metapunk

A couple of days ago I got my weekly YouTube update, which included a ForaTV link to “Dawkins: Did Religion Have an Evolutionary Value?”

You’ll note here that the use of the past-tense strongly implies that religion no longer has any value in evolutionary and social terms, and if you watch the talk you’ll see Dawkins imply that religion itself never actually did—that religion is just an unhealthy byproduct of healthy evolutionary imperatives. All of which is pure assumption / opinion on Dawkins’ part and nothing more.

But it got me to thinking I should write some more measured pieces about Atheism, considering my last one (the first post on metapunk written in anger, probably not the last, but hopefully one of only a few).

At the same time, Dawkins’ video led me to two far more intelligent discussions on the place of religion in the modern world.

The first, by SentientRaven, neatly sums up much of how I, and I think a lot of other spiritual people, feel about the subject:

SentientRaven makes three main points:

1) Concepts like Love and Democracy are words describing social conditions, not neurochemistry. It is the social context, not physiology, which is vital to understanding them. Likewise with God. God doesn’t have to exist physically to still be a relevant and meaningful social issue.

2) As concepts go, God is a really big, expansive one; bigger than any one religion, and something that no single work of scripture like the Bible or the Koran can do justice to. So, these works should be taken with a big grain of salt.

3) Religions (particularly Christianity and Islam), insofar as they rely on a single work of scripture as a source of eternal moral law, present a definite social problem. If these books are regarded as perfect and immutable, there is no way they can evolve and adapt to changing social conditions. There’s no way they can progress, or overcome the mistakes of the social & historical context they were written in. Human beings are not perfect, and there’s no way that our moral scriptures can be perfect either, so we should be able to revise them when we need to.

In other words: it doesn’t matter if God is real, a belief in God is not a problem, as long as you realize that God can’t be contained by a book, and that scripture shouldn’t keep us locked into antiquated moral and social systems.

This is an Atheist with an intelligent and informed opinion. One I really respect. I haven’t met many of those on the internet.

The second video is another one from ForaTV, this time by Sam Keen.

This is part of a larger video at: http://fora.tv/2010/03/11/Sam_Keen_In_The_Absence_of_God

I’ve never heard of Sam Keen before, but I’m going to pay more attention from now on, because again, here is a video that neatly sums up a lot of my own feelings about religion.

He basically says religions develop in 5 stages.

Stage 1: An individual person goes off by himself and has a primary, transformative experience of the sacred. These are people like Moses, the Buddha, Confucius, Jesus (and I would add, Mohammed, Rumi, Socrates, Heraklitus, and many others). Their experiences are symbolised by metaphors like Moses’ burning bush, or the ecstatic poetry of William Blake. Thus indicating that for whatever reason, these people have begun to see ordinary reality as something extraordinary.

To add my own thoughts here, this way of seeing things as sacred is perhaps best summarized by Martin Buber’s explanation of the two primary relations, an I to an It (secular, utilitarian reality), and the relation of an I to a Thou—the experience of boundless or sacred reality.

Stage 2 of a religion, according to Keen, is when disciples are so inspired by this primary figure that they begin to mythologize them. The individual becomes a legend, a superhuman being, born of a virgin or under auspicious star signs, or whatever, with miraculous powers and insight.

Stage 3 occurs when the holy individual’s revelations are turned into a theology—a systematic examination of the implications of the original experiences.

Stage 4 is the creation of a religious institution, a church or whatever, to preserve, continue, and communicate the theology.

Stage 5 is when the religious institution ends up competing with secular institutions, and thus sets its sights on notions of Empire and domination.

Of course, it’s never as clear cut as all that, but Keen feels that it’s in these later stages that religions become a problem. “Religion,” as a concept, is typically identified with the latter four stages; the mythology & theology, the institution and the drive to dominate. But that’s missing the point. “The essence of religion is none of those things,” Keen says, “The essence of religion is a series of primal experiences which belong to us only because we are born human and we share the human condition.”

In other words, the important stage—the primary experience of stage 1—is typically ignored by believers and non-believers alike, overshadowed by the other four. The implication of this is that we can all learn to experience the sacred; to see the world as awesome and extraordinary in a profoundly transformative way. We don’t need churches (or scientists or atheists, for that matter) to interpret these experiences for us or to tell us how to live as a consequence–especially if these people have not had these experiences themselves.

Heady stuff. But Keen is right on the money.

I guess this is why I’m personally so drawn to religions like Sufism and Buddhism and Aboriginal spirituality. In most forms of each, while there is some mythology & theology, and a tradition/institution, the institution remains communal, never reaching an authoritarian stage 5. And instead of overshadowing the primary experience; the mythology, theology, and community are all in the service of that first stage. They exist not to tell people what to think or how to behave, but to give people a path to discovering their own experience of the sacred; their own humanity.

It’s also why I get so annoyed at evangelical Atheists: they’re so preoccupied with the negative, stage 5 aspects of religion, that they’re wildly intolerant of the stage 1, without comprehending it much at all.

That’s enough for now. Look for part II later this week, when I will discuss these misconceptions in more detail, and outline why I believe this kind of vitriolic Atheism itself often sounds like a stage 5 religion, having started from stage 3, and skipping 1 and 2 altogether.