?

need religion?

26 responses to “Do we?”

  1. PB says:

    This was facinating – my favorite part was their little inside, egghead sort of humor: “who would want live in a Lutheran principality in the 30 yr war??” chuckle, chuckle. Um, no? yes? But the discussion itself was important because it is so much subtler than a yes god, no god debate. What are the effects of religion vs. whether or not it is right or wrong for cosmic reasons. thank you lane.

  2. Dave says:

    I don’t watch videos at work (standards!), so I haven’t seen the Bloggingheads. I have to say that discussions of this sort (if I’m guessing right about what they talk about) always weird me out a bit. “Do we need religion?” Well, it should be clear that not all individuals, at least, need religion — plenty of people live happy, moral lives without it. Other people do seem to need religion for various reasons.

    So the question leans on the “we” a lot. Does society need religion? Well, what for? There’s usually some gesture at the idea that religion is the only way to maintain order — maybe by teaching and enforcing a basic morality among people who are too simple to deliberate and act morally on their own. This is where I get icked out: the people having this discussion don’t need religion, it’s the common people who are too stupid to join the discussion who need it. It’s an elite conversation about whether religion is an effective and necessary form of social control. (Straussian neocons say yes, btw.) It’s also a conversation that seems to have nothing much to do with the “truth” of religion as we usually think of it: maybe I can keep the peace better if I impose Catholicism on my subjects, e.g., but what does that have to do with Catholicism as the body of Christ and a vehicle for the salvation of humanity?

  3. Rogan says:

    I prefer dewy religion.

  4. lane says:

    i like liberal protestant religion where the pastor admits that it’s all a little silly. the architecture is amazing, (various secret passage ways up to bell towers and such.) and the coffee and cake at the end is nice.

  5. Dave says:

    But that’s not the question, lane.

  6. lane says:

    From Dave Hickey’s Revisions #1 (Pagans) ” So let’s just admit that all the world’s major religions are well past thier productive prime in their ability to build, create and civilize. Today, they are malignant, meddling tribes in the fury of their decline. For individual Americans, religion is just a lifestyle decision whose occasion rarely rises to the metaphysical. What do your friends do? Is there anything else to do? . . . Is Christian, Jewish, Islamic, Sikh, Hindu or Buddhist virtue really superior to common decency, great art, great sex and good business? You have a choice. The options are out there.”

    Sorry Dave I was being cheeky. The function of religion today is to hold community. And this is fine, and perhaps essential to human well-being. What is NOT essential is the story of Religion. This dude did this thing and bamo! He’s (always a he, with all due respect to the Virgin Mother) PERFECT! And now you should strive for that too.

    Why? . . . deafening silence . . . (because it’s fun to hang out with your friends that are similarly striving?) That’s ALL religion is, community.

  7. PB says:

    OK lane, I have to put in my two cents.

    “What is NOT essential is the story of Religion”

    I would argue that this may be the one thing we will never lose. If by the story of religion you mean the liturgy or commandments or taboos or structure or the “this is bad for everyone” then maybe. But the stories of human belief, the stories of how things came to be, the stories of people who worked in and around their belief in love and war and community, I am with Joseph Campbell on this point. We not only need these stories, we cannot stop them. They are how humans make sense of things. The cobbled and historically magical explanations and interactions with what we don’t understand transcends a specific religion and yet encompasses all religion. That is the pull, asking why and having some crazy supernatural comforting scary answer. You can say we don’t need it – but I say just try and stop it. You can’t toss something away without a replacement. We can call it mythology but even the mythologies give us some order to the chaos.

    I’m just sayin’

  8. lane says:

    i knew you’d take that line PB. your such a sucker for this crap. fine, tell them as stories, NOT religion. Not THE TRUTH.

    In fact make up some new stories. The 16 or so handed down to us are pretty dull.

    OR start talking about the real truth.

