This Viewpoint is a reply to the latest installment in an apparent series of Viewpoints, of progressively greater audacity, penned by the same author. In said Viewpoint, this author characterizes ALL religion as (1) a “comforting fable,” (2) willful self-deception, (3) a “resort” or retreat and (4) a sanctuary from the crushing responsibility of legislating our own ends in the face of a finite existence (and the resulting existential angst). Such a defensive and expedient maneuver, the author claims is not only self-betraying, but also expresses intellectual infirmity and anti-humanism.
Clearly there are numerous points that could, and perhaps even ought to, be raised in reply. However, I will limit myself to the following points (and even then it could take a whole book to do them justice.)
There is little in common between all the different religions of the world, and what is common is certainly not any of the four characteristics listed above. Religion is something that is notoriously difficult to define, and any plausible generalizations are abstract enough that any inference to the justifications of any given religion’s doctrines or practices would be strictly invalid. Consequently, we are not entitled to speak about “Religion with a capital R.” No such thing really exists.
If there is really no such thing as “capital-R-Religion,” then we cannot speak about “capital-R-Religious people.” What it is to be a religious person is an empty non-concept until further qualified by specifying a particular sect of a particular religion, relative to historical, social and other contexts. Similarly indeterminate (and thus vacuous and unanswerable) is the empirical question of why people adopt religion in the first place. However, any attempts to refine the question for greater specificity and therefore answerability will invariably reveal that there simply is no single answer (perhaps at any level of refinement), and there needn’t be. This means that the claim that religion is caused by mental infirmity is either so grossly generic that it either cannot possibly be true, or it “dies a death of 1000 qualifications.”
Likewise, claims about the specific nature of all religions, viz. that they are anti-humanist, are pure fantasy. Such claims themselves express both deep Eurocentricm and pernicious ignorance. Regarding the former, the function of Catholicism in 16th century Italy (of course there was no Italy back then) cannot be extrapolated to the function of any other religion in any other historical/geographical context (contra Marx). Regarding the latter, many religions are (at least in part) attempts to make sense of the cosmos through highly sophisticated systems of metaphysics, mechanical laws and causal explanations — a project that surely makes terrific intellectual demands of its practitioners (for example, the seven Sarvastivadin Abhidharmas). Furthermore, this is to intentionally avoid the epistemological black-holes that are “justification versus truth-value,” “theory versus evidence,” etc.
I challenge the author to study religions more carefully before feeling qualified to comment on them and their subscribers in authoritative ways. Hopefully it will then become clear that the characterizations of religion laid out in the opening paragraph are overly-simplistic, presumptuous, uninformed and false.
Jacob Caldwell, a Contributing Writer for the Voice, can be reached for comment at JCaldwell16@wooster.edu.