Studies in Religion Faculty of Arts College of Humanities and Social Sciences NSW 2006 AUSTRALIA Carole M. Cusack Room N424 Woolley A20 BA (Hons), PhD, M.Ed (Ed Psych) Telephone +61 2 9351 6837 Senior Lecturer, COD, Studies in Religion Facsimile +61 2 9351 7758 email: [email protected]
Religion as Something Absolutely Ordinary
Abstract
Adherents of particular religions (especially the monotheistic traditions) are inclined to assert that their faith is special, different from all the others, even perhaps antithetical to the notion of religion itself. Yet, there is a vast number of religions across contemporary human culture, a number greatly expanded if the religions of the past, that have ceased to be living realities, are included. This has led to the assertion that there is no such thing as a society without religion and that humankind is 'naturally religious'. It is the problematic nature of that second statement that this lecture explores. What might it mean to say that humans are naturally religious? What significance can be accorded to neurologists' claims that they have identified particular patterns of brain activity occurring in states of religious experience (for example, deep meditation by Buddhist monks)? It will be argued that believers have been too ready to adopt such 'objective' external testimonies without recognizing that they actually support the contention that no culturally or historically specific religious tradition or revelation is 'true'. What they point to is religion's status as 'real', but not 'true'.
Introduction: Humanity is the Measure of All Things
Religion is a uniquely human phenomenon; rocks, plants and animals are not religious. Stewart Guthrie has suggested that religion can be best understood as ‘a systematic anthropomorphism: the attribution of human characteristics to non-human things or events.’1 This contention is supported by evidence from virtually all religious traditions, in a variety of ways. Consider the notion that the universe was created from the body of a primordial anthropomorphic being, or is shaped like such a being. The cosmos of the Jains is an example of the latter belief,2 and within the Indo-European cultural complex there exist many versions of the former belief, all derived from an ur-myth. One famous early example is the Purusha Sukta, the ‘Hymn of Man,’ from the Rig Veda (c. 800 BCE); later versions are found in the thirteenth century CE Prose Edda of Snorri
1 Stewart Elliott Guthrie, Faces in the Clouds: A New Theory of Religion, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1993, p. 3. 2 Kendall W. Folkert, ‘Jainism,’ in John R. Hinnells (ed.), A Handbook of Living Religions, Harmondsworth, Penguin, 1991 [1984], p. 269. It is, of course, possible that Jainism acquired this belief from the Indo-European settlers of India, although it is generally acknowledged to preserve Dravidian elements. Sturluson and Old Russian ‘Poem on the Dove King’, and residually in the tenth or eleventh century Irish Lebor Gebala Erenn. The Purusha Sukta states: They anointed the Man, the sacrifice born at the beginning, upon the sacred grass. With him the gods, the Sadhyas, and the sages sacrificed. From that sacrifice in which everything was offered, the melted fat was collected, and he made it into those beasts who live in the air… His mouth became the Brahmin; his arms were made into the Warrior, his thighs the People, and from his feet the Servants were born… From his navel the middle realm of space arose; from his head the sky evolved. From his two feet came the earth, and the quarters of the sky from his ear. Thus they set the worlds in order.3
It is important to note that the basic Indo-European conceptual repertoire is derived from the human body. The Purusha Sukta ascribes the creation of the social order and all cultural forms to the sacrifice of the Man, not merely the origin of the physical universe. Moral qualities derive from the relationship of the human body to the (human-originated) cosmos. For example, the world was divided into right and left, with ‘right’ having connotations of masculinity and positivity; while ‘left’ was feminine and negatively connoted with death. J. P. Mallory comments that: the dichotomization according to side is …based on the anatomical universal which favors right-handedness. This system, however, has also crossed with the method of reckoning the cardinal directions among the early Indo-Europeans. The lexical evidence makes it clear that in IE culture one quite literally ‘oriented’ oneself by facing the sun. In doing so one faced the rising sun in the east and hence the north would be on one’s left side while the propitious right side faced south. This can be seen, for example, in Celtic (OIr dess ‘right; south’, Welsh dehau ‘right; south’) and OInd daksina - ‘right; south’. Terms for north, however, are built on words for ‘left’, e.g., OIr focla ‘north’ from cle ‘left; sinister, unpropitious’, Welsh gogledd ‘north’ from cledd ‘left’; the Germanic words for ‘north’ (ON nordr, OE norp, OHG nordan) but Umb nertru ‘left’.4 Moreover, we should note ‘the relation of the Latin homo, “man,” and humus, “soil”’5; etymologically humans are identified with the earth.