    And not to drift to far in to “that” but “that” is exactly what you get when people get TOO attached to “their” stories. FIne, “the seagulls ate all the fuckin’ crickets” who really gives a shit.

    Dave and I were talking about this once and he remarked “God talking about the bible is so boring. Can’t we talk about something else? Like . . . Toni Morrison? . . . anything!”

    The problem is, in the country as soon as you say religion, most people think Jesus (or Abraham anyway) But really, think about Abraham. Almost killing your son “because god told you to?”

    Pandora, this is a stupid story.

  9. lane says:

    and that should be “God! Talking about the . . .”

  10. lane says:

    And one last thing PB, “They are how humans make sense of things. ” Yeah in the past. But we used to practice slavery and denied women the vote.

    Wouldn’t it be great if by the 22nd Century we could come up with something else?

  11. PB says:

    Lane – if I was there I would whack you in the head with your paintbrush.

    For one thing – Toni Morrison echoes the Bible in all her work. All great western literature speaks to those old stories. It is part of our civilization’s collective consciousness. So to abandon at least a walking knowledge of these “stupid” stories is to lose the richness of our language and culture. And if you do dump the Bible – why not the Greek Myths, the Norse legends, the Native American stories, the Mandela, why have books? why tell your son over and over about the day he was born and how you felt and how the whole world changed because he joined it. And what in the hell is a 22nd century story anyway – there are only about 16 stories – we just dress them in different outfits.

    Yep – I am a sucker – hook line and sinker – because guess what – truth is the story. My truth, your truth, the pioneer who believed the seagulls ate the crickets truth. Why is the truth of one story more or less than another. If someone believed at one time that the world was born on the back of a great turtle – why is that any less true that a bunch of stars that exploded? Are we so arrogant now that we can say our stories, our newfangled existence is the only one worth talking about? Because that is stupid. We justify just as much intolerance and stupidity with our modern stories as people did in past times. Only now we broadcast it across more technology than a tablet or a scroll.

    My only poiint is that religion can be community. Religion can be law. Religion can be ritual.
    But I think the enduring link from culture to culture is the need to explain and understand. It is the hope that by sharing your expereince you will save or enlighten another. What you are proposing is emotional and narrative isolation – the next story is always more meaningful than the one before. Give me the damn crickets. I know what it feels like to want so badly for your “crops” to be saved that a few hungry birds seem sent from God. I know what it feels like to be asked to do something that feels wrong and not knowing what to do about it. In this way I connect with the pioneer or I connect with Abraham. I become part of the human race.

    And the slavery and vote thing – please – stories, religion, are like anything else, they can be used for good or bad – to silence our bad stories is to silence our good – it is the same voice. Do you honestly propose if we stop justifying ourselves with one set of bad stories we will stop being bad? We will simply create another set of justifying dogma.

    Don’t get me wrong – religion right now asks people to hate and blow themselves up or other poeple up in defense of that hate. All I am saying is that you can toss big words around all day long – TRUTH, RELIGION – but what is truth really? It is the consistent experience of a thing that leads us to believe that it will always be that way. It is the world filtered through the human intellect. It is in the end, a story. And lot’s of stories strung together become a loose religion. You should read Gaiman’s American Gods.

  12. PB says:

    Does my threat of wacking make me a crusading fanatic?

  13. lane says:

    “We justify just as much intolerance and stupidity with our modern stories as people did in past times.”

    Really?

  14. Dave says:

    Pandora — What if we just read Toni Morrison (after all taking a Bible as Lit class so we could get her allusions) and skipped the churches, prayers, rituals, sermons, tithes and offerings, sinning, repentance, and all the rest? I agree we need stories. Do we need religion to have stories?

