March 24, 2003
TELL ME A STORY:
Stories, yarns, legends ... these are the stuff of community identity. (Mark Randell, 25/2/03, Online Opinion)"Man is a seeker of the Agent." This notion, cribbed from John Fowle's superb book, The Aristos, is a succinct summary of the reason for the emergence of religion in the human mind.We are seekers of the reason for why we are here, on this ball of dirt in a vast, seemingly empty universe. We are seekers of meaning - "what does it all mean?"
The latter question, as one philosopher notes, is most likely to be asked by children, the mad, the anguished, the ironic, and the damned. It is a question we all routinely push to one side as we occupy ourselves with the family, the business, the bills, the lawn, the local.
The local - no, not the pub, but our local 'area of operation' - is the primary locus of our sense of meaning. It's where we build our most treasured meanings, since meaning is not something received 'from out there' but something we make, something we construct.
If you - as cognitive scientists do - build a 'neural network', a primitive set of connected, artificial neurons, it will take in what data you choose to give it and seek to categorise that data in some way; it will try to make understandable patterns from the data. "Which is what you would expect," I hear you cry, "seeing that's why you built the thing in the first place."
Well, yes, but neural networks are simply an impoverished imitation of a brain, with all its billions of interconnected neurons. The brain is a pattern-seeker, a pattern-builder par excellence, and it evolved that way - we didn't build it.
Human brains run on meaning. All those neurons need nutrients, in the form of information, data to work on, patterns to find. We desperately need to put a meaning to things, to things that happen, things that we see, things that we experience. Most of the time, we put meaning to things by telling stories. We weave our stories in order to make sense of where we are, what we are, who we are.
So, we work our way outwards. We build our local meaning - in family, close relationships, home. We make wider meaning and stories about our place in a community - our relationships with others who work and live nearby - and we make our richest stories about 'ultimate meaning', first causes, prime movers, in order to put some pattern we can handle into the strangeness of our human condition, marooned here on our blue planet between the lost garden of Eden and some mythical promised land.
The richest of these stories have a compelling sense of 'rightness' - they match our pattern sense, they fire the 'God' neuron in our brains. They are, however, stories. They are worked on by generations, refined, passed on, passed down, handed over. But they are stories, built by humans, people seeking meaning.
Is it any wonder then that those "progressive" societies in the West that have abandoned religion, community, neighborhood, family and opted instead for a one to one relationship of the individual to the state have ended up thinking that life has no meaning? Is it any wonder that their arts and culture have become so barren and that they depend on Hollywood to tell them stories? Is it any wonder that having inherited brains that seek patterns, and patterns with a sense of "rightness" at that, but having tossed aside those patterns, so many in the West feel a sense of wrongness in their lives? The question we face is not whether our religious beliefs are based merely on stories, but what we replace those stories with and what effect it will have if we replace them with nothing or with stories that dissatisfy. Based on what we see in most of the West the result seems to be a kind of soul-gnawing neuroses, a corrosive sickness unto death, that we may not fully comprehend, and which they certainly don't, but which we recognize and are repelled by when it's most graphically on display, as in the current crisis. Posted by Orrin Judd at March 24, 2003 10:18 PM
Funny, when I abandoned religion, I did not say, "OK, now life has no meaning."
You speak more persuasively for the religionists than you do for the antireligionists.
I have many foreign friends who reside in the US. While they embrace most of our ideals they find Americans lack of morality, of a sense of community, and religion as depressing. I concur with your assesment of the rot that is eating away at the West's foundation. Its amazing how people embrace people like Camus, a man who looked into the abyss and fell in.
Posted by: Thomas J. Jackson at March 25, 2003 2:16 AMHarry:
Antireligion is religion.
Antireligion isn't religion, it is a belief about
religion.
Two things struck me by their absence from the essay:
First, where does the awareness of our mortality fit in building these stories? I think that is far more explanatory than searches for meaning. That is also why atheism, no matter its "truth value," will be a non-starter for nearly everyone.
Secondly, just because one is capable of formulating a question--What is the meaning of life?--doesn't mean there is an answer, or that the answer will be pleasing if it exists (e.g: There is no meaning), or that the answer will be any more fulfilling than Monty Python's movie of the same name.
The conundrum of religion is that it purports to tell more than a story, it purports to tell the "truth". It is not enough to see patterns of agency in the workings of the world, the agent, God, must be believed in as a literal certainty.
Much of the problem with western religion stems from the shock of realizing that the "truths" of religion were not literal, but allegorical. The story tells us something about ourselves, but are not to be taken literally. Once the allegorical viewpoint took hold, there really was nothing holding us exclusively to Judaism or Christianity. Allegories are human creations, not divinely revealed truths. You can look to eastern religions, or novels, or your own imagination to fill in the stories which bring meaning to your life.
Thus, as I stated in an earlier post, Christianity is not intellectually sustainable by anything other than a literal interpretation (in which case it conflicts with science).
RobertD/Jeff:
Of course religion seeks to answer unanswerable questions. Antireligion says those answers are wrong. Thus does it lay claim to religious knowledge, becoming a religion itself.
OJ:
This probably won't get read because of being archived (why so soon?), but here goes anyway.
Unanswerable questions are just that. Any proposed answer is a belief, not a fact. Religions, unfortunately, forget the distinction.
Antireligion doesn't state the answers are wrong, rather that their truth values are unknowable. Antireligion is a distaste for making conclusions from ignorance
(this is a term of art, but the way, not an insult).
Jeff:
Ms Ives below, like nearly every atheist I've ever heard, seems devoid of such doubts about the rightness of antireligion and the wrongness of religion.