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Theology: Religious fanatacism - is it the east or the west that should worry us?
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Rarely a day goes by where more news is not splashed on our screen about religions fanatacism in some of the Islamic countries - countless news stories fill our papers about their wayward beliefs and dedication to destroy our civilised way of life (this, is also questionable I know).
All the while, little or no attention is paid to religious zealouts in America who, as we speak are:
-Succesfully campaigning for creationism to be given equal footing with Darwinism in schools as viable theory
-Succesfully campaigning against abortion through Pro-life groups, effectively outlawing it in some areas through threats of violence and repercussion.
-Started sending modern day disciples around the world to spread its pro-life message/anti abortion
Are we blind to America's behaviour? The stories of the east fill our newspapers with horror and condemnation whilst the behaviour of the west slips neatly under our radar. We consistently repeat our disgust of nations who use religion to guide their politics whilst bizarrely remaining quite friendly with the worst perpertrator of all.
Who should worry us more? Both east and west have immeasurable influence on world politics - or should we just let em fight it out.
Or am I just talking shite? -
My theory on this hinges on our modern, scientific culture.
Basically the human brain did not evolve to understand the world through science. Imagine a world where you had no concept whatsoever of how nature worked beyond what you saw first hand (or what you were told by your village elders). Now, in this world, the day to day life of agents makes perfect sense. That is, when you want to understand human intention very few problems arise. i.e.- The stag is dead - why?
- I stabbed the stag - why?
- I had been tracking it all day - why?
- I needed food because my family was hungry.
But when the REST of nature is examined, no final cause can ever be found. i.e.- The tree fell in the forest - why?
- The wind blew it down - why?
- ?
The world can be better accepted if agents and intention are drafted in. This is religion:- " "
- " "
- Because the spirit of the forest was angry...
The problem with modern society and how it functions is that science is now pretty much inaccessible to the man on the street. We all have a concept of how the world works through the eyes of science, but few of us understand it to our own satisfaction. Further still, this scientific wall of mystery can seem blank, grey and impenetrable when it comes to matters of the soul.
Science can explain an incredible amount about the universe, for those who are willing to listen, but when the man on the street asks about life, about soul, about his innate feeling of human importance, on this science gets very very blurry. To live in a world ever more reliant on this soul-less view of nature is difficult for some people, especially when all they perceive around them is a society which further seems to be 'slipping' into a moral hole it dug itself.
At this point the agent comes back in, the factors that the fundamentalist perceives as destroying society are then ascribed to the science they themselves have no conceptual grasp of. And to take the last step and conclude that their God is punishing mankind in some way for turning their back on him - this is the slippery slope towards fundamentalist beliefs.
The intention of agents and the logical world of science make bad companions.
My personal belief on how to solve this problem is not, in fact, to better teach science (although this is also necessary). I think that philosophy, or more precisely, logic and moral philosophy, should be brought back into the classroom.
If people could better understand the underlying logic of reality they would better see the incomplete picture of the universe which religion brings. And moral philosophy is a surefire way to get people to share the perspective of others.
So to answer your question - I fear ALL fundamentalism, but I think I can see why it arises. It's time to not only question religious dogma, but give people the tools to be able to do so themselves...
Philosophy come alive! -
As sheggers wrote, the locus of our concern is fanatacism, the Islamic division, with less attention (though certainly far more than zero) paid to its Western cousins.
I think there are two reasons for this:
* The sins of your (real or imagined) enemires are always magnified above those of the home team (for ex. Jim Crow in the US South was seen as regrettable but somehow less awful than Soviet - and I'm talking post Stalinist here - oppressions of the same period)
* As Baudrillard (yes, that man who is dismissed when he is not reviled and reviled when he's not being dismissed here in the US) ...as Baudrillard wrote in his essay on Sept 11 '01, because the scale and type of destruction witnessed in Manhattan matched - almost precisely - the sort of thing one would see in a Hollywood thriller with multi-million dollar special effects Westerners in general and Americans in particular came to believe that anything was possible...that our Jihadi adversaries could pull off even greater - Hollywood style - engineered catastrophes.
Real concerns became intermingled with imagined terrors. When you speak with the most fearful Americans - who tend to believe even the wildest "terror plots" are possible (which computer security guru Bruce Schneier calls "Hollywood security scenarios") the value of Baudrillard's insight becomes clear.
