Kwame Anthony Appiah is a Professor of Philosophy and Law. Sadly, he is as stupid as shit- vide. this essay of his in Aeon magazine.
Undefinable yet indispensable
Tarskian 'primitives' have this quality.
Despite centuries of trying, the term ‘religion’ has proven impossible to define.
No. It has been possible to give it a good enough definition for any useful purpose or project.
Then why does it remain so necessary?
Because it is a Service industry with high income elasticity of demand.
We tend to think of religion as an age-old feature of human existence.
We think it predated our species. We don't greatly care.
So it can be startling to learn that the very concept dates to the early modern era.
It is not startling at all to discover that some shithead who teaches useless shite is making some absurd claim.
Yes, you find gods, temples, sacrifices and rituals in the ancient Mediterranean, classical China, pre-Columbian Mesoamerica. What you don’t find is a term that quite maps onto ‘religion’.
Consider India where religion is called dharma for three thousand years. The Indo-Greeks translated dharma as eusebia which, in Latin, became pietas. Pietas was personified as a Goddess. Religio was conceived as the relationship to this hypostasis but since the hypostasis was purely notional, the reverse was equally true. One could say 'religious piety' or 'pious religion' and mean the same thing. True, some shithead could deny that there was a 'mapping'. But such a shithead might equally say 'My Mum is truly a Mummy. The mothers of other kids lack the uniquely Mummy like qualities of my Mummy. Thus they don't really have mothers. They are orphans in all but name.' However, we find it easy to recognize that the shithead in question is a fucking shithead. We tell him to go fuck himself. My Mum is just as much a Mum as your Mum. My religion is just as much a religion as your religion. For any useful purpose, it is easy to make 'mappings' between Tarskian primitives no matter what language they are expressed in.
What about the Romans, to whom we owe the word?
They turned Christian long before the 'early modern age'. Some features of Roman Religion were carried over into Roman Catholicism.
Their notion of religio once meant something like scruples or exactingness,
whereas now it means that the cunt using the word is an ignorant shithead who teaches worthless shite
and then came to refer, among other things, to a scrupulous observance of rules or prohibitions, extending to worship practices. It was about doing the right thing in the right way.
Whereas, nowadays, Religion means doing wrong things in utterly crazy ways- right?
The Romans had other terms as well for customs, rites, obligations, reverence and social protocols, including cultus, ritus and superstitio. Yet they weren’t cordoned off into a realm that was separate from the workaday activities of public life, civic duty and family proprieties.
So, religious people back then were just like religious people back then. Everything they did was accompanied with prayers or rituals or pious intentions.
What the Romans encountered abroad were, in their eyes, more or less eccentric versions of cultic life, rather than alien ‘religions’, in our sense.
No. They saw some 'foreign' religions which some of them embraced- e.g. Mithraism or Christianity.
It was assumed that other localities would have other divinities; in times of war, you might even summon them, via evocatio, to try to get them to switch sides.
Christian Arabs pray to Allah. They may want Allah to help them defeat Hezbollah.
But the local gods and rites of foreigners could be assessed without categorising them as instances of a single universal genus.
So what? The same is true now. One can say 'Buddha was teaching pretty much the same thing as Christ' or else 'Buddha's doctrine was completely different.' Nobody greatly cares unless there is a war or a pogrom in the region.
Even after the empire became officially Christian, you still don’t get our sense of ‘religions’.
Yes you do- unless you are an ignorant shithead. There was fanaticism as well as syncretism as well as well-bred indifference back then just as there is now. Moreover, we can't be sure that future wars won't be sectarian. Indeed, many people saw the 'War on Terror' as a modern day Crusade. ISIS certainly believes
The Romans don’t start sorting the world into bounded systems analogous to ‘Christianity’, ‘Judaism’, ‘Manichaeism’, ‘Islam’ and so on.
They did so to the same extent and for the same purposes as we do now. Thus, in the UK, if I die intestate, the Judge has to allot me to a 'bounded system'- Hinduism in my case- so as to establish how my estate should be divided.
They have other, older sorting mechanisms, as Brent Nongbri elaborates in his terrific study Before Religion (2013).
