Probing and Philosophizing about Religion

Abstract: In the modern multilateral society, many traditional concepts are being destroyed，re-established, or are being lost or replaced. Confronting with life pressure and life itself, modern people in material luxuries still can’t escape from occasional perturbations, contradictions or other spiritual crises commonly existing nowadays. Since ancient time, religion has been playing the role of salvation and comforting human minds, neverthless, while speculating on life, religion is apt to self-deception and escape. Baced on the above opinions, and from the pespectives of philosophy and sociology, this paper probed respectively religion’s root cause, religon’s necessity as well as religion’s limitations, pointing out that though religion bears wisdom and beauty, more valuable is human identity together with worldly life itself, where lies the final crux of happiness.

Key words: religion; function; value

I. The heavenly religion

So many people presume to know religion or deities that it is impossible to take up this subject without exposing oneself to attack as sacrilegious by some and as a prophet by others. We human creatures, who don’t know the human world completely, presume to know the almighty religion or deities!

Yet “no philosophy of life is complete, no conception of human’s spiritual life is adequate”(Lin Yutang, 2005:401). In fact, the negligible humankind’s imagination is so boundless that it set foot not only in beautiful tales but in the unpredictable religion. Human is actually an incorrigible animist, interpreting all things anthropomorphically; he personifies and dramatizes nature, and fills it with a cloud of deities. Then, what on earth enabled humankind’s imagination radiate to that supernatural and the mysterious field？

I. 1. Common people’s desire

Schopenhauer has ever said, as experience begins to coordinate itself into wisdom, brain and body begin to decay. “Everything lingers for but a moment, and hastens on to death.” (The World as Will and as Idea, II, 454) He considers that fear of death is the beginning of philosophy, and the final cause of religion. Pessimistic of course is his philosophy, while as tiny living things on earth, human beings naturally desire long life and immortality, but it seems unpractical, so besides fears and sighs, they looked foreword to some thing which can weaken their fear of death and fulfill their dream of immortality; furthermore though mankind master the earth, mankind can’t master their own fates, they have too many desires, so they need an imaginary super power to serve them, to satisfy their innumerable desires, thus religion appeared. But surprisingly, from master to slave, mankind as a whole knelt down before the deities created by themselves…and they begin to pray.

Usually religion begins with thinking, so wisdom and sheep-following interscet within. For example, Buddhism summarizes wisely that there are four miseries in human life: old age, diseases, death and life itself, thus, as a fact, human’s full and free exercise of his or her natural ability has to be limited. Nevertheless, in further thinking, most of human’s suffering actually lies in human’s own retrospect or anticipation; pain itself is brief. How much more suffering is caused by the thought of death than by death itself!

I. 2. Inferior people’s dream

Simultaneously, Santayana thinks, with Lucretius, that it was fear which first made the gods. Faith in the supernatural is a desperate bet made by human at the lowest ebb of his fortunes. Since the beginning of human society, primary communism only flashed, society is apt to classify into different ranks, and it’s a common scene that in fighting the exploiting class, often, the oppressed failed, their hope disillusioned, they didn’t know what to do, so they had to look forward to next life for a better life, so the utopia of religion arises. Kale Marx had ever pointed out that religion is a kind of self-feeling of some people, who haven’t found their “self” or “ego” or lost it again, namely religion is the consciousness of those who haven’t taken their own fates under control, and is the alienation of their self-feeling. “Religion is the opium of people”(The collection of Karl Marx, I, People’s Press,1972:1), he said sharply. Then to the oppressed people, perhaps what religion plays is but a lamentable role of anesthetic.

The heavenly religion knitted the world people a visionary paradise, where they can find what they dreamed in spirit mostly, they needn’t fear death any more, for even religion can’t ensure them immortality, they can console themselves that if they lived religiously and morally, they would be permitted to go to their Heavenly Father when died, and also in this way their spirits would be saved.

II. The terrestrial religion

Religion in air is as beautiful as children tales, heaven, angles, auspicious clouds…all arouses people’s desire to fly away from the worldly miseries and worries. So we say, when Westerners are depressed, they turn to God; when Indians are depressed, they turn to Buddha; when Arabs are depressed, they turn to Allah …since the beginning of human history, religion has been playing the role of salvation and consolation, nevertheless, has the paradise promised by religion appeared on earth? Has religion brought the world real blesses and happiness?

II.1. Puppet in politics

When heavenly religion befell the world, its kind tenets changed into mechanical doctrines and rituals, and in stead of granting the weak hopes, religion is most often utilized to serve certain secular powers. Thus, in dealing with affairs of mankind, religion lost its ever charming hues in heaven.