This rich fantasy life of imagined death prompts us to fear Islamic fundamentalists, tied as they always are in our thoughts with terrorism (of course there are real ties between fundamentalists and terrorists but not all fundamentalists and all terrorists - yet in our minds they are one ball of fire), more inasmuch as they are viewed as a far greater threat than our home grown fanatics who've yet to accomplish such a deed of negative daring and who seem like wayward kin (as opposed to the mysteriously murderous Other) to many of us.
Of course, both fundamentalisms are a serious problem if for somewhat different reasons. -
I definitely agree with you idoru345 that a large part of the 'terror' prevalent after 9/11 was a consequence of the American view of reality, but then maybe this simulacrum works both ways - would / could 9/11 have happened in a world devoid of the imagery seen in the movies? I'm not sure...
What I do know though is that the saying 'of Biblical proportions' is more than just a turn of phrase. Religion is the greatest source for Hollywood-like catastrophe off the cinema screen. This brings up whole teems of questions about the nature of mythology in modern culture and the role Hollywod reality has to play in the narratization of the modern world.... but that's another forum post!
Here's an extract from an interesting article about Dan Dennet's new book:To answer... questions [about the science of religion], Dennett says, we must confront two spells. The first is the taboo against asking uncomfortable questions about religion. In his view, religion is simply too important to be spared hard questions. Indeed, he argues, religion is among the most powerful forces on earth and, as religiously inspired warfare and acts of terrorism remind us, it is not always benign. The second spell, in Dennett’s account, is one cast by religion itself. Do we risk dimming religion’s numinous glow by the very act of scientific analysis? Will we, out of what Dennett calls a “pathological excess of curiosity,” rob believers of the deepest and most important part of their lives? Dennett is sensitive to this concern and concedes the danger, but he concludes that the chances of undermining religious sensibility are slight...
There will always be more questions than answers surrounding religion, especially at its fanatical extremeties.
- link to full article
Can you imagine a society devoid of religious zeal? (I would suggest that the secular experiments of the past, such as communist Russia, were chock a block full of religious zeal. Stalin was the ultimate God-like figure in that society and used religious idealism to drive forward his bloody revolutions)... I find it difficult to imagine a truly religious free society myself, however much I wish it could exist.
In what ways do you think that our evolved capacity for religious thought should be revered in this (simulacrum of a) modern world we live in? -
"would / could 9/11 have happened in a world devoid of the imagery seen in the movies? I'm not sure... "
Interesting you should ask this - it's almost verbatim the question Baudrillard asks. Or rather, it's in answer to this question he makes the assertion that the source of the attack's form was our own cinematically imagined disasters (at one point he says, paraphrasing now "...hadn't we already toppled those building ourselves, on screen and in our thoughts, many times before?"). There was no strategic value the way there is in the more practically minded terrorist assaults against oil production and distribution networks we're seeing from Iraq to Nigeria. And the attack on the Pentagon - which, note well, is perceived differently in our memories -lacked the overwhelming real and visual devastation that so gripped us.
It's simulacrum made real leading to the production of further simulacrum (the cinematically inspired super terrorist disaster scenarios that tighten the chests of so many of us who, after televisually witnessing the towers' collapse, believe any sinister thing to be possible...and likely).
"Can you imagine a society devoid of religious zeal? "
At one time I did. This was the result of reading too much Asimov style science fiction as a boy. In Asimov's worlds (at least the earlier works of "hard" scifi) heroic rationality may not always triumph but it is the long term trajectory of our species. Now that it's clear religious expression - and strong religious expression - is a part of our cognitive makeup, like weeping when sad, I think the best we can hope for is a relaxation into softer forms of zeal. Belief yes, but imperialist actions (proselytizing, attempts to change cultures to suit your beliefs as happens over and over again in the US and many parts of the Islamic world) no.
"In what ways do you think that our evolved capacity for religious thought should be revered in this (simulacrum of a) modern world we live in?"
Religious thought has produced subtlety. It has produced attempts (masked as efforts to uncover the divine) to understand the human mind. Isn't Buddhism - at least 'classical' Buddhism - an effort to describe and create a method for re-engineering our various mental states? There are analogs of this sort of thing in the most sublime ends of Judaism, Islam, Christianity and Hinduism, to name those I'm familiar with.
