Religion? Or, in what sense?

Religion has fallen on hard times. With writers like Dawkins selling books like The God Delusion like pancakes, there may very well be widespread agreement that belief in God or something larger than life is silly, irrational or misinformed. Of course, not everyone can be easily fleeced.  I’m not convinced that a life without religion is worth living, but not because I want to serve something larger than life-- something outside space and time and something desirous of our affection. Rather, God is in everything and unites everything; it is a religious outlook upon everything all together that yields real meaning to the maxim, ‘an injury to one is an injury to all’—a maxim that ought to be co-opted for ecological purposes.

Some philosophers argue that religion is inescapable. On their reading, even atheists are religious in some sense. But it seems to me that if one were to make such an argument, one has made the term meaningless.  Perhaps, a better way to get at the term ‘religion’ is to say it means something like ‘open-ness to the mystery’, where ‘mystery’ is defined by way of one’s own personal (or communal) theological notions. In the very least, we will thereby respect the atheist that disagrees with the Christian religious imposition that all are restless until they rest with God. It is simply not true that everyone cares. Being atheist then is being closed to the mystery of life. Moreover, having made this definition ours, we will thereby be in a position to say that many religious people are not religious enough, or that they look for religion in all the wrong places.

A good way to get to the heart of the issue that I want to address is to consider a contemporary philosopher that has a rather interesting relationship to religion. Richard Rorty wants us to forget religious impulses (‘conversation stoppers’), unless they can be used to increase human solidarity against economically and racially impoverishing castes (See Philosophy and Social Hope 249). Whether or not his rhetorical suggestion is religious, in some sense, is not a very interesting question. It wouldn’t make a difference. The trouble is that it isn’t fruitful enough, because not only does it naively suppose that human solidarity (fraternity) can weather the storm, it isn’t clear whether he truly desires economic castelessness (ibid.). We should seek a way of speaking that allows us to fully appreciate the mystery of the Wholly Other, not just the human other. Fraternity should have no limit, and we should seek unity with Nature.

If we make a distinction between religion in the sense of ‘blind faith’ and religion in the sense of being  open to the mystery, it seems that we can move beyond older naive forms of religion, as well as naive and blind faith in technology and science. In this sense, reformational philosophers were on the money. To tie the notion back to Rorty, we might say that Rorty was rightly critical of religion in the first sense, as we should be, but not open enough in the second sense. However, while being open to the mystery of religion doesn’t protect us from being open to the possibility that technology may have some answers for our problems, it does protect the life-filled object from scientific reduction. If we foster a deep religious respect for Nature and our relationship in it, as one species among many, we may stop ourselves from totally annihilating ourselves and the rest of the world.