The human body serves as one of the most potent symbols in cultural vocabularies. Human society is conceived on as a body, with the individual citizens united as one actor. The famous speech of the Roman patrician Menenius in William Shakespeare’s tragedy Coriolanus is built around this image,6 and Mary Douglas’ anthropological analysis of ‘natural symbols’ is a scholarly and enlightening treatment of the same image. Douglas interestingly demonstrates that the core symbol of the body may be positively or negatively coded. This is important because there are societies that are not this-worldly in orientation, in which ‘life will be seen as purely spiritual, and the body as
3 Wendy Doniger O’Flaherty (trans.), The Rig Veda: An Anthology, Harmondsworth, Penguin, 1981, pp. 30-31. 4 J. P. Mallory and D. Q. Adams, Encyclopedia of Indo-European Culture, Fitzroy Dearborn Publishers, London and Chicago, 1997, p. 131. 5 Bruce Lincoln, ‘Indo-European Religions’ in M. Eliade (ed.) The Encyclopaedia of Religion, Vol. 7, 1987, Macmillan, p. 198. 6 William Shakespeare, ‘Coriolanus’, Act 1, Scene 1, lines 95-104, in Richard Proudfoot et al, The Arden Shakespeare, Walton-on-Thames, Thomas Nelson & Sons Ltd, 1998, p. 215. irrelevant matter’.7 The distinction between the material and the spiritual, the natural and the supernatural, is one that will be returned to, but what should be recognised is that even those societies that reject the body remain dominated by the body as model. Douglas concludes: [f]or these people society appears as a system that does not work. The human body is the most readily available image of a system… It follows that the body tends to serve as a symbol of evil, as a structured system contrasted with pure spirit which by its nature is free and undifferentiated.8 Additionally, religions and post-religious secular meaning systems employ the symbol of the body extensively.
The issue of the holistic perception of meaning in pre-modern societies (that is, the absence of a sharply divided sacred and secular) also becomes relevant here. The study of pre-modern societies reveals that although there may be unbelieving or disbelieving individuals they are exceptional, and that religious beliefs and practices are at the centre of culture.9 From this data some have asserted that humanity is ‘naturally religious’. This contention is problematic. Like many themes and issues in the history of the academic discipline of religion, there is an unspoken theological debate being played out behind the overt theoretical hypothesising.
Ancient authors always contrasted religion with superstition (superstitio). Religion was respected and respectable; it had moral and social dimensions. Superstitions were private, unreasonable, and were harmful to society. It was this attitude that led the Later Roman Empire to view Christians as atheists and bad citizens.10 Their worship of one god meant neglect and offence to the gods, and their refusal to participate in public religious ritual created a weakening of the social fabric. It is worth remembering that the English word ‘liturgy’ is cognate with the Greek leitourgia, which meant ‘publicly enforceable civic duty’.
Although polytheism remained the norm in non-Western cultures, the West developed a notion of religion that has a peculiar dependence on monotheism in general and Protestant Christianity in particular. As Christian theology had developed, it developed a rationalistic modus operandi, and the systemizing intellectual climate of the Enlightenment suggested that religion was really about intellectual matters. This had the effect of moving religion from the public to the private realm, a transition that was crucial to the growth of secularisation. However, it is worth noting that this ‘intellectualising’ of the concept of religion was a logical outcome of the Protestant Reformation, and its reaction against medieval Catholicism. Many cultures traditionally do not have a word for ‘religion’, and it is only the spread of Western culture throughout the rest of the world (via colonialism, trade, media and a number of other channels) that has
7 Mary Douglas, Natural Symbols: Explorations in Cosmology, 2nd edition, Barrie & Jenkins, London, 1973, p.17. 8 Loccit. 9 Robert Bellah, ‘Religious Evolution,’ in Robert Bellah, Beyond Belief: Essays on Religion in a Post-Traditional World, New York, Harper & Row, 1970, pp. 20-50. 10 Robert L. Wilken, The Christians as the Romans Saw Them, New Haven, Connecticut, Yale University Press,1984. led to the general use of the term by many different communities. 11
Thus it is not surprising that Wilhelm Schmidt’s 1912 Der Ursprung der Gottesidee (The origin of the idea of God) purportedly discovered an original monotheism prior to the development of polytheism. Schmidt was a Roman Catholic priest and his faith in the Christian God and the associated scriptural revelation made it impossible for him to accept another origin for the diverse religious forms found in human societies.12 Later developments could be explained as apostasy, falling away from the original truth, but the first form of religion must be the recognition and worship of the one God.
