All experiences of the divine must be filtered through
cultural constructs, or symbols. God is beyond our understanding, thus beyond
language. If we are talk about our experiences, however badly, we must filter
them through culture.
RELIGION, although inherent in man,
borrows its expressions from the setting or milieu in which man appears. The
forms through which man expresses the supernatural are all drawn from the cultural
heritage and the environment known to him, and are structured according to his
dominant patterns of experience.In a hunting culture this means that the main
target of observation, the animal, is the ferment of suggestive influence on
representations of the supernatural. This must not be interpreted as meaning
that all ideas of the supernatural necessarily take animal form. First of all,
spirits do appear also as human beings, although generally less frequently; the
high-god, for instance, if he exists, is often thought of as a being of human
appearance. Second, although spirits may manifest themselves as animals they
may evince a human character and often also human modes of action.[1]
Narrative is psychologically important to humans because it
enables us to put things in perspective, to put ourselves into the story and to
understand. Anything can be narrative. Even when events are taken as historical
and the consciousness of myth falls away, the narrative is no less naratival.
The resurrection of Christ, the existence of Jesus and his claims to be
Messiah, all I take to be history and truth. Yet these are also part of the
meta-narrative of Christianity. The meat-narrative is not closed or not an
ideology or truth regime as long as it can be open to outside voices and to
adult itself to them. For that reason the narrative hast to be fluid. The
reason for this is that it has to explain the word in a new way to each new
generation. To the extent that it can keep doing this it continues to be
relevant and survives. This is equivalent to Kuhn’s paradigm absorbing the
anomalies. Even when a certain set of fact is held out as historical and more
that, but “the truth” such as Jesus’ death, burial, and resurrection, there is
still an interpretation, a spin an understanding of just exactly how to put it,
that varies from time to time and culture to culture. The facts of the event
don’t change, the historical significance of it doesn’t change, but the way of
relating it to each generation anew does change. This is not say that ideology
doesn’t change, but the change is much slower and less obvious and less fluid.
Even when the meta-narrative of a given religious tradition features factual
material it’s not closed in the sense that ideology is closed and it’s still fluid.
This is not
to say that religious traditions don’t get infected with ideology. When
traditions take on ideology they usually form something more than Orthodoxy,
something like “fundamentalism.” Orthodoxy is just the recognition of stable
boundaries that ground the fluid nature of the narrative in expression of
continuity. While ideology seeks to create a black hole, like the eternal
conflict between communism and anti-communism, that absorbs all light and
allows nothing to escape; the attempt to suck everything in one eternal
understanding. Ideology in religious tradition probably is most often he result
of literalizing the metaphors. When we forget that the metaphor bridges the gap
between what we know and we don’t know—through comparison--and that it contains
a “like” and a “not-like” dimension, we begin to associate the metaphor with
truth in literal way then we begin to formulate ideology. Critics of religious
thinking might be apt to confuse dogma with ideology. Religious ideas are not
automatically ideological, dogma is not automatically ideological. It’s the
literalistic elements in some religious thinking (not all of course) that
closes off the realm of discourse and crates a closed truth regime. The danger
of form ideology may be acute in a religious setting since it is easy to
confuse the metaphor with literal truth by casting over it the aura of the
sacred. We often associate the things pertaining to belief in God with God, and
in so doing forger a literalism that closes off discourse. Yet religious belief
as a whole is too fluid to be fully ideological. Ideology is self protecting
and self perpetuating. Thomas Kuhn’s talk about damage control in paradigm
defense is a good example of the self defending nature of ideology. While
meta-narrative often reflects concepts of divine truth, it’s too changeable to
be ideological. Even though theology resists change and novelty is a bad thing
in theological parlance, meta-narrative changes in spite of it all. The fact of
changed is noted in the many examples of different versions of the same myth.
One such change turns upon a burning question that must be raised at this
point, why did religious thinking move from numatic realization to a theocentric
nature?
Why “God?”