  15. PB says:

    No. I think what I am trying to say is that religion – or anciently myth and tribal legends – is a crucial vehicle or forum for the human story the same way that it can be a vehicle or forum to eat casseroles together or take care of the sick. I do not for a second think that it is the only way. But I fear that by dismissing “truth” or experience that does not feel true to us as irrelevant or even stupid that we risk losing part of our collective societal story. Sermons and prayers can be motivating and uplifting – they can also be damaging and marginalizing. Rituals can connect our physical and spiritual selves or they can constrict and cause shame. Tithes and offerings can build wells in guatamala and they can fund campaigns of hate in CA. I get it – I have walked away from not one but two monolithic religious organizations in my life – but I think to cast all religion and religious text and practice as an arcane collection of nonsense is to throw the baby out with the bathwater. There is something to our belief, to our spiritual wanderings that is truth. I don’t have the intellectual ammunition to support it – just belief of my own that any human narrative must honor all parts of itself – the head, the gut and that intangible something that flows with “the river.”

    We can agree at this point to disagree – I am the softy jesus freak of TGW, I know. But I sit with the masses and smoke opium on this one.

  16. Hey PB, I’m just pushin’ buttons here. Let me give you my interpretation of your story.

    You actually “walked away” from the mother church of Christianity (with its own big problems) and joined a heretical cult.

    As I said earlier, the progressive Protestant Church is different than both of these. Based on what you’ve expressed here, you might find your spiritual longings more fully met within this body of “the faithful.”

    Might I still encourage you to formally resign from your last religious affiliation and then, hey, believe whatever you want. Go to church (for Chrissakes!) At least then you’d be going to extend YOUR story, rather than someone else’s.

  17. Dave says:

    16: That’s better — a full-throated defense of religion in its many forms, not just of myth. It’s plausible.

    17: Yikes, you’re really pushing buttons here, Lane.

  18. 18 oh come on. not really. PB and I have been over this privately. (and nobody reads the biscuit comments anyway.)

  19. PB says:

    The interesting context of this conversation is that on my flight home last night my seat was mysteriously changed for no apparent reason. In my new seat I sat next to a priest who runs a college exchange program on leadership in Rome. We traded stories and he said he would pray for me. This with the Anne Lamott and having drinks with a Div school doctorate candidate who is going on a mission to South America. I feel like Saul. This has been an odd week.

    And Lane, perhaps you are right – mother church to cult – I like that – it makes me sound well rounded. And I am itching to find a Sunday School again somewhere . . .

    Buttons be damned – this was a rousing conversation.

  20. PB says:

    I read the biscuit comments religiously.

  21. Dave says:

    Maybe people comfortable enough to consider mainline Protestantism don’t need religion, but for billions of people there is no justice in this world, and it’s understandable that they look for it elsewhere:

    “All of us in Guantanamo never had hope or faith in the American government,” said Jomaa al-Dosari, a Saudi who spent six years in Guantanamo before being released last year. “We only ask God for our rights and to demand justice for the wrongs we experience in this life. There will be a time in history when every person who committed a wrong will be punished.”

  22. a very fine point, and as a sometimes church goer, i’m glad someone else is making it.

  23. lane says:

    PB, having just returned from a funeral, i have all kinds of new thoughts regarding the function of religion, “the theater of life” (as i’ve come to see it.) christianity, paganism and the rest. in the end i agree with you, we do NEED it, (but in this age, WE can determine its FORM) and i’m glad dave put up the defense.

  24. Scotty says:

    I’ve been thinking a lot lately about the intersection of Protestantism and capitalism. Isn’t it fascinating that without both, neither would exist? (At least not anymore)

    I’ve just come around to reading all of these comments, and I find PB’s arguments to be quite compelling. As a non-believer, I often find myself running this or that errand on a Sunday morning, and feeling a large degree on envy when I see a congregation in front of a Church saying their goodbyes. Sometimes I wish I could be like those religious folks, and just believe – or at least act like I believe.

    I don’t think that we need religion, but community does need a defining factor, and in most cases religion fills this void. Fascism works fine too.

    Oh and: ““the seagulls ate all the fuckin’ crickets.”” Does the Book of Mormon really use the F word? Cool.

    Feel free to not respond to any of this comment.