As Western culture became more secular throughout the twentieth century, few Christian scholars in Studies in Religion engaged in scholarship that was quite so blatantly proselytizing of their own faith. However, it could be argued that Christian scholars merely went underground, disguising their convictions. For example, John Milbank’s 1990 Theology and Social Theory: Beyond Secular Reason argues determinedly that post-Enlightenment social theory is a secular substitute for theology, and a poor one as it does violence to religion by not duly acknowledging the primacy of revealed truth.13 Other scholars, advocating beliefs other than Christianity, have similarly been exposed as covert proselytisers in recent methodological works and histories of the discipline (for example, Mircea Eliade’s espousal of a timeless mythic past, linked to revived paganism and right-wing politics).14
Natural and Supernatural (Or Empirical and Superempirical)
This Western tendency to intellectualise and rationalise has also resulted in a uniquely problematic tendency to treat the subject matter of religious belief (chiefly Christianity, but it has been extended to the beliefs of those who are not Christians) as having to be understood as actually, propositionally, and literally true. This is also something that is foreign to most of the world’s religions. In addition to its genealogy in Western history, there are elements of monotheism that necessitate such a position being taken.15 For the believer in this doctrine it is not logical that others might be permitted to continue undisturbed with the worship of many or other gods. Mission is one natural outcome of belief in one god; it becomes necessary to bring the message to others. Historically, Judaism did not evangelise as a general practice. However, it did conclude that the gods of other peoples were false and undeserving of worship, and individuals and even groups were converted to Judaism at times. Christianity and Islam were openly evangelistic from the start.
Before the rise of the academic study of religion in the nineteenth century, the traditional Western approach to religion was theological, or theological/ philosophical. Theology proper only developed within the Christian tradition; the
11 See Talal Asad, Genealogies of Religion: Discipline and Reasons of Power in Christianity and Islam, Baltimore, Johns Hopkins University Press, 1994, passim. 12 Eric J. Sharpe, Comparative Religion: A History, London, Duckworth, 1975, pp. 182-184. 13 John Milbank, Theology and Social Theory: Beyond Secular Reason, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1990. 14 Russell T. McCutcheon, ‘Methods, Theories and the Terrors of History: closing the Eliadean era with some dignity,’ in Russell T. McCutcheon, The Discipline of Religion: Structure, Meaning, Rhetoric, London, Routledge, 2003, pp. 191-212. 15 Rodney Stark, One True God, Princeton, Princeton University Press, 2001, passim. other two Semitic monotheisms, Judaism and Islam, do not have theology in quite the same way. This leads to an emphasis focused on possessing faith, approaching subjects using an approved methodology, and on the acceptance that these areas of study did not need to be ‘explained’, but are sui generis.16 By contrast, at least in theory, the academic study of religion was intended to be objective, and to investigate the phenomena in a value-free fashion. I might note that this is never achievable in its pure form; researchers and students are themselves situated in history, geography and culture.17
These Western assumptions (that monotheism is the only legitimate form of religion, that religion must be understood as propositionally true, and is sui generis) create particular problems in the definition of natural and supernatural. Earlier it was suggested that to be religious in natural for human beings. For theologically-oriented scholars this is true, because religion (monotheism) is true and thus humans are inclined to God, even if they sometimes are led astray and engage in inauthentic forms of religion. It is equally true in such a worldview that there is a supernatural that contrasts with the natural; God and the realm associated with him is non-material, spiritual.18
Michael Jindra has acutely argued that in many contexts the related distinctions between religious and non-religious and natural and supernatural break down. He observes that most religions outside of monotheism are naturalistic, while permitting the natural to possess powers that are coded non-natural in Western discourse.19 The field of new religions is one area where the theological concern for a sharp distinction between natural and supernatural, and the acknowledgement of the propositional truth of the existence of the supernatural, has broken down. Many new religious forms are based on fictions: television series (Gene Roddenberry’s Star Trek), films (George Lucas’s Star Wars) and novels (Robert A. Heinlein’s Stranger in a Strange Land); and yet they afford adherents a viable faith.20
