The Importance of Religion E-Book

Gavin Flood

• Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
• Kategorie: Religion und Spiritualität
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 541

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2011

Beschreibung

The Importance of Religion reveals the significance of religion in modern times, showing how it provides people with meaning to their lives and helps guide them in their everyday moral choices

• Provides readers with a new understanding of religion, demonstrating how in its actions, texts and world views religion is enduring and vividly engages with the mystery of the world
• Offers striking arguments about the relationship of religion to science, art and politics
• Engagingly written by a highly respected scholar of religion with an international reputation

Leseprobe

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

Preface

Acknowledgments

Introduction: Religion and the Human Condition

Mediating Our Strange World

Theories of Religion

Religion and Religions

Defining Religion

The Argument

Alienation and the Human Condition

The Primacy of Perception and the System of Signs

The Invisible and the Transcendent

The Truths of Religion

Conclusion

Part One: Action

Chapter 1: Clearing the Ground

Reification: The Marxist Legacy

Rationalization: The Weberian Legacy

Knowledge and Action

Methodology

Conclusion

Chapter 2: The Meaning of Religious Action

The Sociology of Religious Meaning

Meaning and Action

Moral Acts

Ritual and the Body

A Rite of Affliction

The Meaning of Sacrifice

A Phenomenology of Sacrifice

The Meanings of Death

Conclusion

Chapter 3: The Inner Journey

Languages of Spirituality

The Spiritual Habitus

Conclusion

Part Two: Speech

Chapter 4: The Reception of the Text

Routes to the World of Life

Theories of the Text

The Reception of Sacred Texts

Sacred Text and Act

Conclusion

Chapter 5: Tradition, Language, and the Self

Linguistic Universals

Linguistic Relativity

Language and Religious Experience

Language as a Model of Religion

Conclusion

Chapter 6: Religion and Rationality

What is Rationality?

Rational Religious Communities

Rationality and Cosmology

Conclusion

Part Three: World

Chapter 7: The Mystery of Complexity and Emergence

A History of Antagonism

Complexity and Constraint

The Ontology of Process

Conclusion

Chapter 8: The Union of Nature and Imagination

Art and the Real

Cosmological Art

Pavel Florensky

Abhinavagupta

Secular Art

Re-Spiritualizing Art

Conclusion

Chapter 9: Religion and Politics

Religion in the Public Sphere

The Secular Public Sphere

The Traditionalist View

Fundamentalism

The Religious Citizen

Conclusion

Summary

Epilogue

References

Index

This edition first published 2012

© 2012 Gavin Flood

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Flood, Gavin D., 1954-

The importance of religion: meaning and action in our strange world / Gavin Flood.

p. cm.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-1-4051-8972-9 – ISBN 978-1-4051-8971-2 (pbk.)

1. Religion–Philosophy. I. Title.

BL51.F555 2012

210–dc23                                                                         2011026338

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

This book is published in the following electronic formats: ePDFs 9781444399035; ePub 9781444399042; Mobi 9781444399059

For Kwan

Hat man sein warum? des Lebens, so verträgt man sich fast mit jedem wie?

He who has a why to live for, can stand almost any how.

(Nietzsche, Die Götzen Dämmerung (1889),Sprueche und Pfeile 12)

Preface

A prevailing idea from the Enlightenment, still with us today, is that the light of reason would dispel the darkness of religion and reveal the universe to us. While the desire for enlightenment and the attendant aspiration for a better human future are commendable, the identification of religion with darkness and ignorance is problematic. Religion has not gone away and is a topic of deep concern both because of its destructive capacity – most conflicts in the world have a religious component – and for its constructive capacity as a resource that gives people truth, beauty, and goodness. While secularization has developed in the West, this has not heralded the demise of religion. Christianity may be in decline in northern Europe but is expanding in Africa and the Americas. Islam is expanding in Europe and it is not inconceivable that it will be the majority religion in Europe in the course of time. With the demise of communism in Russia and Eastern Europe and the transformation of communism in China, religions are developing in those countries, both new religions and reinvigorated old religions, Orthodoxy in Russia, Buddhism and Taoism in China. In some western societies we also have the enhancement of privatized, individual spirituality linked with a quest for authentic experience and the true self.

This book is written in the context of these developments and in view of the persistence of religion in modern times. This is not a survey of religions or the contemporary religious field, of which there are plenty of fine volumes, nor is it a defense of religion as such, but is intended to develop new vocabularies and theoretical perspectives for the study of religion. It claims that the importance of religion is existential; religions provide significant meaning to life and guide people in their choices and practices.

