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August 8 - August 21, 2019
Our ability to devote our lives to something we deem more important than our own personal welfare—or our own biological imperative to have offspring—is one of the things that set us aside from the rest of the animal world.
Tentatively, I propose to define religions as social systems whose participants avow belief in a supernatural agent or agents whose approval is to be sought. This is, of course, a circuitous way of articulating the idea that a religion without God or gods is like a vertebrate without a backbone.3
The core phenomenon of religion, I am proposing, invokes gods who are effective agents in real time, and who play a central role in the way the participants think about what they ought to do. I use the evasive word “invokes” here because, as we shall see in a later chapter, the standard word “belief” tends to distort and camouflage some of the most interesting features of religion.
What apparently grounds the widespread respect in which religions of all kinds are held is the sense that those who are religious are well intentioned, trying to lead morally good lives, earnest in their desire not to do evil, and to make amends for their transgressions.
Somebody who is both so selfish and so gullible as to try to make a pact with evil supernatural agents in order to get his way in the world lives in a comic-book world of superstition and deserves no such respect.
It is high time that we subject religion as a global phenomenon to the most intensive multidisciplinary research we can muster, calling on the best minds on the planet. Why? Because religion is too important for us to remain ignorant about. It affects not just our social, political, and economic conflicts, but the very meanings we find in our lives. For many people, probably a majority of the people on Earth, nothing matters more than religion. For this very reason, it is imperative that we learn as much as we can about it. That, in a nutshell, is the argument of this book.
Philosophy is questions that may never be answered. Religion is answers that may never be questioned. —Anonymous
One of the surprising discoveries of modern psychology is how easy it is to be ignorant of your own ignorance. You are normally oblivious of your own blind spot, and people are typically amazed to discover that we don’t see colors in our peripheral vision.
Anybody can quote the Bible to prove anything, which is why you ought to worry about being overconfident.
The three favorite purposes or raisons d’ětre for religion are to comfort us in our suffering and allay our fear of death to explain things we can’t otherwise explain to encourage group cooperation in the face of trials and enemies
To sum up the story so far: The memorable nymphs and fairies and goblins and demons that crowd the mythologies of every people are the imaginative offspring of a hyperactive habit of finding agency wherever anything puzzles or frightens
Where there is no ambient doubt to speak of, there is no need to speak of faith.
Most of us know of atoms and germs only by hearsay, and would be embarrassingly unable to give a good answer if a Martian anthropologist asked us how we knew that there are such things—since you can’t see them or hear them or taste them or feel them. If pressed, most of us would probably concoct some seriously mistaken lore about these invisible (but important!) things. We’re not the experts—we just go along with “what everybody knows,” which is just what the tribal people do. It happens that their experts have got it wrong.
It is surely no accident that the language of romantic love and the language of religious devotion are all but indistinguishable,
Some of the saddest spectacles of the last century have been the way zealots of all faiths and ethnicities have defiled their own shrines and holy places, and brought shame and dishonor to their causes, by their acts of fanatical loyalty. Kosovo
