schwantz: You've come to the excellent realisation that morality is not always a construct of religion. The implication of that statement is that intolerance isn't a symptom of religion either... although it can be. The difficulty is illustrated perfectly by Haus' post: we cannot afford to live in a world in which we damn by association. This is the inherent problem about generalisations, whether you happen to call it *looking at broad trends* or not - they aren't always true, and they create an atmosphere in which we can allow prejudice to go unchecked.
A defense of religion is impossible without a definition of religion, as Flyboy quite rightly stated. Comparative religion is so often a trick of perspective, in which large-scale magicko-religious phenomena and structures are placed side by side as though they are equivalents, in which miscellaneous philosophies or localised heirophanies are grouped side by side, their features listed in multiple check-boxes so that the casual observer can make judgements as easily as they compare mortgage ready-reckoners. It's often a practise indulged in by scholars with no vested interest. To say this isn't to state that there are no similarities or influences shared between these ideas and belief systems, as that's blatanatly untrue. The point is that any statement about religion *in general* is nonsense. Scratch the surface of a large number - although not all - of American Christians and you'll discover that their wallets are closer to their hearts than their Bibles, and that if they were forced to chose they'd nail their colours to the mast of capitalist fundamentalism rather than their God. The disease is the same, manifest in a different host, the lines that originally connected the fundamentalism to the religion rapidly becoming blurred (do a Bible study on the attitude to unchecked wealth in scripture sometime).
We live in a multicoloured world, not a black and white world. Suppose I were to say that religion should be rejected in favour of the individual's personal experience, that everyone should discover and maintain their own disciplines with no religious framework. That's fine for the people on this site, many of whom (myself included, to an extent) are engaged in that very practise. The problem comes when you prescribe universally that everyone should be on their own spiritual path, and that having a personal experience of the sacred within a religious structure is invalid. Note that I've exposed a common misconception there: that those involved with organised religion do not have direct access to the spiritual, that they rely on the supposed myths and laws of their faith. Some people are engaged in lifeless traditionalism, that's true. Some people involved in organised religion are as spiritualy active and alive as any Phil Hine, Michael Harner or Carl Jung.
It may come as a shock to some people here, but not everyone has the time, energy or inclination to forge their own spiritual path, based purely on their own research and efforts, not subscribing necessarily to any particular religion. If it's true that we're all "hard-wired for religious/spiritual/inexplicable experience" (something that I'd be inclined to agree with: we all enter trance states, are influence by unconscious factors that are not readily explicable, we all dream, we are always defined by an unknown which is far larger than anything we can ever truly know), then there has to be a way for people to experience the sacred without having to be trailblazers. This is the primary function of religion, and it's one that often becomes lost and obscured. It's a point of access to the sacred for the vast majority of people who are not interested in specialising in the field. Some might say I'd get a better return on my investment if I saved up my capital and invested directly: I say bollocks to all that hard work and get an OEIC (well, not actually, but the principle holds true).
So if religion isn't the cause of *morality* or *immorality* (whatever that means), and doesn't necessarily intrude on people's personal experience of the *spiritual* (whatever that means), and in fact often provides an excellent access point to the *spiritual* for those who don't have the resources for taking their own approach (whatever that means), then the focus changes from the abolition of religion to the improvement of religion (whatever the fuck that means). The revision of religion. It's a process that happens all the time any way, what with all the fun synctretist movements that occur at the fringes, introducing new or lost ideas into mainstream practise, refining and removing prejudice, improving spiritual technique. I'm sorry to burst anyone's happy Gene Roddenberry bubble of anal wind, but you won't get your wish of a world free of religion. Not in your lifetime, or the lifetime of your children, or their children. You are being unrealistic. Abolition restricts freedom and options, and focuses the same fundamentalist stance right back in the direction you percieve it to come from. The result is invariably strongly agressive resistance. Or you can make dialogue, work with people and their ideas about what is sacred, show people that there are other ways, and slowly make the world a better place. Both may be unrealistic (the latter possibly only in the short term), but I'm pretty sure which one I'd rather be involved with. |