Jindra argues that the reductive naturalism of Western science is fundamentally unsatisfying to most people. This might be one way in which religion is natural, in that ‘[m]ost of us desire something beyond scientific explanation, something that gives us some orientation to the world, a moral space in which to differentiate right and wrong, make judgments and construct meaning in our lives.’21 Census data from Anglophone Western countries confirms that there are very few avowed atheists in the contemporary world. This does not mean that the supernatural is real. Indeed, Jindra prefers the substitute term ‘superempirical’, as it is not burdened with theological baggage; and although it
16 See Seth D. Kunin, Religion: The Modern Theories, Edinburgh, Edinburgh University Press, 2003, Ch. 6 ‘Sociology, Methodological Atheism, and Secularisation,’ pp. 73-99. 17 Kenneth L. Pike, ‘Etic and Emic Standpoints for the Description of Behaviour,’ in Russell TT. McCutcheon (ed.), The Insider/Outsider Problem in the Study of Religion, London, Cassell, 1999, pp. 28-36. 18 Michael Jindra, ‘Natural/supernatural conceptions in Western cultural contexts,’ Anthropological Forum, 13:2, 2003, p. 159-161. 19 Ibid, p. 159. 20 Michael Jindra, ‘Star Trek Fandom as a Religious Phenomenon, Sociology of Religion, 55:1, pp.27-51. See also Adam Possamai, Religion and Popular Culture: A Hyper-real Testament, Brussels, Peter Lang, 2005, Chapter 3, ‘Subjective Myths,’ pp. 55-69. 21 Jindra, 2003, p. 161. is not widely accepted by ordinary people, scholars have been advocating ‘desupernaturalization’ since the Enlightenment.22
Human beings develop religious ideas in response to the experience of life, and especially in terms of their interaction with the environment. Being capable of rationality, they are also acutely aware of mortality, and early archaeology records evidence of beliefs about a post-mortem life, which is one of the solutions that humans developed to assist in dealing with the harsh reality of death. Nowadays the range of explanations and solutions might be greater or just different but they are just as necessary for human life to be experienced as meaningful.23
Objective Evidence from the Brain?
Over the last thirty to forty years, the philosophy of mind has been transformed by the discoveries of neuroscientists. Where formerly it focused on the so-called ‘mind/body problem’24 (which was to a certain extent similar to the theological image of the human as a physical body and a spiritual component, the soul), neuroscience has established that the mind is the body, in that mental processes take place in the brain and brain chemistry is essentially the mind. This has implications for the study of religion, and it neatly brings this paper back to the central image of the body, and lived embodied experience, as the basis of all religious systems. As a result of this shift, a new field of research has appeared, neurotheology: Neurotheology, also known as biotheology, is the scientific study of the evolutionary, neurological and psychological structures for the cognitive experiences of spiritual awe, oneness with the universe, ecstatic trance and other altered states of consciousness that are the basis of many religious beliefs and behaviors.25
There are various reasons for the development of neurotheology. Religion in the West has moved away from institutions and the community and is now primarily an individualistic phenomenon. The locus of authority has shifted to the inner self, and thus there is greater emphasis on experience and affective factors than on tradition or dogma.26 Coupled with this are great advances in technology, which result in innovations such as PET (Positron Emission Tomography) and fMRI (functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging) that enable scientists to examine brain chemistry during certain experiences or states of consciousness. As a result of experiment, certain quite simple explanations
22 Jason Xenakis, ‘Desupernaturalization,’ Journal for the Scientific Study on Religion, 111, 1963-1964, pp. 181-192. This is a philosophical treatment of the issue, but there are examples within the study of Christianity, such as Rudolf Bultmann’s approach to the Gospel narratives. 23 Charles Taylor, The Varieties of Religion Today, Cambridge: Massachusetts, Harvard University Press, 2002. 24 The useful philosophical anthology, Antony Flew (ed.) Body, Mind and Death, New York and London, Macmillan, 1964 contains essays that chronicle the mid-twentieth century shift to the neuroscientific position, such as Gilbert Ryle’s ‘The Absurdity of the Official Doctrine of the “Ghost in the Machine,”’ pp. 248-258 and U. T. Place’s ‘Consciousness is just brain processes,’ pp. 276-287. 25 http://encyclopedia.thefreedictionary.com/neurotheology 26 David Lyon, Jesus in Disneyland: Religion in Postmodern Times, Polity, 2002 [2000], Chapter 5, ‘Shopping for a Self,’ pp. 73-96. have been found for phenomena that previously were considered puzzling and uncanny, or even signs of the existence of the supernatural realm.