The same can be asked of the female form? Why a pseudo-parental, suzerain
figure who creates the world and is in charge of the cosmos? Why not, since
this model is obviously a metaphor comparing the unknown with some aspect of
reality we know well, why that aspect and not another? What did people worship
before they worshipped gods? Anthropology tells us that the shamanistic style
of animism is older than the concept of a creator god.[2]
This form of belief dates back to the stone age. Native American tribe
“Shosoni, like other hunting people in Africa, Asia,
Europe, and North America, have
an idea of a “master of the animals,” or an “owner,” a supernatural being who
is in charge of the animals:
Hunting peoples in Africa, Europe, Asia
and America have developed the idea of a supernatural owner of the animal
species, or of all animals, who protects them, commands them, and at request
from hunters delivers them to be slayed and eaten. The concept is not
infrequent in North America.
The master of animals is a spirit, generally figured as an animal. The Shoshoni
have possibly in very remote times known the coyote, or rather the mythical
Coyote, as a master of animals. With the impact of Plains Indian culture the
buffalo and the eagle have halfway achieved the position as master of animals
and master of birds, respectively. In all fairness it should be pointed out,
however, that this type of concept is very little noticeable among the Shoshoni.[3]
We must be cautious but since “shamanism” is connected to
animism this owner of the animals might imply a transition between animistic
thinking and beliefs in gods. We can’t say that all religions evolved in the
same way in every location, but it does seem that in general it was an
evolution from nameless “spirits” to specific pantheon of gods. The development
of the concept of God was probably influenced by thoughts of parents, of tribal
chiefs, or the leader, long before they became complex enough to fit a suzerain
model. Yet it does seem that the concept of God evolved out of an understanding
of nature oriented religion and evolved slowly over time based upon comparison
with the authority figures we know best in life.
In his work
The Evolution of God,[4]
Robert Wright distills the work of anthropology over the last two centuries and
demonstrates an evolutionary development, form early superstition that
personified nature (pre-historic people talking to the wind)[5],
through a polytheistic origin in pre-Hebrew Israelite culture,[6]
to monotheistic innovation with the God of the Bible.[7]
Wright is distilling a huge body of work that stretches back to the ninetieth
century, the work of countless archaeologists, historians, and anthropologists.
Another such successful distiller of scholarship in recent years is Karen
Armstrong. In her work A History of God: The 4000 year Quest of Judaism,
Christianity and Islam, [8] she presents a
similar evolutionary story, focusing specifically upon the Biblical religions.
She sees the pre-historical religious scene through the eyes of wonderment at
the world around us. The cave paintings she understands as an attempt to record
participation in the all pervasive aspect of the enchanted world.[9] The
general agreement between scholarship, social sciences, and the work of anthropologists
is that the concept of God is a product of the evolution of human thought.[10] At
one time the concept was not, then it began and it has developed over time. Of
course the great body of this work is coming out of naturalistic assumptions,
especially in the ninetieth century. In the anthropological study of the
evolution of religion those assumptions centered around the concept of
projection in human thinking. People are projecting the relationship with the
father or the king. This assumption can be traced to the work of Ludwig
Feuerbach, social critic and precursor to Marxian analysis (God is the mask of
money). He understood the concept of projection in terms of Hegel’s philosophy
of spirit.[11] In The Essence of
Christianity Feuerbach argues that superhuman deities are involuntary
projections based upon the attributes of human nature.[12]
How this thesis came to be the basis of modern anthropological understanding of
religious evolution is not hard to seek. As Harvey
puts it “It became the Bible to a group of revolutionary thinkers including,
Arnold Ruge, the Bauers, Karl Marx, Richard Wagner, Frederic Engles.[13]
This circle became a major part of the basis of modern social thought. While
modern anthropology has not necessarily played out Feuerbach’s actual inversion
of Hegel it has taken its que from him by making assumptions about theoroes of
prodjection of one kind or another.
