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Title: The Continuing Appeal of Religion Author: Anonymous Date: 2006 Language: en Topics: atheist, religion, society Source: Retrieved on December 21, 2009 from http://libcom.org/library/the-continuing-appeal-of-religion-troploin Notes: This is a modified version of an essay published in French as the 7th Lettre de Troploin, June 2006, called Le Présent d’une illusion. The English title is inspired by Fredy Perlman’s The Continuing Appeal of Nationalism, which first came out as an article in The Fifth Estate in 1983 and then as a Black & Red (Detroit, USA) pamphlet the following year.
Not every believer is a social conformist. His independence of mind, his
resistance (to war, for example) or rebellion can outdo those of many
atheists. Yet religion is tantamount to social acceptation, because its
very principle separates a here below from a hereafter which created the
here below and is necessarily superior to it. Religious thought (and
therefore behaviour) is dualist: it is based on the division between
body and soul, matter and spirit, and this divide can only favour the
latter over the former. Whatever the believer does to change this world,
for him there will always be another world of a higher order. History,
life as we daily experience it here and now matter less that what is
beyond, outside the everyday world. Therefore, when he fights
inequality, exploitation and oppression, the religious person deals with
realities that belong to a minor level of reality. He can only (and
indeed he must) treat the history of mankind as a subplot within a much
larger story that exceeds men and women, because that story relates to
and depends upon something outside all men and women of all times. A
Christian cannot give the same importance to the history of, say, the
Spanish civil war and to the Gospel. He will say the two are
“different”, but what ultimately matters to him is the Gospel. The
absolute relativizes everything else, or it would stop being absolute.
Thus, inequality, exploitation and oppression are attributed to
individual, moral, natural deep-rooted causes: whatever change we can
achieve has to start within every human heart. Very few Jews, Christians
or Muslims take Adam and Eve’s Fall at face value, but such a tale
reinforces the belief that “something” draws each of us to evil-doing,
dominating and exploiting our fellow creatures, and that mankind’s
meandering course is based on a fundamental flaw, which no evolution nor
revolution could redress. Historical examples of massacres and horrors
only confirm what the original myth symbolizes.
Lots of civilizations have imagined a primeval harmony that was lost
because of some ill-fated desire or deed, but few went as far as the
Bible in putting the blame on the tree of knowledge. It’s because they
tried to sort out good from evil that the first couple unleashed the
doom that is bound to repeat itself until the end of time. The message
is : we should never try to understand what is essential to us, and we
must leave the essential to divine or earthly mediators between us and
the non-understandable.
Consequently, even when religion fuels revolt, as it often does, it’s
always with the assumption that exploitation and oppression can be
alleviated, but not suppressed. No Church could be the Church of the
poor and exploited, because it is the Church of all, rich and poor.
Of course, history provides us with myriads of religious doctrines and
practices that aimed at overall historical change, from Taoists in China
to Renaissance Anabaptists. But they were always heretics, and the
religious institution sided with the rich and powerful to slander and
crush the rebellious. When peasant armies threatened the domination of
the landed classes, the founder of Protestantism had no qualms about it
and called for the outright suppression of their revolt. Religion may
dissent (and often does), but it ultimately superposes divine Law (as in
the Torah) and the laws enforced by political powers.
Those who found a religion do not seek to radically change the existing
world, but to live in it in the light of another world. So they make do
with their time. In the 17^(th) century, hardly any religious creed
questioned slavery, and among Christian groups, at the beginning of the
18^(th) century, only a few Protestant dissenters (the Quakers, for
example) denounced the slave trade.
