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Interesting post!I do hope contributors to this thread are aware that there is no agreed upon definition of the word ‘religion’ and no precise equivalent for it it in many languages and cultures. For example, in Sanskrit (the language in which Hindu and many Buddhist texts are written), the nearest we get is a word like ‘darsana’, which can be translated as ‘a way of seeing’ [reality], and some Indian religious ‘ways of seeing’ are atheistic and deny the existence of a God with qualities like the ones the Christian God is meant to have.
Also, it would be an error to equate religion with a belief in God or gods. If we are talking about ultimate reality when we do that, it then becomes hard to make sense of what the mystics and contemplatives from the various world faiths and philosophies have claimed about this down the centuries.
For example, 'Nirvana' in Theravada Buddhism simply refers to the cessation of suffering, and 'The Tao' in the ancient Chinese writings of, say, Lao Tzu and Chuang Tzu, is not conceived of as in any way like the God of classical theism. Indeed, the underlying message of those same mystics from both the theistic and non-theistic traditions - those who have spent decades engaged in dedicated spiritual practice - is that the only way to know 'God' or 'ultimate reality' is to let go of all notions of what that reality is, to enter a realm of "unknowing", at which point one may begin to glimpse the nature of what is true.
For example, this certainly seems to be what is entailed by the Mahayana Buddhist notion of 'sunyata' or 'emptiness', and in what Meister Eckhart (arguably the greatest Christian mystic) has written on the subject.
There are also profound difficulties involved in making ethical assessments about whether religion is a force for good or evil in the world.
This is something that the atheist philosopher John Holroyd once argued in an article for Philosophy Now magazine. Here are a couple of extracts from it:
Let us suppose that we could reach cross-cultural agreement about what was a religion and what was not. We would then need to do an enormous amount of empirical research to get the data to make a moral judgment about the general effects of religion. How much data would we need? Where would we stop in order to not be presumptuous or unscientific in our claims? We might want to look specifically at indigenous religions, institutional religion, civil religion, liberation theologies, or new religious movements; and in doing so we might reach different conclusions about these different phenomena.
It would also be hard to agree about what the effects of religion are – when religious activities are the cause and when the effect of social phenomena. In any historical or sociological analysis of the moral output of a religion, we would probably find it hard to circumscribe religion and to distinguish it from other cultural factors. For example, how far Christian anti-semitism caused Nazi anti-semitism is something we could spend a long time investigating, precisely because of the openness to interpretation of wide landscapes of historical data.
What I personally suspect is that it is currently the effects of the actions of puritans within world faiths that are having a profoundly pernicious impact on the world and that this is what a lot of people are thinking of when they make negative judgements about religious adherents.
When it comes to Salafi-Jihadists within Islam, we all know about that. Another example would be Christian fundamentalists in America. A book I recently read by Malise Ruthven had this to say about them:
'....they have had a baleful influence on American foreign policy, by tilting it towards the Jewish state, which they eventually aim to obliterate by converting righteous Jews to Christ. They have damaged the education of American children in some places by adding scientific creationism, or its successor 'intelligent design' to the curriculum. They inconvenience some women, especially poor women with limited access to travel by making abortion illegal in certain states. On a planetary level, they are selfish, greedy and stupid, damaging the environment by the excessive use of energy and lobbying against environmental controls. What is the point of saving the planet, they argue, if Jesus is arriving tomorrow? '
There is also the fact that there is a lot of gratuitous, pointless evil about, which makes a traditional belief in God impossible to defend in my view. According to what is known as 'the evidential problem of evil', this issue can be summarised as follows:
When we start to consider the enormous amount of suffering in the world – including the millions of years of animal suffering caused by natural events that occurred before humans even made an appearance – it becomes overwhelmingly unlikely that every last bit of suffering can be accounted for as having some kind of point to it.
- If God exists, he would not allow any pointless evil.
- Probably, there is pointless evil.
- Therefore, probably, God does not exist.
Certainly, I cannot see how anyone can defend the idea of God as 'personal', given the amount of unnecessary shit that is going down at any one point in time that we might care to freeze-frame and examine.
So is there any hope, anything that might be said for religion after all this?
Maybe, just maybe if we change that word 'religion' to 'drugs' ?
In his latest book, How to Change Your Mind: The New Science of Psychedelics, Michael Pollan draws attention to the revival and renaissance that is taking place when it comes to the potential deployment of ‘entheogens’ or psychedelic substances in the field of medicine. Specifically, ongoing clinical trials at institutions like New York University, Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, and Imperial College in London are yielding some dramatic findings, namely, that a one-off, carefully controlled drug-induced mystical experience can have entirely benevolent and profoundly transformative effects on patients who are struggling with addiction, anxiety, depression, or a diagnosis of terminal cancer. For example, in trials at NYU and Hopkins, 80 per cent of cancer patients exhibited clinically significant reductions in standard measures of anxiety and depression, an effect that was maintained for at least six months after having been given a dose of psilocybin.
Though the sample was small —fifteen smokers— another study found that twelve had gone without smoking six months after their ‘trip treatment’ . Twelve subjects, all of whom had tried to quit multiple times, using various methods, were verified as abstinent six months after ingesting psilocybin, a success rate of eighty per cent. Previously, these experimental subjects had tried to stop smoking unsuccessfully, using a variety of methods, on several prior occasions.
Additionally, the recreational use of psychedelics has been famously associated with instances of psychosis, flashback, and suicide. But these negative effects were not experienced by patients in the trials at NYU. and Johns Hopkins. After having administered nearly five hundred doses of psilocybin, the researchers have reported no serious negative effects, though it should be noted volunteers are carefully vetted prior to their experience, and are then guided through it by skilled therapists who are well-positioned to help those volunteers manage the episodes of fear and anxiety that many of them do report.
Pollan intriguingly states at one point that, “Many of the people I’d interviewed had started out stone-cold materialists and atheists, no more spiritually developed than I, and yet several had had “mystical experiences” that left them with the unshakable conviction that there was something more to this world that we know – a “beyond” of some kind that transcended the material universe I presume to constitute the whole shebang.”
So if we want to find out whether there is anything to religion or not, maybe the first thing to do is to sign up to one of these trials. As someone who suffers from a psychologically excruciating chronic health condition and a drink problem, I wouldn't mind taking part in one.
Atheism is twice as old as the religions of Christianity or Islam. Atheistic thought was one of the earliest aspects of the Hindu religion. There was a part of that religion called the Rig Veda that centred around the fact that we simply do not know whether there are gods, and Hinduism openly accepts the concept of atheism.
In Ancient Greece, atheistic thought was present but punished in society. Hedonism and pleasure were thought of in a certain era of Greek religion as the truth, not the gods. But that didn’t last long.