Doctrine and Religion

This post is meant as a companion to the last—in which I attempted to define the personal experience of religion. I defined personal religion as an attitude and orientation in which an intuition of a transcending “beyond” has a genuine reality. While I view this experience as arising in an innate intuition of reality, an “intimation of immortality”—something that trumps, as it were, various conceptual formulations of it—I’m still fully aware that people have the use of intellect and reason and that a fully mature person will have a comprehensive view in which a conceptual framework will be present as well. Today more on the later aspect.

A doctrine literally means a teaching. In the western religious traditions, all of which are revealed religions, the teaching is the elaboration of a revelation directly or indirectly received from God. In the eastern tradition, and here I have the Buddha in mind, the teaching concerns the elaboration of the meaning of an experience persons had—and also about what they themselves said about it. In both cases a certain acceptance, usually labeled faith, is necessary before the doctrine, the teaching, can be considered on its own merits. The fundamental character of such teachings is precisely this faith or this acceptance. There is no way that the ordinary human, even with a great deal of diligence and effort, can replicate the experience on which the doctrine rests. Religious doctrines have a very different character from what we call hypotheses or theories.

To reduce the western religious conception to its absolute grounding premise, it says that the ultimate creator of reality intervenes in its creation at certain times in order to communicate its will to many people through one person. Acceptance of this premise is, I submit, required to go further into the specifics of a doctrine.

The Buddha’s teaching contains another basic assertion, namely that a realm of suffering exits where the illusion of the self is present. The self is created by attachments. When all these are withdrawn, we enter a kind of blissful annihilation.

People who have serious, sincere difficulties with either of these essentials will be left to form their own explanations of the nature of reality. What they must accept as given is that from time to time religious faiths arise from the experiences of individuals, that these experiences are very evidently of a greatly persuasive and very energetic nature—sufficiently so that they produce huge social phenomena that spread over time and, by and large, produce more benefits than harm.

Clashes between groups, the use of coercion to make unbelievers comply with the teaching, persecutions, wars, inquisitions, and crusades do not, alas, at all require a religious orientation. The religious aspect in these phenomena is incidental, not central. What is central in them is the drive to power. The twentieth century brought us ample, indeed rich samples of each of these negatives under entirely secular conditions.

It does not take a great deal of faith to believe in truth, justice, and the good. That comes with personal religion, as I’ve outlined in the last post. The doctrines, however, belong—because of their basic premises—to the realm of judgment.

In Their Bones

The reason why the vast majority of people are religious, broadly speaking, is because they simply know, in their bones, that the superficially overwhelming physical world just does not exhaust the subject. They know it in their bones because—well, they act in accordance with this knowledge. At the most superficial level, they touch wood. This tells me that the rational is, as it were, an added or secondary layer. Deeper down we know better...

This came to mind last night when, serendipitously, as it were—in light of the post I logged on atheism earlier that day—we saw an X-Files special in the evening, titled I Want to Believe. This is a somewhat top-heavily Catholic sort of X-Files presentation in which the supernatural plays a heavy role. The film illustrates just how familiar and “right” a heavily “interventionist” view of God appears in Western fiction. Here the expression of this sense, the sense of something above, something beyond, is sharply focused by our cultural past and rendered as God. God is the only agency behind anything and everything beyond the ho-hum, sordid, and the dreary ordinary.

I got to thinking about that. All people, no matter where they are, have this innate sense of extradimensionality—not least that there are dynamics at work that directly touch us in many different and above all meaningful ways—no matter what name we give it. And in the trials and tribulations of ordinary existence—in the trenches, as it were, in the foxholes where no atheist are, as the saying has it—the elaborate conceptualization of this quite mysterious something is of no particular value. It operates at a level where concepts are not, but we still are. That level is wrongly referred to the physical, the lower. It may be the higher. When we’re really up against it and we cry to heaven for a little help—that’s when we are genuinely authentic. And so are we when, having lucked out again, we praise the Lord without even close to thinking about the artificial superstructures of conceptualization where all the problems, ultimately, surface.

Sheep and Goats

Does humanity really divide into the sheep and the goats? I think so. I don’t think the concept controversial. What I have in mind here is the difference between believers and scoffers. There is a phenomenon in parapsychology called the Sheep-Goat Effect. Those inclined to believe in the psychic experience it more and score in tests above average; goats score below average. The phenomenon is well proved.

I don’t doubt the phenomenon; what interests me more is how to explain it. The classification reminds me of William James’ distinctions between the healthy- and the sick-minded, meaning roughly the same thing as “goat” and “sheep” respectively—the well-adapted and the sickly sensitive. The sickly-minded are more likely to be intensely religious; the classification appears in James’ The Varieties of Religious Experience. If we define reality as simply the world of stimulus and response, being adapted to it is much favored in our secular age. In religious times, being in harmony with God matters more. Realistic adaptation is the hall-mark of Freud’s mental health, the core of Darwinism, neo and otherwise. To be sure, if you can’t breathe, there is little else to talk—or think—about. Adaptation to the world is a good thing, as Martha Stewart might say. And healthy adaptation makes perfect sense if our criterion of value is physical survival for as long as possible. This model might be “collectivized” to make it a little more descriptive of what we really see. What we see is people willing to sacrifice themselves for the collective good, not least in the profession of arms. Modernity sees genetic engineering behind this behavior. We’re chemically programmed to be altruistic; sociobiology has spoken. Darwinism can explain virtually anything by simply invoking the invisible hand of Survival.

But here I demur. Survival needs justification. Translated into plain English Darwinism says that matter in one form strives to maintain itself by persisting and reproduction. The doctrine doesn’t explain why this is so. If its proponents claim merely to be descriptive, they’re not descriptive enough. Why would something that can’t be destroyed in the first place strive so hard to maintain extremely complex forms of itself? Survival as such lacks meaning. The word demands a qualifier, as in survival for what? A roses is a rose is a rose? Ultimately this means that the goats, so-called, adhere to an excessively primitive form of belief. What you see is what you get, they say. They feel no need to explain the strangeness of the world. Not feeling any need, they don’t. All right.

But this gives me a vector of approach. Indeed in parapsychology (if not in religious thought) the sheep and goats simply behave in a certain way; parapsychology does not say that sheep will to believe, scoffers will to doubt. People simply are. Some people are open to psychic reality; others are not. My personal experience confirms this. Interest can’t be compelled. There are those, both sheep and goats, who actively promote their point of view, eager to persuade those who don’t share it: the missionaries of faith and of atheism. I consider these people busybodies, well-meaning but often a pain.

Here is a reasonable hypothesis. Real differences in degree of perception mark different individuals. In effect that seems self-evident. If we wish to give the life-phenomenon some reasonable meaning, we would imagine it is a process of development. Those who sense, feel, perceive, intuit (however vaguely) another dimensionality would, of course, appear from a certain perspective to be sickly, in the Jamesian sense. They are looking out of this world rather than being busy about its laundry and dry-cleaning. From the perspective of the process itself, however, they may be healthier in that they are beginning to adapt to their future environment.

I often think of this as dense and open. I picture openness as having, as it were, a hole at the top of my head by means of which I can feel the airs of another reality moving. I don’t see sheep as having and goats as lacking merit. I also see the difference but as only one of degree. Even the densest have some inkling of the zone beyond the border. Nor does sensitivity equal intelligence. Some of the most sensitive people are very stupid, some of the densest very bright. Matters of merit exist on yet another level. The issue is to make the most of the state in which we are. But this view goes a long ways to explaining why it is that humanity divides into camps and why it is so difficult to have a single great system of belief.