He can do nothing. He can merely recycle shite. High IQ people don't do degrees in History. That's why you don't have books saying that Money or Religion or Love or Heterosexuality are modern concepts. Ancient peeps didn't have any such things. Also they had long tails and liked hanging by their tails from the branches of trees.
When Lactantius, in the 4th century, contrasts vera religio with falsae religiones, he
is doing what every fucking Pope or Ayatollah has been doing for a thousand years. Only our sect is true. Everybody else is sucking Satan's cock. Well, not quite everybody. The Archbishop of Canterbury is taking it up the arse from Beelzebub. But, he is in the queue to suck Satan's cock same as Mahatma Gandhi & the Dalai fucking Lama.
means to distinguish right worship from wrong worship; he isn’t identifying other self-contained systems that might be lined up on a chart for comparison.
Nobody is. You don't find the Ayatollah losing any sleep for failing to distinguish Seventh Day Adventists from Jehovah's Witnesses. All kaffirs will burn in hell without distinction. Still, for the moment, lets stick to blowing up Jews and Christians. Don't piss off the Chinese.
The Christians of late antiquity didn’t view themselves as possessing one religion among many; they viewed themselves as possessing the truth.
Sadly, nowadays, that may involve asserting that the Sun shines out of Trump's backside.
To arrive at the modern category of religion, scholars now tend to think, you needed a complementary ‘secular’ sphere: a sphere that wasn’t, well, religious.
Religion is a legal category. Some modern states are wholly secular- i.e. there is a full separation of 'Church' & 'State'. Others aren't. It is the law which decides the dividing line between sacred and secular. But the law of the land may incorporate Canon or other religion-based law.
That’s why the word’s modern, comparative sense wasn’t firmly established until the 17th century
It was firmly established in Europe by the beginning of the 13th. After that, whenever a heretic was condemned to death under Canon law, the miserable sod was handed over to 'the secular arm' for execution.
– Hugo Grotius’s De veritate religionis Christianae (1627) is one touchstone
No. It was wholly inconsequential. Grotius had to run away from Holland because he was an Arminian.
– at a time when European Christendom was both splintering
it had splintered a century previously
and confronting unfamiliar worlds
they didn't matter. Slaves did. But beating and raping them bred the very familiarity which is father to contempt.
through exploration and conquest. Even as religion could be conceived as a special domain that might be isolated from law and politics, the traffic with ancient and non-European cultures forced reflection on what counted as ‘true religion’.
This could only be said of the Jesuit mission to China. But the Chinese and Japanese objected to their people being enslaved and shipped overseas and thus tended to restrict trade and other contact with the Europeans. African Chiefs, however, were eager to sell 'black gold' to the Christian or Muslim.
It’s just that, when Europeans looked at India,
they found Hinduism and Islam- which were familiar enough.
Africa,
they considered sub-Saharan Africans to be savages save in the case of 'Prester John'- i.e. the Ethiopian Christian.
China
was civilized. Still, converting them might be profitable.
or the ancient Mediterranean,
which they were gaining more and more knowledge about from the Renaissance onward. Indeed, there was a time when smart peeps knew Latin & Greek & maybe some Hebrew and Sanskrit. But that was long ago.
they sifted for Christian-like (and often Protestant-like) elements: a sacred text to anchor authority, a prophetic founder to narrate origins, a set of theological doctrines to sort out orthodoxy and heresy, and perhaps duties that offered a path to salvation.
These were easy enough to find for Hinduism or Confucianism. Amo Arno, the first Ghanaian philosopher to become a Professor in the West, was a Christian convert. Still, it may be, he could have produced something of this sort for indigenous African religion after he returned home. It is said that the Dutch imprisoned him because he was spreading 'dissent'.
If a tradition didn’t provide these, scholars might helpfully supply them. In time, ‘world religions’ could be conjured up as bounded systems with creeds and essences, even when the local practices they subsumed were profoundly heterogeneous. Traditions with no founders were given founders; traditions with no single scripture were assigned canonical texts; diverse local rites were bundled into overarching systems.