In the materialist view, supernatural phenomenon is imaginary, only the physical world is real. The 19th century philosopher Ludwig Feuerbach (1804-1972) thinks that there is no supernatural beings, gods are only imaginary shadows projected, are the target reflections of human fears and desires. So Marx presented: “people created religion, rather than religion created people…religious world is a reflection of the real world…religion is sighs of the oppressed, is the gentleness of cruel world…” Accordingly, religion is actually invented or at least is applied to manipulate people, especially of their spirits. For thousands of years, how many tragedies have been created with the name of religion? How many bloody wars are lunched because of religious conflicts? All kinds of religious authorities claimed that they have mastered the absolute truth, and utilized it as a weapon to acquire social and political rights, even attributed poor people’s sufferings to mistakes of their previous life. Such interpretation and application of religion not only restrained social help toward these people but enslaved them as prey and victim of the exploiting class. As a political puppet, terrestrial religion has deviated from its original intention as human’s mental shelter, thus Marx asserted: “In order to access people the real happiness, we must give them the abolition of those illusory pleasures from religion.”

II.2. Tool in economy

While religion is serving politics, economic benefits will certainly accompany and gather to various religious communities and to most of the social citizens, then as a kind of sacrament, can religon deny itself as a tool in economy? Take Judaism, the pre-Christianity as an example, which not only killed its own prophets, such as the Baptist St. John and Jesus, but, during the course, it is economic interests instead of religious piety played the decisive role.

For many centuries, Jerusalem has always been a monopoly as the religious center, and in Jesus’ period, this position naturally brought most of the residents enormous benefits, and the permanent success is based on the residents’ obeying the antique laws from Moses. Hence, almost all the local citizens depended on “holy temple” to make a living, which including the few economic and political aristocrats―the class of flaman, and their assistants, and further down to common servants (who benefited from cleaning the “holy temple”), to coin-exchanging merchants, to bosses of restaurants and hotels (who offered board and lodging to innumerable pilgrims), and so on. While, Jesus the Christ missionized to the citizens: love God, love all people and God’s spirit can be offered a sacrifice everywhere, not only in Jerusalem! Unintentionally, but imagine if Jesus serman takes effect, what will happen to Jerusalem? To flaman, to servants, to bosses and to all the others relevant? Especially to the Pharisees, who hated Jesus the most? So Jesus was sentenced to death just like St. John was killed before almost for the same reason.

Jesus is died, but human isn’t saved, or in other word, human that time is indifferent to Jesus’ blood. So we can infer thet it is the power of religion, the right of medicine and the effect of law together murdered Jesus, for he dare challeng Moses’ authority and threatened Jerusalem’s economic interests, for he cured patients with miracles, and also for he initiated political turbulence.

III. The value of religion

So many disadvantages and limitations are mentioned above, while as an important part of human civilization, religion is anyhow a fashion of mankind’s holding the world, and mankind, with the help of religion, realized their childish dreams of transcending themselves and transcending their secular lives.

III.1. Transcending oneself

Religion is super mundane, while it is a remarkable phenomenon that human beings everywhere have had religions; How can we understand mankind if we do not understand religion? “such studies would bring the skeptic face to face with the mystery and pathos of mortal existence. They would make him understand why religion is so profoundly moving and in a sense so profoundly just.” (Santayana, In religion, New York, 1913; p.4.)

Philosophers are most often rational and scientific, but even in modern time, not few philosophers and scientists approve religion and object human’s deviation from religious belief, why? Santayana (1863-1952) the delicate and romantic Spanish-born American philosopher thinks that a world quiet divested of deity is a cold and uncomfortable home. He asked himself like this: “Why has man’s conscience in the end invariably rebelled against naturalism and reverted in some form or other to a cultus of the unseen?” Perhaps “because the soul is akin to the eternal and ideal”; it is not content with that which is, and yearns for a better life; it is saddened by the thought of death, and clings to the hope of some power that may make it permanent amid the surrounding flux. But Santayana concludes bluntly: “I believe there is nothing immortal…Not doubt the spirit and energy of the world is what is acting in us, as the sea is what rises in every little wave; but it passes through us; and cry out as we may, it will move on. Our privilege is to have perceived it as it moved.” (Scepticism And Animal Faith, p237 and 271; Reason in Common Sense, p189; Winds of Doctrine, p199.) Splendid of the philosopher’s statement! The reason for why we human beings should live a decent human life is simply because we are decent human beings! Francisco Bacon also claimed that human beings are not real walking beasts but immortal spirits, human need fight against his or her greed, envy and evil, but in nature, human looks forward to loftiness and self-transcending.

III.2. Perfecting moral

From the perspective of functionalism, owner of the planet, but because of human’s individualism and monophobia, human lacks self-confidence, they need a more powerful existence to pray, to obey and to legislate for them.. According to the French sociologist Emile Durkeim (1858-1917), religion can be interpreted as a social cohesion and to him, religion is the symbol and consolidation of social order, which can possibly serve as human’s moral reference.