Hegel did
not think of God as some projection of human imagination. Feuerbach inverted
Hegel’s concept to produce the idea. Hegel understood stages of human culture
as “moments in the unforlding of absolute spirit.”[14]
Thus, as Harvey points out, the
various stages in religious development can be seen as stages in the self
manifestation of Spirit.[15]
In other words, from the cave paintings, to the shamans and the wind talkers to
the highest aspirations of Judo-Christian ethics, Spirit (God), is making
himself aware of himself by moving through progressive revelation to humanity. “In
other words, the history of religion culminating in Christianity was a
progressive revelation of the truth that the absolute is not merely an
impersonal substance but a subject.”[16]
Feuerbach inverts this principal by asserting that finite spirit is becoming
aware of itself through externalizing its own attributes and then projecting
them into magnified from.[17]
On Feuerbach’s part this was the result of a long struggle with idealism. Be
that as it may, and for both sides, it’s clearly the roots of ideology. It
sowed the seeds of ideology in terms of the social sciences naturalistic
assumptions. Now we find those same kinds of assumptions being made with regard
to the laws of physics. Paul Davies has been quoted to say that the traditional
view of the laws of physics are just seventeenth century monotheism without
God, “Then God got killed off and the laws just free-floated in a conceptual
vacuum but retained their theological properties,”[18]
The assumption of modernity is always that belief in God is dying out, religion
is of the past, these are the things that are dying. Armstrong sounds the death
knell and starts singing the dirge in first book. She observes that “one of the
reasons why religion seems irrelevant today is that many of us no longer have
the sense that we are surrounded by the unseen.”[19]
It’s so irrelevant she’s writing books about it.
We can just hear those atheists saying "yes this proves man invented God," not so fast. see part 2 on friday.
sources
[1] Ake Hultkrantz, “Attitudes
Toward Animals in Shashoni Indian Religion,” Studies in Comparative Religion,
Vol. 4, No. 2. (Spring, 1970) © World Wisdom, Inc. no page listed,online
archive, URL:
[2] Weston La Barre,
“Shamanic Origins of Religion and Medicine,” Journal of Psychedelic Drugs, vol
11, (1-2) Jan. June 1979 no page listed, PDF, URL: http://www.cnsproductions.com/pdf/LaBarre.pdf accessed 3/22/13.
[3] Hultkrantz, op. cit. the author also cites other works by himself
on the matter: Cf. Hultkrantz, The Owner of the Animals in the Religion of the
North American Indians (in Hultkrantz, ed., The Supernatural Owners of Nature, Stockholm
Studies in Comparative Religion, Vol. 1, 1961). Hultkrantz, The
Masters of the Animals among the Wind River Shoshoni
(Ethnos, Vol. 26:4, 1961).
[4] Robert Wright, The
Evolution of God, New York:
Back Bay Books, reprint edition, 2010. The book was Originally published in 2009. The
company “Back Bay books: is an imprint of Hachette
Books, through Little Brown and company. Wright studied sociobiology at Princeton
and taught at Princeton as and University
of Pennsyania. He edits New
Republic and does journalistic
writing of science, especially sociobiology.
[5] Wright, ibid, 9
[6] ibid. 10
[7] ibid, 11
[8] Karen Armstrong, A
History of God: The 4000 Year Quest of Judaism, Christianity and Islam. New
York: Ballantine Books, 1994.
[9] Ibid, 4-6
[11] Van A. Harvey, Feuerbach
and The Interpretation of Religion, Carmbridge: Press Syndicate for the University
of Cambridge, Cambridge
Studies in Religion and Critical Thought, 1995/1997, 4.
Harvey is
professor emeritus, taught religious studies at Stanford Univesity. His Ph.D.
from Yale in 1957. His thesis supervisor was H.Richard Neibhur.
[12] Cited by Harvey,
ibid., 25.
[13] ibid, 26.
[14] ibid.
[15] ibid.
[16] ibid.
[17] ibid, 27
[18] Dennis Overbye,
quoting email message from Paul Davies, “Laws of Nature, Source Unknown,”
“Science” New York Times. December
19, 2007. on line edition URL: http://www.nytimes.com/2007/12/18/science/18law.html?pagewanted=all&_r=1&
accessed, 3/25/13.
[19] Armstrong, op.cit. 4.