One simple example is the sensed presence of another being somewhere near the experiencer. Research conducted by Michael Persinger of Laurentian University in Canada suggests that this sensation is created by electrical activity in the temporal lobes, the area of the brain that malfunctions in the case of temporal lobe epilepsy. Persinger’s findings are as follows: [t]he effects experienced by volunteers have been described as supernatural or spiritual. The theory … is that the electrical hyperactivity spreads from the temporal to the parietal lobes - the left temporal/parietal lobes maintain our sense of self while the right maintains our sense of location in space; when the left lobes are excited relatively more than the right, the sense of self is displaced and experienced as external to the person, usually to the left and slightly behind so that the presence is sensed but not seen. …Persinger theorizes that upsurges of electrical activity in the temporal lobes caused by any one or more of multiple factors, such as intense prayer or meditation, anxiety, personal crisis, grief, isolation, lack of external stimuli, lack of oxygen, low blood sugar or even simple exhaustion are experienced as religious or mystical events. His apparatus mimics these mini-electrical storms.27
For some believers, it would seem that if specific patterns of brain activity can be identified when subjects are in states of religious deep concentration or ecstatic trance, then the religious experience is therefore true. It is better argued that the embodied experience is real; the ongoing academic debate in Studies in Religion over the issue of whether there was a single type of mystical experience28 might in one sense be at an end (there is, in terms of brain patterns being identical whether those meditating are Buddhist nuns or Christian Trappist monks), but the second issue, of the role of the culture into which the mystical experience is contextualized, remains just as vexed
Neurologist and Zen Buddhist James H. Austin has, in his writings, explored peoples’ notions concerning their experiences of enlightenment. His analysis foregrounds the sense that the boundary between the individual and the rest of the world had dissolved and the corresponding sensation that things were perceived truly. Marius Paul O’Shea observes of Austin’s conclusions: As a Zen Buddhist, Austin understood his experience not as evidence of a deity, but satori, enlightenment, or “no mind,” and as a neurologist, not as a sign of a suprasensorial reality, but as ‘proof of the existence of the brain.’ Given that, from the point of view of neurology, the brain mediates everything we see, hear, feel and think, his experience prompted him to explore the neurological sources of spiritual and mystical experience.29 Thus it seems that the ‘objective’ evidence for the existence of God, the supernatural or the superempirical has again eluded us; the neuroscientists are actually strengthening the position that all experience is natural, mediated
27 Marius Paul O’Shea, ‘Neural Nirvana: “No Mind” or Out on a Limbic,’ in Carole M. Cusack, Frances Di Lauro, and Christopher Hartney (eds.), The Buddha of Suburbia: Proceedings of the Eighth Religion, Literature and the Arts Conference 2004, Sydney, RLA Press, 2005, p. 71. 28 Jess Byron Hollenback, Mysticism: Experience, Response, Empowerment, Pennsylvania State University Press, 1996, Book One, ‘The Nature of Mystical Experience.’ 29 O’Shea, op. cit., p. 72. through the body. This religious experience, like religious beliefs and practices, is real, but not ‘true’ in the sense that it validates anything outside the natural.
Other Possibilities for Desupernaturalized or Non-Reductive Naturalist Religion
Robert Garland, a scholar of Greek religion, commenced one of his books with what he called a ‘negative catechism,’ a list of everything that the religion of the ancient Greeks was not. It applies to all the European polytheistic religions that were displaced by Christianity, and is as follows: There was no dogma. There was no set of beliefs to which everyone had to subscribe. There was no ‘official’ interpretation of religious observance. There was nothing resembling a church with a centralised hierarchy. There was no concept of conversion. There was no absolute distinction between the sacred and the profane. There was little notion of sin or redemption. There was no rule of life. There was no denial of worldly pleasures. There was little fear of eternal damnation. There was no barrier between religion and ordinary life.30
It seems to me that many contemporary Westerners would be delighted to find themselves granted the possibility of belonging to such a religion. Indeed, one could be agnostic or even openly atheistic, and yet still derive the benefits of religiosity, which include an enhanced sense of meaning and a stronger awareness of community and belonging. Moreover, ritual, which is highly satisfying to humans, and states of consciousness that result from meditation and other exercises, would be entirely separated from any issue of cognitive acceptance of superempirical beings or realms. This would be a religion that was compatible with reason, as advocated by Kant, but which would retain the affective dimensions that are so important for a happy and successful life. Religion would be part of lived reality,
Conclusion: Religion After Secularization