Religions are not primarily propositions about the nature of reality, although they can be that, but ways of living and dying, ways of choosing a good life and guiding judgments about moral choice. Through actions the ways of life that we call religions mediate the human encounter with mystery. The world is a mysterious place, which scientific accounts do not exhaust but rather serve to add to its mystery. Religions show us ways of inhabiting our strange world that are transformative for individuals and for communities as a whole. Religious people in the modern world balance commitments to the secular public sphere – from voting in elections to educating children – with commitments to particular religious communities. This book attempts to describe the ways in which people are religious and to analyze the ways of being religious under the guiding thesis that religions are existentially important in providing people with meaning. While religions are, of course, important for macro-history, as large social and cultural forces moving through time, the argument here is that their primary importance lies in their significance for human persons in their communities.

The book is written broadly from within a phenomenological intellectual tradition, but a kind of phenomenology that is dialogical. It is also influenced by other intellectual traditions, particularly what might be called critical social science and what has come to be known as post-critical theology (theology chastened by postmodern critique). I tend to avoid the term “postmodern,” which now has limited usefulness, although this book is written in the wake of that great intellectual flurry and energy even though some of its results were eccentric. But it seems to me that the ultimate questions that religions deal with (why is there something rather than nothing? who am I? what is the purpose of our life?) and their meaning in people's lives necessitates an approach that is both detached (and so attempts accurate description) and intellectually committed to truth (and so attempts accurate evaluation). The general orientation of this phenomenology is towards the world and this approach shows us that religions are fundamentally about how we are or should be in the world: they are about action, the repeated actions of the liturgical moment through history, the repeated actions of the ascetic life, and the unrepeatable moral actions of social being.

Because of the impossibly vast nature of the topic, I have dealt with some of these complex issues at a fairly theoretical level, bringing in concrete examples to illustrate points. Giving an account of religion in terms of subjective meaning takes us into a number of subject areas, including cultural anthropology, linguistic anthropology, philosophy, and theology. I hope that the reader will find application for the ideas and general argument presented here in their own contexts. Frits Staal speculates that the centre of civilization will return once more to China and India. This is probably an accurate prediction and while few predictions of the future prove to be correct, I think it safe to say that religions will continue to thrive, continue to endow lives with meaning, and will contribute to global, social, and climatic challenges facing the world. The new world citizen can also be a religious citizen.

After a substantial introduction outlining the general thesis I wish to present, that religion must be understood in terms of the human will to meaning and in terms of the desire for transcendence, the book is divided into three parts: action, speech, and world. We can understand religions as cultural forms that mediate the human encounter with mystery. Given this general thesis, in Part One, Action, I develop the idea that religion must be understood in terms of human meaning which finds expression in action: the encounter with mystery occurs through action which is of two kinds, ritual (within which I include spiritual practices) and moral. Chapter 1 examines the two processes of reification and rationalization in modernity and argues that these are not adequate accounts of religion; the latter needs to be understood in terms of the formation of subjective meaning. Chapter 2 develops this thesis arguing that religion calls people into the world through ritual and moral action. The chapter describes three examples of ritual action from the ethnographic literature. Chapter 3 links action to spirituality and describes the cultivating of an inner journey.

Part Two, Speech, shows how mystery is mediated through text which is received into the human world and internalized. It presents an account of religion and rationality and presents an account of the internalization of the sacred text as a form of encounter with mystery. Chapter 4 is about sacred text as characteristic or prototypical of religions, Chapter 5 on the problem of linguistic relativity, and Chapter 6 on rationality and religion. I present an account in these chapters of how religious language mediates the encounter with mystery and endows meaning to communities of reception. Finally, Part Three, World, shows how science, art, and politics are related to religions and how they move towards the world, which we might call the real, through action. Chapter 7 is about religion and science and offers a view of religions in the light of complexity and constraint. Chapter 8 is focused on art in relation to religion, the way art, like religion, mediates the encounter with mystery and its interface with religion. Finally, Chapter 9 examines religion and politics and the topical notion of how being a religious person is compatible with the idea of the citizen. We end with a summary of the general argument and an epilogue.