Nowadays, this opinion is still available, for modern people seemingly are enjoying an uncomaparble material banquet, but they are not as happy as expected, whose alien spirits are calling for help, what is the help? Human morals? So many moral principles have been overturned; Mankind itself? Human seems wandering himself in puzzle, thus more and more people go back to turn to religion, something they had denied long ago. In the Is God a Virus? Published in 1995, the author John Bowker declares: “religion is an organized system to fulfill biological demands, is for the aim of co-existence to assemble people and offers them a living meaning.” Can religion be so all-round, even“…offers them a living meaning”? I suspect.

At all times and in all over the world, moral’s fall is not rare, and people racked their brains to find ways to save it, but, so often, people feel incompetent, and have to resort to religion. But why are human morals apt to fall? Aren’t human morals actively established by human themselves? Plato’s opinion is referential: If everyone is simple and honest, justice is an easy thing, but human is easily greedy, luxurious and ambitious, they love strife, every species “fights for the matter, space, and time of the other.” Then how to persuade them to be reasonable and useful? By police baton? That is an annoying method and wastes money. He said there is a cleverer way of attaching a punishment from supernatural authority to social citizens, and place this supernatural authority above social morals, so religion becomes absolutely necessary. Montesquieu, while exposing religion’s hypocrisy in The spirit of laws (Esprit des Lois, 8, The Commercial Press), considers that even if a religion is hypocritical, it is still the possibly best guarantee to make people honest and upright, and he intends that religion is always the optimal humanity assurance.

By all means, religion endowed the world external powerful deities, especially to the religious followers, the deities can comfort their spirits and reward or punish them according to their degrees of following social norms. The caused effect is not bad, but only stops here of religion’s guiding human mind. Doctor Lin Yutang stated in The Importance of Living that the trouble with orthodox religion is that, in its process of historical development, it got mixed up with a number of things strictly outside religion’s moral realm―physics, geology, astronomy, criminology... If it had confined itself to the realm of the moral conscience, it would be more acknowledged and welcomed.

In fact, just like what shows in the reasons for remaining even creating God advocated by those Enlightenment thinkers, human beings are not fooled by religion but unfortunately ruled by religion.

IV. The waning of religion

Presuming a sovereign power, and following it in life completely, which means religion. Is it a nature that human desires to be ruled? With science’s advancing, world has change a lot from that religion-breeding era, and mankind is sane enough that the neutral cosmos is neither with us nor against us; it is but raw material in our hands, and can be heaven or hell according to what we are. Religion is but a tale.

Besides, when mere creeds or ceremonies usurp priority over moral excellence as a test of religion, religion has disappeared and divided, which are united by devotion to the common moral law. It was to establish such a community that Christ lived and died; it was this real church which he held up in contrast to the ecclesiasticism of the Pharisees. But another ecclesiasticism has almost overwhelmed this noble conception. “Christ has brought the kingdom of God nearer to earth; but he has been misunderstood ; and in place of God’s kingdom the kingdom of the priest has been established among us.” (Quoted in Chamberlain, Immanuel Kant; vol. i.p.510) Creed and ritual have again replaced the good life; And instead of men being bound together by religion, they are divided into a thousand sects. Again, miracles cannot prove a religion, for we can never quite rely on the testimony which supports them; and prayer is useless if it aims at a suspension of the natural laws that hold for all experience. Finally, the nadir of perversion is reached when the church becomes and instrument in the hands of a reactionary government; when the clergy, whose function it is to console and guide a harassed humanity with religious faith and hope and charity, are made the tools of theological obscurantism and political oppression.

Conclusion

If human society indeed need a religion, according to Albert Einstein, it should be a spiritual support, a mental freedom and a loftiness of interests, which seeks not God nor natural deities but a rational-based perception, meditation and belief to the significance of human’s living in the world, namely religion is mere the synonym of holy pursuit and holy ideal, “this religion” is not “that religion” again.

Kant said: “every man is to be respected as an absolute end in himself; and it is a crime against the dignity that belongs to him as a human being, to use him as a mere means for some external purpose.” (Quoted in Paulsen, Immanuel Kant;.p.340) There are no gods, no need to worry about next life or spirit salvation, there is only human self or life itself, which is also a “religion”, if you regard self sublime and dependable.

Works cited

[1]Jean-Jacques Rousseau. The Social Contract. Wordsworth Editions Limited, 2007.

[2]Karl Marx: The collection of Karl Marx, I, People’s Press,1972

[3]Will Durant. The Story of Philosophy. New York: Siman and Struster Inc. Press, 2006.

[4]Ye Shengnian. Western Culture:In Intruduction. Shanghai: Shanhai Foreigh Language Education Press, 2005.