So what? The thing didn't matter in the slightest. Either your people kicked ass in which case whatever story you told about yourself was taken at face value or else your conquerors made up mean stories about you. Only shitheads teaching shite think such stories mattered.
As world religions took hold as a subject of academic study in the later 19th century,
the prestige of such academic study declined. Scientists and Mathematicians and Engineers were doing useful work. Non-STEM subject academics were getting stupider and more useless.
European scholars did their systematic best to treat disparate systems of practice and thought as members of a class. Buddhism became one test case.
How fucking stupid do you have to be not to understand that Mongolians revere the same Lord Buddha as Sri Lankans?
To call it a single ‘religion’, scholars first had to unify various practices of South, Central and East Asia, and then to decide whether a sometimes godless tradition could qualify. Such struggles over classification
were easily resolved by talking to people from those places.
exposed a deeper uncertainty: how was ‘religion’ to be defined?
Lawyers and Judges and Legislators gave the answer to that question. 'Scholars' were too stupid, ignorant, and utterly useless to be of any help.
The great minds of the era
were Scientists or Mathematicians
had ideas. John Stuart Mill
was a fucking clerk at the India Office. He wasn't smart at all.
held that a religion must unite creed, sentiment and moral authority.
That was in an essay on the shithead Comte. But British law had already clarified that there was no such necessity. Moreover, it covered not just Christian but also Hindu and Muslim law.
Herbert Spencer thought that what religions shared was ‘the tacit conviction that the existence of the world with all it contains and all which surrounds it, is a mystery ever pressing for interpretation.’
His reputation declined very rapidly.
The anthropologist Edward B Tylor proposed, as a minimum definition, ‘belief in spiritual beings’. The philologist Max Müller called religion a ‘mental faculty’, separate from ‘sense and reason’, by which humans apprehend the Infinite. For the Old Testament scholar and Orientalist William Robertson Smith, the true foundation of religious life was ritual – the binding force of collective acts. The sociologist Émile Durkheim’s own definition, in his classic The Elementary Forms of Religious Life (1912), joined belief to behaviour and belonging: religion, he wrote, was ‘a unified system of beliefs and practices relative to sacred things’ that united its adherents ‘into one moral community, called the Church’.
All these guys were useless wankers. Religion is important for legal and economic reasons. That's why it is well-defined- i.e. is 'buck-stopped'- for any practical purpose. This doesn't mean that we can stop shitheads writing nonsense about it. It just means a Professor who says 'Religion was invented in 1500' is just on par with one who says 'Religion was invented by Martian Shape Shifters'
These definitions came up short because they
were made by shitheads
excluded too much or included too much. Either they failed to net the fish you were after or they netted too much bycatch. Mill wanted creed, emotion and moral suasion in one package,
He didn't really. He was just pretending.
but many traditions that Europeans encountered in the 19th century didn’t distribute those elements in anything like that pattern.
No religion fits some pattern discerned by a shithead.
Did a religion involve a metaphysical stance on the cosmos and our place within it
only to the same extent as Accountancy or Plumbing does so. In other words, the thing is optional
– was it driven by the ever-pressing ontological mysteries that Spencer considered central?
it turned out, it was Physics which was thus driven. Theology, it turned out, was a waste of time.
What we’d call ancient Judaism had very little of that;
What this cunt would call ancient Judaism doesn't matter in the slightest. The opinion of Rabbis might matter, but only to Jews.
the biblical writers do not stand before the universe feeling compelled to develop a worldview;
Kwame thinks the Prophets had MFAs in Creative Writing from Iowa. What is odd is that so few of them decided to become transgender lesbian abortionists.
they stand within a covenantal drama, entwining law, story and communal identity. And then Müller’s definition could apply to a Romantic poet. (Wilhelm Müller, Max’s father, was a great one.)
he was promising but died young.
Dubious of belief-based accounts like Tylor’s, Robertson Smith had concluded that ‘the antique religions had for the most part no creed; they consisted entirely of institutions and practices,’
just like modern religions.
and ‘while the practice was rigorously fixed, the meaning attached to it was extremely vague.’