Gavin Flood Oxford

Acknowledgments

I should like to acknowledge the people who have influenced this book in one way or another. Firstly I should like to thank my wife Emma Kwan, to whom the book is dedicated, for her constant encouragement, love, and support. She introduced me to a new world of contemporary art. My friend of many conversations, Luke Hopkins, years ago introduced me to Norman Brown's work, which has had an influence on my thinking about the present project. Another friend of many conversations, Oliver Davies, as always, has been an excellent interlocutor and I have been encouraged by his taking theology in the direction of a “new realism.” My teacher John Bowker, whose work on religion and science is exemplary, has continued to stimulate my thoughts. Rebecca Harkin, the commissioning editor at Wiley-Blackwell, first suggested the project to me and I thank her for her thoughts, comments, and encouragement. I thank the anonymous readers for their very perceptive comments. One reader presented precise suggestions and corrected some factual errors and although I have not always followed specific recommendations, I have always taken these comments very seriously. Gavin D'Costa encouraged the project and made specific, insightful suggestions that I have generally adopted. I should also like to thank colleagues at the Oxford Centre for Hindu Studies, particularly Shaunaka Rishi Das, Jessica Frazier, and Rembert Lutjeharms, who have supported my work as have all the staff at the Oxford Centre for Hindu Studies. Among colleagues in the Theology Faculty I would like to mention Afifi Al Akiti, George Pattison, Guy Stroumsa, Joel Rasmussen, Johannes Zachuber, Mark Edwards, Pamela Anderson, Paul Joyce, Paul Fiddes, Peggy Morgan, Philip Kennedy, and Sondra Hausner for their support. I would also like to thank my family (especially Claire and Leela) for their love and good wishes. Last but not least, I should like to thank my students at Oxford on whom I tried out some of the material presented here, and who have provided such stimulating conversations over the past few years.

I am grateful to Faber and Faber for permission to use the Wallace Steven's quote on the title page of Part Three from his Collected Poems.

On occasion when I have used Sanskrit terms, and a few Arabic terms, I have Anglicized proper names and titles of books but retained conventional diacritical marks for technical terms that I cite in brackets beside their translation. Thus Shiva and Krishna rather than iva and Ka, Mahayana rather than Mahyna, and Bhagavad Gita rather than Bhagavad Gt.

Introduction: Religion and the Human Condition

That religion is of fundamental public concern cannot be doubted as we move into the twenty-first century, central to global politics, cultural or identity politics, ethics, and the socio-economic processes of late modernity, as well as to the contested claims made in its name. Religions own vast tracts of land, have access to great resources which impact upon billions of the world's population, and 15 percent of the habitable surface of the earth is regarded as sacred.1 Yet never has religion been so misunderstood. Never has there been a time when the understanding of religions has been more important and never has there been a greater need for such knowledge and critical inquiry to advise public debate which so often lacks informed perspectives. Some disparage religion as irrational, making claims about the world that simply cannot be substantiated in the light of modern scientific knowledge. On this view, religion is a series of propositions about the world akin to scientific theories, but erroneous propositions which have hampered, and still hamper, human progress and true knowledge and understanding. On this view, religions can be explained in terms of evolutionary psychology and are superstitions that we need to jettison. Apologists for religion react to the critique of the new atheism defending it on rational grounds, that its claims are indeed compatible with modern knowledge and scientific thinking. We only need to look around bookshops to see the proliferation of these kinds of works.

Yet both critique and apologetic have fundamentally misunderstood the nature and importance of religion in people's lives. This book is an attempt to understand religions and their attraction both in the adherent's view and in the context of the human sciences. Religions cannot be reduced to a series of claims about the nature of the world because they fulfill a much deeper, existential function that drives human beings not only to answer or come to terms with the great, disruptive events of life such as birth and particularly death, but also compels us to go beyond ourselves and to transcend our limitations. Even the Buddha understood this when he declared that the test of religious teachings is whether or not they worked to relieve human dissatisfaction; a man with an arrow in his side should remove the arrow and not inquire about who shot it and to which family he belonged.2 Religions are primarily ways of life rather than theories about the origin of the world (indeed, Buddhism and Hinduism think the world has no origin, a view even entertained by Aquinas3). Religions are not scientific propositions4 but encounters with mystery and expressions of human needs that form ways of life, ways of acting, ways of responding to the strange world in which we find ourselves.

Religions are ways of being in the world which make strong claims and demands upon people and while they are concerned with socialization they primarily function to address questions of ultimate meaning at a bodily and temporal level in which human beings make sense of their experience. In other words, religions are responses to the human encounter with what is beyond us, to the encounter with mystery, paradox, and the overwhelming force and wonder of there being anything at all. Religions cannot be reduced simply to beliefs or propositions about the world but are visceral responses to the human condition and expressions of what might be called the will to meaning. Some of the claims of religion sound absurd to modern ears but religions continue to hold great power over billions of people who cannot simply be dismissed as irrational or deluded. Even if, as some claim, the churches in the United Kingdom and other European countries are emptying, it is far from clear that this signals the end of religion worldwide or a total disenchantment. (T.S. Eliot once observed that “(w)ithout religion the whole human race would die . . . solely of boredom.”)