Not many people nowadays publicly state to what extent the three
monotheisms set a stigma on half the human species. Instead of being
created (like Adam) in God’s image, Eve more plainly derived from a
man’s rib, and soon was the prime culprit in the Fall: hence the
obligation to (hard) work and (painful) motherhood. She came second in
the process of creation, but ranked first in destruction. Here again,
the point is not that people “believe” in this myth as they have no
doubt about the existence of the pyramids, but that the myth structures
a world vision that helps keep women in a minor role. If we think that
fairy tales contribute to building up a conscious and unconscious
collective mind that plays a big part in our lives, then we must admit
that a tale as far reaching and widely known as that of Genesis plays a
much larger part, even for those who’ve never opened a Bible. The
Vatican’s adamant hostility to birth control is a side effect of a two
thousand year old process of downplaying women.
It’s quite logical that God should be mercilessly vindictive and punish
not just the guilty couple, but their entire descent down to you and me
: to hammer into our heads that we come under an incurable evil human
nature, it is necessary that no generation should get away from the
curse, even two thousand years after the event. There’s no better
evidence of an inescapable original “fault” than an utterly collective
punishment: when only Noah and his family are spared, human failure is
proved by the mass drowning of thousands of innocents, babies included.
On such a cornerstone the three religions of the Book are built, and
only a handful of heretical exegetists have questioned it. Even in the
very patriarchal times when the Scriptures were composed, there were
woman heads of State. But we hear of no woman catholic or orthodox
priest, few female Protestant ministers, hardly any woman rabbi or imam.
The optimist will object that, at least in the West, sexism is on the
wane. It all depends on what we choose to look at. In 2006, a “free
abortion” woman campaigner of the early 1970s declared: “We fought for
the right to be a woman without being a mother. And you can’t say that
today.” True. Most of our contemporaries, in Berlin as in Los Angeles,
including those who regard themselves as non-sexist, feel there is
something missing in a woman that has no child, nor the desire to bear
or raise one. And they would not react in the same way to a man with no
wish of fatherhood. Judeo-Christianity is not the unique cause of that
attitude, but it surely contributes to it, especially Catholicism with
its cult of Mary that present the ideal woman both as a virgin and as a
mother. The Pope was once accurately defined as the person who would
like every woman to be pregnant without ever being penetrated by a
penis.
A characteristic of religious attitude is the privilege given to faith
over rational thinking. The divine can be put into arguments, but is
first meant to be believed in, and its presence felt more than
understood. No theologian believes in God because he’s read books about
God : he reads and writes about God because he’s a believer. So the
critique of religion starts from the idea that there is no need for us
to abdicate in front of the (inevitable) unknown and unknowable,
separate them from our world and set them in another dimension that
we’ll never be able to explore. There is no need to dissociate reason
from feeling.
However, social critique has often harboured the illusion that it could
radicalize the confrontation between bourgeois and priests, reason and
faith, democracy and religion, and take the use of reason to the full
logical conclusions which bourgeois thinkers would refuse to draw. In
other words, the socialist (or communist) would be the only consistent
rationalist.
Yet rationalism could only be a weapon in a democratic revolution. It
does not consist in the (necessary) use of reason, but in the belief
that all evil and misfortune arise from lack of knowledge or from faulty
judgment. It opposes private thinking to authority: to overthrow
oppression, we must start by dethroning the intellectual powers that be,
and we have the means to do that: our own personal intellect, that
everyone’s been equally bestowed with. Mind comes first: hence the
privilege given to education as the ultimate driving force of history.
As has been pointed out, the basic flaw of such a vision is to forget
that any teacher must first be taught what he teaches. This logical flaw
remains if the educational bias is understood as self education. The
oppressed and exploited do not first understand they can change their
situation, and then act upon the situation to change it. They only
understand it as they try to act on it.
Rationalism may refute the “falseness” of religion, but it will never be
able to understand the communal and social phenomenon that religion is.
Reason’s call to the intellect forgets that the human condition is
intellect and fantasy. The quest for the supernatural does not stem from
an excessive but from a limited imagination built by millenniums of
exploitation and oppression: the incapacity to be free on Earth incites
humans to situate freedom out of this world. Dreams and desires are
displaced persons. This is the stuff religion is made of.