No meaning whatever can be attached to anything these shitheads write.
Robertson Smith’s own corrective faltered in the face of practices that were communal but not in any obvious way ‘sacred’, or traditions in which doctrine mattered intensely. Durkheim’s formula fatefully relied on a sharp division between sacred and profane that countless ethnographies would undermine.
Nobody cared. These shitheads weren't doing anything useful. Maybe, during the Cold War, you could send 'Professors' of useless shite to shithole countries and they could gather intelligence of some sort. But to gather intelligence, you need intelligence and smart peeps soon realize that if you buy what you want quite cheaply, then your intelligence is better employed elsewhere.
Georg Simmel,
who had a 'philosophy of money' which was completely shit. Money doesn't structure shit. It is simply part and parcel of verification protocols in an expectations based system.
writing around the turn of the 20th century, had already dismissed the ‘Open Sesame’ dream that a single word could unlock the mystery: ‘No light will ever be cast in the sibyllic twilight that, for us, surrounds the origin and nature of religion as long as we insist on approaching it as a single problem requiring only a single word for its solution.’
This is nonsense. Either the origin and nature of religion is from God, the Creator, or it evolved because it had survival value. Either way, there is a one word solution- 'God' or 'Evolution'. Shitheads may say 'no! Religion was invented by homophobes / Capitalists / Feudal lords / Shape Shifting Lizards from Planet X, etc.'- but only other shitheads will engage with them.
A few years later, William James complained about ‘verbal’ disputation, but then fell back on a recognisably Protestant formula, defining religion as ‘the feelings, acts, and experiences of individual men in their solitude, so far as they apprehend themselves to stand in relation to whatever they may consider the divine.’
He was clearly wrong. Religious experiences benefit by the amplification of being in a crowd. Indeed, some religious experiences can't be accessed in solitude.
The linguist Jane Ellen Harrison, in her study Themis (1912), refused to define religion at all: a definition, she said, ‘desiccates its object’.
Jane liked her objects moist.
In the decades that followed,
shitheads wrote more and more stupid shit
followers of Durkheim foregrounded function, treating religion as a mechanism that bound together societies,
or divided it or had no impact either way
comforted individuals,
or scared or bored them shitless
marked transitions, legitimised power. But saying what religion does
it gets you to think it has a method to get you to Heaven or, at least, a better after-life.
wouldn’t necessarily tell you what religion was, and, anyway, these functions weren’t peculiar to religion.
Nope. If you tell the truth about what religion does, you understand what religion was or will be. This is because religion has a peculiar function. True, there are some people who say 'Judaism and Buddhism don't promise Heaven or a better after-life'. But such people are telling stupid lies. It is a different matter that some may claim to be religious despite not wanting an after-life. But other people who keep fucking prostitutes also claim that they were thinking of their wife the whole time. I don't even like sex. Also, I didn't inhale.
Clifford Geertz’s elegant
meaningless
formula from the 1960s cast religion as a ‘system of symbols’,
like porn
one that establishes ‘powerful, pervasive, and long-lasting moods and motivations’.
like porn
Yet this formula likewise went too big, opening the door to all sorts of political ideologies.
Not to mention, porn.
Evolutionary and cognitive theorists since have offered definitions of their own. The evolutionary psychologist Robin Dunbar, for instance, suggested that religion may amount to ‘belief in some kind of transcendental world … inhabited by spirit beings or forces (that may or may not take an interest in and influence the physical world …).’
That's Magic, not Religion.
Inevitably, these belief-oriented accounts run into the same complaints that earlier doxastic definitions had: they seem awfully Protestant, privileging inner conviction over outward form. Even if you bought into the ‘belief’ part, though, you could baulk at the ‘transcendental’ part. In many ‘traditional religions’, there’s a deep continuity between what we’d distinguish as the natural and the supernatural realm. In the Akan region of Ghana where I spent much of my childhood, people would appease or reproach their ancestors in the same spirit that they might wheedle or berate someone at a municipal office.
Ghana had indigenous religion but it may also have had indigenous sorcery. Its own people could distinguish between the two just as well as we can distinguish between a Church and a Coven.