When religious thought concerns itself with understanding the divine and finding the infinite within finite beings - when, in short, it allows its philosophical possibilities to flourish - the results are often energizing and quite lovely; even for non-believers.
But this sort of endeavor, more often than not, turns out to be a minority occupation, a flight of fancy that enchants only a few. Most are content with rules and lists of enemies.
Because the beauty of their faiths is routinely suppressed (has any lovely thing ever issued forth from the mouth of, say, the American evangelist Jerry Falwell and his ilk? Or there opposites in Islam?) and the balkanizing elements celebrated, the modern world can no longer afford to hope it will all work out for the best.
Zealotry, of all kinds, has set itself as the enemy of the future and must be confronted as such. -
Good chat...
I liked your most recent blog post by the way, quite relevant to what we have been chatting about here. It made me think about past comments I have made on the future of belief, or more specifically, on the forms the realities this belief exists in will take.
Could we be seeing in the transhumanism movement a religious reality for the first time composed entirely around the capacities of man? Sure, the idea of one God, a bloke nailed to a cross and a book that still has moral relevance in a society 2000 odd years removed from its creation is utterly ridiculous - but just wait until our modern simulacra of society, in its role as an ever replicating, self copying system of instant gratification and replacement, manifests its first truly 'Zealous' theology.
No religious mind, whatever form it takes and however inclined it may be - will be able to keep up with the ever shifting tides of theological reality transposing their world day by day into more mere representations of its mythical self.
When WE are the only Gods of our newest and most instantly accessible mythical models, and when these models are perceived in ever vastly different moulds by every consciousness which absorbs them, how then is science meant to track, explain, uncover the face of religious belief? In a religion whose very foundations rest in the bedrock of 'science' (transhumanism) religious fervour may have found its most indestructible, infinitely immutable form yet. -
WHAT?
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Thanks for the kind words about my post and the link.
Must get to work so this will be incomplete and probably error filled...
In some ways, Roman Catholicism - with its strange mixture of rigidity and flexibility (using a combination of brutal suppression and message morphing to dominate , at least for a time, practically all of Europe, much of Africa and Latin America) provides a partial model of how religions will (might) adapt to whatever level of transhumanism flowers.
Consider.
Rome, when it couldn't bludgeon ancient beliefs away, absorbed them into its mythological superstructure. The creation of localized saints, for example, people who, in the pre-Christian context might have been lauded in some other fashion (perhaps as demi-gods or heroes a la Hercules) was the carrot to the sword point and musket sticks.
In a not entirely dissimiliar way, modified humans may be resisted as against God's intent, then adopted as the fulfillment of some divine scheme - that is to say: absorbed into the machinery of belief as if they were always a part of it.
Modern religions remain simultaneously forever old yet suprisingly nimble by claiming new events to be the fulfillment of ancient ideas. -
That is a very good point. Christianity in particular has a way of shifting its focus to fit with a specific time or issue. I guess it will be around in some form or another as long as Bibles still exist.
Your comment too reminded me of Olaf Stapledon's "last and first men" (talk of which has been going on in another topic on this forum). The idea of the uber-protagonist, the ultimate individual, the single manifestation of God on Earth, is a theme which runs through a handful of the early civilisations he outlines. Even as Christianity fades from memory, the collective consciousnesses of the new species of human which arise on Planet Earth still maintain the idea of this eternal individual. So too does Stapledon examine the nature of symbolism as represented in the Crucifix. He describes a future race of humans whose main pastime is swooping through the air in their personal airplane devices - so tall and expansive are the cities which populate Earth's surface. For this race the stretched out wings of the plane are symbolic of rebirth and a connection with a higher plane of reality - the underside of the plane, when viewed correctly, looks exactly like a crucifix.
Anyway, just an example of a vivid imagination pushing religion beyond the boundaries of the world we now inhabit. I suppose Jesus, in ever ethereal forms, existed in the minds of Western Civlisation long before his name was ever spoken.
The blankest of protagonists -
Adding to our conversation - Singularity = The New Rapture?
http://www.tcsdaily.com/article.aspx?id=040506B
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