Scholars of religion realised that their advocacy of the secularisation thesis, defined by Peter Berger in The Social Reality of Religion as ‘the process by which sectors of society and culture are removed from the domination of religious institutions and symbols,’31 was no longer appropriate from the 1960s on. In 1978 Daniel Bell weighed in with a new proposal, what he called ‘the return of the sacred’. This has also come to be known as the ‘re-enchantment thesis’ and is an important step in the long investigation of whether religion will always be part of human society. Bell spoke powerfully of what had happened to religion in the West since the Enlightenment: the world has lost its mystery, that men not gods can rule the world, or that beyond there is nothing, just the void, the underlying thread of modernism which is nihilism…There is thus a double process at work. One is secularisation, the differentiation of institutional authority in the world, which is reinforced by the process of rationalization. The second,
30 Robert Garland, Religion and the Greeks, London, Bristol Classical Press,1994, p. ix. 31 Peter Berger, The Social Reality of Religion, Faber and Faber, London, 1969, p. 107. in the realm of beliefs and culture, is disenchantment, or what I would prefer to call, for the parallelism of the term, profanation. Thus the sacred and the secular become my paired terms for processes at work within institutions and social systems, the sacred and profane for the processes within culture.32
Bell is not nostalgic for religion, nor is he afraid of what might lurk in the future. He acknowledges that post-Enlightenment humanity no longer has to be religious. However, he is interested by the fact that there are actually very few determined atheists, even in the West, and that new religious forms are proliferating to take up the slack left by the retreat of Christianity. He saw these new religions as being of three types: moralizing (which includes all forms of fundamentalism, and suggests that modern society has become a hotbed of corruption and needs to be reformed); redemptive (where the chief focus is the necessity of facing death, even in our very comfortable and medically advanced society, and the need for people to feel cared for and connected to others when facing mortality); and mythic and mystic (which would include the Wiccan material we have discussed in this course). Mythic and mystic religions offer an alternative to the drabness of the desacralized world, by re-energizing old narratives and ritual forms, which are married to modernity and technology for the citizens of the contemporary, post-modern world.
In conclusion, it seems safe to assert that religion will always be a part of human society. The enormous popularity of the Russian Orthodox Church and the rapid growth of new religions in Russia (to the chagrin of the Orthodox Church) after the collapse of the Soviet Union testifies to the folly of attempting to put religion down and prevent people from expressing their belief in it. However, the modern West’s interpretation is more private and individual, with the prevailing tendency being for niche products to be developed, which satisfy the requirements of the individual consumer. This capitalist metaphor is actually highly appropriate to contemporary religion, as people now ‘shop around’ for a church or temple to suit them, reinvent themselves religiously several times throughout their lives, and accessorize themselves with books and workshops, celebrity gurus and religious jewellery, in their search for an identity, both social and spiritual.
I leave you with the thoughts of the murdered ex-Beatle, John Lennon. His song ‘Imagine’ has been the subject of at least one television documentary,33 and despite the fact that it is often characterised as maudlin and sentimental, it contains some thoughts that are of interest when considering the future of religion. The opening verse invites us to: Imagine there’s no heaven, it’s easy if you try No hell below us, above us only sky Imagine all the people living for today… In fact, there is substantial evidence that this is an accurate description of Western religious beliefs, even for many remaining within the Christian religion. Heaven might still be reasonably popular, but Hell has to some extent slipped off the radar. Newer forms of Christianity, heavily influenced by market
32 Daniel Bell, ‘The Return of the Sacred: The Argument About the Future of Religion,’ Zygon, 13:3, 1978, p. 190. 33 Andrew Solt (director) ‘Imagine John Lennon: The Definitive Film Portrait,’ 1988. capitalism and celebrity culture, encourage living for today, and indulgence in the material benefits that prosperity brings.34
Where Lennon appears to have erred is that he perceived that orientation to the world as fundamentally anti-religious. His second verse includes the lines: Imagine there’s no countries, it isn’t hard to do Nothing to kill or die for, and no religion too. However, it is entirely possible to live religiously while disbelieving in heaven, hell, and all other superempirical elements of religion. Indeed, as I hope I’ve demonstrated, outside of the Judeo-Christian-Islamic monotheistic tradition most people have. This is what is meant when it is asserted that humanity is ‘naturally religious’. Humans have engaged in a religion that made sense of life, was based on embodied experience, and was world-affirming. Garry W. Trompf argues that this is the original and perennial form of religion.35 Long may it flourish.
34 John Connell, ‘Hillsong: A Megachurch in the Sydney Suburbs,’ Australian Geographer, 36:3, November 2005, pp. 315-332. 35 Garry W. Trompf, ‘Salvation and Primal Religion,’ Prudentia, Supplementary Number 1988, pp. 207-231.