As the anthropologist Robin Horton observed, so-called traditional religions are less like the Western notion of religion than they are like science:
Anthropology turned to shit long ago. All we ask is that Professors of that subject don't eat their own shit in public.
they aim at explanation, prediction and control.
so does Cost and Management Accountancy. But Accountancy is useful. Anthropology isn't.
True, where science posited impersonal forces, traditional thought posited personal ones.
No. It too posited impersonal forces.
But the underlying move from observed regularities to theoretical constructs was similar; what Europeans wanted to call religion was a pragmatic explanatory framework, reasonable given the available evidence, and part of the same conceptual space as folk biology, folk psychology and everyday causal reasoning.
If the thing talks about a better after-life, it is religion. If it doesn't, it isn't.
By the late 20th century, hopes for a definition had faded.
By the Seventies, the hope had faded that a non-STEM subject Professor might one day say something sensible.
Some theorists turned to Ludwig Wittgenstein’s notion of ‘family resemblance’.
Which was stupid. Families are genealogically related. Girls don't inherit their Daddy's beard. There is 'convergent evolution' or mimetic effects that all daddies of a certain age in a specific society come to resemble each other.
The thought is that traditions can belong to the same conceptual family because they overlap in crisscrossing ways – like cousins who share a nose here, a chin there, without any feature that they all have in common. It’s a permissive approach:
It is nonsense.
you map the ripple of resemblances and give up on strict boundaries. Unfortunately, those resemblances always depend on what you pick as your prototype. If you start with Protestant Christianity, you’ll find resemblances that matter to Protestants; begin instead with Yoruba orisha devotion, and you’ll trace a very different set of likenesses.
Only nonsense can be deduced from nonsense.
The anthropologist Talal Asad
his father was a Hungarian Jew who converted to Islam. Admittedly, that was back when it was Christians, not Muslims, who were most zealous in killing Jews.
influentially and illuminatingly traced both ‘religion’ and ‘the secular’ to the political and intellectual habits of Western modernity.
Islamic modernity is much worse.
Yet in his account, religion sometimes seems more an effect of those forces than a cause, more a product of power rather than a power in itself.
Coz he is an academic, not an Imam.
And even if you think that the phenomena we cluster under the term have been sorted and named by Western modernity,
Western modernity has to do with valorizing STEM subjects and relegating non-STEM teaching to cretins.
you could wonder how we could be sure that they’re examples of the same thing.
If the thing offers a better after-life, it is an example of religion. If it offers a blow job, it is prostitution.
Was the category beyond redemption? The scholar and minister Wilfred Cantwell Smith,
who should have converted to Islam when he was in Lahore. Instead, he became a Trojan horse for Islamists in Academia. No wonder Presbyterianism declined by 75 percent in US since 1965.
whose book The Meaning and End of Religion (1962)
cunts like him were killing off the Church. Islam rose and rose.
had meticulously detailed the belated emergence of the ‘religion’ concept in Europe, long maintained that talk of ‘religion’ conflated too many things not to cause mischief, and urged that we give up such talk altogether; we should, instead, speak of faith and ‘cumulative tradition’.
Instead, people gave up reading that silly billy.
The anthropologist and historian Daniel Dubuisson, who anathematised ‘religion’ as a 19th-century Western imposition on non-Western worlds, urged that it be replaced with ‘cosmographic formation’. These evasive manoeuvres, in turn, have met with scepticism. As the social theorist Martin Riesebrodt drily observed, neologisms like Dubuisson’s could doubtless be shown to ‘have also been “constructed” through historically specific discourses’ and revealed as ‘instruments in the linguistic battle between classes or cultures.’ Besides, he pointed out, those who would eliminate the term ‘religion’ seldom manage long without it.
Meow!
So how has ‘religion’, as a concept and category, endured in the absence of a stable definition?
It has endured because people ignore stupid liars. A guy who says 'religion isn't about a better after-life' is like the guy who claims he has always been faithful to his wife because he is thinking of her when he is fucking prostitutes.
To answer that question, it may help to think about how referring expressions do their referring. Some terms keep their grip on the world even as our understanding of what they denote changes radically; others, once central to serious thought, fall away when their supposed referents are deemed illusions. What distinguishes the survivors from the casualties?
They are true. People really do want a better after-life. Also, if they keep fucking prostitutes, they really do like sex with randos.
Think about our names for ‘natural kinds’. These are meant to pick out groupings that are found not just in our heads but in nature: bosons, barium, bonobos, beech trees. The things these names designate are thought to have causal powers, explanatory roles or underlying properties that justify treating them as more than convenient fictions. When we name a natural kind, what we’re naming is really out there in the world. Anyway, that’s the aim. How do we decide when we’ve got it right?
Utility. We gain it because our productivity has increased.
Start with chemistry, and the question of what counts as an acid. When the term was first used, it referred simply to substances that tasted sour, or acidus. Later they were marked out by what they did: etching metal, losing their bite in contact with alkalis. In 1777, the French chemist Antoine Lavoisier was convinced that acidity came from a common ingredient he called oxygen – oxygène, the ‘acid-producer’. He was wrong. Yet we’d say that when Lavoisier spoke of acids, he was referring to the same class of things we mean by the word.
Because this is useful. Chemistry has greatly raised productivity and thus Human Welfare.
A century on, chemists refined the concept. Svante Arrhenius defined acids by their propensity to dissociate in water and release hydrogen ions; in 1923, Johannes Nicolaus Brønsted and Thomas Martin Lowry each reconceived them as proton donors; Gilbert Lewis broadened the net again by calling acids electron-pair acceptors. Each shift expanded the boundaries, but none made the term obsolete. The word survived because its targets – the substances doing the dissolving and reacting – were real enough to anchor it even as its theoretical profile changed.
No. Chemistry burgeoned because it was useful. It attracted smart peeps. Non-STEM subjects became adversely selective of imbecility.
Not every scientific term has been so lucky. In 1774, Joseph Priestley isolated a gas he took to be ‘dephlogisticated air’. Phlogiston was supposed to be a substance released during combustion, the invisible essence of burning. What he had actually found, we’d say, was what we know as oxygen, the name derived from that discarded theory of Lavoisier’s.
Oxygen means 'acid former'. Lavoisier mistakenly thought it was needed for all acid formation.
Unlike oxygen, nothing in the world behaved as phlogiston was said to behave.
Indeed, it was Lavoisier who brought the curtain down on phlogiston; closed-system experiments, which he conducted with his wife and lab assistant Marie-Anne Paulze Lavoisier, showed that combustion involved the gain of a component of air (namely, oxygen) rather than the loss of an invisible essence. The phlogiston concept evaporated because chemists came to see that it referred to nothing at all. Priestley’s ‘dephlogisticated air’,
Oxygen didn't evaporate though Lavoisier was wrong. But names don't matter very much.
by contrast, referred successfully despite being misdescribed: his experiments had latched on to a real thing, even if his theory of it was wrong.
No. By chance the word oxygen remained in use. But it could have been called something else.
This difference between a term that refers despite error and one that refers to nothing is the difference between a bad map of a real country and a map of Atlantis.
No. Some words become Schelling focal solutions to coordination problems. Others don't. There are maps of countries which don't exist- e.g. the Caliphate of Khorasan- but which are informative and which could exist. If Elon Musk decides to build a city under the Sea, his map of Atlantis would be informative. It could come into existence.
Only the first can be fixed. Philosophers have used such cases to argue that successful reference doesn’t depend on getting the description right. What matters is the causal connection between our words and the things they’re meant to denote. The strategy is straightforward enough: if you want to know what object a word refers to,
look up a dictionary or ask people who use that word a lot
find the thing that gives the best causal explanation of the central features of uses of that word.
It is difficult and costly to do so. It is easy to look up a dictionary or to ask around.
The features that drove Lavoisier’s acid-talk were produced by substances we still recognise as acids, which is why we don’t treat him as having been talking about some other thing, or about nothing at all. Causal theories of reference explain why our words can target the same class of object even when our conception of it shifts, and when the boundaries of the class shift, too.
Nothing can explain why one word gained currency while another faded away. We still say 'cool'. We don't say 'hip'.
Pluto can stop being a planet without shaking the foundations of ‘planet’ talk.
Astronomers downgraded it for their own purposes. Non-astronomers didn't greatly care.
In such theories of reference, a word continues to refer, so long as it stands in the right causal relation to the entity that gives rise to its use. Misdescribed objects can survive conceptual upheavals; nonexistent ones can’t.
Nonsense! Things which may come into existence- e.g. Caliphate of Khorasan or Musk's Atlantis- are treated in the same way as other things. But 'Meinongian objects' too exist in their own realm.
Even in the natural sciences, though, classes of things can fall between those stools. ‘Luminiferous ether’ is a case in point: an invisible medium once thought to carry light waves, it was indispensable to 19th-century physics yet eventually dissolved into what came to be called electromagnetic fields. Was ‘ether’ simply a phantasm?
It was a theory which turned out to be unsupported by the evidence.
Some philosophers think we could well have retained the term, redefining it to mean the very fields that replaced it. Albert Einstein himself, who once helped kill the ether idea, later repurposed the term as the relativistic ether of spacetime, a field with its own geometry. Other theorists suspect that our ‘electromagnetic fields’ may eventually go the way of ether.
What has all this to do with Religion?
If there can be uncertainty about objects within the natural sciences,
because they are inaccessible to direct observation
the wicket gets stickier when we move into the historical and social realm.
No. They get simpler. We can directly observe human affairs.
Here the things we name – revolutions, nations, money, marriage, religion – are doubly human products, being products first of our collective activity, then of our collective description.
No. These are things which are 'justiciable' and 'buck-stopped'. I may say 'Trump is overthrowing the American Constitution. This is an illegal revolution! It is treason!' and I may approach the Bench on this basis. If the Supreme Court denies my claim, I may lobby Congress to impeach the President or take other action to restrain his usurpation of power.
Courts decide what is money, when a marriage subsists and what is or isn't a protected religious practice.
These entities are what the philosopher Sally Haslanger would call ‘socially founded’ (a term she uses to sidestep the confusions associated with ‘socially constructed’).
Her work is founded on stupidity and uselessness.
Many philosophers of language now call such entities social kinds.
Because they really have nothing better to do.
To approach religion as a social kind
is a waste of time. The Law matters. Stupid academics teaching worthless shite don't matter at all.
isn’t to say that it’s as referentially sound as other familiar examples of this sort. Religion may, in fact, be in worse shape than most. It belongs to that subcategory of social kinds that living people apply to themselves. Some social kinds, like ‘recession’, can be defined externally, without the participation of those they describe. Economists can declare one to have happened in the 1870s, even if no one at the time felt it by that name.
Equally, we can say the Neanderthals had a religion as is evidenced by their burial practices.
Others, like ‘wedding’, depend on shared recognition: you cannot hold one without a community that believes in weddings.
You can, if the law permits it.
‘Religion’, like many social kinds, functions in both ways. Anthropologists can use the term to describe practices that their participants would never call religions, yet, once the label circulates, it acquires a reflexive power: believers come to organise their self-understanding around it. In this respect, religion is a product of classification that helps to shape the reality it describes.
Only in the sense that motherhood is a social kind. Baby wouldn't call out 'Ma-Ma' and cover Mummy's face with kisses if some Dead White Male hadn't invented the concept of maternity.
The philosopher Ian Hacking captured this feedback loop with his idea of dynamic nominalism – the process by which classifications and people classified reshape one another.
Thus, having been classified as a philosopher, Hacking became as stupid as shit. If only he had been classified as a Medical Doctor, he wouldn't be so utterly useless.
Categories create kinds. The heavy drinker is seen, and sees himself, as an alcoholic.
Sadly, this is seldom the case- at least amongst those who can hold their drink. Often, there has to be an 'intervention'.
The word doesn’t merely label the phenomenon – it helps to constitute it. Hacking later preferred to call this ‘dialectical realism’, on the grounds that what emerges from the loop (labels affecting those labelled, which then affects the label) is, by any reasonable measure, real enough. When you’ve been told that what you have is a religion, what’s affected isn’t just how you relate to it but what you think you are.
This is obvious nonsense. If you are told you have a religion and will be punished if you don't follow its precepts, you become a hypocrite, not a true believer.
Where does this leave someone trying to understand human life through such refractory terms?
If they are stupid and teach stupid shite, it leaves them yet more stupid and useless.
We might concede that ‘religion’ resists a unitary meaning
It has a good enough legal meaning
and proceed case by case, choosing the angle that best reveals what we need to make visible. When speaking of the Abrahamic faiths, a practice-centred approach may capture the lived textures of ritual and observance.
In other words, just visit some Churches, Synagogues and Mosques, and have a chat with the priest, Rabbi or Imam.
The propositions of the Nicene or the Athanasian Creed are, after all, obscure and arguably incoherent, but the act of avowing them carries weighty significance.
Nonsense! Nobody cares.
When we’re turning to the ‘traditional’ thought of the Azande, the Nuer or the Asante, by contrast, a belief-centred, even neo-Tylorian, lens may illuminate elements that the modern Christian model hides from view. Each emphasis is bound to clarify something that the other leaves obscure.
Fuck have these nutters ever clarified?
The larger truth is that we’ve always navigated the world with models that merely approximate it, with varying degrees of adequacy.
The larger truth is studying and teaching Philosophy makes you stupid and useless.
As Hans Vaihinger argued in The Philosophy of ‘As If’ (1911), we often reason through fictions we judge ‘true enough’, because making use of them helps us act, anticipate and understand.
We generally don't reason about stuff regarding which we can get informed testimony.
The map may not be the territory, but we’d be lost without it.
Sadly, I get lost even with Google Maps.
And the sciences, social and natural alike, advance through such tolerable falsehoods. Their worth lies in the utility of their results.
That's why Philosophy is worthless. It has no utility. Also, it makes you stupider and stupider.
If ‘religion’ endures, it’s because
religion has high Income elasticity of demand. It is a service industry.
the word still does work, practical and theoretical. It orders law and policy, directs research, and shapes the inner lives of those who use it.
No. It provides a service. If it ignores the demand side and concentrates on supplying a boring product, it loses market share.
Sociologists can enquire into its relation to charity or suicide; psychologists can study its connection to prejudice or wellbeing. In the United States, legislators and judges must have a sufficient grasp of the category that they can balance the Constitutional dos and don’ts of ‘accommodation’ and ‘non-establishment’. For the religionist, meanwhile, it continues to name a space where meaning is made, defended or denied. Whatever else it may be, ‘religion’ remains a category with too many stakeholders to be fired by fiat.
A Stalin or Mao could repress religion easily enough.
When it comes to what the word means, no one gets to say, and everyone gets a say.
No. Only the Law matters. My religion forbids me to pay taxes. Should my religious beliefs be 'accommodated'? Yes. I have no income. That is why I sleep on the streets.
Of course, scholarship itself requires observance
unless, it is useless shite. In that case, anybody can utter any nonsense and nobody would care.
– with respect to its own standards of evidence, and on the discipline of paying attention. To be observant, in this sense, is to watch the world closely without pretending to stand outside it.
No. Observant people acquire novel information. Philosophers aren't observant. They have their heads stuck up their own rectums.
And so we try to use our terms with care, aware of what they can hide from sight and of how much they still let us see.
A word can't hide anything from the eyes.
We begin where we are, with the tools our history leaves us, and we make do, even if we suspect that our models may someday be replaced.
The models of philosophers were never used and thus couldn't be replaced.
For now, religion endures as a shared act of attention:
No. It endures for legal and economic reasons. It is a service industry. If it is banned by law, it may go underground. Also, if it gets no paying customers or 'bums on seats', it may disappear by itself.
one of those serviceable maps by which we try to find our bearings, and to keep faith with the world.
Ordinary people have jobs and families to look after. They don't need to waste any time 'finding their bearings'. However, they do want to get to the 'Good Place' and be reunited with their loved ones. That's why Religion endures.
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